My answer to this question will likely surprise you.
In my experience, many business owners believe Google AdWords does not work, and even worse, is a villain out to steal your money. However, there are also many other business owners that feel the exact opposite — they believe AdWords is a hero that brings customers each month and never tires.
The answer appears to depend on your past experience using this ad network.
However, that’s not true! The answer does not depend on anything…
AdWords Can Never Be the Hero or the Villain
The answer is that AdWords simply can not be the hero or the villain. In other words, blaming AdWords or attributing success to AdWords is always incorrect.
That’s because AdWords is merely a tool to get your business in front of your target audience. That’s it. What happens afterward is up to you!
To clarify this point, let’s look closely at what is required to make a sale from a Google AdWords campaign…
The 3-Step Path to an AdWords Sale
Step 1: Every AdWords sale starts with the correct targeting.
With a search campaign, we’re talking about targeting the keyword phrases that your ideal customers are searching. This is where AdWords excels because it’s possible to get your business to show up when prospects are literally searching for your product or service. It’s hard to beat that timing.
Let’s pause for a second and acknowledge that at this point AdWords has done it’s job. Your business is now in front your ideal customer who is literally searching for your product or service. What more could you really ask for? :)
Step 2: Unfortunately, this is where a lot of businesses unknowingly drop the ball. They do not present a compelling offer that stands out from all of the competitors that are also targeting the same prospects. Again, AdWords is not responsible for creating your offer.
It’s up to us to do our homework, review competitor offers, and then craft an irresistible offer that makes sense for our businesses. Without a compelling offer, then your ads will be overlooked by your prospective customers which leads to poor quality scores, less impression share, and higher costs for your keywords.
Step 3: After your ideal customer searched for your product or service and clicked to learn more about your offer, then it’s all up to your website. Is your website set up properly to convert visitors into customers? If not, then all that time and money invested in advertising will be wasted…
When you look at those 3 steps, then it should be clear that AdWords is responsible for only a small portion of the sales process. Is it really fair to place blame or attribute success to a tool that played such a minor role? Of course not!
That brings us to the key takeaway…
Remove Your AdWords Blinders to Find Success
One of the most common mistakes with AdWords is focusing too much within AdWords and not enough outside of AdWords. As illustrated above, Adwords only accounts for the first of three steps in the sales process. However, in my experience business owners and marketers spend the vast majority of their time looking at AdWords data to find opportunities to improve campaigns.
See the problem?
When you step outside of AdWords and focus on your offer and your website, then I guarantee you’ll find more opportunities to improve your campaigns.
Are You Making Any Costly AdWords Mistakes?
Google AdWords is not as easy as Google would lead you to believe. In fact, a lot of the default settings are not in your business’ best interest. That’s why there are a lot of common and costly mistakes made by both beginners and experienced advertisers.
To make sure you avoid these costly mistakes, click here to join our upcoming webinar…
