Why pay-per-click advertising ‘doesn’t work’ for beginners
As an online marketing agency, many small businesses contact us to help them make money online. One of the main services we offer is PPC setup and management, with a focus on Google Adwords. However, one of the most common statements we hear is:
“I already tried pay-per-click advertising and it doesn’t work”
This immediately sounds like an alarm bell, as PPC advertising is one of the most profitable advertising methods available (in fact, we’ve been able to generate over 1,000 sales per day for some businesses using PPC advertising).
After further questioning, we found out that they set up a Google AdWords campaign themselves (because Google makes it so easy) and invested $500 or $1,000 in advertising, only to find out they couldn’t achieve any results… and based on that this, to say that PPC advertising does not work!
Maybe it’s due to the common misconception that “it’s easy to make money online”. We’ve been hearing this for years, and I’ll admit that was one of the reasons I got into online play… but I was wrong, even from the start. Now, after many years of gambling online, I understand why it is hard to make money online and why it will be harder in the years to come.
When you market on search engines, like Google, you need to be on the first page to get noticed, and that’s where the challenge lies. There is a maximum of 10 paid positions available for the entire country. That means that of all the advertisers in the country, only 10 can occupy a position on the first page. That means only those advertisers who know what they’re doing can afford to compete in a market where the top positions are dominated by clicks that cost between $2 and $7 per click.
That’s why you need to work with a professional if you really want to be successful in online gambling, because a professional knows how to work with your current ad budget to get the most out of your ad spend.
And nine times out of ten, when we take over a PPC campaign that was set up by a beginner, we almost always encounter the following errors:
1. Not enough keywords being used – Identifying the most profitable keyword phrases first requires you to build a keyword library of all the possible keyword phrases that someone who is interested in your service would type into Google. Most beginners use only 20-30 total keywords, where the minimum for most small campaigns should be 1,000-2,000 keyword phrases.
2. Incorrect use of targeting: Correct use of exact match, phrase match, and broad match will increase your rankings and decrease your average cost-per-click (CPC).
3. Poorly Constructed Text Ads: Writing effective text ads, using proven marketing principles, will increase your click-through rate (CTR), improve your quality score, and in turn, decrease your average CPC.
4. Don’t split-test text ads: The only way to know if one text ad is better than another is to split-test those ads, track the results, and identify which word combination produced the best results.
5. Campaigns without geo-targeting: Geo-targeting, especially for a service business, is critical to getting the most ROI from your ad spend. The last thing you want is to pay for website visitors who are in locations you can’t serve.
6. No continuous optimization – The most difficult month for PPC advertising and the lowest ROI is the first month, because it is during this month that you are experimenting to identify the keywords that produce the most profit for your business. If done incorrectly, the first month can cost thousands of dollars to no avail. But once the ‘money words’ have been identified, ongoing bid management and optimization is required to increase ROI on monthly ad spend.
7. No Conversion Tracking – Conversion tracking is the most important factor in PPC advertising, because that’s how you measure the success of the previous 6 campaign points. Most importantly, when you track conversions at the keyword level, you can increase your spend on keywords that produce results and decrease your spend on keywords that don’t produce results, increasing your ROI.
Without implementing ALL of the above points efficiently and with expertise, it is virtually impossible for a small business to compete in an increasingly competitive online marketplace.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve seen the cost of PPC advertising rise steadily, with competition in some markets so fierce that the average cost per click (CPC) has more than doubled in the last 12 months.
Pay-per-click advertising is fast becoming a marketing channel dominated by online marketers. When a beginner tries to run a PPC campaign on his own, competing against seasoned professionals, his budget is quickly depleted with no results to show for it. And now that the cost of a PPC listing on the first page is a minimum of $2-$7 per click, how can a beginner afford NOT to use the services of a professional to manage their PPC campaign and minimize your risk?