1. Google wants all businesses to use AdWords and not SEO.
Rubbish. Google needs to have quality organic results otherwise no one would use Google to look for anything, then the ads would have no one to click them! Yes, Google want everyone to use their PPC system AdWords but no at the expense of organic listings. The two can work in harmony.
(Yes I know lots of sites have had penalties from google, but it’s not because Google doesn’t want them in organic listings: it’s because their SEO hasn’t followed Google Guidelines at some point.)
2. “I’ve tried PPC and it was very expensive, I won’t try it again”
Sometimes we try things that don’t quite work out – does this mean we should never try again? Of course not. How long did you run your PPC campaign? You need to be patient and give it time to bear fruit. Was it managed properly? Perhaps you should speak to a Professional PPC Manager?
Don’t try AdWords for a month and expect miracles. By its very nature it takes time to test, measure and optimise. The smaller your budget the longer this may take because with less budget comes less clicks and less data to optimise.
Try to give your PPC campaign enough time and budget to give it chance to succeed.
Compare it to traditional advertising: you could spend £5000 on a magazine advert, how would measure its return? PPC allows you to highly target those in a position to buy, give it chance to work and remember the more you test & measure the better the results.
3. I’ve put my budget up and I’ve not seen extra sales, it didn’t work (2 days later).
Thanks to the incredibly powerful tools systems such as AdWords give us, we can see where we are losing potential sales. If your budget is causing your ads to stop showing as your budget is exhausted then your potentially missing out on sales.
Putting your budget up will get your more clicks but as with point 2, give it time to work. Measuring performance over 1 or 2 days gives you a very small set of data – get some good data over a reasonable amount of time before changing anything.
4. Conversions were down yesterday, somethings wrong, change something, AAARRGGGHHHH!
Nothing is likely to be wrong. Just like point 3, looking at data in small chunks will not give you an accurate picture of what is happening.
Imagine you are selling swimwear online, you’ve had a great summer, sales are great but then on a Tuesday in August your sales stop. Do you revert your last changes, do you make any changes at all?
NO, YOU DON’T!
It may be that it’s raining or abnormally cold! Leave it alone and look at it again in a few days time you’ll probably see it’s just an anomaly. Had you changed it you may have worsened the situation and had a few weeks of poor performance because impatience got the better of you.
5. My Cost Per Click (CPC) is too high – it needs to be lower.
What is your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)? Don’t just pay attention to individual metrics, look at the profitability of your campaign in general. If your CPA is at a point where it works with your margins and your profitable then don’t obsess too much about individual metrics such as CPC’s.
Of course we want to pay the minimum possible per click but make sure you are looking at the full picture – the last thing you want to do is save 10p on a click and lose 20% of your conversions for example.
Summary
PPC works, it works bloody well. However, your PPC campaign needs a commitment from you: Time & Patience.
Its not a license to print money but given time and attention your PPC Campaign can be incredibly profitable and generally speaking the longer you run it (assuming it’s managed well) the better it will perform as its constantly being optimised.
If you are looking for a quick fix, or you expect PPC to turn around your fortunes overnight then it’s probably not for you.
