Category: News & Trends

I cannot begin to tell you how many clients have come to me for AdWords services to find out that they spend several thousands of dollars every month for clicks without holding Google accountable. What do I mean by that?

If you do not have Google AdWords conversion tracking installed and at the minimum Google Analytics installed, you are not holding Google AdWords accountable. You must have metrics in place to be able to identify the success or lack there of of your Google AdWords program.

Without conversion tracking installed you will never know how many leads AdWords actually generated for you. When things get tight financially the first thing you will choose to chop is AdWords. But if you know you got 30 leads from AdWords last month and 5 leads from your website, instead you may choose to increase your AdWords budget to generate more leads and cut back on website services for the time being. With the knowledge of what vehicles are generating a return for you, you can make smart choices in regards to your budget. But if you do not have these metrics in place, you are only guessing at where your business has come from.

Typically we will not take on a new AdWords client until these metrics have been installed by their webmaster, as we want to seriously help our clients get the most from AdWords. We want to have conversations built around historical data not guesswork!

AdWords can bring you leads and sales but you need to do your part to keep the program accountable to match your business objectives.

So you set up your Google AdWords account, set it to run, and now it’s been a few days and nothing is happening. What should you do?

First, if you have absolutely no impressions at all, I would contact Google help through the control panel and ask the ad approval powers to take a look at your program. In nearly all cases you will get a response in 24 hours that your program was under review and is running now. It used to be that a program would run in about 15 minutes after set up, but now I have seen some accounts sit there for three to five days in the ad approval process. The contact is like a kick start. So if nothing is happening give Google a push.

If your impressions are very low, the first place to look is your daily budget and cost per click. You may not be in the auction if you settings are too low.

For clients we recommend a minimum budget of $500 to $800 for clicks for a 30 day period and we will typically set up an account to run with a default cost per click of $1.75 to $3.50 depending on the market.

For professional services like legal and medical services your default cost per click may need to be $6.50 to $8.00 to get any action. If you CPC is at this level you really should have a 30 click budget of $1,000 to $1,500 on top of our fees to manage your account to get Google to show your program.

AdWords is an auction so if you have set your account up with a maximum cost per click of $.05 or $.25 and a daily spend of just a few bucks, the reality is that you are just not going to get any action on Google. Businesses are spending big money on Google and to have Google show your ads, you have to compete in this same arena.