Ron Johnson
Google’s own wealth of information coupled with the experience of marketers worldwide has shown that AdWords campaigns can bring substantial benefits to companies and organizations who want to increase their visibility and success.
At least when the campaigns are properly developed and managed.
On the other side, we have numerous entities who seem determined to throw their money down the proverbial drain when engaging in marketing through AdWords. If you’re in this group, we want to help by providing you with six tips on how to completely waste your Google AdWords budget in 2015. (Hey – if you’re going to do something, you might was well go all the way!)
1. Ready, fire, aim!
Don’t waste your time (or money) on a lot of planning and goal-setting for your AdWords campaign. It’s best to just jump in whole hog and start testing the waters without trying to figure out what you actually want to accomplish.
2. If you write it, they will come
Write your ad copy to the general masses, not to people within your demographic who are most likely to respond to your message. Think about it: isn’t it better to target, say, 20 million people than just several hundred? Remember that everybody likes reading ads, no matter what they’re written about.
3. It’s the hook, stupid
A big key to wasting money on AdWords is to send readers to a landing page that you want them to go to rather than one they think they should go to. You know your selling points, you know what readers want to see. Hook them with your ad, and then sell them on whatever you choose.
4. Negative is negative
Negative keywords? This is Google’s attempt to help you succeed by telling AdWords which words and phrases to not rank you for. That’s not very smart, if failing is your goal. As we said, the point of placing an ad is to get it in front of as many people as possible, so forget about all this negative keyword business – it’s too negative!
5. YOU decide where they land
We mentioned landing pages earlier, but we didn’t mean specifically created and targeted landing pages. Why create a new page when you already have many pages on your website? It doesn’t matter what site page your ad links to – what matters is getting people on your site so you can sell them.
6. Downward mobility
There’s this thing called “mobile-preferred ads,” which make it easy for users of mobile devices to connect with your message. Don’t spend time on this. If mobile users want what you’re selling, they’ll find you no matter what. Don’t make the mistake of catering to this crowd and sinking into downward mobility with mobile-preferred ads, or, worse, with a mobile-friendly website.
Yes, these are some killer tips on wasting your AdWords budget this year. However, if you want all those dollars and cents to really pay off, you need to change direction and do AdWords the right way.
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