I’ve been working with Adwords for a long time, long enough for me to be considered a veteran in my field. What started with me experimenting with a few sites of my own whilst at university ultimately developed into a career. Back then, in the dark ages of Adwords noone really knew what they were doing and for this reason it was easier for novices to make money out of the Adwords system. A playing field full of people that don’t know what they are doing is still a level playing field!
These early campaigns typically consisted of 100′s of broad matched phrases that were badly matched to ads and landing pages. However, as a result of the comparatively low level of competition at the time it was possible to buy clicks cheap enough to compensate for the suboptimal campaigns and still make a nice tidy profit.
Nowadays, the Adwords system is far more advanced providing advertisers with a level of control and accountability that we could only dream of a few years ago. These advanced features and comprehensive reports enable skilled Adwords professionals to fine tune campaigns to maximise profit and minimise wastage.
Great! for some.. but dangerous in the hands of the inexperienced.
The problem is that Google just can’t please everyone, they produce more features to keep the advanced users happy but at the same time has to hide these same features away from basic users to maximise accessibility. This results in new users creating suboptimal campaigns that simply can’t compete with the data driven, finely optimised campaigns created by skilled advertisers. As a result, new users often find themselves spending money on Adwords at a frightening rate with little or no results and soon proclaim “Adwords is rubbish, it doesn’t work”.
This situation is what I refer to as the “fast burn syndrome”, and it’s not easy to treat! The whole “once bitten, twice shy” cliché runs on overdrive and the odds are stacked against you when you engage in any dialogue that relates to resurrecting their Adwords campaigns. I’ve found that the best approach is to ask for a small budget to targets one specific area of their business. Then create a highly optimised campaign that focuses just on this one small area, demonstrate to them using this initial campaign just how effective Adwords can be and by default resistance levels will drop and you’ll soon be developing the account into the lean sales/leads mechanism it should have been in the first place.
