Google PPC doesn’t work

March 14, 2009 Google Adwords No Comments

They’re familiar words to hear.

Working within this industry it’s not uncommon to hear that companies have tried to use Google PPC advertising but it “hasn’t worked” for them.

And they’d be right … in a way.

For starters, the fact that Google defaults to advertisers being opted in to the content network practically guarantees a stream of very poor quality clicks to the website.  That alone must be responsible for numerous advertisers to think “I’ve had all these clicks but they’ve converted to nothing”.  It’s constantly amazing that Google haven’t yet realised that they’re destroying their own business by having the content network set up as default.  Perhaps the short-term money made from advertisers who don’t know better seems worth it to Google.

Apart from that though, there are many other reasons to have the perception that “Google PPC doesn’t work”.  For the purposes of this posting we’ll completely discount the fact that most companies have websites that are poor and so the clicks would have a hard job to convert to enquiries anyway.

Looking specifically at the way advertisers set up their PPC campaigns it’s not at all uncommon to see horrendous mistakes made.   Even those people who go on Adwords courses, read a book, get a DVD, or find out about Adwords in other ways, still make mistakes that will result in click budgets being spent for little return on that investment.

Recently we had this discussion with a company that had created their own PPC campaign.  We looked at their website and found that the website itself was great and so were confused why the company wasn’t getting good results.  We discussed PPC and they said they’d tried it but it didn’t work.   They let us look at the campaign and we explained some of the reasons why it was going wrong for them.  But the damage had been done – in their eyes their fingers had been burnt and nothing was going to detract from their view that “Google PPC doesn’t work”.

So we came to the end of that conversation knowing that there was a strong website within a sector that was perfect for cheap clicks to be gained, and that would undoubtedly have converted to good levels of business.

This is becoming a problem in this industry because companies try to “do it ourselves”, fall into all the traps there are, or even buy in ‘expertise’ that isn’t as good as it needs to be (after all, EVERYONE is an online marketing expert nowadays aren’t they?), and the end result is money spent on Google clicks and a poor return on that investment.

It’s a real shame because, with a few exceptions (e.g. highly competitive industry sectors), Google PPC DOES work.  But like any other form of marketing or skill, it does need expertise and knowledge to get the best results out of it.  Unfortunately, we seem to live in a society where “do it yourself” often seems like the cheapest and best option and when it goes wrong the perception is that the method of marketing hasn’t worked.

And there lies the reason why so many companies are going to die a slow death in the current economic environment.