Can AdWords Make You Money?

It's easy to burn money on pointless traffic

The reality is that it is easy to get started with AdWords. Google makes doing so rather inviting. Why hire a PPC (Pay Per Click) agency when you can just wade in and do it yourself?

You can call Google up and they will walk you through the process of signing up, heck if you spend enough you even get an account manager.

So it’s a 3 step process right?

1. Register an account.
2. Create adverts pointing to your website.
3. Make a truckload of money.

Wrong.

The grim reality is that everyone who is anyone online has heard of AdWords and has likely considered it’s potential.

It is very simple to burn a lot of money through AdWords. If you don’t set your keyword bids carefully, set your overall budgets and decide how your adverts will display, you are already setting out to fail.

Dynamic keyword insertion

The most important thing is the number of people actually convert. Conversion rate is king. Google provides a number of methods to analyse the real world effects of your campaigns. If you can’t pull a positive return, there’s simply no point doing it.

In the case of some heavily contested verticals, such as car insurance, some firms pay up to £2,000,000 a month in AdWord spend alone. The smallest alterations can make huge differences.

There are huge debates as to whether it’s worth capitsalising every word in an AdWords advert or not. You have a very limited amont of space with which to get a user interested so this kind of debate is far from ridiculous.

The margins are getting ever tighter. Remember that Google is not the only PPC provider in this day and age. Even though competitors such as Bing Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing pull less traffic, Microsofts PPC solution is known to pull high quality traffic across many niches. Also, remember that you are only paying for potential leads (people that click the adverts) so if these do not come good, there’s nothing to lose.

The bottom line is that AdWords (and other PPC providers) will only net you a hole in your pocket unless you are selling  either take the time to learn the ins, outs and nuances of PPC or hire someone that does!