How To Get Boned By Google Adwords

Yes that's a photo of Herr Hitler checking out a model of the prototype people's car - the first Volkswagen. Nothing to do with Google Adwords or Making Money With Pay Per Click Marketing but hey...I like it. Now where was I? Oh yeah. Big Bad Adwords.

I just read an interesting story on another internet marketing blog about how they moved their established Adwords campaigns across to a new account and the traffic went berserk - in the wrong direction. I'd give you the link but I don't want to lose you to these sharks so I'll just paraphrase -

Everybody knows that Google gets tons of traffic so why is it that lots of new Google AdWords advertisers fail?

We did a radical test last week to get to the bottom of what is going on.

We had been running a couple of very successful campaigns for one website for over one year.

We paused the campaigns on our existing Google AdWords account and created a new Google AdWords account. We then launched the identical campaigns on a new Google AdWords account.

The results after the first week were nothing short of devastating!

Our new Google AdWords account got crushed! Our average daily click count basically dropped to zero and we got hardly any impressions. However, nothing changed!

In total, we moved over 200 Ad Groups across 10 campaigns and the results are the same across the board.

What can explain this? The only difference is History!

Everything was kept constant except moving campaigns from an existing Google AdWords Account to a new Google AdWords account. Seems when you move accounts you lose its history.

Have you had an Aha moment? Me too. Google puts a lot of credence in history. Its the same with their Search Engine. They tend to favour domains that have been around for awhile. And, apparently, they tend to favour domains that are registered for years ahead. Do you do that? I don't. I have heaps of domains but I only register them for a year at a time. If I felt really strongly about a killer name I might buy five years registration. But it starts to get expensive doesn't it? Hundred bucks here and a hundred bucks there. Back to the story -

Why is history so important? * In Google, everything is based on the Quality Score which is a combination of how your ads have been performing over time relative to ads of the competition.
* Ads with a higher quality score will get surfaced more often and have a dramatically lower required bid minimum. When we drilled into the new Google AdWords account we saw bid minimums that far exceeded the maximum bids that we used previously. So, if your account has no history, you might have to spend extra to establish a good history by bidding high just to get started.

You've heard that before haven't you? Bid high to start and then tweak your CPC after you have position. Sometimes it's painful. I've just started an Adwords PPC Campaign for this blog and I've had to bid €3 to get first page position on some of the keywords. Ouch! About $4.50. I hope I don't have to pay that. It soon eats into the daily spend. I would have to pick a bunch of expensive keywords.

* We also know that ads with a higher click-through-rate will have a higher quality score and that ads that start appearing in a higher position will have a higher click-through-rate because people click on more links that appear higher on the page. So, once again, new Advertisers will have to spend extra to quickly drive up the Quality Score.

So what they are saying is Go For the Jugular when you start your campaign. Try and get Good Quality Score and Good Position before you start trying to save money.

If you haven't a clue what I'm talking about you need to scoot over to Perry Marshall's site and pick up a copy of his PPC Bible ($49 or something) - The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords. (And that my friends is a shameless affiliate link - I gotta eat too)

BTW I just noticed Google has indexed this site already. That was quick. Two days. I think it's a combination of several things - * I'm buying Adwords spots that link here. * I'm on Squarespace which Google seems to love, * I'm linking here from my main blog which has history and good juice and * I'm using Google's Webmaster Tools Tracking Code embedded in my Header so apparently I must pass muster with their Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it? Indexing: Can Google index your site? Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the user's search?

Hip Hip Hooray for Google!