You may have noticed that there is no mention of Google Adwords anywhere on our website and that we don’t offer any Google Adwords services. Well the reason is we don’t fully believe in Google Adwords and therefore we would struggle to encourage anyone else to use it.
There are a few businesses and markets that Google Adwords might be effective for and bring a return on the investment and time spent however these are generally small, direct services that don’t attract a strong advertising market. In other words businesses that the cold calling and spam email marketing industry haven’t yet begun to target.
This isn’t just an unfounded and untested theory we have against Google Adwords. We have given Google Adwords plenty of opportunities to prove us wrong across a huge number of industries. This is a careful conclusion we have generated from 5 years of experience dealing with Google Adwords accounts.
Why don’t we like Google Adwords?
We don’t like Google Adwords because we believe it attracts and provides the perfect hunting ground for spam emailing companies and cold callers. Think about it, if you’re a company looking to offer your business services to other businesses then where better to look than at the paid ads on Google where you can find a number of businesses already spending money on advertising showing they are willing to part with their pennies for the possibility of improving their sales. This willingness is something that is tough to find when you’re a sales person.
Now there is nothing wrong with targeting businesses in this way, it’s very smart. However the result is that those businesses using Google Adwords end up spending their budget driving sales companies to their websites looking to target them so in effect the whole process is working in reverse.
Putting our theory to the test!
Before writing this article we decided to do a test to prove our hypothesis that Google Adwords attracts spam emails and cold calling and therefore wastes away your budget on the exact people that you don’t want getting in touch with you.
We put £100 budget into a Google Adwords account and then targeted relevant key phrases and keywords around the web design section of our website. We made all of our landing pages very attractive to people looking for our web design services so the test was a fair one and if a genuine customer came through to our site the chances are they would get in touch. We also monitored the sales calls and spam emails we were receiving leading up to starting our Google Adwords campaign.
What Happened?
Nothing – well no that is a lie. Something did happen but nothing good! On an average day with the budget we set we received 10 clicks through to our website from our Google Ads. The keywords that these clicks came through were all very relevant and yet what we found was that our bounce rate (the number of people that click on to your website and then click straight off) went up from 30% for organic Google Visits to 80% for Google Adwords visits. This told us that the visitor was probably just trying to get the contact information (email and phone number) for the business but didn’t have any interest in finding out more about the business itself, which is the perfect pattern of what we expect to find from data collecting departments of a sales company.
Also by monitoring the sources of our enquiries we could be sure that we received less than 2 through Google Adwords and this could have been as low as 0 but we did have 2 enquiries unaccounted for and so put these in the Google Adwords column. That is potentially 0 enquiries from over 150 visits to the site through highly topical key phrases.
Finally and most telling we noticed a huge increase in the number of spam emails and sales phone calls we were receiving. On average an extra 5 per day.
Finally another big problem with attracting these types of high bounce rate visits hugely lowered our Adwords Quality Score for each keyword and ad, which gradually made advertising more expensive and meant we were paying on average 50p more per click by the end of our trial campaign.
Conclusion
So whilst we’re not saying don’t use Google Adwords we, as a company, could never recommend it to a business as a constructive way to market and generate a sold return on your investment. What we can tell you is that you will see a large increase in the number of sales companies trying to sell their services to you and the more of these type of people your ads attract the lower the Adwords Quality Score you will receive and the more expensive and therefore less effective it will be to advertise on Google Adwords.
For more information on our services contact us on 01179 735 644 or drop us an email at info@gfmarketing.co.uk. Alternatively you can fill out our enquiry form on our contact page to give us more information about how we can help here »
