The Marketing Viking

(1)Why Adwords Is So Special

Let’s compare Adwords to direct mail:

A customer acquisition mailing costs around £700 per 1,000 letters.

On average of 22% your letters will get binned without being opened and, if you’re writing to businesses, many letters will never be seen by the key decision maker.

But the biggest problem is that, even with a good mailing list, most of the recipients just aren’t interested in what you’re selling

Now, compare that with Google Adwords:

With Adwords, clicks can be as low as 2p (my Adwords clients, who are in a wide variety of industries, average around 75p a click) and you can target your ads so they’re only seen by hungry prospects at the very moment they’re actively seeking what you’re selling.

(more…)

In the summer of 2006, many people who were using Google Adwords found their ads had been disabled and Google was telling them they needed to bid more to re-instate their ads.

This was christened the “Googleslap” and, since then, there have been a number of additional “slaps” where Google have targetted another group of advertisers.

So, what’s going on?

Google, as usual, haven’t been too explicit about their intentions but, reading between the lines, here’s what I think is going on:

(more…)

People often ask “does pay per click work”? Or “will it work in my industry?”.

I want to talk about these questions because they don’t really make sense.

PPC is just a form of multi-step direct marketing.

Step 1, someone sees your ad. Step 2, they arrive at your landing page. And so on … and the final step is when they agree to buy.

The simple rule is: if someone doesn’t complete the final step, no sale is made.

(more…)

A badge of honour … or a waste of time? 

Google Adwords qualifications are frequently used as a “badge of honour” or, alternatively, a “scare tactic” by a number of PPC consultants. 

So, I was interested to her Perry Marshall, the world’s #1 (and, at $726 an hour, probably the most expensive) Adwords consultant, speak out on the Google Adwords Professional qualification. 

In a recent tele-seminar with marketing expert Dan Kennedy, Perry said: 

“I didn’t bother getting their [Google’s] silly little certification.  Google sets up campaigns for people and they do a terrible job at it … I should be certifying them“  

And hit the heart of the matter by saying: 

“[my customers] know that Google can set it up for them and it’ll suck money out of their wallet. If I coach them how to do it, it gets set up right.”

And summed up Google’s Adwords expertise with: 

“just because they built the piano doesn’t mean they know how to play it”. 

I’m glad to hear that Perry is saying things that I’ve been saying for a while i.e. that Google Adwords Professionals may know all about how to “press the buttons” on the Adwords Software, but that’s not what counts. 

Adwords success is all about marketing.

So it’s no surprise that the most sought after Adwords consultant in the world is an experienced direct marketer, rather than someone who’s learned their trade from a course devised by some Google techno-geek.

Steve Gibson  

PS If you’ve got a few hours and you’d like to take the Google Adwords Professional training, you can do it free at the Google Adwords Learning Centre.