Is Google Adwords Worth It?

Nicole originally asked if she should pay for online advertising before her products were ready. Nicole followed up with this question: Did you mean that I should pay for traffic after I do this even though my services aren’t ready? I expect a 6/1 launch date (I hope!), so do I wait or perhaps pay for some text ads on Google, now? A 125×125 ad here or there? What do you suggest?

Read Part 1 of my answer here, How to prepare your website for a paid advertising campaign. And here’s part 2.

Hi again Nicole.

I’m going to be right up front with you and tell you that I’m more than a bit biased against Google Adwords.
Now I know that there are lots of people out there who are having great success with Adwords. And I also know that in order to launch an effective adwords campaign you must either spend a LOT of time learning the system or hire someone good to do the work for you.

Either way you end up investing a lot more into your campaign. And that means that your potential return on investment (ROI) is immediately going down.

Google Adwords is not nearly as simple and easy as people seem to think. Unless you are in an extremely focused and highly targeted industry, If you simply bid on the popular keyword phrases for your business you will pay a lot of money and probably get visitors who are not targeted to your specific products and services.

Adwords pays off when you find hundreds - literally - of highly targeted keyword phrases that you can get for low bid amounts. That keyword research and inputting the data into Adwords can take a huge amount of time. Then you have to write great copy for your ads and get the campaigns set up. Then there’s the ongoing optimization to continuously improve the conversion rate of your campaign.

Unless you are willing to devote a major chunk of time learning how to effectively run an Adwords campaign or are willing to pay someone hundreds or thousands of dollars each month to manage your campaign, in most cases you will be throwing money away. (Which Google will not mind at all!)

Some people run short-term Adwords campaigns to test their landing pages. This can be an effective way to generate some short-term, targeted traffic to generate a statistically accurate testing sample. But again, unless you do it well, you will end up throwing money away on non-targeted traffic.

Bottom line for Adwords: If you’re planning on doing it yourself, set aside at least a full week to learn how to set up an effective campaign and get it started. Then plan on at least 3 hours each week to optimize your campaigns.

If you want to do it yourself, here are some adwords resources to check out:

The official Google Adwords Learning Center.

The official Adwords Blog.

Aaron Wall’s SEOBook blog, Free SEO Tools and Training Program

If you would rather not take the time to learn about Adwords - and put that time to better use creating more products and marketing materials - you can find qualified adwords experts at reasonable prices through services such as Elance.com and Guru.com. If you use one of these services, be sure to be very specific when you describe your project, check their credentials carefully, and speak with one or more of their existing clients.

Next week we’ll look at banner advertising.