Kyle Sulerud - October 24, 2019
The other common questions are:
- Is Google Ads a scam?
- Is Google Ads a rip off?
The answer is : IT DEPENDS
I need to look at your Google Ads account before I can tell you whether you’re wasting money or not.
Generally speaking, GOOGLE ADS is not a waste of money.
Lots of people and businesses use Google Ads to their advantage to actually make a lot of money.
If you’re putting more money into something than what you’re getting back out from it, then that’s what we’d call a waste.
How do we know if we’re wasting money on Google Ads?
1)Track your results.
This should be an obsession for you if you’re running Google Ads. Based on what you’re putting in, you should know what you’re getting out.
The results are going to be different for every type of business.
Example:
A) You’re directly selling merchandise online. Either a physical product or a digital product. That should make it very easy for you to know how much money you’re getting back from the money that you are putting (in Google Ads).
B) You’re a business that’s generating leads with Google Ads. You don’t necessarily know the exact value of a lead right away, but that’s something you can figure out.
Based on the total amount of sales and the total number of leads, you can assess if Google Ads is making your business profitable. The profit must also be worth all the time and effort that you’re putting in all of the campaigns. If it’s a razor-thin profit, then probably it’s not worth it.
2) Look at your Search Terms
In your account, you go to your keywords section, and then go to the SEARCH TERMS. This is going to tell you what people have actually typed in to Google that has triggered your ad to show up, and what gets people to click on your ad.
When you’re looking at your search terms, you can see that certain terms are very good and are very specific to what you’re selling. You would happily pay to get your ad in front of people searching for all these things.
However, some keywords may also be something that you wouldn’t want to pay for. This is where you’re wasting money. You’re putting your ads in front of people that are not likely to lead to a sale.
To address this, you can add negative keywords, based on the search terms that you’re seeing.
This effectively blocks the search terms that you think are irrelevant to what you are selling.
Be proactive about this because there might be more irrelevant keywords that could come later even if you have already set your negative keywords.
You can also be proactive and add negative keywords based on the terms that we haven’t seen yet on the Search Term Report. Do this by looking through Google’s KEYWORD PLANNER. Look into the keywords suggestions that they are making and see what you would like to add as a negative keyword.
You can also use my software: Negative Keyword Pro.
It will actually show you the predictive search results for whatever keywords you type in. You can go through and quickly select the ones you want to add as negatives, and then copy those into your Google Ads campaign.
You can test that out at negativekeywordpro.com. There’s a free trial version there that will give you some negative keywords. For the full version, you’d need to get the ADLEG SOFTWARE SUITE.
Another thing that you can do is add exact match keywords and phrase match keywords.
Usually, if you’re seeing a lot of bad search terms, it means that you’re using broad match keywords in your campaign, or using phrase match keywords that are really short, allowing for extra things to come through. Google is matching close variants to the keywords that you’ve set, so it’s important to always keep an eye on the search terms and add negative keywords as many as you can in the beginning, and keep adding as you go along.
What’s the Bottom line?
Needless to say, we can conclude that Google Ads is NOT a waste of money if (1) you’re doing it right and (2) your business is one that could use connections to potential customers via Google search online.
To do it right, be proactive in adding as many negative keywords as possible so you will not be wasting money on Google Ads. Keep in mind, even if you have very good search terms, it’s still possible that you will not be profiting from the traffic, hence it’s important to see how much your business benefits from being found by people via Google.
Make sure that you are tracking your results: how much you’re getting back versus how much you’re putting in.
When it comes to Google Ads, track your keywords and your business results well to know exactly what you are getting back out of the campaign after you’ve put some money into it.