5 Google Adwords Tips That Most Beginners Have To Spend Thousands To Learn On Their Own

Why spend thousands of dollars on Google when you can simply learn my valuable Google Adwords Tips!

By Special Guest Blogger, Renowned Google Adwords Expert Jeff Sauer

For a search engine that receives over 1 trillion queries each year, Google makes it surprisingly easy for you to advertise in search results for any keyword you desire. Simply sign up for an account, choose a few keywords, write an ad and enter your credit card information.

With those steps, which take less than 5 minutes to complete, you can be advertising your products and services for the entire world to see. Google makes it ridiculously easy for advertisers to get up and running.

In doing so, Google makes it extremely easy for Google to generate profits from unwitting advertisers. Many advertisers have burned through a small fortune with AdWords, only to have underwhelming results.

It is easy to blame Google for poor results, but they are just a medium. It is the advertiser who needs to bare full responsibility for their shortcomings.

The good news is that it is actually very easy to profit from Google AdWords. I should know, because I have spent over $20 million dollars with Google and generated over 1 million leads directly from search engine queries.

So what separates the failed advertisers from the profiteers?

Here are 5 Google AdWords Tips that will save you thousands of dollars from learning on your own.

1) Be crystal clear with your objectives, and target activities that make you revenue

Many advertisers are happy with impressions. Their reasoning? If they are seen in search results, then the profits will come in the future. Before long they realize that impressions are hardly accountable for success, and trying to determine the value of an impression is an impossible dream.

Even more advertisers are happy with receiving clicks from Google to their website. They let Google deliver prospects, and figure they will do the rest with their awesome website. They spend a lot of money with Google, and yet nobody purchases.

The best advertisers are clear with Google about what they want to achieve: they want to spend money to generate new, profitable customers.

We all agree that we want profit, but we must train Google to understand what makes us profitable!

How do we train Google? The first step is to create a conversion in AdWords, and then install code to track this conversion on your site.

Once your conversions are set up and tracking properly, you unlock an entire new world of optimization capabilities with AdWords. Instead of focusing on impressions or clicks, you can focus on the actions that make you money.

Advertising on Google without being able to measure success is like withdrawing your advertising budget in $1 bills, putting them in a briefcase, and then lighting it on fire.

2) Beware the default settings trap

We have proven that conversions are important, but you wouldn’t know that if you were just glancing at your AdWords account. You’ll see impressions and clicks everywhere, but you need to modify your reports to show conversions. We can add columns to our reports quite easily, simply click on the columns section of any report.

Choose conversions or make your own custom set of columns.

Spend a few minutes today and make Google AdWords match your objectives.

There are millions of advertisers on Google, and each has a different vision of success. The only consistent item that Google can report on is impressions, clicks and costs, because that is common to all advertisers.

Unfortunately, because Google has to provide a one-size-fits-all interface for advertisers, most default settings are focused on clicks and impressions. We must change default settings to focus on our objectives to get the best results.

Some examples?

Campaigns focused on generating clicks instead of conversions.

Ads focused on delivering clicks instead of conversions

Avoid the defaults provided by Google, because they focus on the least common denominator. The best advertisers train Google to understand their needs.

3) Train Google to invest in your success

Even after we set up our campaigns to take advantage of the advanced settings offered by Google, there is still more that we can do. Google is not always about squeezing out profits from advertisers. In fact, there are features they make available that allow you to only pay them when they deliver converting customers. How cool is that?

My favorite setting is called conversion optimizer. If your campaign has received 15 conversions in the past 30 days, this option is enabled to let you target a certain cost per acquisition for your ads.

Say that you want to get as many conversions as you can for $100. This is something we can manage through manual bids and diligent management, but it can be time consuming and inconsistent to accomplish. However, with Conversion optimizer, we can let Google do the work. Tell them that we will take every conversion they can give us for $100 and they will deliver the results. Often, they deliver conversions at a much lower price than the bid.

Google still profits with this model, just not due to your advertiser inefficiency. You win, they win, everyone wins!

4) Aim small, miss small

There are two approaches that you can take to advertising. The first might be to go “all in” with Google AdWords. With this approach, we would take our entire advertising budget and throw it into AdWords to see what happens. This is how most advertisers approach AdWords, and it is the wrong approach.

The second approach is to target a small list of specific keywords that fit the purchase intent of the user you are trying to target. Spending your precious budget on a small sample of potential customers allows you to make spend adjustments and reach profit targets very early in your program. From there you can scale up to target more keywords and higher profit margins.

Of these two approaches, the best advertisers start small and build their way up. Much like the concept of product-market fit for entrepreneurs, experimenting with AdWords should be all about capturing the customers who are seeking to purchase your product or service.

By starting small and finding a group of customers that will purchase from you in a predictable way, you can prove early in the process that AdWords will work for your company.

Now that you have proof, you can increase your budget and scale your profits in a repeatable way.

Contrast this with going “all in” with Google AdWords, where you may spend months advertising before you prove that there is a market to sell your products through search.

5) Mine your search terms reports

When you bid on a broad keyword with Google, you are actually bidding on more than just the word you are targeting. Google includes synonyms, plurals and all kinds of other words to your broad matched keywords, automatically.

While this may not seem like a big deal, you will often find that over 50% of the keyword clicks you accrue are coming from keywords outside of your target. To view the actual keywords typed in by users, you can go to the search terms report within Google AdWords.

When you look at details for your selected keywords, you will see how many clicks, impressions and conversions come in for each keyword. Some of the results will surprise you.

By simply monitoring the search queries report in AdWords, you can save as much as 50% in click costs by removing keywords you don’t want to target.

I’ll take a 50% savings any day!

It took me years to learn from these mistakes (and cost thousands of dollars), now it’s your turn to improve your results with my Google Adwords Tips!

You can improve your AdWords results by making a few simple changes to your approach. By teaching Google what makes you successful, you will find more success in your advertising.

About Jeff Sauer:  Jeff Sauer is a Digital Marketing Consultant, Speaker and Teacher based out of San Francisco, CA., who has spent over $20,000,000.00 on Google Adwords and has generated over 1 million leads using the platform.  Jeff is a sought out expert on all things Google, featured on such blog sites as PPCHero and Moz.  For more information on Jeff, please click here.