What to expect from advertising on Google

Google likes for you to think that advertising on its AdWords platform is simple. Getting started on AdWords is easy enough, but getting great business results from it is not easy at all.

I’m not going to cover the exact mechanics of running an AdWords campaign in this post, but I am going to tell you what you should expect.

Top priority: gathering intelligence

The first thing to expect from Google AdWords is that you can’t predict what’s going to happen until you’ve let your campaign run a little bit. I’ve set up dozens of campaigns and found that some perform wonderfully out of the gate, but some will perform so miserably that it almost seems impossible to get a return on your investment.

Sometimes you enter a space with no competition and get great prices on clicks. Sometimes you enter a space so competitive that it’s very costly to even get in the first 8 spots.

It can take anywhere from a month to 3 months to get enough data to know how to improve your campaign. I like to think of this data as an investment. If you analyze your first 1-3 months’ worth of data correctly, you gain some valuable intelligence for improving your results.

AdWords is not a short-term activity

Like your website, AdWords campaigns need to be optimized. It is not a “set it and forget it” affair. Just letting destiny take its course is going to cost your business a lot of money with nothing to show for it.

Like I said, any intelligence that you gain for the purpose of optimizing your campaign is an investment. Why is that? Once you’ve reached a certain level of optimization, you can just let the campaign run. All of the work that you do to figure out which keywords and ads drive the best business can just run on its own for a while.

With AdWords, there’s always a changing landscape of competition, so you do need to keep an eye on things. But it certainly does feel good to let things run for a while, knowing that you’re getting a much better ROI than your competitors.

Most search marketers don’t know what they’re doing

I know that this makes things tough on you as a business owner. Who can you trust? As a search marketer myself, I’ve tried scratching the surface in conversations with other professionals in my industry. I’ve discovered some awesome techniques for improving AdWords lately, and none of my colleagues seem that interested in putting in the elbow grease to run these techniques and save their companies some serious cash.

Unless you’re set on becoming an expert search marketer yourself, you’re going to have some major trouble. My rule of thumb: if you’re not paying someone who questions Google’s intentions, you’re probably paying someone who’s only interested in collecting your money. If you’re paying someone who is confident that the campaign is going to run peachy out of the gate, then they obviously don’t have much experience.