MBA1031 Is Google AdWords Marketing Dead?

Hey O welcome to the $100 RMBA Show. Your go to source for daily business insights and strategies with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's episode you will learn is Google AdWords dead? About 10 years ago, Google AdWords was all the rage. Businesses were investing so much money in marketing with Google AdWords. These are the ads that you find when you search for a keyword on Google. But in the last four, even five years, people have been shifting their focus to Facebook marketing. Facebook ads. Does that mean Google AdWords is dead? Should you not invest any money into Google AdWords? Are there any scenarios or situations where Google AdWords are a great value? This is what we get into in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is brought to you by Long Tail Pro, a step by step system to help you quickly discover thousands of profitable, easy to rank keywords for almost any niche. Visit longtailpro.commba and use coupon code MBA for a free trial and 30% off your subscription forever. Again, that's longtailpro.commba use code MBA one of the reasons why people argue that Google Adwords is dead is because it has become a lot more expensive than it was when it first started. It's just a classic case of supply and demand. At the start, no one ever even knew about Google AdWords. The Internet was very young, so your cost per click was pretty low. When it comes to Google AdWords, there are two ways to pay impressions and clicks. Most people pay per click because they only want to pay when people click on their link. Now, just to clarify, Google AdWords are the ads that show up when you search anything on Google. They're usually the ones that show up at the top of the search findings and it says ad right next to it. It's quite subtle and it's become more and more subtle in the last few years. In the past, your ads were in a little box, so it was kind of obvious that there was something different about these results. But now they just have a little icon that says ads next to it and it's easy to miss. But a lot of people have been leaving Google AdWords because they feel like it's getting more and more expensive per click and they're finding more value in Facebook ads, Instagram ad, different platforms. Now, I'm here to tell you that Google AdWords is not dead. It's just not as cost effective or easy to get into as it was in the past. I'm going to give you some scenarios, some situations, some cases where Google AdWords is amazing and is unmatched by any other type of ad solution, whether it's Facebook ads or Instagram ads. And it's definitely worth you trying it out. Number one, before we get into these scenarios, anytime you do paid advertising, it's going to take some time for you to experiment and understand what you need to do for your business, for your keywords. This is applicable to any kind of platform, whether it's Facebook ads or Google AdWords or whatever. You're going to have to invest some money in tweaking your ads and understanding who you're trying to target. This is especially true if you're going to do this yourself. This might be a little bit more cost effective if you're hiring somebody to do it for you. Cost effective in the terms of how much money you're going to spend to tweak your ads. Obviously you have the additional expense of hiring somebody to run the ads for you. But if you're completely new and green, this is going to take some time. And if you're not going to get any help, it's going to take even more time. But it doesn't mean it's not going to be effective in the long run. But word to the wise, when you're experimenting, you don't have to dump a whole lot of money. You can start with a few hundred dollars to experiment to see what's working, what's not. Run campaigns with smaller budgets and the ones that are working, double down on those. There are tons of courses and videos out there teaching you how to maximize your buck when it comes to Google AdWords. But I'm going to give you some Scenarios where Google AdWords are great and they're unmatched by any other competition scenario. Number one, you're a local business. You're advertising as a local business, a restaurant, a coffee shop, a yoga studio, whatever. You're a physical local business. You're going to get a lot more value for your dollar because you can really niche down. You don't need to advertise to the entire world. You just need to advertise to your local area. And if your local area is not utilizing Google AdWords, and there's a good chance they're not, if you're not in a major, major city, then it's open game for you. You're going to have a very low cost per click because nobody's advertising when they're searching for actual local businesses in the area. So say, for example, you have a bowling alley and you want to advertise your bowling ALLEY Using Google AdWords to everybody who's close to your bowling alley, let's say a 15 mile radius, you're going to be competing with any other bowling alley within 15 minutes of that area that is utilizing Google AdWords. So there's a good chance that you're probably the only one that's thinking about this. Now. Even if you're not, you still can maximize the your benefit of Google AdWords. Because you don't have to just search or run ads for people that search for bowling alley in your zip code or your area. You can also, you know, run ads for people that search for fun things to do, entertainment, birthday parties, whatever, anything that deals with the services or the type of benefits you offer. So local businesses can really benefit from Google AdWords. A quick side note, when it comes to Google AdWords, there is nothing more targeted than somebody searching your keywords. Let's say, for example, you have an accounting software that you want to sell to other people. When people search easy to use accounting software, they are looking for you. So you're going to get extremely targeted people. So your conversion rate is going to be a lot higher than you just pasting a ad or showing an ad on Facebook to people that might or may not be interested in what you have to offer. There's a huge difference between somebody searching the exact words that describe your service versus somebody just seeing you in their newsfeed. So you could see how powerful Google AdWords can be. So scenario number one, local business, right, had a little side note telling you how powerful it could be because it's very targeted. And that leads me to scenario number two. You are a new product or service. If you're a new product or service, no one knows you. And this is extremely helpful if you are a software, a digital product, a course, something that you can sell and deliver online regardless of location. If you're a service that can be offered anywhere, Google AdWords can get you on the map from day one. Let's say, for example, you launch your website, you launch your product. Let's go back to that accounting software you just launched. How do you get the word out if you have no list, if you have no, you know, way to generate leads? This is going to get you traffic to your website. You can actually calculate how much money it's going to cost you to get a visitor via Google AdWords. Because it's pay per click if it costs you $3 per click, $4 per click. You know that to get a visitor who search for your keywords via Google AdWords is going to cost you 4 bucks. So you know already how well you have to convert to make a profit. Let's say, for example, your accounting software costs $400 a year and it costs you $4 per click. If you can convert one customer for every hundred visitor, you're gonna break even because you paid $400 for all the clicks four times 100. And your software costs $400 a year. Now, obviously, if they renew that year, it's gonna be even more advantageous. All gravy, right? So if you can convert more than 1% of your visitors, you're going to be in the plus, you're going to be in the profit. So you can easily calculate how much you should spend and how well you have to convert to make it worth your while with Google AdWords. But again, it's huge for new businesses. People search for your keywords, they will find you. Your ad will show up. Scenario number three, your demographic. The people that buy your products and services simply are not on social media. If they're not on Facebook, they're not on Instagram. How will you find them if you're throwing ads at them? Everybody uses Google. Everybody goes and does a search at one point or another. If they're using a computer or a smartphone and you can find those people that are not on social media through Google AdWords, people, forget about this. Not everybody's on Facebook, not everybody's on Instagram. So AdWords are great for that. Now, I have a few more tips when it comes to starting with AdWords and how to get the most bang for your buck to. But before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. One of the first things you got to do when you start a business is acquire a business address. You needed to register your business. You needed to open up a business bank account. You even needed to register for email marketing. Yes, you need an address on the bottom of your email marketing newsletters. 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Adwords can be really expensive if you don't have a very niche product. If you're selling something that's quite popular, like sweaters, for example, you're competing with every store online that sells sweaters, then your pay per click is going to be expensive. Unless your product is niche, which it should be. Say, for example, you specialize in cheesy Christmas sweaters. That's a keyword. You can get a better cost per click because not everybody sells cheesy Christmas sweaters. So the more niche you are, the easier and the more cost effective your ads will be. Number two, don't forget about long tail. Long tail means a longer phrase. Some people search longer phrases. It's not a common search, but everybody who does search for them will find your ad and you'll pay pennies on the dollar. Well, maybe not exactly pennies, but it depends on your niche. So say, for example, instead of having cheesy Christmas sweaters, a long tail could be cheesy Christmas sweaters for dance. Cheesy Christmas sweaters like on National Lampoon's vacation. I know that sounds crazy and very long tail, but because it's so rare, you may only have 100 people searching for it a month. But those hundred people will see your ad and when they click it, you're gonna pay a whole lot less than just sweaters or Christmas sweaters. So what a lot of people do is they have this strategy where they just, instead of trying to target three or four really targeted keywords like Christmas sweaters or holiday sweaters, they really focus on the long tail and have 50 ads for long tail ads. And those 50 add up to the same traffic as maybe two or three short tail or short keywords. That's a Great strategy because you're gonna get the same amount of traffic, but it's long tail and there are many, many different versions of that long tail. You're gonna get different types of people and different types of searches. My last tip is you have to have a way to track conversions. Make sure you're adding your conversion pixel so you know when somebody buys your product that they actually bought it through a click on your Google AdWords. And Google will help you set that up. They have instructions for that, how to make sure that you can see in your Google AdWords dashboard, hey, you made a sale via an ad. This is going to allow you to know where to double down on and where not to double down on. You don't want to just worry about clicks. You want conversions. At the end of the day, you want people to buy, right? So make sure you do that. All right, that wraps up today's lesson. Yes, Google AdWords is still alive and kicking. You just have to be smarter about it. And they're especially useful for those three scenarios. I talked about local businesses, new businesses, or businesses with customers that are just simply not on social. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love this podcast, let us know in an itunes rating and review. I read every single one of them. And by leaving us a review, you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Every Friday, which is tomorrow, we announce a free Ride Friday winner. It's a random draw with everybody who's left us an itunes rating and review, and a lucky winner wins a lifetime membership to one of our programs. This month we're giving away Easy course. It's our 30 day course on how to launch an online course in 30 days. It's a $500 course over at EasyCourse Co, but every Friday, somebody wins it for free. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review to enter the draw. And once you leave us a review, you enter the draw every week automatically until you win. Alright, before I go, I want to leave you with this. When it comes to paid ads, it's all about experimentation and consistency. You're gonna get the most results when you keep experimenting and changing and trying new things. Regardless if you use Google AdWords, Facebook Ads or whatever. We got the best results when we consistently try and tweak our ads. And when something works, we double down until it doesn't work anymore. And then we have to reinvent the wheel again, try it again, do something new and find a new niche, a new keyword. A new ad, a new audience. That will work for us. All right. I'll check you in Tomorrow's episode for Uri Friday. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.