Blog

Why Google’s Interests are Not Aligned with Yours

Love keywords, big fan of search marketing as many folks I work with know. However, it is important that online marketers don’t forget that Google is a company that can take a lot of your money and very quickly.  One thing I encourage our Clients to keep in mind – Google is not your friend, a helpful source of traffic (maybe “the most”), however they are in it for them. Case in point – when writing Ad Copy to accompany your keyword be wary of what Google uses for optimization. Google offers the ability to run many different Ad Copies and will automatically “optimize” the 3 vital lines of marketing text that is your ad. On the surface this is a great feature for a marketer that should optimize the ad buy and thus increase sales.

The caveat is to look at what Google considers a successful ad to be versus what you, the advertiser/retailer, consider to be a successful ad. For the most part – a successful ad in our opinion is one that drives sales. Arguments can be made in specific cases to run an ad for “branding” or “exposure” purposes, however in most cases the ad buy needs to generate revenue.

Google considers a high-performing ad to be one with a high click through rate (clicks/impressions). Google obviously gets paid on clicks, however not all clicks are created equal. If clicks go up on a non-converting ad then advertising spend will increase without a parallel increase in sales. When evaluating the success of ad copy on Google, be sure to tie it back to a monetizable event (a sale, a lead, etc.). Failure to do so will turn you sour on paid search marketing very quickly.

Always happy to help if you want to know more – don’t hesitate to write/call.

Categorised in: Online Marketing

This post was written by DEP Ecommerce Consultants