Comments on: 5 great ways to waste money in Google Adwords

By: Marlon

Marlon — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 03:11:16 +0000

Hi,

I sell a Mac only product for $14.95 and I DO make a profit by advertising on Google!

You have to learn the game to play in it. Just throwing up a campaign will no doubt cost you money, time and lots of frustration. I’ve been in the Affiliate Marketing space for over 3 years now promoting other people’s product using Google. Now, I’m promoting my own products, hand-coded by yours truly.

Here’s what I’d like to share. I have never used Google Search. All my campaigns in Google utilize the the Content Network, with image ads, not text ads. I guarantee, 90% of your readers never touched the content network and probably 97% of them never used image ads.

Most people feel that search traffic is it. DEAD WRONG. About 80% of those online are busy reading content, not searching. And guess where my ads are showing up? Yep, right next to the content, which needs to be contextually relevant to my ad (actually, the other way around).

You are right about including foreign countries, to a degree. I am getting very good results with Canada, UK, and Australia in addition to US of course. So, learn the game before you play it. You will get hurt if you are ill-knowledged.

Cheers,
Marlon

By: Ashraf Gheith

Ashraf Gheith — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:00:55 +0000

A great article, thank you very much. We wasted a lot of money to now and still do on e-Marketing. I hope this will help us in some progress.

Thank you again.

By: AutoGlassAllen

AutoGlassAllen — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:44:12 +0000

My business has a fairly competitive market, and this is great info considering im just getting into adwords from google, the first time I used adwords I really messed up, made it for the whole state instead of just my surrounding cities. So thanks for the tips.

By: Robin

Robin — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 01:40:02 +0000

Thanks a lot for the post!
Google had given to me a 80€ voucher to try “Adwords”. This is pretty cool to make experiments. I don’t know if everybody has benefited from this “favor”.
In the list of “what to do to waste money in Google Adwords”, I would also add “define a lot of keywords” (Google allows up to 80 keywords!). Indeed, when looking to my traffic logs, I suspect a lot of visitors coming on my site via Adwords will *never* pay nor download my product.
When using Adwords for the first time, your are tempted to add every keyword related to the subject of your software (in the same way it is tempting to stuff the meta tag “keywords” of your website homepage). But people may be interested in that subject without wanting to experiment it by themselves via your software. Ok, they will know your product exists, that’s all…
Having said that, I think when you are selling a software, you should at least include the word “software” or “tool” or “add-in” in your keywords. For example, “qualifier1 + qualifier2 + software”. By this way, you are sure that people coming to your site will be interested first in downloading your trial version (first and necessary step before the sale).
Second advice: at the beginning of your Adwords experience, exclude the “Google display network” since you have no control on the conditions that make your ad be displayed. In addition, this network yields far more display that the “search” one and can burn quickly your budget.

By: 5 Great Ways To Waste Money In Google AdWords | Advice to make AdWords more profitable for you | Adwords Management |

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:23:51 +0000

[...] To highlight this issue, I was going to write another one of those ‘Big Mistakes’ items for the AdWords Adviser, but then I noticed this excellent post, “5 Great Ways To Waste Money In Google AdWords“. [...]

By: netpaths

netpaths — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:14:36 +0000

Yes, I mean design aesthetics. I bet you would be surprised at the traffic change from a redesign.

By: Flash Preloader

Flash Preloader — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:09:26 +0000

Agreed. Especially about negative keywords usage. Many do forget or simply know nothing about them, hence their ads show up in the results with “torrent”, “free”, “crack”, etc words combination in a search – which is indeed a waste of money!

By: Customers Now

Customers Now — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:17:40 +0000

This is great information. Truly appreciate you sharing this. Also wanted to add another resource, Internet Advertising Guru David Szetela’s new book, Customers Now, on how to master two simple content advertising programs – Google’s AdWords content ad network and ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange – so that you can efficiently get your message out and effectively generate a strong customer base.

A free copy of the ebook is available at http://www.customersnowbook.com/ds/free_ebook.html

By: yujinha

yujinha — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 18:56:28 +0000

nice share, great job, are you really do that tips :D

By: Storm Force

Storm Force — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:06:09 +0000

Some good and simple tips here. Particulary on ROI.

I was interested to see that your not using Google Analytics on site? Any reason?

Dave