Why Google gives away money

The aggressive new customer acquisition strategy pursues a single goal: the more companies use Ad Words, the tougher the battle for the top positions becomes. Google awards the positions of the ads in the search results by auction. The more companies vie for the top positions, the higher the click price (CPC) and therefore Google's revenue. If the companies are inexperienced or ignorant, the click price even increases disproportionately. Google has published a great deal about how to maximize the success of an AdWords campaign. This information is available to everyone. However, small and medium-sized companies often lack the time to deal with the optimization of an AdWords campaign or the willingness to commission a professional partner to manage the campaign. As a result, these companies make typical beginner's mistakes, which can cost Google a lot of money:
 
- The ad groups and campaigns are not structured, which reduces the optimization options.
 
- The campaign for local companies is not geographically restricted. This results in unnecessary clicks from interested parties who are not in the catchment area. 

- Only one ad text is placed per ad group, so it is not possible to determine the most attractive offer text.  After clicking on the ad, the interested party is redirected to the homepage of the website, where they do not find what they are looking for and bounce. 

- The preset keyword option "largely suitable" is adopted without any thought. The campaign is placed under keywords that do not bring qualified visitors to the website and only generate costs. 

- No exclusive keywords are defined, which in turn means that ads appear under keywords that are not related to the offer.
 
Google offers everyone telephone support for setting up and managing AdWords campaigns. This raises the question of whether a company whose main source of income is AdWords is optimizing the click price to the benefit of advertisers. We observe that Google sets up AdWords campaigns in such a way that a broad target group is reached. However, the optimization possibilities are not really exhausted, rather Google only does the bare minimum. So it's not a good idea to let the dog guard the sausage. An AdWords campaign should pursue the goal of minimizing the click price (CPC) and maximizing the conversion. And it is precisely this goal that is very often not pursued. Instead of optimizing their campaign, companies compensate for the poor quality with higher CPC bids and budgets. It is undisputed that AdWords, when used professionally, is an attractive tool for reaching qualified prospects and selling offers. A company that wants to exploit Google AdWords to the full must concern itself with campaign set-up and management and not just set up a campaign quickly after work. Otherwise it will easily spend several hundred to thousand francs on unnecessary clicks.

Imre Sinka & Martin Caduff