Google’s right side Adwords wipeout – good or bad for your business?
I’ve been advertising on Google since 2003. I spent over £2.5m of my own money to build a business that’s done over £45m so far, and I’ve managed £2m on behalf of clients in that time.
If you’ve been paying attention to our Facebook page here, you will have seen the recent post where I displayed a snapshot of the Google Professional account we’ve been running since 2008. We’ve bought 4,644,575 clicks which have generated 243,860 online conversions (online purchases or forms being filled in). You can treble that number to about 700,000 if you include phone calls generated.
I’ve seen every update they’ve done in the past 13 years and watched everyone panic when they make changes and scream about the end of the world.
The one change that did actually destroy 1000s of businesses was the Quality Score update, which basically got rid of affiliate marketers and shite squeeze pages, but that improved the web, so no real loss there.
This recent update is interesting.
It basically wipes out the right-hand side adverts and pushes organic listings further down the page. As usual, this will be designed to do one thing: make Google more money.
In case you haven’t noticed it yet, this is what it looks like:
This has created more “active white space” on the right hand side, which means there is more focus to the results, which I actually think improves the user experience.
It also means that the traffic goes to the big 4 at the top, which means traffic is lost to less adept advertisers.
Is this a problem?
Not to me – whenever we run Adwords campaigns we always bid high to ensure top position and split test adverts to continuously improve CTRs (Click through rates).
If you’ve watched my Adwords training inside the Technophobes Guide, you’ll know how important this strategy is – because the higher the CTR, the higher the Quality Score and the more Google rewards you (and ultimately the user) by charging you less per click and placing you higher in the Adwords listings.
As Adwords is market-driven, this means you should be profitable in these positions if you’ve got your target keywords, landing page SEO and user experience right. If it’s not profitable, it’s often because your business model is wrong or your product appeals to only a percentage of the keyword market.
A good example of this is the personalised gift market – it you’re selling a high-end personalised gift, but the market wants something cheaper, then the conversion rate and profitability of your product for a keyword like: “personalised gifts” is going to be lower, or negative.
It doesn’t matter though – the data you get from this can be fed into your SEO which will make you much more profitable, if you run the ads with an actual strategy.
That’s how we increased the turnover of MakeMeSomethingSpecial.co.uk by over 1000{4d2303c3d7018ed3e1a955ec2105d2bcecc5b881e14ee890535c5ae577f46e7a} in just over six months. Look, here’s a picture of the owner Ben eating his hat after we did this:
So, should you be bothered by the Adwords change? I don’t think so. It just means the lazy advertisers will lose out and the smart ones will make even more money.
It’s evolution, baby.
