A Crowded Space

I thought getting my first 25 customers for QwikTalk would be pretty easy - just launch a few PPC campaigns on Google Adwords and everything should be fine, right?  Well, yes and no.  It does work, but it’s not as easy and obvious as it may seem. 

Here’s how the past month has gone: 

I launch a couple Adwords campaigns for each of my initial launch categories, SEO, SEM, Excel.  I put in place a couple ad groups per campaign, two ads per ad group, and about 30-50 broad match keywords per ad group.  Pretty high level type stuff like “find excel expert” and things like that.  I think I set my max CPC bids to about $3 - I just wanted some early traffic.  Also, based on some conversations with others I decided to run the ads on Google search and their content network.  The thought process seemed reasonable - their content network is likely on a bunch of small blogs.  If someone’s visiting a small excel, seo blog - they could definitely have some questions for experts. 

My prior experience managing Adwords campaigns was for oDesk.  When I took over managing the accounts there, we already had 2+ years of history advertising on Google (thanks Abid and Jason) and things were nicely organized and optimized already.  Bounce rates had been reduced, CTRs had been increased, and Quality scores were pretty solid.  Starting off is a different story.  I’m not sure if this is common or not, but my starting quality scores ranged anywhere from 2 - 7 with what looks to be an average of about 4.  Not good.  It didn’t make much sense to me since my ads were carefully constructed to match keywords of my landing page.  But I think Google tends to be pretty hard on new advertisers.  Since I purposely avoided inappropriate clicks by putting the price of my service in the ad (eg, it’s not free) my CTR is probably on the low-end compared to competitors.  I view this as good, but of course Google views it as bad.  My take is that I should be more concerned with things like bounce rate and conversion rate than CTR because that reflects a good match.  (more on this a little later)

So, initial data was ok - got a few conversions, but at a pretty high price.

An account manager, specialist, or whatever called my cell phone out of the blue.  Google apparently now offers to structure your campaign, ad groups, keywords, and ads for you in your first 30 days as an advertiser.  They also offered to give me $100 credit.  Seemed like an easy enough decision so I said please go for it.  

A few days later I got the response - “oh, we’re sorry we can’t give you credit because you already used a $75 promo coupon.”  No big deal - but kind of annoying.  More importantly, they had restructured all of my campaigns. They addressed the quality score issues by jacking up my max bids to nearly $14 per click in some cases.  Did they even look at my site?  I charge $10 for most calls - seems like a bad model.  They tried to reassure me that this was a good strategy to seed the Google ad algorithm with a lot of impressions and get the score up - in reality, all it did was cost me an extra $300 or so with no conversions and no noticeable change in my quality score.  All of their ads employ keyword substitution which is in my opinion, a bad practice that increases spend but rarely increases conversions. They put in only head terms with broad match keywords. With cost per conversion skyrocketing, I was beginning to think Google PPC just wouldn’t work for me. 

In short, don’t accept Google’s help.  

I feel like I’ve righted the ship now and things are moving in the right direction.  I’ve taken a much more active role in managing the campaigns and haven’t left anything to Google (I love them for their ability to deliver targeted customers through search, I’m not impressed with their Adwords account managers). To do it yourself, the data and search query reports are extremely helpful in Adwords to add negative keywords that are unrelated to your business and to add new ad groups for interesting searches that people are using.  Keyword discovery is an ongoing process.  I reduced the bids or paused most of the ad groups created by Google.  I modified the ad copy to reflect the service a little better.  Added testimonials and cleaned up the site a bit to reduce bounce rate. Added two new categories for Mechanics and Veterinarians.  Continue to add new keywords, optimize bids each week.  Picking a winning ad and writing a new one each month from now on. Adding ad groups for new grouped keywords, eg “BMW questions” and “Audi Questions”

We’ve got our first 25 customers almost entirely through Google Adwords. So, my initial panic over ridiculously high costs and Google’s screwups have subsided.  Our cost per conversion has dropped by a factor of 3 since the first week, and there absolutely a ton of opportunity ahead of us to continue optimizing. 

Lesson learned:  I’ve heard from a lot of entrepreneurs: “Adwords doesn’t work for us.”  I’m sure that’s true for a lot of startups, but I’m willing to bet with a little perseverance many people can make it work. At least for those first few customers.