I truly believe we draw lessons from all of our experiences, and I learned a lot from my first Google Ads marketing campaign. It wasn’t long after building the Webmobyle Website that I realised, that having a website on its own was not enough.
I needed to find ways to drive traffic to it in order to make it a worthwhile value proposition, in reaching and finding client prospects. And one of the approaches was Google Ads, along with other marketing strategies.
Usually, when we find a strategy that we think is promising, we tend to think of it as a cure-all in the planning stages, and are inclined to think of it as the messiah, that will solve all our problems.
Unfortunately this is not how advertising with Google Ads turned out for me, initially. Google Ads is a pay-per-click platform, where ads are set up and you get to pay Google for every click of your ads, by people who carry out searches on the search engine and its partners.
When the initial set of statistics for the campaign came in, my ads were being clicked aright, but there was an extremely high bounce rate, to the extent that the entire exercise was literally comparable to pouring money down the drain.
What this means is that, even though people were clicking on the ads to come to the website, they were either immediately leaving the website, or not spending enough time on it to be engaged with what the site had to offer.
My knee-jerk reaction was to completely blame this state of affairs, on the Google Ads platform. I irrationally concluded that the whole exercise was a waste of money, time and effort. What I should have been doing however, was to try and stop playing the blame game, and examine the root cause of this catastrophic failure, in leveraging the Google Ads platform.
After I had calmed down, I sat down and started to closely examining the analytics data for the marketing campaign, and carrying out some research online, to try and see where I had gone wrong.
What came out of this inspection, was the realisation that I had gone in half-cocked, with my own assumptions without taking the time to learn how to do it right. As it turns out, advertising with Google Ads is a science in its own right!
Once I started looking for the problems and making an effort to correct them, the true power of Google Ads came into its own. From my research online, I discovered the book, “Advanced Google Adwords” by Brad Geddes. 600 plus pages of it, all on using the Google Ads platform. The thickness of the book is daunting by anyone’s standards, but I was committed to getting it right, so I went through the book.
What I learned from the book was priceless. And now, when I set up a marketing campaign, even for client’s projects, I know my way around the platform, and now I know what to do, and what not to do. The expression that “knowledge is power” comes into its own, through my application of the wealth of knowledge gained from this book.
Having equipped myself with the right knowledge, and are now setting up Google advertising campaigns with it, I am able to leverage the true power of advertising with Google Ads, and I’m finally doing it right. I am also learning new things as I use the platform more.
Doing Google Ads right is a combination of good keyword research, crafting of the right ad copy with corresponding landing pages, and good Google Ads account organisation, as well as mastering data analysis from reports.
Although I learned a lot about the Google Ads platform from my first campaign, I also drew some valuable life lessons and insights, that apply to life in general;
It is well and good to make assumptions, but you should be cautious and treat them as such. Most of the assumptions you make about anything will be off the mark, and should only be used as a guide, in your quest to establish facts upon which you can base your decisions.
When you are disappointed by the results of any undertaking, do not be quick to throw in the towel. It is a rare occurrence, that we can be great at something when attempting it for the first time. Usually you have to learn the ropes and figure out the process. It is a great idea to repeat the process, until you figure it out before you quit.
Quitting is an instinct that comes the easiest, but is also costly. You will never know what may come out of something, if you quit on the first sign of disappointment. Developing a habit of persistence will see you through many great successes in life.
Mistakes are inevitable on the journey to discovering success. Instead of dwelling on them and using them as bad marks against yourself, use them as a learning tool, build upon your experiences to anticipate and reduce them in future. There is no better teacher than experience.
Without setting milestones, you will never know what progress you are making, if any. That is why it is important to measure your progress in any undertaking that you set your mind to. Setting definite goals and milestones by which to gauge your progress, keeps you motivated and allows you the scope to make adjustments, towards the attainment of your goals.
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