How effective is Google AdWords? Google AdWords is one of those funny things where a lot of people make the mistake of running very basic Google AdWords ads. They have their website, which is probably optimized for search engine optimization, and they just run a basic ad.

Common AdWords Mistakes

For example, if you’re a personal injury attorney, what ends up happening is that you create an ad where you’re targeting a lot of different personal injury related keywords. They fill up an ad with a lot of different keywords that target personal injury. They’ll throw it to the homepage where they say they do car accident, personal injury, and slip and fall.

The problem with that is the way Google works. Google is looking for the best possible result for the searcher.

If you can make sure that every page that you have is specific to the user’s search query, then you’re going to get a lot closer to satisfying their new quality scores. Pretty often when your quality score goes up, your cost per click goes down.

Another AdWords Problem

Now there’s another problem though. If you have a website, you’ll send them to your car accident page if you’re trying to get car accident cases.

Now the problem with that, especially with our sites, is that when we build a website, there are three things that we take into consideration when we’re building any website.

Three Conflicting Priorities

First of all, there is the design element which is how the website looks. But everyone has different tastes, so we always have to keep that in consideration.

The second thing is the actual search engine optimization. How are we going to make this website perform in a way that Google loves?

The third thing is conversion rate optimization. That means when people get on the website, how are we going to compel them to pick up the phone and book a consultation or fill out the contact form?

The problem is that all three of these elements are in direct competition with one another. If you make a website that looks absolutely amazing, it will perform horribly in Google and nobody will call. Have you ever seen a website with sliders where the picture keeps changing?

How To Solve This Problem

We call them conversion killers because although they look nice with these beautiful pictures, they don’t work. They just absolutely destroy your conversions. One thing you want to make sure of is that your landing pages for Google AdWords are only designed for conversion and design.

This is nice because you can get rid of the search engine optimization. There are a lot of search engine optimization elements that just absolutely destroy conversion rates. So, you need to create dedicated landing pages for your Google AdWords campaigns.

SKAG To The Rescue

There’s also a strategy that we use that most people don’t use because it’s a ton of work. It’s called SKAG, and what that stands for is single keyword ad group.

What that means is that you’re doing a lot of work for a single keyword. If your keyword is personal injury lawyer, you’re going to create a landing page that is dedicated only to personal injury lawyer, and not attorney, not law, not law firm, not lawyers, plural.

Then, you’re also going to have a single keyword ad group. The ad group on Google only focuses on this one keyword. The reason for that is because when you do that, you can have an ad group that’s highly dedicated to a topic and it goes to a landing page that’s highly targeted to that topic as well.

That allows you to get a really high-quality score. It also allows you to match the searcher’s query really well, and it keeps your costs down.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s the best way. When you use strategies like that, Google AdWords can be very effective because your costs aren’t going through the roof.

We have a construction accident attorney and last time I checked, it’s like $350 for construction accident keywords in New York. It’s unbelievable how expensive it is. When you take extra steps like that, when you aren’t lazy about it, you can get really good results with AdWords.

AdWords And Phone Calls

The other problem I have with AdWords, which I hate, is that you get a lot of marketing phone calls that way. That’s because marketers are trying to get personal injury attorneys.

They say, I know these guys are spending $150 a click, so I’m just going to go ahead and click on their ads and then I’m going to go and call them. We see a lot of that also.
What We Do

I try to avoid AdWords. However, sometimes we need AdWords to get clients for some of our clients. For example, if we have a campaign that’s not going right or if it’s a client that just started with us.

When we need to give them some leads, we’ll do AdWords sometimes and it works pretty well. That’s a very long way of saying that if you do AdWords campaigns correctly, they’re effective. If not, you’ll probably waste a lot of money.