The Word “Free” and Google Adwords Optimization Mistakes

The advertising market becomes larger every year, and it attracts more customers and companies from around the world. But, when it comes to Adwords optimization, we all see the same mistakes from big companies sometimes, and they still apply the same technique that will never work at all, or that will lose money with not targeted clicks.

In this post, we will talk about using the word “Free” in Google search page advertising results, and when you should avoid using it. Please keep in mind that I’m only talking about products and services that are not free.

So, the user should pay in order to get benefits, however, the company still plays with keywords and add the Google search about free stuff to their ad campaigns.

When you have a valued product, you need to show its real feature, and what makes it better than the competitors. That’s the real strategy that will make more sales if you have the right product in the right place.

If you want to avoid losing money with Google Adwords, you should never follow Google in their optimizations. Google is the biggest search engine and it owns 80% of the search market, and even more in the next years.

So, if Google tries to use the word “free” for some popular searches that people should pay in order to get the product or the service, Google still advertises in its own network and for free, of course. No matter if the user is interested in buying or not, the cost is the same for them and it’s nothing.

On the other side, you’re a company that runs a business and you pay Google for every click generated through the search engine page result (SEPP). that means you need to save every dollar and make your ad campaigns targeted, as possible.

If you are selling laptops, for example, you should promote your ads in technology and high-tech related keywords. Most importantly, you have to advertise your product with “buying keywords”, such as buy a laptop and similar things.

If you try to copy Google and use the term “free laptops”, for example, you will get lots of clicks and nothing as sales. So, you are just buying not targeted traffic from Google, and the most dangerous thing is that no one of these people will buy from you. It’s simple because they’re looking for free stuff and not buying them. So, why waste your hard-earned money there?

Let’s take an easy example, when you search for “Free Domain” which is a popular searched keywords combinations, you will see something like the following search result that will be different from one region to another, but just take it as an example.

The Word "Free" and Google Adwords Optimization

As you can see, Google itself tries to attract people who search for free domains. But, Google offers paid services in its App Engine platform. That’s not our problem, they own the advertising network, and even, if a few people will pay them, later, they still pay nothing for their own services.

At the same time, you can see that companies like GoDaddy, Register, and “1and1”, are claiming that they offer a free domain, but for paid services that are web hosting.

The problem here is that people are looking for free domains, If they need hosting with a free domain, they will search for that phrase. So, they will probably visit their sites, but they will leave them and try another search.

In this case, the 3 companies are buying not targeted traffic for people who search for free domain names, and they will visit companies that offer paid services only. Do you see the wrong optimization? It’s like putting business ads on health-related websites. The conversation will be near to nothing and the company is losing money.

Instead of buying that expensive cost per click for the wrong keywords, the company can explore more “buying keywords” and invest in them. For example, use “purchase a domain name” and start finding more keywords that a few companies or no one, is using actually.

That way, the company build strong optimized Google Adwords campaigns, based on the right keywords. Best of all, they get targeted visitors who are interested in buying the service and not want it for free.

This seems a simple topic if you’re not familiar with AdWords, and the thousands of dollars that companies pay every day for similar examples like the above one. 10 clicks for high competitive keywords will cost something like $500 to $1000 per day at least.

That’s an investment that will bring more sales if the campaign manager uses it in the right place. So,  never use the Google examples when it comes to keyword optimization, and find new ways to get more sales, based on the right keywords that bring sales and not visits.

The bottom line here is that you should use the word “Free” only for free stuff and not just trying to drive some traffic from Google. Google is the best advertising network, but not for losing money on advertising with mistakes that you can avoid.

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About Fathi Arfaoui

Fathi Arfaoui is a Physicist, Blogger and the founder of Trustiko.com. He shares Business, WordPress and Blogging tips to build a better blog and succeed online.

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