How many advertisers does it take to make money on AdWords?

5.
Five advertisers is a bit of a exaggeration, I know. To be honest, you only need one advertiser who has five different traits so he can fully take advantage of all that is available in AdWords.
Everybody who works with AdWords knows that it’s not rocket science. You don’t necessarily need to have quadruple Ph.D.’s to work your way around to making profitable AdWords advertising. This is the reason why I’m often appalled when I see AdWords accounts from large agencies. From your first glimpse, you can see laziness written all over! AdWords is time consuming and you need to want to do it to truly excel at it.
Let me elaborate on the five traits I’m talking about.

1. Factory Worker

This is how far even a toddler can build your AdWords account. The first trait requires you only to spend time with your website, get familiar with the structure and ”copy/paste” it to your AdWords account. Building your account can be very time consuming, depending on the size of your website.
Take for example an eCommerce website. Build all of your campaigns to correspond to the site structure, make sure all your ad groups reflect the product categories. Work your way through the extensive keyword research to find out all the keywords that are searched upon. There, your AdWords account has started to take its shape, you’ve got all the building blocks laid out.

Yes, I named this trait as ”Bob the Builder”, because I can! This is exactly what I mean when I stated earlier that I’m often appalled: this is usually where all accounts stay, they’re not improved! :(

2. Analyst

”Houston, we have a lift off!”.

Now that we have launched our advertising campaigns, we can start to analyze the data we get: CPC’s, CTR’s, CPO’s, Conversion-rate, Bounce-rate and so on and so on. I don’t want to make this post any longer than it needs to be with all the abbreviations available, so I’ll leave it at that.

Here begins the data highway™, where information flows back and forth for us to skim through & take a deep dive into, and make decisions upon. The analyst figures out what data are actionable and what isn’t and then ’passes it on’ to the developer who then tests it out. If we find anomalies and our hypotheses don’t work we can take them further on to the developer to enhance and improve.

Analyzing data is without a doubt useless if you don’t act upon your findings. Make no mistake, data is what everything is based on!

3. Developer

A/B test everything. Run tests simultaneously to enable faster decision making, and always rely on data. Surely, many of your tests will fail, this will give you indication on what doesn’t work, so next time you’ll be more educated on what might work.
At this point you need to have somewhat of a perversion to extreme detail, for you’ll be making one cent bid changes to your keywords to test how they affect your advertising. You will not be painting large landscapes, on the contrary, you’ll be focused on getting the tree branches just the way they need to be.

4. Copywriter

This trait requires a little bit of Hemingway running through your veins. ”Write drunk, edit sober”.
The copywriter captivates the audiences with extremely well crafted copy, fitted into a teeny tiny space. Test your ad-texts with different call-to-actions & USP’s. Actually, test them with everything!
Benchmark yourself against your competitors to differentiate your message. Below is a funny example I found with a Finnish search term ”timanttiporaus” (diamond drilling). As you can see, it doesn’t need a lot to pop out of the masses, with just a different headline? (click the picture to enlarge)

5. Mad Professor

Javascripts, automation, test tubes, explosions – Next step, rocket science!
Once you get to be a mad professor at AdWords, you’ve come a long way. At this point you know the Google AdWords Developer Center inside out, you might even find these scripts coming into your dreams. Optimizing accounts according to weather, creating effective countdown ads with parameters that update themselves.
I skipped few parts on the pyramid that was being built, so here’s the full picture:

The more you spend time with your account, the more efficient it will become, and the more money you will make.

AdWords is a mean, lean, money making machine. Only, if you make it to be! Oh, and all Analyst-people, don’t be mad, I’m not diminishing your work with the second least of dollar signs. Everybody’s together in the circle piling up money!

Keep in mind this checklist when building/improving your AdWords accounts:

• Bob the Builder: keep building your account and restructuring the content
• Analyst: analyze as much data as you can, so you will make decision based on what your prospects are telling you
• Developer: A/B test, keep focus on large amount of smaller changes that will contribute to larger change
• Copywriter: read books on creating effective sale texts, test call-to-actions and USP’s
• Mad Professor: Automate, learn javascript, crash your Excel with too much data

Once you’re done with the list, start over.
If you’re buying AdWords advertising from an agency, make sure they invest time and effort into your account so you can sleep tight knowing that your advertising is properly being taken care of. If you feel unease with your AdWords provider, ask them specific questions concerning your account to make sure they do everything they can to make you more profit. As an additional note, read Toni’s post on the challenges of buying AdWords (only in Finnish) to learn how to pick an experienced AdWords advertising provider.
Let me know if I missed something, so we can all update our lists and become better advertisers!