Free Advertising for Small Businesses: Enter to Win a $25,000 Marketing Makeover

NOTE: The $25,000 Marketing Makeover contest is now closed.

What Would You Do with $25K in Free Advertising Spend?

What if you had $25,000 in free advertising budget to spend on a complete PPC makeover? Where would you start?

This infographic details the top five ways that small businesses can renovate their PPC accounts to get better results from Google AdWords. Key findings from this original research include:

Small Business Advertisers Are Missing Opportunities

A typical small business wastes about 25% of their annual PPC advertising budget. Depending on the vertical, that 25% of wasted spend adds up to a lot of lost business, sales and leads:

• The typical finance & insurance business loses 126 insurance quotes per year
• A bed & breakfast in the travel & tourism business loses 367 guest inquiries
• A shopping company loses 569 product sales
• A car dealership loses 273 test drive appointments
• A fitness company loses 218 gym memberships
• A B2B companies loses 157 leads
• A software company loses 211 enterprise software inquiries

Small Business Advertisers Show Low Account Activity

Just doing more work in your PPC account is probably the single easiest way to improve your results. But most SMB AdWords managers are guilty of laziness:

• Only 1% of small business advertisers does work in their account every week
• Over half (53%) of SMBs only optimize their ads once per quarter
• 43% of advertisers haven’t added a new negative keyword in the past 30 days

In 2013, the typical small biz AdWords account has two campaigns and 212 keywords, but only:

• 9 ad groups,
• 18 text ads, and
• 3 landing pages

Small Business Advertisers Need Better Keyword Research

PPC advertisers, whatever the size of their business, need to do smart keyword research, focusing on keyword relevance and keyword expansion:

• Do long-tail keyword research. These more specific, targeted keywords offer less competition, lower CPCs, and more qualified clicks.
• Use the right match types. Over half of small business aren’t using modified broad match at all. 1 in 4 accounts only use broad match!
• Leverage negative keywords. 1 in 5 small biz AdWords accounts don’t contain a single negative keyword.

Too few keywords, too few negative keywords, and incorrect use of keyword match types lead to high amounts of wasted spend.

Small Business Advertisers Have Poor Ad Relevancy

More relevant ads get higher Quality Scores. With a perfect Quality Score of 10, you’d enjoy 80% lower cost per click and a 50% discount on cost per action. The lower your score, the more you pay – unfortunately the average Quality Score for small businesses is 5.

Small Business Marketers Have Ineffective Landing Pages

Landing pages are how you cross the finish line in PPC and convince your visitor to convert. Small business advertisers aren’t closing the deal because of poor landing page optimization:

• Over 25% of accounts send all their PPC traffic to one landing page.
• 1 in 5 small businesses send all their PPC clicks to the home page.
• Less than half of small businesses have conversion tracking installed.

These landing page mistakes lead to poor ROI and big holes in reporting.

Small Business AdWords Accounts Lack of Mobile Optimization

Now is the time to the opportunities in mobile advertising. However, small businesses still aren’t making the most of mobile space:

• Only 1 out of 20 SMB accounts has set up call extensions (which increase CTR by 10%) in all their mobile campaigns.
• Fewer than 20% of AdWords accounts have mobile-preferred ads.

Get Free Advertising Spend on Google By Using WordStream!

For a limited time only, WordStream is offering $25,000 in free AdWords advertising to an AdWords account user who shows the most improvements following the advice provided by our AdWords Performance Grader. For more details, visit our event page: Grade and Get Paid!