You must understand who is FOR you and who is AGAINST you to stay on top.

The editor at Google doesn’t necessarily even care about the money. She only cares about keeping her job.

And Google doesn’t care about you. They don’t care about your business. They don’t care whether you win, or if the other guy does. What difference would it make to them? They’re a $20 billion mega-corporation with thousands of employees.

They care about their quality score guidelines. They care about not getting complaints from people who click on their ads. Frankly, you are not their customer. The person searching is. Google knows that, you need to know that, and to be honest that’s exactly the way it should be.

Google’s job is to thin the herd.

My job is to fatten the herd.

Not Google’s herd. My herd.

7 insidious “X Factors” that will drown most
AdWords advertisers this year (if they haven’t already)

1. Conversion rates in free-fall: Your conversions are half what they were 18 months ago. But the clicks still cost more than they did then. What do you do about that?
2. What are Google searchers actually looking for?? Your market is shifting unpredictably. Prospects who search Google aren?t asking the same question they were asking this time last year. Your market is more complex now and your position in the food chain is different. Have you changed accordingly?
3. There are growing numbers of deeply competitive markets where not one single advertiser is turning a profit. There are some niches where this shouldn’t be terribly surprising; certain parts of the business opportunity market have been this way for years. But now I’m seeing this in other, unexpected places. There is a constant churn of new advertisers and/or stupid money that is artificially inflating bid prices. (Yes, even at a time when stupid money isn’t supposedly available.) There are all kinds of crazy reasons for this but the bottom line is, you need a way to determine if this is going on – and how to overcome it.
4. Affiliates are hyper-intelligent and they?re everywhere. If you?re not an affiliate, odds are you?re competing with some. If you are an affiliate, odds are you?re competing with a whole bunch of ?em. (Unless you’re in a market where they all got slapped.) 5% of the affiliates are making 95% of the money. Which group are you in?
5. Google relies heavily on real human beings to review websites. If a Google editor gives you a Quality Score of 1, all the HTML changes in the world will never fix it. If you don’t have an ace Google rep (which generally requires a monthly spend north of $15,000), it may be impossible to get a straight answer as to why your QS suddenly dropped to 1. But real human beings with $500, $1,000 and $5,000 monthly ad budgets still have to make their businesses work! I’m going to show you how to get around this and play ball with the big boys, no matter what your budget is.
6. When you ask a question, some nameless, faceless person at Google pats you on the head (Thank you for using Google AdWords) and sends you a useless, cut-and-paste, non-answer to your question that was written by a committee of recent college grads (Hint: with hundreds of thousands of reasonably funded and fairly ignorant advertisers entering the market on a regular basis, you?re little more than a commodity to Google. Commodity = pawn on a chessboard. Expendable.)
7. Google’s Content Network can deliver gratifying quantities of quality traffic, but to most people it?s a mysterious, money-sucking fog. (Did you know that the colors and layout of the Google AdWords interface are scientifically designed and meticulously tested to vacuum out your wallet while you remain placid, comfortable, unaware?) Only those who know how and where to slice and cross-section their Content Traffic get the rewards.

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.