This Company Spends $1 Million In Google Ads Per Day!

Google Ads is one of the very best advertising platforms for companies looking to get targeted traffic to their website. Its strengths lie in its pay-per-click payment system, as well as the fact that the ads appear above the search results on what is by far the world’s most popular search engine. By targeting the right keywords and using well-designed ads, companies can ensure that visitors looking for specific, relevant content and items will find their site and thereby be more likely to make a purchase or to leave their details. You can learn more about this system here.

In short, if someone searches ‘buy big Christmas tree’ and you sell big Christmas trees, then having your ad come up can only be a good thing for your site. Companies know this and that’s why they collectively spent 1.34 billion dollars on AdSense last year.

But one company spent more than any of them. Can you guess who it was?

AdSense’s Biggest Spender

The answer is Amazon who, according to this report from KeywordSpy, spent over $1 million dollars on Google Ads a day during August 2014. This resulted in 1.5 million clicks a day, at an average of $0.67 cents per click. Keywords include:

• ‘Electronic book’
• ‘X File DVD’
• Planet Earth DVDs
• Yoga DVD
• Car cooler 12v
• Learn to speak Italian DVD
• Flash for Cannon Powershoot

A pretty eclectic group of very specific keywords that cater very specifically to the individual items that visitors might be searching for. Competition for these keywords comes from the likes of NexTag.com, Shopzilla.com, Gifts.com, BizRate.com and of course eBay.

What We Can Learn From Amazon

So what does this all mean? What can we take away from Amazon’s approach to Google Ads?

Well, first and foremost, we can learn that Amazon has a big budget when it comes to marketing. We’d probably all like to be able to spend that much on advertising but unless you’re a Fortune 500 company then that’s pretty much out of the question.

What you can emulate though is the nature of Amazon’s keyphrase choice. These words have been chosen specifically to target those looking for particular items and clicking on the ad will take you straight to the page where you can find that item, thus ensuring a high conversion rate. That’s why Amazon get such a high ROI and it’s why they can spend so much on Google Ads.

The same might not be true for you if you sell a service or a lesser known product. In these cases, your visitors might be ‘browsing’ rather than buying. With an ‘X Files DVD’ however, the item will be the same no matter where they buy it and thus clicks are almost guaranteed to result in purchases. Amazon’s pre-existing brand recognition will help a lot too as people will know whether they’d be happy to buy from them before they even click. They know the product, they know the company… so they probably won’t click unless they definitely want to buy.

Amazon could reduce unwanted clicks even further if they added the word ‘buy’ to the search string, or if they included the price though that would limit their exposure and it’s not really necessary in their case. These are things you could consider for your own products though.

So there you have it: Amazon is the big spender on Google Ads, which is mostly down to the nature of their business and their recognized brand. If you sell a product from your site that people are likely to buy from you without shopping around, then you might consider upping your spending there too.