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Google AM told us we need to spend $2M a year on paid search to rank a new site…
Posted by on February 24, 2021 at 4:57 amNeed a good laugh?? Boy have I got a good story for you!
So I work at a mid-size company with B2C consumer products. We mostly sell to retailers, so we don’t have our own site. But after some awesome success last year, we decided to get a few bids for an e-commerce website. We haven’t even built out wireframes for this thing yet and my digital marketing coworker asked them in passing “hey, what a realistic budget and strategy to remain on page one for xyz keywords on our new site?” (keep in mind these are just product categories, non-branded terms)
Well guys, I shit you not, Google’s account manager assigned to us came back and was like “Heeeeeey kiddo, if you pony up $2 MILLION dollars a year, you might just get there.”
So in case you needed a good laugh today too, you can DM me for this hooligan’s name and ask him all your burning questions… I know I’ve got a few of my own.
Edit: Thanks guys for all the ideas and helpful comments. This was just for paid search, not anything organic related. Also, I guess I should have mentioned I wasn’t really soliciting help but more or less mocking the ridiculousness of the “throw a number at them and see if it sticks” mentality of the guy from Google. And yes he was *from* Google according to his email domain. Thanks for the laughs!
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26 Replies
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Jeebus. Google AMs are all shit aren’t they. Like wtf is the point of a call for you to tell me that I need to got step by step with you on accepting every recommendation the algo says I need to make to get google more of my money
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Maybe years ago but i’m calling BS. Google did away with dedicated reps about three years ago and there isn’t a rep alive that is going to tell you that you have to pony up money to rank organically (assuming that is what you are saying).
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Your Google ads rep told you that you have to pay for ads to get on the first page organically? That doesn’t sound too… organic.
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I complained on a couple of them, I am freaking out when they call me 7AM in the mornings and leave voice messages. I keep telling them to email and I will decide whether it’s worth my time. I even yelled and cussed at one of them but she kept calling, until I sent a few complaints and then the quarter changed and she was reassigned. But I also have a bunch of accounts and I can’t spend an hour talking to the rep for each of Ads I manage.
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It’s not just a lie. It’s depending on your keywords and your competitors. If you launch a new brand in food delivery niche you will need a lot of money even for organic traffic. You need to buy content, backlinks and so on. Even if you have employes that could do the work, you need to pay them ?.. i mean what have you thought – get a site online, insert it into webmaster tools and rank on 1?
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I stopped taking calls from Google on Google ads. I know more than them and it’s a waste of time.
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I’ll do it for half. It’ll be tough to keep the lights on giving you that much of a break, but I’ll do it because I like you and want your company to succeed.
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I mean…. They technically aren’t wrong. It might be mostly bullshit depending on the specific category but it they look up similar brands and what they spend they can make an estimate without telling you who…
Additionally, I consult on ad architecture quite a bit at $10k to $1M/month, some of which have started from scratch with minimal organic SEO value. All catalog. No content. Sheeeiittt some of these companies don’t even want to put an address or phone number.
There’s a handful that come to mind. Google and Facebook/IG works best but we use a lot of programmatic native/display/video/mobile for a lot of accounts these days.
Here’s my point: SEO will often say that paid ads don’t impact organic but that’s not true and the reverse is also true. Users are dumb and get tracked, tagged all sorts of ways.
I typically see organic collateral coming in at 5-25% and a similar amount on direct when you step on the gas hard with ads at $10-20K minimum per month in an easy niche and possibly a lot more for a more competitive niche.
$2M/yr is $160K/month on search…. That’s not a totally wild number. It’s high if you’ve never spent it before but relative to competitors and the keywords you’re targeting it could totally happen.
If you’re a business that does $2-3M/month in ecom revenue you could EASILY be spending anywhere from $150K up to $1M/month.
But we’re talking organic so at $160K/month ad spend you can assume a few hundred thousand paid clicks and tens of thousands of collateral clicks coming through as organic and the same for direct.
It’s high, but not crazy high.
What kind of ad spend do you have today?
What kind of organic ranking do you see today?
It’s half bullshit but if it’s a competitive niche it’s super easy to spend that much. Will you see a corresponding spike in revenue? Possibly/probably/maybe.
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Google Ads is Google Ads. So, it is about Ad Rank
Google Search is Google Search. So it is about Search Rank.
If you use Google Ads and set bid, your ad will be ranked on #1 position. But Google Ads is not related to Google Search.
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I used a Google AM once. About 2 minutes into a phone call they told me that I should delete the site, buy a new domain and work with some specific company to build it from scratch. What a bunch of dirtbags.
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Well, a site that spends alot of Adwords gets a lot of traffic, and a % of those visitors might link to it later. A site with zero adspend isn’t going to get much traffic. How would a site with zero traffic ever rank for anything? I always buy traffic to launch all my sites because I believe there is an indirect benefit – it gets the ball rolling so to speak. With that said, he pulled the $2M number out of his ass.
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Google ads are not factor for ranking your keywords on SERPs.
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Hmm…not convinced how true this is, but I have wondered about this before. I’ve run Google Ads for a local carpet cleaning company, and then when my site ranked organically I stopped running ads…I did wonder what Google thought of all that 🙂
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Google Account Manager? As in your point of contact via the Google Partners programme?
Or just some idiot that is trying to pass themselves off as Google to get your money (which happens a lot)?
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Why are you posting about this on SEO?
Your google ad rep is not in the business of organic search.
Furthermore, without knowing your industry, or the number of products you sell, he’s probably right. In fact, that may even be a conservative estimate.
We have clients with 8-figure pass-through numbers.
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