At Embrace, we’re currently working on a study of small businesses that are using, or have used Google AdWords and other Search Engine advertising platforms to help grow their businesses. The businesses that we surveyed all managed their accounts in-house, none outsourced to an agency of SEM specialist.

The aim of the study is to find out what kind of experience small businesses have had with paid search, and how they are/were using it.

The completed study is still a couple of weeks from completion, but we wanted to share some of what we have learned so far.

In summary, Small Businesses are not happy. They are not achieving the results that they were hoping for, they are not generating a profit, they find it too time consuming to effectively manage and those that have used it previously are unlikely to use it again.

This should obviously be a big concern for Google and other search engines, who have been heavily courting small businesses to help push up revenues.

What we also found was those that were not happy with paid search are perhaps not getting as much out of it as they could be. They are not fully utilizing the tools available to them and are not following some best practices.

For example, in many instances, small businesses were only using a single ad per ad group and were not refreshing their creative regularly.  In others, they were running a single campaign with a single ad group. We also found that on average, Small Businesses are only spending a minimal amount of time managing and optimizing their PPC campaigns.

These are all reasons why results would suffer.

What really became apparent during our research is that the perception that running paid search campaigns is easy is far from the truth. At Embrace we have a great deal of experience managing Paid Search campaigns for many small businesses across the board and we know that in order to achieve great results, a lot of time, care and effort need to go into them. We also know that if they are left unattended, like a plant, they will shrivel and die.

Tools such as website analytics software, conversion tracking and keyword research tools must all be utilized to the fullest extent and bids, keywords and ad copy needs to be monitored and optimized on a regular basis. Failure to do this will inevitably lead to below par results.

As mentioned before, we are still a little way off the completion of the study, which we will be distributing for free. As soon as it’s ready, we will be sure to let you know.