What is Google Adwords?
In Googles words:
“AdWords helps connect you with potential customers in the right place, and at precisely the right time by placing relevant ads on the right-hand-side of our search results pages.”
Google AdWords adverts are displayed along with search results when someone searches Google using one of your keywords/keyphrases. That way, you’ll be advertising to an audience that’s already interested in your business.
Try it now, go to Google and type “cheap gardening tools” into the search. You get a list of results, yes? The first thing you see are the sponsered listings in a faint shade of pink, there you are, that is Google Adwords. Below this pink box on the left side of the page there are the normal, non paid, known as “organic” search listings. To the right of the page you have some more “sponsered listings” or Google Adword advertisments.
Google Adwords is a Pay per Click (PPC) system which means that when someone clicks on the ad the advertiser is charged a fee, so be kind and only click if you are really interested in their product.
Unlike traditional PPC advertising where your ad position is based on how much you are prepared to pay. Google adwords reward relevant ads by increasing their position and for bad or irrelevant ads it decreases their position, and in some cases suspends them all together.
Google measures the ad popularity by monitoring how many people click on the ad (Click through rate). The more clicks the more popular and the higher the ad. With Google ads you don’t have to pay the most to get listed first! You need to provide the most relevant and popular ads.
It’s true that at the time of writing this article it’s one of the largest ad platforms available today! The question is should you be using it?
Google AdWords Advantages
Google AdWordsG aims to provide the most effective advertising available for businesses of any size. Their aim is to help you meet your customer acquisition needs by enabling you to:
- Reach people looking for your product or service
- Fully control your ad budget
- Easily create and edit your ads
- See your ads on Google within minutes of creating them
Google AdWords gives you 24/7 access to detailed performance reports that help you track the effectiveness of your ad campaigns. Google adwords comes with some nice features, and is fully customisable for any advertiser:
- Cost-per-click (CPC) pricing, so you pay only for the clicks you have received at a price you have set (choose a maximum CPC from £0.01 to £100).
- Cost-per-impression (CPM) pricing for those who prefer to target individual content sites and pay by the impression.
- Daily budget you set, starting from £0.01.
- Targeted ads you create and manage.
- Ad scheduling: run your ads on the days and hours you want.
- Online performance reports 24/7 in your account.
- Additional network of sites and products for increasing advertising exposure.
- One or multiple ads targeted with one or more keywords.
Google Adwords claims to be the best marketing tool for small to medium size businesses. But is it?
Why use Google Adwords
It is the quickest way of bringing highly targeted traffic to your website. It has many uses; you can use it to:
- Test a product
- Test a Sales letter
- Traffic source for very competitive niches when organic listings are too difficult
- Sell a product
You can quickly and easily bring targeted traffic to your website as it only costs £5 to register; and once registered you can start to using them straight away. They are easy to use and Google provides excellent help.
Are Google Adwords worth it?
Now I know that there are lots of people out there who are having great success with Google Adwords but I have to give a word of warning, your potential return on investment (ROI) can not be very high from the start. Why? Well, the time and effort required to make sure your campaign is returning suitable visitors to your site and not just ANY visitors to your site is actually quite high.
Google Adwords is not nearly as simple and easy as people seem to think. Unless you are in an extremely focused and highly targeted industry, if you simply bid on the popular keyword phrases for your business you will pay a lot of money and probably get visitors who are not targeted to your specific products and services. Your budget will run out pretty quickly and you may not see any custom back for it. So my point is, yes google adwords can be effective but only by spending time and effort on optimising your google adwords campaigns.
Take for example the keyword phrase “web design Leeds”, I would get the opportunity of 1500 hits per month with that at the time of writing this article, BUT I would pay £5.29 for each click through to my site and I am not guaranteed a sale! Think about that this way, I could use that budget to create a successful banner campaign on various websites where I may get more targetted hits.
The only way you will get value for money from google adwords is by spending time learning how to use it, (try the google adwords learning center) and researching keywords using keywords tool and then spending lots of time tweaking your campaign to suit your budget. Now thats a lot of time and effort and is what I mentioned earlier, a reduction in ROI. My Google Adwords Tutorial may help you too.
Google Adwords can pay off when you find highly targeted keyword phrases that you can get for low bid amounts but unless you are willing to devote a major chunk of time learning how to effectively run a Google Adwords campaign, or are willing to pay someone each month to manage your campaign, in most cases you will be throwing money away.
Like anything in life, you need to spend time learning, if you do you will reap the rewards but Google know most people don’t, and they sit back each month lapping up the money people throw away on adwords campaigns simply because they could not be bothered to invest a little of their time learning how to use thier system effectively.
For more help read our Google Adwords Tutorial
You may also like to read:
- A Guide to Google Adwords
- Google Adwords Tutorial
- Google Analytics For Better Search Engine Marketing
- How to Promote a Website
- Do I need a keyword rich domain to do well in Google?
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