Advertising With Google AdWords

What AdWords is, and why you should use it.
If you’ve used Google to search the web (and who hasn’t?) you’ve probably seen the “Sponsored Links” that often appear at the top of and on the right side of your search results. These are AdWords advertisements placed by companies like yours that want to attract people who are searching for specific keywords to their website. The Google AdWords system allows companies to buy advertisements on Google search results pages for specific keywords related to the products or services that the company is selling. In and of itself this is a great idea – since you are advertising on specific keywords, you already know that everyone who sees your ad is very likely already interested in your product or service, since that is what they were searching for.

So, now you know that the people you are advertising to are very likely already interested in your product, but what if you only do business in Michigan? You don’t want to pay to advertise to people all over the country, even if they are interested in your products. This is where “Geo-targeting” comes in. You can actually target your ads to specific countries, states, regions within a state, and even specific cities in many cases. This ensures that you aren’t paying to advertise online to customers that you can’t even serve. So now that we’ve established that AdWords allows you to easily reach customers who are actually interested in your product, and that you can actually serve, the next question inevitably is…

So, what’s this gonna cost me?
First of all, it costs you absolutely nothing to have Google show your ad. Since AdWords advertisements are “pay-per-click”, you only have to pay if somebody actually clicks on your ad and goes to your website. So, by the time you pay, you already know that the person is not only interested in the products or services that your company offers, but that they are also interested in your company specifically since they actually clicked on your ad.

Second, how much you pay for a “click through” on your ad in Google’s search results is also up to you. You decide how much you are willing to pay (generally between 50 cents and a dollar or so, depending on the keywords) and Google decides which ads to show and what the placement of those ads will be based on a dynamic auction system. Generally, the advertiser willing to pay the most for a given keyword gets the top spot on the page with the second spot going to the second highest bidder and on down the line until all the ad spots are filled. When you set up your ad and decide how much you are willing to pay for a click through, Google will give you an estimate of how often and at what placement your ad will likely be shown based on what other people are bidding for that same keyword. Obviously, if your bid is significantly lower than your competitors, your ad probably won’t be shown very often, but the variety of ad placements and the dynamics of the bidding system generally allow for a wide range of bids depending on your budget and how many people you want to bring in to your website.

Third, how much you want to spend on your ad campaign is – you guessed it - completely up to you. The Google AdWords budgeting system allows you to set a daily budget for your Google ads. Whether you want to spend $5 per day or $500 per day, Google will automatically adjust the frequency that your ads are shown based on your budget to try to show your ads consistently throughout the day and automatically stop showing your ads for the day if your budget runs out. It will also “carry forward” budgeted amounts to the next day if your ad budget wasn’t used up on a given day.
Clicks are nice, but what I really want are customers.

So how do you know if the people visiting your website are actually turning into customers?

Google AdWords provides unparalleled tracking and reporting features that allow you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising. Using AdWords and Google Analytics (another free Google tool) you can view statistics about what the visitors clicking through to your website are doing. Want to know how many pages on average they view? Or how many of them immediately leave your website after clicking on the ad? Google AdWords and Analytics provide the tools necessary to answer those questions and many more. You can even set up “goals” for visitors to your website. Whether the goal is purchasing a product, filling out a contact form, or signing up for an e-newsletter, you can set up goals and use the results to adjust the keywords you advertise for, your ad copy, bidding strategy, or even the sales copy on your website.

For example, let’s say your company designs websites and you are advertising on two keywords – “website design” and “adwords consulting”. You could see that 2% of the people who searched for “website design” and clicked through to your site filled out the contact form, while 13% of the people who searched for “adwords consulting” filled out the contact form. When you combine this information with the amount you are spending on the pay-per-click advertising, the number of contacts that turn into actual customers, and the average profitability of those customers, you can quickly determine whether that advertising is cost effective for you. You might then decide to drop the “website design” keyword altogether. Or maybe you change it to target only web searchers in your geographic area and see if that helps. Or maybe you adjust the sales copy on your website and see how that affects the results. The point is that the information provided by these tools makes it possible to fine tune your advertising strategy quickly and easily in a way that is almost impossible to do with traditional advertising.

If the Yellow Pages worked like Google AdWords…
Maybe the best way to explain why Google AdWords is such a great advertising option is to compare it to a traditional advertising medium that everyone is familiar with - the Yellow Pages. So, if the Yellow Pages worked like Google AdWords…

Every time someone opened the yellow pages book, only the ads for stuff they were actually interested in would show up.
Putting an ad in the yellow pages would be completely free, you would just pay them a small fee if someone called you after looking at your ad there. And of course you would tell them how much that fee would be.
There would be international, national, state, regional and city versions of the yellow pages, and you would be able to put your ad in any or all of them – at no extra charge.
You would be able to put as many ads as you wanted in the yellow pages (again, at no cost), and when someone called you, you would know which of the ads they called you from.
You would be able to add, change or cancel your ads at any time, as often as you wanted, and the ad would instantly change in every yellow pages book in circulation. This service would be free as well of course.

When you consider the advantages that online advertising with a product like AdWords has over something as ubiquitous as the Yellow Pages, it almost makes traditional forms of advertising look flat-out silly. Now I’m not saying you should go out and cancel your Yellow Pages ad, but when you look at the two side by side, the advantages of advertising with AdWords certainly make it worth some very careful consideration.

If you are an Indezyn client, you spent good money on a great website, a website that should outshine those of your competitors. In the yellow pages, no phone number is any “sexier” or “more professional” than another, but online, the quality of websites varies tremendously. The quality of your website sets you apart from your competitors while your phone number in the yellow pages is just another number in a sea of numbers. So why spend money to show people your phone number when you could show them your website instead?