How to make Google AdWords work for your business
By Publicity Heaven writer Adam Constable
In the old days when you placed an advert, you handed over your money to a newspaper or magazine, and hoped for the best. Whether you got a response or not, you paid up.
That’s still the way it is today with the big media titles. But when you need to advertise online, it’s considerably different and involves much less financial risk.
The main way to advertise online is using Google AdWords (also known as “pay per click”). When you do a search on Google, the paid-for adverts are the results in the right-hand column (and sometimes at the top of the page too).
The real beauty of AdWords is that you only pay when someone clicks on your advert. So you are guaranteed traffic to your website for your investment.
No clicks, no cost. You can also cap how much you want to spend. If you want Google to stop showing your adverts after you’ve spent £5, no problem. This is all easy and automatic.
You have full control over when your adverts are displayed. You do this by telling Google which search phrases and words people have to type in before your advert is displayed.
The cost and position of an advert depends (among other things) on how much you are willing to pay for a click.
Popular keywords such as “flights” might cost as much as £20, £20 a click. The kind of search terms you are after are more likely to cost just a few pence.
Here are 3 ways you can make AdWords work for your business:
1) Use the keywords that are most relevant to your buyer: When people type something into Google, they are declaring their intention to do something or buy something. The AdWords system helps you work out what search terms people actually use (you’ll be surprised by some of them). Your AdWords advert also needs to be relevant to their search. If they type in “cheap tea towels” they are more likely to click on your advert if that is the headline. There’s an added bonus to this – the more clicks your adverts get, the better Google treats them. Adverts that get more clicks can appear higher up the search results than worse-performing adverts with a higher advertising budget.
2) Send people straight the product they want to buy: If someone has typed in “cheap tea towels”, they will expect to see the products when they click on your advert. So you must take them straight to your tea towels page. If you send visitors to your generic home page, they are more likely to click the back button than spend time searching your site for tea towels.
3) Test and measure the success of adverts: As with all marketing you must closely monitor results and test different ideas. AdWords makes it easy to run multiple versions of your advert at the same time, so you can see which one gets more clicks. This is great – it takes the guesswork out of advertising. If you are going to obsess over a statistic, focus on the advert that generates the most sales, as opposed to the most clicks. Ultimately you want relevant traffic sent to your website which turns into sales. There’s no business sense in attracting traffic for the sake of it. Really, you need a strategy on your website to turn attention into revenue.
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