The fastest way to put your products and services in front of your customers is to pay for advertisements. The single most effective, trackable and targetable advertising method is to place ads online through Google Adwords.
To create ads on Google, go to adwords.google.com.
- Login with your gmail account. If you don’t have one, you will have to create an account on adwords to use the service.
- Click New Campaign.
- Specify your daily budget.
- Determine where your ads run. Your best results will come from running ads on Google, but you can run on their affiliated websites and on other websites that use Google’s adsense to earn revenue as well. If you elect to run your ad on websites that use adsense, you can use the placement tools to pick and choose relevant sites for maximum targeting. There are also demographic tools you can use to target ads by age and gender if desired.
- Create the ads you want to run.
- Specify the keywords or page text that will trigger the ad.
- Specify the price you will pay per click per keyword. This is the maximum you will pay for a click on an ad triggered by the keyword.
- Provide Google with a credit card to charge at the end of the month.
- Google will approve the ads in a few hours and they will begin to run.
There are several rules and guidelines you need to follow in order to ensure Google Adwords will be a profitable exercise. The two most important things to remember are
- Only spend money when you can track the return on investment
- Be conscious that the click price can dramatically increase without warning
“Failure to remember these guidelines can cost you thousands of pounds in a month, and tens of thousands of pounds in a year.”
Creating a Successful Adwords Campaign
To create a successful Adwords campaign, the cost of running ads must not exceed the amount of profit you create from selling your products and services. You need to know how much you have to spend, per item sold, on promoting your product so you can ensure that your cost of promotion is less than that amount you spend in advertising per item sold.
There are some terms you need to understand in order to use Adwords effectively.
- Click Through Rate (CTR) is the % of people who have seen your ad then clicked on it.
- Quality Score is Google’s in-house metric for evaluating the quality of the ad writing, percentage of people that see the ad, the CTR, and the quality and relevance of the landing page.
- Bid is the maximum you will be willing to pay for each visitor that clicks on your ad. The amount you have to bid on each feature varies hugely base on how competitive the keyword is.
Where your add appears on Google search pages and affiliated sites depends on these metrics.
Creating an Ad
Creating Google ads is an art that takes years to master. Here are some tips that may help you achieve better results.
- Title: This will appear in bold in the ad. Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word. Include the keyword at the start if you can. This increases CTR. Include the benefit to the customer if you can. Answer the question “What makes you different?”
- Description: Make full use of the space. You enter two lines of text but it may actually be displayed as one, so bear that in mind. Focus on what’s important to the user. Include your keyword, even if it is already in the title.
- URLs: do not include www. You can have the keyword as the page if you design your site correctly (eg: schoolforstartups.co.uk/Keyword-Here)
Your quality score and bid will determine where your ad appears on a Google search page, and that will determine your click through rate.
Understanding Keywords
When you define keywords in your advertisements, you are specifying what search terms entered in Google will trigger your ads to appear. You can define how closely someone’s entry has to match the keyword using Google Keyword match types:
- Broad match: keyword
- Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
- (The broad match modifier may also be used to further refine your broad keyword matches: +keyword.)
- Phrase match: “keyword”
- Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase
- Exact match: [keyword]
- Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
- Negative match: -keyword
- Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term
“Finding the right keywords is critical to success in Google Adword advertising”
Other rules and guidelines you should follow include:
Start small. Set a small daily budget and run a small number of ads. Refine your keywords and your bidding to earn small amounts of money. So much traffic passes through Google day in and day out for so may keywords, that even very small tests can be very informative. When you find an advertisement, bid, keyword, landing page and product price configuration that results in the ads selling things at a profit, you have something you can scale up.
Make sure your ad keywords, your ads, and your website are all using the same words. Customers expect that, and so does Google. If it examines your ads and your keywords then scans your site and their appears to be a mismatch, your quality score goes down and Google will charge you more to run your ad at a given level on its page. That means instead of being the first for second ad on the page, you may be the third or fourth which will receive far lower click through rate than ads higher up.
When you run your ad on the Google Search Network, the ads run just on Google. When you run them on the Display Network, they run on sites across the Internet through the Adsense program. The site owners get paid some portion of the revenue Google makes. This means there is an incentive for fraud. People can have their friends click your ads and earn money. If Google detects this kind of behavior, it terminates their account, but the possibility of fraudulent clicks always exists. To minimize this, use “managed placements” to select the sites your ad displays on.
Start out with several hundred keywords and refine them over time to determine which sell best. Note that just because an ad and keyword combination generates a high click through rate does not mean it will generate a high number of sales.
Generally, putting the user’s keyword in the ad headline generates a better click through. To automate this, use this as your headline: {Keyword: Alternate Text}. Replace the Alternate Text in that line with whatever you want Google Adwords to display when the search text won’t fit.
Google Adwords is one of the places where it really matters what your company’s URL is. If the URL contains one or more of the keywords people are searching for, your click through rate will go up.
Google Adwords can run not only text ads, but image-based ads, video ads and even TV ads. Experiment with these options over time to see if they increase your profits or decrease your costs.
“Once you find a good Google ad, keyword and product combination, you should start to use SEO and SEM marketing techniques to market your site using the same information.”
If you can increase your organic search ranking to get to the top of Google for a given keyword, you will get the same or better product sale rate without having to pay for the ads.
Many SEO experts use Google Adwords to find out what text and keywords sell best prior to launching a full search engine marketing campaign.
There Are Alternatives to Google Adwords
There are many alternatives to Google Adwords. Many websites will let you buy banner ads on their site. Reddit, for example, has a very cost effective, targetable, sponsored advertisement solution. Facebook and Linkedin will also run ads. Generally speaking, Google adwords will have the highest CTR and lowest costs.
Facebook, for example, doesn’t seem to lend itself to direct product sales, through you may find running ads quite an effective way to increase the number of “friends” or “fans” you have. Linked in targets only business professionals, but click through rate even for B2B products seems to be low. Twitter sells its “promoted tweets” for as much as $100K. They are said to be very effective.
Ad Networks like BuySellAds make it easy to buy ads on a given website, and to sell ads on your high traffic website as well.
The rules for using all Pay Per Click ad networks is always the same. Start small, track profits, scale up when you have a working configuration and monitor costs at least daily to prevent unfortunate surprises.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?