Google Adwords
Again this is yet another application you can choose for use with your Google account, although you don’t have to be an account holder, it makes things easier if you areas everything’s then accessible for you dashboard.
Google Adwords allow you to advertise your company for a small fee that you have arranged and you pay when someone clicks your advert. You can also select what times your ad is shown and what area it’s shown to, which means you can shape your campaign more effectively around the habits of your target market. You can advertise on the main search results page of Google, but dependent on how much you pay, your advert may also appear on other independent websites, and if there’s a site that you wouldn’t want your ad to appear on, you can specify that too.
Google’s Key Suggestion Tool (mentioned in Marketing Tip #1- Keywords) is originally intended for use with Adwords, and it scans your website for keywords before telling you how competitive those are.
The trick with Google Adwords is to make sure that you’re really specific with the ad text. You can analyse this on the dashboard for Adwords, as it provides a comprehensive breakdown of data, and specifically, the CTR.
CTR stands for Click Through Rate, and this is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is displayed via Google search only. The CTR of a keyword is a strong indicator of it’s relevance to the user and its overall success. A low CTR may point to poor keyword performance indicating a need for keyword or ad optimisation.
You only have a limited amount of text to create your ad, like a Twitter status, so you have to be creative and include both the right keywords and right text for maximum impact. Use this opportunity to say why you are different from the rest, as well as ‘this is what we can do for you’.
You can be product specific with your ad for best effect, choosing the most popular product on your site. For example:
‘Roller-skates- cheapest in the UK, adult and child sizes available from £19.99’
You can then catch customers by the right keywords ‘Roller-skates’ and this links directly to your roller-skates catalogue page. Don’t make the mistake of sending them to the homepage of your site- remember customers don’t want to browse, they want to buy some roller-skates now. If they do, they will navigate from that catalogue page with the navigation bar and any breadcrumbs you have provided for them.
Don't do the mistake of making general ads which simply dump people at your homepage. Take them to specific products or services. Taking people to your homepage means your money is effectively wasted as you've left your customer floundering 'at the front door' instead of directly taking them to the product they need.
Product specific ads have a good ROI rate. ROI stands for Return On Investment, and this can be found on your Adwords dashboard.
The easy to use dashboard format of Adwords ensures that you can monitor the impact of your campaign easily and make changes should a particular keyword or term not attract the amount of traffic you had hoped for.
The price of the ads themselves differs, dependent on the area and times you would like your ad displayed, and each keyword comes with a price too. You have the choice of how much you invest into the Adwords scheme as the prices vary so much.
For example, you choose how much you’re willing to pay to use the words ‘cheap roller-skates’, and you might agree that 30p is a good price. However, your rival might be willing to pay 70p, so their ad will be shown more often than yours, and your other competition might only be willing to pay 10p, so there’s will get displayed even less.
Our suggestion is to try out Adwords for a month, and allow yourself a budget of £30.00 for 10 different ads- and from this you should be able to deduce which are the most profitable, and which are not required. You do need to invest some time into maintaining Adwords at the beginning until you’re up and running, but time spent is traffic and sales gained later on!
It’s also worth remembering that Adwords are not beneficial in relation to site optimisation- it’s a popular misconception that a lot of traffic coming to your site equals higher rankings, which is just not true. However, if you can get lots of other sites linking directly to yours, than that’s a different matter.
Also, you can’t stop a person clicking on them, which means if a competitor hates you, they can destroy your budget in a matter of minutes by repeated clicking of your ad. This will affect your data, as all of the clicks won’t equal any sales or traffic, so bear that in mind.
Google Adwords allow you to advertise your company for a small fee that you have arranged and you pay when someone clicks your advert. You can also select what times your ad is shown and what area it’s shown to, which means you can shape your campaign more effectively around the habits of your target market. You can advertise on the main search results page of Google, but dependent on how much you pay, your advert may also appear on other independent websites, and if there’s a site that you wouldn’t want your ad to appear on, you can specify that too.
Google’s Key Suggestion Tool (mentioned in Marketing Tip #1- Keywords) is originally intended for use with Adwords, and it scans your website for keywords before telling you how competitive those are.
The trick with Google Adwords is to make sure that you’re really specific with the ad text. You can analyse this on the dashboard for Adwords, as it provides a comprehensive breakdown of data, and specifically, the CTR.
CTR stands for Click Through Rate, and this is the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is displayed via Google search only. The CTR of a keyword is a strong indicator of it’s relevance to the user and its overall success. A low CTR may point to poor keyword performance indicating a need for keyword or ad optimisation.
You only have a limited amount of text to create your ad, like a Twitter status, so you have to be creative and include both the right keywords and right text for maximum impact. Use this opportunity to say why you are different from the rest, as well as ‘this is what we can do for you’.
You can be product specific with your ad for best effect, choosing the most popular product on your site. For example:
‘Roller-skates- cheapest in the UK, adult and child sizes available from £19.99’
You can then catch customers by the right keywords ‘Roller-skates’ and this links directly to your roller-skates catalogue page. Don’t make the mistake of sending them to the homepage of your site- remember customers don’t want to browse, they want to buy some roller-skates now. If they do, they will navigate from that catalogue page with the navigation bar and any breadcrumbs you have provided for them.
Don't do the mistake of making general ads which simply dump people at your homepage. Take them to specific products or services. Taking people to your homepage means your money is effectively wasted as you've left your customer floundering 'at the front door' instead of directly taking them to the product they need.
Product specific ads have a good ROI rate. ROI stands for Return On Investment, and this can be found on your Adwords dashboard.
The easy to use dashboard format of Adwords ensures that you can monitor the impact of your campaign easily and make changes should a particular keyword or term not attract the amount of traffic you had hoped for.
The price of the ads themselves differs, dependent on the area and times you would like your ad displayed, and each keyword comes with a price too. You have the choice of how much you invest into the Adwords scheme as the prices vary so much.
For example, you choose how much you’re willing to pay to use the words ‘cheap roller-skates’, and you might agree that 30p is a good price. However, your rival might be willing to pay 70p, so their ad will be shown more often than yours, and your other competition might only be willing to pay 10p, so there’s will get displayed even less.
Our suggestion is to try out Adwords for a month, and allow yourself a budget of £30.00 for 10 different ads- and from this you should be able to deduce which are the most profitable, and which are not required. You do need to invest some time into maintaining Adwords at the beginning until you’re up and running, but time spent is traffic and sales gained later on!
It’s also worth remembering that Adwords are not beneficial in relation to site optimisation- it’s a popular misconception that a lot of traffic coming to your site equals higher rankings, which is just not true. However, if you can get lots of other sites linking directly to yours, than that’s a different matter.
Also, you can’t stop a person clicking on them, which means if a competitor hates you, they can destroy your budget in a matter of minutes by repeated clicking of your ad. This will affect your data, as all of the clicks won’t equal any sales or traffic, so bear that in mind.