Your Free Guide To Google Adwords
What Is Google Adwords?
Google Adwords is a pay per click marketing platform which allows you to target users of Google who are actively looking for products and services. As users search, Google gives a certain proportion of the results pages to advertisers. These are marked as ‘Sponsored Links’ which help identify advertisers messages from regular Google results.
How Does It Work?
Each Adwords advertiser has what we call a key phrase bank. This is a list of key phrases that are stored in your account. They stay there, waiting for a user to trigger them.
If a Google user searches for a product or service that matches one of your key phrase targets, your adverts are displayed to the Google user. If that user then clicks your advert, Google then charges you for that active lead – based on the parameters and rules in your account.
What Are The Benefits?
This advertising model has many distinct advantages over traditional advertising. Here are just a few:
• Firstly we call this pull marketing as the user is already part way through the decision making process. We have an active potential customer who is looking to buy.
• Compare this to traditional advertising (such as telesales or mailshot campaigns) where you are pushing your products and services at prospective clients. Google Adwords can often be a more effective way to market your business
• Around 65% of decision makers now use Google as their main way of finding a supplier. Google adwords gives you an immediate way to target these people.
• Adwords gives you a concrete solution to search engine marketing and allows your business to gain instant market penetration.
• Adwords allows you to target people in your local region or by country.
• Adwords is very flexible and advertisers are not tied into long term contracts and can change their budgets as they wish.
• Adwords is far more accountable. You see exactly where your money has gone and what key phrases have been clicked on – can you name any traditional advertising where you get that level of accountability?
What Are The Costs?
Advertisers can tailor their account based on their own budget settings. To set up your campaign you will need to think about what amount of money you are prepared to spend per month. There are no minimum and maximum spends.
Example:
If you monthly Google advertising budget is £500 and your campaign runs Monday to Friday (and not on weekends) Google will split your budget across each working day and give you a daily budget – in this case roughly £23 per day.
This provides an even way to gain visibility and ensures your spend is not all taken in the first few days of the month.
You set your budgets and can login and change them at any time you wish. You may also increase, pause or cancel your advertising as your business needs dictate.
What About Invalid Clicks?
One of the biggest objections to Google Adwords is that people fear a competitor regularly clicking their adverts and wasting their budget. Google does work very hard in this area and has become sophisticated in spotting and weeding out invalid clicks. Advertisers are not charged for any clicks identified as invalid.
On a general basis, we find that our clients move their traditional advertising spend to Google adwords once they see the results. This is probably the strongest argument that advertisers should not overly worry about invalid clicks.
Where Do We Start?
To get started, it is a good idea to use the Google Keyword Tool and start to search for your products and services. From here, you can start to build up a list of words and phrases that you would like to be found for. We suggest you think along marketing lines and split the research into obvious groups – these may be geographic, demographic or by vertical markets.
It is also a good idea to try the Google Traffic Estimator Tool as that will give you a basic idea of potential click costs.
Basics Of A Google Adwords Campaign
The basics of a campaign are as follows:
Campaign
The campaign controls many things including your daily spend, your network targeting and when your adverts can appear.
Ad Groups
The ad group controls all your key phrases and the messages you want to display to advertisers. It also manages the types of adverts you want to show for example – text, image or video.
Keywords
Each ad group has a range of key phrases which are triggered when your campaign shows.
How Do We Manage Our Account?
Adwords provides a useful range of performance data that can be used to refine and improve your campaign. From here you can review where you clicks have come from and which areas of your campaign are working and which are not.
On top of this management data, you can also use conversion tracking metrics and Google analytics to further dissect and refine your campaign.
Useful Links
The following links may be useful: