Google Adwords
Google Adwords is the single most important internet marketing channel in existence today. It's important because it can be used to general almost instant traffic to your site and because it can be expensive if used poorly.
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What is it?
In a nutshell, Adwords allows you to create short ads which appear when (and only when) the keywords you've associated with those ads are typed into the Google search engine. So, if you run a bike shop in Dunstable, you could (and should) run an ad that shows when "bike shop dunstable" is typed in (along with all reasonable combinations of those words).
The key advantage Adwords introduced was this: you only pay for your ad if someone clicks on it. Compare that with most other forms of advertising where you pay for the placement of the ad irrespective of whether you actually get any response.
Your ad will appear alongside the natural listings (and sometimes at the top) but, because there are vastly fewer adwords advertisers than websites, the chances are much higher that you'll appear on page 1 (and if you don't appear on page 1 you're invisible).
How does Google choose where my ad appears?
Google uses two criteria to decide where to place your ad relative to your competitors. Firstly, it uses the maximum price you've elected to pay. For example, you might indicate that you're prepared to pay no more than 5p per click. However, Google's success has been based on how relevant its search results are and this applies to the "sponsored listings" (those provided by Adwords) as well as the natural listings (those that are not paid for).
What this means is that Google takes relevance into account when it decides how high up the sponsored listings your ad appears. It does this by examining the text of the ad and comparing it to the phrase the user is searching on.
For example, let's imagine you sell digital cameras. Your competitor also sells them and his ad says something like:
Buy your Digital Cameras here
We stock the best range at the lowest price
If your ad says something like:
Sony Cybershot Digital Cameras
Buy Your Cybershot Digital Cameras here. Low prices, excellent service.
...then your ad will appear above your competitors if someone searches on "sony cybershot digital camera" if you bid the same price, or even, often, if your competitor bids more than you.
The exact weighting Google gives to the relevance compared to the price is not known but you should work on the basis that relevance is at least as important as price. It should be your target to appear above your competitors and paying less to do so.
There's a lot to learn about Adwords but the system has three huge advantages:
- You can set your own budget: start very low
- You can get results within hours
- It has superb, built in testing so you know if it's working
As you can see from this brief introduction, Adwords is a massive topic but it's possible to get started once you understand a few key principles. Even if you intend for someone else to run your Adwords marketing, you should have a basic understanding.
