Pay per click advertising – mastering the basics
If you use the internet regularly, it’s virtually a certainty that you’re familiar with pay per click advertising, and in particular Google’s AdWords platform. When you key a search term in to Google, a results page appears, and the ads appear as ‘sponsored links’ alongside the search results.
AdWords has been around now since 2002, but if you’ve never advertised through it, you might not be aware of just what it could do for your business, and you may be surprised. Here are the basics of what it could do for your business, and in later posts I will explain how you achieve them.
- Getting traffic quickly – you can set up an account with Google in minutes using a credit card and have your ads running in a few more minutes. It’s advisable to take a little while longer over it than that, as you’ll see in later posts, but it’s still much quicker, cheaper and easier than say advertising in a magazine.
- Precise targeting – unlike an ad or renting a mailing list, AdWords brings people to your site, right at the point that they are looking for what you have to offer. Of course there will be a few people using the wrong search term and even the odd snooping competitor, but most people will be interested in what you have to offer, which can’t be said of many offline marketing techniques.
- Flexibility – if you think that AdWords won’t work for your business you may be surprised. It’s more flexible than ever now to meet the needs of different businesses. It now allows you to target people from very specific locations (even down to street level if you so wish), and you can advertise any time you want (for example you might only want to advertise during your office hours) and you can turn your ads on or off at any time if you need to.
- Low risk – while many marketing techniques are expensive and very much “all or nothing”, AdWords gives you the opportunity to test things very cheaply and quickly to see what sort of response it gets.
- Visibility of results - with AdWords you know what you have spent and how many site visits you have got in return.
AdWords now makes it possible for even the smallest of businesses with very little marketing budget to get potential customers to their website and to compete against competitors with larger budgets.
It’s not all plain sailing though. AdWords can become expensive and ineffective if you’re not careful, so see my next post for some common mistakes and how to avoid them.