Google AdWords is paid to advertise or pay per click (PPC) advertising on Google. The way it works is simple:
People use keywords (or search terms) to search for specific products and services
If the keywords you’ve chosen match what people search for, your paid ad appears next to or above organic Google search results
When people click on your ad, they’ll go to your website to learn more or buy
As mentioned in my previous blog post, How To Market Your Local Business, I mentioned that paid advertising is probably the most direct, most effective, yet most complicated, of all the channels in which to market your business online. There are many benefits to using Google AdWords to market your business, and in this blog, I’ve listed the top five.
1. Measurable
There’s an old marketing adage, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!” With Google AdWords, every single aspect of your marketing campaign is measurable, right down to the number of clicks, number of impressions, click through rate (CTR), number of conversions, conversion rate, cost per click (CPC), cost per acquisition (CPA), etc. It’s very easy to measure your return on investment (ROI). Having a dedicated team regularly optimizing your campaigns, fine-tuning keywords/ads/ad groups will ensure your metrics improve over time.
2. Cost Effective
One of Google AdWords’ primary benefits is that it’s extremely cost-effective. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad (i.e. you pay per click) and you determine exactly how much you want to spend. You can set your budget to $10 per day to $5000 per day; the options are limitless. More importantly, if you’re working with skilled professionals, your campaign performance will be optimized in a way where your cost per click will gradually decline over time. This means you’ll be able to see an increase in traffic without increasing your costs!
3. Maximum Relevance
I often remind my clients that Google’s job is to present the most relevant and accurate results in response to a user’s search query. Advertisers who have large marketing budgets may not necessarily get the best positions on the search page, nor the best ranking. Why? Every single time a search term or keyword is put into Google’s search engine, an ad auction takes place.
This ad auction determines the order of how the most relevant ads will be organized on the search results page. For example, if you are bidding $10 for the keyword “Toronto dentist” and your competitor is bidding $20 for the same keyword, your competitor’s ad wouldn’t necessarily be ranked above yours. Google takes into account several factors when determining the ad rank.
If your Google AdWords campaigns generally have a higherclick-throughh rate than your competitor’s, then the probability of your ad being clicked is higher, and thus, your ad would be placed above the competitor’s. Similarly, Google takes into account your website and the page to which you’re directing the paid traffic (the landing page). If the quality of your website and landing page is more relevant to the search query than your competitor’s, then the user experience would be much higher for your ad than your competitor’s, and thus, your ad would be placed above theirs. This Ad Auction ensures only the most relevant ads are presented to the user and levels the playing field for all advertisers.
4. Highly Targeted
As an online advertiser, sophisticated targeting tools are essential to maximizing ROI with search marketing. Google AdWords’ targeting capabilities are quite sophisticated and provide advertisers various channels in which to fine-tune their campaign, including:
Location Targeting: Google AdWords allows you to target specific geographic locations. For each ad campaign, you can select locations where your ad can be shown. You can choose locations such as entire countries, areas within a country, cities, territories, or even a radius around a location. More importantly, AdWords allows you to target people searching for or viewing pages about your targeted location, even if they may not be physically located in your target location.
Mobile Targeting: Enhanced campaigns allows advertisers to target mobile device users. This is especially important because the mobile consumption of information and mobile search queries are growing exponentially each year. At the same time, devices are evolving quickly with a growing list of capabilities so enhanced, mobile targeting with Google AdWords provide new opportunities to target the right audience at the right time. This is especially important for advertisers who want to customize their ad text or extensions to grab the attention of customers when they’re viewing the ad on a mobile device.
Language Targeting: AdWords has over 40 language options for campaign targeting.
Time Targeting: AdWords allows advertisers to select specific hours during the day for optimal targeting.
Auto-Tagging: Tagging destination URLs for analytics tracking has to be manually executed with other advertisers; however this process is automatic with AdWords.
5. Remarketing
Google remarketing, also known as retargeting, has been chastised in the media for the excessive frequency and poor targeting of the ads. However, if the audience is grown and cultivated correctly, there is a huge advantage for advertisers to recapture their audience’s attention elsewhere. Re-targeting involves showing paid ads to users based on their past web activity on your site. Re-marketing allows advertisers to follow users and show ads to them across Google’s large network of partner sites on the Google Display Network.
The best way to ensure these ads are targeted correctly is to build a remarketing list on Google AdWords. For example, you can create a retargeting list for visitors to your most popular product category and the remarketing tag tells AdWords to save visitors to your “Popular Category” list. You can then build an AdWords campaign with a specific message to show only to people in the “Popular Category” list. For more information on retargeting or remarketing on Google AdWords, please feel free to get in touch with us today!