Google Adwords
Google allows you to interact with
searchers with their Ad word system.
Google’s own guide to their Ad system is
required reading for all those who want to advertise effectively. It’s advised
to read this and the below summary:
You will see Adwords on the top and side of
Google search result pages. Google however expect the ads to be relevant to
what people are searching for, the same way search results are as relevant as
they can be. Your ads will show up in search result pages only if what people
are searching for correlate to keywords you have chosen.
On top of that you cannot actually bid for
first or second place, instead, like webpages, Google will decide where you ad
should place based on the way people value your ad. The more they click, the
higher it will place. This encourages people to write ads that users see as
being valuable. This sometimes makes it difficult for some traditionalists to
write these ads where over-the-top promises won't get clicks but to-the-point messages
instead win the day.
There are now professional copywriters out
there who specialise in Google Ads.
A company should not be looking to run ads
that are based on their company name unless the name is very generic. Why would
you pay money for ads based on your company name when you should be ranking
well or first on Google for your company details?
Adwords Auction System
Choose keywords, bid for them with maximum
price you'll spend, see the results
Tools to use for choosing keywords
Google will show you roughly the volume of
searches for the keywords you choose and the average price that is paid for
these keywords. This allows you to budget for ads if you want to go with those
words/phrases.
Specialised landing pages
It makes sense to have pages created
especially for ad traffic. That way you can measure the impact of the ads and
see what people do on your website once they've reached you. Additionally,
landing pages should be all about the sale and that specific product. Give the
people doing the searches what they want, based on their search. Uncluttered
landing pages end up with better sales than noisy ones with lots of
opportunities to click away and get distracted.
Rarely should you have ads that just bring
people to your frontpage unless that page contains the best data about your
product. For any company that has more than one service or product, there
should be pages for each ad.
Also landing pages that have been optimised
for the Google Ad in terms of copy will see the click rate at a lower price.
Google rewards a landing page that is in synch with the Google Ad. Again,
meaningful ads bringing people to meaningful websites means Google has happier
repeat customers.
Geotargeting Ads
Google allows you to target your ad to
people (based on their computer address) so you can target Irish people or UK
Google Content Network
Google opened up their ad system so their
ads can be shown on other pages and sites apart from search results pages.
Taking the same technology as the contextual ads on search results, you can
target ads to show up on websites owned by Google like Blogger.com and
Blogspot.com or owned by other people. The ads that are served are based on the
keywords that Google finds as it searches all the pages. Since a website or
webpage can contain so many disparate phrases, sometimes the ads don't fit well
with the actual content of the webpage. As a result clickthrough rates for ads
here are not as high as on Google search results.
Timing of ads
Ads can now be timed to go out at different
times of the day. The benefit of this? Ads could be based around certain events
during the day, perhaps you want to make sure those you target are businesses
and if your ads only run during business hours then it avoids a little more
people that are not using Google for business purposes. If you have a limited
daily budget, pushing your ads out during certain hours may be of benefit or
perhaps you are advertising daily deals which expire by 2pm etc.
Google Trends
Google Trends www.google.com/trends
allows you to see volumes of search words and phrases people are carrying out
using Google and this can be broken down geographically from worldwide to
Ireland, to even local counties. Given the way that computer addresses are
allocated by Irish Internet providers, the breakdown by city or county is often
wrong with people from Cork Waterford Dublin
Google Trends for Websites
Google Tends for websites http://trends.google.com/websites also
gives you a rough estimate on how popular websites are and you can compare most
websites to each other and break it down by Geographic location. This is a
handy way of seeing how popular you are compared to your competitors or what
other sites get visited by the audience that visit your site and those other
sites.
Google Adplanner
Google Adplanner – www.Google.com/adplanner is another tool from Google that gives you
rough traffic statistics and demographic data for most online websites apart
from the sites that Google own.
A worthwhile aspect of this tool is that
you can submit a website to it and the Adplanner will give you back other
websites that are visited by the same people. This is important if you are only
targeting specific demographics and want to reach as many of them as possible.
Adplanner will show you all the other sites that are in that same bracket. In
addition if a site you'd like to target does not take ads, you can still target
other sites that do take ads and have a crossover audience.
Many times Adplanner will probably
introduce you to other websites you may never have known about because of their
niche but who might be of extreme value to you.
