What is Google Adwords?

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When advertising your business, there are so many outlets to choose from that it can be hard to know which one suits your business. Nowadays you would be hard pressed to find someone who has a computer and uses the internet, that hasn’t heard of, or doesn’t use Google. When searching for information, all you need to do is type in your phrase and the results will come flooding in. This is why you need to consider adwords as a viable advertisment outlet for your business.

Adwords allows you to buy a phrase or word, so that each time it is typed into Google, an advert that you have created will come up at the top of the list and attract to you the relevant customers who want what it is that you are selling.

The first thing to understand about Adwords is that the most effective campaigns, need to be extremely targeted using narrow keywords. Although you might feel that you are missing out on a wider audiences, the campaigns that focus on a small group are generally more effective. This method is relatively time consuming, but once a following for your business has ensued, then broader keyword terms can be adopted.

Example:

If your business is a jewelry shop selling mainly costume jewelry, you would conduct your advertisements as follows. Within the costume jewelry, you should pick a number of different items that you sell for example, gold necklaces, gold bracelets and gold earrings and use these as your keywords. By subcategorising your costume jewelry further, you know that the algorithm that Google uses to display the adverts, will result in yours being shown regularly to the correct customers who desire the products that you sell.

Once your keywords have been chosen, make sure that you are using dynamic titles for your adverts. There is no extra cost for great copy, so make sure that the words the customers see on your advert are striking and exciting, leading them to want to click on the link and view your site. Create an individual advert for each keyword that you choose, so that the user sees the advert is extremely relevant to their search.

Example:

Fantasticly, unique costume jewelry for low prices at this boutique.

Obviously Adwords isn’t free, so it is important for you to know how much you want to spend, set a weekly budget and stick to it. When it comes to Google Adwords campaigns, the cost is incurred when an advert of yours has been clicked on. Look at the CPC (cost per click) for each keyword you have chosen and then work out how much you can afford to pay that week alongside how many clicks that gives you.

Example:

If you have gone for the keywords gold necklace, gold bracelet and gold earrings, then find out the cost for each word. If gold necklace works out at £0.34 per click and you give yourself a budget of £15 per week, that gives you a potential for 29 people to click on to your advert. If this is enough for you, then go ahead with those specifications and stick to them for as long as they work.

Once you have been advertising on Google for awhile, you will be wondering how to reduce your CPC, and this is simple enough to do within adwords. Unfortunately initially you will have to bid high for the top position on the search results, and once you have secured this position it leads you to more clicks and will rank better on a relevancy and quality score.

After having had your adverts shown for a few days, look at the minimum spend that you need for your specific keywords. Often at this point it will have lowered, so make sure you bit higher than it is to secure your top position and build up your quality rating. If, for example, the bid started at £1.80 then by the time a week has passed it will have reduced to around £1.00, you can then reduce your bid and still remain at the top of the list due to your quality score.

You are also given the ability to target your adverts geographically to make sure you meet your relevant audience. It can be done as soon as you set up your new campaign within your campaign settings. If you believe it’s beneficial to you to target foreign websites then do so, however it is possible to geo-target to individual countries and even cities. The more targeted your advertisements are, the more likely it is that they will be clicked on!

At all times, keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, are they doing better work than you? What keywords do you share with the competitors? Can you work out their strategy? Do they have automated bidding software, do they have some successful strategies that you should be emulating?

This will make it really easy for you to know what is doing well and what isn’t!

There are a number of specific ways to improve your adwords campaign further, these points above provide you with a great basis upon which to start your campaign and gain lots of customers to your site!

Good luck!