AdWords is Google’s paid advertising offering on their search engine.
AdWords, unlike search engine optimisation (SEO), is a very flexible tool to use and is a great way to drive traffic to a website, regardless of its SEO ranking. It basically works like a big auction for certain keywords. You set a budget of what you are willing to pay-per-click to your website from your ad when someone types in a specific keyword in Google. In simple terms, the higher the budget set, the higher the ad appears on the search results page.
Pros and Cons of Google AdWords
Pros:
- You can turn it on and off like a tap.
- It is working for you 24/7.
- It is highly measurable.
- It gets traffic to your site, regardless of its SEO ranking.
- An excellent way of testing targeting prospects via search. Since it’s simple to adjust your campaigns, you can easily test what works and what doesn’t work.
- You can use the learnings from your AdWords Campaign to improve your website’s SEO.
Cons:
- It can be very expensive, particularly in competitive/mature markets.
- Costs are very driven by market forces.
- Not as trusted as organic search results.
- You can become a slave to it. If your competitors start spending more for particular keywords, you will be forced to increase your budget to maintain your ranking.
How AdWords Works
You decide how much you are willing to pay-per-click for each user who clicks on your ad when it appears in the search results for a certain keyword search. Where your ad appears on the page is dictated by the amount you are willing to pay-per-click and the quality of your ad. So: Rank = Max cost-per-click (CPC) x Quality score Quality score is a measure of user experience. Google wants to make sure that they are only serving ads that are highly relevant to what the user is searching for. Quality score is based on a number of things:
- Click-through-rate (CTR): How many searchers are clicking on your ad?
- Ad text relevance: How relevant is your ad is to the actual search keyword?
- Historical performance: How has the keyword performed in the past?
The content of your ad is just as important as the amount you’re willing to pay-per-click and will determine where your ad is ranked on the page. Like search engine optimisation, search engine marketing is complex; for it to be effective, you need to be regularly monitoring and modifying your campaigns.
Tips for successful search engine marketing with Google AdWords
- Take time to structure your account. Ideally, you should run more than one campaign with different ad groups that sit underneath each campaign.
- For example, your campaign name might be “Travel Agent Malvern” and your different ad groups might be “Cruising Holidays”, “Family Holidays”, “Specialty Tours”. You then might run another campaign called “Sporting Tours Malvern” with the ad groups, “Rugby World Cup Tours”, “Winter Olympics Tours”, etc.
- Under each Ad Group, you can have several keywords and one or two different types of ads.
- Keyword research is really important for choosing the right keywords. Also, take the time to understand keyword matching as this can really impact the cost of your campaign.
- Take the time to write your ads effectively.
- If you have a registered Trademark, make sure that you let Google know. You can protect your trademark as a search term and stop any competitors from buying it as a keyword.
- Take the time to setup your AdWords reports. Track them regularly to optimize your campaigns.
- Use Google Analytics to measure the ROI from your AdWords activity vs. other activity.
Online resources to help with search engine marketing
