Paid Search Advertising
Print View
Total views: 190
The fastest way to get people to your website is to pay for advertising. Anytime you purchase advertising you need to really consider if the advertising you are buying is going to bring quality, targeted customers to your website. For example, you probably wouldn’t want to buy an ad on a professional wrestling website to promote jewelry to wealthy, middle aged women (yeah, that’s an extreme example, buy you get the idea J )
The absolute best paid advertising I have found is through Google Adwords. In fact, it is the only advertising I pay for because it brings exceedingly targeted traffic, which means you get a better return for your advertising dollar.
If you want to see what an Adwords ad looks like, go to Google.com and do a search for anything you can think of. When the results of your search come up, take a look over at the right hand side of the page. You will likely see a list of advertisements running down the side of the page that match closely with whatever term you searched for. If you choose to advertise with Google Adwords you will be paying for ads like these.
Why is this a good thing?
First off, you only pay for your ad when someone clicks on it. Many other places will make you pay based on the number of times your ad is shown. With those other places you pay the same whether your ad is shown 1000 times and gets 3 clicks or whether it is shown 1000 times and gets 40 clicks. With Google, you don’t have to pay if people don’t actually click on your ad. This means less wasted money since you are only paying for potential customers who actually make it to your website.
Secondly, you get to choose the exact search phrases that people have to type in order for your ad to appear. If, for example, you are selling a red necklace, you can have your ad appear only when people search for the term “red necklace”. That means that every single person who sees your ad is looking for exactly (or at least very close to) what you are selling. What that means, then, is that people who click on your link from your ad are already shopping for red necklaces, so when they are delivered right to a page featuring a red necklace they are more apt to like what they see and purchase it than if they had just been searching for jewelry in general. Google Adwords gives you the power to deliver your advertising to customers who are searching for exactly what you sell, which means that your sales conversions can be really great compared to other forms of advertising.
Third, Google Adwords allows you to set a daily advertising budget so you never will spend more than you can afford for advertising. If your advertising budget is $30.00 for the month, you would set a budget of $1.00 per day. As soon as you have received $1.00 worth of clicks each day Google will automatically stop running your ad that day so you don’t wind up going over your monthly budget of $30.00. If you have a higher budget, say $90.00 for the month, you would set your daily budget at $3.00, etc.
Fourth, you determine how much you pay to get a customer to your site. You can choose how much you are willing to pay for each person who clicks on your ad. Typically, when you are starting out, the lower the amount you bid on each keyword, the lower in the ad results your ad will appear. That means that fewer people will see your ad and you will get fewer clicks. Again, when you are starting out, typically the higher you bid for each keyword, the higher up in the results your ad will appear meaning that you will most likely get more clicks.
Here’s a tip that not everyone who advertises through Google is aware of that can give you an extra edge. Google rates both your website and your advertisement with what it calls a “quality score”. The quality score is basically a measure of how well your website and ad match what people are searching for, and how many people click through your ad. The higher your click through rate and the more on-target your ad text and website text are with what people are searching for, the higher your quality score will be.
So here’s where quality scores can help you out. If you have a high quality score for a certain keyword that means that you can pay less per click but still appear higher in the search results than someone with a lower quality score. As an example, with a great quality score you may only be paying $0.10 per click to be in the same position that someone with a lower quality score may have to pay $1.00 per click for. That is why it is really important to be sure that you make each of your advertisements very targeted, write good ads that will make people want to click through to see what you have to offer, and provide high quality content on your website that fits with both your ad and your selected keyword.
Conversion Tracking
Conversion tracking is perhaps the single greatest benefit of using Google Adwords for your advertising because it allows you to track exactly which of your advertising efforts are paying off and which are costing you money without bringing results.
What is conversion tracking? Google has set up their program so that you can place a small snipet of code on the “thank you” page that a customer is directed to after they make a purchase from your store. This code notifies your Google account that a customer completed a purchase on your site. The Adwords system then determines if this customer originated from one of your ads that you are running on Google. If the customer did come from one of your ads instead of finding you on their own, Adwords records which ad they clicked on as well as which keyword they searched to before seeing your ad.
You can then generate reports that show exactly which keyword phrases and ads are resulting in sales on your website and which are not. This is incredibly helpful in focusing your advertising efforts and getting the highest possible return for your advertising dollar. Based on these reports you can adjust which ads you are running, increase your daily budget for ads and keywords that are performing well, and remove ads that are not giving you results.
That may all seem confusing now, but I would highly encourage you to learn more about Google Adwords through their optimization center to see if it is an advertising option that would work well for you. The more you can learn about successfully advertising on Google before you start running ads the more likely you will find great success with it as a way of driving quality traffic to your website. Here is a link to learn more and to sign up if you are interested: