Google Adwords provides a way of delivering targeted customers to your website that is measurable and results driven.

We have helped many of our clients increase traffic to their websites that has subsequently converted into new customers and more business. We use it ourselves and measure the actual revenue generated against expenditure to make sure we get a good return on our investment.

The great thing about Adwords is that it can work just as well for small businesses with limited budgets as it can for large corporations with millions of pounds to spend on marketing.

The key factor is the ability to target your customers with precision. By carefully researching the most suitable keywords your customers use, your advert will appear on the first page of a Google search directly in front of customers actively searching for your products or services.

Another advantage is the ability to select the geographic area you want to cover. A local business may only want to target customers within a 50 mile radius of their business. You can select the area whether it is the whole of the UK or the whole world.

You are in control; you choose your daily budget, the words used in the advert and the website landing page for a particular advert and you only pay when someone clicks on one of your ads.

To be effective, your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and adverts need to be set up to maximise click throughs. There is a lot to learn if you have not used the Google Adwords interface before. Some of the most important factors in setting up a successful campaign are:

Keyword research
Do you know which of your businesses keywords generate the most searches?
Using Google’s keyword tool and putting in a seed keyword such as “website design”, lots of other variations can be found which may be cheaper to bid on than a more generic search term.

Ad groups
Each set of keywords will be allocated to an ad group, so you may have 3 or 4 ad groups set up with specific ads relating to those keywords, for example: ad groups and keywords for “website design” and “Website prices”. Using the relevant keywords in your ads improves the click through rate. You can then take the user through to the relevant page on your website to achieve a good keyword quality score.

Quality score
There are many factors Google uses to assess a keyword’s quality score. Scores range from 1 (poor) to 10 (good). Put simply, Google will assess the relevance of the ad to the content on the landing page. If you have a higher quality score on your keywords compared to your competition, your bid price will be lower than theirs.

Adverts
Write and test more than one advert in each ad group and continually trial new ads against the old ones to keep improving the click through rate. This will help maintain a high position for your ad on the page without having to bid higher.

Negative keywords
Always add negative keywords and continue to add more as your campaign progresses. A negative keyword is a word that is not relevant in your search, for example “web developer jobs”; we are not recruiting so the keyword “jobs” is not relevant and we would not want to incur the cost of a wasted a click.

The subject is huge and complex, I have only touched on some of the many tools and analysis methods available to make a campaign successful. You can waste a lot of money finding out what works and what does not if you don’t know what you are doing. If you think PPC can help your business, give me a call.

Mark Langston