Firstly you need to understand the difference between so called ‘natural’, or ‘organic’ results and Google AdWords.
When you do a search in Google for a specific type of product or service, you might have noticed that there are two sets of results being returned, one set of results on the left hand side, and one set on the right hand side.
The results on the right hand side of the screen are actually advertisements offered through the Google AdWords system. These adverts are paid for by advertisers such as yourself and they advertise products and services by directing anyone who clicks on the ad through to a website or a specific page on a website.
These adverts are not just random ads though, they are very specifically targeted towards the actual words that are being searched for at any specific time. So if someone searches for ‘digital cameras’, the adverts that appear on the right hand side would all be related to digital cameras. This makes this form of advertising extremely effective since the advert is closely related to what the person is searching for.
These words that people use to search with are called ‘keywords’ and the Google AdWords advertisements are all built on these keywords.
When you set up an AdWords campaign, you specify for which keywords or sets of keywords your ad should show.
But this is all becoming a bit technical, before jumping into the technical side of things, let us review why you should choose PPC to advertise your business or products.
PPC or Pay Per Click can be an extremely cost effective form of advertising. This is because you only pay money every time that someone clicks on your ad. You can also set the budget of how much you want to spend on a daily, or monthly basis. The amount of money that you spend on Google AdWords advertising is often much less than you would spend on TV, radio adverts, posters or flyers.
All of these methods of advertising are ‘push’ methods, in other words, you are pushing your product or service onto the attention of people, who might not at that moment in time be interested in what you are offering. The amount of people taking up your offer at that point might therefore be relatively low, whereas with Google PPC advertising, you are placing your advert in front of people who were specifically looking for your type of product and service.
This results in a much higher conversion rate of interested party into actual customer and means that your advertising spend has been much better allocated with a much higher return on investment than with traditional advertising methods.
PPC is one way of getting quick traffic, in other words, interested people, to your website.
Remember that it takes months and sometimes even years to see good results in the search engines for your site if you wait for your site to perform well in the organic (natural) results. This is because it takes a lot of effort and marketing to promote your site in the search engines through SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to such an extent that the search engines consider your site worthy enough to display high up in the search engine results.
Another benefit of PPC is that you can control the flow of traffic. You can specify specific hours and days when you want traffic to come to your website, and you can specify other times when it will not be convenient to have new business.
You can also prevent your advertisements from showing on times when business is naturally slow or not possible to conduct, such as over public holidays and weekends – this can save you money so that you do not spend your advertising budget on visitors that you will not be able to serve.
The last benefit is that you can restrict your advertising to run in specific geographic areas. So if you are offering a product or service in a specific area you can set up your advertising so that your ads only show if they are located in that area. In this way you will probably get less actual visitors to your website, but they will be so targeted that your conversion rate will be much higher.
In summary, Google AdWords, or PPC advertising is really a very cost effective way of advertising your business and all businesses should consider using this as a marketing tool, however, there are some finer details around managing your adwords campaign that must be taken into consideration
