A beginners guide to Google AdWords

This article will give you an insight into what AdWords is and give you the basic
understanding of how it works. This article is written for a beginner, and only covers the basics with the purpose to explain the fundamentals

AdWords is an clever always-on tool in every successful online marketing strategy to push sales, leads and targeted traffic to your website, offering full transparency in terms of the budget you invest. On top of that it will give you some really valuable insights for your SEO and content work.

 

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a text based advertising system visible on the top of and to the right of the organic listings in the Google search engine. Utilising a pay per click payment model – meaning you only pay for a click and not a view of your ad and not views.

 

How does it work?

You create text ads in relation to a set of keywords. These ads are then showed/served in the Google search engine when users search on the keywords which you are bidding for. You can also add these to be distributed within Googles Network which includes Google Display Network and Youtube.

You can see the process as an auction. There are two locations in the Google search engine layout page where your ads can be visible – at the moment this is in the top of the page and the bottom of the organic listings.

The better you manage to combine your keywords, with your ads and a relevant landing page, and the better the click through rate on them – the better quality score you will get. And thus pay less for the keywords you are bidding on and get a better ranking in the big “competitor que” of ads for the top positions.

So even though you may have a lower bid on a keyword then your competition, you may have a better position then them, on the basis of your quality score in the way you combine your keywords, ads, landing pages and your generated click through rate.

So it’s not all about the money – its about quality and relevance too.

 

Easy targeting

Your budget is well invested since you can tag specific geographical areas, down to postcodes to make sure you only target people in your business region, as well as setting rules for times and days of the week your campaigns are supposed to be visible.

 

Be in control of your ad spend

You can easily manage and stay in control of your budget by setting a daily spend cap or budget. The same cap can be applied to any automatic bidding process, for example, you only want to pay a maximum of £1/per click on your keywords, then this is easily set-up and managed within your account. The daily budget you set can be changed whenever and the software also saves your budget to allocate it better.

By using Google AdWords you get full control and insight in your budget and you only pay for clicks – not views (impressions) of your ad. Tying this together with Google Analytics and conversion tracking will enable you to get insight on the ROI of each keyword you choose to invest in.

 

Why Google AdWords?

There are plenty of reasons to use Google AdWords and your business is never too small or too big to benefit from pay per click ads in Google. The main reasons are obvious: you are visible in the perfect context! Someone searches for your type of service or product in a search engine and you want to be visible when they do so because you are placing yourself in the environment where people are looking for something they want to know more about and where to find it.

You may want to use this as a traffic booster to your website, but at the end of the day you want more sales or leads, then Google AdWords is the perfect tool to capture that and give you the insight you need to refine your activities across your entire digital marketing mix.

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10 reasons to use Google AdWords:
  1. The ads are visible in a customers buying cycle, which is the search context, you can easily customize your ad based on your customer path to purchase.
  2. To attract new customers, leads or increase sales
  3. Your ads reach as broad or specific audience as you desire, from local
    to national placements
  4. You do not need a high initial investment to start off with AdWords
  5. It’s easy to change – instant in fact – if something does not work – pause
    or delete
  6. You get full control of your budget spend – you set your own limit on
    daily spend for the campaigns
  7. You get full insight on which keywords generate sales or leads.
  8. You can test new services, products or marketing messages before investing in them – – you get valuable insights on what your customer is looking for in Google and how you can adjust your messaging to target their desire.
  9. You can easy do split testing on ads or perform experiments for a low
    cost and there are plenty of tools to automate the work.
  10. It can be a cost effective way of marketing your company on a small
    budget, utilising the right targeting, time of day and high performing key-
    words. Comparing to other digital marketing options.