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Google for beginners: Advertising
It nickel and dimed its way to being one of the biggest, most successful companies in the world and did so by revolutionising the world of advertising.
Google makes billions of dollars a year and does so by giving people powerful tools grow their businesses. The question is, could it grow yours?
How it works
Advertising on Google consists of five steps:
- Open an account on Google Adwords (this takes about ten minutes)
- Write your advert
- Decide which people you want to see your advert
- Fix the maximum amount of money you’re willing to spend each day – this entirely up to you from £1.00 to £1,000,000
- Wait for extra visitors to your website
What it costs
It doesn’t actually cost anything to put your advert on Google, the only time you pay is when someone clicks on it. How much that costs depends on how many other people want to advertise to the same audience as you.
How much is that likely to be? Well, you can get a rough idea by typing the search term you’d like to appear under into Yahoo’s bid estimator.
Example prices
Let’s take a look at a couple of different scenarios. If you were a horticulturalist and wanting to advertise “seeds” each click would only cost you about £0.14 whereas advertising “roses” would cost you £0.80 a click.
If you’re lucky or unlucky enough to be a LASIK eye surgeon, a click on your advert for “laser eye surgery” could cost you a full £4.74.
How much the clicks cost depends entirely on how many other people want to advertise on the same keyword as you and what they’re prepared to pay for each click.
The power of search advertising
Precise targeting
Advertising with Google (or any other search engine) lets you target your advertising to precisely the people interested in what you’re selling. Let’s say you’re Ned Flanders and you want to tell people about your left handed tin openers.
Normal advertising is a hit and miss route to the lefty-market. Most left-handed people don’t read magazines about being left handed so you’re forced to put adverts in more general publications.
This means you inevitably waste advertising budget on right handed people who probably don’t care about left-handed tin openers.
On Google though you can chose to advertise only on searches for “left handed tin openers“. Every penny you spent was spent on a lead to someone who was not only interested in left handed goods but in left handed tin openers.
Accountability
When advertising offline, an eighth-page advert in a trade magazine is likely to cost at least £400 but may generate no new business.
Even when offline advertising is effective it’s hard to know which adverts brought in which customers and where best to invest your future advertising budget.
Advertising online lets you track which advert generated which lead and makes sure you only invest in areas that generate profit.
Value
By letting you track which adverts are paying for themselves and which aren’t Google lets you axe the adverts that don’t pay for themselves and invest more in those that do.
How to get started
If you think you’d like to try advertising with Google, the next step is to sign up for an Adwords account. Confirm your bank details and have a play with different adverts.
You can limit the maximum spend so there’s no need to worry about runaway charges and you can try as many different advert combinations as you want.
You’ll need a website to point the adverts at and we also recommend a tracking package like Google Analytics which lets you monitor the effectiveness of the adverts. With those in place, you’re ready to start generating new business and attracting new customers. Have a play, it’s easier than you think!
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