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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!
Related links:
An introduction to Google
Traffic is your website’s lifeblood and one of its biggest sources of traffic are the search engines.
As one of the biggest drivers in one of the world’s richest industries, how do these engines actually work though? Witchcraft or logic, money or influence, what is it that gets you onto that hallowed front page?
Over the next few articles, we’ll take a look at the mechanics of search engines, what drives them and what you can and can’t do to improve your rankings on the kingpin, Google.
Paid v. natural listings
Google divides its search results into two different categories: paid listings and natural listings.
The company has always been very careful to make sure the two are kept entirely separate and that its natural listings are never tampered with, even when they risk putting the company in hot water.
Natural listings
Natural listings are determined algorithmically and depend entirely on what content is on your site and what other sites link to you. You cannot pay Google to alter or improve your natural listings.
Most search engine optimisation revolves around trying to improve these natural listings. It’s not easy to do, especially when the competition’s fierce but getting it right can drive huge amounts of traffic and unlike paid listings, that traffic is entirely free of charge.
Paid listings
Paid listings are displayed separately to the natural ones and are the place where your dollars will very definitely open doors.
Paid listings are how Google makes its money and take the form of the “sponsored links” that are displayed on the side of search pages.
Google only charges when someone clicks on one of those links so it’s actually free to place them. You only pay when someone clicks on the advert and visits your website.
Both types of listing are useful, both drive different types of traffic and both require different techniques to get the most from them.
The bottom line
Google works incessantly to improve its algorithms such that the most relevant pages display at the top of search results.
What does Google consider to constitute relevance? The answer, ultimately, is exactly what we as humans find relevant. Google looks for good content and for good reputation. Make your site pertinent to your audience and you’ll it make it pertinent to Google.
Create good content that people read and care about and good search rankings will follow.
There are ways you can make yourself as friendly and in the coming articles, we’ll take a look at them but always remember, the most important thing is great content.
In the next article in the series we look at paid listings on Google and how they have the potential deliver a quick profit hit for your business.
Related links:
Google Webmaster Central - tips and tricks from the horses mouth.
Google in 1998 - watch the baby sleeping.
Launch!
We are very proud to officially announce the launch of Sitefire, a service that finally makes it simple to own a powerful and updatable website.
For years we’ve been appalled at just how difficult it is for small businesses to get a good-looking site that they can edit and update themselves. Six months ago we decided to do something about it.
Our mission
- To let businesses communicate their message more effectively
- To make local and boutique information more easily available online
- To make website creation dependable and affordable
- To make our customers and visitors happy
It has been hard work getting here but we’re now very proud to be able to offer websites that are:
- Elegant to look at and easy to navigate
- Easy to edit, update and extend
- Easy to fill with photos and video
- Easy to find on Google
- Clearly and reasonably priced
Bells and whistles
We aim to give businesses all the tools they need to communicate their message as effectively as possible. To do so, we’ve included:
- Full content management - update your site whenever you need to
- Integrated blog and mailing list - keep your customers up-to-date
- Integrated Google video and Google maps
- Google Analytics visitor statistics
What’s next?
We’re very excited by what we can already offer but we’ve got big plans and over the coming year we’re going to be working to include:
- E-commerce integration with Paypal
- Sites that can scale to thousands of pages
- More designs
- Social software components like sharing, recommendations and collaboration
Drop us a line
If you’re interested in what we’re doing and you think it might be of help to you then please call us for a chat.
We’d be very happy to talk through what you’re trying to achieve and see whether we might be able to help.
In the event that we can help, we’ll gladly chat through what sort of package might best suit your needs and exactly what you can expect when you build your site with us.