With the digital marketing world getting more effective, yet more confusing every day, we know that Google offers many options to dip your toe into digital advertising with Google Adwords. We like to help people find the right mix of methods to target potential customers with their advertising budget and the many choices within Google Adwords is often the first stop. Today I want to touch on a few of the options within Google Adwords that can supplement your organic presence from SEO, or provide you a search presence when your SEO hasn’t quite taken off yet.
Adwords Options for Small Business
There are a number of ways to spend your advertising dollars, but we will touch on a few of them below, and what their strengths and some weaknesses may be. It is best to match the best option to your end goals or to mix the choices a little to create a more expansive presence.
Search Advertising
Search advertising is the most fundamental Adwords approach, and the method most people are most familiar with. The main benefit is the flexibility and the opportunity to show up for exactly the search phrases you want to show up for if you manage your campaigns properly. You basically set up a campaign and structure it to target specific search phrases and present text ads and then landing pages that also match the search concept that you targeted.
It is important to be specific here, as it is with SEO. Your landing pages and ads should match the specific search concept and one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is to just try to show up for everything and send everyone to general home pages or service pages. This is the quickest way to waste money and one of the drawbacks of search advertising is it typically costs more for each click than the other methods I will discuss below.
The great advantage you have here is to be as specific as possible and give the searcher exactly what they want, yet it is often the thing I see taken advantage of the least, leading to a lot of wasted money and a bad experience. You should create an adgroup for every concept you advertise and send visitors to a page that specifically talks about that service. If it is important enough to advertise for, it should be important enough to have a page dedicated to it on your site.
Display Advertising
Many don’t realize that you can also create display ads and do branded display advertising throughout the Google network of partners. There are many providers that offer display advertising, but often Google is easier to integrate if you are already doing paid search so that may of the analytics connections and integrations are already set up for you. You do need to be able to create display ads, which sometimes stops a small business before they get started. The most effective ad sizes can be found here. Simply send the URL to your developer or designer and ask them to help you create ads. There are some free tools out there to help you build image ads if you feel you have the artistry and knowledge yourself.
Once you have your ads up and running, there are a number of ways to use them. Google has advanced much further than just plastering your ad up randomly on different sites. All of that data they have been collecting about people through their online actions for years has now allowed them to give you some very impressive targeting tactics. You can target people by interests, demographics, topics, and even in some cases by where they are in the sales funnel. You can also target audiences similar to defined audiences such as your email marketing lists. Simply put, display advertising within digital marketing is not what it used to be and has become extremely effective.
The downside may be that you are not showing up exactly when the user is searching for you like you may be with paid search, but with ads generally being less expensive, you can get much more exposure and repeated placement in front of well-defined targets. Coupling with a search campaign, you can provide even more efficiency.
Remarketing
We have all experienced it. You visit a site after seeing an ad or clicking a link and now the site follows you around the internet wherever you go. It can be annoying, but it is also proven to be very effective. This tactic is called remarketing. It is a type of display advertising that allows you to serve ads only to those that have already visited your site or specific pages on your site. You can often do this for very little cost and it can serve as a bit of a reminder to those that happened upon your site but maybe weren’t quite ready to buy. If you want to get more advanced, you can serve specific ads based on what URL’s visitors went to on your site, and can even remove them if they visited another page. For example, you can target people that reached a certain page in your sales funnel but did not complete. Now you have to have a good amount of volume to create these specific lists, but even smaller businesses with less traffic can typically do higher levels of remarketing based on just site visitors or visitors to certain higher level pages. It doesn’t cost a lot to get going, especially if you already do display advertising, and is worth having it running.
Digital Marketing and Adwords: We Help You Choose a Path
All of these tactics can be mixed with or added to a good SEO plan to have a comprehensive online presence. Each method has very specific and pinpoint methods to efficiently spend your dollars by targeting geographies, searches, or types of activities, or all of the above. I would recommend having a professional help you set it up and manage it, as the tactics are always changing, but even with a quarterly maintenance plan and the ability to turn it on and off when you want to, probably gives you a significant edge over the competition. Call us and we can get you started.
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