For everything there is a season…
…a time for every activity under heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1) Even AdWords.
Yesterday I wrote about how AdWords can be a black hole for a small business marketing budget. Today I want to point out a few circumstances in which AdWords makes sense.
Sometimes AdWords is the right thing to do.
According to a great post yesterday on Hubspot Inbound Marketing‘s blog called 3 Strategies to Run an Effective Google AdWords Campaign, one good reason to use AdWords is if your website is brand new and you’re not sure which keywords to focus on for your organic search efforts. AdWords gives you a chance to test different keywords’ popularity. Another reason to justify your PPC spending is if you’d like to reach “audiences different from those drawn from organic search and thus maximize your reach to potential customers.” (Hubspot)
Want better results? Let me show you the world in Google’s eyes.
If you need to use AdWords, a great exercise might be to put yourself in Google’s shoes. If Google isn’t seen as reliable, then Google goes go out of business. While we’re busy using them to market to our prospects, remember that they’re Google’s prospects first. If serving up our ads is not what Google thinks is best for their customers, they will either not serve them up at all, or they’ll make it much more expensive for us.
What makes a good ad from Google’s perspective?
A good ad is the sum of three parts:
- The keywords we choose to target
- The ad copy we write
- The copy on the landing page
If Google doesn’t think those three things go together like a hand in a glove, then we’ll be paying more, or the ads won’t be seen much at all. There are many sources for information on what makes a good AdWords campaign, especially Hubspot’s post, so I won’t recreate the wheel. But the thing I think is usually underestimated is the power of keeping things simple and keeping these three elements in sync.
Keeping it simple: Now jump into the shoes of the searcher.
You need an A. You decide to look for A online. You type A into the search bar. You see ads come up promising a good deal on A. You click on the ad… but there’s no A. There may be lots of B, which is close, but you were looking for A. B might be on the next page or even implied, but if you don’t see A, are you going to stay on that page? Or click away as fast as you can to go back to the other search results because you have other things to do and you just need an A.
So the best idea for the vendor selling A is to target the keyword A, include A in the ad itself, then make sure that the promise of the ad is fulfilled on the landing page with lots and lots of good A. Google will reward you with a lower CPC and more impressions. They like it when our prospects are getting what they search for. That’s Google’s job. They want to help us do ours better too.
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