Stretching your Advertising Dollar with Google AdWords
How are you marketing your company today? How much are you paying for advertising? Is it performing to your expectations? How much does your marketing cost for each new customer gained?
Consider a new way to advertise. A way that allows you to control exactly how much you spend every day on ads. A way that allows you to market your products only to people who live in your target geography. A way that pre-qualifies customers and will only show your advertisements to people who want what you’re offering. Does this sound too good to be true? Fortunately it’s not too good to be true. It’s Google AdWords. Watch the video below for a brief introduction then read on.
As the video explains, Google AdWords allows a company to place text-based online ads within Google search results. But that’s just the beginning. When an advertiser partners with Google AdWords, they also gain access to the Google Display Network, which allows ads based on rich media, images, or video rather than a “plain” text ad. This network contains over one million websites of every flavor imaginable, including every site running Google AdSense (See “How to Monetize your site with AdSense“), YouTube, Google Maps, Google Finance, and the rest of the Google family; as well as the entire DoubleClick network and more. Within Google AdWords advertisers can even buy a TV spot… for as little as twenty dollars!
But how does it work? Basically, when you place an ad you enter a bid for how much you’re willing to pay for that ad to be displayed a single time. When a user searches for something related to your ad, Google compiles a list of all the relevant ads and displays the ones that have a combination of the highest cost-per-click (CPC) bid and the highest relevance to what the user is looking for. Google always strives to improve the end user experience so rather than dispalying only the highest paying CPC bids Google will reward advertisers with more advantageous ad placement for writing accurate ads and providing users with the content they’re actually looking for once they “click through” to your site.
And how much does it cost? Merely a one-time activation fee of $5 USD and whatever you would like to budget for ads. There is a minimum cost-per-click bid of $0.01 USD and a minimum cost-per-(thousand)-impression bid of $0.25 USD. Aside from those pricing guidelines the cost is completely up to you. Raising your bid will raise your ad’s visibility and lowering it will decrease visibility. Google actually does try to keep advertising costs reasonable though – as the Google Adwords support pags describe, “the AdWords discounter will automatically reduce your actual CPC so that your winning ad is charged only what is necessary to maintain its ranking above the next-highest ad.” And don’t worry, you’re not on your own in determining how much you should bid – Google offers serveral free tools to help you.
And that’s really just the beginning of Google AdWords. Doesn’t that seem much more economical than more traditional advertising? We certainly think so. Do you have a success story or a question about Google AdWords? If so just leave a comment below!
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