Six reasons to run a Google Adwords campaign

Google Adwords offers businesses a relatively cost-effective (depending on your industry and chosen keyword terms) way of reaching and influencing their target audiences.

For a defined budget, you can target people based on the specific terms they are searching for and interested in. For example, searching Google for ‘will writing’ will return a number of results – both organic search results and paid adverts.

At its most basic level, to run a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaign you just select the geography your campaign covers, the wording of your adverts, keywords you want to advertise against and your maximum cost per click. These adverts then keep displaying until your daily budget is used up by people clicking the advert to go through to your site.

PPC is most commonly associated with Google Adwords (the biggest PPC platform) – but the Bing Yahoo Network also runs a similar service for businesses – albeit with a smaller target audience.

So what benefits does Google Adwords offer to a business?

Measurable return on investment

Print advertising has a set cost regardless of how many people respond to the advert. With PPC you only pay if a potential customer clicks through to your website. Pair this up with Google Analytics and you can effectively track how many people respond to your campaign and the return on investment.

Improved customer intelligence

One of the drawbacks of Google Analytics is that a number of keywords that people use to find your site are hidden from view, but if you pay for advertising you get access to this data – allowing you to find out exactly what your customers are interested in. This data can help shape your content marketing to drive more organic traffic.

Reach defined target audiences

You can’t control who visits your site organically, so not everyone who visits will be an ‘ideal customer’. However, Google Adwords lets you target searchers based on location, demographics, interest categories and keyword terms. You can also use negative keywords to rule out certain types of searchers – e.g. job seekers or people searching for free advice.

Getting started

Building a fanbase for a brand new website takes time and hard work developing regular quality content. PPC advertising offers a shortcut to quickly build brand awareness and develop a community of website visitors.

Testing your conversion rates

If the aim of your site is to generate enquiries then you can use the group of ‘cold-callers’ delivered by a PPC campaign to test how effective your site and landing pages are in converting visitors into leads. You can try different variations of pages and copy until you find what really works for your target audience.

Protecting your brand

Imagine a customer searches for you on Google and the first thing they see is an advert for your competitor. One way to prevent this is to run a PPC campaign targeting your brand (including mis-spellings of your brand name).

The key to getting started with PPC is a strong understanding of your audience, their search intentions and what motivates them to buy. If you understand this – PPC is too big an opportunity not to at least consider.