There’s a reason why close to 1.5 million businesses are advertising in Google – it works (when run properly) and can be highly profitable. How else can you drive highly targeted traffic immediately to your website? We’re often asked by customers, “Why should I be advertising in Google?”, to which we reply… let us count the ways…
1. Your Website Needs More Traffic
Most websites simply don’t have enough traffic coming into them and advertising on Google allows you to buy relevant traffic immediately. You set your budget and Google will send you traffic based on the keyword selection you make. If you set everything up carefully and do a lot of testing, you can turn those visitors into leads and sales.
2. Incredible Market Research
Do you really know which keywords will ultimately drive sales or are you assuming you know? A keyword may bring traffic but not bring sales. That’s a mistake we’ve seen way too many times to count. This is also the reason why big marketing agencies survey customers and have focus groups. You may think the ideal keyword is “A” but we’ve often seen that it turns out to be “B”. One way to know for certain is to run an AdWords campaign and TEST it. It’s called Market Research. You’ll save yourself about 6 months to a year of lost work on an incorrect assumption and you’ll come away with priceless info.
3. You Can’t Find the Time for Internet Marketing
You know you should be doing more with the Internet but you’re running around like a chicken with your head cut off. You’re taking calls from customers, fulfilling orders, running your company and you just don’t have any more time left to give. Advertising in Google allows you to somewhat “outsource” a portion of your online marketing tasks and place this in the hands of experts who are going to get results or risk losing your account. Whenever you can take a function and have it done competently by another, it’s one last hat to wear and this buys you more time to focus on other areas of growth.
4. No Long Term Commitments or Contracts
Remember advertising in the Yellow pages? You used to have to commit to an ongoing monthly bill for an entire year on a single (often times) unproven ad. If it didn’t produce results, you were stuck paying the monthly bill regardless. By advertising in Google, you control the process. You control how much you spend, how long it runs, if you want to continue or not and you can change your ad as many times as you like to get a variation that produces the best result. It’s the most flexible advertising system we’ve ever seen.
5. Increase Company & Brand Awareness
In addition to generating leads and sales, some companies advertise in Google to build up their brand awareness and authority as a company. I can’t tell you how many times a company has commented on our website or a clients being at the top of Google for very competitive keywords. This gives you immediate authority.
6. Target a Very Specific Audience
Want to target people who live 30 mile around your local town? Want to ensure people DON’T see you ad when they type in certain related keywords? Want your ads to show only 9-5pm, PST? Want to target readers of certain online websites? This and much more can be done when you advertise in Google.
7. Take the Guesswork out of Marketing by Tracking Everything
By Advertising on Google and having your account setup properly, you can track EVERYTHING about it. Which keywords brought visits and/or sales, which pages were popular, how long people read your pages, where they left your website and what your conversion rate was (how many visitors does it take to achieve a desired outcome, such as a sale, form submission, etc.). This information is so valuable because for the first time you’re able to get detailed knowledge about what is happening, when, why, how and what you can do to improve your situation.
The Pitfalls of Google Advertising
Like all powerful tools, there is a downside. You can waste a lot of money if you’re not very careful & experienced running such campaigns. The AdWords system has become very complex over the years and the competition within the system can be fierce. To Google’s credit, they have worked tirelessly to constantly release new features, tools and resources to help advertisers run better campaigns. They even have a full online training program. The trouble is, there’s a lot of learning curve here and this means most companies aren’t going to try to do this in-house but will hire local experts to manage their accounts. In our experience it takes a few years to create a great AdWords specialist and for this reason we recommend that you initially hire someone to help you out when you’re just starting out. Over time you can learn more about the system on the side if you are so inclined and as your confidence comes up, you can ultimately take the reigns back over. Most customers end up having a company like ours manager their account since we can provide active management, detailed reporting, spending summaries, suggestions for improvements and can routinely get 3-10x’s better results than they could otherwise achieve.
So, Should You be Advertising in Google?
We think you should at least try it to see if it could work for you. Due to our long standing relationship with Google, we have been given several coupons worth $100 in AdWords advertising for this article, to give to new AdWords customers who want to try the program out. Since we only have two dozen of these, we’re giving the small supply we have to customers who want to have us setup and manage their Google Advertising campaigns. Email us or call us today at 727-562-5161 & Press 1 to speak with an AdWords Consultant.
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