And how to get started
Adwords is a service of Google, the most popular search engine on the internet. When you do a search on Google, you’ll see two kinds of results on the page – the free ones and the paid ones.
Depending on your search phrase, you could see potentially millions of free results. Adwords – those paid ads – offers you a way to move your website to the top of the pack. Here are five ways that you can use Adwords to help you in your marketing efforts.
1 – Make Your Website More Visible
Let’s say your store sells pet food. If you do a search for “pet food,” you’ll see that Google lists more than 400 million results. If you use Adwords, you can place a small text ad on Google’s results page – right on the first page, if you want. That way, your new customers don’t have to wade through page after page of results to find you – a task they probably won’t do if they have any kind of life.
2 – You Only Pay When an Ad Works
Ever wonder if your advertising is working? If people who see the ad even get your message? With Adwords, you only pay for the ad if a person clicks on the ad and goes to your website.
Wouldn’t it be great if ads in other media, like newspapers or TV worked like that? I’ll say it again – you only pay for the ad if someone clicks on it to go to your website.
3 – You Control the Budget
Adwords lets you control your budget. You can tell Adwords that you want to spend $50 a month and once you reach that level, the ads simply stop showing for that month.
If you decide you’d like to raise or lower the budget, you can do that at any time.
4 – You Control Who Sees Your Ads
When someone does a search on Google, they enter a search word or phrase. Say they are searching for someone who sells ball bearings, they’ll probably use a phrase like “ball bearing sales.”
If you sell ball bearings, you can tell Adwords to display your ad for any search for the phrase “ball bearing sales.” And on the other hand, if you don’t sell ball bearings, Adwords will not display your ad.
That means your ads are only being shown to people who have an interest in what you do. Imagine if you could do that with, say, a newspaper ad?
5 – Test Ads to See Which Ones Work Best
Adwords lets you create your own text ads. You write the headline and two lines of text. New customers begin to click on the ad and you are pleased. But since you are always looking for ways to improve, you wonder if a different ad might pull better.
Adwords makes it simple to test new ads. Let’s say you’d like to try a new headline with the same body text. Adwords lets you copy your first ad, write the new headline and run it. You can then compare how the two ads do.
If one does better than the other, Adwords will automatically begin using it more frequently.