Beginning on October 23, 2000, Google changed online marketing forever when it launched the “Self-Service Advertising Program.” In just over a decade, Google has generated $42 billion in revenue through its advertising program. Today, we know that this was due to the Google AdWords program. Thus, it has become a vital part of many successful online businesses.
If you’re not familiar with AdWords, it’s a pay-per-click service that allows you to create and run ads for your business. These pay-per-click ads are to be displayed in Google.ro search results. By using the right keywords for your target audience, you will already be one step ahead, because you will directly address people interested in your product or service.
Interesting, right? Here are five top reasons why your business should be using AdWords.
1. AdWords is scalable and flexible
One of the main advantages that online marketing has over traditional marketing channels such as television or newspapers is that it is extremely easy to measure. However, it can be challenging to effectively measure an SEO campaign, as you can’t always get an accurate measure of what contributed to the increase or decrease in rankings. Meet AdWords PPC! This is probably one of the best resources you can use to measure what works and what doesn’t. It comes equipped with a lot of PPC metrics that do this for you.
AdWords is also flexible because it has customizable options for the campaign you will run, so it will suit your needs. For example, AdWords can be used to:
- Specific keyword match types – this allows you to show your ad for specific searches of specific keywords. So, you could place your ad for “Smartphone Romania”, as opposed to general searches for “Smartphone” or “Romania”.
- Ad extensions – this gives you the ability to display everything from product images, contact information, to a bundle of links to your website.
- Narrow the audience. You can configure it so you can discover your audience by location, time zone, language, and even the browser or device they’re using.
- Access sites that don’t use search – Gmail, YouTube and many other partner sites are within reach.
- Use the display network – this can help you establish brand awareness.
2. Faster than SEO
A huge downside to SEO is that it can take months to see and compare results against your competition. This disclaimer does not apply to AdWords. After your AdWords campaign goes live, ads will appear and you’ll get immediate results like visitor data.
Not only will this bring you a lot of benefits for little money, but due to its speed, you will have time to discover how effective your keywords are, which can then be used to build an effective SEO campaign based on the data provided by AdWords.
I personally love SEO and believe that having an SEO plan is the key to online success. That being said, PPC will get you to the top of the search results in just minutes.
3. More interaction
Google is constantly improving AdWords because it is one of its main sources of income. Over time, Google has noticed that product display ads and video ads on YouTube get more clicks from users. These interactive ads mean more revenue for both Google and advertisers.
Consider this as well. YouTube has over 1 billion organic views per month, as well as several billion views per day. If you were to compare this to search engines, it would be second and it is also twice as big as Bing and Yahoo combined. So why wouldn’t you want your ads to be seen by a large mass of people?
4. Can control advertising costs
Here’s something great about AdWords! You can set a maximum cost per day for your campaign. How can this aspect help your business? It allows you to split your campaign budget without worrying about going over the set budget. The most pessimistic scenario is that the amount of ads will start to decrease as the budget decreases. However, you can increase your budget. This scalability is a nice option if you want a lot of customers in a short period of time.
Since you may have several campaigns running daily, it is better to split the campaign into three different target areas:
- Mobile searches;
- Display Network (for remarketing);
- Google Search;
5. You can dominate the competitors
Because of the speed of AdWords, compared to SEO, you have a major advantage over your competitors. Because you will already appear in search engines, your website will receive more clicks from search results than all other companies in your industry.
But what if competitors also use AdWords? There is no problem!
According to Moz, 80% of search results now contain AdWords ad placements. Furthermore, those ad placements cover up to 85% of the space above the results page. This doesn’t just mean that Google is making a big profit, it shows that AdWords is being used by more and more advertisers. So the only way to beat them is to join them.
Have you used AdWords before? If so, which features do you think were most effective?
