Google AdWords is an advertising platform developed by Google. It’s where advertisers pay for text ads, product lists, service offers, video clips, or images to internet users. In simple terms, it can put ads both on the right results of major search engines such as Google Search and even on non-search sites, apps, and mobile applications. To put it simply, Google AdWords lets you advertise your products, services, business, and organizations right in the midst of all these searchers. And if you have the money to invest, you can probably take advantage of Google’s other marketing platforms such as Google Places and Google Maps.
But how does it work? How do you make money with Google AdWords? And what are some of the strategies you should be using to boost your conversion rate? Read on to find out more.
If you’re not familiar with the term, AdWords is a PPC or (pay-per-click) advertising network that uses a point system to calculate the cost per click. Basically, every time someone clicks on one of your ads, you will be charged a fixed amount. The bidding war starts at $10 and you can increase your bid in most instances. You can also choose between pay per click and cost per impression. Let’s take a look at a typical ad and how you can use it to boost your conversions:
As you can see above, the bidding is the starting point of your Google AdWords campaign. What this means is that you will be given a list of relevant keywords to promote your advertisements based on the information you entered when you made the initial search engine query. Your advertisement will appear when the keyword matching your ads matches the query that was entered by your customer. That is the beauty of PPC advertising, the relevancy of your advertisements; people searching for your branded terms will be shown your ads based on what they are actually looking for!
What makes PPC advertising work is that advertisers bid on relevant keywords and only they will be showed when a customer searches for that particular term. When someone searches for x, y or z, the system will calculate how many times the advertiser has been successful when his or her ad was clicked and how many times he or she has lost out. Each time a person clicks on an ad, you will be charged x dollars. The downside to PPC advertising is that you are limited to only having a small number of possible keywords. Therefore, you have to be very specific with your advertising platform if you want to get results.
Another way you can increase your click through rate (CTR) is to target specific keywords. Advertisers bid on the keyword corresponding to a particular product and/or service. Google AdWords offers a search feature that allows advertisers to specify certain keywords to target. So if you are selling dog supplies, then you could target the search term “puppy supplies” and your ads for products related to that would show up in the search results.
The actual cpc (cost per thousand impressions) of a PPC campaign can be highly influenced by the keywords your use. For example, a PPC advertisement for a particular product might cost $.50 but if you are targeting a group of searchers who are looking for a particular product, the actual car may end up being much higher. There are many factors involved such as bid management, quality score, bid price, placement and many more.
The final and most important factor affecting PPC adverts performance is ad copy. If a searcher saw your ad and didn’t click through, it means that they weren’t interested. To make sure you get good conversion rates, you should make sure that your ad copy is attention-grabbing enough. You can use a sales page or sales pitch in the ad copy and have these help improve your PPC rankings.