Posts Tagged ‘adwords’

How Can Google Help You Advertise Your Business Online?

Monday, October 18th, 2010

Google AdvertisingGoogle is one of the biggest companies in the world and has a near monopoly over the billions of searches made through search engines every day. This gives them rather a lot of power over the internet. Luckily for us, Google is quite nice and has the philosophy “Don’t Be Evil” which means that they have your best interests at heart.

Search Results

Google is a search engine first and foremost: the most popular one in the world. Or rather more accurately, Google is a database or index which they have built up by constantly combing the web for changes to current sites and entirely new sites which it then uses its search engine to trawl through in order to quickly pick out the best results based on your search query. By meeting a long list of criteria for a relevant and authoritative website you can get your website to the top of Google search results, which is a very good way to advertise yourself especially if you can do this for a keyphrase which people use often.

AdWords

Alternatively they have provided AdWords which is an advertising service which allows people and businesses to get their adverts in front of millions of pairs of eyes every day for specific search terms without having to go down the organic search engine optimisation (SEO) route. After you have signed up and decided on your budget and your key phrases, you just have to write a catchy advert and outbid your competition for a place at the top of the page.

Google Places

If your business has a shop or an office or a hub location or in fact, even just a vague geographical area you can advertise yourself using Google Places. This service highlights you on a map in Google search results and gives searchers a link to your location and your website. This can be a very quick and effective way to catch some customer’s attention.

Display Advertising

Recently Google have been in New York to discuss display advertising with the Mad Men of Madison Avenue. At Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual MIXX conference, Google presented their pitch about display advertising explaining that it is the future of dynamic online advertising. Especially as new HTML 5 technology will make getting video to every web surfer a slick and easy process allowing display advertising to be more exciting.

So next time you look at your advertising budget and think what you’re going to use it for…save a thought for Google. With the right understanding of Google’s platform you can turn traffic into profit and make your payment service provider really earn their keep. Just ensure that your money transfer services can handle it.

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Mobile Ways to Advertise Online

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

Online advertising is big business: Fact. Google would certainly agree with that, as it’s always been a staple of their business model. In fact advertising is for Google a multi-billion dollar industry. So why is online advertising so successful? Well, unlike traditional advertising like billboards, TV adverts, etc, advertising online is far more direct and infinitely more focused. However with modern changes in how people get online the game is certainly going to change.

If you advertise through Google AdWords for instance you’ll find that your adverts are targeted, making them more effective as you’re putting them in front of the right people. Ads such as these can be configured to fit your demographic; popping up at the right times, and in the right searches. As opposed to traditional blanket advertising, people are actively searching out your kind of service. That’s the beauty of search based advertising. Of course with people getting online through mobile devices you might have to re-think your advertising strategy.

Fortunately there are services becoming available which can help you on your way. Google for instance, has invested hundreds of millions into getting its mobile advertising setup off and running. As an expansion on Google AdWords, Google Mobile helps you to get your adverts in front of mobile users, by providing information to help you tailor your ads for mobiles. Mobile ads are more restricted in the number of characters available for things like the title, and as such copywriters have to be on the ball. There are similar services available from Microsoft and Yahoo, but these are hampered by the fact that there are far less popular browsers available to them than Google, which in turn constitutes a less rewarding platform for businesses to broadcast themselves.

Of course the move into other areas for advertisers doesn’t stop there. Due to roll out in the next few months the iAd platform from Apple is set to be a very different animal. Running on the iPhone, iPod and iPad it’s clearly gearing into a very different section of the market. Advertisers will apparently be charged a minimum of one million dollars when the platform rolls out. Running ads through apps on each device will clearly boost the number of free apps available, as developers take advantage of the new revenue stream available.

Whichever way advertisers go it’s apparent that the online advertising game is changing. The only thing that’s for certain is that it will continue to grow as online advertising takes over.

Martin Able is experienced in web advertising and providing online businesses with money transfer services and security for online credit card processing which has allowed him to see the benefits of effective ads.

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Writing Ad Text for Google AdWords

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

In the previous blog post we continued our look at Google AdWords. We looked briefly at the subject of keywords and how they were pivotal to the success of your pay per click campaign and how selecting keywords that suit your business is an essential step.

This time we will be looking at the concept of ad text and how using it effectively can have a dramatic effect on the effectiveness of your campaign. You wouldn’t believe the seemingly small changes that you can make to ad text to improve the ads success.

One of the primary tips that people are given about ad text is to try if possible to use your keywords in the top line of the text. This is good for potential customers to see when they search – the text that they just searched for (as it is the keyword that triggered the ad) is shown back to the user. This increases the likelihood of them clicking on your advert. In addition this text will show in bold when the customer searches for it, further drawing attention to your advert.

The second line can be good place to really hook the viewer by mentioning some great selling point or reason for them to shop or click on your site. For sites selling directly to consumers this could be a promise of cheaper prices such as a percentage offer deal, or perhaps trying to temp the customer with a free postage offer. Either way the text should try and create a compelling reason for the viewer to click your advert.

The third line is normally a ‘call to action’, an authoritative instruction for the user to follow. An example of this might be “Don’t delay, order today!” Google AdWords won’t allow every type of ‘call to action’ though, text telling the user to “click here” will fail the ad text quality checking.

The final two lines relate to the URLs associated with the ad. The first is the display URL, it is the link that the viewer will see at the bottom of the ad. Depending on how lengthy your text for the rest of your ad has worked out it can be useful to include a shortened URL – without the ‘www’ or full directory path. The last line is the actual landing page URL, the ad viewer won’t see this link so its aesthetics don’t matter. It should however, always be pointed at the most relevant page on your site.

Martin Able is a web retail specialist working with payment gateways and cheque processing for ecommerce websites.

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Key Tips for Keywords in AdWords

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

In the last post we went into more detail about Google AdWords and the methods that advertisers can use to get the best from the budget they have allocated for pay per click advertising. This time we shall look at the powerhouse of any AdWords campaign – keywords.

Keywords are the words that a user enters into Google Search, they are the ‘trigger’ for the advertisers advert to show. As they have such a pivotal importance in an AdWords campaign it is imperative that they are carefully selected.

There are a number of ways to research decent keyphrases, Google itself provides some tools to help advertisers. The Google AdWords Keyword Tool allows users to input keywords and evaluate them for competition and local / global search volumes. Not only that, but the tool will also provide additional suggested keywords to provide the user with even more options. This tool can be a powerful asset for advertisers looking to find keywords for PPC marketing.

Another Google supplied tool is the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. This system takes a different angle to finding keywords, it will actually analyse a specified site and suggest keywords based on its findings.

One tip for advertisers to use is to look at the products they sell and use them as a starting place for the keyword research. After all, the keyword will be separated into specific campaigns and ‘ad groups’ based on the products sold, it pays to find which of those products are searched for most often.

Once the advertiser has a list of keywords that they believe represent the products they are selling it is time to remove any that do not have enough ‘commercial intent’. For an ecommerce site which relies on sales this is an important step, any keywords that are more likely to represent a user simply looking for information on a topic should be removed. Similarly any keywords that are simply far too broad should also be removed, for example – a company selling holidays in Italy shouldn’t be using the keyword ‘Italy’. ‘Italy holidays’ or ‘holidays in Italy’ would be more targeted.

Martin Able is an ecommerce professional with experience in online credit card processing and money transfer services for retail websites.

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Advertise Your Way to More Sales

Friday, March 19th, 2010

In previous blog posts we have looked at how you can analyse site traffic tools such as Google Analytics to better tune your site for better conversions. Once you are confident on your sites ability to convert visitors into customers then you may start wondering how best to drive not only traffic to your site, but traffic that you actually want on your site. After all, 1000 potential customers is better than 1000000 casual visitors with no chance to convert.

One technique to drive quality traffic to your site it to use online advertising, one popular way is to use ‘pay per click’ advertising. This can be a very cost effective way of attracting the right sort of people to your site. As is suggested in the name, the advertiser will only pay when the user clicks on the advert.

The actual running of a pay per click campaign through AdWords can be quite an involved job, those people looking to spend some time setting up their advertising will find that they won’t get the best from what Google’s AdWords system has to offer.

If you have had an SEO campaign previously then you may have a slight head-start when it comes to setting up an AdWords account, try using the keyphrases researched for that SEO campaign to see how they will perform in AdWords. You are looking for keyphrases targeted to your industry that are also used frequently in searches.

Now comes the time to write your actual advert text, or copy. This will be the first way you interact with your potential customer so you need to have copy that is eye-catching. This could be by displaying savings available on your site, by clever word-play or any other technique you can think of to make your ad stand out.

You will now have the beginning of an AdWords Campaign, much of the work is still ahead though, there are many facets to creating an effective online advertising campaign. Many businesses find that hiring another company to maintain the account works out as the most profitable way to organise pay-per-click advertising.

If this advertising is done well then a stream of quality traffic can be effectively directed to your site. If you look at the AdWords page on Wikipedia you can see that Google AdWords reported revenues in 2008 were $21 billion, there are a lot of businesses using this form of online advertising!

With years of experience in money transfer services and utilising extensive online credit card processing methods Martin Able has considerable expertise in managing payment services for online businesses.

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Top Tools for Making and Keeping Your Site Successful

Friday, January 8th, 2010

With any website there are a multitude of hurdles to get over to get the website up and running. The process of laying down a design for a website and getting development underway can be a somewhat arduous procedure. However, particularly for an ecommerce site, the work does not end there.

Once a site is up and running it is vital to keep it in perfect working order as the alternative is to attract few new clients or start losing the clients you have. Ecommerce is a fickle business and in order to stay on top, promote yourself and most importantly turn a profit, it’s imperative that you take any advantage you can get. Fortunately there are a massive selection of tools available that provide assistance in monitoring and optimising your site. Here are a few of the more vital ones at your disposal. (Fortunately, some of them are free!)

Keyword Analysis Tools

Keyword analysis plays a major part in the search engine optimisation of your site. Good use of keywords will allow you to funnel more specific traffic to your site, filtering out the most likely buyers from the browsers. By determining the right kinds of keywords you can determine what kind of competition you’re up against for search terms and which search terms can separate your site from the herd. Fortunately there are a multitude of keyword tools available on the web. Some of the top ones are Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery and Adwords Keyword Tool. The former two offer more features but a have a paid subscription while the Adwords Keyword Tool is free.

PPC

Pay-per-click campaigns can form the backbone of your websites promotion. Some sites sell advertising space, however the most prominent way to run PPC is through a dedicated service such as Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo’s Search Marketing. These major search engine providers run advertising through their own search engines as well as websites who have opted into the program. These services assist you in quickly and easily creating your advert, choosing your keywords, setting your budget and deciding where to display. Alternatively you can turn a profit yourself by renting advertising space on your own site. Just make sure that you don’t allow adverts for your direct rivals!

Website Optimizer

Website optimizer is a free tool from Google that allows you to optimise and tweak your web pages more efficiently. It is important to not only maintain your site but try to constantly improve it. Website optimizer allows you to run two versions of the same page simultaneously by alternating them between users. That is to say that you can compare the success of two variations of one page to determine which is the most successful. Through this, your site can be constantly running comparisons and therefore be ever adapting and improving.

Analytics

Analytics is possibly the most vital tool you can employ to manage your site. It allows you view in-depth statistics on how users are interacting with your site. Through this you can determine which parts of your site are letting you down, which products are drawing the most attention and how people are finding your site among a multitude of other features. You can find out about setting up an analytics account in one of our previous articles as well as several others that provide more in depth discussion of how to utilise analytics for optimising content and optimising for your clientele.

With the use of these tools you will find keeping your site in prime working order a far less laborious process. Furthermore you will be able to make improvements that will help bring more traffic to your site and hopefully generate more sales!

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How PPC Can Increase Your Online Revenue

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

mouse click Pay-per-click (which is often referred to simply as PPC) is a method of online advertising whereby the advertiser pays a certain amount of money each time someone clicks on one of their adverts and is taken to their website.  A small number of sites will sell advertising space on this basis but the most common way to run a pay-per-click campaign is through a dedicated service which will supply adverts to a huge number of website owners (who in turn receive payment for each click that is generated on their website).

The most prominent PPC advertising services are those run by the major search engine providers, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, who run the PPC programs AdWords, adCenter and Search Marketing respectively.  There are two key ways that these three companies run their PPC advertising; through search engines and through websites that have opted to display their adverts for a cut of the profits.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all place adverts in a column on the right hand side of their search results pages (and occasionally in a box located above the standard organic listings).  In order to have adverts placed in these positions advertisers need to bid on keyphrases.  A keyphrase is a term that, when typed into a search engine, you want your advert to appear on the search results pages for.  The cost-per-click (CPC) will vary depending on how many people are vying for advertising space on the results for that particular keyphrase, but typically the cost will be lowered the more appropriate the PPC provider deems your website to be.  Google AdWords, for example, will give each advert a quality score based on well related the keyphrase, the advert, and the landing page are to one another.  By doing this advertisers are encouraged to create the most relevant adverts possible and in turn Google can provide its searchers with adverts that are as appropriate to the keyphrase they entered as possible.

In addition to PPC adverts that are placed on search engine results pages website owners can also choose to add advertising space to their website and have the adverts displayed by a PPC provider.  This can bring the website owner an additional source of revenue from their website and gives advertisers the opportunity to display their adverts to a specifically targeted audience.

Nowadays PPC adverts are often found on blogs as it allows bloggers to make a small amount of profit from an area they were previously unable to.  This is also of benefit to the advertisers as they are able to hunt out niche blogs that are very closely related to their industry and then choose to display their PPC adverts on these specific websites.

Pay-per-click advertising can be an excellent way to give your website a quick boost; they appear instantly and you can decide exactly when you want them to run and what your daily budget is.  The downside however is that a lot of popular terms can generate a high number of clicks in a relatively short space of time.  This means that you would either have to run your advert in very short bursts, or you have to commit to a very large budget.  Providing you carefully select keyphrases (or websites to display the adverts on) and ensure your landing page is well optimised you will be able to convert these adverts to profit and scale the PPC campaign up accordingly.

Remember to check back regularly to read my upcoming posts where I’ll discuss techniques for investigating keyphrases, as well as how to optimise your PPC adverts and landing pages.

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