AdWords Advertising for Your Small Business
Google AdWords provides a venue to promote businesses of any size. But, unlike most print advertising, AdWords offers the a variety of tools that enable you to target the ads and limit the scope to make the most efficient use of your advertising budget. If you put in the effort to carefully craft your ad and its release you can get your message to the audience most likely to respond to what you have to offer without getting trampled by larger enterprises with mass market campaigns.
Targeting Your Audience
Developing a customer profile is often overlooked in the effort to develop an effective ad. This will help you refine your keywords so you’re not competing for high priced terms with large national organizations. One of our customers, splitmaster.com, offers information on stock option strategies for stocks that split. Trying to compete for the term “stock options” not only pits them against large national firms that offer stock options but companies that develop stock option plans for corporate executives and pension plans. While you may get more clicks appearing in this mass market they will more likely be out of curiosity incurring a cost without a conversion. Best to get fewer clicks from a highly targeted audience.
The context in which you appear can also be controlled. When you first set up a campaign in AdWords “content network” is on by default. Using the example above, this contextual advertising may cause the ad to show in articles in the New York Times financial section or the NASDAQ site where once again curiosity seekers may be chewing up the ad dollars. In this or similar circumstances it is best to turn off the content network and limit ad impressions to specific searches for a well defined key phrases. The Google Keyword Tool can be indispensable in finding out just what that is. It can also help you discover just what keywords your competition is targeting.
Geographical Targeting
Google AdWords provides ways to use your ad dollars to target specific geographical regions or cities as well as a defined radius from one or more geographical hubs. Local business starts with adding your business to Google Maps at the Google Local Business Center. This is actually a different vehicle than then text ads. Your listing will show similar to organic search if you show for a type of business in a selected city and will be complemented by an appearance in sponsored links if you allocated ad dollars to your listing.
AdWords campaigns can be restricted to a specific country and region. You can also select a city within a region to exclude from your campaign. Once you establish the area you want searches that specify your selected area and product or searches for you product or service that originate within that region will trigger your ad.
Optionally, you can select a specific city, Sacramento for example, and specify a radius that establish the coverage of your ad. You can ad multiple points and use a radius for each. A business with locations in California’s central valley may want to use a radius from multiple points such as Sacramento, Stockton and Walnut Creek. Searches for your product or service for any city within this coverage or originating withing this coverage will trigger your ad.
Advertising in any media is a very demanding and often expensive task. In that respect it is no different with AdWords. It can often take a great deal of time, money and experimentation to find out what works for you business. The best way to cut down on all these expenses is to either higher an experienced professional or make the effort on you own to learn all you can to create the best campaign before putting your ads in play. The place to start is the Google AdWords Learning Center. The devil is in the details!
