Google Pay Per Click - An Introduction
What is Google Pay Per Click?
Just in case you live in a wilderness, I'll begin by explaining what Google Pay Per Click is.
If you do a search on the Google Search engine then at the top or on the right hand side of the search results you will see some advertisements for products or services relevant to your query. For example, if someone is using google to do a search for 'life coaching', then they will likely find ads promoting sites advertising life coaching services or else advertising training services to help people become a life coach.
Businesses and individuals who want to advertise using this system set up an account with Google. They specify a maximum bid price they are prepared to pay and each time someone clicks on their advertisement they are charged a certain amount for the click (which may be less than that maximum bid but won't be more).
Advantages of Pay Per Click for Advertisers
The Google Pay Per Click system offers highly targeted marketing for individuals. Compare it for example with something like putting leaflets through people's doors and you will realise that it is much more focused. You are not just hoping that a random person is interested in your product. You can specify what search terms your advertisements may and may not appear for, so that only people who are searching for a product or service like yours will see your advertisement. This is a marketing dream!
You can also word your advertisement in such a way as to focus on specific groups of people or to clarify your product or service so that the people most interested in our service are more likely to click on your advertisement. For example, if your life coaching service is aimed primarily at women, you might list keywords to trigger your advert which are likely to be highly relevant queries, such as "life coaching for women" and other related phrases and you can word your ad so that it is clear your service is for women.
Pay per click can also be a useful way of getting your first customers/purchasers of your products, if you are not initially concerned with making profits but more with establishing a customer base or getting some people to test out your service and perhaps write testimonials for you after trying the service.
Disadvantages of Pay Per Click
Three of the disadvantages of pay per click are:
- It is easy to be bewitched by the magic of being able to attract clicks to your advertisement. However, if a lot of people click on your advertisement and none of them then buy your service or product, you can lose a lot of money.
- If you are in a competitive market then there will likely be a lot of other people trying to attract customers via pay per click, so it may be difficult to make it profitable.
- To make Pay Per Click profitable can be very time consuming - there are many different aspects to planning and organising a Pay Per Click campaign which it is worth mastering in order to use the service effectively and not have to bid too high to get worthwhile responses, but it takes time to find out about these, test them out and work out what is profitable and what is likely to be too expensive and perhaps lead to losses.
Google Pay Per Click - Initial Tips
Some sensible points to bear in mind when planning a Google Pay Per Click campaign are:
1. What can you afford to lose? Be wary of over investing until you see that a campaign is profitable. Otherwise you can lose a lot of money in short time if you are not careful.
2. Find out about the different keyword types - exact match, phrase match and broad match and decide which ones you want to use in your campaign.
3. Make sure that the text of your advertisement matches what customers find when they get to your website. Having a wonderful advertisement which people click on will not be helpful if once people have clicked on your advertisement they find something different from what the advertisement suggested- in that situation they will just leave your site and are unlikely to become paying customers.
4. Set up conversion codes on your website so that you can effectively monitor how effective your Google Ads campaign is, which parts of it you want to expand and which parts of it you want to drop or change.
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