Google has leveraged their market share as the internet's top search engine to deliver their version of the pay per click advertising model dubbed Google Adwords.
Google and Yahoo-Overture control over 90% of the PPC market and as such you should seriously consider using them if you want the maximum possible exposure to targeted web traffic through PPC advertising.
Sign up for the Adwords program is free but they require a $5 USD deposit before they will start to display your ad copy. Google provides an excellent interface to work with. A pleasant modular design groups all of your work into nice "containers" for you to work with.
The system reporting is by no means real time but the delay on their results display is palatable when comparing them to the other large PPC provider, Yahoo-Overture.
A nice feature that sets Adwords apart from other PPC providers is that your ads display almost instantly after you place them in their system. They have built a lot of their editorial guidelines into the ad entry system.
Their system will flag your ad before you can enter it if it doesn't meet their terms of service. That is a lot better than waiting 2-5 business days to find out if your ad had a problem or not. Time is money.
Also provided with your Adwords account are a number of free tools to help you with your campaign management.
While several of these tools are great starting points I have found the need to augment what Google provides through my own online research, tools and software as well as e-book purchases.
The lesson learned, everybody that uses Google Adwords has access to the same tools that you do, including your competitors. It goes without saying that if you want to get an advantage here you will need other resources to supplement your knowledge other than what Google provides.
Typical Costs associated with Running an Adwords Campaign
There's two ways to approach this:
Are you going to manage your own campaigns?
or
Do you want to leverage someone elses's experience and invest money in a company that can manage your Adwords campaigns?
Let me suggest that you manage your own accounts at least in the beginning. Start small and start collecting reference materials while you learn how the system works.
Search for other products and resources that can help you but keep in mind some of them won't work out. Don't let that stop your research, there is material out there that can truly help you and save you a lot of money.
Investing in a $40 ebook is a lot cheaper than blowing $500 or more with Google while you are learning the ropes.
Having said that if you want to get a successful campaign started now you can enlist an SEO company to manage your Adwords campaigns.
The question is: How will you know who to trust?
You can burn several thousand dollars for overpriced, untargeted traffic if you let the wrong companies manage your campaigns. How can anyone honestly know what to look for in an Adwords Management company if you haven't even tried the system out for yourself? Food for thought. If you manage your own campaigns at first you will get a feel for the system.
Campaign Costs
Ok, let's talk about the typical costs you can expect running a Google Adwords campaign for yourself. The good news is Google Adwords gives you the potential to reach millions of surfers in a matter of minutes for pretty much as little money as you want to spend.
The bad news is after the novelty of having an Adwords account and setting up your first few campaigns wears off it can begin to feel like a job. There are a lot of monotonous tasks that have to be managed and it can be a tough thing mentally to do if you are left cope with Google's tools alone.
Before you spend money on campaigns and resources acquire mental discipline. Realize before you begin that it isn't going to be fun after a while. Google Adwords is a business tool,one of many, and as such it has it's advantages and flaws.
Ok, your minimum initial deposit is $5 to get started as we learned above. Start here, and I suggest resisting the urge to JUMP in and start spending like crazy...stay at or near this $5 level of investment for a while.
You're not going to see any returns on this investment financially but you will gain valuable knowledge of how best to use the Google Adwords System to generate income without learning the hard way.
You have a lot of learning to do before you want to start pouring money into your account. Google is in the business of making money and their system makes it "REALLY" easy to spend as much as you want.
Minimum bids start at a reasonable $0.05 USD. After developing your keyword list and dumping it into Google's system you have to start making financial decisions.
If you take Google's suggested bid prices for your keyword list you can pay a lot of money for your web traffic depending on how large your keyword list is and how much traffic these keywords generate.
Rest assured Google's system will provide you a lot of traffic quickly if you want to pay for it. It's not uncommon for Google's big management system to suggest max bids in the $20 - $30 range.
You don't have to accept these outrageous suggestions of course so your first big money saver is to lower the max bid to something you find acceptable and enter it for all of your keywords.
Please note Google's system will not charge you this full amount unless someone else is willing to pay that much for the keyword. Leave this number set higher if you want to produce a lot of clicks quickly.
Over time you will learn which keywords are making you money and which one's are simply too competitive for your budget. Google's campaign tracking abilities in conjunction with other 3rd party ad tracking software can help you identify these profitable keywords and track your website visitors.
To make proper decisions you will need to gather as much data as you can on how the Adwords system works. Obviously, you won't have this data until you run a campaign or two which is why I suggest running your own Adwords Campaigns for a while to get familiar with their system.
Study the stats provided by Google which are really quite good in conjunction with one or more 3rd party stats tracking packages.
You will start to notice trends in the numbers which will allow you to make more effective use of your time and money by bidding only on the keywords that are generating sales.
Analysis may also prompt you to tweak your site content if you notice a niche you want to start competing for (better yet start up another site or tier two web page on your site targeting that niche and remove these keywords from the original campaign moving them into a new campaign pointing to your new content).
Google allows you to bid on 3 types of keyword matching options which immediately gives you three times the keywords to bid on without any more brainstorming on your part.
Each matching option provides different results and should be managed on a keyword by keyword basis.
Google also provides two methods of displaying your ad on their network: content match listings and search network listings.
Effectively this allows you the potential to be noticed by:
1)anyone searching on Google's portal,
2) anyone searching portal sites that get their search results from Google,
3) anyone viewing a site displaying Google's ads that has content related to the keywords you bid on.
4) anyone reading an email with content related to your keyword at Google's free email service.
That's a lot of options and a lot of potential exposure.Tweaking to find the right combination for your particular situation and spending requirements is something you simply have to do on an ongoing basis. I think the benefits are obvious to you by now.
A final word on costs. You may have noticed that I didn't use a lot of numbers in my discussion of campaign costs with Google. What I think I have illistrated is a Google campaign truly can cost as little or as much as you want it to.
Advantages of the Google Adwords System
- Highly configurable system with an intuitive web-based interface.
- Reporting system is near realtime so you can tweak campaigns on the fly
- Since their system is web based you can access your account at any time.
- Good list of Free tools and guides (although third party tools may still be required)
- Rewards advertisers that pay attention to providing relevant content to their search clients not necessarily the highest bidder. Get a better CTR and your ads are cheaper.
- Geo-targeting capabilities. Target by City, Country or display your ads Globally.
- Multiple ad delivery systems. Content and Search listings, Partner Network listings, Email.
- Multiple keyword matching options including the ability to 'filter' keywords.
- Reasonable minimum startup cost of $5 with no monthly minimum spend requirements
- They have licensed their search results to several other large search engines improving your web site's exposure to people that don't use Google as their main search portal.
- Free ROI tracking tools.
- Minimum bid is a reasonable $0.05 USD.
Disadvantages of the Google Adwords System
- Learning curve can cost you a lot of money.
- Not the most expensive PPC search engine but certainly more expensive than all other PPCs except Yahoo-Overture
- Click fraud is an unavoidable risk.
- Content matching system does not always deliver the same ROI as their search listings. If both ad delivery systems are enable for a particular campaign the content match results can lower your overall campaign CTR and get keywords disabled.
- Support system is email template driven. It can take you a few tries to get the information you REALLY need from Google's support.
- Interface does not indicate what your competitors are bidding, only the maximum bid for any particular keyword, making the implementation of bidding strategies much more difficult.
