Case Study What Is Google Adword Marketing Essay

The original idea was invented by Bill Gross from Idealab who, in turn borrowed the idea from Yellow Pages. Google wanted to buy the idea but a deal could not be reached.[citation needed] Not wanting to give up on this form of advertisement, the company launched its own solution, AdWords in 2000. AdWords followed a model that was significantly similar to Bill Gross’ creation which led to legal action between the two parties. Eventually the dispute was settled out of court.[citation needed]

At first AdWords advertisers would pay a monthly amount, and Google would then set up and manage their campaign. To accommodate small businesses and those who wanted to manage their own campaigns, Google soon introduced the AdWords self-service portal. Starting in 2005 Google provided a campaign management service called Jumpstart to assist advertisers in setting up their campaigns. However, this service is no longer available, so companies needing assistance must hire a third-party service provider.

In 2005, Google launched the Google Advertising Professional (GAP) Program to certify individuals and companies who completed AdWords training and passed an exam. Due to the complexity of AdWords and the amount of money at stake, some advertisers hire a consultant to manage their campaigns.

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In 2008, Google launched the Google Online Marketing Challenge (http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/), an in-class academic exercise for tertiary students. Over 8,000 students from 47 countries participated in the 2008 Challenge and over 10,000 students from 58 countries took part in 2009. The Challenge runs annually, roughly from January to June. Registration is at the instructor rather than student level.

In 2009, Google revised the AdWords interface, introduced Local Business Ads for Google Maps and Video Ads.

What is Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is the system Google has developed to assist you in marketing your products or services in the Google Search Engine, and its affiliate sites, via the use of a placed text ad that appears when people search for phrases related to your offering, this appears as a “sponsored link”. The system is a “pay per click” system, this means you can dictate where your ad appears through bidding for a series of phrases, but you only pay the amount you have bid for if someone clicks on your ad as a result of a web search, i.e. pay per click!

The ads take the format of a short text ad that includes a title line, two short descriptive lines and a URL link to a website or a specific website page.

The ad will appear on the page of results you decide you want to appear in. For instance page 1 of Google for a search result. The ads appear at the top and to the right of the organic search engine results. You can also pitch at what position on the page your ad will appear, through the amount you bid. Crudely this may mean the more you bid for a phrase, the higher your ad appears on page 1 of the Google Result.

Research shows us that 87% of web users do not scan past page 1 of search engine results. In addition, the higher your website appears on a page will result in more visitors to your website, as web users prefer to click on the ads/search results at the top of the page.

What is Google AdWords exactly?

Google AdWords helps you connect with potential customers looking for products and services like yours. You’ll pick keywords related to your products and services, and choose how much you’d like to spend on each click on your ad. Your text-based ads will appear in search results and on Google’s content network based on your bids for keywords.

The AdWords keyword tool can help you pick the right words and phrases for your business, and AdWords does not set a minimum spending requirement, so you can start slow and adjust your budget as your business grows.

Why use Google Adwords?

It is now apparent that there is a difference between the types of visitor to a website: “browsing traffic”, or, visitors that may have found a website in a search engines organic result, behave differently to traffic that comes directly from Google Adwords or “pay per click traffic”. The reason for this is simple: traffic via surfing in organic results is simply often browsing for information where as traffic via pay per click knows that when they are clicking on a ad, it is simply that, an ad and that the advertisement is for something they need and want to buy, whether that be a product or services. Therefore, you don’t necessarily need millions of visitors via browsing, rather than specific targeted visitors via Google Adwords.

AdWords Features

IP Address Exclusion

In addition to controlling ad placements through methods such as location and language targeting, ad targeting can be refined with Internet Protocol (IP) address exclusion. This feature enables advertisers to specify IP address ranges where they don’t want their ads to appear.

Up to 20 IP addresses, or ranges of addresses, can be excluded per campaign. All ads in the campaign are prevented from showing for users with the IP addresses specified.

Location-based exclusion is also offered as a method of narrowing targeted users.

Frequency Capping

Frequency capping limits the number of times ads appear to the same unique user on the Google Content Network. It doesn’t apply to the Search Network. If frequency capping is enabled for a campaign, a limit must be specified as to the number of impressions allowed per day, week, or month for an individual user. The cap can be configured to apply to each ad, ad group, or campaign.

AdWords distribution

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google’s partner networks. The “search network” includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches, but do not affect quality score.

The “Google Display Network” (formerly referred to as the “content network”) shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. These content network sites are those that use AdSense and DoubleClick, the other side of the Google advertising model. AdSense is used by website owners who wish to make money by displaying ads on their websites. Click through rates on the display network are typically much lower than those on the search network and are therefore ignored when calculating an advertiser’s quality score.

Google automatically determines the subject of pages and displays relevant ads based on the advertisers’ keyword lists. AdSense publishers may select channels to help direct Google’s ad placements on their pages, to increase performance of their ad units. There are many different types of ads that can run across Google’s network, including text ads, image ads (banner ads), mobile text ads, and in-page video ads.

Google AdWords’ main competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.

In 2010, Yahoo formed a partnership with Microsoft, giving Microsoft the control over powering the yahoo search marketing ads. Both accounts are now run through Microsoft AdCenter. When you see an ad on yahoo now, it is powered by Microsoft AdCenter and is run through the Microsoft software interface.

10 Secrets of Google Adwords

Let’s face it… Google Adwords is not the only source of traffic on the internet, nor is it free. However, if you cannot convert the traffic you get from the pay-per-click traffic on Google Adwords, your site surely won’t convert the casual visitor who may or may not be ready to buy what you are selling.

When spending money for pay-per-click (PPC) traffic, whether it is from Google Adwords, Overture, or a 2nd-tier PPC network, the key is to track your traffic to see if it converts into sales. There are many software products and online services that can track your traffic. For a recommendation, visit: http://www.superiormarketingpartners.com/adtracking.html

Many people that have tried Google Adwords have lost their shirt, so to speak. Some keywords on Google Adwords are cheap (keyword phrases start at a nickel per click). Some keyword phrases on Google Adwords can cost tens of dollars per click. If you end up paying high per-click prices on Google Adwords and don’t sell a high-ticket item on your site, even the most enviable sales conversion rate won’t turn a profit.

There are several tricks to advertising on Google Adwords that unless you know them, it becomes almost impossible to turn a profit on your advertising.

Secret 1 – Only bid on exact match keywords

Google Adwords has a few different ‘keyword matching options’ available. When a keyword is placed in brackets like this:

[Keyword], it is called an ‘exact match.’ This means that only when someone enters that EXACT keyword phrase will your ad appear. It might occur to you that by limiting your keyword(s) to only exact match, you are eliminating all those people that may be searching for the phrase “cheap widgets” or even “widget” singular, since only the keyword “widgets” plural is an exact match. Believe me, this is exactly what you want. Sure, it will take extra time to create an adgroup within the Google Adwords system for each keyword phrase you want to bid on, but you will know with 100% certainty which keyword(s) are converting into sales this way. If you do NOT use the exact match option in Google Adwords, then there is absolutely no way to know which keyword(s) are resulting in sales on your site.

Secret 2 – Bid to be in position 2 or 3

When someone searches on Google for your keyword, the first page of search results are going to reach the most people. What you want to do is position your ad in one of the top 3 spots. You don’t want position #1 necessarily, because that position costs the most and doesn’t give you much more benefit than being in position 2 or 3. You pay less for these spots than position 1 and gain most of the benefit.

By being in one of these top spots, your ad gets a higher ‘click-thru rate’ (CTR). This is good is because the Google Adwords system actually rewards you for having an ad with a high CTR by charging you less per click! Google Adwords exists to make money for Google. If they have two companies advertising for the same keyword, and your ad pulls a 10% CTR and your competitor’s ad for the same keyword pulls a 5% CTR, then Google Adwords makes more money from your ad. Google Adwords rewards you for this higher CTR by charging you less per click than your competitor!

Secret 3 – Negatively qualify your ads

Admittedly, the problem with having an ad that has a great CTR is that it gets a lot of clicks! Unless your traffic converts into sales, it’s hard to turn a profit on your Google Adwords ads. The key is to put words in the ad that DISCOURAGE people from clicking on the ad unless they ‘pre-qualified’ to convert to a sale. For example, if you have site that sells widgets that cost $10.00 each, then put something in one of the lines of text in your ad like ‘Widgets cost only $10.00.’ The only catch is that if your ad isn’t getting a very good CTR in the first place, then a negative qualifier is only going to reduce your CTR.

Your next step? There are many more techniques to learn that will increase the profitability of Google Adwords campaigns. The above tricks will start you off towards making Google Adwords work for you. Check back for Part 2 in this series.

Secret 4 – Make separate AdGroups for each keyword within Google Adwords

Google Adwords lets you create up to 25 campaigns per account, with up to 100 AdGroups per campaign as of this writing. It’s important to organize your keywords into separate AdGroups to maintain finer control over the ad text for each keyword. If you had one AdGroup for the following keywords: ‘widgets’, ‘plastic widgets’, and ‘wooden widgets’, then the ads created for that AdGroup would have to apply to all of the above keywords.

If your ad text reads: “50% off all plastic widgets” and this ad is showing for the other keyword phrases in the same AdGroup, then someone searching for ‘wooden widgets’ probably will not be inclined to click on your ad that is focused on people searching for ‘plastic widgets’.

The way to be sure each ad is focused on the exact keyword phrase being targeted is to have a separate AdGroup within your Google Adwords account for each keyword phrase, and ad text that exactly matches that phrase. For example, an AdGroup named ‘Plastic Widgets’ with the keywords ‘plastic widget’ and ‘plastic widgets’ can have an ad with text that reads “50% off all plastic widgets” and the people searching for ‘plastic widgets’ will see the ad most relevant to their search term. Create a separate AdGroup for ‘wooden widgets’, etc. Now you can create ads with text that matches the exact keyword phrase for which people are searching.

Secret 5 – Run tons of keywords in Google Adwords

Most people that have Google Adwords accounts find the top keyword phrases for their industry and run ads for only those keywords. This is a big mistake. The top keywords are the ones that have the most competition and also the lowest click-thru rates. Smart Google Adwords marketers know that the more specific a keyword phrase is the more people will click on the ad. People that search for a keyword like ‘widgets’ are more likely to skip over an ad targeting such a broadly targeted keyword. However, ‘large plastic widgets’ is much more of a refined search and there are far fewer advertisers with ads that target that phrase so you get the double benefit of having fewer ads in competition with yours and you can also run ad text that exactly matches that keyword phrase!

Doing keyword research and compiling a large list of keywords may be time consuming, but you will run rings around your competition if you are willing to do what they are not.

Secret 6 – Split-test your ads in Google Adwords

As mentioned in Part 1 of this series of articles on Google Adwords, it is critical to split-test your ads. Google Adwords has a built-in feature that lets you automatically rotate the appearance of your ads so different ads can be shown an equal number of times (or weighted more heavily toward the ad that gets more clicks if you prefer – you can change this in the campaign settings). The benefit of this approach is that you will be able to see which ad gets a better click-thru rate (CTR).

Since Google Adwords rewards a higher CTR with lower cost per click (CPC), it is crucial that you know which ad has a better CTR. Sometimes just swapping the ad text that appears on lines 2 and 3 will make a big difference in your ad performance.

Secret 7 – Improve your ads in Google Adwords

So what do you do if you find that after split-testing two different ads a clear winner emerges? Simple. Chuck the lower CTR ad, keep the winner, and create a new ad to split-test against the current reigning champion. By following this split-test strategy, you will constantly be improving your ads CTR and lowering your CPC.

How do you know when a clear winner has emerged? Is it enough to have two ads that both have received 10 clicks each? Or should you wait until you have 100 clicks each before making the determination that one ad is superior to the other? Statistically, a total of 100 clicks between the two ads will mean the answer is fairly certain, while 200 clicks between both ads is an almost definite certainty.

What’s stopping you from finding qualified, motivated buyers and getting them to your website when they are ready to buy? There is no better marketplace for this steady stream of valuable traffic than with Google Adwords. By employing the tips and strategies outlined in this series of articles, you will be armed to the teeth to convert those hard earned dollars spent on Google Adwords into profits for your online business!

Secret 8 – Track your ads by keyword in Google Adwords

After spending the time setting up separate AdGroups within Google Adwords for each keyword as mentioned above, the key is to know which keywords are costing you money and which ones are profitable. The only way to know that is to track how many people click on the ad and which of those clicks convert into sales (or actions you hope the prospect to take, such as registering for your email newsletter, etc.). There are several ways to do this, including Google Adwords own ad tracking system (which I do not recommend for several reasons that I won’t elaborate on in this brief article).

Ad tracking basically comes down to a choice between paying for a subscription to a service or buying software that installs on your own web hosting server. From hard-won experience, let me tell you to avoid the subscription services altogether. Relying on someone else’s service for your critical stats is a gamble you do not want to take.

There are several good software programs out there that will do the job, but I recommend the one you can find at: http://www.superiormarketingpartners.com/adtracking.html

Secret 9 – Put keywords in your ad text in Google Adwords

Did you know that the keywords that are part of the text of your ads in Google Adwords will appear in BOLD? If someone searches for “plastic widgets” and your ad text reads “50% off plastic widgets”, then the phrase ‘plastic widgets’ will appear in bold when your ad is displayed. This makes a huge difference in the click-thru rate of your ads!

If you don’t believe me, simply follow the tip mentioned above for split-testing your ads and create two ads, one with the keywords in the ad text and the other without. You will be surprised at how much better the Google Adwords ad with the keyword(s) in the ad text performs.

Secret 10 – Only run ads on the Google ‘Search Network’ in Google Adwords

When creating a new campaign in the Google Adwords system, the default campaign settings are configured to show your ads on both the ‘Content Network’ and the ‘Search Network’. Google has a pay-per-click affiliate program called Google Adsense. This program pays people for each click on Google Adwords ads that are displayed on their own web sites. The problem for you, the Google Adwords advertiser, is that you do NOT want your ads showing up on any old website that has relevant content to your ad. You only want your ad displayed to people actively searching for the keyword(s) that trigger the display of your ad. Why? Because these are the best prospects for whatever you are trying to sell!

The power of the Google Adwords system is that you can attract highly-targeted, motivated buyers to your site by displaying an ad relevant to what a person is searching for at the moment that person is looking for what you are selling. By allowing your ads to be displayed on Google’s ‘Content Network’, your ads are showing on all kinds of websites being casually surfed by people that may not be interested at all in what you are selling. This means you are paying for these Google Adsense clicks for less than qualified prospects.

The first thing you should do when creating a new Google Adwords campaign is uncheck the ‘Content Network’ box in the campaign settings and limit your ads to being displayed only on Google’s ‘Search Network’ to insure only highly qualified and motivated prospects click on your Google Adwords ads.

Make no mistake about it…finding qualified, motivated buyers and getting them to your website when they are ready to buy is what doing business online is all about. There is no better marketplace for this steady stream of valuable traffic than with Google Adwords. By employing the tips and strategies outlined in this series of articles, you will be armed to the teeth to convert those hard earned dollars spent on Google Adwords into profits for your online business!

Google AdSense

History

Oingo, Inc., a privately held company located in Los Angeles, was started in 1998 by Gilad Elbaz and Adam Weissman. Oingo developed a proprietary search algorithm that was based on word meanings and built upon an underlying lexicon called WordNet, which was developed over the previous 15 years by researchers at Princeton University, led by George Miller.

Oingo changed its name to Applied Semantics in 2001, which was later acquired by Google in April 2003 for US$102 million.

In 2009, Google AdSense announced that it would now be offering new features, including the ability to “enable multiple networks to display ads”.

What is Google AdSense?

Google AdSense is an advertising program that was launched in the middle of 2003 by Google, the popular search engine. Google acts as an intermediary between a vast number of advertisers and an equally impressive number of website owners.

Advertisers sign up with Google and create text ads that they would like to be displayed. Google displays these ads on the results pages of searches that people conduct from Google.com. The Google AdSense program allows these advertisements to show up on pages all over the internet. To see some of the ads themselves, take a look at the sidebar on this page. The webmaster simply places a special code in their page and Google AdSense takes care of the rest. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the system is that robots (specialized computer programs that scan internet pages) analyzes pages that ads will be placed on to determine which ads are most relevant to the page’s content.

The relevancy of ads placed by AdSense varies on all sorts of criteria, but most ads are usually very relevant to the page on which the ad is displayed. For example, the ads on this page should be related to the internet, advertising, and/or the Google AdSense program itself.

Advertisers pay Google a certain amount for each time one of their ads are clicked. Google keeps a portion of this payment and passes on the rest to the owner of the website itself. Page views of the advertisements are irrelevant in terms of generating revenue in the program – commissions are only generated when internet users actually click on the ads themselves.

Google AdSense checks are sent out on a monthly basis. Many webmasters wait in anticipation of their checks since AdSense provides them a simple way to recoup some of the losses associated with posting websites on the internet. In some cases, webmasters can even make a profit using Google AdSense.

Websites References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdWords

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense

http://www.virtualnet.co.uk

http://help.yahoo.com

http://www.buzzle.com

http://www.wisegeek.com

Book References:

Ultimate Guide To Google AdWords