Advertising With AdWords

Advertising used to be so expensive. If you wanted to get noticed, you needed to have quality adverts, whether on TV, radio or print. For this, you had to spend for the services of top-notch advertising agencies to conceptualize and produce your marketing campaign. The Internet has changed that, and marketing thru the ‘net has even evolved. Gone are the ugly banner advertisement-type campaigns of old (well, not really gone, but the concept of in-your-face advertising has subsided). Today, contextual advertising is the name ofthe game. And Google has become one of the prime players in the online advertising game, with its AdSense programme.

However, AdSense is the publisher side of the equation. We earlier talked about optimizing your websites for AdSense. However, if you’re the advertiser (instead of the publisher), then you would have to deal with Google AdWords.

Here we’ll start our short series on AdWords advertising. We’ll do away with the basics of signing up for and setting up your own account (we have smart readers, after all). Instead, we’ll give tips on how to maximize the effectivity and efficiency your AdWords ads.

Let’s focus on the following:

• Keywords
• The copy (headline, body)
• Costing

Effective use of keywords

The first thing you have to know about Google AdWords is that it’s essentially marketing via key words or phrases. After all, it’s contextual and targeted advertising. Therefore, you target your ad campaign to users who search for particular keywords. For instance, if you sell comic books online, you can target for the key phrase “comic books,” or the word “comics,” or even “Marvel” or “DC” (referring to the comic book publishers). In fact, you can target for as many keywords as you want.

However, competition can be tough. Hence, you might as well target for the keywords or phrases you know would bring you in the most number of prospective clients who are likely to make a purchase, without breaking your marketing budget.

We’ll talk more about choosing the right keywords in our next post.