Google Adwords
Google AdWords is paid advertising, as opposed to the natural or organic results that take up most of a search engine results page; they are the text boxes you see on the right hand side of the page, and sometimes at the top, under the banner ‘sponsored links’. Search engine ads are triggered by a keyword or keywords – all of the advertiser’s choosing – each time they are queried through the search engine interface.
AdWords can be a super efficient form of advertising, but it can also be wasteful and expensive if deployed with an old school mindframe. Traditional marketing carries with it the implicit mantra of ‘more is better’: it’s always been about getting the most number of people to see an ad, to see it in as many places as possible, and to see it as many times as possible. Mass marketing by definition is a numbers game that relies on a scatter gun approach - fire enough out there and you’re bound sooner or later to hit something of value. Not so in digital marketing...
LESS IS MORE
AdWords produces its best value for money results when used in the very opposite way: you want your ads to appear less often and to fewer people. The only people who should be seeing your ads are the ones for whom the ads hold the very highest relevance based on their keyword search query. Yes, it’s a smaller group that gets to see the ads, and the ads themselves appear less often, but when they do appear it’s for all the right reasons. The quality of the leads generated with a set of finely targeted campaigns is both higher, and less expensive, compared to a non-segmented approach.
The first stop for any good search engine marketing strategy needs to start, ironically, offline; it’s the task of carefully breaking your market into as many discrete segments and sub-segments as possible (we recommend a multi-hour exercise with your best marketing minds, some marker pens and lots of butcher’s paper). It’s not uncommon for a single business to have hundreds of micro segmented AdWords campaigns in operation, each one targeted at a sliver of its market. There’s more work setting this up in the beginning, but it gets better (and cheaper) results in the medium to long run.
Furthermore, If AdWords campaigns are methodically broken down in this way there’s greater measurability; it’s a simple process to quickly determine which campaigns, or which keywords within each campaign, are delivering the superior ROI level results; and conversely, which campaigns or keywords need to be fine-tuned or ditched.
TARGETING
Google AdWords also brings with it some novel targeting features: ads can be served into specific geographies around the world at a country, state or city level, or even at a variable radius from a particular geographic location; they can be served in different languages, on different days or at different times of any day; they can be served into third party websites or mobile phones; or served as a text ad, display ad or video ad.
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