In marketing there is no substitute for effective, targeted advertising. For example, if you want to sell beach towels, you need to go where there is a need and desire for those towels. You won’t find beach towel retailers lined up anywhere but along coastal communities and resorts. Likewise if you want to sell your beach towels online, you need to display your advertising where beach towel consumers can find it. And that is where Google AdWords comes in.
There are more than a few ways to find highly targeted advertising online. Continuing the example of beach towels, you can start your own beach towel website and perform enough SEO that you’re ranking highly in the search engines. This generates natural traffic from effective marketing, but can take time.
In your search for other customers, you can create banners and other advertisements for use on other websites. These banners might be used by affiliates marketing your products and bringing you their beach towel customers for a percentage of the final sale. You might also use the banners and advertisements on other beach product websites. You might find another website selling sand toys or swimsuits and buy some ad space for your beach towel website.
AdWords is Easier
But if you want to take an easy route to more customers while you wait for your other marketing strategies to take full effect, you can use Google AdWords. In AdWords, you will be buying a short advertisement on the right side of search result screen on Google. Your website ad will appear beside the natural search results that appear when a searcher types in “beach towels” or any other keyword you’ve targeted through your advertising campaign. You can select as many keywords as you like, and you only pay when a lead clicks through your ad to your website.
Playing the AdWords Number Game
The trick with AdWords, as with any pay-per-click advertising, is finding the perfect mesh between the amount of money you spend and the amount you make. You must bid on your ad position on the search results page. If “beach towels” is a popular keyword, you might be paying dollars per click through for a top position while “handmade beach towel” might only cost pennies for the top position. The difference is the amount of traffic your ad generates and how many people are bidding on that keyword.
You pay only pennies for the top position for the keywords “handmade beach towel,” but you may get only a handful of clicks. Those clicks are likely to be very interested leads as there are so few people in the market for handmade beach towels. Likewise there are relatively few handmade beach towel marketers, so this results in true niche advertising. This high level of interest from such a limited number means that it is likely you’ll make a sale from those few clicks. Since you spent only pennies, your profit margin will be extremely high.
On the other hand, if you pay big bucks to be first for the more vague “beach towels,” you will likely get lots of traffic to your site. But since “beach towels” is more generic than “handmade beach towels” you’ll also be seeing a lot of people click away without a purchase. Since you pay for each visitor to your site, you could actually lose money on that particular ad campaign if enough people click away without buying. But ad campaigns are a true number game. You might very well generate enough sales to more than cover your costs of generic keywords – only a test and analysis will show for sure.