The Four Benefits of Google Awords - Number Four Flexibility

Saturday, July 28th, 2007

Google constantly talk about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss flexibility.

Google Adwords is a very flexible marketing medium compared to other less dynamic formats such as print. Ad can be created and set to run very quickly, it is estimated that an ad will appear within 15 minutes of its inception.

Following on from the fact ads can be created quickly, there is an unlimited amount of editing, starting and stopping of ads from the campaign management interface on a users account. Once the presses roll with a print ad, there is no changing it.

The last area of flexibility is to do with the placement of an ad. Messages can be run in multiple languages or in a single one, worldwide, in a country, in a state. Adwords is even flexible enough to create ad which only run on computers within a radius of a point of latitude and longitude.

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Google Offer Free Campaign Optimisation Advice

Saturday, July 28th, 2007

I’m going to get thrown out of the Guild of Campaign Managers for this post, but here we go anyway.

If you ask the nice people at Adwords central they will review your campaign and make suggestions on how to improve your ROI and ad performance.

What is more they will do it for free, simply fill out an online form and optimisation tips will be returned within 10 working days. It is then up to the campaign manager to implemenet the changes or not. Check out the inside Adwords blog for more details.

There is a small catch, this service is only available to Adwords users in US, Canada and the UK.

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The Four Benefits of Google Adwords - Number Three Timing

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Google constantly talk about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss timing.

The timing benefit of Adwords is that ads are displayed when people are actively searhcing or browing for content related to the ads.

As an example if someone is searching for blue widgets and an ad is being run against those keywords, the message will be displayed to the potential customer at the right place at the right time. This greatly increases the chances of a sales conversion.

When compared to offline advertising such as newspapers, there is no way to engage an audience at the crucial time when they are making purchase decisions.

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The Four Benefits of Google Adwords - Number Two Cost

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Google constantly talks about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss cost.

The cost benefits of adwords are no minimum spend, the advertiser sets a daily budget, the ad publisher sets the cost per click and the availability of free tracking and management tools. All of these areas are detailed below.

The fact there is no minimum spend is very useful to the small or medium sized company dipping their toe into web marketing and at the other exteme it is an excellent tool for large corporations to test out new keywords without having to invest large sums of money into the process. A company can decide to spend five pounds, three dollars of a few euros, find that Adwords is not for them and retreat back to their traditional advertising methods.

The ability to set a daily budget is very important for many advertisers. It allows them to control absolutely what they will spend over a given month. If a company sets their dailhy budget to be $50, the total cost for that month will be the number of days in the month mulitiplied by fifty. Nothing more and probably nothing less as Google will take your underspend for day x and add it to your daily budget for day y.

Using the cost per click model, and advertiser is able to set the value of their advertising. They will only pay the amount they specify. If they value a click at 50 pence then a click will cost no more than 50 pence. It is often the case that Google’s technology will reduce the cost of the click to 1 unit above the next competitors bid.

The final cost benefit Google provides are the additional (and in my opinion excellent) tools for tracking namely Analytics. Other companies would charge a premium for these types of services, Ebay jumps to mind for their extended subscription services, but Google gives them away free to improve the quality of the advertising experience.

In conclusion Adwords users have greate control over the cost of their campaigns, something usually not true with other forms of advertising.

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What is Click Through Rate?

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

Click through rate or CTR is a metric used within an Adwods campaign to show how effective an ad is. CTR is defined in the following manner

numbers of clicks / number of impressions as a percentage

For example if your ad has 44 clicks and has been displayed 2500 time on Google and it’s associated properties then your CTR is 0.02%

The higher the CTR rate, the better performing your ad is.

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Adwords Click Fraud - Part One Definition

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

This post has been moved.

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Book Review - The Google Story

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

The Google Story
Written by Davis A. Vise this updated version of his book details to startup and rise of Google. It shows the quirky nature of it’s founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and gave me some insight into why Google appears to run like a college campus.

Whilst this book does not provide any new insight into Adwords it provides a very intersting background into the company.

One of the best bits of the book is a sample entry exam paper for potential Google employees.

Link to Amazon to purchase The Google Story

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The Four Benefits of Google Adwords - Number One Reach

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

Google constantly talk about the four benefits of their Adwords programme as reach, cost, timing and flexibility, Over the course of four posts I would like to explain in detail what the four benefits are.

In this post I discuss reach.

When Google talks about reach it is talking about the huge numnber of internet users which are potentially exposed to Google or Google affiliated sites which display ads.

The most obvious place where ads are shown is on the right hand site of a search result under the sponsored links heading, but ads are also shown on other Google properties such as Froogle and the hugley popular Gmail web based email system which shows ads in contecxt to the messages you are reading.

The second area where ads are run is on the sites which use Google as their search provider. Companies such as AOL and NTL have contracted Google to supply search results and sponsored links on their main sites. These

The last area where ads are run is on third party content sites which have signed up for Google Adsense product. These sites are known as content publishers and include small scales bloggers (such as this site, see the ads at the top of the page) to large well know publications such as the New York Times. The Google system analyses the pages and displayed ad in context to the content of the web page. For example an article in the NYT about a new greener car may show ads on hybrid cars next to it.

It is estimated that 80% of the internet audience is exposed to Adwords ads in over 100 languages in countries around the world.

This is the huge reach that Adwords can bring to advertisers large or small.

In the next post I will discuss cost.

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CPM Explained

Tuesday, July 24th, 2007

CPM is an abreviation for cost per thousand impressions where M stands for the latin term for one thousand. The abreviation is a throw back to print advertising where the term meant cost per thousands of homes the publication would reach.

In a Google Adwords context it relates to site targeted advertising where you will pay a set amount for one thousand impressions of your ads on a site or type of site your select during ad creation, as opposed to pay per click advertising when an advertiser only pays when the ad is clicked upon.

CPM ads can be text ads, image ads or click to play video ads, and they are generally used when a company is trying to build brand awareness. An example of this could be a car company who has released a new model and they want to pay for repeated image ads to be displayed on a leading car review site which runs adsense advertising.

I hope that clears up any questions on what CPM or cost per impression is.

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Harnessing The Power of Multi-Language Adword Campaigns

Saturday, July 21st, 2007

I would like to discuss the benefits of a multi language adwords campaign.

For a recruiment agency supplying staff from Eastern European countries and in particular Polish staff to companies in the UK. Poland has recenly become a member of the European Union and as a result Poles are legally allowed to work in any of the member states without restriction. The benefit of employing Polish or other eastern european staff is that their cost of living and consequently their wage demands are usual less than their similarly skilled colleagues from Britain.

The agency is able to harness the reach of Google in multi languages by creating ads in polish for display on Google.pl wbich connects to their multi language website. From there they could register their curriculum vitae (resume) and hopefully be matched up to positions in the UK.

Using Google’s unique world wide reach companies in one country can very easily connect to other companies or in this case potential employees from a different country.

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