Using Adwords to grow your business

Let's face it, if your business isn't on line yet, then it certainly needs to be! Trends, as predicted, are showing a year on year increase in the number of people who are choosing to do their shopping on line. Not only is it cheaper in terms of the deals you will receive, you don't need to leave the comfort of your home to shop for good.

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The problem for many business owners and internet entrepreneurs, is tackling the maze that is Adwords. If you get it wrong, then it will cost you dearly. Get it right, and you are certainly onto a winner.

Pay per click (PPC) advertising was first introduced by Yahoo.com back in the early 2000's. It was an idea that would revolutionise advertising and the way that we use the internet to search for the things that we want. Although Yahoo.com were the first 'smart cookies' to introduce PPC adevrtising, it was Google who really dominated the market by making their systems both highly effective and functional, but also relevant to what people were searching for. Relevance is the key to PPC advertising, and Google certainly got this bit right. The latest figures distributed reveal that over 80% of traffic searches are handled by Google. The remainder of traffic is spread about amongst the other search engine sites such as Yahoo, Ask and MSN. How the board members at Yahoo must now be kicking themselves not for not dominating their own idea!

Anyway, what makes all of this great for you as an on line advertiser, is that you can get literally thousands of 'relevant' visitors to your website within seconds. Of course, there are a number of pitfalls when using PPC advertising, but if you take the time to learn the system, then you can make an absolute fortune in the process.

Earlier on we mentioned the word 'relevance'. Relevance is not only crucial to your advertising campaigns, but it is also crucial to the overall success of your on line advertising. Here's why:

Keyword searches

Those people who search 'on line' for goods or information will type in a word or phrase into the search engine. Once they click 'search', then they will be provided with hundred's or thousands, and sometimes million's of pages of 'relevant' websites. These websites are provided in order of most relevance and Google will use it's unique PageRank system to achieve this. The websites that appear on the natural rankings of Google get all of the traffic for free! Therefore, there is a great incentive to get your website to appear on these free rankings. The only problem is, nobody, and we mean nobody, knows how PageRank works, with the obvious exception of Google themselves.

Taking into account all of the above information, it is vitally important that you choose your 'keywords and phrases' very carefully. In addition to the natural search rankings that Google creates, you will also notice that there are a number of 'sponsored results' on the right hand side of the search engine page. These are what are called 'paid for advertising', or PPC as we better know them.

PPC does exactly what it says on the tin. Every time a person clicks on your advert, you have to pay for it, regardless of whether they buy anything or not! Therefore, there's a lot more to on line advertising than simply getting traffic to your website. There's also the art of conversion to consider too! Back to our PPC then. In very basic terms, you will decide how much you are prepared to pay every time a person clicks through your advert. This will very much depend on how much your product or service is selling for. For example, a person who is selling a DVD for £10 is certainly not going to bid £10 per click as they will be out of business before the end of the day. They are far more likely to bid something like £0.10 per click.

Now here's the trick. In order to pay less for your adverts and each time a person clicks through on it, you MUST make your advert relevant. This can be achieved in a number of ways:

1. Choose a domain name that matches, or is similar to, the search term.

2. Make sure you include the search term in your advert - Google will make relevant domains and search terms bold so that they stand out.

3. Use 'capitalisation' in your adverts. Again, these will allow the advert to stand out from the rest.

The more your advert stands out from the rest, the more people will click through on it. Because Google is so hell bent on providing its users with relevant content, it will charge you less the more people who click thru on your advert (Click Thru Rate - CTR). If more people are clicking through your advert, then therefore it must mean your website is relevant to the search term! Bingo, everyone's a winner!