Google Advertising

If there is one thing Google is extremely good with it has to be marketing. Their brand is established so much in the minds of their consumers that the “Google it” is a common phrase used on a daily basis. This is because of various reasons of course, but the one that stands out more than most is the simple fact Google always remains at least one step ahead of its competitors. One of the factor that is evident is the Google advertising campaign with their AdWords and AdSense programs. But for now we will focus on AdWords and what it is.

The Google advertising program is this innovative company’s main source of revenue which made them a staggering $21 billion in 2008 alone. Now AdWords offers advertisers the opportunity to market their product or service by means of pay-per-click (PPC) and site-targeted advertising with both text and banner ads. Say for instance that you have a website for the product or service you are selling you will be able to run your very own PPC campaign where you will be able to reach your specific target market by means of the carefully chosen keyword phrases you have chosen. These ads can then be distributed to your local audience, or national and international, whichever you prefer.

Now at iLead Online we run our clients’ PPC campaigns for them by doing the proper research as to which keywords they need to focus on. Once the keywords have been decided we will create the short text advertisement which consists of a title line and two content text lines. Images can be added if you prefer but they need to be of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes. As soon as the small advertisement has been created will it be loaded to this Google advertising initiative. You are probably wondering where exactly these ads will be made visible? Well, Google will advertise them on their advertising network as well as to people searching on Google. If you have ever done a Google search you will now that the results page will give you a result list that appears on the left-hand side of the page. When you look to the right side of the page you will observe advertisements listed under the title “Sponsored Links”. These are known as PPC ads which sometimes also appears above the main search results.

If you are a novice to Google advertising, running a PPC campaign is much easier said than done however. You really need to know what you are doing as you will be required to “bid” for these paid-for listings and it all depends on the other advertisers’ bids and the quality score of the ads. Google will be doing the quality scores which are calculated by the historical click-through rates, your account history as advertiser, the relevance of your ads text and keywords and other relevant factors that are also determined by Google. When Google has calculated these quality scores they will then use it to set the minimum amount for the bids for your chosen keywords which also takes into consideration the quality of your website’s landing page. Exactly how Google calculates all the various factors has always a remained a secret and through the years the parameters that are used have changed dynamically. The reason for Google’s secrecy is to ensure that people do not use tricks or try and cheat their way to the top and in the process undermines the credibility of the program, but in order to help the advertisers Google has released a list of guidelines to help us get the most of Google advertising.

We’ve mentioned before that Google also makes use of their advertising networks. This initiative of site-targeted advertising was first introduced to us by Google in 2003. We find this to be a great way to advertise our clients’ products and services on relevant sites within the content network. How this works is that the advertisers, which in our case would be us doing it on behalf of our clients, uses the AdWords control panel where we enter keywords, domain names, topics as well as demographic targeting preferences. Google then uses this information to place the ads on the various relevant sites. In the case of targeted domain names Google provides us with a list of related websites from which we then choose the ones we’d prefer to advertise our clients’ websites on plus bid on whether or not it should be cost per impression (CPI) or cost per click (CPC). While there is no minimum bid for CPC the minimum cost-per-thousand impressions bid for placement campaigns are 25 cents. An added bonus of this option of kind of Google advertising is that instead of the ad block being split into 1 to 4 ads it can be larger in size taking an entire ad block space, resulting in higher visibility and a greater chance of being clicked upon.

One of the main reasons why our clients to choose for us to run this type of Google advertising campaign for them is the simple fact that you can control the costs involved quite easily as you only pay when somebody clicks on the ad. At the end of the day we offer our clients a service that fits their budget while creating as much brand awareness and selling points for their product or service. If you have a product or service that you want to advertise online but are not quite sure which route to go, contact us. One of our representatives will talk you through the various options and benefits that we can offer you by means of Google advertising.

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