Using Google to advertise your business
Using Google to advertise your business- written and compiled by Paul John Gioio
In the past, using the internet to advertise your business was a fairly straight forward affair; it was a cheap means of advertising. All you needed to do was to build a website displaying your services or products and chances were that when someone searched for a product or service in your line of business, the search results would easily bring up your company but times have changed. The internet has evolved and titans of the industry dominate and control the way we search for products and services. Google is one such company. Google has come a long way to making the internet more user friendly but at what cost to us today. Today if you want to advertise your business or service on the internet you will need to look at Google’s advertising program. Previously you could build a website and there would be no more need to take advertising a step further but today things are different.
Google has setup the web and the way we search it to suit their needs. Just take a look. If you search on Google for something today, you will find that more likely than anything else that only older web pages are displayed by default, users of the search engine will have to change setting before the latest results are displayed and this default setting by Google forcers a business owner such as yourself who wishes to use the internet for advertising to only consider Google Advertising.
Google advertising works on the basis of keywords searching which means that when someone searches for a keyword (potatoes), Google will deliver search results for potatoes but Google will also display ads for potatoes both at the top of search results and on the right hand side of search results. If you are a supplier of potatoes to an open market and you want to hold one of those adverting positions on the top or side of the search result, you will need to create a Google adwords account and start your advertising campaign. Once you create your account, you then create your ads but this is where things can get costly and complicated. Let’s just say you want to advertise when someone searches for the keyword potato and you want your ad to be the first on the list. In order to do this, you will need to bid against other advertisers for the keyword potato. This is where the auction begins and unless you are the highest bidder, chances are that your ad won’t appear and even if it did somehow end up being displayed, it would be somewhere at the bottom of the list.
Apart from search results, you can also have ads for content. A typical example would be a website like 24.com, which when you visit you will see ads on almost every page. This means that where there are websites about potatoes, and these websites display Google ads, your potato ad will be displayed. This system of ads for content also works on a keyword bidding system and to display your ads you will need to bid against other advertisers. If the bidding in the field of which you do business is a very competitive and valuable keyword, then Google advertising both content and search can be a very costly expense. It would be a good idea to do some research on the subject before jumping in to join the party.
I had a client once who asked me to setup Google advertising for him because he had seen all these other companies who were being displayed. We went ahead and setup his account, chose a daily budget of R25.00 and set his bidding price to default. This meant that he would be paying as much for a click on his own ads as the other companies would be paying who were already being displayed there. After 1 week the client had called me and told me that his ads weren’t being displayed anymore. After inspection we concluded that someone (not sure who but I think it was his competition) was clicking on his ads. This resulted in his daily budget being reached and once that happened; his ads were not displayed anymore. Since the discovery he had decided to cancel his adwords account.
Summary:
If you are considering using an online advertising system such as Google ads consider what your advertising needs are and whether or not it is what you really need to boost your online presence. It’s important to remember that your cost per click is determined by what is currently being paid for keywords in your line of business. There are other advertising portals online such as bizcommunity which specialize in local business advertising with an extensive market reach which could be cheaper than pay per click advertising. Also it’s the more traditional approaches that work much better than newer technologies. Advertising directly in newspapers is still a proven technique to reach a target market.
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About the Author:
http://www.beyond-design.co.za
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