My Secret Use of Adwords
Google Adwords is not best used for getting traffic to your site.
Read that again.
It’s true – I don’t believe in using Adwords simply for buying traffic. Long-term, I think that strategy often costs more. HOWEVER, I do believe Adwords is a great first step for search engine optimization. Buying traffic (or using a free credit) gives you the ability to research the effectiveness of a lot of elements of your SEO and online marketing efforts before launching into time-intensive campaigns.
#1 – Keywords
When people think of which keywords to pursue for their SEO purposes, they often just brainstorm a few that ‘sound good’ or are ones their competitors are ranking for or another similar ‘feels good’ strategy.
This is an incredible waste of your time and money spent on an SEO freelancer in pursuit of these.
Instead, I like to use an Adwords campaign to test my brainstormed/researched keywords to find out which CONVERT. Who cares if I rank well for “baby photos” if the people who are buying my product or signing up for my list are the ones searching for “newborn photographer prices” ?
Of course, to get this data, you need to have Google Analytics installed on your site and conversion goals set up.
#2 – Ad Copy
Google Adwords is a great arena for testing what ad copy converts.
Adwords allows you to set up multiple ads for the same keywords (you should never serve just one) and serves the most-clicked ad most often by default. Tell Google not to do this by setting the Ad Serving option to ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’ so you can see not just which ad got more initial clicks but which ad led to more sign-ups or purchases.
Test different benefits, wording, guarantees. Once you learn which ones perform best (you could try this tool to help you determine how many impressions you’ll need before you have a statistically significant outcome), apply these lessons in all of your sales copy.
#3 Geotargeting
Not sure if your marketing copy is suitable across state or country lines? Adwords can help you test these sensitivities by limiting campaigns to a specific location (Google walks you through how to do this in this article) and help you determine significant cultural differences that have implications for your marketing.
Or maybe you have a bilingual audience and aren’t sure if you should invest your time and resources into making all of your copy bilingual? Serving two ads in the same location but in different languages and observing the click-through-rates of each would give you an indicator of whether a bilingual focus is as necessary as or more necessary than you thought.
Haven’t started Google Adwords yet? Check out my beginner’s guide to setting up your first Google Adwords campaign.
What marketing lessons have you learned from Google Adwords? Did you find this post helpful? Let me know in the comments!
Image: Kittikun Atsawintarangkul / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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