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Maximize Your Return on Investment with Google AdWords

Most businesses want a cost-effective way to bring in more customers. The challenge is to find prospects who are thinking about your products at the exact time that you reach them. Read more now on ryancameron

With the advent of Google AdWords, it is now possible to target prospects at the very moment they are thinking about buying your products or services. If someone does a Google search on digital cameras, they only see ads for digital cameras. If someone does a search on organically grown coffee beans, they only see ads for organically grown coffee. Google AdWords enables you to implement precisely targeted advertising.

Read on to learn how to maximize your success with Google AdWords. With proper preparation and execution, starting Google AdWords can be like planting a money tree that will provide your business with a steady stream of revenue.

What is Google AdWords?

Open up a Web browser and go to the Google website. Type in the search term coffee and click search. Essentially, two types of search results come up: on the left and below are the organic search results that nobody has sponsored. On the right side of your browser window and sometimes above the organic results are the Sponsored Links. The Sponsored Links are paid advertisements. Sponsored links are always identified as such by the heading Sponsored Links.

As participants in this automated auction, each of these advertisers is bidding for the keyword coffee. They only pay if someone is interested enough to click on the advertisement; if nobody clicks on the ad, the cost is zero. The higher the advertiser bids on a keyword, the higher in the rankings the ad appears and the more likely web searchers will see it. Ranking means visibility, though you do not have to be at the top of the rankings or bid the highest amount for prospects to see your ad and click on it. Your goal is to get the lowest Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and the highest quality clicks (sales and leads) for your budget.

Find your Niche

Sometimes with popular keywords (e.g., coffee) there are many companies competing. On the other hand, popular keywords get millions of searches so there might be enough clicks to go around. The only way to find out if a particular keyword will work for you is to try it. The problem is that many other advertisers are bidding for the popular keywords so your CPC is likely to be high. You are more likely to get a low CPC with more obscure, highly targeted keywords. It will take some thought to come up with the right keywords.

Our coffee roaster would probably want to try the keyword coffee, and watch it like a hawk as it could result in many low quality clicks (not many conversions to leads or sales). If a keyword does not produce high quality clicks after a reasonable trial period (a couple weeks), then remove it; it may even be obvious sooner that a particular keyword is costing money but not producing results.

Perhaps our coffee roaster sells shade-grown coffee that protects Central American songbird habitat. While far less people are searching for shade grown coffee than just coffee, it is likely to yield a lower CPC and higher quality clicks.

Do some brainstorming and write down an initial list of keywords that matches your market niche. This process of finding targeted keywords will be a useful exercise to help you focus your campaigns and maximize your return on investment.