I can’t think why advertising wouldn’t be advantageous; however, it would ultimately depend on your product or service as well as your target market. But the basics are that, if you want traffic to your website, then yes, it could be beneficial regardless of what you sell. Make sense thus far? Good! So now, what type of advertising would work? Again, if you want traffic to your website, pay per click, also known as PPC advertising, Google or Yahoo!/Bing would be ideal.
The skinny on PPC
For those who are less familiar where the actual paid ads show up, here is the skinny. When you do a search on one of the search engines, Google for example, you will see a results page that Google thinks would best match your search query. The paid ads, also marked as sponsored ads, will show up as the top three results with a little ‘Ad’ icon, along the right hand side of the search results and sometimes in the middle or bottom of the organic results. Remember, that organic results are ‘free’ listings and you don’t have to pay to be there but you need to optimize your website in order to earn your spot there. You need to have the right keywords, get links to your page, internal links on your page and etc to help you get higher up in the organic rankings. Check out our search engine optimization section for more on SEO and organic rankings.
Your advertising goals
Now you know where the ads show up and that it will most likely benefit your website as far as driving traffic to it, now what? You will need to determine the goal of the advertising. The goal may be to help gain brand awareness, to help sell a specific product, get people to know about a certain product or offer a service. Once you determine the goal of the advertising, you may begin crafting the ad campaign.
Creation of your campaign
You will need to do a little research to determine the type of keywords consumers’ imagine when thinking of your product or service. Then, you would create a keyword list, create the ads and set up the financial and geographical parts of the ad campaign. The point is to create a keyword list that is relevant to the products or service you are selling and craft the ad to that keyword list. This is important because when someone clicks on the ad, you will be charged and the idea isn’t to get consumers to click on an ad that is selling cake pops, if you only sell brownies. (yummy) Another point to make here is to utilize negative keywords, so if someone enters a phrase that you absolutely don’t want your ad to show up for, you won’t. A great example is if you sell trucks, but you don’t want to have your ad show up and be clicked on for toy trucks, so you could make toy a negative keyword.
Again with the why
Now that you understand how the advertising campaign is set up and where it shows up, let’s touch back on the why. You want to have a paid advertising campaign on search engines so when consumers are looking for a specific product and you are selling it, or offering it, you will show up higher in the rankings, usually within the top two pages in the search results. Could YOU benefit from more traffic to your website? That’s a silly question!
Could you benefit from more of the right traffic to your website? DUH! Get it with PPC Click To TweetKeep in mind
Reminder, when consumers are searching on the internet, they are actively looking for that product to research or buy. You want to be there every time they do. So the question remains, when consumers are looking for your product, do YOU want to be one of the options they have? If are you aren’t there, know, someone else will be, do you want to lose that sale?
If you aren't showing up in organic or paid search, know, your competitor is. So be there! Click To TweetShould you have any questions about PPC or would like to set up a campaign and still aren’t sure, please reach out and contact me and I would be happy to help. Otherwise, good luck on your campaign and happy clicking! Also note, it isn’t a set it and done type thing and needs to be continuously managed. I’d love to help manage your campaigns.
~Kristen
This is GREAT information on paid advertising! Thanks Kristin! Very valuable 😉
Great tips, it takes a lot of effort to be on top of Google and probably helps to add some paid advertising. I will check out your SEO tips. Thank you!
Thanks! It would look really good if consumers not only saw your paid ad but also your organic placement. Thanks!
Too often our business consumers are told that “with us there is a guarantee” of top of 1st page placement! That means lots of $$$ to do it! I could be wrong, but I can get good page placement with “organic” means of SEO! Then if you can invest in more, so a sponsored ad? THEN either way, you have to wait to get the results. It takes time to populate the internet world to get great placement! I will check out more of your articles! Good stuff here!
So true Cheryl, and you would know! I tell clients and prospects, I can not and will not guarantee anything… especially when I can’t control the results, and this is one of those things. By the way, usually much easier to get on the first page of paid, since less people are paying for the ads and geography has a lot to do with it, landing page and the specific keywords… but still, never guarantee #1, if so.. RUN! PPC is a good way to start if you have a decent website, or rather, landing page, because it can help push traffic, immediately, while you are building the ranking in SEO. Thanks!
Great tips on paid advertising and how is can affect rankings on search engines such as Google.
These are great tips to get to the top of the Google chart. When someone searches my niche, I want to be the one they see!
Thanks Heather. A way we can be in front of potential clients without having to first physically be in front of them. 😉
Great information to know when putting your business ‘out there’!
I would say to anyone that is considering PPC, that its worth working with a professional who does it and not do it alone – you could end up wasting money if you don’t set things up the right way.
Well, I couldn’t agree with you more. Short story – 2 of my clients I had to redo their PPC campaign. One I just started over, the other I did revise (but should have started over). They were paying for clicks that were no way going to turn to a lead. The ads need to be specific. You aren’t going to get anywhere by tricking a person by clicking on the ad and going to your website, thinking they will stay… they won’t, not if your website is nothing near what they wanted. You can’t make them change their mind. Thanks Liran, good point!
PPC advertising can should be beneficial to a company. If you have to hire someone make sure they are reputable because you can loose a lot of money.
Agreed, also if you don’t know what you are doing, then you could waste money on wasted clicks that wouldn’t give you a benefit.
Great tips, thanks! Before I can think about doing PPC ads, I need to get a lot clearer on my keywords.
Very good point Maria, you can’t set up the campaign without the keywords. You can use the keyword planner in Google and Google Adwords has “suggestions” as well, but be careful, they don’t know your business as well as you do. Let me know if you need any help. 😉
Great summary here Kristen in terms of breaking down some of the basics. I would venture to say that most people aren’t familiar with most of this…
Thanks Edmund. You are absolutely correct, not many understand it, let alone the GREAT benefit to their business. I see future blogs for me in my 2014 future! lol
I think advertising is essential to growing your business and increasing your brand exposure. The nice thing with online advertising is that the tracking measures are built in. Question, though: How do you set up “negative keywords”?
True, the tracking is there with Google Adwords, but you also have Google Analytics that can tell what traffic you get from organic, direct and paid… so that helps too.
Your question, I am not sure of your familiarity with setting up a campaign, but it is actually located in the keywords tab (in Google) and at the bottom of the list. (in Yahoo!/Bing, it is under the Settings). You can set up negative keywords for the whole campaign or specific ad groups. Also, like with keywords, you can make negative keywords [exact match], {phrase match} or broad match. You just have to be careful that you aren’t killing any opportunity. For example, if you are a Chevy dealer, one may think that you would want Ford as a negative keyword, but sometimes that isn’t the case, because what if someone wasn’t decided on the type of car they wanted, this gives you an opportunity to deal with the competition. So, you want to be sure the keywords are truly negative. Here is an example – I had an equipment dealer, they sold fork lifts and lift trucks (same thing)… and I’d do a query report to determine what keywords were bringing people to my ad – lifted trucks (you know, big tires, jacked up trucks) not what we wanted or the guys that go mudding and they wanted truck games. Well, we didn’t want those to make our ad show up and/or get clicked on just to find that wasn’t what they wanted – bounce. So, we made lifted and toy two negative keywords so any search that had those words in it, wouldn’t show up. I hope that helps???
I share to my clients to budget for ads and marketing! The small ones resist – great post!
Unfortunately some are resistant, but the question is… is it because they don’t understand it or they don’t want more traffic to their website? Of course you know that is a trick question… so it is us… we need to better educate so they will see it is a must!
great post! I’d been hesitant to do specific paid advertising because I have my hand in so many pies—– via my website I increase awareness of my Mary Kay business, I provide information for fellow direct sellers who are interested in Send Out Cards or WowWe, and I also provide social media services. I have one main list. I was wondering if I should drive paid traffic to a squeeze page specific to one aspect of my business rather than driving it to my main site.
Yea, Social media, websites, search engine and paid advertising along with all the apps and etc can be overwhelming… but if you have an optimized website, you’ve got social down and need some more traffic, it is a great tool. Well, it is great even before then, but if you are trying to pick and choose, PPC would be after you get SEO as it does help with your keyword quality scores. Nothing like driving people to a page that has very little on it.
So, more specifically to you… you indicated you increase your awareness about Mary K on your website, but how do people find you to find out about that awareness?? I did check out your site, and I found what you are referring to. I assume that you can’t mention Mary K due to copyright issues or regulations about how MK wants you to sell or market? So, if you were wanting to promote MK, you could use a squeeze page or just have them land on the skin care page, so they land where they can gain further information about MK. However, you may want to optimize that page more to coincide with the keywords that you use in the campaign to better your quality score for the keywords, which helps get your ad to show more.
Further, I rarely use a home page for a landing page on an ad, unless the client has a small site and there are few options. I would have them land specifically where they need to in accordance to the keywords. So, that might mean you need to have several campaigns (like one for social media, one for Send out Cards, one for MK, etc). Obviously you will need different ads, diff keywords and maybe different demographics.
Hope that helps. Let me know if I can be of any assistance.
I’ve never even considered PPC because of all the horror stories I’ve heard about it from people who were penalized. But they were probably from people who didn’t know what they were doing.
My first priority is SEO… so perhaps we should chat about that sometime.
Really Shelley? You never considered it? What horror stories and what penalties? Interesting. I would say the horror would be over paying in that people don’t administer their campaign correctly. But ultimately, it all comes down to knowing or not knowing what you are doing… pretty much the same for most things.
SEO is a good priority… albeit slow moving.. while PPC is immediate traffic drivers. So, yes, would love to chat. 😉
I’ve had some really great results from paid advertising, so I’ll keep doing it. But only for specific campaigns that have a well thought out strategy. Thanks for the great writing!
So very true Mona, you really need to have specific campaigns, which is true for most things, don’t you agree? Glad that you were able to have great results!
Thanks for the info. I haven’t run an ad and never would have thought of negative keywords but it makes sense.
Thanks Mike. Ads can be very beneficial and are instant results of driving traffic to your site. Tell me, why haven’t you considered it, I wonder??
Wow! What an insightful article….you nailed it. Great post man!