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You can cut the cost of your advertising by keeping in mind three basic principles.

Google AdWords is a popular way for many businesses and organizations to reach their customers and clients.  After all, why wouldn’t it be?  It’s a shortcut to get to the top of the search engine rankings, that extremely valuable area of real estate in Google searches.  Search Engine Optimization techniques will get you there without having to pay Google, but that sometimes takes time.  Google AdWords is immediate.

If you ask Google themselves, they talk about how easy it is to set up a campaign.  They say you can “Get started in minutes” and “Fine-tuning is easy”.  In a sense, they’re right.  It is very easy to set up a campaign, get it running, and make changes.

Then again, it’s also very easy to throw wads of cash on top of a burning fire.  And sometimes they have the same impact.

Starting a campaign is easy. But running an effective campaign is not.  It takes an understanding of how Google AdWords works, optimizing ads and your target website to work together, and constantly monitoring and adjusting your advertising campaigns.

How Google determines the cost of your AdWords is a bit of a mystery – they have their proprietary methods, and they aren’t telling anyone exactly how they work.  But they operate on some basic ideas, and knowing those ideas can help make a campaign more effective.

Google looks for a match between your website, your advertisement, your keywords, and the search terms that someone types into the Google search box.  The closer all these things match, the cheaper your ads will be.

That leads to the first principle: ensure your website, keywords, and ad content match as closely as possible.

And it also suggests the second principle: make sure you’re bidding on keywords that people are actually using.

But matching everything isn’t the only factor that goes into your AdWords costs.  AdWords is an auction.  The more people that are trying to rank for the same or similar keywords, the higher the cost will be.

So, that leads to the third principle: Find keywords that have limited competition.

With these three principles in mind, the hard work is just getting started.  There are hundreds of different options that Google offers through AdWords.  Knowing which ones are best for you takes experience and time.

Also, there is a whole art form behind writing ads that grab the attention of your target and encourage them to click through to your site.

Finally, running an effective AdWords campaign requires regular adjustments of all of your components.  To do that, you have to be able to understand and interpret the data you get back from AdWords.

AdWords can be a very effective way of targeting and reaching your audience.  Unfortunately, it is not a “set up and ignore” system unless you want to waste money.  By knowing how AdWords works, and following the three basic principles, you can build a very effective system.

Analytic-OR offers AdWords management services.  Contact us for more details.