Winning Online

By Ralph Serra

When we hear Google there are so many things that come to mind. It seems like they are consistently doing something that will have an impact on the way we compute. One particular service that Google offers that I use on a daily basis and have fallen in love with is AdWords. Google AdWords allows you to affordably and efficiently advertise your product, service, or organization. In economically trying times everyone seems to be tightening their belt when it comes to marketing dollars. AdWords allows you to spend less but at the same time still reach a large number of people.

As a marketing professional there are two things that really excite me about AdWords. The first is the brand equity that Google has developed.  Brand equity basically refers to what gives the brand value to you. In the case of Google, what doesn’t give them value? You know when you see Google stamped on something you are most likely not going to be let down. AdWords is no different. It has that same quality that you associate with other Google services and apps. The second thing that excites me is ROI (return on investment), which is usually the most important figure at the end of the day. ROI breaks it down and tells you how much money you made off of the money you spend advertising; this is highlighted phenomenally with AdWords.

Analyzing and tracking the success of your advertising campaign with AdWords allows you to do so many things. You can view easy to read reports that display all the vital statistics any marketer could wish for. The two main things when assessing your campaign are the impressions that you achieved and the CTR (click through rate). The number of impressions refers to how many times your advertisement came up when a search was preformed. The CTR refers to the percentage of the time that your ad came up and it was actually clicked on.

Outside of the basic principals there is a whole world of additional options that AdWords offers, allowing you to customize your advertising campaign. One particular component that we use here at WSITS is “geo-targeting” our ads. This allows us to specifically target the geographic area that we wish to show our advertisements. When you are paying per click it makes perfect sense to be as specific with the placement as possible, so when the ads do appear they have the greatest impact. For example, one particular campaign that we have run targets 26 different areas within New Jersey alone. These locations were strategically selected after intense research and consideration based on the client’s need.

Within each separate campaign there exists a unique advertisement(s) that will appear based on the key words or phrases associated with the campaign. This translates to individuals in selected areas seeing ads that were tailor-made to strike their interest based on what it was they were searching – and where they live.

Doing daily reports on these ad campaigns also allows us to optimize our results. Keeping a keen eye on daily statistics helps us to recognize trends and ultimately make any improvements that will get our clients ads on the screens of potential consumers.  We can test and execute any changes instantly and chart the fruits of our labors at times within hours. Once these changes are made it will be easy to measure the effectiveness of our changes. At that time we can opt to make another change or run with what we have implemented.

Google AdWords offers so much more to users. Individuals, companies, and organizations that may not have been able to find a good way to advertise within their budget have now found an answer to their prayers.  As of August 2009 – year to date - 72% of all searches preformed on the internet were being done through Google. Google’s search technology is also used by AOL, Ask.com (3.23%), Earthlink, and NYtimes.com, opening up additional advertising channels to optimize your potential even more.  This is very impressive considering Yahoo - coming in 2^nd in search share - was only at 16.6% and Bing, in 3^rd place, had 6.67% of all searches happening on its revamped search engine.

The more our firm implements AdWords campaigns, the more institutional knowledge we ascertain. And there is always something new and exciting to discover, test, and analyze. The work we do with Google AdWords and SEO (search engine optimization) is like nothing you will ever learn in a classroom.  For Winning Strategies, years of industry experience and creative minds complemented with a quality service really create lighting in a bottle.