How Google Adwords PPC Advertising can Increase Your Online Sales

What is PPC (Pay Per Click) Google Adwords Advertising?

Adwords is a way for advertisers to place ads and be shown on the first page in Google’s search results page.

Where are the ads located in Google’s search results page?

The websites in the right column are PPC ads using Google Adwords, and at the top of the page there will often be yellow highlighted ads and these are preferred PPC ads by Google. These ads are preferred by Google because they relate more to the search term, their ad content and their website landing pages then any of the other PPC ads.

I’ve done a broad term search for Australian Art as an example to show you the layout in Google's search results page.

About Google’s Search Engine ‘Organic’ websites – the free listing area

The main area of the Google search results page is where the “Organic” websites are. These are free and are the most related websites to the terms/keywords that you search for. More often then not, these websites have a lot of information about the topic and that is one of the reasons why they are so high up in the Organic search area of Google. A lot of these websites will also have been optimized for the web using targeted keywords to run through out their content, images, meta tags, headings and other areas of the website. They will also have worked on link building to help increase their page rank – boost their position in Google.

As you can see on the top right hand corner on the above image, there are 60,200,000 searches for ‘Australian Art’ and to compete with them when you’re just starting out or have not been ranking well with your current website can be difficult. This is why PPC Adwords advertising is so great. You can be on the first page of Google! Most people only tend to look on the first sometimes second page of Google so this is really where you want to be to have good traffic flow through your website.

Should I just focus on Organic Advertising or PPC Advertising or Both?

It can take quite a lot of time and effort to rank well in the Organic section of Google. Depending on your website, search engines may only look at it every few months which means that the content and link building that you’re doing to improve your Organic ranking will not take effect immediately. And even when your pages are found and indexed they still may not show on the first page. I do highly recommend that link building and website optimization still be part of your website development but if you want to get things happening straight away or want to be on the front page of Google for your target market, then PPC advertising is the way to go.

How much does it cost to be number one in your market with Google Adwords?

The cost and position of your PPC advertising depends on your keywords, your ad and your landing page. The more optimized your ad and landing page, the cheaper it will be for your PPC ad. This is because Google will see the relevance of your ad and rank it higher then other ads because of its content, but if your landing page has nothing related to your ad or keywords, or is a small page with not much information on it, you will have to pay more for your PPC Adwords Campaign. Also if your landing page on your website is a general information page only and doesn’t relate to your ad then you’ll lose your visitors because it is not what they were searching for therefore loosing you money.

Testing your ads

You simply cannot create an ad, active it and then forget about it because you will loose your money. You need to keep track of what sales pitch is working, demographics, budget, what keywords are working - exact match - broad match and negative keywords. What we may expect to work often doesn’t so testing and keeping a track of your PPC Campaign is a must!

The benefits of PPC

With pay per click advertising, your ad is shown thousands – hundreds of thousands of times and after not too long seriously millions of times but you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and is taken to your website.

Google Adwords is great because instead of waiting for search engines to find new content that you may of added to your site, you can be listed straight away on the front page of Google.

If you’re a small business that sells hardware, obviously you don’t need to advertise to the world – with Google Adwords you can target your local community, that way you’re only paying when people within a certain radius of your location click on your ad.

If you would like to know more about PPC Advertising, require a quote or just have some questions then please feel free to contact me.