Online advertising is a very cost effective way to market your business. By choosing cost-per-click campaigns you can test different programs without breaking the bank!
With CPC (cost-per-click) advertising, you:
- Only pay when someone visits your website
- Control the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click through.
- Control the total amount you are willing to pay daily for advertising.
If you’re a beginner at online marketing, start with a low budget and use Google Adwords (the largest cost-per-click network). Once you get familiar with Adwords, you can branch out to other networks such as Yahoo and MSN.
I’ve been using Google Adwords for almost 8 years as the main online marketing channel to promote BCjobs.ca. We now have over 145,000 registered users. Bottom line, it works!
With Adwords, you choose keywords or phrases to bid on. If your bid is high enough, your ad will show when someone searches for those keywords on Google. To start your ad campaign, you’ll need to decide what keywords you’d like to bid on.
Here are four simple ways to start:
- Think about how you would search for your company if you were in need of your product or service.
- Try searching different keyword variations and see if any of your competitors or similar business’s come up.
- Visit your competitors sites to find out what keywords they use on their website.
- Use the Google keyword tool to get suggestions.
To learn more about how you bid on these keywords with Google, you can watch the video below that I’ve embedded from their site.
Once you’ve developed your keyword list, you can start setting up your campaign on Google. To begin, login or create an Adwords account. Once logged in, here are the steps involved with creating a new ad campaign:
- Click on the Campaign tab.
- Select + New Campaign in the middle of the page on the left hand side.
- Select your settings for this campaign. settings include the campaign name, geographic region where your ads will show (country, state/province, country or region) and select your budget.
- Click Save and Continue
Your campaign is now active.
With the ad campaign created, it’s time to create ad groups. Ad groups are used to create ads for a set of keywords. If you have relatively few keywords, you might be fine with creating one ad group. If you’re managing a lot of keywords, it’s best to group them based on words they have in common. When you write your advertisements for each ad group, use the keywords in each ad. By doing this, you let Google know that the ad is relevant to the keyword. This gives your ad a higher quality score with Google which in turn means they will charge you less per click for that ad.
Here are the steps involved in creating a new ad group:
- Click the + New Ad Group button in the middle of the page on the left hand side.
- Name the ad group.
- Choose the default price you’ll pay for each click through and click Save.
- Write your ad in the space provided and click Save and Continue.
- Type or paste your keywords into the text box and click Save and Finish.
Voilà – you have created your first ad.
If you haven’t already found it, here is the link to Google Adwords to get you started.
