Signing up for Google AdWords is very straightforward. You simply start an account, and if you get stuck you can telephone a Google advisor to help you. You can tailor your advertising to suit specific customers, and you can change your advertising campaign throughout the year. You are able to measure the impact of your advertising, and you can make changes to improve it. Basic data will explain to you how many people saw your ad, and then went on to click your ad. You can make alterations to improve the rate of click through. You can set a daily budget limit when you sign up, and you can change it at any point.
- AdWords – simple steps – Let us do it. Sign up at www.google.com/adwords (or your local equivalent e.g. co.uk/AdWords)
Sign up for an AdWords account
2. Create your advert. Tell your customers what you have to offer. Choose your search terms (keywords) such as ‘budget+piano’. Set your daily budget – keeping it low at first. A popular keyword will scoop your investment quickly. Hence, explore cheaper, niche keywords. They do exist, and Let us face it, if nobody clicks on them, you pay nothing.
3. Your potential customers will see your advert when they search for similar terms e.g. ‘where can I buy a budget piano?’ Your advert will appear! Google does this automatically.
4. Customers click on your advert, and they go to your website. The cost of the click is deducted from your daily budget.
5. Whilst this might sound like the end of the journey, it is actually the beginning. There are a number of actions you can now take to improve your customer acquisition and retention. Let us look at some of these.
6. Once the potential customer has entered your website, you need to make sure that the page that they land on has all of the information and images that they will need to make a decision.
7. Now you have started your AdWords journey, you can change and improve the adverts themselves so that more clients click on the advert and come to your website. Therefore, you can also change your web pages to make sure that as many people buy your products as possible.Also make sure that there is a Call To Action (CTA) which means a button for them to click on, a telephone number for them to call, a shopping carts to begin the ecommerce process or some dynamic operation which will lead your customer to the final sale.
8. If people do not buy, you need to grab their data. Put simply, you have gone to a lot of time and effort to get potential clients to come to your website. If they decide to leave without buying, you have lost contact with them. Use a mailing list or some incentive, such as free information or a free trial or a sample, to get the person to sign up with your website. This means that you can market to them in the future and close the sale a different day. Do not just let them walk out of your store, not now.
9 AdWords has a learning curve. You will get better at it with practice, and it is highly likely that AdWords will become part of your daily marketing online. If not, invest a small amount at first and if it does not work for you, you can put it down to experience without losing too much cash.
