The Green Geek: Online Advertising – When less is more.
Last month we began discussing online marketing for your nursery web site. This month, we take a look at the importance of targeting your online ads to people who will actually buy.
Google dominates online advertising. It controls the bulk of English-language web searches and uses this near monopoly to place ads according to some very smart algorithms, both on its popular search page and also on hundreds of thousands of web sites all around the world.
Google AdWords is its flagship product for running ads online. Setting up an AdWords account is relatively simple and all you need is a credit card and a little time. To start, open up your web browser and go to http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/ads/. Click on “Get started with AdWords” button and follow the instructions. Once you have your account set up, you will be able to start running ads, both on the Google search page, but also on thousands of web sites.
The first step in advertising with AdWords is to create an advertising “campaign.” You can set up more than one campaign in AdWords, each with its own set of rules and collections of different ads. When you finish setting up your first campaign, AdWords will also ask you to set up at least one ad group within the campaign and enter test for a single ad. Think of an ad group as a collection of related advertisements that are each displayed in turn. It’s actually very easy to set up your first as, as Ad Words puts everything you need on one screen. (See figure 1.)
Next you type in a list of search terms (called keywords) which you want associated with you ads. Put simply, when someone types any of these keywords into the Google, your ads will have a chance of being displayed.
Finally, you will be asked to make bid for your ad placement. The way AdWords places ads is to place the ads with the highest bids in the best places (like at the top of the Google search results page). If you bid is too low, your ad may never be displayed! Luckily, AdWords has a any tool to help you determine the amount of money, and even estimate your daily spend. To activate this, just click the “Estimate search traffic” button under the Keywords entry box.
Once you have set your bids, you simply save the ad group and wait for AdWords to approve your ad. This can take up to six hours. Once the ad is approved, your ad will start to display automatically.
When Less is More
Unfortunately, it is very easy to spend a lot of money advertising with Google and get very little in return. This is because it’s easy to forget that, unlike physical magazines, online ads are placed dynamically. With a print ad, you pay a fixed price and hope that every reader of the publication sees your ad and picks up the phone to call you for a sale. It’s a single step link between seeing the ad and taking action for a sale.
In the online world, potentially millions of people will see your ad… but rather than picking up the phone to call you directly, they will click on your ad (which costs you) and visit your web site. Whether or not a visit to your website turns into a sale is not part of the ad’s success: its actually part of your web site success. And here’s where online ad campaigns go astray…
Many people mistakenly believe that the more clicks your get on online ads, the better your marketing campaign is performing. Not true. The more clicks you get, the more money you spend and the more people you get to your web site. The question you should ask yourself is, are the people clicking on my ad likely to buy from me? If your ad attracts lots of people that have no real interest in your products, then you are wasting money. What you need to do is ensure that Google only displays you ads to a specific audience, and structure your ads to only attract serious buyers.
For example, if you were a rose grower you may place bid for the ad word “Rose” and run an ad on the Google search page that reads: “Stunning roses of all varieties. Every color. Best quality. Direct!” Sounds good right? No. This ad would likely generate a huge number of clicks each day as the ad, as it currently stands, would run internationally and also would attract lots of romantics seeking to buy bunches of flowers for their lovers.
A better approach would be to rework the ad to make it clear that you are grower of roses for gardens. For example, your ad could read: “Unique Garden Roses. Make your garden the envy of the street. Rare heritage blooms direct.” See the difference? The first ad focused on a generic market, while the second ad focused on how the product would benefit the buyer. Plus it had a nice emotional call to buy. This ad would not appeal to anyone looking up information on roses - it would only appeal to someone looking at buying roses for their garden at the time of the search.
In addition, it would be a good idea to find ways for Google to limit where and when your ad would be shown. A good start would be to use Google’s Campaign controls to limit the ads to only Australian viewers, and possibly even only viewers in your state. This would dramatically cut down the potential for clicks by people who would not be able to buy from you even if they wanted to. In addition, you could narrow the search term from the vastly popular single word “rose” to “potted roses” or “buy garden roses.”
In summary, when working with AdWords, it is a good idea to try and limit the number of people clicking on your ads to those would actually want to buy from you.