After recently sitting down with a client to talk about paid advertising, I thought it best to offer a quick guide on just how effective paid advertising can be, if done properly!

Google Ad Words (PPC)

Many people opt for Google Ad Words as a quick fire way to gain high (all be it paid) rankings on Google. This is a poor, old fashioned mindset when it comes to advertising. Don’t think in terms of rankings and positioning, think in terms of “visitors you’ve paid to visit your shop” – What will their experience be like?

With this mind set, you’re much more likely to get the most from your ad campaign, as in order to get your visitors to buy; you’ll want them to enjoy looking around.  And it all starts with keyword research….

Step 1: Keyword Research

Keywords are the phrases that your customers type in to find products, services and information on the internet.  Any good internet marketing company (getyouonline being no exception) can provide a list of profitable keywords for use with a paid advertising campaign. More importantly, these key phrases can be justified with data and reasoning, not just guess work!

Step 2; Advert Compatibility

Now you’ve got your keyword/s it’s time to create your advert. Again, the text should specifically appeal to people typing in your chosen keywords, encouraging them to click by incentivising them on price, offers, services or your reputation. It’s always great to interact through asking and answering a question.

 Step 3: Landing Page / Visitor Destination

Make sure you deliver on user experience. You’ve just paid some one to type in a keyword about a particular product or service, click on your highly relevant advert, make sure you send them to a relevant page of your website.  Time and time again, even large companies make the mistake of running hugely expensive advert campaigns on Google, only to send their visitors to a generic home page.

For example, if you owned an online pet store, and you’re advertising “cheap dog food”, the best pace to send this traffic is to a page, dedicated to nothing other than cheap dog food, not just an overview of your fantastic pet supplies company!

Though this stuff seems pretty obvious, dare I say easy, you’d be surprised on the number of companies out there blowing their hard earned advertising budgets on highly ineffective advertising campaigns.

For help with setting up a Google Ad Word campaign, or to rescue one that already exists, call our Customer Services team today on 0115 9722 050