Google Adwords for small businesses - Part II

In the first part of this blog we introduced Google Adwords as a serious options for small businesses looking to increase their sales leads from the Internet. In this blog we'll be looking at three very important areas to work on before you start paying for advertising:

• Budgeting
• Keyword Research
• Updating your website to receive visitors

Budgeting - The first step for any campaign

Putting together an adwords campaign can be daunting if you've never done it before, and one of the biggest worries for new users is how to manage cost. Thankfully, Adwords has simple built-in tools which allow you to manage your budget as you see fit, and automatically switching off your adverts when you reach your limit.

Budgeting your adverts comes in a couple of forms:

Daily budget
This is very useful while you are fine-tuning your campaign. Essentially, this function allows you to set a limit on how much you spend per day - great if you're trying to keep your marketing budget in-line with the income being generated from the marketing, but it also means you can set an initial budget of say - £5 per day (which might buy you 15 visits to your site) and each evening you can analyse how your money is being spent, tweaking your campaign as necessary.

Campaign Budget
It's good to set yourself an upper limit on how much your entire campaign is going to cost - this gives you the confidence to jump in and see what happens!

Some of the bigger businesses on the web have open-ended Adwords budgets (e.g. Amazon, AT&T and eBay to name a few, spend over $6M every month), but for a lot of businesses, especially small ones, a marketing campaign is just that - a campaign to generate more business or promote a certain event (such as a new product range). How much you spend depends on how much your product or service retails for, and how ambitious you are about growing your business.

Keyword Research - Save money by doing your homework

There are some great tools out there for performing keyword research - the best one being Google's own Keyword Tool, which gives you all the information you need to get your adwords campaign effectively focused. (Google's Keywrod Tool is a subject on its own, so we won't cover it here - it's free to use though, so have a go!)

However, if you're smart enough, you shouldn't have to do that much research. Specifying keywords for your campaign is all about getting as many interested visitors to your website as possible, for the minimum spend.
Here's a quick example of good and bad practice. Let's say your online business sells t-shirts, and for Christmas you're releasing a new range of celebrity themed festive t-shirts.

Essentially, what you're looking for is people who are interested in this sort of thing, people who will buy your t-shirts. The lazy thing to do, would be to start an Adwords campaign running one advert with the following keywords specified:

"t-shirt", "celebrity", "christmas"

Now that would certainly promote your advert to the correct people, but because of the generic and popular keywords being used, to get on the first page of Google (page 2 is almost pointless) you would have to spend quite a large amount per click. Not only that, but a large percentage of visitors would not find for they were looking for, and therefore not be converted into sales.

It costs no more to set-up multiple adverts in Google Adverts, and this is always the best practice - well worth the extra effort. Good practice would be run a few adverts per celebrity, targeting your visitors more specifically. and also expanding your terms beyond one word, e.g.

"George Clooney t-shirt", "George Clooney christmas t-shirt"

...and then maybe add some more terms to catch people searching under alternative terms, e.g.

"George Clooney top", "George Clooney christmas top", "George Clooney festive top"

Hopefully you get the idea. The only people in these instances who are going to click on your adverts, are going to be people who have a genuine interest in buying the product you are selling.

Now, moving on....once you have the right people clicking on your Ads, you need to make sure you do everything you can to close the sale.

Website updates - make sure you're sending people to the right page

We'll keep this part brief.....it's vital that you have a "landing page" for visitors who have clicked on your Google Advert. It's amazing how many adverts you see that just take people directly to the homepage of the website, but that is a classic mistake. Remember, a successful and cost-effective Adwords campaign is all about converting clicks into sales, and you won't achieve your conversion targets if you make life difficult for the customer.

Let's use our t-shirt business as an example.

You've gone to all the trouble of creating a set of adverts for each celebrity t-shirt - we have the luxury of knowing that our visitor is interested in buying something with Mr Clooney's face on it, rather than just any old t-shirt.

So taking that visitor to your homepage and asking them to search all over again is a surefire way of making them click on the "Back" button. They've already completed their search on Google, they really don't want to do it again. You need to be taking them directly to the page where they can buy a "George Clooney christmas t-shirt" (no harm in showing them related products on that page too) - this simple rule ensures that your conversion rates are high, right across your product range.

*The same goes for services - if you're an accountancy firm, create adverts for each individual service you offer and then direct visitors to a page dedicated that service.

In the final part of this blog, we'll look more closely at ways of further defining your audience to increase your conversion rate even more.