What is Google AdWords?
AdWords, operated by the most well-known search engine, Google. It is a pay-per-click based online advertising system. By using it, one can specify the maximum amount one is willing to pay for a visitor who clicks on one of the ads and limit the spending on a per day basis. The price of a click is determined by competition among different advertisers.
Following the activation of a campaign Adwords becomes effective immediately, unlike some other search marketing tools.
- Why Adwords?
Firstly, you only pay if the user who searched for a pre-specified keyword clicks on your ad. In addition to search keywords you can control the countries your ads appear in. Even more importantly you have full control of the costs of your campaign; the pay-per-click costs can be changed and reset in a flexible manner.
How does it work?
Adwords advertises your product or service via a campaign; if a user of the Google search engine types in a keyword and if it is among the ones you specified, your ad will appear on the result pages. If the user now clicks on these ads he/she will end up at your website and learn more about the products/services offered by your company, as well as order them or simply get into contact with you.
What are the advantages?
When a consumer clicks on your ad it is already clear that he/she is looking for certain products or services. The click takes him/her directly to the information sought without taking his/her attention away from the original intention. This means that the visit will more likely to result in sales.
Comparison of pay-per-click advertising and organic results
Both pay-per-click advertising (e.g. Adwords) and organic listings are methods of search engine marketing (optimisation):
Organic results are search results generated by the inner logic of the search engine. This inner logic ensures that the results are relevant to the keyword(s) used by the searcher and are ranked in decreasing relevancy. It is a well-known fact in the Search Marketing industry that only the first 10-20 results are read through by most people. It is hence vital for a given website to be listed among these in order to be found by searchers.
Google became successful within a short period of time because the ranking of results due to its proprietary algorithms seemed better than that of the competition. There are ways, however, to influence this ranking for a site. The simplest factors are purely technical and have to do with the machine readability of the site by search engines. The more sophisticated factors have to do with content, formatting and link structure. One important point is often neglected, however: web sites are ultimately used by humans; search engines and search engine marketing will only make sure there are (hopefully lots of) people coming to our site. Therefore, over-optimised web sites can fire back and miss the point: achieving more sales.
Having a web site with good rankings in search engines is highly desirable. Making our site to the top, however, is a time-consuming and not entirely controllable procedure. This latter fact is due to the unknown nature of the above mentioned inner logic of search engines.
Pay-per-click advertising in search engines, e.g. Adwords at Google implies that regardless of the state of your web site you can launch an advertising campaign that will instantly start bringing potential customers to your site. Paid results appear right of (and sometimes above) organic results. When a searcher clicks on one of our ads a certain amount will be charged in between a minimum specified by Google and the maximum cost-per-click amount specified by us. The actual amount charged will depend on the competition; there is a bidding for the ad position. We can target our campaing in various ways, taking into consideration the location and language of the searchers, as well as the keywords entered, together with the mentioned cap on the cost per click. The quality and quantity of paid ads are not effected by those of the web site, i.e. by simply advertising we will not get better ranking in the organic results. Campaigns stop bringing visitors to our web site the moment we turn them off.
The defitionions above already highlight the differences between the two different marketing methods. The main differences are highlighted below:
| Organic listings | Paid advertisement | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first results | Takes a long time, on average 3-5 months from project start | Immediate start after setting up a campaign |
| Sustainability of results | Long term results. Search engines tend to change their ranking systems from time to time, but this does not effect good pages. | Works only while the campaign is active. |
| Advantages | Visitors only click on the first few organic results. Organic results are considered to be more unbiased thus resulting in increased click-though-rate and conversion. | A fine-tuned, professionally managed campaign can be very effective. Paid advertisement should be used where the keyword usage is unclear, i.e. for online market research, or if the competition is very tough for the organic results. |
| Costs | Requires a relatively large one-time investment of creating a content-rich optimised site. This, however, results in a sustainable improvement in organic ranking for a selected set of keywords and a steady flow of potential customers. After the initial investment it requires maintenance (content updates) to keep the site interesting for visitors and search engines. | Depends on the settings and the market price of keywords. Definitely more expensive on the long term than organic listings. |
| Measurability | Effectiveness (conversion) can be tracked with high precision | Effectiveness (conversion) can be tracked with high precision |
