Nine reasons why you should consider Google Adword campaigns!

We often get emails asking about Google Adwords. Some emails are from people who have never used Google Adwords and are afraid to get started. Some are from people who have spent a lot of money on Google Adwords and never made a sale.

So here is the first in a series of posts about getting the best out of Google Adwords!

Google Adwords is the paid search engine advertisement program offered by Google. These advertisement listings appear above and to the side of the regular search results in Google.

Google Ad-words is a Pay-per-click program where you are charged only when a visitor clicks on your listing. You also get to decide the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click. Google charges a $5 activation fee but there are no monthly minimum charges. Google also gets to decide the minimum amount you will be charged for a click depending on your web page contents and the keyword phrase. Most times this is a few cents but it could also be $5 or $10 per click based on the quality of your landing page. We will discuss this in another post. This post is mainly meant to discuss the advantages!

The major advantages of Google Adwords are:

• Immediate activation. Google Ads go live almost immediately after it is created.

• Low startup cost: Google charges just $5.00 to activate your campaign. There are no minimum monthly fees and you are billed only after you get the clicks. Even the smallest business can afford to advertise on Google.

• Set Your Budget: You can set daily budgets for all your campaigns. Google will manage the advertisement placing automatically through out the day.

• Optimized Cost Per Click: Even though you have to specify the maximum amount you are willing to pay for a click, your actual price per click is just one cent more than your closest competitor.

• Relevant Ads = Better Ranking at No Extra Cost: The positions are determined by a combination of cost per click (CPC) and click through rates (CTR). Just because some one is willing to set a very high CPC, it will not ensure that their advertisement is shown at the top most position. If you make a relevant advertisement you can attain the top position without setting a very high CPC. If an ad is irrelevant to a web visitor, she won't click on it and if not many people are clicking on it, it will move down the page. Ads that are clicked more will rise to the top, at no extra cost to you.

• Large Content Partner Network: You can elect to have your advertisements shown on Google (as part of search results) or on a large number of partner sites (called content network).

• Powerful Tools: Google offers a number of useful of tools to forecast your budget and traffic, select target keywords, select campaign negative content network sites, diagnose advertisements and track conversions. The Google keyword tool suggests other phrases, popular synonyms, etc. based on actual searches. This results in better advertisement targeting and high click-throughs. We recommend using Keyword Strategy Studio for finding and managing the keywords. You can use the Adword campaign to fine tune your lists.

• Geographical Targeting: Your advertisements can be targeted to users in a specific country or only to speakers of a specific language. Supports 200+ countries and 14 languages.

• Easy Campaign Management: You can create multiple ads per campaign. Google will track individual ad performance and you can weed out the advertisements that are not performing well. You can also create multiple Ad Groups, set a maximum price for an individual keyword or a group of keywords, and so on.

So if Google Adwords are so great, why do some people miserably fail at it?

There are a number of possible reasons but the most important is not being able to meet the visitor's expectations after she or he clicked on the Google Adword link and landed at the web page. We will discuss this in another post.