Advertising on the Search Engines...

These days, virtually all of the major search engines offer some sort of payment for promotion. They are sometimes a bit coy about how they present this, as they don't want people to think their search results are based on how much people pay them (and generally they don't). Therefore, they may refer to their ads as "sponsored links" or "paid announcements" rather than advertising but call them what you like — they are advertisements in every sense of the word.

Organic listing vs paid ads

adwords Research has shown there is a good deal of confusion amongst internet users as to the difference between an ad (or sponsored link) and what is known as an 'organic' listing. (An organic listing is a free listing from the search engine's database).

Google Adwords, is by far the most successful advertising medium on the net and in our opinion, the one that offers the best 'bang for your buck'.

Google, presents its organic (free) listings on the left hand side of the search results page and the Sponsored Links (Adwords) on the right hand side or sometimes along the top. They generally look like small classified ads (see diagram at right).

Google offers a highly complex and fascinating mixture of free and paid services. They charge for advertising but at the same time, still list the vast majority of pages for free. So, while they want you to pay for advertising, they still send out their spiders to index millions of pages for free.

This then begs the question:

So, why would you pay them money to advertise your site when your site will probably get listed for free anyway?

The answer is, simple: With search engines like Google, listing billions of webpages, it's getting harder and harder to get any sort of prominence in the free listings. Plus, organic listings are notoriously fickle. You can be top of the heap today and come up number one in a search engine's results page and be banished to oblivion tomorrow at number 5,001. And, if you're not in the first 10 or 20 results, you may as well not be there at all. So, paid adverting makes sense, if you want to ensure your continued success.

And, when you think about it, it's not such a silly idea. Most businesses spend a small fortune advertising in newspapaers and telephone directories etc., so why should it be so foreign to us to now pay for a similar service online?

Go where the action is

Advertising on search engines like Google, makes good sense and online advertising spend now exceeds newspaper advertising. This is not surprising, as smart marketers have simply followed their audiences online – because that's where the action is!

Google Adwords can really get results and you don't need to spend a fortune to find out whether it could work for you or not. You can set your budget to as little as a few dollars a day to start off with and then increase it, as you get results. Plus, it's very accountable. Your ads only appear when someone types your chosen keywords or phrases into a search engine. And you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad! Unlike print media, where you pay out thousands of dollars and then wonder if anyone even read your ad!

Getting started

It's relatively easy to start an account with Google Adwords online and start doing it yourself. However, I must warn you — it's a highly complex system and it's very easy to waste a lot of money learning how to use the system correctly.

We had one client recently who was spending over $2,000 a month on Google Adwords and thought they were getting a good result. We took over the management of their campaign and were able to save them around $1,400 a month and still improve their enquiry rate! We have another large client whom we saved $40,000 last year alone.

You need to extensively research the right keywords to bid on and you need to write effective copy for your ads – so they create genuine enquiries. You also might need to create landing pages on your website specifically for your online advertising campaigns. Then, you need to continually monitor your progress and constantly make adjustments to the bidding, the ads, the positioning, the timing, etc.

It's a very involved process plus it's changing constantly, so you need to keep continually abreast of these changes.

If you don't have this sort of time to invest in learning the system or you would rather spend your time developing your business, we offer a service that does all this for you at a very modest cost. There's no long term contracts and it's a totally open system.