Online Advertisement-Understanding Google Adwords

  Online advertising, also called Internet advertising is a form or advertising which uses the Internet to deliver promotional marketing messages  which are displayed on websites through text, banners and pop-up windows messages and others. With advanced  techniques such as those implemented by Google Adwords, facebook ads, chitika, etc    advertisers can track whether  people  are clicking on their  ads or not. According to technopedia, online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique and useful applications. This had been the major concern of Adwords to its advertisers.  Let us examine some features that we need to understand before exposing our products/services to customers.

                                           

 Options available for AdWords

If you are thinking of getting started with AdWords, then it is good to understand that you will make a choice from the following Google advertising networks.

1.     Google Search Network

This involves displaying ads on Google search and its search sites that have a partnership with Google.  Other places that you ads can be seen are on Google maps and shopping which is less popular in Cameroon. The functioning of this option is very simple.  Consider you want to import used cars to Africa. There are people who are searching with the words ‘’ used cars for sale’’. If you closed a keyword in this category, it means your ad will show up on the top page when someone is searching for that keyword or any other related keywords. T

2.     Display Network

If you are in Cameroon, you should be seeing jumia.cm products showing up on all websites you visit. All the sites that you see these ads are member of the Google Display network (www.ransbiz.blogspot.com) inclusive.  When you choose the display network, you ads will appear on the all the partner sites, one partner site or some partner sites depending on the way you set up your campaign.

 Advertisers have to make their choice on the sites to display their products wisely. Will you promote for example phones on a website selling phones or a phone review website or a website selling cakes?  Advertisers can chose where their ads can appear, and to what type of audience .ads can be displayed in various forms such as text ads, image ads, rich media ads and video ads.

Note that you can choose Search and display network on a single campaign. But this requires you to understand how AdWords really function to choose this option. You pay just a single budget for your campaign.

My words.

If you are starting an Adwords campaign, it is important you create two different campaigns for the same product. One for search and the other for the display network adwords campaign.  By monitoring your account from the campaign tab, you will be able to see where you are getting more clicks. This will help you in knowing where you have more audience and their behavior in some cases. It will help advertisers to better manage their advertisement budget and  to target audience as well. Good luck.

What next? Can I get started?

NO.

After considering all the various ways to display your content/ads, the next thing to consider is how to target you audience.  

Make your choice of key words related to your product. This will help in getting your ads delivered to the right people either on a partner website or on search results.

The next thing to consider is the age of your audience. Consider you have building equipment to sell, will you expose them to people of age 17 -20? So make sure you choose the right age range so that you can get your content delivered to the right people.

With adwords, advertisers can set ads to show on a particular location or devices and to people who speak  a particular language. You can imagine what it will look like if you your ads are displayed in French  are being displayed to a Chinese audience.

AdWords has an option that also permits advertisers to specify time(which hours or days) and duration  of your Ads. Depending on your budget you can also set the frequency of you ads. That is how many times will you want your ads to be displayed per day?

In addition to targeting, you can monitor the success of your campaign. For example how many clicks are made in may be  100 impressions, how many clicks are made per day, how much the clicks cost among others. This will help you to manage your campaign(s) better.  You can get work done in real time at your convenience  offline with the AdWords Editor,

                                     What about ‘’ money matters’’?

According to adwords, there is no minimum budget to start, since you choose how much you will like to spend per month, per ad, per click or per impression. It is important to run a test campaign for a week or two to understand adwords  if  you are new to it. Just do the right thing and I assure you will  get quality results.  You have to be confident. It works with Adwords.

Other things to consider ,before making your  Adword campaign.

The following bidding options can help you decide how much you will use for your first AdWord campaign

Cost-per-click (CPC): Here advertisers pay every time a user clicks on their ads.

 This is very important if you intend to drive traffic to your website.

 Another bid strategy available for the display network is the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) bid . With this you pay when you ads are displayed 1000 times on partner sites. If you have a new product that you want people to be aware of then consider trying this method of bidding.

Lastly, you can also consider cost-per-acquisation (CPA) bidding. This is commonly referred to as conversions. Here you pay when people take an action, for example download software, buy a product or sign up for a service. The amount you pay here is not fixed compared to the CPM  and CPC

With all this, can I  save money ?

The answer is yes, you can.

The first way to save money with Adword is by designing quality ads. This will increase your ad quality score thus ranking you ads higher which in turn lowers your cost per click among others. When we talk of ad quality, the following are considered

How many people are clicking on your ads? (Click through rate)

How relevant are your ads to users?  This has to deal with the quality of the service or product you are advertising.

How relevant are your landing pages? Here we are talking about the design of your website in simple term. Is it updated, can customers easily find the product and do purchase with little or no stress?

 This is the reason why some people get a higher ad position despite a placing lower CPC bid for a given key word.

Just give Adword a try, there is much to discover .What is your opinion about Google Adwords?