Are you using Google pay-per-click AdWords even when you’ve decided not to use paid search advertising to market your product or service? It sounds a bit crazy, but it makes a lot of sense to me!
There’s an old business principle: “The only way to be sure of something in the world of marketing is to test it first.” Make an assumption; test that assumption. Now, based on the results of that test, either stand by your guess or make a new one.
Let’s take an example from the real world. Let’s say you are a medical malpractice lawyer and you plan to get most of your business using television advertising. From the TV commercial, you will be directing them to your website for more information.
Those of you who have done television advertising before know that the costs can run into the thousands and even more. How do you know if the website you are referring your prospect to will convert for you or not? It doesn’t, at least not until you try it.
Wouldn’t it be better to modify your copy, layout, etc. so that conversions and sales are maximized BEFORE you spend all that money on commercials? Why, of course he would. But how?
Easy. Spend money on a Google AdWords campaign first so you can drive low-cost traffic to your site and test your marketing assumptions. Google AdWords is the best marketing medium I know of to get IMMEDIATE feedback for your business.
In the example above, the law firm could set up an entire Google AdWords campaign and drive traffic to their site in less than 10 minutes. How fast is that!
Here is another scenario. Let’s say you’ve decided that a Google AdWords campaign may not be an efficient way to make money from your product. Perhaps you’ve tried this before, but found that your cost per click was prohibitive and there simply wasn’t enough profit to justify the overhead costs associated with setting up and running your AdWords campaign.
So instead, you’ve decided to focus all your efforts on free search marketing. In other words, he wants his website to appear organic (or free) on the first page of Google when customers search for keywords related to his product or service. That’s all well and good, but the real question is, what keywords to optimize your website for?
In other words, what words or terms are you going to use on your site so that Google knows what your site is about and can rank your site ahead of your competitors. But the MAIN question is which keywords actually CONVERT. After all, wouldn’t it be foolhardy to spend money on SEO (search engine optimization) only to find out that those particular keywords aren’t going to bring “paying customers” to your site?
Well, a very quick way to find out which keywords are driving conversions is (surprise) to set up a Google AdWords pay-per-click campaign. Next, keep careful track of the keywords that drive visitors to your website and (more importantly) the keywords that drive sales. Now, instead of wasting perhaps months of precious time, you can know in just a few days how you need to optimize your site.
When you’re done with testing, you can close your campaign and start using the free search traffic to sell your products. But wouldn’t it be better to have the best of both worlds? Why not drive traffic to your site using free and paid advertising? In the example above, we assumed that the previous Google AdWords campaign was unprofitable because the bid for specific keywords was too high. Maybe it was too loud because you didn’t know what you were doing.
Many times we have found that the people in the top 3 advertising positions in Google AdWords are paying LESS (sometimes much less) than the people in the lower positions. There are many reasons why this is so, and there isn’t enough space here to go into the details, but unless you’re willing to invest a sufficient amount of time and money into the tools you need to play the Google AdWords game, then maybe. Maybe you need to consider a professional Google AdWords campaign management company that can play the game for you so you can spend all your energy making those sales when the traffic comes.