Getting into Google’s ‘sponsored links’ box has enabled many business to grow massively since its inception but PPC isn’t just about search. In fact, search is just the very beginning. In this blog post, we’re going to take you through the main sub-categories of PPC, all of which you can benefit from with Net Natives’ PPC.
We’ll start with the easy one – Traditional Google Adwords Advertising. The classic. Sponsored search results based on keywords. The mainstream of online advertising and the largest source of highly targeted, keyword-based visitors who are ready to convert. Your ads will show not only on Google’s search results pages (across the top and down the right hand side), but on results pages of its partner search engines. These include, Ask.com, AOL search and many other popular search engines. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad and you get to see exactly which keywords, which ads and from which places your customers have come from. Of course it is more than bidding on key phrases, you need to take into account negative key words , use effective keyword insertion, track and measure your results and ROI. But when you get it right, it’s powerful. Very powerful.
It doesn’t end there – for many businesses the Google Display Network is even more important. Here, you can target thousands of websites by keyword or by demographic to gain trackable, good quality traffic at the same time as promoting your brand. Ads can be text-based or image (banner) based but we always recommend doing both so you can target the widest array of sites.
Many advertisers ignore the display network, opting for basic search marketing only. The display network is often under half the cost-per-click of advertising on search results pages and is therefore a massive source of high-quality, new visitors. The branding benefit is not to be missed. Nowhere else can you reach hundreds of thousands of people without paying a penny unless they visit your website to find out more. The Google Display Network is not only a superb source of new business but it reinforces your online marketing elsewhere.
With Gmail advertising, you can display text ads at the top of users’ GMail pages. These users can be keyword-targeted, based on the content of their emails, or demographically targeted by age, gender, interest and many other criteria.
This a great and hugely underused way to gain low-cost, high-quality traffic. In terms of overall engagement and conversion potential, this is a superb place to expand your reach.
YouTube advertising is the fastest growing area of online advertising. As online TV services evolve, YouTube is set to be even bigger. As with traditional Google Display Ads, you can targeted users by keyword or demographic, focusing on the best performing videos as the data emerges. YouTube advertising can be in-video (pop-up text ads at the bottom), in-stream (your own video ad that runs before or after the main clip) or banner-based (sitting next to the video). In addition, if you have your own video content you’d like to promote, this can be done on the YouTube search results pages.
The thing about YouTube is that it’s a superb source of engaged, qualified visitors who are ready to interact with your brand. The depth of content available combined with a relative lack of competition of ad-space (in comparison with search) makes it a very attractive advertising space, even more so for advertisers with their own video content to promote.
A recently launched and very effective feature is Re- Marketing. This allows you to target only users who have already visited your website or a specific page on it either using text or image ads. It’s is a superb way to target users who have already entered the buying cycle at the same time as reinforcing your brand to an audience that matters. The classic use of Re-Marketing is to target users who got to your form page or checkout but didn’t convert. However, there are loads of great uses including reinforcing an offer to existing customers to targeting users who visited a specific page.
If you, or your agency, are only using Traditional Google Advertising, you’re missing a massive proportion of your audience. Few agencies offer AdWord sub-catergories in the online marketing mix. We do – so contact us now to find out more.
