While Google AdWords advertising is not for everyone, I don’t think anyone could turn down $75 of free advertising for their site! Google offers all new clients a $75 coupon to try out their services. There’s absolutely no commitment to carry on, no automatic billing should you forget to cancel, no deposit, just good old fashioned free money! Simply do a search in Google for “Google AdWords advertising $75 coupon”
But, it Costs too Much!
Free coupon aside, the main complaint of most people who try Google AdWords advertising is the cost. People will pay several dollars per click through for some high competition keywords. That’s like paying several dollars for one visitor! I have a technique to lower that cost. I woke up this morning, logged into my Google AdWords account and saw an average of $0.14 per click, much better.
Lowering Advertising Costs
The key to lowering the cost of click throughs is with Banner advertising. While this takes a little more time to setup, you can generally hit highly competitive keywords at around 5-15% of what it would cost you for text ads. This is still the same highly targeted traffic as you would get from those text ads. I want to address two concerns you may be having right now:
· You don’t have to have a fancy expensive graphic design studio to make banners – you can download a free graphics design tool called “gimp” that you can design your banners with
· You don’t have to be a graphic design artist – I designed all my banners myself and I have zero training in any artistic discipline, it’s simply about getting your message across. My click thorough rate is around 0.37% which may seem low, but considering the average banner click through rate of 0.2 – 0.3%, it’s actually pretty good! (Source: Wiki Click through Rate).
Optimizing Banner Campaigns
Here are some general tips that I have followed to get decent click through rates at a low cost per click with Google AdWords advertising.
· Keyword Research – focus on 2-3 main keywords that are 100% related to what you want to advertise. Copy those keywords into the Google AdWords Advertising Keyword Tool to get some more keyword ideas. Try and build up 200-300 highly targeted keywords, as specific as possible to what it is you are advertising. This doesn’t have to be done all at once, but try and start with 50-100. Read my article on using the Google Keyword Tool if you are new to this.
· Banner Design – it’s even more important to focus on your banner’s message than keyword focusing. You want visitors to click on your banner that are interested in exactly what you are advertising. For example, if I am advertising whey protein isolate, I want my banner to convey exactly that. Not whey protein, not protein, not nutritional supplements, I want people to click on my banner that are specifically looking for a whey protein isolate.
· Bidding on keywords – Google AdWords advertising works on keyword bids. You specify the dollar amount you are willing to pay for someone to click on your banner. I generally keep the same bid for each keyword, but you can manipulate each keyword bid individually for more targeted keywords. Start off low, around 15c. If you don’t get any traffic after 24 hours, increase to 20, then 25 etc. until you get the level of banner impressions you are comfortable with.
· Banner Population – Google AdWords advertising allows you to upload various sizes of banners – you want to upload at least one of each size! This is important. For your specific market, people might be focusing on a 728×90 size banner, maybe a 250×250? Who knows? You want to exploit the banner size that people may not be using, or not using as much. For me it was the 300×50 size banner.
Here are the Google AdWords advertising accepted banner sizes:
· 300 x 50 Mobile Leaderboard
· 468 x 60 Banner
· 728 x 90 Leaderboard
· 250 x 250 Square
· 200 x 200 Small square
· 336 x 280 Large rectangle
· 300 x 250 Inline rectangle
· 120 x 600 Skyscraper
· 160 x 600 Wide skyscraper
The main key here is focus, focus, focus! Google AdWords advertising can be very successful if you generate the right type of traffic – targeted traffic. If you are general with your keywords and banners, you will get exactly that – general visitors, not specifically interested in what you are advertising!
Offsetting the Cost
I generally offset at least 50% of my Google AdWords advertising costs with another Google product, Google AdSense. It’s basically the flip side of Google AdWords advertising, you get paid for people clicking on ads you put on your site. Also flipped is the way I show these ads, I only show text ads because I receive a lot more revenue from text ads than banners.
One word of caution, apply Google AdSense tastefully to your website. I have one ad in my side bar and one at the bottom of each article. Do not plaster them all over your website if you wish to use Google AdWords advertising – especially not on the landing page that people click through your banners to. Your banner ad will not get approved until Google deems your site suitable.
I also want to stress something else about approvals. It used to be that the folks at Google AdWords advertising would approve my ad in a matter of hours. Recently it has been 3-4 days, so be patient when submitting your ad and realize it may be several days before it goes live.