A brief introduction to Google Adwords
Here is a short article I wrote for the soon-to-be-launched website holidayhomeexpert.com. It is designed to be an easy to grasp introduction to the concepts behind advertising with Google Adwords, and act as a base from which to delve further into the world of online Pay Per Click marketing.
Introduction to online marketing
More ad more property owners are turning to the internet to advertise their properties, and rightly so. A well placed advert or optimised website can have a potentially global audience, and specific targeting strategies can help you get the clients you want - the well paying, trouble free ones! A growing trend is for holiday home owners to build their own website, so that they have complete creative control over the look and feel of their property profile. But with the added freedom over the design and the flexibility of displaying unlimited information about your holiday home comes the problem of promotion. Larger, more established sites such as holidaylettings.co.uk and myholidaylet.com are built in a way that makes your individual property easily ’searchable’ on the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo, their home pages receive far more hits than you will ever get with a personal property page.
So how do you and your little site jump above the bigger sites and get to the top of the search engines? In this first part of a larger guide on promoting your property online, we’ll be looking at how you can use Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising to pay to have your property listed at the top of search engines such as Google, what it can do for your business, and how to turn a small investment and a little time into more bookings.
Google Adwords
Google Adwords is probably the most popular and easiest to use Pay Per Click adverting system on the internet at this time, with hundreds of thousands of individuals, bloggers, charities and multinational corporations using the system to place their adverts in specific places on the world wide web. This targeted advertising is what makes Google’s system so attractive to both advertisers and webmasters - Google’s clever algorithms mean that an advert will be displayed only in places where there is relevant content around the advert. Even more clever than the algorithms is the phrase that describes the system by which Google charge for the adverts - Pay Per Click.
How adwords works
When an advertiser creates an advertisement to go through the adwords system, they essentially bid for certain search terms relevant to their company and pay Google each time somebody clicks their banner or text adverts (which I will explain a bit more later). Some search terms, or Keywords, are very cheap, costing no more than a few pennies per click and some can be extremely expensive - for a list of some of the most expensive keywords, follow this link. When somebody browsing the web for information clicks one of Google’s ads, the system charges the advertiser whatever they bid on the keyword, Google then takes a cut before passing on a slice of the revenue to the person whose site showed the advert in the 1st place. The system uses some very complex technology, but it generally works flawlessly.
Now let’s learn how you can use this technology to advertise your holiday home to a potentially global audience…
Creating an advert with adwords
Signing up to Google Adwords is an easy and straightforward process, an takes only minutes. Once you ave deposited your first funds into the system, you will be able to create your first advert. The key at this stage is to work out which ‘keywords’ you are targeting. A keyword is the cornerstone of Google’s system, and allows the matching of advertisements to relevant content. When you select a keyword to be assigned to your advert, you should take into account 1) the number of searches performed in that keyword and 2) the cost of the keyword. Marketing budgets can be very rapidly consumed if you do not focus on cheap keywords, so make sure you use the very useful Keyword tool built into adwords. The traffic estimator tool will allow you to enter a selection of words you think best describe your site, and phrases that you think the public will type in when trying to find a property like yours. For example, for a country house in the Cotswolds, you may wish to analyse the terms “country holiday house”, “cotswold holiday”, “holiday cottage in the cotwolds” etc etc… Google will then estimate the approximate cost of bidding on a keyword, and show a rough estimate of the potential number of clicks an advert based on that keyword could bring in. The ideal scenario is a high traffic estimation and a low CPC (cost per click). This is almost never the case however, which is where you have to get creative!
If you follow the example above, you will notice that the best performing phrase was “cotswold holiday”, which receives more search queries than the other two phrases. Try playing around with different combinations of keywords and phrases to see what works. Remember, the most obvious words are not always the best. Try focusing your adwords campaign around a specific event or festival in your property’s area, and imagine in what context your advert would be most effective.
Popularity: 15% [?]
