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For too many reasons to fully explore here, we love Google AdWords PPC advertising. Advertising through AdWords can help immediately put your business in front of thousands of potential customers searching online, in targeted locations. And with negative keywords and specific targeting, it can make help make sure you don’t spend your advertising budget on clicks that aren’t likely to convert into sales — imagine trying to make that claim with traditional advertising.
So, we can’t recommend the platform to our clients enough. However, there’s an entirely separate reason that AdWords can benefit your business and it’s not one that is often advertised. Running campaigns on Google AdWords lets you test various aspects of your marketing thousands and thousands of times over and (through reporting) leaves you with a wealth of data that can help you decide which approaches work best online across other channels as well.
Here are three areas that can benefit from insight that’s readily available in your Google AdWords reports:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Much of the keyword research that goes into a well-defined search engine optimization strategy overlaps with the design of an effective Google AdWords campaign. Although in-page SEO is critical to ensuring visibility, it often takes time for organic search results to generate data for reporting. Your AdWords campaign lets you test keywords and search terms immediately, and the quality score that is assigned to you by Google is a direct reflection of the relevance of the connection between your keywords, ad text and landing page copy. A simple and effective strategy is to find the keywords in your AdWords campaign that have the highest click-through-rates and incorporate these into site content more often, putting the best performing terms to work on organic results too.
Advertising Messaging
One of the basic best practices of AdWords is to run many ads simultaneously to see which generates the highest rate of clicks and thus performs best. By comparing performance of similar ads, you can quickly learn what works best in terms of copywriting for your company. Describing a product or service in one particular way often leads to measurably higher engagement, and by consistantly testing ad messaging and identifying what works, you can ensure your copywriting is as effective as possible across your website, blog, e-mail campaigns and even any traditional print media.
Devices
Much like Google Analytics can tell you what types of device (desktop, tablet or smartphone) were used to by incoming visitors, AdWords can tell you how these specific types of devices interact with your advertising campaigns, which can be used to improve your website design and help define your focus when designing and developing landing pages and campaigns on other platforms you want to reach specific types of users with.
Location Data
AdWords lets you perform geographic targeting like almost no other platform — right down to targeting specific postal codes and neighbourhoods. Analyzing data for geographically targeted campaigns can help determine what type of messaging works where. Your business can use this data to not only find the most profitable physical locations to focus your business efforts, but learn more about how potential customers in various areas interact with your marketing.
Although all businesses looking to reach customers online can benefit from Google AdWords advertising, the information outlined above is especially helpful for businesses which are new, or for existing businesses that are entering a new area in the marketplace. In addition to all of the other marketing activities which help define an overall strategy, data from your AdWords account can provide real-time insight, all while also helping drive more potential customers to your website as only AdWords can.
Want to learn more? Get in touch!