What is Google Adwords?

For official information on Google Adwords, visit the Adwords web site. I’ll explain it here in hopefully more user-friendly terms.

A Google Adwords campaign involves a monthly advertising budget, much as a television or radio ad campaign would.

Google adwords, in a nutshell, works like this: You create a series of very focused, strategic text-based ads (or we can create them for you). You can create two or 100 or 1,000, however many you want. You determine a monthly budget. Google will give your ad even exposure across the entire month, based on your budget. If your budget is $50 a month, you’ll get a whole lot less exposure than if your budget is $10,000 a month.

Google displays your ad when people search for the keywords that we associate with your ad. If a person sees your ad, and does not click on it, you pay nothing—this is called an “impression.” If someone does click on your ad, then you are charged, which is why it’s called “pay per click” advertising. The effectiveness of your ad is determined by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. So if you have 1,000 impressions and 5 clicks, you have a .5% “clickthrough” rate.

Be prepared for clickthrough rates to be very low. .5%, in fact, is not unusual at all. This is because the very nature of searching means that you will have an extremely high number of impressions, so no matter how many clicks you do get, you’re going to have way more impressions. The good news is, you don’t have to pay a cent for those impressions.

If your budget is high, your ad will be displayed much more frequently than if you budget is low. So you’ll get a lot more impressions—and that results in more clicks.

So what are you charged? Some keywords are very expensive, others go for pennies. It depends on how popular your desired keyword is, and also how specific. For example, “dog” might be a keyword that goes for $4 or $5 per click, but “Pensacola dog adoption” is going to be something like 5 cents a click.

This is great news, because you’d be much more likely to get a click from someone searching for “Leadership consulting articles,” because your site (assuming you’re a shelter somewhere near Pensacola) matches those terms more closely anyway. It’s crucial that your site (or the page you direct the ad to from Google) be extremely relevant to the ad and the keywords you choose. Otherwise, clickers may feel deceived, and you’ll waste money.

Google does its best to evenly distribute your budget evenly over the month, but once it’s gone, it’s gone. Our strategies will ensure that your budget lasts as long as it possibly can! We will help you determine a budget that you can live with that will help you meet your web advertising goals and see results.

Remember, in addition to the monthly budget you have with Google Adwords, there could be an additional cost of having someone maintain and monitor your account (if you hire someone to do it). This involves tweaking ads, monitoring performance and adjusting as needed. In the case of advising a commercial client, I would say it’s crucial to hire someone to manage your account. But in the case of non profit animal rescue groups, that’s most likely not going to be in the budget, so avail yourself of Google tutorial videos to learn all about managing your account, and we’ll create some here on TheSocialAnimal.com as well.

There is one top-secret tool available to non-profit organizations…and I have just about decided that I’m going to tell you guys what it is. To my loyal readers…I will pass this one along. Okay, I have convinced myself…Stay tuned for a blog post this week about how YOU can have a Google Adwords campaign, even if you have NO budget for it. It’s true, but it’s not too good to be true…

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