Google AdWords is one of the most popular platforms to use for online advertising. Companies have the ability to pay for their ads to be displayed on the google search page. Companies typically use this platform and couple it with quality content and important keywords so they show up in both paid and organic search results.
1. With Google AdWords, you can strictly target the types of customers you want to appeal to. This allows companies to only pay for likely customers and not have to waste money advertising to others.
2. Your keywords play a huge part. By pairing keyword Warm Cookie Delivery with a paid ad that promotes Warm Cookie Delivery, your ad appears alongside Google search results and is promoted on other sites promoting Warm Cookie Delivery.
3. Set-up location targeting to only reach potential customers. For example, if you opened up a new restaurant in New York City and want to advertise, it makes more sense to only advertise to people in the area, rather than all over the world.
4. The three most important factors that determine the rank of your ad are quality of the ad and landing page, search context, and keyword bids (how much you’d be willing to pay for a click on your ad). These factors will also help your site climb the ranks of organic search.
5. Having a quality website pays off. Ensure your Google Ad takes the user to the correct landing page where they can find exactly what they are looking for. If the user has to click around the site, they are less likely to stick around and will go back to Google to find another option.
6. With cost-per-click, your only charged when someone clicks on the ad and visits your site. What makes Google AdWords so different is the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) aspect. Google decides how much the company pays for each click and cost to keep it there.
7. Make your site mobile friendly to climb the ranks of AdWords. Since Google adapted their algorithm, sites that are mobile friendly rank much higher than sites that are only optimized for web based searches.
8. Campaigns are collections of ad groups, which are collections of different keywords and their corresponding ads. Campaigns are great ways to organize and track how each ad group is doing, especially if you’re promoting different products or services.
9. Set up some goals. Goals in AdWords are called conversions and a conversion occurs when a visitor becomes a customer, clicks your ad, and makes a purchase or subscribes to your site.
10. Plan to spend around thirty-minutes to an hour logging in to your AdWords account and tracking what keywords and campaigns are most successful and how many conversions have been made. This will be discussed more thoroughly in The Ten Critical Things PR Students Must Know about Google Analytics.
In 2006, Google unveiled Google Analytics, a major game changer for anyone interested in what attracts, engages, and converts visitors into customers. It’s mainly used for measuring site traffic and is a great tool for customizing your site to what visitors want.
1. Whether you have a blog, personal site or business related site, Google Analytics is a very useful tool. You can learn how many people are visiting your site, where they live, what pages are most popular, how many visitors became customers, and whether or not you should optimize your site for mobile, along with many other useful measurements.
2. Once you configure your account, set up some goals. Goals are reached when the visitor makes purchase, submits contact information, or complete another important action on site.
3. Take a look at how visitors typically find your site, whether or not your content is effective and if it converts visitors into customers. This will be a great initial starting point for deciding what your next steps will be for optimizing your site. Google Analytics organizes this information by grouping it into four different channels: organic search, direct (user knows url), paid search, and social.
4. After looking at the different channels used, Google Analytics allows you to dive even deeper with The Referral Traffic Report. This report gives very specific information on how people get to your site, for example what sites people used to find your site, how many people from each site, how many of those visitors were new users, and the average amount of time they spent on your site. (moz)
5. Use the Social Media Performance Report to look at which platform drives the most traffic to your site and target your ad campaigns to those platforms. For example, if a high percentages of visitors found your site via Instagram, spend a little more time campaigning and optimizing your Instagram pages.
6. HubSpot recently conducted a survey and discovered there is a direct relationship between landing pages and conversion rates. Use the Landing Page Report to see which of your landing pages are more successful and why. This information helps you optimize the pages that aren’t attracting much traffic. (next scoop)
7. Check to see whether your visitors are mostly mobile or web based and what type of device their using, including the operating system, so you can make sure your site is properly optimized for their use. (zen media)
8. Use ‘Behavior Flow’ to see how users travel through your site. This data is super valuable because it’ll show what attracts traffic and holds interest, and why some pages might be more successful than others. (zen media)
9. The Exit Report is a great way to see where visitors are losing interest and leaving your page. Use this information and re-organize the page or create new and engaging content.
10. Based on all of the data you’ve received, decide whether or not you have it in your budget to tweak your goals and campaigns so you can be as successful as possible.
Good evening, and welcome to Boston University’s weekly PRSSA meeting. Tonight we’re going to talk about how the mastery of Google is key to our success as public relations people. We’re all extremely familiar with the typical practices and common myths of public relations, and I’m here to debunk these myths even more and discuss why google is a suitable solution for some of the issues our clients are currently experiencing.
If you asked someone in the past what they thought public relations entailed, they might have answered that PR people spin stories and create propaganda. You might’ve also heard that PR is just for releasing news, reporting from press conferences, and cleaning up media messes.
But today, PR is a much bigger job than anyone realizes. PR people are expected to work closely with the marketing and advertising teams and essentially become one big team that works on creating quality content and making sure it’s placed in the right place for the right people to see.
The key to making all of this easier? The use of Google, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics. PR people are starting to understand the importance of having a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. With the use of Google and all of the programs they have to offer, public relations, marketing, and advertising all sit under the same umbrella, with access to the same information, making everyone’s jobs easier.
The power of the google search is shifting the mix of push and pull communication and acknowledges that the audiences is in control. The best thing we can do as PR people is ensuring that when people go looking for something, we are the first result that comes up in organic search. Search is becoming more action based than ever before and users are searching to learn and find solutions to their problems.
If this sounds like a difficult problem to overcome, learning more about what Google AdWords and Google Analytics can do for you will put your minds at ease.
Google AdWords allows you to target a specific group of people that are potential customers, based on what they’ve searched for in the past and what keywords they’re using in their current search. The best way to make sure you’re getting the right people visiting your site is to select a few different keywords you find are most important and relevant to your site and set up campaigns for ads to come up above the organic search results when those keywords are entered into the Google search bar.
Today, it’s nearly impossible to go viral or be successful by focusing only on paid search or organic search. One of the best things a company can do is have a good mix of both. Effective companies will often supplement their quality content and keywords with paid search. That way they will show twice in a row, once on the paid search results and right underneath on the organic search results.
Something else great about Google AdWords? You only pay for the ad when it’s clicked on. This feature is what makes Google’s advertising platform different from the conventional world of advertising.
You might be thinking that this is all a great idea, but what if it doesn’t work? How we will we know what’s working and what isn’t? This is where Google Analytics comes in.
Google Analytics is an extremely useful platform that can be used alone or alongside Google AdWords. With Google Analytics you have the ability to measure how many people are visiting your site, how they found it, how much time they spent on it, what pages they viewed, and what made them leave the site or complete important actions like subscribing, entering contact information, or making a purchase.
There are many different types of reports that dive deeper into all of this information and give specifics. But most importantly, Google Analytics shows you the most popular search terms that were used to find your site. You can use this information, take the top ten most popular keywords and make sure they are appropriately located throughout your site.
At the end of the day, the use of Google, Google AdWords and Google Analytics will save you time and money while at the same time providing useful information that will help you become as successful as possible. As public relations people it’s extremely important that we recognize the power of search and learn how to use to it to best suit the needs of our clients.