Google Adwords pay-per-click search results are shown above 'organic' search results

As most people who use a computer connected to the internet know, Google is where the world goes to find information on the internet, but Google also offer a relatively cheap way to promote your business.

Google Adwords is a form of PPC (pay per click) advertising – you only pay when users click through to your website, no matter how often your advert is displayed.

With Google AdWords, the idea is that you reach your customers at the precise moment they’re looking for your products or services. When users search on Google, they’re demonstrating which products they’re interested in. Potential customers will see your ad displayed above or next to relevant search results. In addition, your ads could appear on relevant search and content sites within the Google Network.

Google Adwords’ precise targeting and your ability to control how much you’re willing to pay per click can mean a higher return on investment (ROI) for your advertising budget.

A recent study found that search advertising is still the most cost-effective method of advertising (and it is a fraction of the cost of direct mail, email, online banners or yellow pages), mainly due the fact you can target your market so effectively.

However don’t think that Google Adwords is the answer to all your marketing prayers. It’s still very easy to get wrong unless done properly and this could end up costing your business. If your not careful, and on top of your campaigns and your campaign goals, your in danger of wasting your time and money.

The migglemedia team manage Google Adwords accounts for many clients from a variety of industries. Get in touch with us on 0845 094 8443 to see how we can help you improve your online marketing ROI.

Find out more:
> Pay per click advertising with migglemedia

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Recently we’ve seen various UK ‘Winter Wonderlands’ in the news. Families have paid handsomely, expecting magical snow kingdoms; only to be met with dank fields, skinny animals, jerry-rigged displays and disgruntled staff.

These businesses had gone a great job of driving an audience to their attractions, but had neglected to consider what their audience would want once they’d arrived.

There is a crucial lesson here that can be applied to all online businesses: Do not waste time and money increasing traffic to a website that is not ready.

Your metaphorical bucket may not have a hole in it, but if it does, then there’s no sense in pouring in more water. And, if there’s already water in it, then it’s worth trying to keep it there.

The migglemedia team start the process of building audience by appraising your site, analysing your stats and looking at the behaviour of your users. Checking for leaks, in other words. We make sure your website is water-tight before encouraging you to invest your marketing budget on audience building.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Once you’ve taken the decision to sell advertising space on your website to other businesses, there are some important issues to consider:

Brand
Can you sell to advertisers who will provide creative that can do justice to your brand? To safeguard your brand values, you will need to decide what you will allow an advertiser to feature on your network.

Selling
Who will be selling your inventory (advertising space)? What’s your revenue target going to be and what levels of CPMs and % sell-throughs do you need to reach to achieve this? How do your sales team derive prices for your various offerings? What are your costs of sales – and what is your profit margin going to be on your inventory?

Inventory
How will you predict future levels of page views and users? Where are the highest value areas for selling display advertising on your site and what is your strategy for dealing with the high value inventory versus the low value inventory? (The answers to these will also help shape where you might integrate Google text ads or banner inventory sold by third party adservers.) How will you deal with auditing ad delivery and charging clients?

Audience
To what extent (and how/when) will you segment your audience on the site to potentially target advertising?

Sales Programmes
What’s your sales programme going to be? (i.e. what do you sell, and where?) What creative formats will you host on your site? Video/Flash/JPG, IAB or non IAB formats?

Scheduling
Who will manage acquisition of creative from the client and schedule the creative on the OpenX server?

Reporting
What information from OpenX will you make available to clients – and will you allow them access to the system to get this information themselves? Who in your business will monitor both the success of house and client campaigns as well as review the effectiveness of the overall sales programme you settle on?

Contract
What contractual agreements will you enter into with your advertisers? How will you cover yourself against service outages and under deliveries? In your whole ad sales process what are the points of failure and what risks do these present to your business? How do you mitigate these?

Find out more:
> Online display advertising

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.

Art Review: display advertising served via Open X

Introducing OpenX – amongst other things…

For high traffic pages on my website, I would look at how I could sell these myself. In this respect OpenX is a great service for managing your own advertising inventory. A self contained, stand alone management system, it generates code to drop into your web pages to manage the display of advertising.

A solution such as OpenX gives you the power to manage campaigns you sell yourself, which means you can set your own rules as to what type of creative you’ll display and who you’ll sell to. You can also use OpenX to manage your own internal promotions and start to track how effective these are. The experience you get from this could be invaluable for when you decide you want to buy banner advertising on other sites.

migglemedia are now running an OpenX installation and can set up you up with full access to the system.

Finally, don’t just use any old size ad on your site. Use IAB Universal ad package sized formats that are easy to incorporate into site designs. If you make up your own sizes, and then you want to sell your ad space to clients, they’ll have to create special versions just for your site. Which doesn’t make sense. You can find out more about the IAB ad standards here.

If you’d like to talk more about how to best monetise your sites, or to find out more about our experiences with OpenX, feel free to get in touch with me at migglemedia.

Based in the UK’s silicon city – Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.