If Adverts In Magazines Behaved Like Google Adwords Campaigns

I did a ten minute talk today to my buddies at Networx Wirral about how to run an adwords campaign and thought it might make for an interesting post.

To illustrate why a well optimised Google Adwords Campaign can be such an effective way to market your business I described an imaginary scenario where an advert in a printed magazine behaves the same way as a well optimised campaign. Here are 6 ways a printed advert would behave if is behaved like an Adwords Campaign.

  1. Almost everyone reading the magazine would be in the market place for your product or service. For instance, if you are a plumber in Liverpool, then everyone reading this magazine happens to need a plumber in Liverpool.
  2. Not only would the people in the magazine be in the market place but they are actually taking time out of their to actively look through the magazine for someone providing the services you offer.
  3. Instead of a fixed cost you would only pay each time some reads your advert in the magazine. If they skip past you advert you don’t pay anything.
  4. The price you pay when someone looks at your advert is always a very fair price. So if you are selling birthday cards you may pay pennies if you are selling laptop computers you may pay £5 per “reader”.
  5. Your advert is actually a little bit psychic. It has an idea of what people are looking for so instead of just “plumber Liverpool” it will know that they are thinking “cheap plumber Liverpool”, “gas safe plumber Liverpool”, “out of hours plumber Liverpool”…
  6. The advert isn’t just psychic, each time someone looks at it, it actually changes itself to match what the person is looking for. Always putting your best foot food e.g. emphasis on being gas safe. The advert can even make itself invisible so you aren’t paying for people looking for cheap or for vacancies

So that’s the 6 differences. All of the above combine to make a very powerful advertising platform that allows you to pay a fair price to advertise to people actively seeking your services, with the ability to describe your service in a way that matches what the person is looking for, in order to increase the chances of them signing up.

To explain how this is possible in a live campaign I have gone over the points again below:

1 & 2) Your Google ad only shows up when someone is on Google spending time searching for what you offer. Sticking with the plumber example people don’t normally spend time on Google typing in “Plumber Liverpool” if they aren’t looking for one.
3 & 4) The system works on a cost per click basis so you only pay when someone clicks on your advert and visits your website. The cost you pay is based on what your competitors are willing to pay multiplied by the performance of your campaign (this is a slightly simplified explanation). So if you can’t afford to pay £10 in marketing for someone to buy a £3 birthday card chances are your competitors can’t either.
5 & 6) Most searches are what is known as long tail searches where the searches specifies a bit more information on what they are looking for like “gas safe plumber Liverpool”. A well optimised campaign should have lots of landing pages so site visitors can be sent to the one that matches what they are looking for. In this example there would be more emphasis than usual on the fact that the plumber is gas safe e.g. it may be at the top of the page instead of at the bottom.

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