Day 14
GOOGLE AD WEBINAR BY THE SBDC
Skip To The Key Takeaways & Action Items
We’ve already done a lot with the Mason SBDC locally in Fairfax, but the Virginia SBDC also provides a variety of free services for small businesses. One of those services is a series of free webinars presented by W3 Consulting.
These webinars tackle different aspects of small business marketing that many businesses struggle with, specifically related to social media.
If you have ever used social media to market your business, you probably notice how much they change. Things that worked a year ago aren’t even available today (especially on Facebook which seems to constantly be changing how things work). In fact, there were new things that the instructor didn’t know about (which was not a good look for the instructor).
Today’s webinar was about Google Ads.
As a small business owner, especially one that will be marketing not only my own business, but my marketing consultation clients businesses as well, I need to know everything that is happening and changing with Google.
There is a lot of wasted money spent doing Google ads, and a lot of people are throwing money at the wrong things. If you are running them for your own business, make sure you take the time to educate yourself on how they work at THIS current time (not how they worked 4 years ago).
Here are my key takeaways from the webinar:
Key Takeaway #1: You Can Use Advanced Search Operators In Ads
One of the keys to advertising on Google is to really drill down your ad keywords into a niche where you can cost effectively display your ads to a really specific target market. Using strings of keywords is a great way to do this. However, I had not been taking advantage of the advanced search operators.
These are:
+ Makes sure that word is included
- Makes sure that word is not included
”” Makes sure the entire quoted phrase is used
[] Makes sure the exact quotes are used
By using these operators, you can drill down farther and basically get some distance from the big advertisers and their big budgets to reach that niche.
Action Items:
Use advanced search operators to create an effective Google ad
Key Takeaway #2: Link Your Add To The Appropriate Page
After creating an ad, it is important that the ad links to the proper place. Many people just link it directly back to the main page of their website. Depending on what the goal of your ad is, perhaps that is what you want.
However, many of the ad goals would be to convert leads, or to create an action (buying a product or service) and just throwing your website up there is not going to convert as well as a specific landing page.
Action Items:
Create specific landing pages for each of my Google ads (and other social ads)
The webinar was helpful in keeping me up to date on Google (although as I said the instructor missed a few new things). Hopefully the tips involved will help me (or my clients) to better maximize their ad dollars on Google and stop wasting money with ads that are reaching the wrong people.