Are you getting the best bang for your advertising buck?

To grow your business and find new customers, you must advertise. Many businesses must also advertise to keep their existing customers, particularly when in highly competitive markets. Not all advertising is the same, however, so how can you be sure you are getting the best bang for your advertising buck?

To answer this question, you need to make sure the following applies to your advertising spend:

• You target your ads at the right audience
• Your ads reach the customer at the right time
• You have a way of accurately measuring the return on investment of each campaign
• There are steps you can take to optimise that return on investment

The above is not rocket science. After all, you don’t want to spend money advertising to people who have no interest in what you sell or who have already made a purchase. Also, you need to make sure the money you spend on advertising is delivering a return that is high enough to justify that investment.

The problem is there are not many advertising options available to you that deliver on the above list. If you advertise on TV or radio, for example, none of the four points above apply.

There are solutions, though, with the best being AdWords. With AdWords you can:

• Target a specific audience
• Target that audience when they are in a purchasing frame of mind
• Precisely measure return on investment
• Optimise future campaigns to get better returns

Are You Getting the Best Bang for Your AdWords Buck?

If you do run campaigns on AdWords, the next question to consider is are you getting the best possible results for the amount you spend? Could you spend less and get the same results? Could you spend the same amount while getting better results?

These things are important to think about as, on the surface, AdWords is an advertising tool that anyone can use. You simply need to set up an account and then work your way through the guided process to launch an ad.

If you have any experience with AdWords, you will know the reality of running AdWords campaigns is not as simple as described above. In fact, it is easy to completely waste money on AdWords, and many businesses have.

Optimising AdWords Campaigns

The only way to ensure you are getting the best possible results from your AdWords campaigns is to optimise them. This is an ongoing process of testing, refining, and tweaking every element of an AdWords campaign including:

• Keywords
• Negative keywords
• Bid amounts
• Bid strategies
• Geographic targeting
• Ad headline
• Ad text
• Ad display URL
• Landing page targeting
• Landing page design
• Landing page headlines
• Landing page content
• Landing page call-to-action

All these things and more can impact the performance of your AdWords campaign. The objectives you should have include:

• Reducing the cost-per-click to as low a rate as possible
• Ensuring clicks come from the right audience so you waste as little as possible on clicks that won’t convert
• Maximising conversions

Conclusion

To ensure you get the best bang for your advertising buck, you should start by considering AdWords as an advertising strategy. If you already use AdWords, you should take steps to ensure your campaigns are as optimised as possible. This will keep more money in your pocket while still generating new customers and sales for your business.