When you decide to advertise your business online, it’s because you want to get more customers or clients to visit your website, contact you, or maybe call into your actual business premises, right?
Well, to begin with, you have two main choices regarding how you get these ‘leads’, and those are paid or free.
Of course, as most people do, you’ve probably gravitated to the free option first, right? But, hang on a second, because for starters, there’s no such thing as truly free visitors.
There are no free visitors
The term free visitors (visitors are also known as traffic) refers to visitors arriving to your website via the search results or social media. This traffic is ‘free’.
So when someone searches Google, the listed results are there because Google has put them there based on a whole host of ranking factors, too complex to go into here.
However, they aren’t free at all. You need to work hard on your website to crack a high ranking in the search results. And time is money.
It’s the same with social media. Yes, using it is free, but managing it successfully isn’t. It takes time, patience and consistency to get good results.
Note:You’ll also see the Sponsored Ads above the ‘natural’ search results, and you pay to put your ad in these spots. More on that in a moment.
It’s a huge mistake to avoid paid traffic
Paid traffic isn’t nearly as expensive as you might think when you do it right, and it brings results fast. It’s a huge mistake to avoid paid traffic, but many people do when they begin advertising their business online.
They think that the articles on their site and social media posts will bring them a wave of traffic, not realising it can take months to get the tiniest of results that way.
Use Google advertising for paid traffic on the other hand, and you can set up an ad campaign and have visitors arriving at your website, or ringing your business in a matter of hours.
And those visitors will be:
- Subject Targeted:Meaning you know they are looking for what you sell because they searched for it online.
- Geographically Targeted:They will all be relevant to your business location. Local customers anyone?
- Responding to you in the way YOU choose:Want your visitors to visit your website, email, telephone or call in? Your choice.
- Paid for only when they respond:Rather than paying as soon as someone sees your ad, you don’t actually pay until someone clicks your ad. So you only pay when you get the action you want.
So why isn’t everyone using it?
Well, the learning curve for Google advertising is pretty steep.
It has very deep software running it and it can be a little intimidating at first. Which is a shame, as it’s so effective at attracting exactly the kind of customers most businesses are looking for.
You also get a ton of data which holds the key to improving your results as you move forward. But unfortunately, this data can be hard to interpret at first and you also need to understand how to convert that data into actionable improvements.
Don’t worry, there is another way.
‘Done For You’ Google Advertising
Adzooma, offer their affordable and scalable Google advertising to SME’s who would rather have an expert take care of running their ads.
You get expert level, agency-style ad management, including professionally written ads, ad placement and your very own missing piece of the puzzle, your own high-converting webpage. It’s a page designed specifically to send your visitors to when they click on your ad.
This rectifies another huge mistake too. You shouldn’t send your visitors to your homepage, but to a specific page designed to work alongside your ads and boost their effectiveness.
This is serious stuff and sadly missing from most other offerings. Using things like this puts you years ahead of the curve and they take care of everything.
