Internet Marketing

Pay-Per-Click Advertising for Small Businesses

Posted on by Andrew Lehrfeld

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising has been hugely successful for many businesses since it was first introduced years ago — someone searching for the product or service you offer types what they’re looking for into Google, one of Google’s partner websites, or another search engine altogether, and your ad can appear prominently on their screen.

Google Adwords

Google’s PPC advertising product is called Adwords. You pay Google nothing to have your Adwords ad appear; you only pay if someone clicks on it. If the product or service you offer is one that people tend to search for, and if your ad captures their interest and drives them to a relevant page on your website, there’s a good chance they’ll take your call-to-action and contact you.

But creating an Adwords advertising campaign is a science, and unless you do it for a living, you are likely to get poor results.

Among the problems you’ll encounter:

  • Not knowing the search terms your prospects are searching for;
  • Failing to distinguish between “qualified” clicks and “unqualified”;
  • Running Adwords ads that don’t attract clicks;
  • Having a website that doesn’t convert clicks into customers;
  • Overpaying for each click.

Adwords Express

To address these issues and make PPC advertising more attractive (especially to small businesses), Google rolled-out “Adwords Express” not long ago. Adwords Express is a slimmed-down, streamlined version of the original Adwords. It’s much easier to use, and therefore it’s got small business owners pausing to take a look. But that streamlined simplicity comes at a huge price, and for that reason I don’t recommend it.

There are many differences between Adwords and Adwords Express, the biggest being that Adwords is a manually-crafted advertising campaign, while Adwords Express is fully-automated, with most decisions being made by Google’s robots. Adwords allows you to make all of the choices and decisions yourself, whereas Adwords Express seeks to make decisions for you. That may sound like a great idea, except that you lose out on the ability to achieve maximum ROI for your advertising dollars.

We’ve brought down the cost of managing a Google Adwords campaign. If you have a product or service that people search for, take another look at Google Adwords. Call 203-548-0070 or fill-out the contact form online.

Andrew Lehrfeld

Andrew (Andy) Lehrfeld is a classically-trained direct-marketer whose first job after college was with the New York City advertising agency, David Deutsch Associates. Andy works with mid-size businesses and professional firms that want to improve their online presence, get found, look good, and get results from their Internet marketing. He lives by the mantra, "Above all else, help others". Andy is a proud business owner, friend, colleague, husband, father, and grand-father. He can be reached at (203) 548-0070 or via email at andrew@internetpresencellc.com.