Advertising on Google – Quality vs Quantity

Many South African businesses still do not know of the opportunities that lay await in the world of online advertising. Advertising on Google can have a major impact on the amount of sales your business generates. However, the method at which your business is advertised in the online space is the critical factor in defining your online success. So how do you go about generating leads and sales in the online space? Who do you trust with your advertising budget? To answer these questions you first have to be able to identify the difference between the quality approach and quantity approach.

Quantity
A simple scan through some of the online advertising company websites in your area would reveal that many of them make use of the “more is better” rule. How this works is that the company will gaurentee a certain amount of visitors to your website for a certain amount of budget. This means that the advertising company has a promise to fulfill every month or face penalties. As you can imagine (although this escapes many companies), this would put the advertising company in a situation where they would have to find keywords with a lower cost per click and possibly (almost always) endanger the relevancy of the keywords and campaign.

Typically, you’ll know you’re dealing with a company like this if your Google AdWords campaigns have 100’s of keywords for just one of your products. Another way of identifying if your online advertising company is using this tactic is when your average click through ratio is extremely low, typically below 1.0%.  This is not ideal.

Quality
The quality approach requires a lot more finesse and research than simply throwing in thousands of keywords and hoping for amazing results. When a company takes this approach you know you are in good hands. When looking for quality visitors (visitors that are likely to convert into an enquiry or sale), the advertising company monitors a select few keywords that has been handpicked, identifies the keywords that are producing more conversions and further optimises them to ensure maximum return on investment. With monthly optimisation, more keywords may be added to the mix and in a typical situation, only the best 10 to 20 keywords per AdGroup is neccessary.

With advertising on Google, its not always about how many visitors you can get to your site as quick as possible. Advertising on Google should be about finding the quality, relevant customers that are more likely to convert into sales or leads. The conversion rate of your website is directly linked to the relevancy of the keywords used to bring in those customers.