So, where do you begin? Let me break this down in a few areas.
Geography – Google gives you complete control on where to advertise. If you’re just targeting your town, you can target your town, or if you’re a company selling goods everywhere, you can advertising globally.
The most important part are keywords to target. I’ll break this down into two categories, Brand and Non-Brand keywords.
Brand Keywords
Brand keywords means showing your ad when users are searching for your company. You may ask what’s the value in this? The value is to ensure you capture all of the demand out there, because in some cases, your competitors will steal your customers. Example below, see how Catalano Automotive Repair is literally taking away customers from Route 1 Auto Service. Reason is they are buying ads to appear when a user is searching for Route 1 Auto Services’ and diverting customers to their business.
Suggestion: Conduct a few Google Searches for your business, if you are not in the top spot for your brand or other competitors are buying your keywords, you should take control and advertise your brand, immediately.
If you are in the top spot, see example below for Dedham Wholesale Tire, don’t waste your money on buying these keywords. Move on to Non-Brand (next section).
Non-Brand Keywords
These are keywords outside of your brand. Sticking to themes, for Route 1 Auto Service, this would be showing ads for users who are searching keywords like “oil change”, “oil change near me”, “car repair”, etc.
As I shared earlier, the huge power Google gives is the ability to only serve ads to users who are searching the EXACT product/service you’re looking for.
