At first glance, it might seem easy to launch your own Adwords campaign. However, building a strong foundation for your campaign takes quite a bit of research and planning. And continued success with AdWords requires detailed on-going monitoring and optimization.

In this webinar, we cover everything you need to get your campaign off the ground as well as what steps you should be taking to drive improved effectiveness throughout the lifetime of your campaign.

More Questions and Answers

There were a lot of great questions asked during the webinar. Unfortunately, we did have time to go through all of them, so below are answers to the questions that didn't make it into the presentation.

Does the cost change depending on the target location?
Yes, definitely! If you’re in a local market where a lot of competitors are advertising through AdWords, that increased competition is going to drive up the price of your cost per click (CPC).

How do we keep competitors from clicking our ads?
There isn’t much that can be done for one-off clicks from competitors, but Google does have a robust anti-spam system built into the AdWords platform that automatically looks for fraudulent clicks and removes them from you account before you pay anything.

If you feel like there is fraudulent activity that is slipping through their anti-spam system, you can request an Invalid Click Investigation from Google. If they find anything suspicious, they’ll apply a refund to your account.

How does AdWords differ from SEO search terms?
The search terms that drive traffic from your Adwords Campaign aren’t really that different from the search terms driving organic search traffic to your site. All of them are coming from people who are going to Google, typing in their search term, and clicking a link to your site.

The difference is that with AdWords you’re directly paying for each of those clicks. With SEO, your site needs to be ranking highly in the organic results from that search term in order to receive clicks.

If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, check out our Understanding the Fundamentals of SEO webinar.

What is better, AdWords or SEO?
The answer to this kind of depends on your goals and budget. As we mentioned in the presentation, AdWords can start driving qualified traffic to your site quickly, but that traffic stops as soon as your stop paying Google for clicks.

On the other hand, it can take several months to achieve keyword rankings that are high enough in the organic search results to drive traffic to your site, but once you achieve those rankings, you won’t drop off immediately if you stop investing in SEO.

With that said, both AdWords and SEO should be parts of your larger marketing strategy. Neither one is a magic bullet for growing your business, but when working in conjunction with other marketing tactics, they can be very powerful.

What about Bing?
Excellent question! We didn’t really talk about Bing in our presentation, but they have an advertising platform that is very similar to AdWords. Bing has a much smaller portion of the search engine market than Google, so that means it won’t drive as much qualified traffic as your AdWords campaign. But that smaller market share also means less competition which translates into cheaper clicks for you!

What we recommend is building and optimizing your campaign on AdWords first. Once you’re happy with the results that it’s driving, you can export your entire campaign and import it directly into Bing and easily start running ads with them.

How long would you say it takes to get a solid benchmark for your AdWords campaign performance?
Figuring out whether your campaign is successful can vary from industry to industry and even from campaign to campaign. However, I’d say that you should be prepared to run your campaign for at least 3-6 months with a healthy budget of at least $1000/month. That will give you enough data on lead generation and conversions to paying customers to determine your ROI.

What is the difference between your Pro and Express AdWords Management services?
We offer two options with our AdWords Management service: AdWords Pro and AdWords Express.

In the AdWords Pro program, we manage your campaign in the full version of the AdWords platform. This gives us more strategic control of features like keyword targeting, bidding strategies, ad variation testing, negative keywords and more.

The AdWords Express program is managed on a separate advertising platform from Google called AdWords Express. This platform provides much less control over the strategic features that are available on the full AdWords platform and thus, has a lower management cost.

If you’re serious about your AdWords campaign, we highly recommend the AdWords Pro program as the increased level control will lead to a great possibility of success. However, if you’re operating with a limited budget but still want to include some advertising in your marketing strategy, AdWords Express can be a great place to start.

The discounts we mentioned in the webinar are only available for our AdWords Pro service.

What is the contract term for Pronto?
Our AdWords Management service has a 3 month commitment because we strongly believe that success with AdWords is achieved over the course of months as we make continual improvements and optimizations to the campaigns. After the first 3 months, you can cancel your subscription to the program at anytime.