Unlike with Facebook P.P.C., the clicks/interactions resulting from a Google AdWords campaign originate exclusively from keywords, the corresponding phrases of which are chosen by you, the campaign manager. This offers you the ability to cast an incredibly wide net of search terms relating to how you think your customers are looking for you, then cull the ones that turn out to be ineffective. Google’s Keyword Planner tool (a free service that’s part of the AdWords network) can even help you discover keywords pertaining to your business that you might never even have thought of otherwise.

You Only Pay For Results

One of the biggest selling points of P.P.C. advertising is that your credit card is only billed it people actually click on your ad. What this means is that Google affords you an essentially unlimited trial and error period to fool around with different keywords and demographic targeting options until you get it right. It’s a very compelling case on Google’s part: Despite having a more expensive average cost-per-click ratio than Facebook, the AdWords network offers exposure to a much wider range of users (ie. everyone in the world who uses Google) and allows you to direct them to specific pages within your site. The same performance-based billing applies to the Google Display Network, which is the section of AdWords that allows you to showcase full image ads on an extensive range of popular websites that your potential customers could be browsing.

Campaign Segmentation

Let’s say, for example, that you work for a creative firm which offers an array of different web design and online marketing services, and that you want to market them separately under one campaign in the AdWords network. Not only does Google allow and encourage this, they make managing multiple ads quite easy. You could create one about web design, one for social media management, one for back end development (etc.), then track their respective performances both individually and in the context of the whole campaign. You can also assign different budget for different ads within a campaign, focusing the bulk of your spend on products and services that you’re trying to push more than others.

SEM is very similar to SEO, the key difference being that you’re paying the search engines directly to get your website seen as opposed to optimizing the site yourself so that it’s likely to happen naturally. It’s worth mentioning that SEM is how Google makes the vast majority of its profits. Put simply, you choose a set of keywords that Google thinks you’re likely to get found for (given budget and location), then they gives you a rough estimate of how much your credit card will be charged every time someone clicks through to your site.

Like anything in life, there are pros and cons to SEM, particularly on a local level. Pro: you’re getting hyper-focused data from the world’s largest search engine; Con: the smaller and more specific your desired market, the less likely Google is to know how to target it. Take the island of Bermuda, for example. As one of our target markets, we’re constantly perplexed at the lack of search marketing attention paid to this location. As it stands, the only type of Bermuda businesses currently getting indexed on Google Places are restaurants and hotels, with other fields being unable to set up a listing. Basically, if you run a small business in what Google deems to be an obscure location that falls outside of those two fields, you might not be able to leverage the full benefits of SEM.

Another thing working in SEM’s favour is Google’s recent decision to encrypt all of their keyword data for organic searches, meaning they’ll soon be taking away free access to specific statistics, i.e. our ability to see how many people are searching for given keywords on a month-to-month basis. With this development, any small business owner who currently uses the Google AdWords keyword tool to sniff around as to what his/her potential customers might be searching for will now have to either choose a different strategy or bite the bullet and start paying for local SEM.

If you plan to start an SEM campaign for your local business, there are a few things to consider. First and foremost: it’s complicated. Despite Google giving you a trove of data and search marketing tools to tinker with, there’s still a trial and error period where you’ll have to test which ads/keyword combinations work, and which don’t. Without the proper guidance, you’re likely to end up wasting money initially. Secondly, just like with SEO, SEM requires an ongoing time commitment that many business owners are unable to commit to, and don’t feel comfortable delegating to one of their employees for lack of experience. If you understand the importance of web traffic but are unable to commit your time to increasing it, it might be time to enlist professional services to make use of this fantastic tool.