An introduction to Google Adwords
For any online marketer or business owner, Google Adwords is easily the most important way to drive traffic. As the age of SEO is reaching its end, the art of CPC and PPC has become a must-have tool in the shed for online marketers. Google Adwords is simply the most powerful way to drive traffic to your website as it’s powered by Google and is based on Google’s awesome search engine system. You get to choose the keywords you want to target and only people searching for those keywords will see your ads. This means your ads won’t show to random people and you can target the exact people you want to reach.
Google Adwords lets you create text or animated ads and then these ads are shown to the people you target.
How text ads work
This is pretty simple. You can create an ad campaign with a heading and a few lines of text. When someone searches for a keyword you have targeted, the ads show on the results page. They either show up at the top of the page before the first results or on the right side. Headings are normally bold so they catch a person’s attention. The main thing here is to make sure the few lines you get are written well and make people click instantly on your ad.
The problem with text ads
Unless you’re the Shakespeare of online marketing copy, you can’t be sure that whatever you write will attract users. As you only get a few lines to sell your product or service, getting them right is more important than anything. You could try split testing different ads till you get to a perfect combination of words but there is no guarantee you’ll be able to get something that converts instantly.
The other problem with text ads is that internet users have been programmed to ignore ads. Anything that’s not in the middle of the page where the search results are will just simply get ignored. There are many studies that have outlined this very problem and that’s why advertisers are now looking for ways to attract people towards their ads with something new.
How animated ads work
Animated ads work the same way as far as how and when they’re shown but the creation is totally different. Instead of being limited to a number of words, you can create an animation of up to 30 seconds in length.
Why animated ads are the way forward
If you are marketing an online food ordering service, having a burger or pizza fly around the screen when someone searches for ‘order food online’ is sure to grab their attention. They don’t have to read through boring lines, they simply see what they’re looking for and the chance of them clicking on that is far higher. With the introduction of HTML5 Google Adwords banners, your options are no longer limited. You can put in sound, add unlimited custom animations and pretty much guarantee a higher conversion rate.
The best thing about this is that animated HTML5 Google ads are very cheap to get made and compared to text ads, they simply perform much better.
What are your thoughts about animated vs text Google ads? Share your experiences in the comments and let us know which ones work best for you.
