Adwords are not advertising
Imagine that you’ve got a high-street store - you stand at the door of your shop and you grab the next passerby and say: “Please don’t come in and browse. Only come in if you’re going to buy. Only come in if I’ve got what you’re looking for. In fact, look here I’ve got a printer cartridge for a Hewlett Packard 57 printer. Do you have an HP 57 printer? You do? Do you need a cartridge for it now? Ok, you can come in.”
This is what Adwords is like, and the beauty of it is that there are millions of people passing by, and you don’t pay when they see your Ad, you only pay when they clickthrough. Out of those millions of passerbys, your job is to find the few that want your product at your price. If they like your competitor’s Adword better, that’s fine, let someone else pay for the clickthrough. You don’t want them, you only want customers who want you. Refreshing isn’t it?
This is the ultimate in request marketing. We’re only interested in consumers who want our product. There’s no persuasion. There’s no tempting a customer to buy something he or she doesn’t want. Adwords aren’t really advertising. They’re precise units of information delivered to consumers who’ve requested them.
There are mega-brands out there using Adwords to build brand, build reputation etc etc. I’m glad I’m not burning those dollars. The best Adwords are highly specific, leading to dedicated landing pages that deliver exactly on the promise of the Adword. Think of it as the haiku of advertising. 3 lines, 95 characters, no over-capitalisation. Short and to the point.
Adwords are not interruption marketing. Browsers are in front of their computers, on-line, searching to buy your product. When they click on a specific, targeted Adword, they’ve just given you the biggest buy signal you’re going to get. Don’t be alarmed then when you see CPCs running into several pounds. If CPCs are expensive, they’re working in your market, and you need to work out how they can work for you.
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