Heres a question.

here is a question for you guys to help me. Just had the perfect example pop up on here. So i will try to explain best i can.

My main competitor is 12 miles down the road. What he sells in his store is the same as us, we are cheaper and better customer service.

Now we are a small place, compared to my competitor, who is a big company with plenty of money behind them, where ad money to us is stock at the moment. But he is Mindful of us as we are of him.

reading through posts on here i saw at the top, an ad from google, which was the company mentioned. What sort of Money, lets say daily rate would someone like me have to set to be as close to them on the google adwords as they appear to pop up very regular.

also google adwords. I also see they have broken there ad campaign in groups.

for example.

my ad campaign is. fish and seafood direct, which is the one i have running.

my competitor is is popping up with many different ads. so would he have a few campaigns going

sorry if im not explaining to well, its all getting baffling to me lol. It trying to get as much out of ads as i can on small budget ive been given.

Oh yeah buy the way, I think you guys have created a great place here for us small businesses. And the info is tops. Keep up the great work.
as i know you put alot of free time into helping us.


sean

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http://www.fishandseafooddirect.co.uk
Fresh & Frozen Fish & seafood delivered to your door

I am not 100% clued up on Adwords but have tried it in the past. I think that the amount per click / impression is what you need to look at, also strong keywords. Unless you know how much they are bidding per click / impression you may struggle. As I understand it, the more you bid the more you will appear.

What is your SEO like?

I have a £2 per click on Fire Alarms and I m doing ok on the google ads.

In my sectors there are many many big companies with mutli million pound budgets.. its worth speaking to someone who has a bit more experience then me but I found it useful.. and £2 per click I seem to be spending about that a day but my impression rate is like 4000 per day.. I dont know if thats really good or not but I m getting traffic to my site

I know people will say how can I be with one click per day, well I assume its because I use my web address in the advert so people can see my website name without clicking on and also my freephone number (ie calls)

The one good thing about pay per click advertising ( Google AdWords) is that you can compete with the big boys to more of a degree that you can with other forms of marketing.

One of the most common mistakes many smaller business make is not structuring their AdWords campaign correctly. My guess from your comments is your competitor HAS got his structure right! The mistake made is to have one (or very few) Adgroups running all the keywords they want to target with one adtext (advert). This is where you might be falling down and your competitor is succeeding.

Bunch your keywords into associated groups and have these in one adgroup with 2 advert versions. Write your advert so it is closely related to that bunch of keywords. By doing this you a) can get your main keyword(s) into the adtext and b) the advert is more closely related to your keywords which in turn will encourage clicks and raise your CTR. You may find you have very few keywords in an adgroup and this is fine, in fact more that fine You may find you have 10,15, 20 or 50 adgroups within your campaign once you restructure. This will all help you gain better related adtext to your keywords and is all good too!

The other important aspect to AdWords (or any PPC marketing) is sending the traffic to the correct landing page. So if you have an advert for a certain product or category of products make sure your advert landing page sends them there rather than to the homepage of your site.

The higher your CTR the higher your "quality score" will be which in turn means you pay less per click on a particular keyword. Lower cost per click equals lower conversion costs and higher ROI.

So in reality, you can compete with anyone via AdWords if you get it right!

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You'll also pay less for ads if Google ranks the quality of your site highly.

My advice is to think about your ads carefully because they need to drive sales. It is easy to keep paying Google money because people click on your links but if you're not making sales you need to modify your campaigns.

I'd also consider using other forms of marketing in the immediate term, particularly if you're unsure about PPC or banner ads. Aim to make marketing work for you as best you can.

This is not strictly true.
You get a higher quality score on AdWords due to relevance of keywords to your site. The main factor for a high quality score is CTR ( click through rate from volume of impression or search). The cost per click you are willing to pay, keyword and adtext relevancy and lastly the quality and relevancy of your landing page to the campaign.

Look at the AdWords help page for quality score calculations
or
this YouTube video on quality score is useful to watch too

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