Higher Education Articles
Using Google Adwords to generate more student enrolments . By Simon Healy
Google Adwords is a a Pay Per Click (PPC) program of advertising on Google. The ads appear on the right hand side (and sometimes on the top of the page) of the Google Search site depending on the keywords or key phrases that you enter.
As an advertiser, you pay an click fee every time your ad is clicked by a potential customer.
The first step is to create a Google-friendly site. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines offer help on general design, technical, and quality issues.
This lets your ads connect with your customers, at the exact moment when they are looking for your services and you only pay when the customer clicks on your ad and goes through to your website. Importantly you don't pay to place your ad, you only pay for the clicks which is why this form of marketing is called Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
Why use Google Adwords?
Google Adwords is recognised as one of the most powerful direct marketing services ever developed. Using Adwords, you can reach out immediately to a global audience of more than 800 million internet users and acquire new clients from as little as $0.05 per acquisition.
Advantages of the Global Reach of Google Adwords
The Google Network now reaches more than 80% of Internet users, which makes it the most effective search engine to place your advertisements.
Targeted Advertising
The success of Adwords advertising is that your ads are targeted to the people who you are most interested talking to. You set the keywords and phrases that will trigger your ad and as soon as your potential client searches for them. If for example you have a particular education course you want to promote you simply create an Adword campaign specifically for that study course and you will reach students who are interested.
It doesn't matter if you are trying to reach a student in your city or from Tokyo, Google Adwords allows you to decide which country, state, metropolitan area, or even a specific geographical radius where your ads will appear in.
Pay Per Click
With Pay per Click marketing, you only pay when a customer actually clicks your ad and visits your site. You do not pay to list your ad. There are very few other forms of advertising that allow you to do this. Click costs start from US$0.05.
Budget Control
It's important you don't overspend your budget. Google Adwords lets you to set the maximum amount you want to pay for a click as well as the maximum you want to spend each day. With this feature you won't ever spend more than you want.
Measurable Results and Reporting
Google Adwords includes excellent management and reporting tools that let you to measure how successful your campaigns are running as they happen. You have access to very detailed traffic statistics, ad group tracking and click costs. Using these analytical tools allows you to see which keywords and phrases are working well, the volume of clicks you are receiving and how many of them are converting to new customers.
New Market Opportunities
Google Adwords allows you to tap into markets you may have wanted to target for years but have never been able to. If you run an english language school in Australia and want more students from Norway you would normally have had to get an agent to represent you, paid a local marketing firm to assist you, outsourced your marketing to a professional education consultancy firm, purchased advertising on a number of other educational related websites that promise you they have lots of Norwegian students or perhaps you may have even had to visit Norway and attend a student fair to promote your college.
Now you can simply create an account, write your ads and keywords, target Norway only and activate your campaign. Your ads will begin showing almost immediately in Norway by your potential new students.
Now is the time to act, as there are still many astonishing opportunities in Adwords not being used by your competitors. By creating your Adwords campaigns now, you can dominate Adwords before your competition even find out about it.
Fast Results
With Google Adwords, your ads appear virtually the instant you create and deploy them. You can be attracting new customers in 10 minutes.
Adwords Challenges
Although it is quite easy to setup and Adwords campaign, it is much harder to run and manage your campaign effectively on an ongoing basis. The costs you are charged by Google are determined on a combination of your Cost Per Click (CPC) and your Click Through Rate (CTR) for every keyword that you use.
Google has created this formula in order to promote effective advertising for all of it's users and more importantly to get rid of ineffective ads. So it's not as simple as just bidding more for increased clicks as this will not guarantee you a higher position. Google may even suspend your ads if they are not performing well. Therefore you really need to have a good understanding of how Adwords works in order to use it successfully.
Costly Mistakes Can Happen
If you are an inexperienced user it's very easy to make costly mistakes. This can happen when your ads are not optimized or your keywords are not correct. For example we were recently optimising a campaign for a Sydney institution who only wanted students from Sydney yet they were serving up their ads right across Australia. In other words they were wasting literally thousands of dollars every month on untargeted ads that were being clicked but for which they would never receive a single new student.
Time Consuming
Adwords is not something you can setup and forget. You need to find the right keywords, create your ads, correctly get your account settings in place, and begin your campaign to begin with. You must then monitor and optimise your campaigns so that they maintain a high click through rate and high ranking placement. To do this you need to fine tune your entire ad groups, keyword lists as well as undertake weekly (if not daily) maintenance.
In Summary
Google Adwords is one of the most powerful new advertising services available today. It can help you reach new customers more effectively than any other form of advertising. However setting up an effective Adwords campaign is not easy. It requires learning, time, dedication and a high level of expertise. In a nutshell, Adwords has an initial steep learning curve that rewards experienced users. However if you don't know what you are doing you can make costly mistakes and lose thousands of dollars very quickly.
Article List
Using Adwords to generate more student visitors - Simon Healy
The top 4 search engine things you need to consider - Simon Healy
'The Recruitment 2.0 Revolution'. Simon Healy
Making your institution's website Google friendly. Simon Healy
Web design and how it will affect your Page Rankings. Dale Pillars