Week 1_MBA 6101_AdWords

 

AdWords: Paying to be at the Top

As a frequent ecommerce consumer, I can type any brand or description of what I am looking for into Google and millions of searches bounce back. While there are so many responses, I rarely click past page 1, and I am not the only one. For a business to be easily found, they need to be on that first page, and that comes at a cost. Companies can pay money to Google to put their links and name towards the top of the search response list. AdWords is a marketing system designed by Google to help companies reach target audiences through specific words or phrases. For the company, they pay per click, meaning that if a visitor clicks on their link, the company pays Google. 

As mentioned in the book Introduction to Search Engine Marketing and AdWords: A Guide for Absolute Beginners, authors Todd Kelsey and Brandon Lyon describe how AdWords have created a bidding war and a guessing game. Companies will continue to develop and upgrade their websites to outperform their competitors, the same can be said about AdWords. Companies will pay more money than their competitors to get further up the Google search list. This is a continuous bidding war that can be seen in multiple different industries between competitors. The guessing game comes into play when thinking about the percent of people who purchase from the company based on the AdWords. A company can spend a large amount of money on advertising but if they don't see a correlating response to sales, then the AdWords didn't have the expected result. 

When looking at my marketing project and "What's Going on Chicago", there are a few different ways we could utilize AdWords. Right now, if you type "What's Going on Chicago" into Google, it provides a list of upcoming events, nothing about sports. I could utilize words such as "Chicago Sports", "Chicago Podcasts" or "Chicago Bears Podcast". I will spend the next week researching more about AdWords and how I can apply these concepts to the marketing project.