There is ONE central idea, one key concept that Google wants you to understand.
If you have this right, Google will literally reward you by giving you lower prices on clicks, and your customers will reward you by buying what you have to sell.
If you DON'T have this right, you'll pay way too much for clicks, your competitors will eat you up, and your whole Google experience will be very, very unpleasant.
The one thing that matters on Google is relevance.
You might think of this as "message-to-market match."
This will make complete sense once you understand a bit of Google's history.
Google started in 1998, after the "big boys" in the search engine game like Yahoo and AltaVista were already well-established.
At the time, few people would have bet that Google would overtake them all - but in less than five years they did exactly that.
What's even more remarkable is they did so without a bunch of hype and loud marketing. They literally built a better mousetrap and the world beat a path to their door.
So what happened?
Google's mission in life was to build a search engine that would give people exactly what they were searching for, as fast as possible. If you were searching for "California butterflies" they wanted to give you the very best and most popular California butterfly websites on the very first page of results.
They developed an amazing mathematical formula for figuring out who visited websites and why, and using that information in their search engine.
So ... when they began to sell Pay Per Click advertising, they were extremely concerned that advertisers should also put out messages that were highly relevant.
Google rewards you for being relevant, and they let people who are searching vote for you. If your ad gets clicked on, it's relevant. If it doesn't, it's not. It's that simple.
The higher your clickthrough rate - i.e., the more folks who see your ad and click on it - the less you have to pay for the position you want. But if you write lousy ads, Google will make you pay more to get your ads to show at all.
So this creates a "Darwinian" effect, a deliberate natural selection that weeds out bad advertisers and rewards good ones. What's good for Google's customers is good for Google and good for you.
When all the dust has settled, what really matters is that your ads and your content be relevant to the keywords you're bidding on. Your message must match what the person is thinking.
So ... what were they really thinking when they typed in "California butterflies?" That is the question! Figure that out and put it in front of them, and you'll win at Google. Write an ad that matches exactly what they're searching for and you'll beat your competitors by a country mile.
A Valuable Little Piece of Customer Psychology for You:
Here's a little mental trick to help you write Google ads.
Imagine that you are not you. You are your customer.
You're not the dude with the cool solution. You're the guy or gal with some stupid problem. You've got an itch and you want to scratch it.
And you're not in front of your computer. You're sitting in front of their computer. What do you type into the search bar on Google?
And what do you hope will come up?
Answer that question and you'll be successful marketing online.
Perry Marshall, perrymarshall.com
Starting your own home based business
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