Promoting a website
The very FIRST key to a successful website is to get people to come and visit it, and maybe more importantly to get the people you WANT to visit your website to come visit. More than likely, your site is geared towards a very specific, targeted audience. Reaching those people can be challenging.
Search engines are a GROWING force on the internet. As the amount of information grows exponentially, search engines are gaining fast popularity as the preferred method of finding information on the web. And an entire industry has sprung up around the concept of getting your website good placement on a search engine. This is reffered to as “search engine optimization” or (SEO).
Another method of website promotion via search engines has also proven to work quite well, and that is the example we want to focus on here. This method we will refer to as “paid placement”. The idea being that one pays for certain search terms relevant to the site they wish to promote. When someone searches using those terms, an “ad” for the website is shown beside or included with the “normal” search engine listings.
As we write this (May-04), this is a VERY hot topic in online advertising, but one that so far seems to be only adopted on a very small basis in the agriculture industry. We are going to present a case study of doing this using an example website: www.ksagresearch.com. The owner of this website (Kansas Agricultural Research Association) is a group of individuals dedicated to advancing and improving production agriculture. They are co-sponsoring an upcoming event involving auto-guidance and on-the-go sensing equipment to be held August 2004. This case study will involve using the web to help promote this event.
We will focus on the use of the Google Adwords program, as well as promotion via some of the agriculture discussion forums available. Although there are several search services out there, each with their own advertising method. We will focus on Google simply because they have the largest market share by far of any of the services.
In the screen above we have done a google search on “Buying a computer”. The Blue shaded box with the website link www.dell4me.com is a premium paid advertisement. The links on the right hand side of the screen are text ads created with the google “Adwords” program.
This screen shows the Goggle adwords “campaign” we have created. We have specified a daily budget of $1.00 so our cost will NEVER be higher than that. (If we use up our limit, Google will cease showing the ad). Most importantly, we have targeted our ads to the states that are closest to Kansas and the most likely locations for field day attendees. Notice the states listed in the lower right-hand corner.
This image contains all the details. In the upper Left hand corner is the text for our ad – exactly as it will appear in the Google search results. (The text starting with Autosteer Demonstrations and ending with the website address in green). Also, you can see all the keywords we have selected. Anytime these keywords are used in a Google search, our ad will be displayed. This screen will show us ongoing status on a daily basis of which keywords have been used, how many clicks we have gotten from each keyword, etc.
This is one of the most powerful parts of the Google Ad-words program. It allows for almost instant monitoring and adjusting of promotional activities. It will be very easy for us to see which keywords are generating the best response, adjust text of ad and measure response changes, etc. Keep in mind we are trying to reach a very targeted, specific market here, so we do not anticipate adds or click-through to be very high (guessing around 20-50 ads per day) with only 1-2 resulting visits to the KARA website.
We also specified a maximum “cost per click”. We used $.05 on all these ads (the minimum). As there are currently no other advertisers bidding for them.
VERY IMPORTANT NOTE - PLEASE DO NOT DO A GOOGLE SEARCH AND CLICK ON KS AG RESEARCH ADDS AS DOING SO WILL COST .$05 EACH TIME…
If you have any questions or comments about this, please let me know
Darin Grimm