Queensland’s Silvio Ferrero is one of the emerging breed of internet advertising and marketing professionals who usher their clients through the new-speak technological intricacies of the web.
He recently moved to Australia after selling his London web marketing and internet consultancy agency to Windmill Partnership, a well known UK advertising and PR company.
Before that he founded and ran Bestitalian, a web portal specialising in advertising Italian products and services.
He now runs a Maroochydore-based company called Adwordizing and is one of about 20 Australians (one of the first 3) to hold Google Adwords Qualified Professional Certification, describing himself as a search engine marketer.
“We develop campaigns based on the ads that appear when customers search on Google for a phrase relevant to the advertisers business,” he says.
Which sounds simple, but to be truly effective and competitive in this medium means entering a tricky and confusing technological maze and mastering a new set of buzzwords including click through rates, keywords and ROIs – return on investment.
When someone Googles a search phrase, such as Australian hotels for example, the search results are shown on the screen and usually to the right of the results are a series of advertisements or ‘sponsored links’ in official Google-speak.
Advertisers, or sponsors, usually pay a small fee per click on their ad. The trick with effective marketing is to get an ad on the first page of the results and the ultimate achievement is to get an ad on top of all the others.
This positioning is determined by a few factors including cost per keyword or phrase and click through rate. But the click through rate not only determines the prominence of the advertisement – it also determines the cost, and the more successful the ad is in attracting clicks, the lower the cost per click.
“The advertisements are triggered by a click or user query and this is called keyword advertising,” says Silvio. ”Keyword advertising has many distinct benefits. It allows you to target your ads specifically to users who are looking for your product or service, and avoid those users who are not likely to become your customers. As a result, you can get a better return on investment, for your advertising budget.
“Planning campaigns can be complicated because every keyword has a different price and you are also competing against other advertisers. So what’s happening in order to get to the first page you sometimes have to pay a little bit more than people who advertise on page two or three.
“It works also on the click through rate. For example if my click through rate is much better than yours I still pay less because relevance is very important, and if Google thinks that your ad is more relevant than mine and is backed up by less click through then you pay less on parity.
“If you and I bid $1 for the keywords ‘Hotels in Queensland’ and my click through rate is much higher than yours then I will be above you, even if we bid the same price.
“A campaign in keywords that is not well optimised can be quite expensive because a low click through rate affects the campaign performance and therefore increases the cost, while campaigns and keywords with a better click through rate are placed above your competitor at less cost.
“That exactly where I come in as a Google Adwords professional – I will optimise your campaign so that you spend less for more results.”
As for the cost of clicks on ads, Silvio provides several client case studies to show the financial breakdowns of keyword advertising campaigns.
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