© 2007 by David Gillaspey (resume). All Rights Reserved.
 
Permission is granted to print and distribute copies of this article freely for personal use or for the internal purposes of your church or organization, as long as the author's name, the copyright and the source (www.greatchurchwebsites.org) appear on the first page of every copy. This material may not, however, be posted on your organization's website in any form without explicit permission.

PART TWO: how to advertise on Google

First, a few words of clarification. In this and the subsequent articles about paid listings, I use the terms "keyword(s)" and "search phrase(s)." By this I mean the single word or multiple words, respectively, that users enter to search the internet when using a search engine. The terms I use in my discussion also refer to a single word or multiple words that you expect or hope that users will enter. This is because your sponsored listings (i.e., paid links to your site) are always associated with these.

When you sign up for paid listings, however, you'll see the instructions consistently use only the single word "keyword(s)" to refer to a single word or multiple words. It's the same thing concept; I just choose to be a little more specific.

How Google AdWords works

I signed up for Google AdWords on June 18, 2004. Google is a top search engine — see this report titled Major search engines and directories — and therefore a logical place with which to start. Google Adwords is how you get sponsored links for your church to appear on Google similar to the one for my site shown in the screen shot below:

Sponsored links like this for your church would appear in the righthand column of the search result pages whenever a person uses Google to search for a keyword or a search phrase relevant to your church. The good news is, you get to decide what words or search phrases are relevant to your site. The bad news is, Google only displays eight sponsored links per page.

If more than eight companies or organizations have paid for a sponsored link to be associated with a given keyword or search phrase on Google, only eight sponsored links will appear on the first page of the Google search results. Up to eight more will appear on the second page of Google search results, possibly more on the third page, etc. (depending on how many there are total). Naturally, you want your church's sponsored link to appear on the first page of Google search results if possible, or maybe the second page. This is because everyone views the first page of Google search results (that goes without saying), but only a percentage of Google users will go on to the second page of results, and only a percentage of those people will go on to the third page, etc.

(However, this is still preferable to the way Overture handles sponsored listings. See Part Three for more information.)

How do you ensure your church's sponsored link gets a good "placement" (as it might be called in the advertising world)? First, Google AdWords are based on companies or organizations bidding on keywords and search phrases. (This is also true of Overture and its affiliate partners.) The more you bid, the better the placement of your sponsored link. Note that you don't pay Google because someone merely viewed your sponsored link on Google. The company calls this an "impression." You pay Google when someone actually clicks on your sponsored listing and goes to your website.

A second factor is the total amount you are willing to spend per day, which is your "daily budget." This factor together with the one above determines the placement of your listing on Google's search result pages (with respect to all the other sponsored links associated with a given key word or search phrase), or whether it even appears at all. Google makes a statement declaring that it runs your ad "evenly through the day" to ensure you do not exceed your specified daily budget. (Overture handles this problem differently, as you'll see.) That may seem like a bad thing, but it's actually good because the feature allows you to control your costs.

Your goal is actually to control (or budget) your monthly costs, however, not your daily costs, so you'll want to aim a little high when setting the maximum cost per day you are willing to pay. (Some days you fall short of the maximum, so you set your maximum a little high so the average cost per day X 30 days stays under your desired monthly budget.)

Creating a Google sponsored link

There are four main steps (with many substeps) to creating a sponsored link in the Google AdWords program. You don't actually sign up or pay for anything until the last step, so you can safely try out creating a Google AdWords "campaign" for your church without committing yourself to anything. In fact, as you'll see, there's a good reason to go through the process even if you don't sign up for a sponsored link in the end. So try it out!

In step 1a, you choose the language of the population you are trying to reach (Google uses the word "customers"). For most churches in the United States, that would be English. But a U.S. church wanting to reach a Chinese population in, say, San Francisco, might choose "Chinese" instead. (You can choose multiple languages.) For my site, I chose English.

In step 1b, you determine the geographic location of the people you trying to reach. Your options are: "Global or nationwide," "Regions and cities," or "Custom" (which turns out to mean "within a certain distance of your church"). Most churches, I think, would want to choose "Regions and cities" or the Custom option. Churches — not necessarily large churches — who consider themselves to have an international ministry, might want to choose the first option.

For each choice in step 1b, you are taken to another screen that asks for more detailed information about the area you are trying to reach. For my website, I chose "Global or nationwide" followed by the choice of two countries — "United States" and "Canada" — for now. Later, when I begin adding churches from around the world to my database, I'll go back and change these settings. (Yes, you can edit your settings at any time after you have created an account.)

Why bother with these choices? It has to do with controlling your cost per day and therefore your monthly costs for the campaign. If you are wanting only to attract unchurched people to your worship service or ministries, you don't want to pay for click-throughs by people outside your area who can't get to your church anyway. But if your church considers itself to have an international ministry, or your church is a "teaching church" (e.g., Saddleback, Willow Creek, Ginghamsburg), or you want your church to receive donations from anyone no matter where they are located, then you'll want to choose options that allow you to reach people from outside your area.

***Warning*** Using your browser's "Back" button while creating an Google AdWords campaign usually causes an error and stops the process, so be careful.

In step 2a, you create the actual sponsored listing by filling out HTML text fields on the webpage. This step is interactive because you see the actual ad being built in front of your eyes (in a separate text field) as you type.

You fill in five HTML text fields: headline (maximum 35 characters), two lines of description (maximum 35 characters each), the visible URL to your site (your URL minus the "http://"; maximum 35 characters), and the actual, destination URL to your site (maximum 1,024 characters, to allow targeting of specific product pages, or ministry pages in the case of churches). You can, and probably will want to, make changes to your sponsored listing later. I've tweaked my ad numerous times since creating it.

Google AdWords allows you to create a separate "ad group" for each product (or ministry in the case of churches), if you desire. The term "ad group" refers to a group of keywords or search phrases (see next step), not a group of ads as you might expect. "Ad groups" themselves are grouped into "ad campaigns." You can have as many ad campaigns as you want, each with as many ad groups as you want.

For my website, I have just one AdWords campaign, with just one ad group. Your needs may vary.

In step 2b, the fun really starts. In this substep, you create a keyword list. You start by typing in the obvious keywords and search phrases that you think would be associated with your church. (That is, you want anyone who searches in Google for these keywords or search phrases to see your sponsored listing next to the search results.) Include plurals and singulars and misspellings of words. As an example, for my AdWord campaign, I made sure I'd be covered whether people used "websites" or "web sites" (as in "church websites" or "church web sites") for their search.

Next, use Google's Keyword Tool to generate a list of possible additional keywords and search phrases to add to your original list. It appears that the keywords and search phrases the Keyword Tool generates are those actually used by people looking for something similar to your product/church in the past. That's why the Keyword Tool is so valuable. It really helped me to expand my list of keywords and search phrases.

Also, check your website usage statistics report when it becomes available to you. The usage statistics report for my website provides, among other valuable data, the top "search strings" (keywords or search phrases) used by people to get to my site. After examining the list, I went back to my original AdWords keyword list and greatly expanded it.

Some side notes:

According to the article titled Search engine placement tips from searchenginewatch.com, it's very important to include your keywords or search phrases in the HTML title tag of all your webpages. The HTML title tag for this page, if you viewed the source code (View menu => Source), looks like this:

<title>Publicizing your church website</title>

The HTML title tag controls the content of the title that appears in the bar at the top of the browser window. Search engine spiders or crawlers use it as a primary means of indexing, and ranking, pages, so it's important to compose a title that incorporates the best possible keyword or keywords. That increases the chances of webpages on your site being indexed, and correctly indexed, by search engines. You'll want to compose different titles for different pages on your site. Don't use the same title for all the pages of your site.

I mention this here because I think Google's Keyword Tool; "Traffic Estimator" (see below), which estimates potential traffic in advance; and the AdWords performance report, which shows actual performance of each keyword or search phrase after your campaign is launched, to all be great tools with which to intelligently choose the best keywords or phrases to include in the HTML title tags of pages on your website.

Furthermore, at the top of most HTML pages, in the source code, there's something called the "Description" meta tag. The content of this tag is also used by search engine spiders or crawlers to index and rank pages, so you'll want to ensure that your Description meta tag contains the best possible keyword or keywords. However, the Description meta tag is the source for the description lines that users see on search engine results pages (as well as that of directory searches), so you also have to write descriptions that make sense to the human reader, accurately summarize the content of pages, and encourage him or her to visit your site. Therefore, you really have to put some thought into writing descriptions for the pages of your website.

And finally, at the top of most HTML pages, in the source code, there is also something called the "Keyword" meta tag. It used to be, in the old days, that search engine spiders or crawlers would use the keywords included in this meta tag for indexing and ranking pages. This led to much abuse by people wanting to get their websites listed by search engines, and ranked as high as possible. Therefore, search engines now use the keyword meta tag data much less than before, if at all. See How to use HTML meta tags from searchenginewatch.com for more information.

But, as with the HTML title tag, I mention these meta tags here because of their importance (or diminished importance in the case of Keywords) to search engine indexing and ranking. Again, Google AdWords gives you great tools with which to intelligently choose the best keywords or search phrases to include in the Description and Keywords meta tags of all the pages on your website.

The good news is, you can use these tools (except the post-launch performance report) even if you don't ultimately sign up for the program! So go for it.

But back to creating a Google AdWords campaign.

In the next step (an unnumbered step), you determine the maximum default cost-per-click you're willing to pay for each keyword or search phrase in your list that results in a visit to your website. This is the maximum amount you're willing to pay Google for each keyword or search phrase that someone used for a Google search, that resulted in him or her seeing your sponsored listing, and that resulted in him or her clicking through to your website. (Mere viewing of your sponsored link doesn't cost you anything.) This is your cost-per-click bid.

Here's the deal: other churches, companies, organizations, whatever are also bidding on the same keyword and search phrases that you are (only you don't know what they're bidding, unlike in a real auction, and unlike with Overture). The higher the bid, or cost-per-click you're willing to pay for each keyword or search phrase, the better positioned your sponsored listing will be on Google's search results pages, for that keyword or search phrase, and the more likely a person will be to view the listing and click on the link to visit your website.

Google offers a "Traffic Estimator" that, among other things, estimates the average position of your sponsored link that you can expect for each keyword or search phrase, based on the maximum cost-per-click you've specified for each. This might be helpful to you, but I doubt it. More useful, for reasons intimated above, are the estimates of number of impressions and number of click-throughs to be expected for each keyword or search phrase. (Such information helps you choose the best keywords or search phrases to incorporate into the HTML title tags and meta tags of the pages on your site.)

Google will suggest a maximum default cost-per-click for your keywords that may be ridiculously high. Change it to something much lower. For many keywords, a cost-per-click per keyword or search phrase of as low as US$0.10 or US$0.20 will work just fine to get your listing on the first page of search results. But for some very popular keywords or search phrases, you'll have to pay much more to get decent positioning.

In addition to a default maximum cost-per-click, it's possible (later) to give individual keywords or search phrases their own individual maximum cost-per-click that allows you to achieve the positioning you want for that keyword or search phrase. I've done this for a handful of keywords and search phrases for my website. I set the maximum cost-per-click for each to an amount somewhat more than the default amount I have set for other keywords and search phases on my list. For some popular keywords and search phrases, on the other hand, I just don't have the budget to allowing setting a high enough cost-per-click to get decent positioning. So I'm living with poor placement. (But at least my sponsored listings still run. Overture's sponsored listings work much differently in this respect, as you'll see.)

Later, after your campaign has been running for a while, you can log on to your account and view a table showing the actual "performance" of each of your keywords or search phrases. The table shows number of impressions, number of clicks, cost per click, average position, and other information for each keyword or search phrase in your list.

Now click on the "Calculate Estimates" button to go to the next screen. There's no other way to proceed, as far as I can tell.

In Step 3, you set your daily budget. Again, Google provides a suggested daily budget, but change this to something appropriate for your church's budget.

In Step 4, you provide account and billing information, which completes the process.

After you have logged out, within a few minutes, you should begin to see your sponsored link on Google's search results pages — somewhere! (Sometimes it will be buried many pages deep in the search results.) Go ahead and test all your keywords and search phrases. Positioning of your sponsored listing will vary for each keyword or search phrase depending upon how many other companies or churches are bidding on the same keyword or search phrase, and how much.

If you don't like your positioning for a given keyword or search phrase, then re-log on and increase the maximum cost-per-click you are willing to pay for that keyword or search phrase to try and improve your positioning. Re-logout to see the results of your changes.

If you obtained good positioning for a given keyword or search phrase — maybe your ad is the second ad on the first page of the search results — consider lowering the maximum cost per click you're willing to pay for that keyword or search result. You got good positioning — why pay more than you need to?

I've gone to great lengths to describe the process of creating a Goggle AdWords campaign because I think this is something any church could afford, if you make wise choices in language, population, keywords, maximum cost-per-click, and daily budget to control your costs. For example, if you defined a search phrase narrowly, e.g., "episcopal salem oregon," then very likely you'll have few competitors for that search term. That means your cost-per-click bid can be low, maybe as low as $0.10, and yet you'll still reach potential users trying to find an Episcopal (or Baptist or Assembly of God or whatever your denomination) church in your area.

PART THREE: how to advertise with Overture and its affiliates

 

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