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by Steve Juth
Here are five of my favorite ‘non-advertising’ things you can do with Google AdWords:
1. Survey Your Potential Customers
Need an opinion or want to know what people think about an idea for a business? Don’t just ask your friends or family! Put it out there for the world to see. Throw up a blog with your idea asking people to comment or create an online survey for free at surveymonkey.com. Then use Google AdWords to drive traffic to your blog or survey and offer an incentive to get people to respond. An incentive could be a free report or a drawing where one respondent wins a gift certificate to Amazon.com.
2. Find out which Name for a New Brand or Website People Like Best
Take your list of potential company or website names and buy a domain name for each one. Create an AdWords ad that uses one of these domain names and run it for about a week. Keep track of the overall click-thru-ratio. Run the next domain name for the next week, again keeping track of the overall click-thru-ratio. Rinse and repeat. After running the last one you’ll know which name is the most popular.
3. See How Bright Your Idea Really is
Want to see if an idea might be hot, even without a website? Create an ad for the potential product/service you are envisioning and link it to a similar site found in Google’s natural rankings (not in AdWords). Study your clicks, impressions and costs to see how effective and affordable your idea really is.
4. Discover What People Really Want
People buy things for their benefit. In AdWords you can discover what benefits people are really looking for by running multiple ads for the same adgroup and keywords. For example, do your prospects prefer ‘simple’, ‘easy’ or ‘free’. Substitute these words into your ads to see which ones deliver the highest click-thru-ratios and then build your advertising program around the winners.
5. Be a Keyword spy
Want to discover new ways to attract leads and customers? Use broad match terms to target the widest audience possible. Then be sure to run a search query report within your AdWords account’s reporting section to discover new keywords to target. You might be suprised at some of the new angles or strange misspellings you discover within your niche.
Even though Google AdWords can be challenging these days, it can still be a lot of fun when using these creative techniques for testing your ideas in your market. Keyword research tools provide a good measure in terms of what people search on. The techniques described above can take keyword research one step further by helping you get into your prospects’ heads without much investment of time or money.
AdWordAccelerator is the Ultimate Google Adwords Intelligence Tool
About the Author
Stephen Juth is the creator of AdWordAccelerator, a popular software Intelligence tool for Google Adwords. AdWordAccelearator is used by some of the leading Adwords experts including Perry Marcshall (Autho of the Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords) and Howie Jacobson (author of Adwords for Dummies)