Every church should consider some kind of search engine keyword campaign as part of their marketing strategy. You know those ads that show up down the right-hand column or across the top when you’ve googled something? They show up based on the word or phrase you just searched on. How would you like an ad like this to show up if someone was googling for a church in your city (first ad in the beige header area):
sample Google Adwords ad
Your church can place these ads to connect with people who are searching on the internet. Keep checking back because we’re doing a short series on what keyword advertising is, how it works, and how to use it creatively.
Pricing
How much does it cost, you ask? Here’s the best part – it’s up to you. With Google AdWords you can set your own daily budget as well as how much you’re willing to pay for each click- more on that in a minute. And you don’t pay anything when the ad appears; you only pay when the user clicks on your ad (this is called pay-per-click or ‘PPC’). You can change what your budget is at any time, so if your money situation changes, you can change your AdWords budget the same day.
Here’s the tricky part: Google charges for different keywords based on demand, so it ends up being kind of like an eBay bid against other advertisers. Google will let you know what other advertisers have been paying for your keyword so that you can choose your maximum cost per click accordingly. You can even choose a different maximum bid for each keyword; all the money stuff is fully customizable.
Here’s an example: you’ve decided you could spend $100 a month on this, so you put in $3.33 for your daily budget. You’ll have to decide which keywords you want to pay for. You decide on ‘Los Angeles church’ and Google lets you know that the average cost-per-click is $1.04. You also choose ‘LA church’ and Google tells you that the average cost-per-click is $.80. You can choose maximum bid amounts based on that information. If you get outbid one time, their ad will show instead of yours, but your ad could be the high bid the next time your keyword is searched if the other advertiser has hit their daily maximum. By using a pay-per-click method, your ad can show up literally thousands of times each month. But when you hit your daily maximum because of people actually clicking on your ad (that’s a good thing), your ad will stop showing up for the rest of that day (maybe not so good).
Regional Targeting
You can also control your cost by restricting the campaign to people in a certain state, city, or region. If your church is in Indiana, you wouldn’t necessarily want to pay for someone is Los Angeles to click on your ad. Google makes it easy to choose different zip codes or even draw a custom polygon on their map to show where you want to advertise:
custom polygon for South San Diego 
Keywords
The two other most important pieces to the campaign are the keywords themselves and writing the ad. Your keywords should be as specific as possible – use ‘Los Angeles churches’ instead of ‘churches’. Remember, you can have as many keywords in your campaign as you want. Be creative and try to put yourself in the shoes of the person who is about to google something. What word or phrase would they use? Also, consider putting in mis-spelled versions of your keywords, such as ‘Los Angeles chruches’ to net those who are typing too fast. These ‘typo’ keywords will likely cost you next to nothing as they won’t be high on the competition list.
We’ll give you more in a coming post on how to choose keywords and internet tools that will show you what keywords are actually being used and how often. We will also tell you about Google’s awesome reporting and metrics, running multiple simultaneous campaigns, and other good stuff.
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[...] Search engine keyword campaign. Check it. [...]
I “amen” the props for Google AdWords. Having spent the majority of our marketing dollars pre-launch, we are being very intentional with where we invest our promotional dollars ongoing.
With just a $50/month budget to AdWords, we have seen our # of 1st time guests coming as a result of the Website increase by 500%. And the types of families we’re reaching are right within our target demographic – young start-up families, either moving to town or, because of a life-change situation (marriage, baby, job crisis) are looking for a church family.
We decided this week to raise our monthly budget to $100 a month for more exposure.
Thanks for your feedback, Janie.
I’m working with a planter in a major California city who would have had to pay $500 a month for a phone book ad but is spending $200 a month on AdWords instead. He sees several people come every week because of the online ads. And now he’s increased his budget temporarily for the grand opening. I’ve learned a lot from him.