Updated: Apr 27, 2025
Author: Tony Waldegrave
If you are looking to generate more enquiries and sales opportunities from your website, then Adwords advertising is an ideal option. Google Ads (formerly Adwords) has for the most part become the best means for small businesses in NZ to achieve this objective and accordingly should be on your must do list of advertising initiatives.
Whenever we want to learn something, find something or purchase something, more often than not in todays digitally connected world, we go to Google to find what our best options are. In the case of products and services, this active stream of consumer search activity represents an obvious way to position a business offering against relevant search activity.
Google has built a dominant position as a search engine due to being very good at delivering highly relevant search results for users regardless of their location. This allows businesses of all types to readily connect with prospective customers, whether they are b2c or b2b or their service reach is local, regional, national or international.
Google’s advertising product, AdWords, is the easiest and fastest way to position your business against relevant search queries in Google and focused to the geographical area or region that you service. Adwords essentially matches buyers with providers just like a traditional directory, and executed efficiently should provide a steady stream of enquiries.
Given that Adwords is matching demand to supply, it normally operates at attractive cost per enquiry metrics. Many traditional advertising options are more broadcast in nature relying on a high reach and frequency to generate enquiries and can be quite costly and are often prohibitive to many small businesses.
Remarketing is often recommended as a complimentary tactic to Adwords and will often improve ROI and campaign conversion rates.
Adwords campaigns can be turned on and off and restarted as required. Advanced features allow ads to be scheduled by hour of day and day of week. You can run your ad campaigns on as little as $5 per day, although we normally advise a min of $15 per day.
AdWords has become increasingly competitive with many businesses now running ads in Google. Accordingly, click costs have increased especially in highly competitive segments.
The size of a Google search page hasn’t got any bigger, and if anything its shrunk for the growing number of users now searching on mobile devices. The AdWords platform has also become more complex over time and really does require in-depth knowledge to get the best out of your advertising.
Finding the right balance between being too conservative or too expansive with your campaign and keyword targeting is an important part of getting an optimal level of campaign performance that is aligned with your expectations.
Often businesses will make the mistake of being too expansive too quickly and then disband the campaign entirely because of cost. In contrast, those advertisers that are committed and persevere and leverage learnings are the ones that achieve results and ultimately competitive advantage.
If you cant dedicate resource to managing your AdWords, we recommend engaging a specialist AdWords management company.
Sounds great in theory, but SEO is a long play game and should be run in conjunction and not as a substitute to Adwords.
Ideally its best to see Google as an online market place where buyers are matched and connected to providers. For every business there will be a core set of strategic “must be present” keywords in Google that drive consistent results.
For these keywords the objective must be winning the greatest share of that search activity and the opportunity to do so will be greatest with having both ads and organic listings featuring for these keywords.
We highly recommend setting up verified Google My Business listings for those businesses that have physical business address. These listings are free, although its normally worthwhile to get an expert to set them up for you. GMB listings should be updated regularly with new photos and info about your business.
There is talk of Google preparing to launch a new advertising product in Google Maps and GMB.
For the majority of small to medium businesses the top 3 must do online advertising initiatives we recommend are:
Often the weakest link in online advertising campaigns, is the website. Too many businesses fall into the trap of building their own websites by using a free website builder tool. Just because you can build a website, doesn’t mean you can build one that successfully engages visitors to a point where they feel compelled to make an enquiry. Getting some expert advice will pay dividends and get you results quicker than a DIY program.
Typically, more than 50% of search activity is conducted on mobile devices and having a website that is mobile friendly is an imperative for achieving good mobile visitor conversion rates.
The performance of your lead generation program is a big contributor to your business success. The online advertising and marketing environment is becoming very competitive and highly sophisticated in the breadth and depth of options available for targeting prospective customers. The options are literally changing constantly, with the Google Ads platform for example undergoing in excess of 200 changes every year. It’s imperative that you get expert advice in determining your best strategy and also in executing your tactical campaigns.
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