Bart Burggraaf, Managing Partner at MediaGroup Worldwide takes an interesting look at Forex Brokers’ still #1 marketing choice – good ol’ Google – in a special LeapRate guest post.
Google built its empire on a simple idea: show people an ad relevant to what they search for.
Bart Burggraaf, MediaGroup
Last year alone, Google had $74.5 billion in revenue, at least 50% of which came directly from Google Adwords advertising. It was a good idea. The reason Google was able to build this massive empire is that they have the attention of their users all day, every day and they know exactly what these users are looking for. Combine this with the powerful keyword bidding system and targeting options, and they basically have a money printing machine.
But advertisers are not charities (well, sometimes, but that’s beside the point) so they must be getting something out of it. To start with, PPC gives some of the best targeting possibilities and allows advertisers to constantly test and optimise. In addition, Search Engines are often used in the final stages of decision making for broker selection. All in all, this means that the average ROI brokers get from PPC advertising is among the best of all channels. Being older, it is not as sexy as Programmatic Advertising or Social Media, but it sure does get the job done.
In order to run an effective global pay per click campaign, Brokers need to invest significant resources in producing, managing and optimising campaigns. Brokers like Plus500 have a competitive edge through operational efficiency, and so can bid higher for keywords that are uneconomical for other brokers. But there are ways to compete, and through smart and hard work, any broker no matter its size can compete globally and gain customers from the search engines.
Strategies that allow any broker to compete include going for long tail keywords (ie ‘best EURGBP broker UK’ instead of ‘Forex’), making micro campaigns with specific ad text and landing pages for each major and mid-tier keyword, bidding lower on a larger set of keywords to still get the volume needed and more. In addition, brokers can use other search engines such as Bing, Baidu or Yandex to get in front of similar audiences with less competition.
Search Engine Marketing, and Google Adwords in particular, takes a lot of time and resources to properly employ, but set up correctly it can be a money printing machine for you, too.