The following guest post is courtesy of Katya Yun, Head of Marketing at MT4 technologies provider Takeprofit Technology. Takeprofit’s products include A and B-book risk management solutions, the Klondike liquidity bridge, and the Ashira automated dealer anti-cheating defense. Takeprofit’s clients have included Forex brokerages and white-label solution providers such as Darwinex, FXPIG, FXSTAT, BTFX, FinFX.
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The pay-per-click advertising in Google Adwords is one of the marketing instruments we are using at Takeprofit Technology. We have found interesting tips which are really useful on the Forex brokering market. So, in this article you can find some advice about Google Adwords for Forex brokers.
I guess that more or less you should already know about Google AdWords. Here is a screenshot of AdWords advertisements for the search term “open forex account”.
All ads have different size, location, headings, texts, links. The performance of each one is also different. Some of them will bring new customers to your business, others will just spend your marketing budget.
How to make the biggest advertisement
One of the basic pieces of advice is to make your advertisement size in search results as big as is possible. The more space it takes, the higher the possibility that it will be clicked. This principle is working for all spheres, but not all businesses have enough interesting information that can be represented in the compact Google advertisement format. Fortunately, Forex brokerages have a lot of information which can be included in an ad. It can be information about spreads, regulation, minimum deposit, leverage, business model, trading instruments, educational courses, trading platforms, account types.
You can put essential information into the basic part of your ad, additional information can be put into extensions. Ad extensions are a type of ad format that show extra information (“extending” from your text ads) about your business. There are different kinds of extensions which you can use to make ads more informative.
Sitelinks extensions show from two to six links to your site pages. You can edit links to make them more compact and eye-catching. For example:
- Trading Platform MT4
- Deposits & Withdrawals
- Trading Conditions
- Our Partnership Program
- Seminars and webinars
- Free educational courses
- Free 1-on-1 Training
- Sign up for Free
Also you can add your address as a location extension, telephone number as a call extension. If you have any testimonials from organizations you can show them as a review extension. Any important information which you haven’t managed to put into ad text can be put into callout extensions.
The smaller the groups – the better
When you create an ad campaign there is a parameter “Location” which lets you choose in which countries your ads should be shown. If your brokerage works with different countries you can choose all of them or even the whole globe. But I don’t advise anyone to do it. Would be really better if you create campaigns for each country or group of countries. This way the cost of a click will be a little bit lower and you will also have separate statistics on each country.
The same advice is for your services, special offers and others. Don’t mix all of them into one campaign. For example:
You want to attract clients from Europe, China and India. You have 3 types of ads. The first accents on the minimum deposit, the second on the low spreads and the third offers to attend a free training session.
According to these conditions your campaigns can look the following way:
Make a regular cleaning
There is no way to block non-target audiences to click on your ads. But there is a very useful tool called “Negative keywords”. It tells Google not to show your ads to anyone who is searching for the phrases, which you tagged as negative keywords.
For example, there is a rather popular search term “binary options trading”. If one of your keywords is “trading”, AdWords will show your ads for this term. In case you are not providing binary options, it would lead to a flow of non-target traffic on your site.
Negative keywords also take care of your reputation. If you don’t want your ad to be shown for the terms “Forex scam” or “Forex fraud”, put words like that into the negative keywords.
When your campaign is launched, you can check what search terms were used in Google by people who clicked on your ads. If you see that some of the search terms are not relevant you can move them to negative keywords.
The last advice for today is the following: if you want to benefit from Google Adwords you should take care of every cent that you spend on it. You should always try to get more relevant clicks for a cheaper price. Another way it will be quite difficult to benefit from this instrument on a such a competitive market as retail Forex.
We hope that these pieces of advice help to make your campaigns a little bit more effective.