Assume that you have attracted enough visitors, perhaps even paying customers, through the use of AdWords. Now it’s time to take the next step: push the customers to take specific actions that will generate profit for you and make your SEO a success. You can do this in one of two ways:

• Direct-response campaigns

-or-

• Brand-engagement campaigns

These campaigns can get you the customers you want, and drive them to take your desired actions, such as: buying, selling, or signing up for regular updates or newspapers.

1. Direct-response campaigns

Direct-response campaigns are sometimes referred to as traffic-generating or lead-generating campaigns. You have to set-up these activities while working with AdWords. This is one of the common goals of virtual business owners to drive sales and generate leads. You need to consider the following information to campaign successfully:

• Choose where you want to run your ads within the Google Display Network. There are various tools in the website that will assist you by providing information about  ad placement
• Avoid sites that are not matching your branding criteria
• Select sites that target your key audience
• Implement the cost-per-click method of bidding
• Generate strong call-to-action text ads

Purpose of direct-response campaigns

To help you to gather contact information, increase the amount of traffic to your site, work as a sales driving force.

2. Brand-engagement campaigns

The key objective of this strategy is to create positive impressions about your product and site in the customers’ minds. This will help you in the following ways:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Creating a way for customers to  interact with your brands
• Increasing your number of loyal customers
• Helping to reach relevant customers by using placement targeting, bidding, and ad formats in AdWords.

Purpose and use of brand-engagement campaigns

This type of campaign helps to increase consumer awareness of your product. It will provide a marketplace for your customer to access your products in an interactive way through the Google Display Network.

What are placement targeting, bidding, and ad formats?

Placement targeting is selecting specific sites or specific sections of sites where you run your campaigns based on topic or target audience.

In bidding strategy, your ads are shown only on sites relating to your ad text and keywords. With this method, you pay only for the number of times your ads were shown in search.

Through ad format or ad texts, utilizing animation or video, you can target your desired customers.

The most effective places to run campaigns

Your efforts will go in vain if your ads appear on the wrong pages. You have several options to choose from when you run campaigns in AdWords. The options are as follows:

• Advertise your campaign in Google’s search pages. You can do this by just advertising under the Google Search Network (GSN)
• Advertising on sites other than Google, through Adwords, to generate additional traffic, clicks, and revenues
• Campaign on sites, or sections of sites, that are relevant to your ads, to attract specific customers who are browsing for related categories. This strategy is known as contextual targeting.

Once your ad campaign is fully up and running, you need to constantly evaluate and reevaluate the effectiveness of your strategies. Campaigns that are not performing will have to be cut back or replaced with other forms of campaigns so that your investment money does not go to waste. I would suggest following a balanced campaign path through AdWords.