Visibility on search engines is crucial to succeeding in the online arena, and your competition knows it. That’s why they may already have created a budget for Google AdWords management. If you’re still on the fence, here are five good reasons to hop on the AdWords bandwagon.

1. AdWords Doesn’t Require Membership

Sure, you can purchase ads on Facebook, and they do have a large member base. However, anyone can use Google without signing up; although, plenty of people are signed into their Google accounts. For people who don’t understand social networking or have privacy concerns, search engines are that much more important. If your ad is on that search engine, everyone can see you, including Facebook users.

2. You’ll Probably Pay Someone Anyway

What we mean by this is that it’s increasingly difficult to get to the top of the SERPs. We know that almost all searchers click on one of the top three results in the list, and if you’re on the second page, search engines are virtually useless to you. To combat this, many people pay marketers to organically boost that position, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll rank for a specific term. With AdWords, however, you know you’ll show up in a prominent place on the SERPs. Investing in a PPC campaign also produces results more quickly than SEO. So shift the money you were going to spend anyway to Google AdWords management.

3. You Can Choose the Location

Google knows how important local searches are, and the search engine allows you to advertise to everyone on a global scale if you need. However, if you work directly with local prospects, you can pick your town, state or county as your advertising demographic, ensuring that the prospective students you most care about see your ad. Facebook has similar filters to connect you with the consumers who matter most but, as we pointed out, Google has the much bigger user base overall.

4. Ads Appear on Other Sites

With AdWords, you won’t just show up on the SERPs. Ads appear on YouTube videos, too. If you’ve ever seen an ad running along the bottom of a video, then you know how AdWords works. You don’t even have to perform a search to see ads. Google loves to promote itself, so you’ll see ads across many of its properties, including maps. That’s another boon for advertisers that cater to a specific location, like maybe a community college. If a prospective student is looking for colleges in the North East, you can make sure your educational institution pops by in front of their eyes.

However, your ad can also appear on other sites that are part of the AdWords network. Plus, you can choose some of those sites. Sites that have AdSense advertisements are all over the place so it is a great opportunity to get in front of your target audience besides just hoping on specific searches.

5. AdWords Has Tools

One of the perks of Google is that the company is eager to provide you with information to keep you using their tools. So you can research keywords and view related searches before spending any money. You’re also able to exclude keywords, so if you’re trying to attract enrolments, your ad won’t show up for searches where people are trying to get a job at universities, such as professors or academic staff, it’s highly tailored to the target market, and doesn’t attract unrelated people. In fact, you can choose what time of day your ad appears.

After you purchase, AdWords provides you with all sorts of metrics for your PPC campaigns, so you can see who is clicking and who isn’t. When combined with conversion offers on your own site, this paints a picture of which strategies are working for you. This is especially useful in comparison to Facebook. Although the social network does have some measuring tools, they’re meager when side-by-side by AdWords.

This post was written by Sally Smith