Artdomain Art Marketing Blog

If you have ever wanted to get better search engine results for your art on the web, you may have considered using Google AdWords. These are the paid for search results that show on the right hand side of the results page of any search you do on Google.  They can also appear at the top of the results page and will say ‘Sponsored Links’ beside them:

I’ve spent a lot of time working with AdWords and wanted to share with you some of my thoughts on the effectiveness of investing in this form of advertising for artists. 

Firstly why would you want to pay for search results?  Well all websites need visitors and all artists websites need potential buyers to visit.  There’s no use having an art gallery down some back street where no one visits or can even find.  Google AdWords can help people find your art.

Sounds good doesn’t it?  The only problem is that for the most popular search terms, there is a lot of advertiser competition for the top spots, and this can push the bidding on these keywords up to a point where you feel like you are feeding the ‘Bank of Google’ rather than making money from it! 

Where AdWords works best is if your art is on a niche topic, for example marine art, equine art, landscape art of a particular area.  This is because the advertiser competition is comparitively very low, so you only have to bid low to be visible in the top search results.

Where AdWords works less well is with more popular or generic terms that are being strongly bid on by many advertisers i.e contemporary art, abstract art etc. However you can still use AdWords to promote your art for these terms if you know what you are doing.

AdWords works on a bidding system where you set the price per click that you are willing to pay, and you set the amount per day that you are willing to spend.  Google AdWords then uses a system to decide which order it will display the advertisements based on the price you are willing to pay, PLUS the relevance of your keywords in your advert, PLUS the relevance of your website to the keywords you have chosen to bid for, PLUS probably a whole lot of other clever stuff that normal mortals couldn’t hope to understand.  It decides the relevance of your website by scanning for these keywords.   It also bases it’s decision on whether the viewer thinks it is relevant to the keyword by counting your adverts ’bounce rate’ i.e how many times a viewer clicks on your advert, gets to your site, and decides ‘no this is not what I wanted’ and hits the back button to return to back the search results. 

You can get keywords to bid on by using the Free Google AdWords Keyword Tool, or alternative tools like Wordtracker.  Using these tools you can find out which keywords have the most advertiser competition and likewise which keywords have least advertiser competition.  Another good way to see how much advertiser competition there is, is by using the Google Search Sponsored Links web page.  If you use the above example of ‘Marine Art’ you will see 5 pages of sponsored links and on investigation you see that only the first page is showing sites with Marine Art in their advert title.  If you do a sponsored link search on ‘Abstract Art’ you will see it returns 28 pages, while ‘Contemporary Art’ returns 63 pages!

In my next installments of this ‘Artists & Google AdWords Article’ I’ll detail how to choose keywords, bid on keywords (even those hotly contested keywords), and set your adverts up and running.

In the meantime leave comments on what you think of AdWords.  Do you, as a web user, click on the sponsored results when doing a search?  If you’ve tried using AdWords, what results did you get?  Let me know.