Google has many terrific free resources for small businesses. Below, we summarize our six favorite free resources for small business from Google. In each case, we describe the resource, help you understand why you should consider using it, and offer tips on using with links to additional information if you’d like to read more about that resource.
1. AdWords Small Business Center
What it is: AdWords is Google’s advertising program. When people search on Google.com and partner sites, Google displays text ads (at the top of the search results and to the right of the search results). According to Google:
AdWords enables you to create online advertisements and show them on Google and across a huge network of partner websites. Advertising with AdWords allows you to reach new customers at the precise moment when they are searching for your type of products and services. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and you control how much you spend on each click, your daily budget, and where your ads appear. AdWords accounts also include graphs and performance data so you can track what’s working and edit your ads accordingly.
The AdWords Small Business Center was established by Google earlier this month to help educate small business about ways they can better leverage AdWords and to provide best practices and tips. The Center has useful free guides on writing strong text ads, choosing good keywords, adjusting your budgets, tracking your results, and improving your conversions. The Center contains useful tips for beginner, intermediate and advanced users. The Center also has a discussion forum where users can share AdWords strategies with others – and ask questions.
Why you should consider using it: Although AdWords can be a powerful marketing tool for small business, more than half of small business owners stop paid advertising within six month of starting. This often happens because many small business owners don’t fully understand the many ways they can customize and leverage their AdWords marketing programs.
Tips: If you’re spending money on AdWords, you should regularly read Google’s AdWords blog for the latest information about AdWords, useful resources, and tips. If you want to learn more about search engine marketing, I suggest you read 10 Practical Small Business SEO and SEM marketing tips.
2. Google Analytics
What it is: Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Why you should consider using it: There are numerous paid analytics tools available – and many are quite good. Google Analytics is free and offers more than enough features that small businesses need. Google has continued to innovate in this area and has recently added new features, including advanced segmentation (allowing you to analyze subsets of your traffic) and custom reports.
Tips: We monitor traffic to every page on our site. We also monitor every marketing campaign that we run to evaluate whether the expenses (both time and effort) are justified. We’ll also occasionally compare our data to those of our competitors. If you’re interested in reading more about evaluating your competitors, I recommend you read 10 Tips For Evaluating Your Competitors – a useful guide that lists additional resources that could supplement your analytics data.
If you use Firefox, you’ll want to get this extension right away – Better Google Analytics. It adds a ton of useful features to your analytics account giving you the ability to export data to Google Docs, absolute numbers (as opposed to percentages), quick search, table sorting, and social media metrics (among other things).
