Online Marketing

I’ve started doing some online marketing through Google Adwords. Those of you in Taiwan may see ads for my restaurants show up on Google searches for various keywords. I’m not really sure how effective this will be at getting customers in the doors, but it’s not terribly expensive.

Google Adwords is pretty nifty in the amount of control you can get over your ads. You can restrict things to a particular geographic area. Over here the most I can narrow things down to is all of Taiwan, though I’d prefer to limit it to just Taipei City. They don’t have that option here, but in the US and some other countries you can narrow down the advertising to as small an area as a city block.

The system works via a bid system where you tell how much you are willing to pay and then it will show your ad or not depending on who else is bidding on the keywords you want. There don’t seem to be a lot of other people advertising in Taiwan, at least not for the keywords I’m using, so bid rates are quite low to get even top placement.

You can even do nifty things like display different ad versions depending on which language the browser is set to use, so I can target different ads to Chinese or English speakers, which I do. And they even have a tool that will suggest based on your current keywords what other keywords might be appropriate. This is great for me for the Chinese keywords since I would have to struggle to come up with other things besides the basics.

Anyways, it’s still unknown what effect this will have, but so far 329,874 people have seen my ads, 318 have clicked through, and traffic on my web site has gone up by a factor of 10.

There’s still a lot of work to do. I really need to reorganize my web site to make it easier to navigate and better organize the information. I should also work on building an email list of customers who want to get updated on new promotions, exclusive discounts, and new product news, as well as offer some kind of online coupon system. If anyone else has some ideas, I’d love to hear about it.