There’s no arguing the effectiveness of traditional SEO to help support your comprehensive marketing strategy. It’s an organic approach that can offer a great deal of traffic to your website, but it’s also a process that takes time to show results. While SEO is a necessity, there are other strategies to utilize in the meantime — one of which is paid ad campaigns using Google Ads.
What Are Google Ads?
Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is the paid advertising platform from the search engine giant, Google. It holds the title as the most-used online advertising platform across the globe; it allows users to pay for ads that show up at the top and bottom of Google search engine results. It also shows ads on a display ad network, which means those ads show up on any number of a group of over 2 million websites, videos, and apps — reaching over 90% of internet users in the world.
There’s a long list of benefits to using Google Ads. Campaigns allow users to target certain demographics based on keywords and location, reaching potential leads more directly. Because of this, Google Ads offer much faster results in a boost in website traffic than SEO.
How Do Google Ads Work?
Picture an online auction where bidders are businesses competing to secure the top spot in advertising placement. However, instead of trying to be the business spending the most money to grab that spot, Google is looking for other factors beyond cost; this includes ad relevance and overall quality. Advertisers (businesses) submit a bid for a keyword that tells Google how much they’re willing to pay for each click someone makes on the ad, referred to as maximum bid value.
From there, Google takes the bid amount, assigns a score based on quality, and gives the ad a ranking. AdRank is a number that’s calculated by multiplying maximum bid value by the quality score. Google takes a look at several factors to determine quality: keyword relevance, ad copy, the rate at which viewers click the link provided in the ad (click-through rate or CTR), and the quality of the pages they land on when they do click through. Higher AdRank numbers mean higher ad placement in search engine results.
Getting Started With Google Ads
While it’s possible for business owners to implement Google Ad campaigns on their own, it’s quite the technical process that takes experience and expertise to see results that offer ROI. This is really a strategy that’s best left to the pros, but it’s a good idea to better understand the fundamentals of Google Ads.
Ads are organized into tiers. Campaigns represent larger categories of products or services, and those are then broken down into ad groups that represent more specific areas. Think about a clothing store, for example. The campaign could be labeled “winter clothing” while ad groups could be refined to include “jackets,” “gloves,” and “hats” — known as keywords. The best way to build ad relevance and increase the click-through rate is by choosing keywords that are directly connected to business products and services. Google Ads offer several match types that direct ads with certain keywords to different viewers.
Budget is the next consideration, which is further divided into a daily budget and a bid budget. Daily budget is the number advertisers are willing to spend on ads each day that they’re scheduled to run, and bid budgets refer to how much advertisers want to pay when someone searches for a chosen keyword and then clicks on an ad. Think about the example above; while the clothing store may carry winter clothing year-round, it wouldn’t make sense to allocate much of the ad budget to that campaign during the summer, when it’s clear that customers aren’t searching for jackets or gloves.
Managing Google Ads
Before the ads go live, there are several more steps to take. Landing pages should be set up, as well as deciding which devices (mobile or PC) the ads appear on. The ads must also be written strategically, with error-free copy that doesn’t exceed the character limit that Google sets. Even when those tasks are completed, work isn’t done; the success of each ad needs to be tracked carefully using Google Analytics to get a clear picture of their success in driving traffic to your website.
It’s easy to see why many small business owners overlook the impact of Google Ads as this marketing strategy takes some time, which is often in short supply for busy entrepreneurs. Get in touch with our team to pull back the curtain on paid search ads, and start campaigns to boost online presence.
