Getting Started with Google Ads

Is your business stuck in a rut and not generating the traffic you need in order to meet your goals? Foot traffic to your business is one thing, but now a days, most people aren’t walking around aimlessly looking for the goods and services they need. More often than not, potential customers are searching on Google to find a business that best suits their immediate needs. This is why becoming familiar with Google Ads, its basic functions, capabilities, and monitoring tools, is essential knowledge to have if you’re looking to advertise online.

Advertising through Google Ads is not only easy, but very user friendly to ensure even the most technologically inept can navigate. Google Ads allows you to advertise only in relevant areas, which means it only shows your ads to the right customers at the right time. Their sophisticated targeting system shows ads to the right demographics, locations and sorts by keywords which ensures you’re not wasting your time and energy showing ads to people who wouldn’t want to see it (Google Ads, 2018). There are also cost and budgeting control options to ensure no ad campaign empties your wallet.

Where and how will Customers see your Ads?

There are two areas of the Google Network where your ads can be seen; search ads, and display ads. Search ads are good for a business that doesn’t need to show images of its services such as plumbing or accounting. Search ads will appear when people look up keywords related to your business or the services you offer through sites such as Google Maps or Google Play. Display ads work great for a fashion designer or interior designer where they can display their work in the form of rich media on sites such as YouTube or Gmail.

There are also so many different formats that your ads can be presented in such as shopping ads, video ads, text ads, or image ads. Keep in mind that not every single format appears on both Google Search and Display networks. Sometimes certain formats like app promotion ads can appear on both networks, whereas rich media ads will only be shown on the display network. (Google Ads, 2018).

Ads Basics

Let’s talk text ads! Text ads are the simplest form of ad to display to customers, but it’s important to say the right things to entice people to click on those ads. Your headline needs to be clear and grab attention, the URL should take people right to the offer you’re advertising about, and the description should be clear, relevant, specific and should ALWAYS contain a strong call to action (Google Ads, 2018)! If you can follow these three steps not only will people engage more with your advertisements, but it’s more likely they’ll interact with your landing page as well. More interaction on your landing page means greater chance for a sale.

Now once people have seen your ad where do they go? There’s a good chance they’ll want to contact you to probe for more information. This is where extensions come into the mix. Extensions allow people to contact with you or allow you to link them to specific pages on your site like a Sitelink Extension (Google Ads, 2018). Callout Extensions that allow additional text in your add, or Structured Snippets, which highlight certain areas of your product or service, are also great extensions to setup manually.

As the ranking of your add grows, Google will automatically add in extensions with your add such as customer reviews and ratings. There are other extensions like call extensions, price extensions, or locations extensions, but the general idea here is to drive more traffic and allow people to further interact with what you are offering.

Ad Campaigns

Ad campaigns help you reach different users in different ways. The type of business you operate or what your advertising goals are will help determine what add campaign would best meet your objectives. Campaigns are listed as follows:

• Search Campaigns – Appearing in Google’s search results and useful if you want to show up to high-potential clients when they search for related products or services
• Display Campaigns – Adds that are shown in related Google Display network sites, great for targeting audience with a specific interest
• Search Campaign with Display opt-in – Mixes search and display network options so you can expand your potential audience to people searching for relevant products
• Video Campaigns – Ads displayed on videos on YouTube and across the display network that include banner ads, in-stream adds, and video discovery ads
• Shopping Campaigns – Ads displayed on Google Shopping or partner websites, useful for retailers to boost traffic, sales, and leads
• Universal App Campaigns – Displayed ads through search, display and YouTube networks, ads are automatically adjusted to appear where you get the most clicks

Look into this list and apply whichever one applies to you and your business. You can also have multiple campaigns for different product ad initiatives which allows you to customize and track individual products and their progress (Google Ads, 2018).

Targeting and Keywords

A key element to the marketing world, as I’ve learned over the past 2 years, is to know your audience well and target those who want your product, when they want it, wherever they are. Making ads too broad, while reaching many people at once, won’t drive the same amount of traffic that targeting certain groups will. Luckily, Google Ads allows for targeting customization to enhance your ad exposure. A great way to target what people are searching for is with keywords. Keywords are words or phrases that you can put in your ad, website and promotion that reflect what people are likely to search. Accurate and relevant keywords that capture what people are searching for, is a sure way to generate more interactions.

Five to 20 keywords is a great number to start out with (Google Ads, 2018)! Now I didn’t know this before completing Google Ads fundamentals, but you can add in negative keywords to prevent you from showing up in unrelated searches which is brilliant! It prevents you from paying for clicks that get your product nowhere. Speaking of wasted clicks, make sure to setup which searches will trigger your ads by customizing the way you enter keywords in Google. You can have keywords that will match with broad misspellings of searches or you can narrow it down to specific phrases where searching, let’s say “Craft Beer” will only give you results spelled in that exact way (Google Ads, 2018). This customization is all about either widening or narrowing when your ads appear in search.

Google Ads Auctions and Bids

Just like out bidding your competitors at a real-life auction to be the lucky guy/girl to win an item, Google Ads has mini auctions every time a search is conducted. Except in this scenario its you (the “bidder”) competing to have your add placed higher up on search results pages. Your placement is directly influenced by these three factors: the quality score, Click Through Rate (CTR) and your bid. Quality score is affected by many factors but essentially just describes the quality of your ad, its keywords, and the related landing page. CTR is how often you might get click based on keywords and is based on how keywords perform. Finally, your bid is the maximum amount you will pay to have someone click on your site (Google Ads, 2018). Now these bids can either be setup automatically or manually. Find what works best for your campaign.

With this being said, you cannot bid your way to the top like you can in a traditional auction. The quality and utility of your advertisement is what will make or break your ad’s ability to shine on the big stages. Unlike what some famous Hollywood parents believe, you can’t just pay a ton of money and expect things to go well all the time. You must put in the time and effort to not only create valuable information for people but to monitor and remove what doesn’t work for strategies that do work.

Bid Adjustments

Sometimes bids don’t work out the way you think they will on Google Ads and that’s why you need to consider bid adjustments. Bid adjustments can increase or your bid size based on location, performance of ads, which device they show up on, and even time of the day (Google Ads, 2018). As you grasp the idea of bidding and how it works, start playing around with adjusters to maximize your exposure, conversions, and visits when you need them and to who need them the most.

Cost Models

Can you tell me what CPC means in terms of advertising? How about CPM? If you’re like me, then you have probably never heard of these terms. These are all cost terms that advertisers like Google Ads uses to charge you base on your customer interaction. There are a few different cost models that I want to briefly cover which are:

• CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions) – Paying every time the publisher serves your ad, used to raise brand awareness
• CPC (Cost Per Click) – Paying when someone clicks on your ads and that’s it, used to increase traffic to a website
• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) – Paying if someone acts on buying your product or service, used to drive more actionable sales
• vCPM (Viewable Cost Per Thousand Impressions) – Pay whenever you ad is displayed to the user and they view over half of the ad for one second (Google Ads, 2018)
• CPV (Cost Per View) Pay when people watch your video ad or interact with he video ad

Budgeting is also crucial to consider for any business and Google Ads offers different budgeting approaches to suit your business needs. You can work with monthly budgeting methods, average CPC budgets, recommended budgets and your ad delivery method (Google Ads, 2018). Again, your business size and potential ROI is what will influence this important decision. The better your ads begin to perform, the more you can increase and adjust your budgeting to what initiatives are working best.

Final Thoughts

While there is so much more content about Google Ads I could summarize, this blog should provide you with a condensed and basic outline to what you can expect when using Google Ads. Make sure when creating your ads to follow Google’s guidelines about spelling and trademarks. Posts with spelling errors, incorrect punctuation, or emojis wont be shown and that’s good for nothing. If you come into contact with trademark issues, request for third party usage or adjust your ad to fit guidelines. Lastly take the Google Ads Fundamentals course and complete the test. This will further your knowledge of valuable advertising information.

With that being said, I’ve taken the course and the test, and as of posting this blog I haven’t passed the course with more than a 73% (80% is a passing grade). There is so much information to grasp, so my free advice to you is to free up the necessary time to complete the course and pass the test. Really take your time to understand the concepts and better yet, if you’re already using Google Ads, implement changes to your ad campaigns in the process of learning the material. While this is a long read, hopefully you found this useful and maybe even convincing enough to start using Google Ads with some confidence.

Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave your comments below and let me know what you thought, learned, or what I could improve on. Cheers!

References

(2018, September 22). Retrieved from Google Ads: https://academy.exceedlms.com/student/path/3132-google-ads-fundamentals