If you’re thinking of using Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) as part of your marketing strategy but you don’t know whether or not it’s the right decision for your business, don’t worry, you’ve definitely come to the right place. Whether you’re looking to promote your website or you want to promote a specific product, Google Ads are a great way to drive traffic to your website. While you may not understand just how powerful they can be, there are lots of great reasons to start using Google Ads as a regular part of your marketing strategy and we have some ideas to help you craft amazing Google Ads.
What are Google Ads?
Google Ads come in many flavors from shopping ads like the one that appears above to ads with extensions to display ads to ads shown on YouTube. Each type of ad requires a slightly different set-up but ads share commonalities, as well. Because we want this article to share tips consistent with all types of Google Ads, we’ll focus today on those commonalities.
First, Google Ads are highly structured ads served through the Google Ad network, which includes search, as well as the display network composed of 1000s of websites and YouTube channels that use advertising to support their communication and entertainment efforts. Google ads drive traffic to your website, your physical store, or encourage users to contact you via phone.
From reaching new people to accessing analytics on your customers, crafting amazing Google Ads build success for your digital marketing efforts. With that in mind, here are 7 reasons to consider using Google Ads in your marketing strategy:
How do Google Ads work?
Google Ads work like most other advertising efforts, although with certain advantages only available through digital advertising. Advertisers craft an ad composed of text (for search ads) or images (for display ads). You then determine where ads should appear by identifying keywords related to your products (Google provides help in identifying the right keywords through its Keyword Planner). Next, you choose your desired audience based on demographic or geographic variables (although some level of selectivity based on psychographics is possible). Setting your bidding strategy, since Google Ads are shown based on the highest bidder for a particular keyword rather than a fixed price.
Launching the ads happens next by setting daily and campaign budgets, although you need to monitor ad spend carefully to ensure you don’t go over budget as Google doesn’t always stop after consuming your entire budget.
Search ads are shown to users based on Google’s interpretation of their intent, relying both on the words used in the query and what Google knows about the users based on their cookies and previous search history. You only pay for the ad (based on your bid) once someone clicks on the ad (hence the reason these ads are often called PPC ads), which makes these a very cost-effective advertising option. For ads showing in the display network, Google uses a combination of cookies data as well as the content of the site visited. Hence, if you visit a YouTube channel focused on cooking, you’ll likely see ads for cookware, food, and related items like dinnerware. If you recently visited a site to look at new cars, that data from your cookie might mean you start seeing ads for new cars everywhere you go online.
Next, we’ll talk about how to craft an amazing Google Ads strategy.
Crafting an amazing Google Ads strategy
As with any other marketing strategy, you begin by setting goals, objectives, and selecting tactics that work best toward achieving your goals. Next, comes implementing that strategy, which is the focus of the remainder of this post.
Crafting an amazing Google Ads is part art and part science. Among the keys to a good strategy are:
- A strong CTA (call to action)
- Visually appealing ads
- Earning a high quality score
- Choosing the right keywords to match user intent
- Add negative keywords to avoid wasting your budget
- Include branded keywords
- Understanding the bidding process and setting the right bids
- Use effective targeting to match your personas
- Craft an effective A/B testing strategy
- Monitor performance closely
- Tweak ads until you reach optimization
Here are some other factors to consider as you craft your amazing Google Adwords strategy.
1. Control how much you spend
One of the common misconceptions when it comes to Google Ads is that they are very expensive and while you can certainly spend a serious amount of money, your costs depend on your budget and the goals you set. Of course, the better your strategy, the lower your cost to reach the goals you set, so it makes sense to spend time and effort learning how to create amazing Google ads or hiring someone else with this skillset.
If you only have a small budget for PPC advertising, you can limit your budget. This is especially important as a means to test the waters before committing a large budget to Google Ads. For guidance when it comes to how much Google Ads cost, visit this site.
2. Reach new people who want your products
When it comes to your target audience, Google Ads offers one of the best ways to ensure you reach the right market at a reasonable cost. Since showing up in search or on the display network is a function of users’ intent as expressed by keywords in a query or reflected by cookies, your ads only appear when users express an interest in your products. Hence, they self-selected as someone interested in the kinds of products you sell, often later in the decision-making process when they’re ready to buy, which is a great advantage.
Similarly, narrowing your ads so they only show up for certain consumers reduces advertising waste inherent when you use traditional advertising that reaches a bunch of people with no real interest in your products.
3. Reach your target personas
In order to help filter out the people who don’t really fit your target personas, Google Ads allows you two options. The first allows you to identify the specific type of users who is a candidate for your brand by demographic and geographic variables. Google also allows for some rudimentary psychographic segmentation to ensure your ads get the most bang for the buck. For a guide to creating targeted ads on Google Adwords, visit this site.
The second tool available for targeting specific segments of consumers is negative keywords. Negative keywords act to restrict where your ads show up by identifying specific keywords where you don’t feel you’ll find value. For example, let’s say you offer an online tool. Competitors offer a free version of the tool that’s a very watered-down version. You might set up “free” as a negative keyword to filter out those users who only want the free version. Hence reducing your competition to only users willing to pay for the tool.
4. Control
Another great reason to consider using Google Ads is that you can pause your campaigns at any time. Having control means you can set up a number of ad candidates and test them out with a limited budget. You can pause ads that underperform or even pause the entire campaign to give yourself time to evaluate the performance, make some changes, then restart the campaign.
5. Structured ad copy
Especially when it comes to search ads, you stand the same chance of success as much larger brands due to the required structure with strict limits on the number of characters allowed and, for search ads, are limited to text (except for shopping ads). Thus, big brands lose the advantage that comes from having a stable of graphic designers and copywriters. Anyone can craft amazing Google Ads, at least when it comes to copy.
6. Hire Professional help
If you’re unsure whether or not you can craft amazing Google Ads that generate high conversion rates, there are lots of professionals out there able to give you a hand. A professional, especially one specializing in PPC ads can handle everything from budgeting to keyword strategy, to bidding (which is a very complex element of Google Ads), to ad copy. For more information, you can get in touch with folks like Claire Jarrett.
7. Testing, tracking, monitoring
Probably the best tip I can give about crafting amazing Google Ads comes from the richness of metrics available to monitor the performance of your PPC ads. Within the Google Ads platform, you have access to a number of metrics such as CPC (cost per click) to guide decision making and allow you to tweak your campaigns until they’re optimized. Plus, integrating your ad platform with Google Analytics allows you to follow visits emanating from your advertising through the pages of your website. This allows you to calculate the ROAS (return on advertising spend) for various campaigns to determine future decisions related to these campaigns.
Conclusion
I hope we succeeded in offering you insights into why you should use Google Ads and how to craft amazing Google Ads. Obviously, you should read more about Google Ads before embarking on an advertising campaign, but I hope we at least gave you a sound footing on which to build your expertise. What other insights should we share in future posts? Did we miss anything from the list? Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.
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