Google Ad Marketing
With the right online marketing strategies, small and medium businesses are finding new ways to compete against the big companies.
Internet marketing refers to any form of advertising or marketing on the web. It’s an all-inclusive term for promotions shared via emails, social media posts, paid advertisements displayed on search engines, etc. As users get younger, companies have shifted their marketing strategies to the Internet, where they can reach a larger, more relevant audience at lower cost to traditional advertising options.
Google Ads allows you to create and share well-timed ads among your target audience, they reach to your products and services via Google Search or Google Maps.
With the right online marketing strategies, small and medium businesses are finding new ways to compete against the big companies. Even with a limited budget, companies are able to get creative and effectively reach customers at each stage of the buying cycle. Be it when a consumer is searching on Google while considering a purchase or at the final stage before checkout, they will see your brand at every step of the way.
Google Ads is a paid advertising platform that falls under a marketing channel known as pay-per-click (PPC), where you (the advertiser) pays per click or per impression (CPM) on an ad.
Google Ads is an effective way to drive qualified traffic, or good-fit customers, to your business while they’re searching for products and services like the ones you offer. With Google Ads, you can boost your website traffic, receive more phone calls, and increase your in-store visits.
Google Ads allows you to create and share well-timed ads (via both mobile and desktop) among your target audience. This means your business will show up on the search engine results page (SERP) at the moment your ideal customers are looking for products and services like yours via Google Search or Google Maps. This way, you reach your target audience when it makes sense for them to come across your ad.
Note: Ads from the platform can span across other channels too, including YouTube, Blogger, and Google Display Network.
Over time, Google Ads will also help you analyze and improve those ads to reach more people so your business can hit all of your paid campaign goals.
Additionally, no matter the size of your business or your available resources, you can tailor your ads to suit your budget. The Google Ads tool gives you the opportunity to stay within your monthly cap and even pause or stop your ad spending at any point in time.
Now, onto another important question: Is Google Ads really effective? To answer this, let’s consider a few statistics:
- Google Ads have a click-through rate of nearly 8%.
- Display ads yield 180 million impressions each month.
- For users who are ready to buy, paid ads on Google get 65% of the clicks.
- 43% of customers buy something they’ve seen on a YouTube ad.
Why advertise on Google?
Google is the most used search engine, receiving over 5 billion search queries a day. Not to mention, the Google Ads platform has been around for nearly two decades, giving it some seniority in the area of paid advertising.
Google is a resource used by people around the world to ask questions that are answered with a combination of paid advertisements and organic results.
And, according to Google, advertisers make $8 for every $1 they spend on Google Ads. So, there are a few reasons why you’d want to consider advertising on Google.
Need another reason? Your competitors are using Google Ads (and they might even be bidding on your branded terms). Hundreds of thousands of companies use Google Ads to promote their businesses, which means that even if you’re ranking organically for a search term, your results are being pushed down the page, beneath your competitors.
If you’re using PPC to advertise your product or services, Google Ads should be a part of your paid strategy — there’s no way around it (except maybe Facebook Ads, but that’s another article).
Google Ads Best Practices
If you’ve tried unsuccessfully to advertise on Google, don’t give up. There are many reasons why your Google Ads could be underperforming. Let’s cover some common Google Ads best practices.
You really need to nail it when it comes to your keywords, which is why testing and tweaking should be a part of your strategy. If your keywords are too broad, Google will be placing your ad in front of the wrong audience which means fewer clicks and a higher ad spend.
Review what’s working (i.e. which keywords are generating clicks) and adjust them to best match your ads with your target audience. You likely won’t get the mix right the first time, but you should keep adding, removing, and tweaking keywords until you do.
It’s a combination that will yield the results you’re looking for, and it may just be a few tweaks away. You have the option to create multiple ads per campaign — use this feature to split test which ads work best. Or, better yet, use Google’s Responsive Search Ads feature.
Improve your Quality Score (QS).
Your Quality Score (QS) is how Google determines how your ad should rank. The higher your rank, the better your placements. If your quality score is low, you’ll have fewer eyeballs on your ad and fewer chances to convert. Google will tell you your Quality Score, but improving it is up to you.
Optimize your ad landing page.
Your efforts shouldn’t stop with your ad — the user experience after a click is equally important.
What does your user see once they click your ad? Is your landing page optimized for conversions, meaning does it use the same keywords? Does the page solve your user’s pain point or answer their question? Your user should experience a seamless transition through to the conversion.
- AdRank
- Bidding
- Campaign Type
- Click-Through Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Display Network
- Ad Extensions
- Keywords
- PPC
- Quality Score
