Google recently exceeded $100 billion in annual sales for the first time in its 20-year history. The company brought in $110 billion in a single year, topping the $90 billion in sales it boasted in 2016.
The company owes much of this success to its ad platform. Google and Facebook dominated more than 60 percent of digital ad spending in the U.S during the previous year.
Given those numbers, we can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t be using Google AdWords.
What, though, is the secret to using Google Ads effectively? How do you create killer ad campaigns that provide huge returns on your investments?
In this complete beginner’s guide, we’ll answer those questions and more. So stay put and prepare to take notes.
What Is Google AdWords?
Before we go into more detail about implementing successful Google ad campaigns, we’d like to briefly talk about what Google AdWords is.
Yes, Google AdWords is an online advertising platform. But the platform is a bit more complex than some newbies would assume.
Google designs its ad platform to respond to users’ search queries. Whenever a user enters a query into the search bar, Google displays relevant ads.
In other words, a user’s search intent is key.
Of course, search intent plays only a small role in whether or not Google displays your ads. Every business that runs ads via Google must enter bids. Those bids partly determine how visible your ads are to search engine users.
How Google Ads Work
You now have an idea of what Google AdWords is. But how exactly does Google AdWords work?
As we suggested above, user search queries trigger relevant ads. Before users see those ads, however, advertisers must select keywords they’d like to bid on. Google then decides the relevance of these keywords to certain queries.
But keyword relevance doesn’t guarantee that many users will see your ads. The relevance of the keywords advertisers bid on is only one part of the equation.
The ad rank of an advertisement is the biggest determiner of whether or not people will see your ads. This ad rank is the product of:
- An ad’s quality score
- An advertiser’s maximum bid
An ad’s quality score is a measure of how relevant or useful your ad is to users. If your ad’s relevancy is low, Google’s won’t display the ad often.
The maximum bid simply measures the maximum amount of money you bid on your target keywords. The higher your maximum bid, the greater the chances of Google displaying that ad.
But beware:
A low-quality score and a high maximum bid don’t play well together. There’s no better way for an advertiser to waste money than to bid high on low-quality ads.
Taking a Closer Look at the Numbers
Our next order of business is to explain to you why you should be using Google Ads. But before we lay out the benefits, we’d like to let the numbers speak for themselves.
- Google’s parent company boasted second-quarter sales of $26.24 billion in 2018.
- Its advertising business ballooned by 24 percent during that same quarter.
- Spending on Google Shopping ads has increased by 31 percent within a year.
These massive increases in sales are no small feat. Even as Amazon rolls out its own advertising platform, Google AdWords has remained competitive. Businesses are still finding the platform profitable and pouring more money into it.
The platform’s profitability, however, isn’t its only selling point. Check out the next section to discover a few other reasons to use Google Ads to grow your business.
Why You Should Be Using Google Ads to Grow Your Business
Google Ads can certainly help any company turn a profit, but the platform’s greatest strength isn’t its ability to help you generate revenue. If anything, some of its greatest strengths are more about how it helps you generate that revenue.
Not sure what we mean? Let’s take a closer look below:
It Produces Fast Results
Generally speaking, many online ad platforms generate fast results for businesses. Online ad campaigns take mere minutes to create. After their creation, many of them immediately make their debuts on the internet.
But Google’s ad platform produces next-level results that most competitors can’t top. Perhaps these amazing results have something to do with the fact that Google accounts for around 87 percent of online searches around the globe.
In order to put that number into perspective, think of it in terms of the sheer number of queries Google handles: 63,000 queries per second, 5.5 billion per day, or trillions each year.
So when you pay for a well-targeted Google ad? Several netizens are going to see it.
You Have Complete Control Over Your Advertising Costs
Google structures its ads in a way that lets you completely control your advertising costs. This control has everything to do with the company’s pricing structure.
When you run a Google ad campaign, you don’t pay the company to display your ads. You instead pay the company for each click your ad receives.
So if no one ever clicks your ads, Google never charges you to display those ads.
The Results Are Measurable
The measurability of the results Google AdWords produces is arguably the platform’s biggest benefit. Because of its comprehensive Google Analytics tool, you’ll never have to wonder how well your ads are performing. The analytics tool will provide that information for you.
If your ads aren’t producing conversions, you’ll know immediately. You can then start making any necessary changes.
How to Launch Your Own Ad Campaign
The moment of truth has finally arrived. We can now dive into the mechanics of launching your own ad campaign.
There’s a lot to cover here, so let’s jump right in:
Choosing Ad Placements
The first step to creating any ad campaign is deciding where you want your ads to display. As you’ll soon find out, you have tons of options here.
You can separate these options into two primary categories:
Search Network ads and Display Network ads.
Google’s Search Network encompasses all of the advertisements users see when they use the company’s search engine. These ads appear at the tops and bottoms of the SERPs as well as on the right-hand side of search pages.
The Display Network, on the other hand, includes the advertisements users encounter while browsing other websites. These ads are typically more visual and tend to incorporate rich media.
The ad placement you decide on depends heavily on your target audience.
If, for example, you’re trying to catch users’ attention as they search for certain products, the Search Network might be the best option. But if you’re trying to convert readers of certain niche sites? Maybe you should consider the Display Network.
Or you can run ads on both networks and measure the results.
Optimizing Ad Copy
Here’s the deal:
You might feel as if your product is so amazing that you need to use tons of complex language to describe it. But writing ad copy is all about readability. Potential customers need to be able to quickly understand what your product’s all about.
Having said that, here are a few tips to live by when creating ads:
- Keep your ads simple. Don’t use long sentences or extremely complex language.
- Write a gripping headline that catches users’ attention.
- Create actionable copy that encourages people to act now.
Learning How to Bid and Budget
Before you officially launch your ad campaign, you’ll have to learn how to bid and budget.
Fortunately, overbidding isn’t an issue since Google AdWords gives you complete control over your costs.
That doesn’t, however, mean that there aren’t inefficient ways of bidding.
Some keywords, for example, are more competitive than others. These competitive keywords can cost two or three times more per click than less competitive terms.
Your goal is to avoid blowing your budget on these expensive keywords. You should instead target less competitive keywords to stretch your budget.
And here’s another tip for maximizing your budget:
Creating Ad Groups
Google AdWords allows businesses to create ad groups. These ad groups help businesses separate advertisements for distinct products.
So if your business sells mobile phones and laptops, you can advertise those two products within different ad groups.
Ad groups, however, allow you to do something else:
Maximize your budget through ad optimization.
Let’s say, for example, that you’re hiring for a position at your company. In order to do so, you create free job postings and supplement those postings with advertisements. You separate these advertisements into two different ad groups.
Your primary goal is to identify which ad group maximizes the metric of your choice. If, for instance, you’re concerned with increasing your conversion rate, you’d select the ad set which better accomplishes that goal.
Once you’ve identified it, you should take note of the strategies you used to build that ad set and use those same strategies in the future. Doing so will save you time and money since you’ll know which bidding strategies don’t work for you.
Don’t Do These Two Things When Setting Up Your Campaign
On their quests to build the perfect ad campaigns, some businesses make a few major mistakes. These mistakes can be costly.
What, though, are a couple of these mistakes? Below you’ll find just two examples of things you shouldn’t do when setting up your ad campaigns.
Overspend
Overspending is an issue for several small businesses, and not just when we’re discussing ad campaigns. Many businesses, for instance, overlook insurance costs and the costs of goods or services.
One of those overlooked costs happens to be the cost of advertising.
Some businesses throw thousands of dollars at ad campaigns in hopes of improving these campaigns’ performances. Perhaps these companies believe that putting more money into these campaigns will increase their reach.
But here’s the problem:
If your ad campaign isn’t performing well, money isn’t going to fix the problem. A campaign that doesn’t perform well usually has underlying issues that are related to its quality or ability to resonate with buyers.
That ad campaign might, for example, have a low quality score. If you recall correctly, Google doesn’t display ads with low-quality scores as frequently as it displays ads with high-quality scores. And investing more money into your campaign isn’t going to cheat Google’s algorithm.
Pull Your Ads Too Early
Sometimes businesses have to pull ads for one reason or another. Maybe these ads are too controversial. Perhaps they just don’t perform well.
There’s one aspect of pulling ads, though, that some companies struggle with:
Knowing when to pull those ads.
Pulling an ad the second it doesn’t generate the results you want may sound like a solid move. When you pull an ad this soon, however, there’s a chance that not enough people have seen it for you to measure its success.
Sure, only 15 out of the 100 people who saw your ad may have clicked on it since you launched it yesterday. But by tomorrow, 600 out of the 1,000 people who have seen your ad may have clicked.
Monitoring Your Campaign Via Google Analytics
After you’ve launched your ad campaign, you’ll need to monitor your campaign’s performance via Google Analytics. The tool provides several useful insights which will help you improve the campaign’s performance.
Keep reading to find out more about how to use this tool to optimize your ads.
Tracking the Right Metrics
The Google Analytics tool does more than allow businesses to track their campaigns’ performances. The tool also provides information about conversions and how your landing pages are performing.
So if Google AdWords refers 2,000 people to your landing page but only three of them make purchases? You’ll know if you’re using Google Analytics.
Revamping Your Ad Campaign
Once you’ve identified the problematic elements of an ad campaign, you need to revamp your ad campaign by addressing those issues. Fortunately, Google Analytics (and other available analytics tools) present information in a way that makes addressing the issues easy.
Take the hypothetical situation about the ineffective landing page we just provided in the previous section for example. If you know that the problem is with the landing page, you have two viable options:
- Reworking the landing page to make it more compelling
- Routing your website’s guests to a completely different page
Neither of those options has to be difficult. They’re actionable and straightforward.
Set Up Your Google Ad Campaign Today
We know that the information provided here is a lot to take in. Google AdWords may be easy to use, but there’s definitely a learning curve. You’re not going to become an expert overnight.
Luckily, you don’t have to become an expert so soon. You can always just invest in some strategic marketing services to perfect your Google ads.
If you have any questions about how to create amazing Google ads, you can also reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you.