Ads are always by our side: wherever your online ventures may lead you, they will always be there, trying to sell you something that you might be interested in. As regular users, we almost always annoyed by them, but what if we started a campaign? Let's see how it's done.
How it Works
Google offers to create a paid campaign that will show your ads on top of the search results. Remember when you wanted to try some new food delivery, and Googled it? You will see the paid search results with an "Ad" flair. Apart from the search engine ads, Google offers something that is called a "Display Network" — hundreds of partners connected to the Ads system that will display your ads on their websites.
Smart Campaign vs Expert Mode
When starting a new ad campaign, you will be given a choice: a smart campaign that is designed for people with no marketing knowledge, or an Expert Campaign for more advanced users. It is up to you what to choose: but there is a huge difference. Smart Campaign is really easy to set up, but its biggest downside is a complete lack of customizability. Almost everything will rely on automatic settings that you won't even know existed in the first place, but chances are you wouldn't know what to do with those anyway. Expert Mode is a completely different thing — it provides you with the most powerful advertising toolset there is. You can customize everything about your audience, and all the privacy conspirators out there, let me give you a warning, you do not want to know how many things Google knows about you and the stuff that you do every day. Marital status, how many kids you have, your employer, your hobbies, whether you have pets or not — it's just the tip of the iceberg. While it might come as scary to some of you, that is how ads work now. Without collecting and storing data about users, we, as businesses, would be missing out on huge opportunities to go out there and do our thing.
Auction System
The important concept to understand is that Google Ads works on Auction System. Every time a user searches for something, thousands of companies compete for a better match, and the winners are displayed on the top. To win the auction, you might want to look at your Quality Score (QS) and the amount of money you bid. Factors that affect your QS:
- Keywords and their relevance to the ad group - Ad and its relevance to search queries - Landing page and its relevance to the ad - Your click-through rate over time - Performance over time You want your QS to always be high, because it will lower the cost of your ads, and the system will show them more often.
Cost
There is no universal rule to the costs. Overall, they highly depend on your industry and location, and, of course, your QS. The IT industry, for example, is very packed and competitive everywhere, so be prepared for the higher bids.
Tips For a Better Campaign
Get a Clear Goal
The first thing you want to do is understand your main objective, be it to have more leads, make more sales, more clicks, there are options for everything you might think of. From there, you can start to narrow down your campaign into more specific ones, defining your other goals on the way, and customizing the campaign accordingly.
Review your Landing Page
You create ads to make people click them and get to your website. It's a no-brainer, but make sure that your website, especially the landing page, is appealing, optimized, and easy to navigate. If you don't have one, hit us up, get your free consultation and quote, and we will make sure to research, design, and develop your business website in no time!
Plan Ahead
Ads are not the place to just bust in and set up everything at once. You have to put your mind into every page that Google puts you through. That means that you will have to curate every keyword, every location that you are targeting, every description. It's a tedious process, but if you do everything right, it will be very rewarding to see some good results after the first week.
Keywords
Keywords are the main driver of your campaign. You will see that Google has two options for those: broad match, and exact match. What you want to do, is target longer keywords with a broad match: this way you will have better chances to get a specific match that will win you a bid, getting you a click, and a conversion after. Don't add too much of them though, as it will not just make no difference, but make everything worse: you'll get more false matches and lose money. Be sure to focus on the essentials only, and keywords that will surely bring the right people to your landing page. There is also a "negative keywords" thing that you want to look into. Thing is, there is almost no chance that some irrelevant searches will shop up and waste your money: you have to be there to catch them and ban them right away.
Extensions
Be sure to always use those. It's a must. You can specify your location, specific products, discounts and so much more. Set up a phone extension too, so people can get in contact with you right away, and you'll have yourself a warm lead — soon to be a customer.
Use Automation
There is always an option to set up smart bidding that will make your life a little bit easier if you have no experience. It is not a bad thing to rely on automation and AI learning the patterns from, like, millions of people, and it does its job pretty well. On a side note, be sure to control everything. Just like Tesla's Autopilot, it's a wonderful thing, but you have to keep your hands on the wheel at all times to take over if something out of the ordinary happens.
Don't Be Afraid to Experiment
Google Ads offers a lot of durabilities: you can pause your campaign any time, add or remove keywords, basically change everything from scratch. Always be on the lookout to change something and experiment: there is no universal rule to success for your specific ad campaign and business in general.
