Google Ads, The Fundamentals

Google is a huge search engine and receives around 77 thousand searches per second. With a bit of maths, that’s more than a whopping 3.5 billion searches per day. But why do people tend to rely on Google search campaigns that much? Simply put, it is a place where people can get information more freely than ever.

With all that information, it can be hard for the viewer to find the direct answer they’re looking for. Therefore Google Ads was established as an online advertising solution to get the right information out there through digital marketing online. And there are certain ways of doing this.

Google Ads Campaign Types

Search

This is a type of campaign which appears after you search for a result and right below the query your ad would come up; as you can see on the right. This is mainly used for getting people onto your website. By optimising keywords and phrases you can make sure that people are prompted to your website.

Display

Display is the next one on the list. It appears across two million sites and apps but is visible to around 90% of the people on the internet. What this means is that whenever you’re just browsing the web, you are most likely to see an ad that’s relevant to what you’re searching for even searched in the past.

Shopping

Next up is the Shopping campaign. This is where you would search for an item that you’d like to buy and before you know it, Google is already displaying products to what you might be looking for.

This campaign is meant for the many merchants out there. By featuring your product for a particular product, there is a potential of increasing your leads and getting people to know about your products.

Videos

The fourth campaign is Videos. You may be a business which needs to promote a product like a pair of headphones. To get the right audience and gain their interests, a video ad would be perfect. Your ad would appear before they watch a video or even in the midst of a video depending on the video and what it is about.

App

Finally, there is an App campaign. They are across the interface of the app which can include searches on the Google Play Store or even Google created apps. With an app campaign, you are likely able to drive more engagement with users who could stumble upon your ad. This gives app developers the chance for their game or app to be shown in various places from articles to in-game adverts.

Best of all, you can choose how you want the campaign to be done. To be specific there are 2 ways of running your campaign:

Locally

Local campaigns are mainly established to use the searcher’s location and advertise the closest business relevant to it whenever they search for something. This brings in more customers to the storefront. They can appear on Google Maps, Google Search, Google Display and even on YouTube.

Discovery

As an advertiser, you would be able to publish personalised ad experiences to people. They appear in the search results page where you can search for something in its own entity like YouTube for example. As shown below

Knowing what type of google ad campaign you would prefer to use would benefit you in either getting more sales, leads or web traffic.

You can choose to either get yourself known more to customers or encourages customers to complete a purchase. But what if you want more people to know about you as well as getting more purchases.

Well, Google can also do that for you with their Dynamic Search Ads. It determines what seems best for your website given if you specify what each page of your website/product is and it can then do all the types of campaigns it thinks is relevant. This saves you time having to think about what to do and enables you to have more time for you to put within your business.

But what makes an Ad good?

A good Ad is a way of saying a lot of people click on your ad and come back with positive feedback. Either they learnt something about you or they felt the need to purchase a service for example. Advertisers only pay when people click on their ads and there are 3 factors that determine how much you pay and what people will see.

Expected Clickthrough Rate

Google predicts how your ad will be clicked on when it is shown. This is done through user clickthrough rates (CTRs) which tells Google how users react to the ad. Users react by voting on what they think about the ad. With millions of people doing this giving feedback, they can make a prediction.

Ad Landing Page Experience

Users want a page which is relevant to what they were searching for. The more people who are satisfied, the more likely you will gain a ‘higher score.’ In other words, you are most likely to come out on top of all the other advertisers with similar products/services.

A high-quality landing page consists of appropriate content which is easy to read and understand. This ad is a good example of this.

Whoever is looking for an insurance quote for free could’ve clicked on their ad and come across this. All they need to do is follow 2 of the steps as stated and they can get their quote.

Ad Relevance

Last of all is Ad Relevance. This is Google’s way of analysing how well an ad matches what the user is searching for. This makes sure that Google advertises useful ads whilst it helps businesses from paying for any ad searches that are not related to their product or service.

All of these 3 factors will help influence how your ad gets shown to people. Google’s way of saying all of these 3 factors in words is Ad Quality. The higher the quality, the less expected you are to pay and the more likely your ad will be at the top position of a search (SEO Ad Rank.)

What does that mean? It means a higher chance of your ad being an advertising success. The better the ads, the happier people will be and their more likely they are to click on.

How to make your Ad Relevant?

Every query made on Google requires a specific consumer need. So how can you tailor your site to meet their needs?

Ad Extensions

Using Ad extensions enables users to have more relevant information which can then help them make a decision. If it is created properly for the right purpose, users will have information which related to what they want and where they’re from, etc. This equates to higher engagement and this leads to better ad quality.

To sum it all up, having an extension gives users relevant information upfront. So when users go on your website, they already have enough to fulfil their desires. Which extensions would you need to know of them?

Types of Ex€tensions

Sitelinks

These are additional links that appear just below your ad. It is a way of showcasing what else you have to show in stock for them (more engagement.)

Callout

These are 25-characters of text which consists of short snappy information about your business. It works the same way as a slogan.

Location

This is a common extension and indicates people which way is the way to your business.

These are the ones that you’ll see more often however there is a whole lot more:

• App Extensions
• Price Extensions
• Promotion Extensions
• Message Extensions
• Ad Extensions

How to put all this into practice?

With all this information that you’ve got, it’s best to put all this into practice. You know your customers best. With what you’ve done before, you can input your data who’s used your site before and from there build it up. Look at it as remarketing.

Some people may have been on your site before. Some may have placed an item in their basket but never checked out. With Google Ads, you turn previous or even current data and use it to remarket.

You can create offers and broadcast it with the promotion extension. A 10% can’t do any harm and if anything, it allows you to gain customers and in the long run, they can be returning customers. You could do this by increasing your bids on certain audiences or decrease them.

You can tailor ads based on the customer using ad groups to create keywords to those who have visited your site before. For those who haven’t, they can have the option to visit your site for an offer like 20% off limited time only.

Uploading your data to Google Ads not only gives more accurate results but also allows Google to read the information and put it to use by creating you a form. This form has an insight who your audiences are and you can then see what you can do next to see if you are able to influence them to make purchases from you. Or to at least acknowledge yourselves as a trustworthy service.

Optimisation

With all this being said there are a few things left to say. There are times where you’ll notice your campaigns are at their lowest. If that is the case patience is what you need. Some words do better than others so the best thing you can do is to remove the underperforming keywords rather than wasting your money that isn’t converting well. With that being said, always keep an eye out for what is converting well and what isn’t.

In Google Ads, there is an Ads Recommendations page which estimates how well your search campaigns are doing roughly. If it is 75% it means that there is still a 25% option for you to to be able to improve your ad. This percentage is known as Optimisation Score of your ad and indicates that there could be a few things that you could improve.

After that, you could review the way you have structured your ad campaigns. Look for the way you have targeted your locations. Think about the types of people who live within that area. Would you be able to tailor your business to people with different ethnicity. If that’s the case, add language settings. It won’t do any harm and by doing so there is a potential that they would start coming to your business and they could bring in their own people. Just like that, you are more of a business than what you started off before.

Your URL could be made unique just for your website. Instead of it consisting of a bunch of letters and numbers you could make it so that it could be the same as the title of your page. This would ensure that if a word is searched and is one one of your keywords, users are more likely to click on your ad. The little things like that all add up just to up your score and ranking.

These are the things that you should take into consideration. Taking these things into account gives you a major understanding of Google Ads search. You should have a greater insight on how Google Ad runs and what to do in order to reap the benefits off of it from the startup.