In this highly-competitive market, it is very essential for any brand to maintain its online presence. This is required in order to acquire and retain customers, and eventually, drive Sales. Hence, having the right Marketing Strategy in place is important in building up your brand. Advertisement Support is one of the main ingredients of a robust Marketing Strategy, and Google Ads is one of the most pervasive Advertising Platforms being used by brands to maximize their returns and profit.
Google Ads is the world’s largest Advertising Tool used by businesses of all sizes to bring in new Leads and increase Sales. Google Ads helps users to get in front of people by showing Ads on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) and other websites. If you do it right, Google Ads can give you nearly instant results. But if this is your first time advertising on Google Ads, there is a learning curve. This Google Ads Guide discusses how you can use Ads by Google to get more visibility for your business.
Table of Contents
What is Google Ads?
Image Source: www.zeevector.com
People search on Google to find the answer to their problems, and this is your opportunity to get in front of people and showcase your services/products as the solution that your business has to people’s problems. Google Ads is the most prominent Advertising Platform leveraged by large, small, and enterprise-level businesses to increase their Sales and Brand Awareness by getting their Ads on top of the Search Results. Businesses pay Google to get their Advertisements, Product Listings, or Service Offerings displayed to Web Users on Non-search Websites, Mobile Apps, and Videos via the Google Ad Network.
Google Ads Advertising Platform falls under the category of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Paid Marketing, and allows advertisers to pay an amount for every Ad click. Google generates millions of search queries in a day, and it has comprehensive resources to drive more traffic. Hence, with the help of Google Ads, you can drive quality Website Traffic, generate more Leads, and increase Sales at your Online Store.
What makes Google Ads so powerful is not only the ability to target very specific Keywords, but you can also get very analytical and target Web Users by Geography, Time, or the kind of device they’re using.
Simultaneously, Google Ads helps you to optimize your Marketing Campaigns by analyzing and reviewing your paid Ads Campaigns and suggesting changes that can work well for your business. Thus, with Google Ads, you can increase Conversion Rates and ROI with optimized Marketing Campaigns.
Google AdWords to Google Ads
On July 24th, 2018, the Google AdWords brand updated its name, logo, URL, and features. The URL changed from “adwords.google.com” to “ads.google.com”. Google had renamed its AdWords platform to Google Ads. Google rolled out added features to include Video and Display Ads with the newer version. The new Google Ads platform represents the full range of campaign types available today, including Search, Display, and Video.
While Google AdWords focused primarily on Text Ads on Google Searches, Google Ads has made it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to advertise across all Pay-Per-Click channels such as Partner Pages, Videos, Search, and more. Extending the functionality of Google AdWords, Google Ads allows enterprise-level advertisers to leverage its Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Forecasting capabilities.
Google Ads introduced Smart Campaigns for small businesses to target users who are willing to call, visit the store, or go online to make purchases. Simply put, the change is intended to evenly spread out your Marketing Budget across various content platforms.
Hevo Data is a No-code Data Pipeline that offers a fully managed solution to set up data integration from Google Ads (one of the 30+ Free Data Sources) and 100+ Data Sources and will let you directly load data to a Data Warehouse or the destination of your choice. It will automate your data flow in minutes without writing any line of code. Its fault-tolerant architecture makes sure that your data is secure and consistent. Hevo provides you with a truly efficient and fully automated solution to manage data in real-time and always have analysis-ready data.
Get started with hevo for free
Let’s look at some of the salient features of Hevo:
- Fully Managed: It requires no management and maintenance as Hevo is a fully automated platform.
- Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to transfer.
- Real-Time: Hevo offers real-time data migration. So, your data is always ready for analysis.
- Schema Management: Hevo can automatically detect the schema of the incoming data and map it to the destination schema.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100’s of sources that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
- Live Monitoring: Advanced monitoring gives you a one-stop view to watch all the activities that occur within Data Pipelines.
- Live Support: Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to its customers through chat, email, and support calls.
Sign up here for a 14-day free trial!
Working with Google Ads
New to Google Ads? Don’t worry because we bring to you the Ultimate Google Ads Guide which will help you to get started and eventually earn more with Google Ads.
The price structure of Google Ads is like an auction that allows businesses to bid on the Pay-Per-Click (CPC) rates, making it the most cost-effective Advertising Platform for all businesses.
In addition to the amount you’re willing to pay, there are other factors like Quality Score, Search Variations, Match Type, etc which help in deciding how high your Ad will be placed on the SERP. Let’s discuss the various aspects of Google Ads which will help you get started.
Step 1: Getting Started with Google Ads
To get started, you’ll need a Gmail Account. If you don’t already have a Gmail Account, you can always go and sign up for free. Here are the important things to know before you create your first Ad.
a) Create a Google Ads Account
To set up your Google Ads Account, visit their home page and click on “Get started”. Fill in the necessary details such as your Email Address, Time Zone, Currency, etc, and finish the setup to create your account.
b) Keyword Research
Image Source: www.payu.in/blog
Keywords will be the building blocks of your Ad Campaign. The first real step is to do Keyword Research to figure out what someone would type into Google to find your product. You want your product to be advertised for the most relevant searches to increase your conversion rates. Hence, finding the most effective keywords for your campaign becomes very important.
Exact matches may not be that effective, so you need to experiment with a wide range of Keyword Variations to get your product or service across a wider range of your target audience.
However, it is impossible to predict every possible variation of a specific keyword, but you can still cover a lot of it. Below are the different match types that you can consider exploring.
- Exact Match: Exact Match will return your Ad Campaign only to searches with the term as typed. It will also return your Ad to the close variants of the term including misspellings.
- Phrase Match: Phrase Match will match searches with the term intact as typed, but with variations before or after the term.
- Broad Match: Broad Match will return your Ad to the search variations (including synonyms) similar to the term without any limitations.
- Modified Broad Match: This will return your Ad to all the search variations (including synonyms, misspellings, abbreviations, plurals, etc) similar to the term without any limitations.
c) Write a Strong Ad Copy
After you’re done with the Keyword Research, it’s now time to be ready with an Ad Copy.
Image Source: www.siteimprove.com
- Impactful Headline: A strong Headline can easily grab someone’s attention. The Headline should be clear, catchy, tempting, but relevant. Google often emboldens the words in a Headline that matches with the user’s search.
- Clear Ad Body: After creating a strong Headline, you now have 2 lines to describe your product in the Ad Body. Your Ad Body should be clear enough to the reader, anything vague or puzzling will deceive the users and will increase the bounce rate.
d) Landing Page
Google will help you get people to click on your Ads and redirect them to your Landing Page. But from there, it’s your responsibility to convert them into Sales. To do so, your Landing Page must be relevant to what the Ad promised.
You can also come up with a catchy Display URL to get a marketing edge. Google emboldens matching keywords present in the URL.
e) Customize Ads Settings
There is always a possibility of saving some money by optimizing your Ad Campaigns.
Google suggests a package deal that includes both Search and Display Advertising. However, if you’re just starting out, you can skip the Display Advertising part. You can explore the Search Advertising part and understand a little more about your Ad Campaigns before spending heavy bucks on Display Advertising.
It is also suggested to turn on “All features”.
- Ads Scheduling: This allows you to schedule your Ad Campaigns to reach people at the right time.
- Target Location: You get the flexibility to display your Ads only to an audience from specific locations. A targeted location is a good Advertising Strategy for location-based products.
- Ad Rotation: The Ad Rotation feature allows you to run multiple Ads for the same search.
- URL Tracking: You can also add tracking codes to your URLs for better insights into your Ad Campaigns.
- Reviews: Apart from the above-mentioned tips, you can also include Customer Feedbacks from third-party sites in your Ads.
- Snippets: You can add a snippet about your product from your Landing Page into your Ads.
These important tips are more than enough to help you get started with Google Ads.
Step 2: Optimize your Google Ads Campaign
This part is about how you can improve the performance of your Ad Campaigns. Here are the important things you can implement to improve your Ad Campaigns.
a) Competitor Analysis
You can always learn from your competitors. People searching for your competitors are more likely to be a part of your target market. And, your competitors have already tried and tested many approaches with the same audience, and they have established themselves in the market. You can always try out the keywords and approaches that worked for your competitors.
You can also experiment with Long Tail Keywords based on longer search phrases used by people to ask questions. This will help you increase conversion rates by closing in on visitors who are already tuned in to what you’re offering.
b) Update Ad Copy
In this ever-changing world, it is necessary to be up-to-date. It is advisable to update your Ad Copy every once in a while. You can always experiment and make new changes/variations to your Ad Copy to drive more people to your Landing Page.
c) Measure Overall ROI
Image Source: www.gatorworks.net
Keeping an eye just on the traffic numbers isn’t the right way of measuring ROI. There is a possibility that a variation of an Ad gets more clicks and traffic but has a lower conversion rate. And it is also possible that another variation of the same Ad gets less traffic but is able to convert more sales, bringing in more revenue. Hence, always measure the overall ROI of an Ad Campaign to identify the real winners.
d) Improve Your Quality Score
The amount paid varies from one advertiser to another based on many factors like their ad position and how relevant their landing page is.
Google assigns a Quality Score depending on how relevant your Landing Page is to the searched keyword. Your Quality Score directly affects the amount you pay for Pay-Per-Click (PPC). Having a good Quality Score can help you save a lot of your Advertising Budget.
You can improve your Quality Score by putting relevant Ads and creating a great Landing Page experience for your viewers. This will help you to cut the overall Advertising Cost.
e) Remarketing
Image Source: www.lookinla.com
Ever happened to you that you browsed some product on a website and you see the same product recommendation on other websites as well? Well, this is called Remarketing. With Google Ads, you can display your Ads on other websites via Google Ad Network.
f) Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic Keyword Insertion allows you to instantly customize or modify your Ad to match what viewers are searching for. You can include the search keyword dynamically into the Headline or the Ad Copy. However, you need to be a little careful while working around Dynamic Insertion, as you can end up wasting a click if you don’t offer exactly what the user searched for.
If you can work on all the above-mentioned tips, you’re bound to run a successful Google Ads Campaign.
Conclusion
Google Ads is the best tool to reach a wider audience with an unplanned budget and low traffic. Google Ads charges you based on the number of clicks your Ad gets. But you need to know the right strategies to improve your Ad Campaigns and optimize your Advertising Budget. This article introduced you to Google Ads and took you through various aspects of it which you can consider to run a successful Ad Campaign.
If you want to integrate data from Google Ads to carry out an insightful analysis of your Marketing Campaign and Strategies, then Hevo Data can be the one-stop-shop solution for your Data Integration needs!
visit our website to explore hevo
Hevo Data with its strong integration with 100+ Sources & BI tools such as Google Ads (a Free Data Source), allows you to not only export data from sources & load data in the destinations, but also transform & enrich your data, & make it analysis-ready so that you can focus only on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools.
Give Hevo Data a try and sign up for a 14-day free trial today. Hevo offers plans & pricing for different use cases and business needs, check them out!
New to Google Ads? Share your experience of working with your first Advertisement on Google Ads in the comments section below.