PPC / Google Ads Management Services
What is Google Ads?
Not every business can afford to reserve ad time during the Super Bowl. Most need to achieve results through more realistic means. Options that let them control their marketing budgets while still reaching large audiences. To meet these goals, one of the most effective methods available to the modern business owner is Google Ads.
Google Ads is an advertising platform that allows businesses to target high potential consumers without investing thousands of dollars into analyzing individual trends. An effective Google Ads campaign will increase site traffic, overall engagement, and convert more visitors into paying customers.
The platform uses the information that Google already collects and leverages it to display your advertisements to searchers with an interest in your product. For example, someone searching for a camping tent might be shown ads for bug repellant. Google Ads’ algorithm helps your ad show up at the best timing and increase the odds of a clickthrough.
There are even AI components to the platform that progressively improve your campaign. If a certain banner isn’t doing well, it will learn and fine-tune your campaign to hit a more fitting audience. Best of all, Google Ads operates on a PPC model so you don’t end up paying for ineffectual ads.
This article will delve into how you can use Google Ads to help advance your business goals.
What Does PPC Stand For?
PPC is shorthand for “pay-per-click.” It’s a marketing payment model in which the ad’s owner pays a predetermined fee for each person that clicks through. This means you aren’t charged for all the thousands of people who see your ad but choose to ignore it. Every cent you spend is effective since you aren’t charged unless a minimum level of interaction is achieved.
Some people wonder why paid advertising is important at all. Public relations is also a highly effective method for elevating a business’ reputation. Not to mention free. However, at the top of each industry, every company is already taking full advantage of non-paid marketing methods, so they need to turn to paid options to get a leg up.
Google Ad’s PPC model is a cost-effective method that can get them a competitive edge. Advertisers place bids on specific keywords to give their ad a chance to appear on searches related to their product. These are the “sponsored ads” that you’ll see at the top of most pages.
This is why paid advertising is important. It allows smaller businesses to appear higher on search results than other companies that organically raised their SEO rankings.
You might look at this and believe that you have no chance at outbidding multi-million dollar companies. However, depending on your niche, these companies aren’t who you’re usually competing with.
Google Ads’ allows you to restrict your ads to specific locations. After all, a family plumbing service in Dallas doesn’t want to be charged for clicks from San Francisco. Locational targeting also gives your business a leg up against industry titans who are bidding on a national scale.
The Importance of Keywords
You can bid on all the keywords you want, but you won’t see matching results until you’ve done the right keyword research. While ineffective Google Ads campaigns don’t directly harm you due to the PPC model, the wasted time and loss of potential customers is an invisible cost.
The right keywords let you appear more frequently, dodge unnecessary competition, and better represent your product. If you’re not seeing the returns you expected from your campaign, then you might want to change up how Google Ads is using your keywords. Match Types offer an easy way to target related queries without adding dozens of additional keywords.
Understanding Match Types
If you have the skill to choose the objectively best keyword for every ad in your campaign, then you’re quite an amazing individual. Most of us need a little more leeway when making keyword selections. This is where Google’s Match Types feature comes in handy.
Match Types tells Google how you want your keyword to be used. You can set your ads to display only if the exact keyword is searched, or you can have it appear for any search related to your product. There are four ways that Google Ads accomplishes this.
- Exact Match: As the name suggests, this option keeps your keyword phrase in the exact order and wording you chose. Nothing is added to the phrase to alter it and it will only appear in queries that match it completely.
- Broad: This setting matches your keyword phrase with a wide range of similar queries. It does this by using individual words in your phrase to decide. Under this option, using a phrase like “Basketball Shoes” could match your ad to searches for regular shoes or just a plain, old basketball.
- Modified Broad: This option ensures that a certain word in your keyword phrase is included in every match by inputting a “+” sign before the word. For example, “+Basketball Shoes” would only match queries with the word “Basketball” in them.
- Phrase: This match type displays your ad on queries that include your phrase. It may add extra words before or after, but your exact keyword phrase will always be included. If your keyword was “Basketball Shoes,” then your ad might show up for searches like “Children’s Basketball Shoes.”
Where Google Ads Can Appear
What makes Google Ads one of the best ways to reach a specific audience with your campaign is automated targeting. You don’t have to predict which sites to put your banners on or which YouTube video to choose for your ad. Google Ads automatically reaches the right people at the right times through a massive network of blogs, stores, and social sites.
Controlling where your ads appear requires an understanding of what criteria is reviewed by Google Ads. These include:
- Who they target
- The size of your ad
- The content (text, image, video, etc…)
Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs)
The most natural place for Google Ads to appear is on Google itself. The average person uses Google for a search between 3 and 4 times a day. Sponsored ads appear at the top of the search page, even higher than the top-ranking, organic results for the keyword. However, it isn’t just Google.com SERPs that are included in this.
Google has a number of search partners that also participate in their ad services. This obviously includes their maps services, play store, and shopping feeds, but its reach goes far beyond that. Among their search partners are non-Google juggernauts like YouTube, Amazon, and even The New York Times.
Google Display Network
The Google Display Network is a collection of over 2 million sites that your ads can appear on. Unlike the SERPs page, which targets internet users when they’re just beginning to show interest, the Google Display Network reaches them throughout their buying research. Ads that appear in this phase are able to better influence their buying decisions in your favor.
Additionally, ads on the Google Display Network aren’t limited to text form like on search pages. They can include text, images, audio, and video, so there are fewer restrictions on the type of campaign you want to run.
Mobile Apps
I don’t need to tell you how much time the average US consumer spends on their phone. A lot of this screen time isn’t spent on internet browsers but on mobile applications. Games, news, ebook readers, and social media applications are great ways to kill time.
This works for apps in both the Apple and Google Play Stores. However, you’ll want to be extra careful when investing in mobile app advertising. Studies have shown that 90 percent of mobile users find interruptive ads on their devices more annoying than other sources.
You’re able to choose specific apps for your ads which can help you pick out interested demographics and avoid damaging your online reputation.
How to Test a Business Idea With Facebook Ads
Social media allows us to poll unprecedented numbers of consumers and get results back nearly instantaneously. If you want to know more about the efficacy of a possible product, then Facebook Ads offers an easy way to gauge interest before investing.
Here, we’ll outline the general steps to testing a business idea with Facebook Ads.
- Create a Facebook Profile Page: While you can create a page with your business identity, that also means tying your business with the products you’re testing. Products that you don’t have complete faith in (for now.) If you want to avoid this, then it’s best to create a public figure page.
- Set Up a Facebook Ads Account: Aside from a Facebook profile, you also need to create a Facebook Ads account. This is where you’ll manage your posts and measure their effectiveness. The process is straightforward and can be completed by following the prompts provided on Facebook’s business page. You can find a step-by-step guide here.
- Post Some Content: Create a post that is easy to engagement. It shouldn’t be an article, long video, or link to your online store. You’re just looking to check for possible interest, so a short survey or probing question is perfect.
- Measure Engagement and Interest: Facebook pixel is a program that tracks the actions that visitors take on your page. The pixel is triggered whenever your ad is interacted with and even allows for retargeting practices to determine the level of interest. Just remember that results on Facebook can manifest in many ways and not just in the total number of views. Check stats like the share rate and even which emoticons were used. Every little detail can tell you something.
Whether you’re using advertising to bring in customers or just check on the viability of a product, you need to fully understand the results of each step. The wrong judgment can lead to misleading results that can misrepresent the success of the entire campaign. That means having a Google Ads specialist that can bring your campaign from initial setup to final analysis while tweaking the campaign the whole way through.
BroadVision Marketing is a highly experienced agency that prioritizes transparent communication with our clients. When an ad needs an adjustment, we make sure to fully explain our reasoning and methods so the client always knows where their money is going. To learn more about how Google Ads can help you advance your business goals, contact BroadVision Marketing today.
