Do you know how many businesses around the world use Google to drive sales to their companies?
Google reported in 2017 that approximately 1.5 million companies use their advertising platform every year. This advertising has led to sales in the billions.
But how do you get in the action? The digital advertising landscape can be daunting for someone starting, but there are things you can do when starting to get off on the right foot.
Keep reading to learn what paid to advertise on Google is and how you can do it right.
What is Pay Per Click Advertising?
Pay per click advertising is a form of digital advertising that allows you to show advertisements to consumers on websites.
Advertising networks have an inventory of websites that sign up to their program to run their ads. When you purchase advertising through a network, your ad will run on related sites to drive traffic to your website or landing page.
What Types of Ads Can You Run?
There are three main types of advertisements on the web. Here are the kinds of ads you can run.
Text Ads
Text ads show up as a link and a few sentences about your product and service. They typically appear alongside other text advertisements that were purchased from other companies.
Image Ads
Image advertisements typically show up in the same places that you find text ads. You will usually have the ad space to yourself which allows you to grab the attention of the website visitor better.
Video Ads
As the name implies, video ads will show a video to the people you are trying to reach. You can find these ads more commonly on video platforms like YouTube.
But, some websites allow video on their sites. Usually, these are set to play on user interaction, so there is no guarantee the user will see the advertisement at all.
How Does Google Auction Work?
The Google auction is the process you go through to buy ad space.
You set up your campaigns by bidding on keywords. For each term you want to target, you will set the price you want to pay.
Google then takes this and compares it with the prices set by other companies and distributes ad inventory based on who pays more.
After that Google will determine the quality of your ads. Your ad is assigned a quality score after being run which is then factored into your ad positioning in the search engine.
The final factor for the Google auction is the quality of your landing page. Google wants this page to be relevant to the ad so it will rank it on quality and adjust your ad position accordingly.
Tips to Help You Get Started
Getting started on Google ads doesn’t have to be difficult. Below you will find a few tips that will help you launch your first campaign and scale it to be profitable.
Use the Google Adwords Keyword Planner
The Keyword Planner is a tool provided by Google that will give you statistics on the various keywords you can target with ads.
It provides statistics like search volume, the average cost per click, trends, and competition. You can use this information to find new keywords to target with advertising and figure out how much to bid for your campaign.
Run Multiple Ad Sets
Chances are a large number of your campaigns won’t be adequate. Nothing you do will be optimized when you first get started.
You need to figure out what works, and this happens when you test multiple ads to see which one performs better.
Once you track your best performers, turn off the ones that don’t make money and focus on optimizing your winners.
Read All Your Reports
If you just set up your ad and don’t do anything, you will never get anywhere. Read all your reports to learn how your ad is performing.
Google also provides free analytic tools for your website which can track conversions. You can use these reports to figure out what ads are leading to the most profit.
Test Different Titles and Descriptions
Consumers don’t react to words the same way. You should test your headlines and descriptions to see which ones elicit the best response for your advertisement.
Your words should be simple and entice the consumer to take action.
Use Different Ads for Different Demographics
Knowing that consumers react differently to words, we can take things one step further. Separate your advertisements based on demographics like sex, age, location, and interests.
By doing this, you can craft your marketing to better fit the people seeing it.
Test Your Budget
Even if you follow the Keyword Planner for your ad budget, you may still not be getting good results from it.
Try experimenting with your budget to see if it allows you to reach more people. Your quality score can also play a factor here. You could get away with a lower budget if Google thinks you are providing excellent value.
Use A/B Testing
Once you have your winning ads, it’s time to optimize them to get the most profit out of them. A/B testing an ad means changing small things about the ad and then comparing the results at scale.
Even small changes can make a difference. You might think that half a percent increase may not be worth the effort, but when you apply this to a large enough volume, you can see a noticeable improvement in success.
Add in a few of these changes, and you can increase your conversions by several percent if you are productive with your testing.
Advertising on Google: Final Thoughts
Advertising on Google can be very profitable when you learn to do it right. Chances are you will struggle at the beginning to see ROI on your advertising. But, once you determine which of your advertisements perform the best, you can keep putting money in and see conversions roll into your store.
Are you trying different conversion strategies to get more out of your digital ads? Check our conversion guide for more tips to get the most bang for your buck.