Recently, digital ad spend is rising globally year over year and is gradually replacing traditional advertising. Experts are predicting in five years digital advertising will reach a new peak. Google is the biggest and most popular search engine, it has an impressive 90%+ market share of online searches. Therefore Google Ads is undoubtedly one of the most important and effective digital marketing channels for small businesses. Google Ads helps small and medium businesses reach the right customers and grow businesses with low budgets, no contracts, and no obligations. Interested in Google Ads advertising? What are Google Ads? What are the pros and cons? Want to know how to reach the right audience and dominate the market? What makes Google Ads different? You will find the magic power of Google Ads for small businesses in this article.
1. The Four Google Ads Types
There are many different channels and platforms you can use to advertise your business: Google Ads, Facebook ads, Bing ads, etc. The most popular is Google Ads.
Founded in 2000, Google AdWords is an advertising platform developed by search engine giant Google. Google Ads accounts for 97% of Google’s revenue. Google Ads is Google’s pay per click solution, which allows businesses and websites to bid on the chance to show their ads to visitors on Google. You can select between one of seven campaign types, the most commonly used are search ads, display ads, shopping ads, and Video ads (YouTube Ads).
Google Search Ads
When businesses advertise on the Google Search Network, their ad can show above or below the search results when someone searches using keywords related to your paid campaigns. Allowing advertisers to advertise their products or services, these text-based ads bring visitors to their landing page. Getting really precise in targeting and converting visitors, Google search ads are a great choice for small and large businesses.
Google Display Ads
Based on users’ previous online activity and ads shown to users through the Google Display Network, Google display ads can reach people while they are browsing their favourite websites and allow advertisers to retarget users who have already visited their site. With a relatively lower click-through-rate and cost-per-click, Google Display ads are an effective way to extend the reach of your brand.
Google Shopping Ads
With rich product information including prices, pictures and descriptions, Google shopping campaigns, are a great choice for e-commerce websites, to promote products to customers using Google’s own keyword data. Some visitors click and buy immediately while others save for future use.
YouTube Ads
As the world’s largest video platform, YouTube lets visitors take action when they watch or search for videos. Ranging from seconds to minutes, YouTube ads connect with users in a creative and memorable way. Similar to expensive commercials on TV, YouTube ads enable businesses to engage with users in a cost-effective way.
Confused? Different types of ads are for different goals and businesses. It is necessary to set up pilot campaigns and test different options, the search ads are usually the most effective and common way to start though.
Depending on your business there are different types of goals that are important to you.
TIP: It is important before you move on to the next step you have conversion tracking in place correctly. Not setting it up correctly will lead to incorrect optimization and money wasted. **note our one clients had conversion tracking set up incorrectly, read more here**
2. Why You Should Use Google Ads
Precise targeting: Google Ads targets the audience through keywords, demographics, location, language, device, time, etc. You can reduce costs by narrowing the audience.
TIP: As a small business, it is very important that you select the targeting carefully. If you start out too big, your daily budget can run out very fast!
Flexible budget: Google Ads lets you set a daily budget and bid for each campaign. You can adjust your campaign budget or pause your ads at any time.
Instant traffic and sales: Google Ads gives you nearly instant results. While SEO sometimes fails to target the keywords you want, Google Ads will instantly target the keywords you want. Getting your ads to show up in search results quickly and precisely, Google Ads is a powerful way to generate traffic with highly competitive keywords.
TIP: Be careful about which keyword type you select, using broad keywords can trigger irrelevant searches that will end up costing you money.
Big data analytics: Google Ads also shows you whether visitors signed up, purchased your product or called your business after interacting with your ads. Therefore you can see which ads or keywords are best at driving traffic and optimize your campaign accordingly.
Google Ads Statistics Panel
Scalable: As the world’s largest online advertising platform, Google Ads enables advertisers to grow and scale campaigns to improve return on investment. The more effort you put into your campaigns, the more traffic and clicks you will get. Your ads can show up anywhere Google appears.
3. Account Structure of Google Ads
Before building out the company’s Google Ads account, businesses and advertisers should have a basic understanding of account organization, especially the search ads. The way you structure your Google Ads account can drastically affect the performance of your campaign.
Google Ads Campaign Structure
Google Ads is organized into three layers: ad account, ad campaigns and ad groups. The ad groups contain a set of similar keywords and ad copies.
Google Ad Account: a manager account can have 20 Google Ad accounts and as many as 10,000 campaigns for each. A typical account is usually more than enough for small businesses. Larger businesses may use multiple ad accounts, depending on the different types of businesses and domains they may have.
Google Ads Campaign: A Google Ads campaign can be created as a search campaign, display campaign, shopping campaign, video campaign and so on. Noah Digital strongly recommends that you set up and manage campaigns based on the category of your business or product (for example, each product or service can be a campaign). Therefore you can clearly see the result and performance of each campaign, which makes it easier to optimize and scale. In addition, in the ads account budgets are allocated to different campaigns. Generally, the budget is first given to search advertising campaigns that are most likely to bring in traffic and sales. Display ads may use up to 20% of the budget, the allocation is affected by the goal of the business though.
Ad Group: in each ad campaign, there are different types of ad groups with similar keywords. Ad groups use a similar structure as campaigns, including up to twenty keywords related to the product/business. The main function of the ad group is to refine the product or service, so as to monitor the performance of each specific keyword.
Keywords: keyword selection is the core of Google search ads, and keyword matching can be divided into four types – broad match, modified board match, phrase match and exact match. Keywords are typically related to the brand, product and service. When setting up keywords, you should not use the same keywords that appear in other campaigns and ad groups, this is not good for performance, optimizing and cost. Phrase match and exact match allow you to reach prospects searching only for the specific or close keyword, with a relatively high click-through rate and conversion rate. The match type keywords “broad match” and “modified broad match” can be very broad, with a relatively low click-through rate and conversion rate.
Ad Copy: each ad group needs three sets of ad copy and one landing page. Headlines and descriptions are the most important, catching the user’s attention. The headline contains up to 30 characters and the description contains up to 90 characters. In the advertising headline and description, we use high-level copywriting skills to clearly describe unique selling points and offers, so as to make the ads stand out among competitors.
4. Myths About Google Ads
People always ask “competitors will click on my ads?” “how about the performance?” and more. Here are eight common myths about Google Ads.
Google Ads Myth 1 – “people don’t click on ads!”
A lot of people think users don’t click ads. In fact, most users click the top ad when searching. Many users can’t distinguish between ads and organic search results, and they just click on the first search. A survey shows that 75% of users think Google search ads help them find useful information.
Google Ads Myth 2 – “Google Ads is expensive!”
Google Ads uses pay per click, and for most industries, the keyword cost (CPC) is around $1-3. With the traffic and sales brought by Google Ads, it has a relatively lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) and is much more cost-effective than traditional advertising. In some highly competitive industries, the CPC is very expensive, for example, some keywords can be $50-100+ in the law industry. The commercial value of these words is also very high, as the return is higher. Compared with other advertising channels, Google Ads is more controllable, with more precise targeting and better performance. Learn more about customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV) to help you properly evaluate the effectiveness of Google Ads.
Google Ads Cost Per Click
Google Ads Myth 3 – “I do search engine optimization, so I don’t need Google Ads!”
Some people think: my search engine rankings are good, I don’t need to pay for Google Ads. Did you know that 41% of the clicks were picked up by the top three Google ads? In fact, even if your website ranks first on the Google search results page, users still see Google ads first, which leads to a large loss of traffic originally belonging to you. If you don’t advertise, and your competitors are advertising, then you will lose a portion of your market share. More importantly, search engine optimization only covers a limited number of keywords, and there are a large number of keywords that are not covered. At this time, Google search advertising shows its great advantages. Read more about the differences between PPC and SEO.
Google Ads Myth 4 – “if you don’t sell products online, you don’t need to advertise!”
There are two types of businesses using online promotion a lot. One is e-commerce who obtains sales online through e-commerce websites; the other is business obtaining leads through online channels, and then convert leads into customers. From immigration, law, education, real estate, home decoration, finance and insurance, tourism hotels, to B2B professionals, almost all industries can use Google Ads to attract potential customers. This is a great opportunity for small and medium businesses to beat their competitors. The question is if you want to seize the opportunity.
Google Ads Myth 5 – “do competitors click on my ads?”
Don’t worry about that at all. Google’s advanced technology can identify those false clicks and will refund you.
Google Ads Myth 6 – “can I run Google Ads independently?”
Google Ads platform is different from other advertising platforms. It seems simple, but actually, it is very complex and complicated. Experience and knowledge are required to deal with different situations and problems. To save costs, some businesses do not hire a professional team, they tackle it themselves. As a result, they waste a lot of money on advertising with poor results. Google Ads is a very sophisticated system. If you don’t set it up correctly, take the time to optimize it and the experience to analyze it, thousands of dollars will be wasted. When we reviewed a Google account recently, we found that a company was losing $10,000 a year due to just one incorrect setting. If SEO or website design is not done well, the worst case is that you don’t have results. However, if your Google Ads is not done properly, you may lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Google Ads Myth 7 – “Google Ads doesn’t work”
When overseeing Google Ads accounts, we found that those who did not manage Google Ads well think Google Ads has no effect. Problems include lack of web optimization, poor campaign structure, wrong settings, wrong keywords and so on. These seemingly common but very expensive mistakes let many businesses fear and give up. The best way is to hire Google PPC experts to help you plan and launch Google ads.
Google Ads Myth 8 – “how many clicks and views can you guarantee?”
This question has been asked a lot. We focus on precise traffic, conversion rate and customer acquisition cost. If the audience is not precisely targeted, then it is useless. So you should know how many leads and sales the ads can bring in, and what is the cost of acquiring them.
5. Google Ads Case Studies
You may have had this experience. Finally, your website is online, however, there is no traffic, just like an isolated island in the desert. You did SEO, but there is not much organic search traffic as well. At this time, Google Ads can save the new online site! It can bring you instant targeted traffic, leads and sales. In the past 18 years, Noah Digital marketing experts has made impressive achievements in helping customers from different industries use Google Ads to multiply your leads and sales within months. Learn more about Noah Digital’s online marketing case studies.
In Conclusion
In digital advertising, Google Ads is undoubtedly the most effective advertising channel for small and medium-sized businesses. Google Ads has the benefits of precise targeting, instant effect and high scalability. Knowledge and experience is the most important role in successful Google Ads, which includes the creation of the advertising campaigns, daily management and optimization, big data analysis, and understanding of different industries. Google Ads is highly professional and requires Google Ads certified professionals to manage the campaigns. Noah Digital marketing team has 18 years of experience in Google Ads, managing more than 50 million dollars of advertising campaigns across a wide array of industries, and success stories have been published featured on Microsoft’s website. Noah Digital is led by Dr. Tang and Mary Wang, our team of Google Ads experts will help you dominate the Chinese and English markets, grow faster, and take your brand to new heights. Contact us for a free consultation!
