How Google Ads Will Benefit Your Business

I'm sure in this day and age you are familiar with ads being displayed all over the internet- through search queries on Google, scrolling through Facebook, images on sites you were not expecting to see ads on, and the most annoying- having to wait to watch a YouTube video so they can serve you an ad first. As someone surfing on the internet it gets old, but for advertisers it is tapping into a never-ending pool of potential customers. Google Ads (formerly known as Adwords) is a digital advertising software by Google that allows advertisers to have their advertisements show up on Google's search engine results page (SERP) whenever a user types in keywords that are relevant to the website's business. We have all seen these ads before, but you might wonder how exactly companies are able to serve them to you when you type in that search query.

Well, The Secret is Out

There it is. This is the back end of one of our client's Google Ads account home pages. On the overview, I can see important metrics such as clicks, conversions, what a conversion costs, and how much has been spent. As you can see the data is from the last 14 days, and you can segment the data into any historical time duration so you can track changes in performance.

How Do I Go About Setting Up Google Ads?

The first thing you need to do is set up an account with Google. I won't go into that in this blog but follow the link when you feel that you are ready.

Once you have an account set up with Google, the next step you are going to take is starting a new campaign! Select the "Campaigns" tab and click "New Campaign."

You will be prompted with various campaign options, let me go a little deeper into the differences between these.

Search campaigns refer to the Google Search Network. For this type of campaign, you bid on various keywords relevant to your website and when your ad wins a slot in the auction, your ad is displayed to the person searching the term. You are charged once someone clicks on your ad, and charged by Google based whatever the cost-per-click (CPC) is. This is beneficial because it allows you to tap into an endless amount of customers.

Display campaigns are more so re-targeting campaigns. This is useful to serve an ad to a user on one of Google's affiliate sites (90% of sites on the internet are Google affiliate sites). One of the benefits of re-targeting ads is that is allows you to increase brand awareness as it displays them to users who left your site and perhaps did not fill out forms, purchase their cart, or other conversion. These are also much more cost effective for your budget as the CPCs are much cheaper, and you will generate tons of impressions to your ad.

Shopping campaigns are for e-commerce sites. If you offer physical products on your site you can bid on keywords related to those products, similar to a Google Search Campaign, and have your product pop up.

See here I searched the term "supreme shirt" on Google's search engine. Once I searched that term, a ton of Supreme shirts pop up. If I were to click on one of those ads (which I won't because I am sure the CPC is abnormally high for high ticket items like that) I would be able to purchase the product directly from Google. To set this type of campaign up, I would need to import products from my site to Google, which can all be explained here. These ads are extremely beneficial for sites offering products because the consumer can see the product image before they click on it- thus knowing that they have some sort of interest in the product you are offering.

Video campaigns allow you to display video advertisements on either YouTube or one of Google's Display Partners. These are great means of re-targeting visitors who left your site and did not complete an action, and they can allow you to generate a lot of impressions for fairly cheap. Videos are great for engagement because videos are always more appealing than text.

Roughly 60% of users prefer watching a video over reading text, and if you are trying to acquire new customers you know it is much easier to explain your value proposition through a video as opposed to text on a screen.

Which Type of Campaign is Best for My Business?

I was hoping you would ask that question. And the answer is... it depends.

I am going to lay out two scenarios - one scenario is if your business is geared towards products, and the other is for services.

Let's Say Your Business Offers A Service

If you are a doctor, lawyer, accounting firm, photographer or any sort of freelancer, I would first set up a search campaign. As previously mentioned, with search campaigns you bid on search queries such as "doctor near me, lawyer near me, etc." and you write enticing 80 character description that would make the person searching the term want to click on your ad, such as the image below:

As you can see, I typed in "doctor near me" and the first ad that popped up was for a company called Zocdoc. They have a clear title description, as well as ad text that explains what they do for you. They also have included site link extensions, which are additional links to pages on their website.

Obviously, they want you to book your appointment online- that would count as a conversion for them. But what if you don't? What if a customer goes to your website, and does not make an appointment?

To acquire users who did not convert, you would then set up either a display campaign or a video campaign. These campaigns allow you to filter for the users who visited your site and left without making an action, so you can be sure that they are continually reminded of your website and are invited to come back. You can set parameters that allow your re-targeting ads to display to users who have not been on your site for various durations of time. And throughout time, you will see leads and sales generated through these re-targeting methods.

Let's Say Your Business Offers A Product

If your business offers a product, then I am sure you already realize from reading the previous portion of this blog that a Google Shopping Campaign would be best suited for your business. And as you saw in the Supreme example, you would bid on keywords related to the physical products you offer.

Unfortunately, not everyone who clicks on your ad is initially going to convert to a sale. So as mentioned before, you would then re-target these users on display campaigns, or video campaigns. You can even make your display and video re-targeting so specific that it can serve an ad for the specific product page that the user went to and abandoned.

Google's advertising capabilities are enormous and navigating through the Google Ads software can be extremely complex. Here at Helix House, we specialize in all of the types of campaigns mentioned above. Contact us to see if we could benefit your business, we would love to hear from you!