Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is Google’s advertising platform, where promoters and marketers bid on specific keywords that allow their clickable ads to emerge in the search results of Google’s search engine.
Google Adwords help you share and generate timely ads for your potential clients to see. Your website will appear on the search results page at the right time to grab the attention of potential consumers who are searching for relevant goods and services like yours.
Google Adwords will certainly get you more customers for your brand. But to run these ads, you need to pay Google for these clicks. This is how Google has been earning money for the past several years!
Google Ads is the next phase in your marketing efforts after you’ve perfected your website and implemented SEO basics. Now, all you need to do is attract your targeted audience.
We’ll help you understand Google Adwords, its benefits, and how you can create an effective ad campaign for your website. This step-by-step guide will help you optimize your brand ads and accomplish outstanding results.
Advantages of Google Ads for your Business
Google Ads is no doubt an efficient strategy for growing your small business and generating potential clients while they’re searching for particular services or products like the one you provide. These well-timed ads can significantly help boost traffic, orders, and profitability.
You might be wondering why you should advertise on Google when there are other platforms too. That’s because Google offers you $10 on every $1 of your investment.
Google has been around for 20 years and receives 4 billion searches per day. One of the biggest benefits of Google Ads is that it works much faster than SEO. Rather than waiting to get more views on your website, an Ads campaign will immediately drive traffic.
Additionally, you can even enhance your brand awareness and generate new leads. It also offers you the opportunity to get ahead from your rival brands and promote your brand in the right way.
Plus, by using Gmail Ads through Google Ads, you can effortlessly make your brand accessible to your audience, right in their inbox.
How to Create a Google Ads Campaign
Step # 1: Create a Google Ads Account
First things first, you need to create an ads account on the Google platform. This will help you set up your very first Ad campaign.
All you need is a Gmail account, billing address, and your website. The following steps will help you in creating your Ads account:
- Visit the Google Ads homepage and click on the “Start Now” button.
- The next option is selecting your campaign, depending upon your goals. You have to opt for the right option that aligns with your business model.
Now, insert your Business and website name.
Establish your budget, provide billing information, assess your campaign, and then submit. One of the points to keep in mind is that your budget should always start small. An easy budget will help you get conversions and traffic on your site without being heavy on your pocket.
- Choose the targeted audience and the location you want to serve. Select the network you want to concentrate on and then add relevant keywords.
- Lastly, provide a brief overview of your product or service and then write the copy for your first Google Ad.
Voila! You have just created your first Google Ad.
Step # 2: Start a Campaign
Nowadays, new online ventures have numerous brand marketing options, like SEO strategies or content marketing on top platforms like Medium.
But these approaches require time and patience to reap the results. Although search optimization is a lucrative option, a large number of businesses invest in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Starting a campaign can be quite difficult and needs proper planning. The most important step before starting a PPC campaign is consumer research. Before you launch your ads, you need to understand what your customers want and how they look for it online. This will help you find the keywords or phrases related to your products or brand.
If customers aren’t searching for phrases or keywords you have targeted, then your campaign won’t be effective. Worst, all your invested money will be wasted with zero traffic and conversions.
These Adwords campaigns are the premium buckets, followed by ad groups and driven by keywords.
Campaigns are a great way to develop brand awareness and target particular clients at specific locations. They can help you set up a type of search network where your brand ad appears. Similarly, ad groups permit marketers to concentrate on particular ad campaign variations.
Let’s suppose that your online website sells home décor items, and that your campaign will include paintings, wall pieces, candles, or crafts. You’ll set up ad groups for fine arts, interior design, abstract paintings, etc. This will help you focus on your keywords, making your campaigns effective and successful.
Step # 3: Define Targeted Audience
The right audience will help you increase your sales and profitability. Targeting potential clients is the key focus of every online brand page.
Your target audience is the group of individuals who possess particular interests and demographics that all represent potential customers for your product or service. Identifying your targeted audience will enhance the performance of your ad campaigns by getting the right viewers for your brand site.
Google also helps create an audience list that allows marketers to reach their potential audience. You will discover most of your viewers in the Audience Manager present in the shared library.
Google automatically generates a remarketing list for you that allows you to attract high quality leads effectively. Google will offer two options: either target the whole audience or target only specific viewers.
The audience segmentation available includes demographic targeting (reaching a specific age, gender, or status on the audience tab), remarketing lists (visitors who have not used your services or bought products), and interest category (showing ads to only those who are likely to make purchases).
Selecting the kind of audience segmentation depends on your goals. You can even target all the viewers and then manage the proposals for a particular audience, such as demographics vs. targeting, or eliminate only particular viewers from your chosen network.
Step # 4: Set a Campaign Budget
Sometimes budgeting can feel like a chore, but you cannot avoid it while launching your ad campaign. Since you are new to Google Adwords, it will be better to invest a small amount on your first campaign. First, you need to decide the approximate number of customers you want to gain. For example, you plan on getting 50 leads in your first week.
Now, figure out your conversion rate, cost of your keyword, and lifetime value of clients. Your campaign budget is highly dependent on these three factors. Suppose you have an ad that has a CPC of $0.25 with 250 clicks per day. Now you can easily calculate your daily budget i.e.
0.25 x 250= $62.5
For campaign budgeting, the first thing to know is the amount of traffic you need, which you can calculate through this formula:
Required traffic = customers needed / conversion rate
Once you have estimated the number of leads and CPC, you can then set the budget through this formula:
Total budget = traffic required X average CPC
You even need to calculate the low and high ranges of your total budget to give you an idea. It can be calculated by using the above formula twice.
Lowest total budget = Lowest Traffic required X lowest average CPC
Highest total budget = Highest traffic required X Highest average CPC
Moreover, before finalizing your budget, you need to learn about the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers. This value basically represents your consumers’ expectations during their lifespan. This amount will help you understand how much you can get in the future through this customer. LTV can be estimated through this principle:
LTV = Annual profit of customer X number of years the client remains with you
Setting a campaign budget is actually estimating the value of your customers.
Step # 5: Select the Bidding Strategy
Google Ads campaign offers various bidding approaches, each tactic defined for a different campaign. The bidding strategy highly depends on your targeted campaigns’ network, whether you want to concentrate on impressions, getting clicks, or increasing website views or conversions. Marketers themselves decide what approach is best for their site.
But before that, it is necessary for you to know what the acquisition cost is; not having enough knowledge can make the process difficult. CPA (Cost per Acquisition) is basically the amount of money a site owner can afford in order to spend on one purchaser client.
Let’s say that the price of one of your products is $80, and you are setting your target to $80. This would result in breaking even, though your goal is to gain profit. So, decide your target CPA first then enter it.
Consider the network of your targeted campaign in optimizing conversions. If your key focus is to drive conversions on your site through an ads campaign, you must select the target CPA bidding approach, focusing on converting the users at a specific acquisition cost.
Through this strategy, Google Adwords will spontaneously establish your bids on every campaign on the basis of your CPA.
Image Source
You might spend a minor amount on some conversions, while some of them can be quite expensive. This will help you get aligned with your acquisition budget.
Want to become the smartest marketer in your niche? Choose the best bid strategy for your brand site and see your website among the top results. Google will offer you five smart bidding approaches: Target cost per action (CPA), maximizing conversions, ROAS (Target return on ad spend), ECPA (Enhanced cost per click), and Maximize Conversion Value.
Step # 6: Set Ad Extensions
Your unfamiliar product site needs traffic and conversions. You’ve introduced your first ad; now, you can enhance it through the right extensions. Google Ad extensions are basically the additional information about your product that you couldn’t add to your campaign.
There are various types of ad extensions, and each one of them provides diverse benefits and information that results in optimizing and enhancing the performance of your ad campaigns.
You can easily create these ad extensions while creating your Google Adwords or distinctly through the Ads Manager, depending on your choice. It will only take a few minutes to set up, as the templates are already available. All you need to do is fill it out.
You can create ad extensions through the Google console. Go to the Ads and Extensions, and then click on the Extension button.
A list of extensions will be presented to you to choose from. Select the create button, and add the description. You will have to provide different descriptions for each extension type.
Once the extension is set up, now you can add it to your ad campaigns. During the Adword creation process, there will be an option “Ad Extensions” at the bottom.
Step # 7: Keyword Research Choosing Right Keywords
Marketing your service or products through Google Adwords will help your website gain the right traffic and increase sales. Just as you made efforts to curate effective content through effective keywords, your Adwords campaign needs to have the right keywords, too.
It is especially important that the keywords you have added in your campaign are the most searched ones. By combining a list of analogous keywords, you can easily set yourself up for related Ads helping you get more views.
It is advised that you only use a maximum of 15 keywords for your ad campaign to perform effectively. You can even make use of Google Adwords keywords Planner to help you search for the right keywords for your business. Moreover, the Planner also offers numerous options for validating your own researched keywords by presenting the CPC, completive data, and their search volume for each keyword.
Image Source
Google keyword planner provides insights on how often the specific keywords have been searched and how these searches have changed with time. This allows marketers to narrow down their search lists.
After listing the right keywords, the next step is to get bid estimates for every keyword, which will help you in estimating the overall budget for your brand site promotion. Now, you can add these keywords to your ads campaign. Once you are ready, you can finalize and then launch your PPC campaign.
Step # 8: Create High-Quality Display Ad
Display Ads are basically the visual-based ads that most of you observe while browsing a website, watching YouTube, or using an app on a mobile phone. Responsive display ads create a win-win situation for your business.
When you create high-quality, responsive display Ads by investing more into Google Ads, the platform will make use of machine learning to optimize your ads. The prime combination of assets for each ad niche based on predictions will be built from your performance history.
High-quality display ads also help in reaching a wide area of audience. When you create logo Ads, videos, numerous headlines, and images, Google adjusts its size and appearance according to the site.
A high-quality display ad can be created by using various color schemes, videos, and images. You can experiment with different display ad types and content designs. You can even create your own routine images as well as general display ads based on your existing text ads. This will help you reap beneficial results, i.e., more impressions and clicks.
Step # 9: Billing Information
You want your ads to be on the top, running effectively, right? Then it is advised that you provide billing information to improve the efficiency of your website.
There are several ways available to pay for Google Ads, depending on your location and currency, as well as the place where your business is registered. See the options that are available before completing your account.
Once you have provided all your information for creating your first Google Ad, you will be set up billing information. You can see that there are two billing options available, i.e., manual payments and automatic payments. If you choose the manual payment option for your business, you will prepay Google Ads, and charges will be subtracted from the prepaid amount. When your prepaid balance is tapped, ads will be kept on hold until you make another payment.
Automatic payments allow you to make the payment after accumulating clicks. Google will charge you for these ads when it reaches the billing threshold or maximum a month after you made your first payment.
Image Source
You can either choose to make the payments through a bank account or credit card. Just make sure that your bank account is verified through Google, which might take a while. If your website is running on the top, the best option is to link your credit card.
How to Make the Most out of Your Campaign
During these difficult times, where most businesses are struggling, affiliate marketers need to devise effective strategies for generating greater leads and drive more traffic to their sites. If you need to see immediate improvements in terms of traffic and getting more viewers, “Never Stop Optimizing.”
Leaving your ad campaigns alone will result in their slow decline. It will generate zero traffic.
Continuously optimize your Google Ads, and you will squeeze out greater performance and effective results along with minimum cost per click (CPC).
Here are some effective steps that can help you make the most out of your campaigns.
- Refine and review your keywords. If the click-through rate (CTR) of a keyword is less than 1, delete it. Search for new keywords by using Google insights.
- It is better to add negative keywords along with the positive ones on which you do not want to bid on. You can save money and enhance your CTR by adding Negative Exact Match and Negative Broad Match keywords to your ad groups and phrases.
- Keep on testing your landing pages and your ad copy. You do not have to pay for testing new ads, so it is better to test one to three ads in addition to your best-performing ones.
- Judge keywords after 200-page impressions.
- Run search query reports that will help you find new keywords on which you can bid. Google Ads shows a particular searcher where your ads appear, and you can use it for further improving your campaign.
- Fish when the fish are feeding. Make sure that your ad campaign is scheduled at such a time where you can get a higher customer response. Find out the time and day where the consumer’s response rate is higher. You can check this by going to the settings option where you can check the days and hours of your campaign.
Conclusion on PPC Campaigns through Google Ads
Creating and optimizing a Google Ad campaign is very much both an art and science. It would be best if you work on your ads outlook as well as constantly optimize it to get better results. You will have to use the data you are being given to get potential customers for your website.
Want your website to stand out and be on the top? Make your Google Adword account, sit back, and wait patiently.
Ad campaigns require patience. You will not see the outcomes immediately, but once you start getting better CTR, analyze the data, review your ads, and eliminate the ones that are not effective. It will increase your ROI, get you more traffic, and make optimization your habit. Adwords campaign optimization is definitely not a one-time event!
Liza Brooke is working as a Content Strategist and Digital Evangelist at Dissertation Assistance. She has worked for many renowned websites. She even shares digital marketing strategies on her social media platforms. Her keen interest in writing allows her to create content that people actually want to read.
