PPC stands for pay per click. It’s a digital advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ads are clicked. Google Ads is the most popular platform for PPC ads. It provides you a number of keywords matching option which helps you in targeting the right set of audience.
Benefits of PPC advertising
1. Increases brand awareness – Google Ads helps in increasing brand awareness. It enables the customer to interact with the brand in a number of ways, including watching videos, playing games or spending time on website.
2. Faster results – PPC Services on Google Ads helps advertisers in getting quick results. Reasons behind the fast results are as follows:-
i) Quick results are possible because Google Ads enables the advertising agencies to focus on multiple keywords at a time.
ii) Google Ads also allows the ad agencies to turn on/off the ad campaigns whenever they want.
3. Measurable performance – Google Ads informs about the exact performance of the campaigns to the ad agencies. Information provided by Google Ads are as follows :-
i) Who clicked on the ad?
ii) How much traffic the website received from Google Ads?
iii) How many leads have been generated?
iv) Which keyword generated the most traffic and leads?
v) How much does it cost the advertiser per lead?
This information helps advertisers to understand what worked for their ads and what didn’t. Using this information, advertisers can improve their ads performance until they achieve the optimal results.
4. Tackle your competitors – Google Ads helps the advertisers to check how their competitors are promoting the ads and what type of ads they are running. This information enables the advertisers to grab the opportunity which makes them stand ahead of their competitors.
Types of advertising on Google Ads
Google Ads provide different types of advertising options which helps advertisers in reaching their target customers, some of the options are:-
1. Search ads – Search ads appear next to Google search results when people look for products and services that it offers. These advertisements provide relevant search results which are based on customer’s queries. It also helps small businesses to compete with bigger firms without spending a major portion of their budget.
2. Display ads – Display ad is also known as banner ad, is a form of online paid advertising that is typically based on designed image or photo. Developing click-worthy images directs a viewer to a landing page with relevant content about the brand or company. Display ads function differently, they can be spotted on websites and can feature interactive displays or some type of animation to engage the user. These ads not only increases brand awareness, but they can engage visitors in your marketing to help filter the visitors into your funnel to become a lead.
3. Video ads – Video ads allow brands to inform quickly and visually through entertainment that generates a powerful platform for conversions and accurately target customers.
How to use Google Ads?
Following are the steps you should follow to know how to use Google Ads:-
1. Select your campaign type and name – In the first step; you need to select the campaign type and give it a suitable name. Also remove the tick next “Include search partners” for now (you can always change this later).
2. Location and language – The next step is of selecting a geographical location where you want to target your ads. You can choose whole countries, regions of countries, states or cities. Google recommends you to choose the language that serves your customers best. This helps in increasing traffic on your ads and getting more conversions.
3. Bidding and budget – To run your ads on Google, the right budget and bidding options needs to be selected. Your budget should be the average amount you’d be comfortable spending each day.
Your maximum cost-per-click bid (max. CPC bid) is the price you are willing to pay for each click on your ad. By managing bids, amount of traffic ads receive can be influenced, as well as the Return on investment (ROI) they generate.
4. Ad Extensions – It is an important part of any campaign, but you can do this once you have finished all the steps.
5. Create your first ad group –An ad group can contain one or more ads which can be targeted at a shared set of keywords. A bid can be set which will be used when an ad group’s keyword triggers an ad to appear. You can also set prices for individual keywords within the ad group.
6. Inserting keywords – To use this feature in your ad, you need to insert a special code in your ad text. For e.g., let say you are running a campaign to advertise your shoes store and you have an ad group that promotes your shoes store. The code that you’ll insert in your text might look like: {keyword: Shoes}. Doing this means when a keyword can’t be inserted in your ad, Google Ads will present shoes.
7. Review – Double check your ad and keywords to be sure that they are the best match for conversion. Check your cost-per-click to be sure you get the positions on the page you want.
8. Billing – You ads will start showing as soon as you confirm your payment.
Terms related to Google Ads
1. Keywords – Words that describe your products and services you select for your ad are known as keywords. The keywords determine when and where your ads will be displayed.
2. Bidding – A process which determines the maximum amount you are willing to pay for each click on your ad. If your ad gets clicked, you will not have to pay more than the maximum CPC bid.
3. Quality score - Quality score is the Google’s rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords, description, ad headline, and destination URL to the potential customer seeing your ad. A higher ad quality score can get better ad placement and lower cost.
4. Impression – Impression is the measurement of how many times your ad appeared on a search result page or on any other site of Google network. Each time your ad appears on Google or the Google network; it’s counted as one impression.
5. Landing page – Landing page is a webpage where people end up after clicking on the ad. Landing page is an important part of advertisement. Significance of landing page are as follows:-
i) Landing page provides the most basic and essential information to the web users in limited words.
ii) Landing page is analyzed by Google after a series of human evaluation and combination.
iii) Landing page provides information along with offers that attracts the mind of users.
iv) Landing page should follow the same sequence as done by ads and keywords. Once the pattern gets followed, the information regarding the products and services gets available to the web users.
Disadvantages related to Google Ads
Google Ads has been the reason behind the success of many advertising campaigns. It provides a number of options to the advertisers that help them in getting connected with the potential customers. With number of advantages, there are also some disadvantages associated with Google Ads. Some of them are:-
• There’s no easy way to learn Google Ads. You can only learn it through experience and testing. Google Ads can be tough for people with limited time and small budgets. So, if you don’t know how to properly select your keywords of budget, you can end up spending more than you make.
• No competitor data is shared by Google Ads. As a company policy, Google does not disclose the performance of other companies that may have the same product or services as yours.
• There have been a lot of PPC advertising myths related to payment and charges. Every click on the ad is a charge for the agency even if the web user makes a purchase from the website or not.
Growth of small businesses through PPC advertising in Google Ads
Small advertisers have been able to make growth of their agencies count with the help of PPC advertisement in Google Ads. The most of it has been possible through Google’s reputation and the rest was because of Google giving advertisers the authority of price control. The progress of small business is noticeable because their ads provide relevant information to the web users.
Final Words
Google Ads can be a big investment both in money and time, but it’s a good one. The search network of Google Ads makes sure that your ads rank well and the display network can be used for brand awareness and engagement of web users. Though Google Ads can be complex but there’s a lot to gain from using it, and it’s entirely possible to run profitable campaigns with low CPCs even with the smallest of marketing budgets.