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3rd March, 2021

Advertising With Google Ads

By Christopher White
“Advertising With Google Ads”
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Estimated Reading Time: 19 minutes

What Are Google Ads?

Google Ads is the online advertising platform offered by Google. It was formerly known as Google Adwords but was renamed to Google Ads. It is by far the biggest online advertising platform, with over 70% of the market. If you need to advertise online, Google is going to be the primary place you will want to be.

It is easy to advertise on Google, but it is much harder to do it well, at a low cost per click (CPC) and good click-through rate (CTR). This post will help guide you through the process of advertising on Google, though if it is all too much for you, get in contact with us and ask for a free website and marketing review.

How Does Google Ads Work?

Google Ads is effectively an advertising platform where you can advertise your products, services or brand in a number of different ways:

  • Search ads
  • Display network ads
  • Google Shopping
  • YouTube
  • Remarketing ads

It is totally free to advertise on the Google Ads platform and you only pay when somebody clicks on one of your ads. This is known as pay-per-click advertising. In theory, you could be running thousands of ads at the same time, but you will only incur any cost when someone clicks on your advertising links. Compare this to print advertising where you will usually run with just one ad at a large up-front cost.

Google Ads allows you to filter your target audience so finely that your ads will be shown to exactly the type of people you are trying to target. If you do your research well and create superb ads and landing pages for those ads, you could be running a highly effective ad campaign, bringing you much-needed new business or leads.

Google Ads is the polar opposite of search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is a long-term strategy where real results will take months or years to show through. With Google Ads you could be seeing positive results within hours. Therefore, advertising on Google is often a great strategy for new businesses trying to quickly build up leads or sales or established businesses needing to boost business in the short term. If your PPC strategy is done well, you can have your ad showing at the top of page one of Google's search results in no time at all.

Why Should I Use Google Ads?

One of the main reasons you should use Google Ads is the speed of the results you can see from advertising with Google. Additionally, getting to the top of the first page of Google for your chosen keywords takes a lot of time and effort, if you want to get your web page there organically. With Google Ads, you can be at the top of page one quickly by creating an ad which is shown in the top spots.

In combination with this, Google Ads is an easy way to get results fast. Whether you are after leads, sales or brand awareness, Google Ads allows you to achieve your aim by creating ads targeted for your keywords and ideal audience.

Google Ads gives you excellent tools to analyse and measure the progress and success of your ad campaign. Using these tools you can keep a close eye on your budget and how your ads are performing. Under-performing ads can be switched off, or budgets can be increased for high-performing ads. You have control of your campaigns! Connect your Google Ads account to Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and you can have incredible insight and data on the smallest detail of your campaigns.

Remarketing is an important part of the Google Ads platform. Remarketing advertising is a relatively inexpensive form of advertising on Google which can be used to great effect. Do you ever notice ads which seem to follow you around the Internet and show on website after website? Almost certainly you have. These persistent ads are remarketing ads. If a visitor has once clicked on your normal Google ad and you have remarketing set-up you can follow them around the web.

Is Advertising On Google Expensive?

Answering the question "is advertising on Google expensive?" depends upon your perspective and point of view. Google Ads charges per cost of click and this cost varies enormously, depending upon the keyword being targeted, the industry your business operates in, the competition for ads for that keywords, the quality score Google places upon your ad and much more. Different businesses have a different perspectives on cost too.

Let's have a look at a few examples and try to understand whether ads are expensive or not.

  • The most expensive keywords are currently "casino" related keywords where the advertiser can expect to pay an average of £58.57 per click. Sounds a LOT, doesn't it?! Now, look at that cost from the casino operator's perspective. Yes, the CPC is high, but what is the lifetime value to the casino of a visitor who is converted to a customer? You can guarantee that they are likely to spend way more that the cost of the ad click. Therefore a high cost per click may seem expensive to you, but to the advertiser, the ongoing revenue gained as a result of the cost of that click is probably worth hundreds, if not thousands of pounds to the advertiser.
  • Most UK advertisers can expect to pay somewhere between 66p and £1.32 for a click on their ad. A very basic rule of thumb is that the more expensive a service being advertised, the higher the cost per click will be. Solicitors, private healthcare businesses, software companies, banks offering loans, insurance companies, education offerers, web hosts and so on will all see high CPCs.

Whether advertising on Google is expensive, or not, depends upon your perspective of value. In short, Google wants you to make money from advertising, because the more you make, the more you are going to spend on Google Ads!

How Do I Advertise On Google?

Advertising on Google is quite simple to do, though you will need to keep an eye open for a few gotchas in the set-up process. We will look at some of these in future posts.

  1. Create your Google Ads account. Go to the Google Ads homepage to start the set-up process. If this is your first Google Ads account, be very careful at this stage and do not take the Google suggested options. Choose the manual account set-up. The former options will take you down the Smart Campaigns which you do not want to do! the manual set-up will give you access to tools and metrics you do not get in the Smart Campaigns.
  2. Set your aims for your campaigns. You will be given several options for what you want to achieve with your Google Ad campaigns. In most cases, you will probably choose the Maximise Clicks option.
  3. Target Your Audience. Google provide you with tools to filter your audience down to a tight target group. Filtering can be done geographically or by the target's interests or sector.
  4. Create your keywords. You will want to spend time researching your keywords properly. there are a load of tools available for keyword research, including Google's own free Keyword Planner. Long tail keywords will help you keep your CPCs lower. Don't forget to use negative keywords too, to filter out keywords you do not want your ad showing for.
  5. Decide your daily budgets & maximum cost per click. We looked at whether Google Ads is expensive, or not. This is the time you can take control of your costs by setting the maximum amount you want a CPC to cost you, as well as setting how much you are prepared to spend per day.
  6. Write your ads. The final stage of setting your ads up is to write the actual ads. The quality of your ads will affect your quality score and your CPC, so make sure the copy is high quality and your landing pages are relevant and likely to convert.
  7. Track your ads' performance. Now that your ads are live, you need to analyse which ones are working well and which are sub-standard. If your ads are not converting, they are not working!
  8. Start your remarketing. With your ads running, get your remarketing ads up and running to capitalise on your visitors' interests.

What Do I Need To Do To Analyse The Success of My Google Ads?

Analysing your Google Ads' performance is so important, assuming you do not want to waste your advertising money. There are three key areas to keep an eye on and understand well.

  1. Your Ads' Quality Score. The higher your ad's quality score, the less you will usually have to pay for each conversion through your ad. What Google wants is high-quality ads which are as relevant as possible for the chosen keywords. Google gives each of your ads a quality score the highest possible score you can achieve is 10.
  2. Your Click Through Rate (CTR). Your CTR is one of the most important statistics to analyse. Google uses CTR as one of its methods for giving your ad a quality score. The click-through rate is the figure calculated from the number of times your ad is displayed in search results and the number of clicks on the ad. You should try to get a CTR of over 1%, or one click per 100 displays of the ad.
  3. Your conversion rate is the figure to analyse to understand how well the visitors to your ads are converting to paying clients, leads or whatever goal you have set. Where click-through rates measure the attractiveness of your ad, the conversion rate shows you the effectiveness of the ad and your return on investment (ROI).

Google Ads allow you to mine an enormous amount of data, especially when Google Analytics and Tag Manager are linked to your Google Ads account. If you are a fanatical analyst, there is loads to keep you busy! However, as a minimum, you should keep a close eye on the three areas detailed above.

Another area to watch carefully is the performance of your keywords. If any of the keywords are not working well, turn them off. It is not worth paying for keywords which lead to underperforming or overly expensive ads.

What Can I Do If My Google Ads Are Not Displaying?

If your Google Ads are not displaying in the search results, you have probably accidentally missed a setting or not fully set up your account.

  • Payments. If you have not added a credit card to your Google account, or if a payment fails, your ads will not be shown. No pay, no display!
  • Display timing. If you have set a timed display for the ads and the ads are not scheduled to be displayed when you have searched for them, they will not be visible. This is an easy one to overlook! It is also something to bear in mind if you are displaying ads in different countries or time zones.
  • Bidding errors. There are two things to keep an eye out for in your bids. If you have set a cost per click which is too low, it will not reach the threshold needed to be competitive enough to be displayed. Conversely, if you set a CPC which is above the daily budget you have set at the campaign level, it will not be possible for the ad to be shown.
  • Paused. Check that either your campaign, ad groups or ads are not paused. You can choose to pause at any one of the three levels of the hierarchy, so check them all to find where the pause is set, and make it live.
  • Disapproval. Sometimes your ads will be will not be shown because Google disapproves of them. If this is the case, they will tell you the reason for the disapproval.

What Can I Do If My Google Ads Are Not Performing Properly?

Ads can perform poorly for a number of reasons, some to do with the ads themselves, some to do with the destination the ads send the clicker to.

  • Poor Ads. You have not used your chosen keyword well and the quality of the text is uninviting to your audience. Make your ad relevant and use the keyword effectively.
  • Ad Groups. Ad groups are important to construct well and carefully. They contain your set of ads and keywords. It is all too easy to add too many keywords into an ad group which are not relevant to the ads being displayed. In many cases, we go to extreme lengths to only allow very tightly defined keywords to be added into an ad group so that the ads and keywords are perfectly matched.
  • Landing pages. You can make the most perfect ads in the world, but if the landing page - or destination - the visitor is sent to is irrelevant or sub-standard, you will get the click-through (and cost of the click), but no or low conversions. Make sure your landing pages are well constructed and relevant to each ad you are running.

Is Google The Only Place I Should Be Advertising?

There are many other places you can operate a PPC marketing campaign. Google is the best-known online advertising platform but by no means the only one, or even the right one for your business. Each PPC advertising platform will perform different types of ad campaigns.

Some of the main advertising platforms you may consider are:

  • Facebook Ads use a different model from Google Ads and can help you reach an audience which is very finely targeted. You pay for the display of ads, rather than the click in Facebook's model.
  • Microsoft Advertising is Microsoft's equivalent of Google Ads. It uses the Bing, Yahoo and AOL networks and can be a good alternative to Google Ads as there is generally less competition in the UK and CPCs can be lower.
  • Amazon Ads are great to use if you sell products on Amazon. You have different types of ads available to you - sponsored products, video ads, custom ads and so on, so you can advertise your goods to the right audience within Amazon.
  • LinkedIn Ads can be highly effective for B2B businesses. Your ads can be targeted to reach people in your target industry, or with the right level of seniority to make purchasing decisions.

What Are My Next Steps?

If you think Google Ads is the right thing for you, you can get started right away! If you want to start advertising on Google but are hesitant about making the steps yourself, White Media can help you with the set-up and management of your Google Ads campaigns.

If you are unsure about how Google Ads could help you, ask us for a free website and digital marketing review and we will give you an objective and honest opinion of whether we believe Google Ads is right for your business. If not, we will suggest what could be a good strategy for you!

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About The Author

Christopher White

Christopher White - Cotswold WebsitesChristopher White is the founder of Cotswold Websites. An accredited digital marketer and website designer, he has over 18 years of experience in creating bespoke websites.

With a background in international logistics and business analysis, Christopher uses his business experience to advise organisations how their website can and should work for them, along with helping them implement business strategies to use Digital Marketing techniques to boost their public exposure.