Google Ads - A Powerful Marketing tool if used properly

By Radhika Rajalakshmi Google Ads April 15, 2022

How to Advertise on Google?

Advertising on Google requires a Google Ads account, which is free to create.

Once you’ve opened your account, it’s time to figure out how to use Google Ads to grow your business!

The following is a ten-step process for advertising on Google:

Establish your account goals
Determine your audience
Conduct keyword research
Set budgets and bids
Build your optimal account structure
Write high-performing ads
Create effective landing pages
Implement conversion tracking
Grow your remarketing lists
Make optimization a habit

How Google Ads works?

Keywords connect you with customers
Keywords are words or phrases you choose when you set up your Google Ads campaign. These are terms you think your potential customers are likely to use when searching for products or services like yours.
By matching your keywords with the ads you create, you make it possible for your ad to show when someone searches for similar terms or visits a website with related content.
For example, if you deliver fresh flowers, you could use fresh fruit delivery as one keyword paired with an ad promoting fresh fruit delivery. When someone searches Google using the phrase fresh fruit delivery or a similar term, your ad might appear next to Google search results, or on other websites related to fresh fruit delivery.

Campaign types and ad formats:

The ad formats available to you depend on your campaign type (App, Display, Discovery, Local, Performance Max, Search, Smart, Shopping, and Video) and campaign goal (for example, “Drive conversions” for Video campaigns or “App installs” for App campaigns)

Mobile ads and campaigns:

Some campaign types only show ads on mobile, such as app promotion campaigns and call-only campaigns.

How does Google Ads determine which ads should show?

It all happens with a lightning-fast ad auction, which takes place every time someone searches on Google or visits a site that shows ads.
Google Ads calculates a score, called Ad Rank, for every ad in the auction.
Ad Rank determines your ad position and whether your ads are eligible to show at all.
Generally, the ad with the highest Ad Rank appears in the top position, and the ad with the second-highest Ad Rank appears in the second position (when ads meet the relevant thresholds).

Five factors of Ad Rank:

Your bid – When you set your bid, you’re telling Google Ads the maximum amount you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad. How much you actually end up paying is often less, and you can change your bid at any time.
The quality of your ads and landing page – Google Ads also looks at how relevant and useful your ad and the website it links to are to the person who’ll see it. Our assessment of the quality of your ad is summarized in your Quality Score, which you can monitor—and work to improve—in your Google Ads account.
Ad Rank thresholds – To help ensure high-quality ads, we set minimum thresholds that an ad must meet to show.
Search context – With the ad auction, context matters. When calculating Ad Rank, we look at the search terms the person has entered, geographical location at the time of the search, type of device used (such as computers or mobile phones), the other ads and search results that show on the page, and other user signals and attributes.
The expected impact from your ad extensions and other ad formats – When you create your ad, you have the option to add additional information to your ads, such as a phone number, or more links to specific pages on your site. These are called ad extensions. Google Ads estimates how extensions and other ad formats you use will impact your ad’s performance.

At the end of the day, what you pay with cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, you’re charged only when someone is interested enough to click your ad and go to your website.

You tell Google Ads the most you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad (called the maximum cost-per-click bid), but you could be charged less.

In a nutshell, Google Ads provides an opportunity for small businesses and huge corporates to spread their campaigns without wasting a lot of time gaining organic impressions and traffic for their products and services.

Why Google Ads Aren’t Working?

Your Clicks Are Too Few and Too Expensive
You Are Getting Far Too Many Irrelevant Clicks
You Are Getting Great Clicks But Your Conversions are low
You Are Getting Plenty of Impressions But Not Enough Clicks

Pros of using Google Ads:

Targeted audience: Google Ads lets you target the specific region, behaviors, specific terms & phrases, and specific buyers based on demographics that suit your products the most. This is handled automatically, so all you need to do is to set your preferences.

Budget optimization: You can start running ads with the minimal possible budget in your hands. With respect to your keywords and audience planning, you can start running your ads.

Easy to set up: Google Ads are relatively easy to set up compared to running complex campaigns on social media and other platforms.

Multiple ad formats: You can select a variety of ad types for your campaign. Text ads, dynamic ads, video ads, picture ads, or a combination of them can be used to drive your campaigns. Also, these ads can be shown cross-platform, so it’s a better option to go for.

Better reach: Compared to organic SEO techniques, which are time-consuming; Google Ads gives you instant reach via search results once you run the campaign with the presets.

Measuring the results: By using multiple tools like Google Analytics and more, you can measure the ROI of your ad campaigns. Proper tracking via your campaigns and keywords, you can track clicks, returns, and conversion rates.

Cons of using Google Ads:

Lots of competition: As many businesses run their campaigns on Google Ads, to gain the first position on the search results; you would face a lot of competition and would end up paying more than your budget values.

Many rules to play with: Google Ads has a lot of security and policy features to obey. Some restricted and prohibited items cannot be sold or promoted via that platform. Thus it binds some businesses to limits.

Learning curve: We know that setting up and running an ad is the easy part of Google Ads. But, to learn all the features and pieces of the platform, users would need time and practice.

Ad targeting: Ad targeting in Google Ads is very good. But, as a user, if you put things a little wide open, then a lot of unwanted traffic would make way to your products – costing you money! So, be careful while initiating the process and select the right keywords for your campaigns.

Technical help for development: To run your campaigns, you would need landing pages and a setup of funnels for your website. For this, a technical person (developer) or some expert would be needed.

So overall, if you can initiate the ad process, you would gain a lot of benefits. Above all, Google Ads gives you the flexibility to run ads across users’ favorite platforms, so it’s highly recommended to use for your business as well.

Google Ads- is it right for small businesses?

The answer is yes. That’s because Google Ads offers benefits that are specific to small businesses:

Google kept small businesses in mind when creating Google Ads.
They even built “Smart campaigns” by tailoring the technology available with
Google Ads for small business owners.See how other small businesses are using Google Ads.
With Smart campaigns, you can create effective ads in minutes that deliver results like consumers calling your business, visiting your website, or coming into your store.

Small businesses have unique needs:

The fact is, as a small business, the easier it is to launch a certain marketing initiative, the more likely you’ll be able to do it successfully.
With many businesses having just a single person running them entirely, you have to pick and choose where your focus goes and predict if the effort will be worth the results.
Google Ads provides the wiggle room and flexibility small businesses require with little commitment and big return.

You can target locally:

As a small business, you may have a physical store that people need to visit in order for you to serve them.

Specific geographic range:

With Google Ads, you can target your ad to appear to people based within a specific geographic range.
By advertising to people in your geographic location, and not in others, you are making sure your ads are reaching only the most relevant potential customers.

You know your customers:

To create the most effective Google search ads, you need to know what your customers are searching for — and no one knows their customers better than small businesses.
When you set up your ad, you need to bid on the best keywords that not only relate to your business but also address the problems your customers are having that your business solves for. You have to think like your customers to find the right keywords.

Timing flexibility:

Another benefit that comes with using Google Ads is that you set the timeline for them to run.
This can be a necessity if you are the only one running your business or marketing initiatives.
Taking a vacation? You can turn these ads on and off whenever you need. Seasonal business? Set your ads to end a month before your business closes.

Budget flexibility:

Google Ads uses a type of ads also known as “pay-per-click” or “PPC ads”.
This means that you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on it.
If you are unsure what your advertising budget will look like far in advance, don’t worry.
How much you spend is entirely up to you.
With Google Ads, you can set your budget ahead of time, capping it at a specific price.
This way, you will never spend more than what you can set aside.

But Why Isn’t Google Ads Working for Small Businesses?

Over the last few years, Google has been slowly but surely changing the game.

Some of these changes have come in the name of privacy.

Some have come in the guise of making the platform easier to manage for less-sophisticated marketers.

Google made the changes to make more money. How?

We aren’t living in a world of straight auctions anymore.
It’s challenging to determine what the actual price of a click is – or even the true factors that resulted in the pricing of said click.
Google’s strong-handed attempts to move its customers into automated bidding structures have taken away advertisers’ control.
When the advertiser isn’t in control, the algorithm dictates the cost-per-click.
This forces local advertisers to compete with big-budget national brands automatically inserted into results where they may not even be relevant – just because Google’s ads algorithm thinks a click might result from the placement.

Is Google Smarter Than Humans?

For those not involved in day-to-day paid search – the simple fact is that Google has made it harder to optimize your paid search spend.
Google increasingly requires advertisers to rely on Google to optimize their accounts.
Gone are the days when advertisers were presented with the data and given the ability to make their own decisions.
In typical Google fashion, Ads have become a robot marketing to consumers, looking for patterns amidst many data points they believe constitute an audience’s psyche.
It’s ironic that Google encourages marketers to appeal to humans instead of robots when it comes to SEO.
In paid search, Google thinks its robots are better at appealing to humans than actual humans.

Google Says “Feed Me”:

To make decisions, Google’s robot requires food.
In other words, the Google Ads algorithm can’t make decisions unless it gorges itself on data.
So, for Google to serve ads to the right people at the right time, the slothful robot needs to see data on where the right people are at the right time.
Once Google understands this, the results can be spectacular.
But unfortunately, lately, that point occurs sometime after an advertiser has spent north of $3,000 per month.
Over time a small advertiser should see the benefits of the Google Ads learning algorithm, in theory.
But the reality is changing user behavior, shifting budgets, and changes at Google itself make it, so those small advertisers spending less are more likely to give up before they see the types of results the big boys experience every month.
Most small businesses don’t have six months to a year of spending $3,000/month to see results.
Small accounts that “take a break” also appear to have to start this process all over again.
It’s almost as if once an advertiser stops feeding Google, the advertising algorithm acquires sudden and total amnesia.

Are you Spending Enough to Be Effective?

It’s always tricky to understand how much to spend on Google Ads.
It’s harder to know if you can afford to pay enough to get results.
It all comes down to how much you can invest in acquiring leads and understanding what objective you’re giving your campaign.
As a general rule, you want to make sure your budget has enough by the numbers to fit enough clicks in the day to get at least one lead/customer. Depending on your industry/market that might mean 10 or 100.

While the average CPC is around $3 per click, many industries have clicks upwards of $25.

If you have a 10% conversion rate:

U.S. Average CPC: $30 per day or $912 per month.
$25 Average CPC: $250 per day or $7,600 per month.
$150 Average CPC (low for legal): $1,500 per day or $45,600.

If you have a 1% conversion rate:

U.S. Average CPC: $300 per day or $912 per month.
$25 Average CPC: $250 per day or $7,600 per month.
$150 Average CPC (low for legal): $1,500 per day or $45,600.

When setting a budget, it’s crucial to factor the customer value, location, and vertical into the discussion. While it’s not impossible to achieve value with a smaller budget, any budget lower than $5,000 will struggle to fuel the algorithm (ultimately costing you more because you’re in the learning period longer), as well as not being able to support the objectives it’s responsible for.”

But most small businesses can’t afford to drop $3,000-$5,000 a month just to see if a marketing channel will work for them. And that’s what Google is asking small businesses to do.

Google Ads vouchers:

This is despite the search engine spending millions of dollars over the last few years encouraging small businesses to use their platform.
Numerous small businesses received their free $100 Google Ads vouchers from some marketing campaign,and what kind of results they’ll get from their newfound windfall.
The answer is practically nothing.
Now it seems those ad vouchers may be worth even less.

Google created the perception that small businesses will succeed if they just use the Google Ads platform.

Millions of small businesses hear the message and run to Google to part with their hard-earned cash.
But as soon as the pay-per-click drug has those small businesses hooked on results, they raise the stakes, take away the controls, and say pay up or get off the ride.

So The bitter truth is,

If you can afford to spend the money, – Google Ads is fantastic.

If you can’t spend the money, then you’re better off getting on another ride.

Also Read : GOOGLE ADS – A POWERFUL MARKETING TOOL IF USED PROPERLY (PART 1)