How Do Google Ads Work?
Paid advertising often referred to as pay-per-click is a modern way to drive highly relevant traffic to your website.
PPC or Google Ads can offer a fantastic way to attract potential customers and improve your brand’s visibility and increase your sales.
And unlike search engine optimisation, which can take many months, Google Ads is an instant fix.
Unlike traditional advertising where you pay upfront fees regardless of performance, pay-per-click is a model where you only pay for results.
Google Ads operate an auction system where advertisers bid on specific keywords that are relevant to their product or service, and when the users search for that particular keyword within Google, Google decides which ad to display based on many factors which include the advertiser’s bid and the relevance of that ad.
Here are a few hints and tips on how to maximise the chances of success of any Google ad campaign.
Keywords sit at the heart of the project so it is crucial that you can do thorough research to identify the keywords that are relevant to your products and services.
Many tools can help you with this, including the Google Keyword Planner or third-party software such as SEM Rush. Both of these tools will help to find keywords with a decent level of search and reasonable competition.
Once you have established the keyword to target, you should set about creating engaging ad copy.
Your ad should grab attention and tempt users to click through to your website.
The headlines should address the user search intent and the description of the ads should highlight many of your key benefits and also include a CTA (known as a call to action), in order to prompt people to take the next step, for example, buy now, sign up, find out more etc
You also need to ensure that the landing page on your website is optimised for conversions, or traffic could be wasted which would see you burning your budget.
The landing page should be relevant to the ad. It should load quickly and it should be optimised for conversions, e.g. make very clear the purpose of the visit and the action that you would like the user to take e.g. you want somebody to make a purchase or to download an e-book or to sign up for more information.
Once you are happy that the website or landing pages are optimised you then need to decide on the click budget.
Whilst every industry and geographic area is different we normally recommend that you start with a reasonably small budget, something that you are comfortable with and that will not break the bank, however, it needs to be a sensible enough budget that you will be able to generate a sufficient level of traffic to test the campaign properly.
For example, if an average click in your geographic area and industry is say £5 a click, then a £10 daily budget is not going to be enough to test it.
Equally, if a click is £1 or less, then a £10 daily budget is sufficient to give things a test.
Once the campaign is up and running it needs to be constantly measured and monitored.
Negative keywords should be added which prevents your ad from appearing in irrelevant searches, for example, if you are selling expensive shoes you would want to add the word cheap as a negative so people looking for cheap shoes do not stumble across and click on your ad.
You must also ensure that conversion tracking is successfully implemented within your campaign as simply generating clicks is not enough.
It would help if you tracked where the sales or leads are coming from, so conversion tracking is absolutely essential to measure and monitor the success and performance of your campaign.
This is a highly effective tool if the campaign is set up properly and then managed intensively, whilst this is something that many business owners could technically do themselves, we do find that many customers say they simply do not have the time to learn or to manage the campaign, which is where an agency like Altitude Internet can come in and help.
We have a highly skilled team of people who fully understand every intricacy of Google Ads and will be able to set up, monitor and optimise your campaign to help deliver the best return on investment.
If you are interested in running a Google Ads campaign or paid search project, please click here to request a call with a member of our team, we will more than likely want to schedule a 30-minute call with you to find out more about your business and to see how we could potentially work together.
In the meantime here are some links to a couple of other blogs on Google Ads which you may find relevant.
