Designed as Google’s advertising tool, Google Ads allows you to advertise services and products on the most famous search websites around the world. 

Through it, it is possible to create all kinds of campaigns and ads, track access to your pages and receive help from marketing experts through an app for Android and iOS.  

The platform also allows companies to gain more visibility and reach by exhibiting search items on the searcher’s first page. 

Learn below the platform’s functionalities and much more:

- What is Google Ads?

- How does it work?

- Resources;

- Advertising with Google Ads;

- Which mistakes not to make;

- Google Ads premises;

- Reasons to use Google Ads in your marketing campaigns. 

What is Google Ads?

Released for the first time in the 2000s, Google Ads is an advertising platform from Google, in which the user can advertise, through an external payment to the company, your website, product or service to be ranked on Google, associated websites or another platform first page’s top results. 

The ads are exhibited as sponsored links on the customer search results. Most companies have been standing out with ads on Google, joining other digital marketing strategies. 

But Google Ads has another marketing strategy: the companies can stand out to a segmented public, that is, can invest in an audience related to the business. 

Based on cookies and keywords, advertisers can determine where the ads will be displayed. 

How does Google Ads work?

On Google Ads, the users determine the maximum amount they want to pay per click on their advert within a period, setting daily budgets, so the platform deducts charges on credit card or prepaid sales slip. 

When signing up, you have to make a keywords list that describe the product or service offered, so that, when a potential client Google for a certain item, they find the service you are offering. 

Since all users that provide the same kind of service or product look for a good rank on the search results, the advertiser which obtains the best results with their investment, will reach the top rank for that keyword on Google. 

• How to rank higher on Google?

The results and final rating are established by the maximum amount the advertiser pays to the platform on the cost per click (CPC), and through the quality index - rating Google does to your campaign. 

The quality index elements are:

- CTR, Click Through Rate (number of clicks received on your ad divided by the number of times it was exhibited);

- Relevance;

- Landing page.

For that, Google combines some factors that help to rate the ads place based on your Ad Rank, which is compounded by the Quality Index multiplied by the Bid (maximum CPC). 

Which means, even if the other investor’s bids are higher than yours, your ad can still stand out in case the quality index is superior. 

Resources

From the Google Ads app, it’s possible to create campaigns and advertisements, manage the budget and status, update the CPC bids, edit the keywords and visualise the statistics of what was released (how many clicks your ad had and the conversion rate). 

Advertising with Google Ads

First of all, Google will only display your ad if you have added a credit card or have paid the sales slip. Also, your content needs to have been approved by the company’s publicity policy. 

Inside the platform, you can advertise your services and products in four ways: 

1. Ads on the search engines

These are the ads displayed on the search results for certain keywords in the searcher. They are featured at the Search Engine Results Page’s (SERP) top and bottom, with a small “Advertisement” caption to indicate it’s a sponsored link. 

The format is really effective to reach people who are looking for specific products, services or solutions, and the advertiser only pays to the platform when the person clicks on the link to access the website. 

Most advertisers only use ads on the search engines, without benefiting from the other platform functionalities. In this case, read carefully the next items, because you have to request your company’s digital agency to use ads beyond the search engine. 

2. Ads on the display network

This campaign type is exhibited on websites, news pages and blogs that form Google Display Network. This network reaches on average 90% of the internet users around the world. 

The graphic ads, specialised in this modality, are, according to Google’s estimations, exhibited on over two million websites and over 650 thousand apps. Besides that, Google Ads permits the creation of responsive ads that adjust to any website or app format.  

The tool has essential options for segmentation, keywords, demographic information and remarketing. With that, there are many ways to use the platform’s graphic ads:

- Banners: graphic ads that can be images, interactive elements, animations and personalised layouts; 

- Texts: ads in “text box” format, which have title, description, company name and URL;

- Gmail: personalised ads on Gmail that are displayed directly in the inbox;

- Apps: ads displayed specifically on mobile apps.  

3. Ads on YouTube

As an advertiser, you can also create campaigns to be exhibited in videos on YouTube, that can be shown at the beginning or in the middle of the content released by other users. 

Inside YouTube, you can select the target audience based on age, gender, place, interests and much more. Also, according to the platform, you only pay when people interact with the campaign. If the ad is skipped before 30 seconds or before the end, you won’t pay for it.  

4. Applications ads 

These ads are directed at those who have a company with apps available on the market for download, and want to increase their reach with Google’s platform. You can promote your business or even your app to iOS or Android users. 

• How to attract more clients and use the internet in your favour?

Which mistakes not to make

Some potential mistakes can be avoided when using Google Ads.

Lack of planning and defined goals: the ads investment has to be faced seriously, knowing how much you can and will spend on the campaign. For that, it’s important to have a plan and clear goals within your business, analyse the investment time, and compare with previous data, among other factors. 

Work only with the bottom of the funnel: with no clear vision of your campaign goals, it’s a habit to go straight to the sale moment, where, in many markets, the potential clients are not ready to instantly close the deal. That can be frustrating, after all, you don’t get the wanted results. Going straight to the bottom of the funnel is problematic because the company website may not be optimised for sales. This means, the campaign may even be well done, but the final and main step will be missing. Therefore, the platform allows you to work with the top and middle of the funnel, with remarketing actions for people that don’t know your solution yet or are still considering the possibility of acquiring your product or service. 

Other minor problems that should also be avoided:

- Ignore the practices recommended by Google;

- Focus the campaign on the CPC, and not on the user;

- Bet only on Ads and don’t diversify your content in other channels, such as social media;

- Not measure the results obtained with the investments; 

- Use the bid management tool before having enough data. 

Google Ads premisses

Once in Google Ads, you can:

1. Observe the Buyer’s Journey

A good strategy inside Google Ads is to structure your account following the same model as the Buyer’s Journey to create specific campaigns. 

This strategy can be divided into three parts: 

- Conscience, where the customer is searching about a problem, therefore the ideal is to create campaigns with more generic words;

- Consideration, investing in words connected to your brand so that the customer search leads them to you;

- Decision, so that now the customer knows your offered product models. In this case, the campaign needs to have specific words connected to the content on sale. 

2. Make directed advertisements  

Google Ads is a good tool to elaborate campaigns associated with small and specific themes, dividing the word’s purchases. It is important, on this matter, to put the main word two or three times in the ad, to obtain gains in the click rate and the account’s quality index. 

3. Ads can be optimised by: 

- Geographic segmentation: used when it’s needed to segment the ads for more than one region; 

- Timetable and weekday: following some marketing ideas, some products sell more on the weekend, and others after business hours. Therefore, it’s worth it to study your sales market to know when it’s the best time to release your campaign;

- Shared budget: the campaign budget can be shared into small groups with the same demand, behaviour and performance; 

- Adding and removing words: Google Ads reports inform you which words generate more clicks on searches. From this, you can choose new keywords to add to your campaign and remove the ones that don’t have a return. 

Other Google Ads general optimisation controls:

- Quality index variation;

- Analysis by search partners;

- Analyse devices;

- Competitor analysis. 

Reasons to use Google Ads in your marketing campaigns

1. Immediate results

Creating content and using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in your company are effective functionalities in a marketing campaign, but the results take time to show. Because of that, through Google Ads, you can optimise your offer in a shorter amount of time. With Ads you set the campaign and “overnight” starts to get new qualified visitors for your pages. 

2. Find out the keywords potential to SEO 

Google Ads recommends directing the investment to convert leads or sales, because, besides the immediate benefits, you can test the relevant keywords conversion rate and identify which ones bring the best numbers. 

3. Optimise Landing Pages and conversion flow 

With Google Ads resources, a budget to get the experience started, combined with a good Landing Page construction tool, can create tests to evaluate the impact on offer variation, titles, benefits, your business page formats etc. 

Eventually, the own conversion flow can be improved, going beyond the page optimisation. For example, to a certain keyword, what works best: leading the user to the product page, to a good content Landing Page or a post about the matter? Many times this answer can only be given through tests and investments. 

4. Estimate the terms conversion 

Google camouflages the keyword searched by the user if they are logged in with a Google account on their device. With that, the Analytics reports don’t show which were the terms searched by this user. All these searches are consolidated in the term “not provided”, that for most websites already is over 20% of all organic searches. 

This way, it’s more difficult to assess the performance of the keywords through the organic search reports. To know the conversion rate of each one of them and properly plan the SEO investments, we’ll need to rely on what the paid search reports inform us. 

5. Discover new keywords

Usually, all Ads or SEO campaigns start with content keyword research. But it’s obvious that some terms are missed and others appear with time. 

These terms can be searched when looking on the Analytics report for access via paid and organic search. Due to the “not provided” terms, having an Ads account in these moments is crucial to make complete research. 

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