The Basic Principals Of Google Ads

Understanding the basic principals of Google Ads can be helpful for any business who wants to try to boost its revenue through paid search marketing. 

Google Ads (which used to be called Google AdWords) is Google’s ‘in-house’ marketing services and, in short, means that you can place results for your business to appear on a search page if you are willing to pay for the privilege. 

This is excellent news for businesses who don’t have the patience, time, or expertise to make sure that their website manages to find its way to the top of each engine results organically, and can get their products and services seen by their target audience with pretty immediate results. 

A paid for advertisement will usually appear to the side or above the search engine results page. To distinguish them between the organic results you’ll notice a small ‘Ad’ label on them in green, but otherwise, they look much the same as the organic results, which is even better news for businesses looking to use paid search to get noticed. 

Getting a Google Ad set up is easier than you might expect, and doesn’t have to be insanely expensive either. 

To start with you need to research the keywords that an individual might input into a search engine to try to find a business like yours. You use these keywords as the basis of your advert, these are the ones you are paying for – so when customers type in these words, your advert will appear on the results page. 

It is important to note that while this sounds super easy (and in some ways it is) there are also rival companies out there who are thinking the same thing and could outbid you for the search terms you want to use. You, therefore, need to tell Google how much you are prepared to pay each time a customer clicks on your advertisement when it appears, the more you are willing to spend, the more likely yours will be the ad that shows. 

Another factor that is taken into about however is ‘Ad Rank’ and the ad with the highest rank tends to achieve the top position on the page, the second highest will achieve the second position and so on, and if your ad doesn’t rank it won’t appear at all.

So how is Ad Rank determined? It depends on several factors such as:

The quality of your advertisement

Whether your advertisement meets the quality thresholds (these are variable and determined by factors such as location, topic, device type and so on).

Ad extensions and other ad formats such as extra information like a phone number, or additional links to your website.

To set up a Google Ad, you need to determine how much you are willing to pay per click (PPC) the figure you decide upon is known as the cost per click (CPC).

You can choose an alternative to the above which is where you pay Google for every 1,000 times your ad appears on the search page. This is known as CPM – cost per impression. Choosing this option may get you more visible, but you still have to pay Google regardless of whether anyone who sees your ad decides to click on it. 

If you are prepared to create quality advertisements and take into consideration all the factors that Google does to determine the ad rank then using Google Ads could be a great way to make your business more visible. They could help you reach a wider audience, increase your web traffic and boost your revenue, so it’s well worth considering implementing them as part of your digital marketing strategy.