The Basics of Google Ads

Google is ubiquitous – through handheld devices, laptops, tablets or any other form of tech device, its well-known search capabilities are within your reach.

Although you may be working hard on SEO to get your company at the top of Google’s organic search ranking, there’s another way you can connect with Google users, and that’s through the company’s Ad Services division, which includes the following:

• Google Ads
• Google Marketing Platform
• Google Ad Manager
• AdMob
• Google AdSense

Google Ads have a very simple recipe for success. Every day there are about 3.5 billion searches on Google through its main page, and its other regional language pages. That means a lot of people are searching for a lot of information, and Google comes into the picture by recommending products, services, facilities or whatever the customer is seeking.

The search engine does this by intelligently looking at the words that a person has entered in the search engine, and giving them the best optimized result for it along with an ad that ticks all their boxes. People have an option to further their own research, or just click and check out what Google has recommended for them.

Here’s How Google Ads Work

Many Google Ads work under the PPC model, which stands for Pay-Per-Click, which means that they target words known as keywords, which in turn are bid on by different companies. So for example, if you want to search for a 350CC motorcycle, there might be two companies vying for your attention; however, the ad you see will likely be from the company who might have bid the maximum on the word “350.” So when you search 350 on Google, Company A gets its ad shown rather than Company B. Marketing professionals usually follow three different approaches to bidding for Google Ads and Words:

• Cost-Per-Click (CPC)
• Cost-Per-Mille
• Cost-Per-Engagement

CPC or Cost-Per-Click means you only pay when a user clicks your advertisement. CPM or Cost-Per-Mille is what you pay for 1,000 ad impressions. CPE or Cost-Per-Engagement means you only pay when a user does a specific task that you had designated for your ad (filling in a phone number, email address, etc).

Understand the Quality Score

Following these actions, Google takes your bids and combines them with an assessment of your ad to create what they call the Quality Score. The scoring for this is between one and 10, with 10 being the maximum. So what Google looks for in this is the quality of the ads including their words and images, plus website links that marketers put up for promotion via Google. The higher your score, the higher your chances of appearing at the top of the list of the Google page that every other company is vying to get to. This can help even out the playing field wherein a small company with a really engaging ad can compete against a giant with a sub-standard effort. So when a company’s ad pops up on top of your page and you click on it, then the marketer pays a certain amount to Google which was pre-determined, thus the term Pay-Per-Click model.

Your company will have to decide the type of ad that will be most beneficial to your firm, as different formats work better or worse for different entities. The different kinds of ads are:

• Search campaign
• Display campaign
• Shopping campaign
• Video campaign
• App campaign

A search campaign is the simplest campaign, wherein an ad is showcased based on keywords that a marketer specifies, and a user searches. These are the returns you get whenever you search for anything on Google. They come as a URL next to your search results.

The display campaign is what marketers get from Google’s extensive network of other websites. It is in the form of banners and slots on third-party websites, which are facilitated by Google. It can be in the form of gifs, pictures, text, video, etc.

A shopping campaign is a visual return to any commodity search that a user enters on Google, and it features a comparison of different products.

A video campaign is normally a pre-roll that runs in various video platforms before the searched video. It can be from the same field, or it can be completely unrelated. These can be very useful if your company has a lot of visual merchandising.

An app campaign also makes use of Google’s extensive network of app builders/owners, etc. This is a very targeted segment, wherein ads in the form of display and video campaigns are run on apps that cater to one form of user only.

To get the maximum from Google Ads, it is essential that you make your ads targeted, specific, crisp and short. It is a paradox wherein the smaller your targeted area, the more hits you get for your ads. Google’s massive reach; its capability of targeting a range of geographies; and the fact that it returns quicker and valuable results, enhanced brand awareness, more conversions and definitely a high ROI, is what makes an entrepreneur or a brand more likely to find benefits within the Google Ads platform.