PPC Agency Northleach

Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords and Google AdWords Express) is an online advertising solution that businesses use to promote their products and services on Google Search, YouTube and other sites across the web. Google Ads also allows advertisers to choose specific goals for their ads, like driving phone calls or website visits. With a Google Ads account, advertisers can customise their budgets and targeting, and start or stop their ads at any time.

Google AdWords and Google AdWords Express are the previous names for the new, improved Google Ads.

Google Ads works by displaying your ad when people search online for the products and services you offer. By leveraging smart technology, Google Ads helps get your ads in front of potential customers at just the moment they’re ready to take action.

1. You start by selecting your goal, like getting more visitors to your website or more phone calls to your business.
2. Next you select the geographic area where your ad should be shown. It can be a small radius around your business or much broader, like cities, counties or entire countries.
3. Finally, you’ll craft your ad and set your monthly budget cap.

Once your ad is approved, it can appear whenever users in your target area search for a product or service like yours. You only pay when users engage with your ad, like clicking your ad or calling your business.

There are three basic types of Google Ads:

• Search Network campaigns – usually text form, these ads can show on Google Search results pages when someone searches for a product or service that’s similar to yours
• Display Network campaigns – usually image form, these ads appear on websites or apps that your customers visit
• Video campaigns – usually 6 or 15 second videos, these ads show right before or during YouTube content

CPC (Cost Per Click) or PPC (Pay Per Click) means you only pay for an ad if someone clicks on it.

Other advertising models include:

• Cost Per Impression, where you pay based on how many times your ad was shown (not clicked)
• Cost Per Engagement, where you pay when a user completes a predefined engagement (like watching your video ad)

Your Google Ads cost is determined by your budget settings. Google Ads can work with almost any budget. You’re only charged when users interact with your ad, like clicking to visit your website or to call your business. With Google Ads, there is no minimum spend requirement, and no required contract length – you can stop your ads anytime. The cost of a click or call can vary based on a few factors.

To get started with Google Ads, click here to sign up. Our guided set-up process will walk you through creating your first ad in just a few steps. If you need help signing up, our Google Ads experts are available to set up your new account and even assist in creating your first campaign at no additional cost.

SEO is a longer term game and involves the correct set up of your website and online presence, ultimately to bring you more organic search and referral traffic. You don’t pay for this traffic, but you’ll pay with time and money getting it right.

SEO should always be an important element of your digital marketing mix, and it’s often overlooked and underestimated by both business and web developers.

Google AdWords is a fast way of bringing in targeted traffic to your website. It is fast to set up, and a far faster way to generate the traffic than SEO (generally). Both are ongoing investments, but you’ll only pay for AdWords clicks when people are interested in your product (generally).

With SEO you have to invest before you get the traffic. With Google AdWords, you generally only pay when people click through to your website.

Both are important. Certain SEO elements will help improve the quality of your AdWords campaigns.

It is important to understand that running paid advertising with Google will not make any difference to your organic search rankings, although it may improve the click through rate of your organic listings (due to searchers subtly seeing your brand in an advert before scrolling down).

Usually when I hear this opinion of AdWords, the root cause is due to either running campaigns in house without the appropriate knowledge, or having a bad experience with a “pile ’em high, sell them cheap with hard sales call tactics” type agency.

Running an AdWords campaign without knowing how to use the platform can be a recipe for burning money fast. With the first campaign I ran for a client, I saved almost 50% of their ad spend within minutes as they were serving ads for completely inappropriate search terms. For another client who was running their campaigns using a generic Google helpline, I halved their cost per click from £2 to £1 meaning they were previously spending twice as much money as they had to. It is also not uncommon for me to take an internally managed AdWords account and change the average clickthrough rate from 1-2% to over 10% (and sometimes higher), and get results that return many multiples of ad spend.

All of those are good metrics but I’ll also sort out your conversion tracking so you can track monetary values, which is the ultimate metric to measure

Of course you can, but re-read the previous answer first.

AdWords changes a lot, and it’s very powerful. It can also be very dangerous if you look at the wrong metrics. Even Google tells you a good Click Through Rate is the best metric in one of their help documents. It’s a great one, but return on investment is the ultimate, but it’s usually just a bit more effort to set up. This involves getting Google Analytics set up correctly, and integrating a few platforms to get more data.

If you don’t know about all these AdWords features, Google won’t be rewarding you, meaning your campaigns can suffer, meaning you are spending more than you need to. A good campaign structure could quite easily make the difference between a $5 cost per click and $1.

I’ve also seen other messy situations as internal campaigns targeting extremely vague keywords, and having competing versions of Adwords running at the same time.

To run successful AdWords campaigns takes a lot of investment in time and learning. Aren’t you better off spending that time working on your business?

Setting up an AdWords campaign is quite complicated if you are doing it well, and involves a good knowledge of the platform. It’s not just clicking a few buttons. Setting up a new campaign involves the following, and more :

• Understanding your advertising objectives
• Understanding your products and profitability of them
• Deciding which campaign types are most appropriate
• Keyword research
• Creating the correct campaign structure to drive down costs
• Your campaign ideas may result in several AdWords campaigns being created to be more effective
• Creating many ‘ad extensions’ to make your adverts more compelling
• Writing copy for many different adverts (It’s not uncommon for a ‘simple’ campaign to have 100’s of ad variations if done well)
• Creating or providing input to several different banner adverts (if using display)
• Setting up conversion tracking within Google Analytics (this can be simple, but can also be very time consuming)
• Minor modifications to your website to allow conversion tracking

…and lots more.

This takes a lot of time, but ultimately it means your money will go further, and you’ll get better returns. Well set up campaigns will definitely save you money, and potentially lots of it.

Your campaigns need to be managed and optimised regularly to make them work better over time, and allow you to expand on them.

This involves creating new ad groups and keywords, pausing ads or keywords that aren’t working, making suggestions about new campaigns, checking if the budget is adequate and making suggestions around where to increase it, ensuring your ads aren’t being shown for irrelevant keywords and lots more.

The advertising space isn’t static. There’s millions of calculations performed in a real time auction every time an ad is displayed. Optimising it means your campaigns will continue to improve and expand. Even if nothing was touched, and other advertisers started new campaigns, your results could be very different on a week to week or month to month basis.

Maybe, but probably not if they are reputable. You may not be entering the keywords that have been set up in your account, you may find your budget isn’t enough to reach all searchers, or your ‘quality score’ is lower due to your website, so your ad doesn’t get shown all the time. It may be the advertiser has excluded your internal computer address to improve campaign performance, or not targeting people in the location you are in.

There are some great staff at Google but when you call the main helpline you are unlikely to get the same person. If you do they have to help many people and will not be able to help with more detailed elements like tracking return on investment and discussing the best goals to set up in Analytics to measure.