Google Ads (formerly Google Ad Words) is an advertising solution and program for Google companies to advertise across their many products and the wider search network.
The advertising platform allows you to advertise on the two largest search engines in the world: Google and YouTube.
If you want to advertise on other Google products like Gmail, the program is the only way.
Google search and other features have more advertising than ever before in different forms, which means that if you don’t use search ads and other types of ads in your business, your business will feel the impact.
For many businesses, Google advertising has become a necessity to stay competitive, not just a way to increase sales and reach.
Learn about search engine marketing or alternative search engines you might want to use for your ads.
In this article, we look at the benefits of Google Ads. Learn more
But first, let’s see how this all works.
How does Google Ads work in a nutshell?
With search ads, you’re trying to rank your ad as high as possible in search results, while still matching users’ search intent as closely as possible. And the purpose of display advertising is to match consumer interests with the ads they want to receive.
Simply put, Google Ads advertisers bid on keywords to have their ads appear on search results pages or other websites.
An ad auction occurs whenever a user searches for something on Google or visits a website on a larger network.
For each auction, Google calculates the Ad Rank for each ad in the auction, which determines whether users see your ad first.
There are currently six factors that determine ad rank:
✓ Your maximum bid
✓ Ad Quality and Landing Page Experience
✓ Ad Rank must be above threshold
✓ Competitiveness
✓ User browsing context (e.g. device, location, time of day and search intent)
✓ Expected impact of ad formats and extensions
Then your ad may appear in the top search results if your Ad Rank is high enough. There are currently four ad slots available at the top of the results. And more ad space is available at the bottom of the search results page.
A key component to getting a higher ad rank is optimizing for ad quality. You can look at a metric called Quality Score, which is a combination of your ad’s performance indicators from past performance.
The Quality Score ranges from 1 to 10 and determines how relevant your ad is. Google itself doesn’t use Quality Scores in active ad auctions, which is important to understand. Instead, it helps you optimize the overall quality of your ads.
Google ad types
The platform offers ample space for online advertising through Google’s many services and its extensive network of more than two million third-party applications and websites.
Google Ads can appear on all Google products and third party websites.
All Google services where you can place ads:
✓ Google search
✓ Gmail
✓ Google Shopping (Learn more)
✓ Google Maps
✓ YouTube
✓ Google Discovery
This means that depending on the style of content you create, you can find the perfect ad type to suit your campaign needs.
Also, the different ads in your content distribution strategy can help you keep your marketing and advertising efforts fresh, as different ad formats target people at different stages of your sales funnel.
All available campaigns and ad types:
✓ Search ads (text ads)
✓ Google Shopping Ads (Product Ads)
✓ Video Ads (Learn more about YouTube Ads)
✓ Display ads (image and banner ads)
✓ App Ads (via Google AdMob)
Why you should use Google Ads to grow your business?
In short, you should use Google Ads to grow your online business. Let’s take a look at the other key benefits and the main reasons why businesses should use it as part of their online strategy.
If you want to generate sales, increase brand awareness, test new business models online, or collect data, advertising platforms are a special channel you can use.
Benefits of Google Ads:
✓ Cost and return on investment
✓ High level of control and management
✓ Fast results
✓ Level competition
✓ Local ads
✓ Increase brand awareness
✓ Alignment
✓ Remarketing
✓ Analysis
✓ Conversion Tracking and Optimization
✓ Benefits of SEO and Content Marketing
✓ For Scaling Profitably
Google Ads Costs and Return On Investment (ROI)
With many campaign settings and bidding options, businesses using Google Ads can achieve results with different, high and low budgets.
For a small business, you can start advertising for as little as a few dollars a month, but your effective results may not have the impact you want, but you can. This makes the advertising platform flexible for all types of companies across all online advertising needs.
For large businesses, the benefits are multiplied as you can enable cost-effective ad scaling, and Google Ads is cost-effective compared to traditional advertising.
Effective advertising costs depend on:
✓ Contest
✓ Offer
✓ Quality results
Individual cost-per-click (CPC) varies widely by industry, niche, and consumer intent.
For example, if you’re in finance, you’ll find that click costs are higher than in a less capital-intensive industry.
And search intent matters for cost: keywords leading to a purchase will rank higher than keywords customers used early in their customer journey.
But even the most expensive keywords contain cheaper match types, you just need to track them in the data or with the help of a keyword planning tool.
The key is to find the keywords that best fit your goals, as cheaply as possible. Finding a balance between purchase intent and other stages in your sales funnel is one method of reducing costs.
Most companies that advertise on Google get a refund on their advertising costs, making Google worth the money.
Usually we see that goals are not matched by ads or poor optimization is the main reason why you are not getting a return on investment.
High level of control and management
In general, Google Ads offers users many ways to effectively control and manage their campaigns.
And you can take full control of the following, for example:
✓ How much did you spend and how big was your offer
✓ Stop ads with the press of a button
✓ Campaign goals
✓ Control transformation
✓ Control individual and target group keywords
✓ What your ad will look like (as long as you don’t break any rules)
✓ Make sure you present your brand well
With this level of control, you can manage and customize your ads and campaigns to get the most out of them.
But there is another possibility. Since there is a lot to manage in a Google Ads campaign, Google makes it very convenient for beginners.
With tools like Smart Bidding, where you choose goals like Conversions, Google bids to maximize your campaign’s performance.
The advantage of these automated campaigns is that the results are as transparent as you are responsible for.
This means you can closely monitor performance and change anything that looks wrong.
Google Ads Outsourcing
When it comes to managing your campaigns, there is always a choice, should you outsource it?
Usually, the smaller the budget, the more you get by just learning and doing it yourself. The more you learn, the more comfortable you will be using Google Ads and profitably increasing your advertising costs.
Learning how marketers think about effectiveness is very beneficial for your business.
But of course, this isn’t always possible, especially as budgets get bigger and campaigns get more complex as your digital marketing strategy evolves to allow for faster growth.
In this case, the agency will help you scale your ad and display it, although building an in-company online marketing team is beneficial.
The advantage is that you can easily control who runs your campaigns.
Fast Results
Like most paid online advertising methods, Google Ads is fast. And what do we mean quickly?
Deliver results quickly.
Creating the necessary accounts and setting up the first campaign only takes a few hours. If you follow the rules correctly, you’ll have a live campaign pretty quickly.
After a few days, you can analyse the actual performance of your ads to make the necessary changes and optimizations.
Before changing your bid settings, Google recommends leaving your campaign alone during the training phase. Google Ads campaigns have a training phase that collects performance data to optimize your ads.
Even considering the training phase, the whole process of getting results is fast. And you’ll soon discover what works and what doesn’t work for your business goals.
For example, search engine optimization (SEO) or organic social media marketing is unlikely to produce results initially, so it is very difficult to optimize until results are available.
Therefore, the speed of Google Ads results can launch an online business faster than organic methods.
And the speed with which new ideas are tested helps you reach your goals faster.
Level Competition
One of the biggest advantages of Google Ads is that it is a way to even out the competition. While larger businesses with bigger budgets can do more horizontally with Google Ads, small businesses can take advantage of many targeted niches.
It’s important to understand that you can’t just pay with Google Ads. While bid size is key, it doesn’t explain the whole picture.
Businesses advertising there need to optimize their ad ranking and ad quality to stand a chance of landing the most coveted ad slots.
Higher yields mean even smaller businesses can get higher placement for their ads if their campaigns and landing pages are optimized properly.
Not advertising on Google Ads is likely to cost you more than you think. Even if you get a lot of organic traffic, your competitors’ ads for keywords you value can reduce the overall traffic you get from search results.
Especially for the most intentional keywords, like B. Online shopping, visitors have a lot of choices before arriving at organic results.
But let’s flip it over: you can do the same thing, allowing you to compete with established brands and companies that already have extensive brand awareness in search results and beyond.
Enforcement against competitors
For example, if an established business advertises on keywords that interest you, you can use the auction information section to analyse how well your ad compares to your competitors.
You can view statistics such as:
✓ Impression Share
✓ Overlapping rate
✓ Position above rate
✓ Top of page rate
✓ Abs. Top of page rate
✓ Outranking Share
By browsing these metrics, you can measure the actual position of your ad relative to your competitors. By combining the data with your quality results, you will learn more about what you need to do to rank higher than your competitors.
Local Advertising
Google local advertising benefits all businesses that rely on local traffic to make sales.
With Google Ads, you can advertise locally to maximize traffic to your business at the most favourable times or to increase local brand awareness.
Advertising at the right time when customers are looking for something to sell will dramatically increase your local sales. Local demand has strong purchase intent, especially for service-related keywords, as customers strive to meet nearby needs with minimal effort.
In particular, by using Google Maps ads in your campaigns, you can attract customers who are already looking for directions to related products and services. Make sure your service is always front and center when potential customers search for them on Maps.
Find everything you need to know about Google Maps marketing.
In addition, Google simplifies local advertising by simply logging into your Google My Business account and clicking “Create Ad” and taking a few minutes to create a local ad with a reasonable estimation of your needs like:
✓ Approximate location and reach of ads
✓ Keyword theme
✓ Optimal budget to reach most customers
Of course, you can change your local ad settings at any time.
A Google My Business (GMB) account has many other benefits for increasing local search visibility. Learn more about GMB here.
Google Ads Increases Brand Awareness
While search ads are best at targeting customers at the right time and place, they also increase your brand awareness online, but using display ads can help you build brand awareness online faster.
By combining display ads and search ads, your business can create more online space to grow brand impressions.
If you want to increase brand awareness, Google Ads should be one of the first places you can start advertising.
Using display advertising gives you insight into which websites your customers and users visit on a daily basis and can lead you to find interesting partnerships for guest blogs or to advertise directly on those third party websites.
You’ll also find new influencers, such as website or their YouTube channel. If your ads are performing well on these influential channels, we recommend contacting them to develop an impactful marketing strategy to grow your brand online.
The more you understand the behaviour of your target audience, the better digital marketing strategy you will have.
Target Google Ads
Using targeted keywords in Google search advertising is a powerful way to find customers at the optimal time when they are looking for services and products.
The keywords themselves come in many formats, you can have more general keywords that fit a wider range of search terms, or you can target specific searches that work in your favour.
Finding the right keywords for your business should be the goal of every Google Ads user.
The benefit of Google Ads for Keywords is that you can start with a wider range of keywords and dig deeper to find profitable long tail keywords that are usually less competitive and more expensive.
You’ll have access to all the search terms that triggered your ad, and you’ll see the specific performance of each keyword. This makes it relatively easy to find the perfect keyword once you have enough data to analyse.
Keywords are just a starting point for targeting. You can dive into more specific targeting options to find the right audience for you.
Additional targeting options:
✓ Audiences
✓ Demographics (age, gender, parental status, household income)
✓ Location
✓ Language
✓ Device
✓ Promotion Plan
As you can see, the combination of targeting options combined with the best keywords can affect the profitability and success you get from advertising on the platform.
There are other targeting options for display ads:
Location
For example, you can find websites, YouTube channels, and apps where your display ads will appear.
Subjects
Displays ads for content related to the selected topic.
While display ads offer a similar ad experience compared to social media ads, search ads offer users a seamless experience searching for a specific topic.
Users are more likely to convert if they have such intentions.
Google Ads remarketing
Redirects in online advertising are very important; You always want to be in the minds of your customers after they see your website.
With Google Ads, you can effectively drive customers and users to your website or create a more sophisticated audience by using different steps in the sales funnel.
While you should always use referral campaigns when using Google Ads, you should consider remarketing your ads independently, even if you don’t use Google Ads actively.
By promoting those who have visited your site, you increase your chances of turning them into sales.
For example, by testing the different ad formats that Google Ads can offer, you can find the optimal format for converting visitors into customers.
Like your audience and products, YouTube referral ad campaigns can be very powerful.
The ability to get Google Ads into your device to maximize your return on ad spend is critical.
Suppose you are actively using Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads by combining them with Google Redirect Ads. In this case, maximize visibility to users who have shown interest in the past.
Google Ads and Analytics
Web analytics plays a big role in using Google Ads and optimizing it for better performance.
The main benefit is that with all the results you get from advertising, be it Google search ads or display ads, you are always up-to-date on what you are getting from your ads.
Analysing your ad results is simple and easy to understand for beginners. The more ways you use data in your business, the more you can use data to your advantage.
And you don’t have to rely on Google Ads itself to measure the actual performance of your ads, because you can connect third-party tools to improve your performance.
If you link at least Google Analytics to your account, you can better see how your ads are performing by measuring behaviour.
For example, you can use behavioural metrics to track how your users use your site based on different keywords and other targeting options. Understanding the differences will help you discover new opportunities that you can use later.
The data obtained will help you to increase sales if you want, but you will also increase your other marketing activities on different platforms.
When you use the integration of these analytics tools with your ads, you can compare the results with other online marketing methods to see which one works best for you and increase your overall bottom line.
Next, let’s look at other reasons to use Google Ads, conversion tracking, and optimization.
Conversion Tracking and Optimization
With Google Ads, you can track the conversions that are important to your business. Conversion tracking makes it easy to understand campaign performance based on specific terms and results.
Not only can you track key conversions like sales or leads, but the platform also lets you create custom conversions. Custom conversions make ad optimization very useful.
To get started with custom ad conversions, check out our nine Google Analytics conversion goals and ideas.
Once you’ve set up your top conversions and collected enough data, you can enable conversion-based bidding in your ad campaigns.
Basically, these conversion campaigns use conversion data to maximize results from modified bids and targeting ads.
By combining custom conversions and a conversion campaign, you increase the results you can get from your ads. More importantly, increases your total return on ad spend to grow your business profitably.
Benefits of SEO and Content Marketing
Combining the use of Google Ads with your SEO and content marketing strategy has many benefits for increasing productivity.
Immediate benefits include:
✓ Find new keywords with Keyword Planner
✓ Find new search terms and keywords that previously worked
✓ Website optimization (traffic speed helps you identify and fix new issues faster)
✓ Analyse and create a profitable audience
For example, you can use Google Ads to target keywords and find the ones that work best for you. And once you know what your target audience is and what keywords they use, you can start expanding your SEO strategy to target them.
SEO content marketing can be expensive; Ideally, you want to make sure that you target your content for the right keywords, especially in the beginning.
And with the help of ads to track the performance of certain keywords and their combinations to the core, your return on investment in content marketing will increase dramatically.
When you look at certain keywords, especially long-tail keywords, they can be difficult to find without an ad at the start. Since there are many keywords themselves, you need a system to collect and research them to improve SEO and content marketing.
But with advertising, you can set a wide variety of targeted keywords, and over time you’ll find the search terms your audience is using. And creating targeted content like that with SEO in mind will help you grow online.
Whether you’re using keywords SEO for ecommerce or even YouTube SEO to grow your online presence, Google Ads will help you find relevant keywords.
Google Ads enables cost-effective scaling
As we discussed, the benefits of speed and how you can use speed to quickly test new ideas, new sales channels, products, or business models as part of your campaign.
Launching a profitable campaign that is profitable but reaches new customers in new ways will help you answer the question most businesses should be asking: Can it scale up?
Scalability in Google Ads is easy.
If you create a campaign that performs better than others in your previous attempt, you can start investing more in that campaign, which will scale to the results you want.
If you measure the right metrics and see that a certain set of campaigns, ad groups, or keywords are producing them, you can redirect the rest of your budget to where you see results, or you can start scaling your ad spend profitably.
One important note: As you scale your ad spend, you may run into a bottleneck at some point.
For example, winning keywords and campaigns could only get there because you ran out of leads.
That’s why you need to keep testing to find new viable and scalable options to use later.
That means even if you find a winning combo, never stop testing new campaigns with different settings.
But at its core, scalability is a benefit of Google Ads. As always, you have the ability to scale to realize your campaign’s full potential if the results match your well-defined business goals.
Conclusion
Today, a strong presence at Google is essential for any type of business, from local service providers to international conglomerates. And using Google Ads benefits all types of businesses to achieve their online goals.
Online advertising has reduced advertising costs and democratized the way growing businesses can take matters into their own hands to grow online.
Lastly, Google Ads is one of the best ways to advertise online at low prices to attract new customers, increase sales, or build a brand online.