As you’re learning how Google advertising works, think about what it is you want to accomplish. What are your specific goals? Because I guaranty there will be a way for Google to help you achieve and track those goals.
Google’s advertising platform is called Google AdWords, and it encompasses a wide range of capabilities. They are divided neatly into Google’s two advertising networks: The Search Network and The Display Network.
Advertising on Google’s Search Network
When you advertise on Google’s Search Network, the text ads you create will appear as part of Google’s search results, as well as other Google sites like Maps and Shopping. The ads also appear on hundreds of non-Google “partner” websites like AOL that will match your ads to search results.
This is a great way to show text ads to customers who are actively searching for your type of products or services.
Advertising on Google’s Display Network
This is where it gets really interesting, because there’s so much you can do and so many people you can reach. The Display Network includes YouTube, Google Finance, Gmail, Blogger, a billion partner websites, mobile websites, and even apps. The ads can be text, graphic, video, or some really cool rich media combinations of text, image, and video that drop open when you hover on them.
We can choose the topic of the web pages on which we want the ads to appear. Or we can be specific and choose which websites on which to advertise. We could ignore the website and instead focus on the person — Google collects data about Internet users and can show your ads to people who fit the demographics, affinity, interests, locations, and languages you select. Usually, the display ads we set up for clients are a combination of all of these things, to reach the most relevant targeted group of people possible.
Those Ads That Appear After You Visit a Website
They’re called remarketing ads. Many of our clients like the idea of an attractive graphic ad that appears to people who recently visited their website, to remind potential customers of their products and services and encourage them to come back to the site and complete the purchase, research, or other conversion metric.
How Much Do Ads on Google Cost?
The cost for Google AdWords depends on what you want to advertise and what kind of results you expect. The good news is you choose your own budget. For some ads, you pay for impressions, video views, or specific conversions (website visitor actions) that you choose yourself. For the most part, though, you pay per click to your website. The biggest deciding factor for cost per click is your competition (it’s a bidding war), though other factors will affect your rate (the quality of your website landing page, how high you want your ads to appear in search results, how relevant the ad is to the keyword search, etc.).
You can spend a couple bucks a day, and get a few clicks to your website out of it. One company’s most effective Google ad plan will be vastly different from another company’s, due to different goals, different competition, and different target markets. A large e-commerce company with high competition may be spending thousands of dollars per month on shopping ads and remarketing ads, while a small corner coffee shop is spending a few hundred per month on mobile ads targeting people within a 15 mile radius of the location, while yet another company with a more obscure service is spending very little to appear in search results for specific searches with less competition.
Why Google?
Why are we so focused on Google? According to Forbes, Google is the No. 2 most valuable brand in the world (behind Apple), America’s No. 2 best employer (behind Costco), and worth $101.8 billion. According to NetMarketShare, as of August 2017 Google far surpasses the other search engines at 82% of search engine use worldwide. Bing is at 7%, and Yahoo and China’s Baidu are each around 5%. It’s estimated that Google processes at least 5.5 billion searches per day. Some of those searches are in your area, searching for your services, and we want potential customers to find you rather than your competition!
Google’s advertising capabilities continue to expand in more unique and targeted directions as it strives to give advertisers more success and users a more pleasant experience. “What will they think of next?” is a question I could ask almost daily. Sometimes it feels like Google knows us better than we know ourselves.
Google ads can encourage people to:
- Buy on your website
- Visit your website
- Take an action on your website (such as fill out a form or sign up for a newsletter)
- Call your business
- See your ad (branding)
- Visit your business
This was just the bare basics of how Google advertising works. I didn’t cover ad positions, bid strategies, keywords, conversion tracking, or any of the more complex intricacies of setting up and measuring the results of an effective digital advertising campaign. When you meet with us, we’ll discuss your budget, who you want to reach, and what you want to accomplish. We’ll set up the Google advertising plan that’s right for you. Call or email us to learn more about how Google advertising works, and how it can boost your bottom line.
