Why is Google Ads key to your marketing strategy? If you are selling goods, services or information, it is important to build a digital marketing strategy that is based on value to your customers. To be of value – you must be where and when they need you. That means a multi-platform strategy with different content for different times in engaging your customer. This article explores why and where Google Ads are important to you and when you need to be investing in them.
Why Google Ads?
Google is an essential part of any marketing mix. It is where people are actively searching for you (or things you have that they need) in the market. And when they do, it’s essential to be at the top of the page in search results. Google Ads also encompasses a wide variety of different ad types – including text, video and display ads, which let you advertise on almost any webpage.
It’s wise to market your products to consumers who are already showing intent to purchase. Google Ads help drive awareness, generate leads, sales and provides more information about your products and services.
What is the difference between SEO and SEM and when should you pay for Google Ads?
Google Search gives you two opportunities:
- Earned search results are when people are researching a product or service and Google determines that your website delivers the best-aligned content to organically answer their search. With relevant and fresh content, this can be an effective low cost-return for you. This is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
- Pay for search targeting – allows you to reach those directly searching right now using terms that match you or the products or services you offer by placing your website at the top of the results page. Here you are competitively bidding for the best placement against others who also want to bid on the same terms. This is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
The Google Search Network is all about people who are actively searching for your product. The best things to measure here (apart from Cost, Clicks, Cost-Per-Click, Impressions and the like) are Impression Share, Average Position and Quality Score. They help in understanding how your ads are performing relative to your competitors’ in the same market.
Search also can comprise a number of different types of ads. These include:
Google Adwords
When people search using keywords like, for example, “party footwear”, Google allows search network ads, which are the ads that appear on the top of the results page. The higher the position of your ad the greater the chances for it to be clicked. Getting to the top needs a plan that includes a combination of keywords, your budget, bidding strategy and relevance and the quality of the information in your ad as well as on the web page you are driving traffic to.
Display
The Google Display Network is a way for you to reach people not actively searching for your product or a need your product can fulfil, through serving images to people based on your targeting and exclusions (ie it shows up where they are). Google Ads also allows you to place display ads on either relevant or even your competitors’ websites and can be used directly or in retargeting campaigns. These can either be used to reach them first or in retargeting from wherever else they have interacted with you.
YouTube (video)
The YouTube Network focuses on video assets that play before YouTube videos. It’s a great brand awareness tool, and you can retarget these people through forming a remarketing list which you can use to direct your display network targeting.
Shopping Ads
If you are an ecommerce business, Shopping Ads are tailored for your requirements. Your product listing and offers populate in the search results when someone searches for a relevant product. Because shopping ads are images, they’re great at catching attention immediately.
Benefits of Google Ads
More leads at a better cost
Unlike Facebook, Twitter and other platforms that can help build your brand and interrupt when people are engaging on those platforms for other reasons, Google Ads appear when people are actively searching and are in the market for things relevant to your business. Generally, they are looking for an immediate solution or answer and thus have greater intent and need “right now”.
Depending upon the competitive nature of who else is after these terms, investment in Google Ads can generate better quality leads at a lower Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), however, you will always be limited to the volume of those looking in real time.
When you’re targeting people who are looking for solutions that your business can solve, to achieve more leads at a lower cost, you can use different bidding strategies to automize how you want to spend your money.
For example, if you care more about driving traffic, you can optimize towards maximizing clicks, or if you want a lot of conversions, you can look to the objective to maximize conversions.
Know your competition activity and do better
Unlike other platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Google Ads lets you see who you’re competing against under Auction Insights. This gives you an in-depth view of how your ads are stacking up compared to your competitors, and you can gain some idea of how much your competitors are spending and if their strategy changes.
You can even go into granular details and have a look at the specific keywords your competitors are bidding on so that your business can improve your bidding costs.
You can look at your overlap rate with competitors, found under Auction Insights, which tells you the percentage of keywords that your ads and your competitors are showing up on. By changing keywords and watching this overlap rate, you can get a better idea of where to change your own strategy so that you can outbid them.
Reach a potentially larger customer base that is interested in what you offer
Because Google services over 5 billion searches daily, and its display network reaches over 2 million websites and 90% of all internet users, your ads can have a big impact.
By segmenting your audiences through the different demographic, socio-economic and interest filters, you can reach a larger audience that would be interested in your offers.
In Display, you can even retarget and in some cases place your ads on your competitors’ websites and other related web pages so that you know you’re getting high-quality traffic.
Work with a much bigger picture of your marketing strategy
It’s important to look at Google in the context of everything else. While Facebook and Twitter may give you strong brand awareness campaigns and can deliver a great number of leads that you can continue to nurture, you can’t ignore the value Google represents either in reaching those actively in the market today or those you can remind by being present wherever your customer is.
Before spending large sums on paid media we recommend you have all your tracking pixels set up so you can see where your customer goes from the first reach to throughout their journey with you (search to social to website and vice versa), allowing you to see what content performs best at each stage of the funnel. And you should segment, target and measure every activity you do to know what is working for you. Read about how to set up your own marketing funnel
How does Digivizer Help?
It’s important to look at Google Ads as a part of the rest of your marketing mix. This is where Digivizer helps, allowing you to see Google Ads in the context of your other social platforms. You can see side by side, apple for apples, the ability to compare where your best return is, in real-time.
Through tracking measures like daily spend, impressions, clicks, conversions, and results across all platforms, all campaigns, you can see exactly where your money is going and how it best leads to conversions for you.
Visualizing and easily gaining insights into what is happening in real time allows you to quickly pivot your budget to where you are getting results and to stop spending where you are not.
The Digivizer team also helps our platform users to work out a strategy that helps their marketing and business performance through our complimentary Premium Ads Support. You can book a monthly session with one of our Google certified experts when you link your Google Ads account to Digivizer.
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