What Are Google Ads?
Google Ads and Advertising Made Simple
Google ads are one of the best ways for you to spend your advertising budget. With over 63,000 searches per second (as of 2018), Google is the number one place that people turn to when looking for a product, service, or piece of information. Thus, it should be pretty important to your company that you turn up at the top of the page when people search for you or your product. So, what are Google Ads exactly? Plain and simple, they are an easy way for your company to come up as one of the first links in Google search results.
Google Ads are paid advertisements that show up as the first few (typically 1-4) results on the search engine results page (otherwise known as SERP). As seen in the image below, they are differentiated from traditional organic results with the green Ad box to the left of the page URL. Why is it important to show up in the top few results? A link that is above the fold (meaning you don’t have to scroll to get to it) is much more likely to be clicked on. Afterall, we as consumers trust that Google will present us with the most relevant results first and will likely click on the first page offered to us. Being in the top results is a highly enviable place to be, as it almost guarantees that users will chose to visit your site, increasing your traffic and thus conversion rate.
So how does it work? Companies looking to participate in Google Ads select keywords that they want to target and then pay to have their site show up when a user types in a search with that keyword. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Google takes a lot into consideration when deciding if your company is going to show up in the search rankings. Keywords are bought by companies by bids, that is, how much they are willing to spend per click. Multiple companies may be targeting the same keyword, but one may be paying a whole lot more to make sure their site comes up more frequently in the results. Additionally, Google judges the relevancy of your ad to the question being asked, the landing page that it leads to on your site, your prior click through rates, and more to determine if your company’s ad should come up in the coveted top results. It’s important therefore, that you to optimize your bid amount and your Google quality score (which includes all the above relevant information about your ad) in order to bring you the best returns for your paid advertising.
The average cost per click for Google search ads across all industries is $2.32. However, the cost that your company will have to pay for your ad to show up will vary depending on a variety of other factors, including the competitiveness of the keywords you are trying to target, your industry, the location of your business, and the quality score that Google assigns to your ad. After everything has been taken into consideration, Google will let you know exactly how much you can expect to pay for a link click.
Of course, to some companies the idea of paying over $2.00 every time someone clicks their ad sounds insane. Afterall, what if a thousand people end up clicking their link and they end up blowing their marketing budget? The nice thing about Google Ads is that you have a lot of control over how much you want to spend. First of all, you can set a maximum budget, telling Google exactly how much money you have to put towards an ad campaign. Once you’ve reached that maximum, Google will stop showing your ad to people,
so you won’t continue to be charged. You never have to commit to a contract and have the freedom to change your budget or stop your ad whenever you want to. Additionally, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and is taken to your page – not every time that your ad is presented to someone in the SERP. This lets you know that you are only paying for clicks that will likely lead to customer conversions.
Google Ads are a great way for your company to be found online and bring in new customers, particularly when you don’t have great organic rankings. You may have to rearrange your marketing budget to accommodate for the ads, but they are an amazing way to get the results you need. Make sure that your company is getting the traffic it deserves by using Google Ads.