(Updated: 9 July 2023)
When it comes to online marketing, businesses have access to a variety of tools that can help them reach their desired audience. However, some of these tools take considerable time and money to deliver a measurable ROI. This is where Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) comes in.
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system created by Google, that can work for almost any business model. This platform allows you to create online ads to reach audiences that are actively searching for products or services like yours. This powerful PPC platform delivers measurable ROI and provides you with total control over your campaigns.
Let us take a closer look at the reasons why you should include Google Ads into your online marketing arsenal:
1. It’s a Google cash cow.
With the increase in population size and access to the internet, Google has had to handle an obscene amount of traffic each year, with a record high of 2 trillion searches being documented in 2016. In 2020, Google made $146 billion from Google Ads. Two years later, according to Statista, in 2022, Googles’ ad revenue amounted to $224.47 billion U.S. dollars and with Google responsible for more than 84% of global desktop search traffic, it has proven to be the go-to platform for people world-wide.
2. Google Ads scales with your business
One of the many benefits offered by Google Ads is its ability to scale to your company’s ever-changing needs. As a business owner, you have full control over your campaigns’ daily / monthly spend, which means you can increase or decrease your campaigns’ budget, or even pause your campaign at any time to suit your company’s financial needs.
In turn, you can also create multiple Google Ad campaigns with different targeting methods and keywords to better determine which converts at a profitable rate and which campaign does not. This makes Google Ads a highly effective marketing tool for businesses of any size.
Google Ads can scale with a business by leveraging its extensive reach and targeting options. Advertisers can increase their budget, expand their ad campaigns to new regions or demographics, optimize keywords, and employ various bidding strategies to drive more clicks, conversions, and ultimately, business growth.
3. Google Ads is flexible
Google Ads provides you with a variety of targeting options to help you better reach your desired audience. With these targeting options, you can easily customize your campaigns to create high-performing, high-converting ads that will entice your audience to act. For example, with Google Ads you can:
- Specify keywords: You can choose to use long-tail or short-tail keywords within your campaigns to target a specific audience type at a specific stage of the customer’s journey. For example, if you use a search term like “construction company”, this will show your ad to prospects most likely at the earlier stages of the customer’s journey. Whereas, if you used a search term like “hire a construction company” your ad will show to prospects with purchasing intent.
- Ad extensions: Using ad extensions can help you showcase certain information at a quick glance such as unique product features, company trust indicators, service offerings, contact information, relevant website links or your physical location.
- Target your audience: By using the location, calendar, language, browser, or device tools within Google Ads, you can target your audience further. You don’t have to worry about showing your ads to audiences outside of your desired range, especially if your products or services are limited geographically.
- Negative Keywords: You can also add negative keywords to block your advert popping up when a related, but wrong keyword is searched for along side you actually targeted keywords. These would normally include keywords like job, free, diy etc.
4. Google Ads gives faster results than SEO
When using SEO tactics, your company could wait 6+ months before they see results within Googles’ search results. Whereas, with Google Ads, you can start measuring clicks, impressions, and conversions almost immediately. Through Google ads, you can get your business in front of your target audience sooner and receive actionable insights that can benefit your SEO efforts in the long term. It’s also easier to completely change your Google Ads campaign compared to turning around a current SEO position.
5. Create more engaging ads
Google Ads allows you to use various types of ads, including search ads that appear in search engine results, display ads shown on websites and apps, video ads displayed on YouTube, shopping ads for e-commerce products, and app promotion ads to drive app installs and engagement.
6. Google Ads dominates SERPs
Over the years Google has changed the ways the search results display within Google by giving more and more above the fold real estate to Google Ads, since it makes them more money. As a marketer this change is highly beneficial as it allows you to get your brand in front of potential prospects ahead of organic results. Coupled with more engaging ad formats, you can easily dominate the SERPs and improve your conversion rates. Organic search results are getting suppresses on page 1, requiring more aggressive techniques around visibility.
7. Improve your conversion rates
To improve sales conversions with Google Ads, businesses can focus on several key strategies. This includes optimizing keywords and ad copy to align with customer intent, conducting thorough audience targeting and segmentation, implementing effective landing pages with clear calls-to-action, utilizing remarketing to reach potential customers who have shown interest, testing and optimizing ad campaigns continuously, and leveraging conversion tracking and analytics to measure and refine performance.
8. Connect your marketing channels
Although Google Ads on its own is an extremely powerful marketing tool to have, it only forms part of your overall marketing strategy. When creating a Google Ads or PPC campaign, you typically connect to another online platform such as your website. Therefore, it would be beneficial for you to optimize your website landing pages to maximize the chances of converting prospects to paying customers. The same applies to aligning your marketing message across channels to ensure consistency and improve brand recognition.
9. Enjoy actionable insights
Google Ads provides comprehensive reporting to track the performance of advertising campaigns. It offers metrics such as impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, cost-per-click (CPC), and return-on-investment (ROI). Advertisers can generate reports on various dimensions like time, geography, devices, and demographics. Additionally, it offers features like conversion tracking, Google Analytics integration, and attribution modeling to gain deeper insights into campaign effectiveness, audience behavior, and the impact on sales and conversions.
10. Beat your opposition
Google Ads provides several ways to gain a competitive edge. Advertisers can use competitive analysis tools to monitor and adjust bids, keywords, and ad placements based on competitors’ activities. Utilizing ad extensions, compelling ad copy, and strategic targeting can also help improve visibility, click-through rates, and conversions, ultimately enabling businesses to outperform their competition in the digital advertising landscape.
Conclusion
When it comes to your online marketing strategy, it may be beneficial to consider using Google Ads. We at Cognite understand the value Google Ads can bring to the table and have seen first-hand how Google Ads have improved the ROI for our clients. Need help navigating the pros and cons of Google Ads, contact our team today and let us show you the way.
