How To Get Started With Google Ads

Google Ads is quite possibly one of the most effective and wide-reaching advertising platforms in the world.

Whether your business is local, national or global, you can almost certainly leverage the Google Ads platform to boost sales or raise awareness of your products and services.

As Google Ads experts, we are often asked how to get started on the Google Ads platform. So we wrote this article to answer some of our most frequently asked questions.

Lets start with the WHAT?

Google Ads is a paid advertising platform that can show your ads online.

Google Shopping is a great platform for e-commerce merchants

The main areas your ads may show are:

• In Google search results and Google Shopping searches
• On YouTube
• On websites that your potential customers visit
• In smartphone apps

Google Ads is a type of marketing known as pay-per-click advertising (PPC). This is where you pay the platform (in this case Google) each time a user clicks your ad. The price per click is determined by a real-time auction between you and your competitors.

Why Google Ads?

There are many reasons to use Google Ads, but the fundamental reason is to improve your marketing strategy and get more sales. 

It is well known that strong Google Ads campaigns can generate lots of new leads and customers. This is why Google Ads has become increasingly popular among businesses across all industries.

To get budget approval for any marketing activity, the activity has to provide a return on investment (ROI) by being profitable. To know whether a campaign is getting good ROI, it must be measurable. It’s been said that marketing without measurement is like playing golf in the dark.

Traditional advertising, such as outdoor or print media, lacks the ability measure its effectiveness. As one of the original Lever Brothers famously stated:

“Half of my advertising is wasted, and the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”

One of the main selling points of Google Ads is the amazing measurability. Using Google Ads correctly can show you the pathway to success.

Questions we ask before starting a Google Ads campaign

One disadvantage of Google Ads is that the platform can be complex and presents a multitude of different options.

Google Ads professionals are here to guide you through the process of starting your campaign right so that it makes money as soon as possible.

These are the things we help our clients consider before starting an Ads campaign.

1. What do you sell?  A product or service?  This will determine what kind of treatment is required and where to show the ads. For example, an e-commerce store may be well-suited to Google Shopping ads, whereas a charity might choose display ads on non-Google website.
2. Where? Where do you currently sell your product? Is it hyper-local or do you sell nationwide? Do you know where your customers are geographically located?
3. When? When do your customers generally look for your product/service? Have you checked Google Analytics to see when users visit your site? Some businesses have customers who research products and service at their desktops at work. Others may see more shopping taking place in the evenings and at weekends. Knowing when your audience is looking for products like yours is key to timing the ads to best effect and not wasting money.
4. Who?  Who is your target audience? Are they young, old, male, female? Or a mixture of all? Do you already have data on your customers from your website that we can remarket to?
5. How? How is your service delivered or your product despatched?
6. Price?  Is the price of your service or product static? Do you publish the price? Is the marketplace price driven?
7. Promotion? Do you offer sales promotions? Having a promotion especially during peak shopping periods will increase your click through rate and therefore, potentially, your conversion rate.
8. Profit? What is your current profit per sale? We use this important information to calculate what your ad spend should be. Without knowing this we would be working in the dark.
9. Budget? What are you willing to spend? Do you know what the life time value of a sales conversion is?  Are you willing to create a budget with this figure in mind? It I good to know what your comfort zone is – think about how much you are willing to spend before an ad campaign is honed and delivering conversions.
10. Sales CRM? Do you have a sales pipeline that is linked to your customer data? We track leads and contacts generated from Ads, and recommend that they align with your CRM system to help identify the lifetime value of a lead from Ads. We want to provide efficacy on behalf of Google, therefore it has to be measurable.
11. Expectations:  what does good look like to you? Businesses work on a range of expectations – one business might have an acceptable profit margin of 5% and another might be 50%. What do we need to deliver to meet the objective?

If you can answer these questions this will help form the basis of the campaign. We then continually reassess how the campaign is performing based on these parameters. If you don’t have all the answers straight away, no problem! We can guide you through the process of defining what your campaign should look like and what your budget should be.

Get in touch so we can help you start your journey with Ads.