Google ads are a great way to get your business on people’s radar in 2021. With over 3.5 billion Google searches a day, the search engine has become the first place people go for answers. If your business offers a solution to a problem, getting your site to rank highly on Google is key to helping customers find you, but because of this it is also a competitive advertising market.
However, you don’t always need to outbid your competitors to promote your business effectively with Google ads. Understanding keywords and how Google calculates your Ad rank can help you win ad auctions and reach a large audience without having to spend more. Read on to understand the factors that determine your Google ads success, and start applying them to grow your business’s online profile.
The 3 Parties Your Ad Needs to Work For
When making your Google ads campaign, there are 3 parties whose needs you should be considering. First and foremost is the customer you’re trying to attract to your business. If you’re placing ads in Google search using keywords, it’s the words the customer searches that decide whether your ad shows up for them, so you want to keep the customer’s needs and questions in mind when choosing effective keywords to target with your Google ads.
The next thing to consider is your business needs. What areas of your business are you trying to attract customers to? What different services does your business offer, and are there specific pages of your website you want to send different customers to?
The final party to bear in mind is the advertising service itself. Google ultimately decides where to rank your ad, and it’s their frequently updated algorithm you need to please for the best chance to promote your business online through Google ads.
How to Use Google’s Keyword Planner
Once you’ve decided who you want to advertise to, and which parts of your business you want to promote, it’s time to select your keywords. You can find relevant keywords using Google ads’ keyword planner tool. With this tool, you can search relevant keywords you’re considering using in your ad.
For example, if you were promoting a pottery business, you might search ‘pottery’. Once you search your keyword, you’ll be able to see the statistics for how competitive that keyword search is going to be in the Google ad auction. This is where going for less competitive, more specific keywords can really pay off.
To find keywords that target specific searches relevant to your business, which you can provide an attractive answer to through your website, try adding an extra word to your keyword search to narrow it down. For the pottery business, you might add a location such as ‘pottery london’ or an action, like ‘buy pottery in london’.
To take this further, think about specific products or pages on your website you could link to, and search for keywords relevant to these. A pottery business might have a lot of success advertising with less competitive keywords like ‘handmade coffee cups’ or ‘hand painted vases’ in different ad campaigns for different pages of its website.
When it comes to keywords, it pays to be specific, and weigh up competitiveness versus relevance. Play around with Google’s keyword tool to get an idea of the best keywords to drive traffic for your business with Google ads.
Advertising Auctions and How to Win Them
Once you know who you want to advertise to, and have an idea of the keywords you’ll target to achieve the best results for your business, you can enter into the ad auction. This is a lot less high-adrenaline than it sounds; you don’t actually have to enter a direct bidding war with your competitors. Instead, you place a bid you feel comfortable with for each keyword you want to use. Google then decides your ‘ad rank’ (where you will appear in the order of ads at the top of Google search results for each keyword).
There are two factors which determine your ad rank, so the cost of your ad is only half of the final result. Google considers the bid you have placed compared to other businesses bidding to advertise with that keyword, but they also take into account your quality score. Simply put, quality score is found through combining your business’s scores for 3 elements:
Relevance of your ad to the keyword search
Expected click through from your advert
Landing page experience
This means that businesses with a high ad ranking can actually pay less to advertise through keywords and still get their site to the top of the Google ads search results. Read on for more details on these 3 key elements and tips on how to make sure your ad ranks well.
How to Maximise Your Google Ad Rank
Now let’s talk about what these different ad-ranking categories mean for promoting your online business. First, you need to make sure you are bidding on keywords which are relevant to your advert. This means being selective when you’re using the Google keyword tool and only choosing the words which you are actually talking about in your ad or selling on your page.
One way to make sure you are doing this is to group your keywords under ad campaigns in your business’s Google ads account, so you have different ad campaigns for different products and services your customers might be searching for. This keeps your ads relevant to the keywords and also increases the chances of a high click through rate, the second goal for improving your ad ranking, because your website will be shown to people who have searched the exact keywords it relates to, so they are more likely to choose to use your business’s service.
Grouping your keywords like this also lets you use adwords to improve your customers’ experience once they get to your business’s landing page. If you create different ads for different sections of your website, then when customers click through they will immediately see that your business can provide what they have been searching for, and they are far more likely to make a purchase or provide their details. If you use adwords in a strategic way, you make your customers’ experience smooth and hassle free, so they are more likely to follow through to a purchase, at the same time as improving your ad ranking.
Watch the video below for more information on how you can group keywords to promote your business in a cost effective way.
Understanding Your Ad’s Performance
You can get a better understanding of how your ads are performing, or predict how they will perform, by looking at your stats on your Google ads account. One of the most important pieces of data for figuring out how to make your advert more effective is your quality score.
Once you’ve found your quality score, you can view it overall as well as seeing a breakdown into the 3 elements (ad relevance, clickthrough rate, and landing page experience). This is helpful in understanding where you need to improve. Generally, anything above 7/10 is considered a good quality score.
Once you know your quality score, you can compare this to how that adword is performing for you in the ad rankings. The ‘status’ column when you look at your keyword statistics will say either ‘first page ranked’ or ‘ineligible’. This tells you whether your ad is placing at the top of search results, or being dismissed in the ad auction.
If your quality score is below 7/10 for an underperforming ad, go to [how to maximise your ad rank - internal link to earlier paragraph] and follow the tips to improve it. However, if your quality score is already 7 or above, you are probably being outbid in the ad auction. If that is the case, you have 2 options; you could increase your bid, but you also may be going for adwords that are too competitive, in which case getting more specific with keywords can be a way to keep your advertising campaign cheap.
Change your bids or keywords as needed according to the data on your Google ads account. But remember to keep your focus on ad relevance and creating a smooth customer experience by making sure all of your ads link to relevant, up to date pages.
So, now your Google marketing strategy for your business is in place, your ads will keep running until you choose to pause them or your budget runs out. Check in on your ad data regularly to make sure you are promoting your business online in the most effective, low cost way.
To learn more about Paid Ads and how effective it can be for you, click on the link https://www.regalroye.com/paid-ads and you will be directed to our main page for more details.
If you would like to know more about promoting your business online contact Regal Roye today and we'll get you started.
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