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Investing in an online advertising campaign is a great way to promote your site on the Internet. You can do this with Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords), an online advertising tool that helps attract people searching for products, services or companies in your industry to your site. Google Ads campaigns, however, can scare small businesses. Fortunately, with our tips, running them will be simpler.
How to create a Google Ads ad?
In theory, starting a Google ad campaign is trivial. A Google Ads account is required of users, of course. To begin with, we need to choose the target (aka conversion) of the campaign. It can be:
- getting more phone calls
- gain more transactions or registered users on our site
- getting more visits to our location
Google’s website will then ask us to enter the name of our company, the keywords we want to advertise on and the location where we want the ad to display.
Now we move on to the settings of the campaign itself. All you have to do is create the text of your ad, choose the right keywords you want to target, set a daily budget and start and end dates for your campaign. Of course, this is just theory, and in reality running Google Ads, especially for a small business, is a bit more complicated.
How much do Google Ads campaigns cost?
What will most differentiate a small business’s Google Ads campaign from a large company is, of course, its budget. For such campaigns, we set the budget individually. This type of advertising is very cost-effective, because we pay only for individual clicks (PPC) of potential customers. The cost of such a click will depend on several factors, including. The popularity of our chosen keywords.
So we can spend, for example, 500 zlotys on such a campaign – the amount we will pay may turn out to be less if our ad does not bring “clicks”. The budget for advertising campaigns can also be adjusted at any time.
How to run Google Ads? With the help of Google Analytics, choose the right keywords
Many small companies and sole proprietorships assume that if they cannot afford a large advertising campaign budget, it will not be successful. However, the success of Google Ads is not at all dependent on the amount of money you spend on them, but on the keywords you choose.
Not only can the keyword planner in Google Ads help us with this, but also Google Analytics. Google Ads, for example, allows us to customize ads to reach our specific target audience – people in specific cities or regions. Awareness in the local community is nothing more than building recognition of our brand in our region or city. It turns out that as many as 46% of all Google searches are for local information, and 72% of local searchers visit a business within 10 kilometers of them. This is why building awareness of our brand online will be the best way to outshine the competition.
So if we find out from Analytics that most of our customers come from Gdansk, for example, we can capitalize on our popularity in that region by choosing the right keywords and adjusting the rate per click.
Of course, there are also reverse situations. Sometimes we want Google Ads to cover the whole country. This will be the case for online stores.
Google Ads – use “long tail” key phrases
Long tail phrases are referred to as keywords that have 2 to 4 words and convey user intent well. They offer a higher chance of conversion, so it is worth including them in your Google Ads campaign. For example, if our product is sneakers, it makes sense to use long tail phrases like: “men’s athletic shoes”, “sneakers for men”, or “colorful sneakers for women”.
What should be the content of Google Ads?
After selecting keywords, we will need to create advertising slogans. This means entering the headlines and content of the ad. Of course, we need to weave in keywords. As with any advertising, the content must be interesting. It should be original, unorthodox and encourage the customer to click on it because they want to learn more. At the end of the ad, of course, there must be a so-called “call to action”: buy, subscribe, check, see, use, etc.
Check the budget report offered by Google Ads campaigns
Properly setting a budget for Google Ads and the pace of spending will help us achieve our goals. To have more control over this spending, it’s worth tracking the report available in the Google Ads interface. It will let us know how much we have spent on the selected campaign so far, as well as see monthly projections of overall spending. The report will also help us understand how changes in a campaign’s daily budget can affect its effectiveness.
Running Google Ads campaigns – optimize your landing pages
For a Google Ads campaign to be effective on a small budget, attractive landing pages optimized for conversions are essential. Landing pages are nothing more than the pages on your site that a customer goes to after clicking on your ad. It is extremely important that these landing pages are well optimized and correspond to the content described in the ad that the customer clicked on. If the content of the ad does not match that on the landing page, we can forget about getting a new customer. On the contrary: we may discourage him from visiting our site in the future.
Google Ads campaigns aren’t everything – don’t forget other features
Paid advertising is not the only way to market through Google search. Many ways are even free. For example, having an industry blog or creating a company profile on Google will help us appear high in the search engine. A high position will also increase the “click-through rate” of our paid advertising, also let’s not neglect these free methods. Mastering SEO will also increase our chances of getting clicks on ads.
Is running Google Ads on your own a good idea?
As you can see, running a Google Ads campaign is not all that easy. Creating the right advertising, keywords, landing pages, choosing a good budget and tracking its effectiveness can not only overwhelm us, but also consume a lot of time.
That’s why running Google Ads campaigns (but also Meta Ads) is now often part of marketing agencies’ services. This means that we no longer need to plan such activities ourselves, professionals will do it for us. We can launch a Google Ads campaign with the creation of a new website, designed by such an agency.
