How to Advertise on Google Search – Easy Guide

The world of advertising has changed vigorously over the last decade with advanced digital marketing strategies.

In order to drive more customers and get into their heads, a few businesses spend a ton to advertise and drive them to their products or services.

And till the point that your company notices that spending in millions hasn’t got them the expected customers, they will re-think on what went wrong.

If you are planning to spend a pocketful of money on ads to reach your target audience, you would better start spending it in the right place.

Somewhere with 3.5 billion daily interaction, over 246 million unique visitors, and a soaring return on investment that can go up to 700%.

Somewhere like Google Ads.

Google Ads was started two years after the launch of the most popular website worldwide, Google.com.

Since October 2000 Google Adwords had been making noise in the advertisement world.

After rebranding in 2018, they changed their name to Google Ads.

Google Ads allows businesses to display their products or services to their users when they are searching on the web for the product you offer.

But Google Ads can be a little complicated and costly for some people.

If you want to advertise on Google search without spending a dime you may need to consider SEO as a better option in the long run.

So, we will discuss some basic questions that will strike your mind while you begin to advertise on Google Ads for your business so that the process gets seamless and easy.

What is Google Ads?

It is a paid advertising platform that falls under the marketing category of pay-per-click(PPC), where you as an advertiser pay per click or per impression(CPM) on a particular ad.

Advertising on Google Ads has proved to be an extremely effective process to drive qualified traffic to your business while they are searching for the products or services you offer.

Over time Google will also help you to monitor and improve those ads so that you can reach more people and have a successful paid campaign.

Why Advertise on Google Ads Platform?

The first mention-not is, Google Ads platform has been powering businesses for around 2 decades where it automatically creates a sense of eldership and accomplishment in the world of paid advertising.

Secondly  we all know, Google is the most used and preferred search engine worldwide that receives more than 3.5 billion search queries on a single day.

According to stats and stories by Google, advertisers(business) get a return up to $8 on every $1 they spend on Google Ads. And a higher return on investment is all businesses look for.

Another valid reason is that even if your business is ranking organically on the first page, it could be pushed down by your competitors who are running Google Ads on the same business terms.

PPC gives you an opportunity to advertise your products/services and be on the top.

Google Ads Terms that You Should Know

AdRank: AdRank determines your ad placement. It is done by your maximum bid multiplied by your Quality Score.

Click-Through-Rate: Your CTR is the number of clicks that your ad receives on their ads per number impressions.
Higher CTR indicates a quality ad.

Bidding: Google Ads run via a bidding system.
Advertisers get three options for Bidding and the higher you bid, the better your placement.

1. CPC – Cost-Per-Click means the amount you pay for each click on your ad.
2. CPM – Cost-Per-Mile, is the amount you pay for 1,000 ad impressions when your ad is being shown to 1000 people.
3. CPE – Cost-Per-Engagement is the amount you pay when one of your audience takes a predetermined action on your ad.

Campaign Type: While you begin a paid campaign, you will have to select among the three types: Search Ads, Display Ads, and Video Ads.

1. Search Ads– Text ads that are visible among search results within Google SERPs.
2. Display Ads – They are image-based ads that are displayed on the web pages inside the Google Display Network.
3. Video Ads – They are displayed on Youtube with length between 6 to 15 seconds.

Conversion Rate: It is the proportion of total visits on your landing page measured by number of form submissions. High CVR indicates a seamless user experience.

Display Network: Google Display Network (GDP) is a network of websites that authorize space on their webpages for Google Ads.

Extensions: Ad extensions approves you to boost your ads with added information at zero cost.

PPC: Where the advertiser pays per click on an ad and is one of the most common paid advertisement campaigns.

Quality Score: It measures the quality of your ad by analyzing your click-through rate(CTR), quality of your landing page, past data on SERP, and your keyword relevancy. 

Keywords: When a user puts a query into the search box, Google come back with a chain of results that meets the user’s search intent.

How does Google Ads work?

Google ads basically function as an auction. Google serves the one wanting to advertise its product or service via Google Ads. And this leads to full-fledged competition in more or less every category of the products or services offered.

So, how does Google recognize which ads to display to potential customers?

An auction.

So,

 What is Google Auction?

Whenever a Google search is done, an auction takes place every single time. Its purpose is to determine which ads to display for a specific search and in which order will it appear on the page.

Ads that finally win the auction and are placed highest among the results hold the highest Ad Rank.

Ad Rank: The value that decides your ad positioning.
It determines where your ads show compared to other ads on the result page.

Now when we have discussed the basics of Google Ads, we can roll on how to advertise on Google search.

How to Advertise on Google Search?

Beginning to advertise on Google primarily needs a Google account that is definitely free to create.

Once you complete the primary step, you have to evaluate how to run Google ads to grow your business.

● Establish a Goal

Once you sign up Google will help you to pick a campaign based on a particular goal and help you in setting it up.

Google provides 6 different types of Goals to pick from, but if you want to make your own, you can create a campaign without a default goal’s guidance.

Before discussing on How to create your own campaign we will learn about the default goal and how it helps.

1. Sales: It is used to draw sales on the phone, your store, or online within your app. This goal is recommended by ROI Amplified to businesses that sell physical products.
   Campaign: Search, display Shopping

2. Leads: This will help you to get leads(potential customers) and accelerate other conversions by encouraging the customers to take clear action. ROI Amplified suggests this goal to the business that doesn’t own an e-commerce website.
   Campaign: Search, shopping, display, video.

3. Website Traffic: It guides you to draw people to visit your website.
   Campaign: Search, display, shopping, video.

4.  Product & Brand Consideration: This goal is designed to encourage your audience to explore the products or services you offer. ROI Amplified recommends this to businesses with innovative products and creative assets.
   Campaign: Display, video.

5. Brand Awareness & Reach: This goal helps you in reaching to a broader audience and create awareness for your product or service.
   Campaign: Display, video

6. App Promotion: It guides you to focus on achieving more installs and interactions for your brand’s app. If you get your potential customers to download this app, they are more likely to buy the product or service you offer.
   Campaign: Application

7. Create Campaigns without Goal’s Guidance: You can take any available campaign type and create a campaign step-by-step without being recommended by Google’s Goal.
   Note: This should only be applied by legit Google Ads Certified Experts.

● Campaign Types

Mentioned below are all types of campaigns that you can opt-in for your business.

1. Search Network Only: Display text ads next to search results to potential customers when they make a Google search.
   When people say PPC, this is what they are referring to.
   This will work out the best when you know what they are searching for on Google and the time they are looking for your product or service.
2.  Search Network with Display Select: Show text ads to potential customers on Google’s partnered websites as well as next to the search results.
3. Display Network: It displays visual ads(images & videos) to potential customers wherever possible on the web.
   Google says GDN can reach up to 80% of all internet users.
4. Shopping: It shows detailed information about the product to the shopper to promote inventory, increase traffic to your local store or website, and find qualified leads.
   They appear at the top of Google search results.
5. Video: It boosts customer engagement with a category of ads in video formats on platforms like Youtube and other video partner websites.
   It improves brand awareness.
6. Universal App: It assists in promoting your app across multiple Google platforms such as Search, Google Play, Google Display Network, and Youtube.
   It is best if your business has an app to promote.

● Naming Your Campaign   

Keeping an exception yet a relatable name for your campaign will make it attributable.

Name it according to the purpose of selling such as if it is a remarketing campaign name it Remarketing. The more specific your words are, the easier it will be easy to navigate your account in the future.

● Locations

If your business is about offering location-based services such as lawyer service in Chicago or pest control service in Manhattan, you should define the location you want to target.

Google grants you permission to target the zip code, which will let you have control over the customers you want to draw.

● Choosing Your Bid Strategy

Google offers different bid strategies to best suit individual user’s needs. These strategies can be categorized into two main categories;  Automatic and Manual.

1. Automatic CPC

These strategies are given to Google as people just don’t have the whole day to constantly update bids for each and every campaign.

a) Target CPA: This strategy sets bids to help get as many conversions as achievable at the aimed cost per acquisition (CPA) asset.

b) Target ROAS: Helps get as much conversion value as possible on the aimed return on ad spend (ROAS) that you have set before.

c) Increase Clicks: Sets your bids to help you draw as many clicks as feasible within your estimate.

d) Increase Conversions: It helps set your bid in such a way that you drive most conversions within your allocation.

e) Target Search Page Location: This aggressive bidding strategy notifies Google to set your bids to help boost your ads to the top of the search results so that it gets in front of a lot of your potential customers.

f) Target Outranking Share: This breakthrough lets you pick a domain that you want to outrank in the search results and how frequently you want to outperform it.

2. Manual CPC

Manual strategy gives you complete control over all your campaigns and needs most of the time to manage.

Each Ad Group or keyword will remain the same bid unless you change them.

But do not go for it unless you have excelled in all of the 2020 Google Ads Guide.

• Enhanced CPC: It will be turned on by default when you start a Manual CPC campaign. This bid strategy is designed to automatically adjust your manual bids to help expand conversions.

● Setting Your Budget

While setting your budget Google would want to know the average you want to expend each day. First decide how much you wish to spend monthly and then divide that number by 30.4 to get your daily allocation.

Google sometimes allows you to go over budget for a particular day depending on fluctuations so that you can respond better. But Google will make sure that your spending doesn’t go above your monthly budget.

● Delivery Method

Google grants you two features on how to deliver your ads. Standard(default) or Accelerated.

1. Standard Ad Delivery: Google has designed this ad in such a way that it evenly allots your budget throughout the entire day.
2.  Accelerated Ad Delivery: These will be displayed as soon as the day starts more frequently. But there is a chance that you run out of your budget faster than expected.

● Create Extensions

Google gives an easy-to-overlook tool(and rewards you for utilizing) commonly known as Extensions.

Extensions are quite crucial for your campaigns to run flawlessly.

Extensions can  improve the efficiency and functionality of advertising on Google Ads, though we can’t oversay how important it is for your campaigns. 

We would suggest you use any extension that can be applied to make your job more seamless.

 Google offers a range of Ads Extension to pick from if you want to learn more click right here.

● Ad Schedule

This is needed when you want to run your ads on particular times or a few days of the week. This will help you set it up easily.

● Ad Group Name

You have to make sure that you name every ad group in the campaign a different name. It should act as a theme such as for Summer Sale, name it “Summer Sale”.

● Keywords

Keywords play a vital role in triggering your ads to appear when searched. Coming up with great keywords will need you to know about the phrases your customer can use to search for similar products like yours.

Take the help of Google Keyword ideas by choosing a web page or product/service. It will display suggestions that you can start with.

● Keyword Match Types

Properly utilizing the keyword match types could be a little difficult as it can be hard to understand at the first look.

Each of the keyword match type controls which search engine to trigger your ads, from specific searches to broad searches and phrases. This is one of the most important factors when it comes to Google ads in 2020.

1. Broad Match: This is a default match type that will be assigned by Google to all the keywords until you instruct them to do otherwise. This type will show your ads to the most possible people.

2. Modified Broad Match: Used more oftenly by advertisers because it allows you to pick specific combinations of words which you want your ads to show for. Keyword order doesn’t matter as the only purpose of this type is to display for specific keywords despite the phrase they appear in.

3. Phrase Match: It limits the total number of searches that triggers the ad when compared to broad keywords.

4. Exact Match: This type will help you match your keyword exactly or very closely thus helping in triggering your ads.

5. Negative Keywords: These are the keywords that you want your ads to show up for, it teels Google which phrase and keywords are not related to your product/service.

● Create Your Ad

Now is the time that you can put your creative mode on!

A good ad creation is when you match the ad language with the keyword that will help trigger your ads, while taking into consideration what a user on the other end is intending when they are searching on Google.

For ex: If someone is looking for Laptop repairing service on Google, you would never want your ad copy saying “ New Laptop For Sale”.

1. Final URL: All you users will end up here when they are clicking your ad often which is commonly known as the landing page.

2. Display Path: This is a green URL that is shown beneath your headlines. You can utilize up to 2 display paths, each ranging up to 15 characters in length.

3. Headlines: These are the most crucial part of your ad copy. They are mainly categorized into headline 1 , headline 2 and headline 3. Headline’s objective is to catch user’s attention and requirement to clearly address their needs. Headlines can go up to 30 characters long.

4. Description: Descriptions are pillars for your headlines which show for detail about the product or service you offer. You can put 2 descriptions each having 90 characters, adding upto 1880 characters in total.

Coming down to one of the most important parts of advertising on Google search.

● Creating Ad Groups for Display

Now, after setting up your first campaign, your next job is to create an ad group that will contain only related ads and keywords.

Every ad group should have its own themes in order to show the product or service category you offer.

The keywords in your ad group get triggered when you win a bid in Google’s auction.

Google, then display the ad you have created for that specific ad group.

● Audiences

Google offers one of the best features to target your ads by your audience interests.

This gives advertisers the potential to reach people who keep interests in the products or services just like yours.

Audience targeting has always been a powerful tool for advertisers, especially because it lets you base your audiences around Affinity, Remarketing, and Intent.

1. Affinity: Helps in showing people;s lifestyle, interests and buying habits.

2. Intent: It builds an audience, based on the product/ services your ideal audiences are actively looking for. You will have to provide keywords and URLs to Google to have this audience type work.

3. Remarketing: This builds an audience via the customers  that have interacted with your business before.

● Demographics

No one precisely knows who their ideal customers are. Demographics will let you set a perimeter on who to show your ads to. Demographics and audience both lessen down the net cast by your ads and it is up to you to decide whether it is positive or negative.

● Automated Targeting

It will allow Google to analyze and expand your audience to the people that are alike most of your valuable customers. Conservative automation is the default here, with two other options No automated Targeting and Aggressive automation. We suggest you to go for conservative automation though.

● Create Your Ad

You can use the ad generator given by Google for Display ads or you can also create your own images.

Conclusion:

Google ads are extremely effective and ROI generating if it is used in the right way.

As we talked earlier, Google ads can be daunting, if you try to use it without studying or you could end up mismanaging it.

It is the process of continuing education and proper management.

Now, is the time to take your advertisement in your own responsibility and make it worth it.

Author Bio:

Rintu Biswas has been working as a content marketer since 2011.

He is very passionate about SEO and white hat link building. His main aim is to learn new things and do experiments, especially in link building.

Currently, he is managing the content creation with Brizy the website builder.