What Are Google Ads?

Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords) operate on a pay-per-click model, in which website owners bid on keywords and pay for each click on their advertisements. Every time a search is initiated, Google digs into the pool of advertisers and chooses a set of winners to appear in the results page. The “winners” are chosen based on a combination of factors, including the quality and relevance of their keywords and ad campaigns, as well as the size of their budgets.

More specifically, who gets to appear on the results page is based on an advertiser’s Ad Rank, a metric calculated by multiplying two key factors – CPC (cost-per-click) Bid (the highest amount an advertiser is willing to spend) and Quality Score (a value that takes into account your click-through rate, relevance, and landing page quality). This system allows winning advertisers to reach potential customers at a cost that fits their budget. It’s essentially a kind of auction.

A successful Google Ads campaign is made up of 6 things:

  • Expectation setting
  • Keyword research
  • Ad copy
  • Landing Page/Site quality
  • Tracking
  • Optimization

Expectations

The great thing about Google Ads in comparison to Organic SEO is the time to placement is extremely fast. For new accounts, you can have an Ad running and receiving traffic in less than a week. Organic optimization can take 4 – 12 months of dedicated work to see meaningful results. With Ads, however, it’s important to set the proper expectations with what your ROI will be. As the system is an auction, we see plenty of people who want to “test the waters” with a small daily budget. This typically results in a campaign that yielded few conversions, a frustrated client, and a mindset that Ads just doesn’t work for my business. If you are considering running an Ads campaign, we’d want to set the expectations by asking a few questions:

  • What is the goal and/or how would we count conversions? This is easy for an ecommerce site, as a conversion = a sale. For a lead generation site, however, we would want to discuss what counts as a conversion. Some ideas are form completion, click-to-call, newsletter sign up, etc.
  • What is the conversion worth to your company?
  • For ecommerce, what is the COGS on the sale?
  • For lead generation, what is your average close rate as a percentage?

Knowing these items will help us run a few scenarios through our goal calculator to see if running an Ads campaign makes sense for your company.

Keyword Research

Knowing what keywords to bid on is critical to your campaign’s success. We tend to recommend bidding on  keywords that are in the middle or bottom of the sales funnel, not top of the funnel.  Meaning we tend to bid on keywords that are more action oriented than research oriented; especially for ecommerce sites. The keywords that you bid on should closely match your service offerings, your main benefits, and your call to action.

Doing the keyword research up front (and not just taking Google’s suggestions) will go a long way in making sure your campaign is a success.

Ad Copy

Actually writing a Google ad is challenging. You have very definite character limits and rules that you have to follow in order to get the ad approved. We recommend sitting down with a pen and paper (or Word and keyboard) and brainstorming a couple dozen headlines before you start creating your Ads. Google headlines are 30 characters, so you’ll need to keep your headlines within that limit. But think through what you are offering, how you can clearly state your unique selling/value proposition, what your call to action is, what the customer’s pain point might be when they’re looking to call you, etc. For each Ad, Google will show up to 3 of your headlines – but sometimes they’ll just show 2.

After you have a bank of headlines created, think about your body copy for the ad. Google gives you 2 description sections each with a 90 character limit.

Pro tip: Write separate ads for each of your main services, don’t try to cram all of them into one ad.
Example o Google Ad, showing Headlines and Description

Landing Page/Site Quality

In the example above, we are bidding on keyword related to hot water heater/tank replacement. When someone clicks on that link, they are taken to a page all about hot water tanks. On that page you’ll find hot water heater common issues (identifying and connecting with the problem), common repairs, tips, social proof (reviews) that this company can do all the repairs you might need and, of course, a call to action to be able to schedule an appointment to get your tank repaired. There is nothing on this page about clogged toilets, leaking pipe repair or sump-pump installation – this ad is all about Hot Water Tanks and so is the page we take people to. This product/service specific page is called a landing page. The more relevant the landing page is to your ad, the higher your quality score will be. Landing pages can just be pages on your site, we just don’t want to send people to your homepage and have them wonder what the next step might be.

It is also critical that if you are running ads and generating traffic to your site that you have a couple basic things covered. You need to have an SSL certificate on the site and your site needs to be built for mobile traffic. Each page must have a call-to-action as just bringing traffic to your site is not going to increase your bottom line.

Tracking

The hardest part about Google Ads is making sure the technical bits are all taken care of. In order to properly track how your campaign is doing, you’ll need to tell Google what counts as a conversion. This requires installing Google Tag Manager on your site (dropping a bit of code) and an event tracker for each conversion tracked (also code added to the page). If this is not done properly you could:

  • Not have any idea what your actual ROI is on Ads.
  • Be double counting conversions (overestimating the ROI).
  • Be tracking a non-conversion metric (like page views) as a conversion.

Without proper tracking, there is no way to tell if a campaign is successful.

Optimization

Ads is not a “set it and forget it” marketing platform. We login and monitor the accounts we manage daily. There will be budget changes, additional keywords to add (or remove or block), ad refinement, new headlines, etc. to update regularly. We do recommend giving a new account a few weeks to get some data before optimizing, but if your account has been running for more than a month, you can begin refining your account to make sure you are getting the most out of the traffic you are paying for. 

Ads are a fantastic way to generate additional traffic and sales for your business. The 6 items above are a great starting point but nowhere near a comprehensive guide to getting started on Google Ads. If you’d like to have a more in-depth conversation about what Google Ads could do for your business, give us a call. We’d be happy to run you through our goal tracker to see if running an Ads campaign would make sense for your business.

Run the Numbers

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