How to advertise on Google

Before getting into how to advertise on Google, it is a good idea to get a basic understanding about what Google AdWords is.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a PPC platform by Google (the Search Engine), that allows companies and individuals to advertise to customers searching for specific products or services. A typical advertiser will create an ad campaign that has specified keywords or keyphrases associated to it that will trigger the advert when a potential customer searches on Google. This form of digital advertising allows your company to reach the right people or target audience quickly and effectively. If you would like to know more, it is worth reading our blog article “Google AdWords PPC Explained” to get a more in depth understanding.

How to Advertise on Google? What Steps to Follow

Setting up a Google AdWords Account may seem like a daunting task but it is actually very simple. Visit the Google AdWords website and follow the sign up steps. This is free to do and you only spend money once you have setup campaigns and entered in billing information. Once your account has been setup, we can begin to create your AdWords campaign.

1. Determine what your goals are:
   1. Understanding and defining clear goals will help you to measure whether or not your efforts are having a positive impact on what you are trying to accomplish. Without these measurements, there is no way to determine success. For example, if your goal is to get users to sign up to a newsletter, then you would create this as a goal.
2. Who are you targeting?
   1. To maximise your budget and generate targeted traffic, we recommend defining your target audience. For example, if you only offer services in the Johannesburg area to women between the ages of 25 and 30, then advertising globally to both male and female of any age group would be a waste of your budget and no help to increase online sales.
3. Research is key!
   1. Keyword research can mean the difference between spend money wastefully and converting customers. If your campaign is using the wrong keywords you could not only be pushing the wrong traffic to your website but also negatively impacting your organic SEO by increasing your bounce rates and decreasing time spent on your site.
4. Shared budgets
   1. Creating a shared budget on Google AdWords will help you to scale up your campaign with control of the overall spend on a monthly bases. Google AdWords calculates the daily spend by taking your monthly budget and dividing it by 30.4. For example, if you want to spend R5000 p/m then your daily spend budget would be 5000 / 30.4 = R164 p/d.
5. Campaign Structure
   1. Keeping your campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords and other parts of your AdWords account in a neat, structured way will go a long way to make identifying gaps in the market and problems with targeting easy.
6.  Ad Performance
   1. Google AdWords bases its CPC (Cost Per Click) on the performance of a combination of keywords, ad relevance and landing pages. Monitoring the performance of your adverts will prevent increasing in cost per click.
7. Conversion Tracking
   1. Conversion tracking can be implemented in various different ways. You may require the services of a website developer to achieve this. We highly recommend implementing Google Tag Manager to quickly implement event tracking.
8. Website Optimisation
   1. Landing page optimisation is important for both improving conversion as well as reducing Cost Per Click. If your website page is not optimised correctly for your advertising efforts you could be fighting a losing battle.
9. Remarketing
   1. Ever wondered how adverts about products you viewed on a website have miraculously begun showing on other websites you are visiting? This is known as remarketing. This is a great way to try push your service to users who have originally shown interest.

What you should be doing every week

In order to maximise the return on investment (ROI) of your Google AdWords advertising spend budget, your team will need to monitor keyword performance, ad performance, search terms and loads more. This can be a  time consuming process but it is definitely well worth the time. Without implementing ongoing changes and updates your campaign will quickly start to lose momentum and begin wasting money on fruitless traffic. Some of the tasks we complete for our clients on a weekly basis have been listed below:

1. Keyword Performance
   1. Monitoring of the keywords or keyphrases in campaigns to make sure that the most effective keywords are running effectively. Understanding CTR (Click-Through Rate), impressions, CPC (Cost Per Click) and conversion rates is key to making decisions on which keywords to keep and which ones to scrap.
2. Negative Keywords
   1. Spending tens of thousands on keywords that are not actually related to your product or service will sap your spend budget quickly and have no positive return. Make sure to update negative keywords constantly to reduce this.
3. Ad Performance
   1. Creating variations of adverts will help you identify the type of headlines and descriptions that your target audience respond to. Target your ad correctly with optimisation of adverts will improve your conversion rates overall.
4. Ad Schedule
   1. Showing your adverts at the right time can mean the difference between a conversion and wasted budget. Make sure your adverts are triggering at the correct times by updating your Google AdWords Ad Schedule
5. Bid Management
   1. Managing the ever changing bid requirements on keywords is critical to performance. Updating bids and creating bid modifiers will help your ad campaign performance.

These are some of the tasks we look to improve and monitor weekly for our clients. There are alot more tasks that should be completed but without the above mentioned basics, your campaign could be wasting money.

If this all seems a bit overwhelming, why not take a look over our Google AdWords Management service and give us a call today!