Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a great way to drive traffic to your online or offline business. Google Pay Per Click advertisement is especially desirable because it is the biggest and most used search engine in the world. So many of your potential customers are using Google in one way or the other and you could leverage that by advertising through Google Adwords.
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What is Pay Per Click advertising (PPC)?
As the name suggests, Pay Per Click advertising is a type of advertising campaign where the advertisers pay for every click of their advertisement on a platform.
Let me elaborate. Say you are a business looking to advertise your product on a website. The website allows you to put banner ads. But you don’t pay for putting up the ad in that space or the number of views the ad gets. Rather you pay based on how many people actually click on the ad. This is PPC advertising.
Google PPC Ads and how it works
Google makes most of the revenue through advertising. Google allows you to put up ads in various places and makes money charging companies who want their ads published. It follows an auction system for its PPC ads. The businesses will bid on different keywords for which their ads need to be displayed and pay google for every time their ad gets clicked.
Google has a method of choosing the ads to be displayed among those bids. There are many metrics involved in choosing which ad gets displayed during a particular search like keyword relevance, ad campaign relevance, and keyword length. Two key factors influence what ads get finally displayed: CPC (the cost per click that you have bid) and Quality Score.
CPC is the highest amount a business is willing to pay for a click. The quality score of your ad comprises many factors like relevance, landing page quality, click-through rate, etc. Ad rank is calculated with these two factors and the ads with the highest ranks get displayed.
Different types of Google Ads
There are various types of Google ads depending on the places it appears and how the ads are targeted.
- Search Ads: These are the ads that appear on the search page above or beside the organic search results. These are the most common and highly utilized PPC ads.
- Google’s Display Network Ads: Have you seen google ads in a random 3rd party website? People who own these websites have signed with google to put up ads on their website and in apps. This is a great way to focus on the niche audience.
- Local Search Ads: Ads targeting customers based on a defined area is called local search ads. These are the ads you see in Google Maps or search results when you are looking for certain services near you. These ads have a high potential for conversion.
- Remarketing Ads: Have you searched about a product or company and found ads about it everywhere on the internet afterward? This is known as the remarketing campaign and it allows you to target users who are already familiar with your brand. This kind of campaign is known to have higher conversion rates.
Is the Google PPC program for you?
Now to the most important question: Is Google PPC program for you?
There are a few points you need to know before you get your business involved with Google PPC. While irrespective of the size of the business one can use Google Ads, there are other factors you need to watch out for.
- Do you have a separate budget allocated for marketing/ advertising? If no, you might have to think twice before starting your PPC campaign. You will be paying only the number of clicks on your Ads but the clicks do not necessarily convert to higher sales for you.
- The Cost per click (which we will talk about a little later) depends on various factors like the type of product or service, search frequency, and competitors. High competition could result in high CPC. On the other hand, if no one is searching for what you are selling the ad campaign would be a waste.
- Familiarize yourself with the rules of the industry ads and Google’s policy. Some keywords or ad campaigns may not be permissible. Industries like healthcare, alcohol and financial services have such restrictions.
- Google Ad campaigns take time. It is quite easy to set up your campaign on Google and get started. However, you might not reap any real benefits until you spend time in it checking the analytics and making necessary changes now and then.
If you try to analyze all these points for your business, you will know whether Google Ads is the right way to go for your business.
What are the benefits of Google Ads?
Google is a platform that constantly tries to make things simple for its users. It does the same for its advertisers as well. That and its reach is what motivate many companies to join the Google ads program.
The following are some benefits of Google Ads:
- Google ads allow you to grow your traffic faster in comparison to organic traffic. Gaining traffic through only SEO can take months or years. Google ads can speed up the process for you.
- Google Ads has a lot of tools that will make setting up and running an ad campaign very easy. For example, Google AdWords Keyword Planner is a free tool by Google using which you can research the keywords your target audience is using. To use this too you must have a Gmail account.
- Google also provides pre-designed ads that can help you ease into Google Ads.
- You can create highly targeted ad campaigns with respect to demographics and geographic locations. This ensures that your ads are seen by more of your potential customers and less by people who are irrelevant to your business.
- Google ads can be customized to different devices.
- You can set a daily limit on your Ad budget so that you don’t end up accumulating bills more than you can afford.
- Google Analytics will help you measure the success and impact of your ad campaigns from time to time.
- Google Ads are a great way to generate buzz for a new product or service that you are going to launch.
- It is easy to tweak and edit your Google ad campaigns. So, you can make changes as per the analytics and make sure your campaign is performing well.
- Google Ads is a great platform for small businesses to fight and find its audience where the market is usually overshadowed by giant companies.
How much does Google PPC Ads cost? (Cost per Click)
Google has an interesting way of calculating Cost Per Click.
First, it ranks all its advertisers based on Ad Rank. To find Ad Ranks the following formula is used:
CPC Bid x Quality Score = Ad Rank
The quality score is given by Google based on the relevance of the keywords of your campaign for a particular search and the user experience.
The ads get displayed according to ranks. The Cost per click is determined by the following calculation:
(Ad Rank of the ad that is ranked next to you / Your Quality Score) + $0.01 = Your Cost Per Click
So, the higher your quality score, the lesser you pay for the clicks. A tool like Jaaxy is another keyword research tool you can use to find laser targeted keywords for your campaigns.
Click here to read more on how to set-up a successful ad campaign and manage your campaigns.
Hope you found this article useful.
Do you have have any question or suggestions or comments about this article? If you do, please ask them below.
Hi Mike, Great read. I tried Google Ads a couple of months it wasn’t exactly straightforward I don’t think but definitely may be something to reconsider in future. I think it can be a bit of a money pit if you don’t know what you are doing with keywords positive/negative etc. Will be something to look at again in future I think.
I agree. Google ads can be a bit scary and eat up your money but the more you do the more it becomes easier. The key is to not do exactly what they want you to do because the system is designed to make money. So most of the settings benefit them and you have to adjust so you don’t lose a ton of money fast.
Case in point; when you are adding keywords its default setting is broad. This is a money pit. They keyword settings is broad as it comes. You will receive unrelated traffic and everything. For this reason, phrase and exact match is where you need to be. Another keyword setting modified keyword. To do this, simply add +before all your words. So for +make +money +online +training would only send traffic with those words only. These are the match types you should use when you try out Google Adwords again.