Do you know how Google Ads works? When it comes to winning over customers and increasing your presence in the online market, some Google tools are very useful and can make all the difference to your business. One of the most important ones is Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords.
Thanks to its worldwide reach, Google’s ad platform means visibility and expansion, as it contributes to boosting brands and creating new business opportunities.
As your company cannot stay out of this, in this post you will discover how Google Ads works and how easy it is to create your online campaign in a few minutes. Keep reading to check it out!
With its first version launched in 2000 by the Californian giant Google, Google Ads is an online advertising tool that displays ads in the form of sponsored links as soon as a person performs a search, basing its results on the words used at the time of the search.
Google’s platform, even with the emergence of several others on the market such as Facebook, still leads the world ranking of online advertising revenue, with an incredible $134 billion dollars in 2019 alone based on Statista data.
This information demonstrates the power of this tool and how many companies around the world trust digital advertising using the Google platform. Since its launch, Google Ads revenue has grown continuously year after year.
The main differential of this tool is the possibility of taking your message to a qualified audience through highly specific segmentation.
At the exact moment a search is performed, the person will receive an advertisement for a product or service related to what he is looking for. To grab consumers’ attention, these ads are placed at strategic locations on the page, such as at the top or footer.
In addition to being present in the search area, Google Ads can also display ads in the form of banners and videos on various Google partner sites.
An ideal ad is the one that reaches the right people at the right time, right? That’s why Google’s tool is one of the best options on the market — after all, it promotes your product or service in a segmented, measurable and targeted way. See below the main advantages of Google Ads!
You Choose How Much You Want To Spend
One of the main benefits of Google’s ad system is that you set the budget! For example, you can set a monthly budget of USD 3,000 for your campaign, but if necessary, you can reset it at any time.
This is a safe way to make an announcement and adjust the amount invested according to the results. If a campaign doesn’t do well, it can be canceled at any time. On the other hand, if it is achieving great results, you can increase the budget whenever and for the amount you want.
How You Are Charged: Cost Per Click
Being charged only when the ad is clicked is another advantage of the tool. The cost per click (CPC) can also be set by you, simply by entering the maximum amount you want to pay for a received click.
Google Ads manages the budget, allowing you to spend up to 20% more than the stipulated amount per day when the ad is displayed more often, making your sponsored link not fail to receive valuable clicks for your business.
In the same way, Google Ads lowers bids on other days, adjusting according to the total budget set so that it is balanced throughout the campaign. It is also worth noting that if the campaign is not done carefully, Google Ads can become more expensive than it should.
Always make your campaign with people who understand the subject or look for information so you don’t fall into any trap. But if you read this post to the end, rest assured — you won’t face any problems!
Segmentation
One of the great advantages of investing in advertising within Google is the high power of audience segmentation that the platform offers us, making it possible to create highly specific campaigns.
There are several forms of segmentation to be used, allowing the display of ads to be highly effective according to your marketing strategy. Among the possibilities we can highlight:
- Keywords — ads are displayed according to searches performed by users in the Google search bar, using certain words, expressions or phrases, also taking into account browsing history;
- Topics and Placements — the tool allows you to choose from a number of specific topics, and ads will be displayed on various sites dealing with that particular topic, reaching users with that interest. It is also possible to directly choose the ad locations;
- Target Audience — through target audience segmentation, we have access to a wide range of data about users, choosing those that best represent the persona of your business, presenting ads not only in searches, but during their navigation through websites that maintain Google advertising spaces;
- Display Location — the platform is not just about ads in the search bar, there are several other places where you can display your brand, products and services. The tool allows you to choose between these options such as blogs, websites and the search engine itself;
- Demographic — Demographic targeting is critical to a campaign, as your target audience can be very specific. Googles Ads allows you to choose between age, location, language, gender, among other options;
- Ad Schedule — there is a very interesting possibility that can further improve the effectiveness of a campaign, targeting by schedule, the days and times that the ads will be shown;
- Devices — finally, we have a device targeting, where you can choose whether your ads will be shown only to smartphones, for example, allowing you to adjust a campaign solely for mobile.
It is necessary to remember that all these segmentations do not cancel out the others and it is possible to combine all the possibilities to create highly effective campaigns and with a great return for your company, one of the things that makes Google stand out in digital advertising and makes this ad model much more interesting than traditional media.
Greater Reach
You probably have heard someone say “google it” at some point, right? Google has become part of our lives and this expression is something common to all of us, as whenever we have a question, we turn to the internet search.
People use the Google search bar to find information about products, locations, services, ask questions and more.
This moment of search shows interest in something, and this can attract new customers to your company, presenting solutions that solve the problem faced by those who are performing the search.
This moment of interest has great potential, as if a company has the solution to a problem, there is nothing more pertinent than being there and offering to solve it.
To give you an idea, Google holds no less than 65% of all searches performed on the internet, according to data presented by comScore.
According to Estatista, in Latin America, amazingly, 92% of all internet searches are carried out through Google, that is, the reach that your ads can take when inserted on this platform is enormous.
It is practically impossible to think of an efficient digital campaign without using Google Ads and its search ads.
Measurement of Results
In addition to all the advantages already described so far, with Google Ads, the advertiser has access to a range of valuable information about the interactions of the target audience with each of their ads.
There are several ways to measure what is happening, such as counting impressions and clicks, and users who clicked on an ad and performed some type of conversion on the website or landing page, such as purchasing, filling out a form or downloading some stuff.
With a specific control, it is also possible to do remarketing by showing your ads to people who have already interacted with one of your ads, helping to reinforce the campaign.
All this is accounted for and made available by the Google Ads platform, thus allowing the advertiser to have full control of the return on their investments with online ads.
In addition, having a general control of the campaign, you can see which are the ads that receive more clicks and which do not show a good performance with users, allowing you to prioritize your investments.
The platform also demonstrates several other interesting data, such as average advertising cost, mobile ad results and various other valuable information to improve your campaigns.
Another point to note is that you can also use Google Analytics to track the behavior of your target audience, understand more about their habits such as search time to purchase, interests and other points, and create more effective campaigns.
How Does Google Ads Work?
As you have seen so far, Google Ads allows you to create an ad for your company, product or service to be published in Google search results and also on your network of partner sites (Google Adsense). That is, they are paid ads that appear better positioned in search results related to a particular keyword.
When performing a Google search, it searches its library of content related to the term and publishes them on the results page, respecting first the order of the sponsored links, which are positioned at the top and right side of the page.
Thus, a sponsored link campaign allows you to appear in front of organic results.
By tracking the performance reports available in Google Ads, you get accurate data from your entire campaign, such as ROI, traffic evaluation, brand awareness evaluation, sales and conversions, and so you can detect, through measurements, what is going well. or not in your sponsored links campaign.
This is the best way to know in real time if something needs to be improved and/or adjusted in time to save the campaign or if it is best to abort it to direct the funds to other actions that bring consistent results and in accordance with the company expectations.
Now that you understand how Google Ads works, let’s break down each feature of the tool to help with your strategy. Follow up!
Search Network – This network integrates the pages on which your advertising campaign will appear. As a result, sponsored links not only appear in search results, but also on Google websites (such as Google Play), company partner portals (such as Uol and Terra) and Google Adsense affiliates.
Display Network – Another way to increase the reach of ads, the display network includes graphic campaigns such as interactive banners that are displayed on Google sites such as YouTube, Blogger and Gmail.
YouTube Ads – By integrating the Google display network, YouTube Ads allows the creation and dissemination of ads in various formats, from videos to graphics. In addition, you can choose when and where your campaign will appear on the platform and to which audience it will be presented.
Ads for Email Lists – This feature offered by Google Ads is very effective and, in practice, means showing your ads only to people who sign up for your website’s email list.
This means that your messages will only be sent to consumers who have shown some interest in your service or product and, therefore, the chances of a high conversion rate will be much higher.
Call Only Ads – A call button can hardly be ignored, can it? This is the proposal for call only, an option with your company’s phone number in the ad itself. So, when the consumer taps the button on their smartphone, they will be directed directly to make the call, not to a website.
An advantage of this technique is that you only need to make the payment at the time the call is made. So, if your business can benefit from phone contacts, this could be the ideal Google Ads option.
Google Shopping – Every day people do the most diverse types of searches on Google, including those related to products and services. With an eye on this demand, the company created Google Shopping, a product display and price comparison tool.
In other words, we have direct searches for products and services that your company can serve, one more way to show your solutions to search engine users.
For those who work with sales, advertising with the help of Google Shopping is a mandatory strategy, however, here there are some differences in relation to how Google Ads works in general.
Here, the search giant’s platform makes a relationship between what the person is looking for and their browsing history, taking the ad to where it is.
That’s why we often browse several different websites and always see the same ads on each of them, it’s because Google’s algorithm has verified that that ad is relevant to you.
Mobile Apps – Google Ads is also an interesting option to advertise within mobile apps, or even to advertise your own app.
There are several ad options in this case, which aim to encourage interaction with your campaign through mobile devices, or the download of your app.
For the promotion, you can use search or display networks, referring to their capture page or downloading from the Play Store.
Similar Audiences (Lookalike) – This tool is very interesting and can be used as a segmentation resource, to reach an audience that is not your direct audience, but that has a great similarity, being able to consume your products and services in the same way.
This targeting model can be applied to various Google ads such as the Display Network, Search, Gmail and YouTube. Lookalike lets you create lists that are constantly updated according to your website visitors.
That is, it is possible to make your ads appear not only for the audience configured in the campaign, but also for those who have a profile similar to the users who click on your ads.
Remarketing – Remarketing is a very interesting strategy that you can apply with Google Ads, making your ads “stalk” users as they browse other sites.
For example, when a person clicks on an ad, but doesn’t make a purchase for any reason, we can set up Google Ads in a remarketing campaign, causing ads about that product or service to appear on their navigation.
We can say that remarketing is a powerful strategy to increase sales conversion, making the lead constantly remember the product and end up closing the purchase.
How are ad positions defined?
There are a few simple rules when it comes to the way ad positions are displayed to users on Google’s search engine. Let’s talk about the two points to be verified and how this verification takes place through an average.
Quality Index
The first item is the quality score, which is an evaluation carried out by Google itself and determines the degree of relevance of the keywords, the ad and the landing page for the user who is performing the search.
This index is fundamental for the composition of the position that your ad will be displayed in the search engine, demonstrating that it is not enough to think only about the ad, but we also have to work on the landing page and all its relevance to the user.
Max CPC bid
All marketing campaigns within Google Ads work like auctions, in which you need to define how much your company is willing to pay for each click on your ads.
That is, changing into kids, whoever accepts to pay a higher amount per click, can occupy a greater prominence in the Display Network or search listing, having greater chances of attracting the attention of users.
When the campaign is set up and the budget is determined, you need to enter the maximum CPC, so that will be your highest bid to appear in a given search.
Ad Rank
Even though maximum amounts per click are important, it is not who pays the most that appears most prominently, as Google created a metric to average the amounts invested and the relevance of the ad to the user.
The final placement of the ad is given by the Ad rank, an average value composed of the Quality Score and the maximum CPC.
As such, we can run well-positioned campaigns that compete for first place, focusing on the quality and relevance of our ads and landing pages, while preserving the campaign budget.
Tip: Do You Want To Learn How To Run Ads on Google? Check out my video tutorial
