Google Paid Ad Spend: R 1,000.00

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7 Benefits of Google AdWords to Grow Your Business Online

1) Adwords works faster than SEO

The topmost benefit of Google AdWords is that it works faster than SEO. Both SEO and Google AdWords are search engine marketing strategies to generate more traffic and leads. But, a well optimized AdWords campaign can work much faster for a business to get the much coveted first spot in search.

Here are some reasons why it’s faster and more effective

  • You can focus on multiple keywords at a time.
  • You can turn the campaign on or off whenever you want to.
  • Ads which appears on the top of the page get immediate visibility.

Of course, this does not mean that you should ignore organic sources, as they have more long-term benefits. But with AdWords, there is a better chance of driving more traffic and leads instantly. Additionally, the platform is more transparent, and you know exactly what is happening with the ads.

On the other hand, search engine optimization, though very beneficial, is a long-term process. To rank for any keyword, it requires a lot of perseverance and a lot of well-written articles, and backlinks. And even then, it takes a while for them to gain the necessary authority.

Simply put. ads give you instant visibility at an instant cost, whereas SEO would give you long term success, depending on the effort you put on the quality of your content.

But, I am not here to debate one strategy’s benefits over the other. You need to use both simultaneously, but be realistic about the success time frame, and the effort/money that would be needed for both.

2) Increase brand awareness

Google AdWords, in addition to boosting traffic, clicks, and conversions, is also an efficient way to tell people about your brand. To verify this, Google partnered with Ipsos to run a study across 12 verticals, right from automobiles to retail. It was discovered that search ads lift top-of-mind awareness by an average of 6.6%.

Benefits of Google Adwords - brand awareness

Source: Google

When it comes to SEO, your rank also depends on the number of your brand name searches and its variations. That’s another reason you should aim to increase brand awareness through search, as well as display ads.

3) Reach more customers through their Gmail Inbox 

One of the most used marketing strategies in every business is email marketing, which is why gmail ads can be helpful as well. In September 2015, Google integrated native Gmail ads with Google AdWords and made it available to all advertisers, which means you can reach more prospects through their gmail inbox.

Usually, Gmail ads appear on the promotion tab, but sometimes you can see it on the social tab too. These ads run on both desktops and mobiles. Since Gmail ads generally cost much less than search ads, if you have a small budget, then you can try Gmail ads as well.

Mobile Gmail ad:

Benefits of Google adwords - Gmail ads on mobile

Desktop Gmail ad:

Benefits of Google adwords -Gmail Ad on desktop

4) Reconnect with visitors of your website

One of the coolest benefits of  Google AdWords is reconnecting with your website visitors. Let me elaborate.

You might have window shoppers on your website. These are people who have visited all the pages on your website but haven’t taken any action. How do you remind them of you and what you could do for them? Enter Display Remarketing and RLSA campaigns.

a) Remarketing on display network:

This helps advertisers target visitors on different advertising-supported websites using banner images. Assume you run a travel business and a visitor is looking for Thailand packages. But for some reason, he decides to leave without purchasing. You can just create a remarketing list like the one below to target him.

Benefits of Google adwords - Remarketing

Similar to remarketing lists, you can create suppression lists as well (as shown above). These suppression lists ensure that you target new leads and not run ads for those who have already converted.

b) Remarketing on search network:

RLSA stands for Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. As the name indicates, it runs remarketing campaigns on the search network, much like display remarketing. Additionally, the advertiser needs to add keywords in this campaign. By doing so, Google ads can match the user’s search query with the keyword and remarketing list. This will help Google to show relevant ads for each search query.

Benefits of Google adwords

Since visitors have already visited your website, there are more chances of converting them to leads when they see your remarketing ads also.

5) Measure your performance consistently

It is very difficult to measure the outcome of traditional advertisements like newspapers, radio, broadcast television, cable television, outdoor billboards, brochures etc. Also, they are much more expensive than Google AdWords. You can’t control your own budget and spend. Additionally, you wouldn’t know the source of the leads coming from these media, unless your customer chooses to divulge it. As a result, it would be very difficult to calculate ROI from traditional media.

But, AdWords, on the other hand, would tell you exactly what happened with the campaign. You would know:

  • Who clicked on your ad.
  • How many leads have been generated.
  • How much traffic you have got from AdWords to your website.
  • Which keyword generated the most traffic and leads.
  • How much does it cost you per lead.

This would help marketers understand what worked and what didn’t. Using this information, you can then tweak your campaigns until you achieve optimal results.

6) Explore more using your ads

Confused with the title?  As I said, there is a lot more to explore when you link your Google AdWords account with your Google Analytics account. AdWords is a great platform but it won’t let you know what people do after clicking the ads. But, Google analytics would help you understand,

  • How long a visitor stayed on a page
  • How many pages have been visited
  • Bounce rate of your landing page
  • Details about new visitors and returning visitors and much more.

By linking them together, you will have a lot more data in your hand.  An advertiser can measure the complete performance of the Google ads. He/she can pause the non-performing keywords/campaigns/ads and try different variations to boost your results. This data would also help in writing more articles/posts using keywords that performed best for your business. Using those keywords you can rank better for organic search as well.

7) Tackle your competition better

When someone searches for something related to your product/services online, and you aren’t running ads, but your competitors are, then that means trouble for you. You’ll lose business almost instantly.

You need to keep an eye on them to see how they are promoting their business, what kinds of ads they run etc. The transparent system of Google AdWords helps you do this. Grab the opportunities that come your way and make yourself stand out from your competition.

Now you have reasons to advertise on Google AdWords. But let’s discuss if this platform makes sense for you at all.

Description

What is Google AdWords (Now Google Ads)?

To give you the dictionary definition, Google AdWords is an online advertising service developed by Google to help marketers reach their customers instantly.

When someone searches on Google for a particular term, say ‘travel packages’, Google would throw a list of searches for you. But if you look closely, you will notice that the top and the bottom results are generally ads.

What is Google Adwords - travel packages ads

But how did Google know which ads to display?

What is google adwords - how ads work

Now that we have that sorted, let’s discuss the types of ads you can run using the Google AdWords platform.

Type of ads in Google AdWords

What is Google adwords - Campaign types

Now, let us look at each of these ad types in detail.

A) Search ads

Like my travel example earlier, when a user searches for something on Google, the list of ads that appear above the organic listing are called search ads.  For example, when a user searches for “Kashmir holiday packages”, the search results will look something like this.

The ones marked “Ad” are ads.  And, the results below that are organic.

Google considers many factors before deciding which ad to display first, as well as the sequence of ads that follow. We’ll discuss all these factors, their relative importance, the correlation between different factors etc. in a more detailed chapter later. But, let’s take a brief look at them:

Important factors in search ads

  1. Targeting – For instance, your ads will be shown in the geography that you choose (you can go as specific as the ZIP code)
  2. Search term and keyword – What is being searched for by the user + the keyword that you optimize the ad for.
  3. Ad copy relevance – Ads that appear for a specific search term should be relevant. A search for colleges should not throw results for travel packages.
  4. Landing page experience – How relevant is the landing page to what the searcher wanted? Did he get what he was looking for?
  5. Conversion rate – This is again controlled by relevance, landing page quality, and experience.
  6. Bids – If 2 advertisers have perfect ads and landing pages, the higher bid will get preference over the lower one.
  7. Quality score: Quality score again depends on all of the other factors mentioned above. So, it’s more like a cycle than everything else. Everything is interrelated.

In addition to the standard search ads, you can also run these special ads in search network. 

  1. Call-only ads – This ad is available only on call enabled mobile devices. After clicking the ad, instead of taking you to a landing page, you make a call directly.
  2. Dynamic ads– This ad type is more suitable for businesses who have a well-managed website. This is because the content of the ad as well as the landing pages is taken dynamically from the website. They are very similar to text ads, except that no keywords are involved here. For example: a training institute is running dynamic search ads. A user searches for “java courses”. Google displays a list of ads. But dynamic ads would automatically replace the ad headline with “java course” (the search query) and the ad text with the relevant website content and landing page”.
  3. Mobile app promotion- These ads are suitable for businesses with mobile applications. The goal of this ad is to encourage users to download your app or take a desired action within the app.

Note: All these special ads are available on the search network. Except for call-only ads, others are available in display and video campaigns as well. The concepts are the same, but the platforms are different.

B) Display ads

Have you ever noticed them? While you are reading a post or viewing a video on some random website, you see ads in a lot of different places on the page, and in different dimensions. These are display ads.

 

Here the searcher is not explicitly looking for what is ad offers. But, based on a number of factors like keywords, audience interest, managed placements etc, Google decides to show them to you. These display ads only appear on advertising-supported websites.

Below are the targeting criteria, based on which Google selects the websites to place the banner ads.

  1. Keywords – The ads are displayed based on the keywords that they are optimized for. Let’s say the keyword for the ad is “Social Media Marketing”, then Google would choose websites that have content on the topic.
  2. Placements – Placements are nothing but the websites on which you want your ad to appear. Just add the websites where you want to show the ads, instead of keywords. For example, if you want to show your ads only on travel related websites, then look for advertising supported travel sites and add them to your targeting.
  3. Remarketing – This helps you reconnect with your existing website visitors. Using this, you can target visitors who have come to your website but have not taken any action.
  4. Topic – There are specific topics in AdWords, under which all websites are grouped. It will be easier for the advertisers to choose topics related to the businesses. For example, websites related to travel will be listed under the topic ‘travel.’

C) Shopping ads

If you are a retailer, this campaign type would make more sense for you. This ad type boosts traffic to your website and helps in generating quality leads as well as increasing your conversions.

This is how shopping ads would appear on the search network.

Google Shopping Ads - what is google adwords

Requirements for running shopping ads:

  1. Setup an account with Google Merchant Center (It is a platform that helps retailers to upload all their product listings in a specific format).
  2. Setup an account with Google AdWords & link them together.
  3. Submit updated product data every 30 days to Google Merchant Center.

Since both the tools are linked together, shopping ads take all the product details from Google Merchant Center, matches the search query and displays relevant ads to the user.

D) Video ads

This ad type lets advertisers run video ads on YouTube and other Google Display Networks.

The 3 main benefits of running video ads are:

  1. Better targeting – This ad type has demographic, location, interest, keyword and device targeting which helps you reach the right audience on YouTube and Google Display Network.
  2. More reach – As of January 2017, YouTube is the 3rd most visited website and has 30 million visitors every day. Additionally, video ads are also available on Google Display Network. This means that you have access to a wider audience.
  3. Measurable – Unlike advertising on TV, YouTube ads let you know all the necessary metrics like views, view rate, clicks, reach and frequency, engagement, performance etc.  This helps you measure the success of video ads.

E) Universal app campaign

This campaign is helpful for businesses with a mobile app. Here, the advertiser can promote the mobile app across search, PlayStore, Display & YouTube. AdWords uses ad text ideas and other assets right from your app store listings. All you need to do is provide some text, a budget. and a starting bid. Also, don’t forget to set languages and locations for the ad.

By utilizing all this information, AdWords itself designs a variety of ads in different formats. Google will automatically test different ad combinations and display the one that performs the best.

Universal App Campaign - what is google adwords

Conclusion:

Google ads has a wide range of marketing benefits specifically setup to benefit any type of organization form.