Formerly known as Google Adwords, the Google Ads platform is a great way to put your brand front and center on search engines. With over 70% of the market share, Google is a smart choice for driving qualified traffic to your website, along with more leads, conversions, and sales!
In this article, we’ll walk you through how Google Ads works and the rules to follow to build a campaign that gets results.
Online advertising with Google Ads
Google Ads is a platform that lets you run paid online advertising across Google’s network, putting your products and/or services in front of people. You can publish ads in several places, such as search results, websites, or videos.
The idea behind the platform is to show your paid ad to users who search for a specific keyword that you choose when setting up your ad.
For example, the top result for the keyword “web marketing agency montreal” is Hamak:
Paid ads appear above organic search results, which gives advertisers a real edge!
How Google Ads works
The Google Ads platform runs on an ad auction model that weighs three main factors when ranking your ad: your bid, quality, and competition.
Your bid
The way it works is simple: advertisers target a keyword and set a bid for it. They then compete with other advertisers targeting the same search term.
The bid you set for your ad is the maximum price you’re willing to pay for a click to your website. You can set this manually or let Google’s AI handle it automatically.
There are different bidding options depending on your priority: impressions to build awareness, clicks to drive traffic, or conversions to boost sales.
- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM) refers to the amount spent for 1,000 impressions on your ad and works best if your main goal is to increase visibility.
- Cost per click (CPC) describes the amount spent per click on your ad and works best if you want to grow the number of visitors to your website.
- Cost per action (CPA) represents the amount you’re willing to spend per user action on your website and works best if conversions are your priority. Automated bidding is also a good fit if you want direct action taken on the ad.
- Cost per view (CPV) reflects the maximum price you’re willing to spend per view and is the bidding model used for video ads only.
You can also set a maximum daily budget for each ad. This lets you plan ahead for how much you’ll spend on your digital ad campaign.
Your ad quality
According to Google, “Quality Score is based on the relevance and usefulness of your ad and the site it links to.” It’s made up of three criteria:
- How relevant the ad is, based on the targeted keywords compared to what users are actually searching for;
- The experience on the ad’s landing page (unique and original content, easy navigation, clear information, and disclosure of how user data is used);
- The predicted number of clicks the ad will get, based on historical data from Google search queries.
Why competition matters
Don’t overlook your competitors’ ads! To improve your ad ranking, you need to take into account your industry’s CPC and the various ads targeting the same keywords as yours.
Your industry’s average CPC gives you a benchmark for what you should expect to pay per click to your website.
As for competing ads, keeping an eye on them lets you study what they’re doing and use it to your advantage. In fact, you can draw inspiration from the headlines and descriptions they use to stay competitive!
Another good way to stand out and improve your ad quality is by adding extensions. These can take several forms, such as a call button, links to specific web pages, or extra text.
Which type of campaign should you choose?
Google offers a wide range of campaign types, split into two main categories: Display and Search Network.
Search Network campaigns
Google Search Network ads appear after a search query and can take different forms, the most common being text. For example, here are the text ads that show up for the keyword “car insurance”:
You can also run ads on Google Shopping, which showcases your products. For example, for the keyword “sport leggings,” Google Shopping ads appear above the text ads:
Display Network campaigns
The Display Network includes all of Google’s partner websites where your ads can appear. Often used for remarketing, Display ads can take several forms, the most common being banners.
For example, the Météo Média website features a display banner for the Metro grocery store:
Other formats exist too, such as video ads, ads in Gmail inboxes, or ads across Google’s app network.
What does a Google ad campaign cost?
The Google Ads platform is open to everyone, from small businesses to large corporations. There’s no minimum ad budget required to reach your business goals, and costs vary from one advertiser to another!
That said, the more budget you put into your Google Ads campaigns, the better they tend to perform. That’s because more data gets collected, which helps automated bidding strategies learn faster and deliver results that match what you’re hoping for.
How to set up a Search campaign on Google Ads
The first step to running your ad on Google Ads is creating an account, if you don’t already have one.
Before building your ad, you can choose “Express mode,” which gives you more guidance along the way. Or you can go with “Expert mode,” which gives you more control over your campaign settings.
Here’s how to set things up in Expert mode:
Set your advertising goal
First, you need to determine the main advertising goal for your campaign. It should be clearly defined so it can work as well as possible.
Next, you’ll select a campaign type on the Google Network: “Search,” “Performance Max,” “Display Network,” “Discovery,” “Shopping,” or “Video.” In our case, we’re going with the “Search” campaign type.
Set your campaign parameters
In this section, you choose where your ads will show geographically, which networks they’ll run on (Search Network and/or Display Network), your budget, and which extensions to use.
You can target multiple countries, specific regions, or particular neighborhoods. That said, to get better results, it’s usually better to focus on a specific area rather than a wide radius. You can also specify which languages your customers speak and add audience segments.
Next, you’ll need to set the maximum daily budget you want to allocate to your campaign. You can also set a maximum CPC.
Finally, you can choose which ad extensions you’d like to add to your campaign. As mentioned earlier, extensions help improve your ad quality and, in turn, your click-through rate.
Create ad groups
In this section, you’ll select the keywords you want your ads to show up for. You can use several free tools, such as Keyword Tool, to help with this.
Your keywords should match what your ad is about and be as specific as possible to match what your potential customers are actually searching for. Copy and paste them into the dedicated section.
By default, keywords are set to “broad match,” but you can change the match type to “phrase match” or “exact match.”
Write ads that get results
Once you’ve selected your keywords, you can create your ad. Start by entering the destination URL and adjusting the display path with the most fitting keywords. Then, you can add up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions to make your ad as strong as possible.
Set up your billing information
The last step is entering your billing information to pay for your Google Ads campaign. Then, all that’s left is to click “Submit” to confirm your ad is ready to go.
Congratulations, your first campaign is live! But the work doesn’t stop there. Ongoing optimization is what will help you get the results you’re hoping for.
If you’d like help building high-performing Google Ads campaigns, feel free to reach out to our team.
