We run Pay per Click campaigns for the tech Support clients.
Business is making a big shift to online focus over the past decade, spending your marketing budget on Pay Per Click has become more and more of a priority. Google AdWords has been in operation since October 2000, offering advertising spots firstly on Google Search results and partner sites, but since expanding to cover multiple forms of placement.
Originally, Google AdWords saw customers charged a monthly fee to have their campaigns created and managed by Google, but has now grown to allow advertisers to create bespoke adverts, and optimise settings to suit their business needs. Google AdWords operates across multiple platforms, taking into account modern technology and internet users’ browsing behaviour, and allowing users to choose their own budgets.
Today, at least 95% of Google’s huge revenue comes from advertising, and with over 86% of consumers using going online to find information on local businesses. Whether you want to invest into selling specific products via the Google Shopping platform, or promote your services to people searching for relevant keywords on Google Search, there’s an ad format to suit any company. AdWords is a highly adjustable tool, allowing advertisers to closely monitor and adjust how much they’re spending on advertising, directly target the specific demographic of people they want to, and make use of a huge network of websites to get maximum visibility for their business.
Here’s an overview of the types of advertising available through Google, and what they can do for your business.
Google Search
On average, there are over 63,000 Google searches across the world every second. Advertising on Google search results opens your business to a large visibility, enabling you to appear on the search results page for your chosen keywords.
Advertisers can create a campaign for their business, setting up several ad groups within the campaign that can focus on different categories of keyword. For example, a web design company might choose to run adverts for web design, SEO and social media marketing, and would create individual ad groups for each of the three topics, each bidding on different keywords and showing adverts written specifically for them.
Top Google Search AdWords Tips
To help you get the most out of your AdWords search advertising, we’ve put together some top tips, highlighting some of the key features offered by the platform that can improve and optimise your ads.
Callout Extensions: The bulk of your selling points should be included in the advert’s main description, but for any other key pieces of information worth highlighting, it can be done via callout extensions. You can add up to four callout extensions onto your advert, each with a 25 character limit, to showcase your business’s main USPs.
Sitelink extensions: Although your advert already links to the relevant page you’re advertising, you can add additional links under the main body of text, helping to increase your advert’s visibility and user interaction rate.
Call extensions: To encourage users to call your business, as well as click through to your website, you can add a phone number to your advert. For users seeing your advert on a smartphone, the phone number will be clickable, initiating the call to your business with one simple click.
Negative Keywords: With search advertising, you’ll be bidding for your advert to be triggered when someone searches for a specific keyword. However, depending on the type of keyword match you have set up, the advert can sometimes appear on irrelevant searches. For example, an optician may be bidding on the keyword “glasses”, but his advert shows when someone searches for “wine glasses”. The advertiser should regularly check their account’s search terms to see what has triggered they adverts, and add any irrelevant terms to their “negative keywords” list. In this case, the optician should set “wine” as a negative keyword.
Bid adjustments: One of the huge positives of online advertising is that the advertising costs are highly adjustable. A great example of this is bid adjustments, a tool that allows you to change your bids based on specific attributes. If you notice your ad performs better on mobile devices between 9am and 5pm, you can create a rule that increases your bids by a set percentage to people using a smartphone in those hours. Bid adjustments can be edited to take into account device, location and time.
Google Shopping
Google Shopping is a great tool for advertisers who have an ecommerce website. Although a search campaign can be used to advertise a website and its special offers, a shopping campaign can advertise every single product individually, without having to set bids on all of the products’ keywords.
By submitting a feed of all of your products to Google Merchant Centre, and setting a daily budget and CPC bid, your items will appear on the Google Shopping platform. As well as appearing on the Google Shopping page, some items may appear on the search results page, as below:
Primarily though, the products will appear on the Google Shopping platform, which compares your product prices with that of other merchants, also allowing users to filter their search based on price and other product-specific attributes.
To put yourself ahead of the other merchants using the platform, it can be beneficial to add a promotional tag to your products. If you’re running a discount code on your website, this can be displayed on Google Shopping, attracting customers to use it to get the cost as low as possible.
📷
Video Advertising
In November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for more than $1.6 billion, sparking the start of the website becoming more commercialised, with more adverts appearing day by day. This change to YouTube opened up more huge opportunities for advertisers, with the website currently offering a variety of advert formats, including:
TrueView in-stream ads: This is the type of video ad that appears before, during and after other YouTube videos, and is skippable after five seconds of viewing. The adverts can also appear on videos on Google partner sites, and advertisers are only charged when a viewer watches a full 30 seconds (or maximum duration of video if less) of the video advert.
TrueView video discovery ads: Rather than automatically playing your video advert to users, you can set up a discovery ad, aimed at getting site visitors to watch your clip. The advert appears on YouTube search results, next to related YouTube videos and on the mobile YouTube homepage, with advertisers charged only when viewers click through to watch.
Bumper ads: Similar to the in-stream ad format, bumper ads appear before, during or after other videos on YouTube and partner sites, but are a maximum of six seconds in duration and cannot be skipped by viewers. The format is perfect for distributing a short, punchy message, and advertisers are charged via cost-per-thousand impressions bidding.
Mobile Advertising
Google mobile searches have overtaken desktop searches in several countries across the world, with Google responding by creating new advertising formats tailored for smartphone users. Here’s some of the mobile-specific ad formats available:
Universal App campaigns: In November 2017, universal app campaign became the only way to advertise mobile apps through Google AdWords. The new format allows ads that encourage viewers to download and install apps to appear on the search network, Google Play store, YouTube and across the display network. The ad campaign can be created to drive more installations, or encourage more in-app actions, and the process of setting it up is more automated than other types of AdWords advertisement. All the advertiser has to do is supply some text, a bid and assets, and Google does the rest, creating multiple ad combinations and running with the ones that are most effective.
Call-only ads: Mobile call-only ads look similar to text ads, and appear on the search network. As with text ads, they require a display URL, business name and two lines of descriptive text, but the headline is replaced by a phone number, encouraging searchers on smartphones to call the business, rather than visit their website.
Display Advertising
Google’s display network is a wide selection of websites that accept advertising via AdWords, allowing advertisers to promote their business in a variety of formats:
Text ads: The ads are identical in format to the text ads on the search network, but are displayed across the network of partner websites. You can kill two birds with one stone and publish the same advert on both the search and display networks by creating a “Search network with display select” campaign.
Image ads: This is a more eye-catching ad type, allowing you to use images on the display network to get people to click through to your website.
Rich media ads: Rich media ads are similar to image ads, but have interactive elements and animations that make it more eye-catching and interactive.
Video ads: This is similar to a rich media ad, but a video can be embedded to play directly within it.
Whilst on the search network, advertisers bid on keywords to choose where their adverts appear. The display network works differently, with advertisers having a choice of placement and targeting type:
Contextual targeting: By selecting keywords, contextual targeting aims to get adverts onto websites that are relevant to the business, meaning people will see your advert while reading about the product/service you offer.
Placement targeting: This allows advertisers to choose specific sites they want their adverts to appear on.
Remarketing: This doesn’t apply only to the display network, but on display, you can advertise your business to people who have already visited your website.
Topic targeting: This enables you to choose a category of website, that will be relevant to your business advert, to display your ads on.
Demographic/Geographic & Language targeting: If your adverts require a specific audience, the campaign can be set up to target people based on age, gender, location and language.
