Among the many opportunities to create exposure for your B2B company – from pre-event promotions and post-event offers to email marketing – is Google Ads. This marketing tool is becoming increasingly popular.
Many companies find managing and placing Google Ads to be confusing. They’re not alone. And make no mistake, since Google is the most popular search engine and most visited website in the world, Google Ads in many cases are a must-have whether we like it or not.
Google recently renamed “AdWords” to “Google Ads.” The ads consist of two types – search and display. Search ads appear above the organic search results on the search engine results page and display ads appear on websites that Google tries to determine are relevant to your audience.
In this post, we’ll focus on how you can get started with the search-type ads. This is where most organizations begin.
Here’s an example of what a paid Google search ad looks like after typing in “office chair” into the search box on Google.com:
As you can see, the ad has a bolded “Ad” term in the first line. The search result just beneath it – for Amazon – is organic and is not a paid ad. A good overview of paid Google Ads versus organic search results can be found here.
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To get started with your own campaigns, just sign-up for a Google Ads account.
Again, if you’re just starting out, try search-type ads first. With so much of campaign success riding on the keywords that are used to determine when to display your ads, you may be able to glean some insights from search ads before moving on to the more labor-intensive display ads.
Keyword Research
Speaking of keywords – what are those? Keywords are what users enter into the search box on google.com to search for a topic. Think about what you type in so you can find something. For instance, to find multiple resources for one of my links in the second paragraph of this post, I typed in “top search engine in the world” and got pages full of resourceful links returned to me.
One might find selecting keywords to be daunting, and rightly so. However, to help you decide which keywords to use for your campaign, you can use Google’s own keyword planner. You can enter a product or service or an existing website as examples, and the planner will provide recommendations of keywords to use. Here’s what Google’s keyword planner looks like:
Tip: You can also use SEO (search engine optimization) keyword tools from other sources to research keywords that are popular with visitors and that are being used by your competitors. One example is SpyFu, which has a free option.
Write the Ad
As you can probably tell by now, Google Ads are as much about research as they are about writing the ads themselves. Which is what you’ll be doing next.
With tools like SpyFu, you can see examples of other companies’ search ads in some cases. This helps you when deciding what words and headlines to use when writing your own ads. If you don’t want to use an extra tool like SpyFu, just use your best educated assumptions to start out and you can tweak the copy later.
Here’s an example of an ad appearing when searching for “office laptops” on Google:
The ad – in this case for Dell – showed up within the top three results on the search engine results page. This is likely due to solid ad copy and a good bidding strategy.
Time to Budget
After the ad is written, bidding and budgeting are the other elements needed when implementing Google search ads.
For the budget, select how much you’d like to spend each day and for how long. For example, a good starting point might be $25-$50 per day for 30 days. Check in with your account often. Following the first 30-day period, you may want to evaluate your campaign performance to decide whether to continue. Most often, you’ll want to continue, and you can adjust your budget up or down and also implement the campaign recommendations that Google will likely offer you at this point.
Time to Bid
Google Ads are based on a CPC – or cost-per-click – model. This means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
You can start your bidding by selecting a bid strategy that is based upon your campaign objectives. Your goals might be to garner impressions or to simply get web visitors. While bidding consists of some mix of trial and error, analysis, and constant adjustment, a good place to start is with the “maximize clicks” strategy. Google will help you constantly adjust to the best maximum bid automatically by leveraging its growing artificial intelligence engine.
You can learn more about bidding here.
The Power of Google
There are other search engines on which you can place ads – like Bing and Yahoo (Microsoft Advertising) – and perhaps you can do those if your budget allows. However, with a more conservative budget in mind, it’s hard to match Google’s power within the website-user sphere. The term itself has become a verb in many instances – “just try Googling it to see what you can find.”
Author – Scott Fuhr
Scott is a marketer with concentrations on lead generation campaigns, marketing automation programs (Marketo, SharpSpring), Google search and display ads (PPC), social media strategies, and business writing.
Brandwidth Solutions serves the healthcare, life sciences, energy, and contract pharma industries. We work with companies that want to make the most of their marketing – who want their marketing empowered to help drive leads – and ultimately sales. If you want to move your product or service forward in a smart way, we want to work with you. Call us at 215.997.8575.
