Google Ads – how it works, why it can work wonders for your marketing & when to invest.

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve heard about Google Ads in some capacity.

Whether you’re a newbie to the marketing world, want to brush up on your own skills or are looking for a marketing agency to take away the pain of managing it yourself, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we delve a bit deeper into our good friend, Google Ads, and why we LOVE it so much! 

How does Google Ads work? 

Google Ads works by creating a series of campaigns with associated search term keywords, ad groups and ads. 

By setting your own daily budgets you can either take a manual approach to your bid strategy or let Google Ads do the hard work for you, which is called automated bidding. In most instances you’ll pay per click for your ads, so the better constructed they are, the higher click and conversion rate you’ll achieve.

The setup of your Google Ads account can make or break the performance of your campaigns, so it’s vital you lay the right foundations for your campaigns to succeed. 

Who is it best suited to? 

In a nutshell, Google Ads can work for any business, large or small, that’s trying to promote their service or products. However, you need to consider the following: 

• Do you have the budget to keep your ads running? You certainly don’t want to spend all those hours setting up your account and campaigns perfectly if you can only afford to run ads for a week or two. All ads go through a learning phase, which basically means that Google is sussing out what you’re trying to sell or promote (ever heard of the Google algorithm – it’s powerful stuff!). You also need to think about the lead time of your customer in general, from initial impression of your business to conversion. Can you afford to run campaigns for this period of time? 
• Is your website up to scratch? We’ve seen it time and time again; clients think that Google Ads is the magic wand to get their sales soaring or leads coming in thick and fast, but haven’t spent the time or money to get their website where it needs to be. Consider these questions: 
  • Is there a clear call to action? Could you consider creating a specific landing page just for your Google Ads traffic to go to?
  • Do your landing pages relate clearly to the ads you’re putting online? 
  • Does your website provide a good user experience? 
  • Is it clear what you’re selling? 
  • Do you have Google Analytics and conversion tracking set up (or the knowledge to do this before going live)?

• Are you happy to trial different A/B tests or campaign types? When going down the route of Google Ads, you need to be sure you’re happy to ‘go with the flow’ and try different techniques, whether that’s new campaign types, or changing your website if things aren’t going as initially planned. 

Google Ads can work successfully for both B2B and B2C businesses if you have the core fundamentals in place; just remember that Google Ads success doesn’t happen overnight and takes a lot of trial and error to get that sweet spot we’re all looking for. 

When is a good time to start advertising on Google? 

Once you tick all the boxes above regarding website and strategy, you should be good to go. Google Ads setup and management certainly isn’t for the faint hearted, so you want to be sure you know what you’re doing otherwise you’ll quickly haemorrhage money on key terms that aren’t working for you. 

How much do Google Ads cost?

There isn’t a single answer to this question. Research can be done during the strategy phase to establish what the estimated cost per click for your term is going to be, however, this isn’t going to be an exact figure as many factors affect what the final CPC is (such as website landing page relevance and ad quality). 

It’s more important to look at the budget in another way. How much would you be happy to pay for a lead? If the service you’re selling is worth £10,000, then chances are you’ll be happy to pay £100 or more for a single lead. But if your product is only worth £20, you won’t want a high cost per conversion. 

Once you have some data to play with, you can establish your ROAS (return on ad spend). This is slightly simpler to work out if you’re using Google Ads for a transactional product such as clothes or homewares as opposed to a service offering. 

To cut a long story short, budgeting your Google Ads can be tricky, but the good news is that you can very quickly turn off (or on) your ads when you’re ready. For example, you could start with a trial budget of £500 per month and see what data that gives you and go from there. 

So, is Google Ads worth it?

From the opinion of a Bournemouth marketing agency, we would say 100% YES! Here are just a few of our favourite benefits of Google Ads: 

• Easy to track performance and results are very transparent 
• Gets your website to the top of Google if you’re struggling with organic traffic uplift 
• Allows you to build an audience or users to your website which you can then retarget (this is the super clever stuff that follows you around the internet) 
• Can be used as a sales tool and brand awareness simultaneously
• There’s flexibility with the spend