If you have reached this article, you are probably wondering whether you should implement ads to promote your business and more importantly, how to do it.
Google has several products and services within its catalogue and its ads is surely one of the most popular and well-known services.
In this article we will look at exactly what Google ADS is, what types of ads exist and how you can make the most of it to achieve your goals.
What is Google ADS
Google ADS (Google AdWords until 2018) is an online advertising tool that allows you to promote products and services (such as your website, your business or your application) through various ad formats and through its search networks such as Google, Youtube, Gmail or Google Display, among others.
In addition, Google allows you to fully customise your ad, including targeting, budget, location, audience type, timing and much more. Plus, you can post and stop your ad whenever you want, so it’s really convenient and practical if you want to promote any element of your business.
Do you want to know how to prepare an advertisement yourself? Keep reading!
Steps to set up a Google ADS advertisement
Create your account
You should know that creating your Google account is very simple and totally free. First of all, you should go to Google ADS and follow the steps to set up your account in order to activate it. You will only need to answer the following questions:
- Information about your company: such as your company name and website, if you have one. If you wish, you can also synchronise your profile with other Google networks, such as Youtube, Google My Business profile, phone number or your mobile application.
Once you have the basic information about your business, we’ll leave the rest of the setup for later, so don’t worry if you don’t have all the information you need right now to create your campaign.
Difference between campaign, ad group and ads
A small nuance before starting to create the advertising campaign, is to know how to differentiate the different elements that compose it:
- Campaign: An advertising campaign is a strategy designed to meet a certain objective with a certain budget and duration. For example, we may want to run an advertising campaign for Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day. Each campaign consists of one or more ad groups.
- Ad group: An ad group contains one or more ads that share similar objectives. Set the type of bid, the target audience, the location.
- Ad: Set the advertising message according to the type of target audience and the product or service you want to offer.
Choose your advertising target
It’s time to create your Google ADS advertising campaign. In the start menu we will click on the “create new campaign” button and we will start creating our advertising campaign and our advertisement.
The first thing you need to do is to choose the objective of your ad, so that Google can tailor your ad, for example, to increase calls to your business, increase visits to your physical shop or get users to take an action on your website.
These are the 8 types of targeting you can select when choosing your ad:
- Sales: To drive sales whether online, through an app, over the phone or in-store.
- Leads: To encourage customers to take actions to generate leads and other conversions to interested prospects.
- Website traffic: To get the right users to visit your website.
- Brand and product consideration: To encourage users to discover what you offer.
- Coverage and brand awareness: To make your brand known to new customers.
- Application promotion: To increase downloads of your application.
- Shop visits and local promotions: To attract visitors to your shop.
- Non-targeted campaigns: Campaigns without a specific objective.
We recommend that you take the time to decide what the objective of your advertising campaign is.
From this section, you can also configure which conversion rate you want to set for your advertising target. A conversion is any action that you want your customers to perform on your website and that you want to measure. You will be able to configure it in this section, as well as later on.
This section is somewhat extensive, so we will discuss it in another article.
Select a campaign type
Google ADS has different campaign types depending on the need you have and where you want your ad to be displayed. Depending on your objective, you will need to choose a campaign type, which means that you will need to select the best Google platform where you think your ads can be displayed, for example:
- Search: Display your products in Google search results at the right time for customers to see them with a clear intention to buy.
- Display: Advertisements aimed at capturing the attention of users in a massive way. This type of campaign is very useful to create brand visualisation.
- Shopping: Show your products to customers while they are looking for what to buy.
- Video: Video advertisements for Youtube.
- Maximum Performance: Reach audiences across all Google properties with a single campaign.
- App campaigns: Get downloads and increase engagement with your app.
Select the type of bid
This section is very important as it will define how Google sets up your campaign. A bid is the maximum cost we are willing to pay for each click a user makes on one of our ads.
Among other options, you will have to choose what you want to give more value to and where you want to focus your bidding:
- On clicks
- On conversions
In both cases you will have to define whether you want to implement a maximum cost per bid. Like a physical auction, you can tell Google if you have a maximum price you are willing to pay for that potential customer to click on your ad (CPC) or take an action (CPA). If you are on a tight budget, we recommend that you add a maximum cost.
Campaign setup
In order for your ad to reach the people you are interested in, you will have to configure the parameters of your ad, for example:
- Network: Type of network you want your ad to appear on.
- Location: Select the geographic locations where you want your advertisement to appear (or not appear).
- Languages: Select the languages spoken by your customers.
- Audience segment: You can select which audiences you want to see your ads. Audiences are groups of users with specific interests and demographics. These are users to whom you can show your ads.
- Broadcast schedule: If you wish, you can select the days and times at which the advertisement is broadcast.
- Start and end date: You can choose the start and end date of the announcements.
Manage your message and keywords
For this section, we have followed the steps that should be taken if you choose a search type advertising campaign. Please note that if you choose a different type of advertising, the steps may vary slightly.
In this section you will have to write the message you want to launch and select the keywords with which you want your ads to appear when potential customers search for it. Keywords are words or phrases that are used to match advertisements with the terms that users are searching for.
Once you have added your keywords (you can always modify, add or remove them later), it is time to write your ad message. In this section you can select:
- Final URL: To which web address users will be directed when they click on the ad.
- Title:What main message you want to send to users. You can write up to 15 titles, which Google will combine according to the user’s search.
- Description: This time you will be able to write up to 4 descriptions to accompany the titles. Note that these will also vary depending on the customer’s search intent.
- More resources: In this section you can add more options for the configuration of your advertisement such as promotions, prices, add a telephone number, forms, images, text that you want to highlight, …..
Define your budget
Once you have your ad set up, it’s time to set the budget you want to apply to your ad. We recommend that you start with a low budget (€5 per day) and increase it depending on the results.
It is very important to know that Google will never spend exactly the budget you have indicated. Depending on the competition or traffic on a given day, Google may spend a little more than you have indicated in order to get that click. In return, the next day it will compensate for the excess, so that the average monthly expenditure is maintained. For example, if your daily budget is €5, it is quite possible that one day Google spends €7 and the next day €3, but the average daily budget stays at what you have indicated, €5.
Don’t forget to add your payment information so that Google can charge you on a monthly basis.
Launch your ad and track the results
Once your ad has been launched, Google will analyse that your ad meets the appropriate parameters and place it online. From the final menu you can monitor the results via the Google menu overview. Such as, for example:
- Impressions: Number of times an ad is shown in search results.
- Clicks: Number of times a customer has clicked on your ad.
- Click-through rate (CTR): Rate obtained by dividing the number of clicks your ad receives by the number of times it is viewed.
- Cost:Cost of the advertisement.
- Cost per click (CPC): Rate obtained by dividing the total cost of clicks by the number of clicks.
- Conversions: Indicates how many times your leads have reached the goal you have predetermined for your campaign.
- Conversion rate: Rate obtained by dividing the objectives obtained (conversions) by the number of times users have visited your page.
- Cost per conversion: Rate obtained by dividing the cost of the advert by the conversions.
We look forward to seeing you at Trucker360
This is the end of today’s article. We will go into more detail about the aspects mentioned in this article, such as keywords, bid types, conversions, display and shopping ads, later in this article.
If you want to get your Google Ads up and running and don’t know how to do it, don’t hesitate to contact us.
We look forward to seeing you at Trucker360!
