google ads

Updated By Les. Jan 2022

Yes Absolutely.

Google Ads is highly suitable for any sized business and is an excellent way to generate leads for your business. It is also a platform for businesses to manage their brand awareness digital marketing campaigns. It helps marketers create ads that can be shown on Google Search. Google Ads ability to instantly create well-targeted online ads is something no other advertising platform can offer. Google Ads is also very affordable compared to other search engines. That is why so many small businesses choose it as their primary source of lead generation.

Here are top 7 reasons how small businesses can benefit from using Google Ads.

1. Search intent

When it comes to search intent, Google Search out ranks all other search engines like Bing, Yahoo or Baidu. In 2021, Google Search has taken almost 90% of the of the search engine market while Bing has 2.48%, Yahoo has 1.5% and Baidu 0.29% (source Gs.statcounter.com).

The annual global growth of Google Search is now 8.2% (firstsiteguide.com). This translates to roughly 40,000 search queries per second (Internetlivestats.com).

According to further research statistics: –

• 80% of all companies focus on Google Ads for PPC (WebFX, 2020)
• Online ads can increase brand awareness by up to 80% (WebFX, 2019)
• Two in five small-to-midsize businesses are running a PPC campaign (WebFX, 2019)
• More than 7,000,000 advertisers use Google Ads PPC (KlientBoost, 2019)
• Google Ads is currently the biggest provider of search advertising on the market (Statista, 2020)

Everyday more and more people are using Google Search to research products and services.

Paid search (i.e. Google Ads) is typically more cost-effective because it involves bidding on keywords in order to appear higher in the search results. Organic search typically requires time, patience, and hard work to achieve results.

In a nutshell, using Google Ads will increase the probability that your business can be found faster through effective brand awareness on top of being found organically.

2. Effective cost control

Google Ads is highly cost effective compared to traditional marketing such as printed flyers, radio advertisements or TV advertisements. These traditional approaches target everyone and anyone regardless of whether they have interest in your product or service offering. Traditional marketing costs are high with very minimal control and return on investment (ROI). Small businesses usually do not have the resources to conduct traditional marketing campaigns.

In Google Ads, you can define a monthly spend budget and control who gets to see your Ads. Spend on some days may be higher than others especially when there are more opportunities for conversions. However, the overall month spend is normally within +/- 5% of the budget. The best way to implement this is to create a shared budget and then share this budget across the relevant campaigns. This way you only need to change the budget parameter in one location and will be applied to all campaigns that use the same shared budget.

If you are concerned of going over budget, Google Ads allows you to set a spend limit. This way you will never go over budget.

3. Keyword-based targeting

Google Ads allows you to target prospects with specific interests that will improve your lead generation. You can do this by using keyword-based targeting campaigns.

Keyword-based targeting is one of the easiest ways to reach potential customers on Google Search. It uses keywords to target the right audience and make them aware of your product or service. So say for example, I am in need of a tow truck service in Perth to transport my car from one location to another. In this case, I would use the search term “tow truck perth” and Google Search will return a listing result like below. As can be seen, Google Ads served up Ads that met my search criteria by showing me Ads from relevant advertisers.

Google Ads keyword-based targeting strategy is excellent for targeting customers with specific interests. This strategy also ensures the budget is spent on relevant searches and shown to those who are specifically in the market to acquire your product or service.

4. Geo-location targeting

One important element of Google Ads that is often neglected is geo-location targeting. It allows advertisers to reach customers based on their geographic location.

In Google ads, this can be either set by country or state or city. Google Ads also provides the option of using a radius setting around a certain area such as shown below.

The most common goals of geo-location targeting are driving foot traffic, increasing sales and improving customer service by providing more relevant search results to customers in a specific location. Geo-location targeting helps digital marketers reach their desired audience by displaying ads based on the user’s location.

Another key benefit of geo-location targeting is effective campaign budget spend. Geo-location targeting ensures advertising spend focuses on the desired customers in their specific location. This avoids unnecessary spend on prospects that are not in the target audience and unlikely to convert.

5. Ad copy control

There are many different factors that play into the success of a Google Ads campaign. One of the most important factors are the headlines, descriptions and keywords that are used in the ad copy itself. Optimised ads should be specific, relevant and enticing (e.g. unbeatable price, new product or exclusive offer).

While Google Ads offers the advertiser complete control over the ad copy, headlines should be short and descriptive to promote interest in your product or service. The description on the other hand should include clear benefits for your customer, so they know what to expect when they click on your ad. The keywords used in the headlines and descriptions should relate to what you are advertising so that it will be found by potential customers who are looking for something similar. In order to create a successful ad, every detail needs to be perfect from the description right down to the URL. This level of control is important so that the advertiser can optimise their campaigns for good ranking results.

6. Landing page metrics

Landing pages are the webpages visitors land on after clicking on a link from a search engine like Google Search. Websites and single standalone webpages are considered landing pages. A website is just a more detailed elaborate landing page with navigation menus serving up different webpages for the website. If visitors can’t find what they are looking for or if they don’t like what they see, many will bounce off the landing page and never return to the site. If your business uses Google Analytics, linking Google Analytics to your Google Ads campaigns can provide significant data insights about the performance of your landing page.

Google Analytics is the most commonly used website analysis tool for understanding website visitor behavior. It provides comprehensive insights about visitors, goals and conversions. Through Google Analytics, advertisers can measure how long visitors stay on their landing pages and analyse the bounce rate (i.e. it is the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce”) without doing anything).

By linking Google Analytics to Google Ads, advertisers can track traffic from paid ads. Advertisers can then figure out which landing pages are most effective with which audiences respond to positively by submitted leads and can optimize accordingly.

When linked to Google Ads campaigns, the key data insights from Google Analytics to analyse are landing page bounce rate, percentage new sessions and average session duration. A high bounce rate or low average session duration indicates that a page is not optimised for that specific audience segment. Conversely, a low bounce rate or high average session duration indicates that the landing page is highly optimised for the target audience. The percentage of new sessions indicates the percentage of new visitors to the landing page.

7. Monitor and optimise

Google Ads offers businesses the ability to regularly monitor campaign performance and optimise campaigns accordingly. Google Ads offers a plethora of different metrics to analyze. Apart from bounce rates, average session duration and percentage of new sessions, advertisers should analyse these metrics as well:

• Clicks (Sum of clicks on the ad.)
• Click-Through-Rate (CTR) (Measures how often people click your ad after it’s shown to them, which can help you understand the effectiveness of your ad.)
• Impressions (An impression is counted each time your ad is shown, which tells you how often your ad is shown. The aim is for high impressions.)
• Cost (Cost is the sum of campaign spend during the reporting period.)
• Average Cost (Average cost is the average amount that an advertiser paid per interaction.)
• Average Cost-Per-Click (CPC) (Average cost-per-click is the amount that was paid for the ad divided by its total clicks, this tells how much is being paid on each click. The aim is to maximise impressions and clicks with the lowest CPCs.)
• Conversions (Shows the number of conversions or lead submissions received after ad interactions.)
• Cost per conversion (Shows the average cost of a conversion i.e. cost divided by conversions.)

Summary

In closing, Google Ads should be a part of a businesses marketing strategy as it offers many advantages over traditional forms of advertising. Google Ads offers small businesses the ability to advertise their brand online, quickly and effectively. Google Ads is search intent based. It not only offers advertising spend control but also allows businesses to target their specific target audience and control their ad copy content. With a multitude of performance metrics available, campaign performance can be effectively monitored and optimised. As you continue to use it over time, you will discover more, improve your knowledge and reap more benefits to improve lead generation for your business.

If you are looking to understand the components of a digital marketing strategy, feel free to read this blog.

We also have a Google Ads case study which you can view first hand how effective Google Ads is in lead generation.

Updated By Les. Jan 2022

This Google Ads case study demonstrates how Google Ads was used to effectively boost sales leads across a 2 month period while achieving lower costs to maximise return on ad spend.

The success of the campaigns was as a result of sticking to a proven routine of doing things the right way with very regular monitoring to identify improvement opportunities. Small, incremental changes can add up to significant improvements over time.

Read on this Google Ads case study to find out how we did it.

The Background

Our client, Kennedys Aust Pty Ltd, is a family business operating in Victoria Australia. Their core business service offerings are commercial plumbing and asbestos removal. They operate a number of strategically located branches in Victoria. The business has a comprehensive website with web forms and excellent relevant web content including case studies with rich videos.

The objective of this Google Ads project was to boost their sales leads at their Geelong branch and surrounding areas as soon as possible over a 2 month run window.

The Challenge Ahead

The Results

After the first month run, the campaigns yielded 3 conversions. Refer to the snapshots from Google Ads below.

The second month campaign run yielded 7 conversions, more than double of that in the first month.

The snapshots above highlight the following key achievements in comparison to the previous period: –

1. Clicks grew by 62%
2. CTR improved by 50%
3. Impression grew by 8%
4. Conversions grew by 133%
5. Conversion rate improved by 44%
6. Average Cost decreased by 5%
7. Search impression share decreased by 23% but still produced more conversions

The Solution

To meet the challenges and deliver the positive results, we implemented a number of creative and innovative techniques to maximizing Return On Ad Spend (ROAS):-

1. All campaigns used manual bidding as this strategy offered the best method to control cost per click to fit in with the limited daily budget of $25. This technique also allowed us to get the best out of Google Ads. With manual bidding, we adjusted bids to minimize spend simultaneously maximizing impressions, clicks, conversions and lowering CPC.
2. Ad group relevance and highly targeted Ad creatives that focused on commercial plumbing and asbestos removal were created. Each Ad creative included a Call-To-Action. Ads comprised of a combination of Expanded Text Search Ads and Responsive Search Ads.
3. To further enhance Ad strength, Ad extensions were implemented including Sitelink, Structured Snippets, Call-Out, Location and Call extensions.
4. Implemented landing page split testing using the existing company website and custom landing pages with web forms.
5. Organised campaigns using different geographic implementation techniques including location restricted by postcodes, location restricted by radius and Melbourne wide with further restrictions in some campaigns using a combination of in-market and affinity audiences, and profitable keywords.
6. Ads split testing with different creatives to keep the campaigns fresh to overcome any Ad fatigue.
7. Extensive keyword research lead to a combination of broad, broad modified and phrase match relevant targeted keywords that were implemented across the campaigns.
8. Set up conversion tracking for web form submissions, call from Ads, calls from extensions and calls from website.
9. Implemented shared budget that spread the $25/day budget across all campaigns.
10. Daily campaign monitoring and optimization to identify problems and opportunities for overall improvement.

Looking for really useful Google Ads tips, then download our 6 Top Google Ads Tips here.

You can also find more details about our Google Ads management service here.