One of the biggest challenges for businesses is getting their website in front of customers. Search engine optimization can be tricky for new business owners, and launching ad campaigns on the wrong platforms can burn money quickly.
How can marketers ensure that their business is appearing in search results for relevant keyword queries on Google?
The answer is Google AdWords campaigns. They’re quick, effective ways to ensure your website listing is displayed in front of relevant customers. Businesses that need results immediately are using Google AdWords to drive customers to their business.
In this post, we’ll explore five reasons why you should advertise with Google AdWords. Before we do, let’s examine the capabilities of Google AdWords and why the ad platform is effective in driving customers to a company’s website.
What is Google AdWords?
Google Adwords is an ad platform that businesses use to reach customers on Google, the largest search engine in the world. By launching campaigns, their ads will appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) for targeted, relevant keywords related to their business.
Search ads appear as regular listings with an ad label in the top-left corner. Most of the time, the ads will appear as one of the top listings, always ahead of the organic ones. However, sometimes ads will be shown at the bottom or side of the page depending if Google has any featured snippets for the requested search query.
Businesses of all sizes and industries will benefit from launching a Google AdWords campaign.
Some businesses focus on localized strategies, while others target national or international audiences. Campaigns can be optimized for link clicks, impressions or conversions depending on your goals.
Marketers can log into the ad platform to create ads, set budgets, target relevant keywords, optimize bids and measure conversions. They can use the Google Keyword Planner to gauge average monthly search traffic and the estimated cost-per-click for specific search terms.
These insights can help guide their ad strategy and teach them about what their customers are actively seeking on the internet.
Other strategies like email, content, and affiliate marketing may take too long unless you’re using web apps like Wordable.io to optimize and speed up the process. Instead, running ads on Google AdWords can be an effective way to get more customers to your website immediately, at a relatively low cost.
Benefits of advertising with Google AdWords
Some of the many benefits of advertising with Google AdWords include:
- Capitalizing on Google’s search traffic
- Targeting relevant keywords
- Beating competitors with conquesting ads
- Forgoing graphic creation
- Leveraging their pay-per-click bidding structure
Let’s dive in.
1. Capitalizing on Google’s search traffic
If your customers were all congregating in one location, wouldn't you want to be there to sell your products? Well, your customers are on Google, and you need to take advantage of the site’s nonstop traffic. If you don’t, you’re making it harder for interested customers to find your business.
Google is the most visited site in the world, with 5.8 billion searches per day.
People may be searching for your site or your products and unsure where to look. If your site isn’t optimized for search and you don’t have ads running, your potential customers might find your competitor instead. If you don’t capitalize on Google traffic with paid and organic tactics, you are leaving a huge marketing opportunity on the table.
Initially, you might think it’s okay to rely on your organic SEO strategy in order to drive traffic to your site. However, this can be challenging for new businesses, as content, links, and RankBrain are the top three ranking factors.
Most of the time, it will take more than six to12 months to begin seeing your SEO efforts pay off.
In addition, there are a handful of factors ranging from site speed, domain authority, relevance and more that will impact your ranking. It can be difficult to diagnose SEO-related issues and understand where to invest your time to drive organic results.
On the other hand, Google AdWords campaigns are simple to set up, and you may start seeing results almost immediately. By using Google’s guided campaign builder, you don’t need any technical knowledge to begin serving your ad to relevant prospects.
2. The ability to target relevant keywords
If you have a limited budget, you might be wondering where to spend it. There are so many different ad platforms. From LinkedIn to Snapchat, marketers can be lost trying to decide where to begin.
How do you know if Google AdWords is the right match for your business?
The core differentiator that sets Google AdWords apart from other social media ads is search intent. Search intent refers to the reason why someone was looking for terms related to your products, service or company.
Unlike ads on other social media sites that simply serve the ad to a passive audience who is browsing their news feeds, those searching on Google are actively interested in their results.
On Facebook and Twitter, viewers are scrolling through their newsfeeds looking for updates and entertainment with a few ads in between. On Google, people are searching for listings similar to yours and may actually want to see your ad at that moment in time.
3. Beating competitors with conquesting ads
If your company is new to the market and has a prominent competitor in the space, you can launch conquesting ads to try and tap into their audience that is already searching for a related product.
Conquesting ads target competitor brand names and keywords, so your ad will show up when someone searches for their product or business name.
Look how this ad for Nectar Sleep appears on the SERP for the query “Purple,” a major direct to the consumer mattress company. Nectar Sleep targeted their competitor’s brand name, so customers searching for Purple would see their $100 off promotion and potentially reconsider.
As you can see from Nectar Sleep’s ad, conquesting ads typically have a promotion in the copy that is used to lure customers towards a better offer. For this same reason, you should also bid on your own brand name. You won’t want competitors intercepting traffic that was originally planning to browse your page.
4. No graphics are necessary
Small businesses don’t always have robust graphic design departments or budgets to create fresh ads. Thankfully, search ads launched on Google AdWords do not require an image.
First impressions are everything when it comes to your marketing assets.
Sometimes it seems that every aspect of your marketing is focused on the graphic attached to it. Search ads run through Google AdWords focus solely on the copy. This means that the copy must be effective enough to convert customers at first glance.
Marketers need to have multiple ad variations in rotation to test and figure out which copy performs the best.
This can help guide broader messaging decisions across the company as well. If you see a value proposition or use case that customers are frequently clicking on, you might want to integrate that messaging into your website, emails and landing pages.
With Google AdWords, you only have a few lines of text in your search ad. You need to take advantage of every aspect of it, ensuring you are capitalizing on all the ad real estate that is available to you. This will ensure that your brand message is comprehensive and thorough for the prospect who is viewing your ad.
5. Pay-per-click bidding structure
There are many different bidding structures you can choose when setting up your campaign. The most popular structure is pay-per-click bidding. In this ad campaign type, you will only be billed when someone clicks on your advertisement. You aren’t charged for impressions or conversions that are associated with your campaign.
This is valuable, because you’re paying for traffic — not merely views.
You are getting someone to your site instead of burning through cash showing your ad to people that will scroll past it. However, once you get that traffic to your site, you need to make sure you convert it. That’s a challenge for marketers.
The easiest way to increase conversions is to set up custom landing pages for individual ad campaigns.
For example, if you’re a mattress company targeting customers with back pain, you might have a landing page that specifically talks about why your mattress is great for people who like to sleep on their backs.
By having custom landing pages for different ad campaigns, you will increase the relevance of your offering and drive more conversions for your business.
Conclusion
Businesses that aren’t advertising on Google AdWords are missing out on relevant customers that are actively searching for their brand. Companies should launch a new Google AdWords campaign to capitalize on paid search traffic by targeting relevant keywords and conquesting against competitors.
These campaigns can launch with text-only ads and pay-per-click bidding, so they only pay when someone visits their site. Once they launch their first campaign, they will realize the value of Google AdWords and the dramatic impact it can have on their bottom line.
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