Google Ads,Marketing Strategies,Uncategorized

Demystifying Google Ads: A Comprehensive Guide to Boosting Your Business With Targeted Advertising

May 16, 2023

What are Google Ads?

You’ve probably heard of them but might not be really clear on what they are.

So overall, Google Ads is a way to boost traffic to your website through targeted advertising. Now, Google has 91% of the market share as of January 2022. The other portions of the market share were, of course, Microsoft, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and some of the other smaller ones. But the majority of searches and advertising happen through Google.

Google managed to get into our phones a couple of years ago. It used to be Safari, which was the default, especially with Apple, but Google then made a deal with Apple so that it could be Chrome. They’ve done all these things over the years to ensure that they get the most traffic to their website.

What does it mean for you as a small business owner?

Well, it means you can use Google. When people, as I would say, have intent-based searches, like bottom-of-the-funnel intent-based searches, they go to Google. Again, that’s shifting, so don’t take what I’m saying as gospel, as it’s still the majority, but it’s shifting. My younger demographic is going more for TikTok and Pinterest because they don’t quite trust the search engine. So it really does depend on who your avatar is, but for most service-based businesses, it’s still Google.

By Definition:

Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google where advertisers can bid on their service offerings, products, and videos. It’s what we call pay-per-click or cost-per-click pricing. So you pay for each click, not per impression, and you can get really good results from it.

The Benefits:

1. Drive more traffic to your website

So what happens is that you get your ad out there; this usually appears when people search for optometrists in Kelowna. They see your ad, and they’re then going to click on your website. And so the benefit of advertising is to drive more traffic to your website. If your website doesn’t convert, though, then you’ll have a problem.

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2. Very cost-effective compared to radio, TV, billboards, or anything like that.

You only pay when someone clicks. Now, granted, sometimes a click can be as high as $100 if you’re in the personal injury space, but my optometrists in Squamish, BC, cost anywhere from $3–$5 a click. So it can be very, very effective.

3. Hyper-Targeted Advertising

You can do hyper-targeted advertising down to the zip code, or in Canada, the postal code. So you can get very targeted, and there are also layers of audiences that you can add to it to get very targeted to your list. You can even import your current customer list and get Google to make what they call a similar list of target people who are similar to your current customers.

4. Track Results

Best of all, you can track your results. On things like a billboard, radio, or TV, it’s hard to track your results. In fact, a couple of years ago, one of my attorneys in Springfield, Missouri, ran a TV ad, and he was curious, so he put a tracking number in his TV ad that was specific to Call Rail that tracked anybody that called from seeing that ad, and I think it ran for six months, and he had like two, maybe three phone calls. There is something to be said for brand awareness, which you can never keep track of. If someone just sees your name over and over and over again when they go to Google, they’re more likely to pick you because you sound familiar. That is something that’s not trackable but is still very important. But if we’re talking about measurable, trackable results; you want to see a return on an investment, that’s one of the benefits of doing Google ads: you can track it.

Not sure how tracking works?

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Google Ads vs Traditional Ads

Cost

So for my optometrist, he spends $500 a month on ads on Google. A radio placement that he didn’t see the return on, I want to say, was like $3,000 or $4,000. TV, don’t even go down that rabbit hole; add another zero. He did see a return on investment for the local newspaper, but for billboards, he was looking at a couple of thousand dollars for two weeks, and that primarily would have been on the Squamish reserve. So, of course, high volume with high traffic equals high dollars to invest. So the biggest thing when it comes to Google is cost.

Flexibility

You can also control it on a day-to-day basis. You can turn it off and turn it back on—it’s not something we recommend, but you can do it. You can get things going really, really quickly with Google Ads; in under a week, you have your campaign going.

If you’re hiring an agency or doing it yourself, you can do it in a couple of hours and have everything tracked and targeted. So instead of just doing that brand awareness targeting, you can actually only target and spend your money on the people who are looking for your services, which helps keep your overall advertising budget under control.

And since there’s no long-term commitment with Google Ads, you can adjust it, you can tweak it, and there’s no big, huge, long creative process. There is no long approval process; you can literally do it in a couple of hours just to get going.

Measurability

You can measure Google ads. You can’t measure the billboard; you can kind of measure the TVs as we did, but for the most part, you can definitely generate a return on investment and see how many by tracking every single lead that comes in and saying where they came from, both from a first touch point and a last touch point, whether it’s Google ads or social ads, so we can do that kind of stuff.

There are a lot of powerful things that happen in the world of Google.

So hopefully that gives you an idea of why you would want to do Google ads. And in the next couple of videos, I’m going to go into a little bit more detail about Google ads themselves and go from there.