After setting up your business website and implementing SEO, what else can business owners do to drive potential traffic quickly? With a little budget, you can register for a Google Ads account to start your online advertising campaigns. Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords, is an online paid advertising platform where advertisers can bid on certain keywords to display brief advertisements, product or service offerings and videos to users in Google’s search results. Services offered are based on a pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model.
You must be thinking “Do I need to spend a lot of money?” or “It is too expensive!” Many people have misconceptions that they need to spend a lot of money on Google Ads to drive and increase traffic to their business websites. However, this is not true. The cost varies due to a number of factors such as the competitiveness of your keywords and industry, geographic location etc.
Eg. For business service industries like real estate and accounting; they are one of the more competitive verticals in Google Ads and that means it would result in higher costs per click (CPC). This is due to the nature of a niche market and one client could yield significant revenue of $1K to $10K depending on your business so a CPC of $50 is a minor price to pay for that client.
On the other hand, industries like arts and entertainment incur smaller CPCs because they need to reach many more customers to hit that same revenue of $1K to $10K. So how do you manage when you have a limited advertising budget? Similar to Facebook, you can set a daily budget for Google Ads. Let me explain. If you want to place an ad with a CPC of $0.50 and you like to receive 100 clicks, that would put you on an estimated daily budget of $100.
In this example, it means $0.50 is the maximum amount you will be charged per click if that is your maximum CPC. In reality, the actual amount might vary every time, depending on individual ad auctions but it also means you will not pay more than $0.50 per click but could possibly end up paying less. There are other advanced options that might affect the overall budget such as dayparting, geotargeting and device targeting but we will leave that to another time.
More importantly, let’s talk about 6 practical features to help you master the basics of Google Ads and easily increase traffic to your website!
1. New ad copy formats
Since 2019, Google Ads has released different ad format options to use and if you have not used them yet, it is a good time to look into these new options. Previously, advertisers had limited text space to put in their ads but now the space has almost doubled and you can use any number of preset options to create an attractive advertisement for individual users. Eg. Video ads can be used to provide an interactive and fun experience to customers. These can be featured on websites that partner with Google.
2. Search impression share
Just because you run Google ads does not mean that you will automatically get traffic. A major factor is the use of keywords. Sometimes, your business does not show up because the ad rank is too low which is a good indicator to work on improving your quality score. Other times, it might be due to budget constraints. With search impression share, you can find out how often your business appears based on the keywords you use and it points you to where the underlying problem is so you can make the adjustments accordingly to increase traffic.
3. The Home tab
Do you agree that when you see this tab, you tend to “switch off” or ignore it in a way because there seems to be a mass of information to digest? This is often the most overlooked but insightful page in Google Ads. Within the Home tab, you will find interesting information like missed clicks due to budget, good quality but low traffic keywords and even suggestions to increase traffic by adding new keywords. It is a great free tool to help you improve on directing more traffic to your business website.
4. Auction insights
While you cannot directly see how much your competitors are bidding for keywords or their quality scores, there is still a lot of information you can gather from the Auction Insights tab. It offers a thorough analysis at what your competitors are bidding alongside you, how often their ads appear for your keywords and where their ads show up on the page. If you feel that the bids need to be at the top of the page to increase traffic clicks, you can review your competitors to check who is outbidding you.
5. Different bidding strategies
Google Ads has put in place several automated bidding systems to help businesses in achieving different goals – search page location, clicks and conversions etc. However, you will want to have your account set up and running for some time before using any of these automated bidding strategies as research has shown that past account history plays a part in their efficacy. By doing this, it helps you save time and money in the long run because the analytics will show you which strategy works best for your business.
6. Remarketing
If you are not familiar with the concept of remarketing, it is worth doing some research. With this tool, you can “push” ads to people once they visit your business website. Retargeting can be specified down to particular pages of your website so you can tailor ads for those unique areas. Similar to traditional advertising, some people need to visually see your brand many times before they decide to connect. With remarketing as an indirect advertising strategy, you can continue to remind them of their previous visit and make the first ad click worthwhile by “pushing” ads even after they have left your website.
We hope this information has been insightful and helpful so you can maximize using Google Ads to increase traffic to your business website. You may need tweaks here and there but you will definitely achieve the desired results in due time!
