What are Google Ads?
What are Google Ads, and should your business be using them?
As a marketing agency, we often get asked questions like ‘How do I get my business to the top of a Google search?’ or ‘Should I be doing Google Ads?’
In this article, we will be breaking it down and explaining exactly what Google Ads are, how they work, and how to know if you should be using Google Ads as part of your marketing mix.
Google Ads is a paid advertising platform by Google. It is often known as pay-per-click or PPC. To put it simply, it is a digital advertising tool used to help your business reach the top spot in a Google search by paying for it.
PPC advertising is a very effective way of driving relevant traffic to your website who are searching for your products or services online. Essentially PPC means that the advertiser pays for each click they receive on the advert.
There are different types of campaigns you can create within the Google ads platform depending on what your business and marketing goals are. For example, you might want to get sales online, drive traffic to your website, reach a broader audience and increase your brand awareness or drive visitors to your physical store.
What do Google Ads look like?
Paid Google Ads will show at the top of the search results page, and a quick way to identify them is by the ‘Ad’ symbol next to the listing.
How do you know if Google ads would work for your business?
There are two quick checks you can do yourself to see if Google Ads might be worth considering:
1. Are your competitors using Google Ads?
Whether your competitors are using Google Ads or not can form part of your decision whether you should. It is really easy to do; simply head to Google and type in words that your customers would search to find your products/service. The Google search result will show you what ads are running for those words, and you can see if any of the top listings include your competitors.
If your competitors are using Google Ads, this shows that they are willing to bid on those words to get traffic to their site, and you could be losing potential customers to your competitors.
2. Keyword Research
One of the best ways to know if Google ads are right for your business is to do keyword research. This will show you how many times your keywords are being searched for, which can help you to decide whether you will see a return on your investment.
For example, if only 10 people are searching for your keyword per month, then Google Ads might not be worth the time and effort.
Aside from driving traffic to your website and potentially increasing sales, PPC has a wealth of other benefits that could add huge value to your business:
- Google Ads can provide your business with a wealth of data on keywords and user behaviour. This information can be used for other marketing efforts like SEO.
- PPC ads won’t take long to activate after setting them up, meaning you’re not too late to the competition when it comes to businesses providing similar services. The ROI can be demonstrated very quickly.
- Pay Per Click is easily measured and tracked. Our advertising team will be able to see which ads are working well, and those that need optimising.
Take a look at our advertising case studies, and see how our PPC advertising service has benefited other businesses:
John Howe
This third-generation family business wanted to continue to grow the business by launching a strong Christmas campaign to target their customer personas. Our team provided email marketing, PPC management and content creation.
Are you ready to reap the benefits of PPC?
Our paid search experts will create a bespoke strategy specific to your business and closely monitor the performance, fine-tuning it along the way to get the best results for you. We can help you decide on which keywords will be best and create optimised ads ensuring that you get the best results out of your PPC advertising.
Let’s meet and discuss your marketing goals and see how Google Ads could help you.
Written by Hannah O’Toole
Social Media Marketing Manager
Her day-to-day role at I Do Marketing consists of Social Media Management, Content Creation, Campaign Generation and Digital Marketing. She has worked in Marketing for the past 14 years, in many different countries and across a variety of industries.
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