Google Ads
Introduction
Google Ads provides a way of generating visits to your website and Google makes it relatively easy to setup campaigns.
The real challenge is generating a return on the investment you make. To achievei this, you need a good understanding of how your potential customers, in particular:
- What poducts they search for and the keywords they use.
- How likely they are to buy from you once they land on your website.
- How much they spend when they place orders.
- How much they are likely to spend in the future.
- How much is costs to get them to visit your site.
The first time you use Google Ads it is unlikely that you will know eoungh abaout the above in enough detail to optimise your campaigns. However, once you start Google can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
For this to happen, you need to configure Google Ads correctly.
Configuring Google Ads
To get Google Ads up and running, you need to do the following:
- Create your Google Ads account and setup your billing. You will need to give you credit card details to Google to do this.
- Configure your ecommerce or content management system to work with Google Analytics, so that it is able to track visits to your website and record when users have placed order or reponded to "calls to action", such as being added to mailing lists.
- Link Google Analytics to you Google Ads account, so that Google Ads can see what happens to the traffic it generates for your website.
This will get you to the point where you can start advertising using Search Campaigns. However, if you want to create Google Shopping campaigns, where you products appear with images and pricing at the top of the search engine results, you wil also have to:
Setting up adverts
Campaign fundamentals
Adverts in Google Ads are organised into Campaigns of which there are two fundamental types, Search Campaigns and Shopping Campaigns, reflecting the two two different types of adverts they support.
To summarize:
- Search Ads are the sponsored links that you see on the top of bottom of the search engine results pages (SERPs) that look a bit like search results.
- Shopping Ads are the rows or tables of products that appear at the top or to the site of the SERPs that include an image, a price, and (if you are using an approved feedback service) your service rating.
As you will discover, there are a lot of options than can be configured in campaigns, but here are some of the most important.
| Campaign option | Description |
|---|---|
| Daily budget | This is the average amount you want to spend on the campaign each day orver a one month period. That means that some days Google will spend more and some days it will spend less. But the total for the month will never be more than £ Daily Budget x 30.4. |
| Example | Example |