What is Google Search Advertising?

Google Search advertising is different to display, shopping, video or application.

When people are looking to buy, know, go or do – Google is their first stop. Every day 3.5 billion searches are made on Google search alone – each one looking for something.

Sometimes that something is your product of service.

Leveraging Google Ads, you can have your company or service show up alongside search results when people are looking for the products and services you offer. before we start there is a couple of questions you need to address:

– Where do you want your adverts to be seen?
– How much do you want to invest?
– What do you want to share in your ads?
– What keywords will match your customer’s search terms?

Campaigns are the building blocks of all search advertising – and all search campaigns have goals: Sales, Leads, or Traffic.

You have the opportunity to either have your advert shown on the complete Google Search Network – which is Google Search, Google Maps, Play and Shopping along with 1000s of blogs and sites across the globe. You can also choose to only show your advert in Google Search.

Google Search Ads allow you to bid on keywords that your customers are searching for on Google. If you have a succesful bid, you will populate the Google search engine results like a normal listing. If a customer clicks your advert – you will be charged the bid amount. This is called CPC advertsing or Cost Per Click. We have a detailed explanation on keyword selection and bidding here.

Customers today are multi-device – constantly on their laptops, mobiles, and tablets. Often times they use different devices for different parts of their buyer journey. Buying on the laptop, comparing on the tablet, browsing on the phone – with Google Ads you can pick any or all of these devices and target your customers based on their device use and buyer patterns.

There is also language and location targeting preferences. A small bakery can target searchers only currently in their neighborhood, but an online retailer may want to target international locations. Language targeting allows you to present adverts based on a user’s language preferences.

You can even choose to run adverts on specific days, and hours depending on your customers search preferences or layer your Google Ads with sophisticated Audience targeting or remarketing (we explain audiences here).

You decide your daily budget, broken down by Campaign or AdGroup (more on that below) – simply enter what you are comfortable with for the entire campaign. You can manually decide how much you would like to bid on your keywords, or Google can optimize for you based on your bid strategy – Maximize clicks, CPA bidding, Enhanced CPC.

Google Ads Auction decides how much you pay per click, depending on both your click bid and the quality of your advert (more on that here).

Campaigns are broken into AdGroups – typically you keep one AdGroup in each theme – for instance we sell Office 365 (that has one AdGroup) we also sell Cloud Computing (that has another AdGroup).

Within each AdGroup you will add keywords that will trigger adverts if a user search. This level of granularity gives you more control and gives you the chance to target based on your campaign goals and target the correct customer.

Every search advert is built from 3 pieces – Headline, URL, Description.

You can add additional elements to your advert through a tool called Ad extensions – this allows you to add other parts to your advert including your phone number, location, and other website categories.

Aware offer a suite of Google Ads Management solutions. We can offer consultancy, management as a service and handle all your creative assets.