Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content, and generate mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users
At it’s most basic level, the ad platform operates on an auction basis. You bid on keywords to trigger an for ad placement in a search engine results. Every time someone searches that keyword, your ad is triggered an is shown on the SERP, then you pay a small fee id the searcher clicks on your ad.
AdWords is considered the most popular paid search platform used by search marketers, followed by Bing ads (which serves a large portion of their ads on Yahoo).
Google offers several types of advertising products including:
- Search
- Display
- Video (YouTube)
- Shopping (Ecommerce)
- Gmail
Benefits of Online Advertising & AdWords
Online advertising allows you to show your ads to the people who are likely to be interested in your products and services, while filtering out folks who aren’t. And you can track whether those people clicked your ads. Online advertising also gives you the opportunity to reach potential customers as they use multiple devices — desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
AdWords allows you to take advantage of these benefits by showing your ads to the right people, in the right places, and at the right times.
1. Target your ads
Targeting gives you the ability to show your ads to reach people with specific interests — namely, people who are interested in your products and services — and show them relevant ads.
AdWords offers different ways of targeting, which we’ll go over in more detail later. For now, here’s a look at the choices that you have with online ads that can make your marketing campaigns even more targeted:
- Keywords: Words or phrases relevant to your products and service, which are used to show your ads when customers search for those terms or visit relevant websites.
- Ad location: Show your ads on search engines, commercial sites, or personal sites.
- Age, location, and language: Choose the age, geographic location, and language of your customers.
- Days, times, and frequency: Show your ads during certain hours or days of the week, and determine how often your ads appear.
- Devices: Your ads can appear on all types of devices, and you can fine-tune which devices your ads appear on and when.
2. Control your costs
AdWords gives you control over how you spend your money. There’s no minimum. And you can choose how much you spend per month, per day, and per ad. You’ll only pay when someone clicks your ad.
3. Measure your success
With AdWords, if someone clicked your ad, you’ll know. If they clicked your ad and then did something valuable to your business — purchased your product, downloaded your app, or phoned in an order — you can track that, too.
By seeing which ads get clicks and which ones don’t, you’ll also quickly see where to invest in your campaign. That, in turn, can boost the return on your investment.
You can get other valuable data, including how much it costs you, on average, for advertising that leads to your customers’ online purchases or phone calls. And you can also use analytical tools to learn about your customer’s shopping habits — how long, for instance, they tend to research your product before they buy.
4. Manage your campaigns
AdWords also offers you tools to easily manage and monitor accounts.
If you manage multiple AdWords accounts, a My Client Center (MCC) manager account is a powerful tool that could save you time. It lets you easily view and manage all of your AdWords accounts from a single location.
You can also manage your AdWords account offline with AdWords Editor, a free, downloadable desktop application that allows you to quickly and conveniently make changes to your account. With AdWords Editor, you can download your account information, edit your campaigns offline, and then upload your changes to AdWords. You can use AdWords editor to manage, edit, and view multiple accounts at the same time, copy or move items between ad groups and campaigns, and undo and redo multiple changes while editing campaigns.
The Benefits Of AdWords
Whether you are launching a new product, would like to increase brand awareness, or drive in-store traffic — it’s possible to achieve your desired results with AdWords’ advertising products and measurement tools.
Here are some of the main benefits of using AdWords to address your marketing objectives:
Relevance
One of the main benefits of AdWords is the ability to target ads to users based on their interests, as well as a number of other factors like location, language, and demographic. With search targeting, marketers can respond directly to what a user is looking for with highly relevant ads. An advertiser can use Contextual Targeting to reach users across the Google Display Network as they read about specific topics related their products or services. Mobile Ads with location-specific messaging can be used to encourage in-store sales by reaching users with a location-specific offer when they’re on the go with a smartphone or tablet.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Since online advertising is more measurable than other forms of advertising, it’s easier to tell whether you are meeting your advertising goals. Every user’s click can be tied to a particular ad, keyword, and search query, all of which you can track and optimize according to your goals. If you spot a trend, you can create, modify, or delete keywords, ads, and campaign targeting selections on the fly. This allows you to respond quickly to changes and trends and improve your ROI even after your campaign has started.
Reach
Everyday, Internet users conduct billions of searches on Google, view millions of videos on YouTube and consume at least as many pages of the Display Network partners’ web content. When you use Google AdWords, you have the opportunity to target any segment of that broad worldwide audience that’s actively looking for or consuming relevant content about products, services, information, and websites. By giving your client’s products or services a presence during relevant user searches or while they’re pursuing their interests online, you can help them be visible to their target audiences at all the crucial points in the buying cycle — be it awareness, consideration, or purchase.
Google offers a wealth of information on all of it’s products including Google Ads. If you would like to learn more about advertising on the Google platforms, I highly recommend you read through read through the Google Ads training available through the Google Skillshop portal. Google offers specific training on Search Ads, Display Ads, Video Ads, and Shopping Ads as well as Ad Measurement and how to become Google Ads Certified.