Basics of Google Ads

Over the past few weeks I’ve been introduced to Google AdWords in my Digital Media Strategies class. With that I have gone through a few study guides and assessments that led me to become certified in both Google Ads Fundamentals as well as Google Ads Search. I’m intrigued by all of the different ways businesses get their brand out there and the ability to see exactly how these brands are being seen in the eyes of consumers. Google is a great space to advertise, it is the most used search engine receiving 3.5 billion search inquiries a day. Advertises make $8 for every $1 they spend of Google Ads.

Google AdWords is an advertising tool through Google. AdWords can transform your business. It’s a PPC (pay-per-click) platform where advertisers can bid on certain keywords for their clickable ads to appear in Google search results. The better your ad campaign is, the more clicks you will generate. This platform helps businesses better connect with their customers. To generalize - you create and online ad, tell Google Ads who you want to reach, and it brings your ads to them.  Being a PPC, you only pay when people engage with your ads.

Analytics = data-driven decision making. It’s information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. Google analytics is a service that reports and tracks website traffic, it’s a free tool through Google. This tool puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. It uses a small piece of Javascript tracking code to collect this data about a companies website visitors and their interactions on that website. Interactions are all types of actions users perform on your website; clicking a link, hitting the play button, loading a page, etc. With interactions comes another vocab work “Hit”, a hit is an interaction that results in data being sent to analytics. Some “hit” types include event tracking, pageviews, social interaction, transactions, and ecommerce hits. Each time a user loads a page on a website or a screen in a mobile app, analytics records that activity - each interaction is packaged into a hit and sent to Google’s servers. All this data is sent in the form of an invisible data file. Below is an example of how “hits” are formatted, they’re all formatted in a similar way.

There are various ways companies promote their brand to increase services or sales. The top dogs are online marketing and offline marketing (online is seen to be the more affordable route). Online marketing includes some strategies talked about earlier with Google Ads and analytics. The goal is to leverage web-based channels to spread messages about a company’s brand, services, or products to possible customers. Examples of this include email, display ads, SEO (search engine optimization), and of course one of the most used today...social media marketing. Offline marketing includes more traditional marketing. This can be direct mail, flyers, posters, billboards, radio, and this marketing can even range to local festivals, trade shows, and network events. I almost forgot, word-of-mouth, people are 90% more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by a friend.

It may seem more difficult to track analytics of offline marketing since direct websites don’t apply, but I recently learned about a simple way to track offline advertising. Tracked links are used to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, it’s a normal URL with tags attached to the end. These tags specify the channel a visitor comes from. For example, you can see that someone clicked your link through a specific social media site such as Facebook or Twitter, you are able to see exact detail about your traffic sources.

Within Google analytics, there are a few hidden gems that I found to be interesting. One being the “Navigation Summary” allows you to select a specific page to see how people find that page and where people travel to next on your website. This basically gives a before and after snapshot of your content.  Another feature that google analytics provides is the “pre-conversion” path. This allows you to see where potential customers were before making a purchase or getting in touch with your business. It shows the most recent pages users were on right before making a conversion (action of someone interacting with your ad). The last hidden gem of Google analytics I want to share is how to compare different types of users. You can use Advanced Segments to create different segments for different user types (phone,tablet,desktop) and compare them across reports. This feature can be good for recognizing problems on a website.

Going back to Google Adwords, now that I defined exactly what it is, now I want to go a little further and go over some beginner steps to building a campaign. First step is making an account signing in with a Google account, that's all you’ll need. Once you’re in, you need to think of a daily budget, this step is important because it makes sure you do not go over your spending limits. After you’ve established a budget, you define your target audience - starting by specifying the geographical location. This just makes sure your ad is shown only to users in that area.  Next step is choosing a network, either Google’s Search Network or Display Network. The search network puts your ads on the SERPs (search engine results pages) and the display network will show your ad on any website that shows ads. The search network is probably the best to use for beginners and small businesses.

This next step is pretty vital....choosing your keywords. These are the terms/phrases that a user types into a search box when they are looking for something. You can use about 15-20 keywords of your choice that may trigger your ad to appear. As you choose these keywords, it shows you each word/phrases search volume. Warning: keywords with high search volume can get pricey. There's an important term to be familiar with and that is “negative keywords”, they are terms to make sure that your ad is not shown to irrelevant audiences - it’s cool feature of AdWords. Next is setting your bid, a bid is the amount of money you are willing to pay per person that clicks on your ad. You and your competitor are bidding for the same keyword, and you are willing to pay more per click, then your ad will show up higher than theirs. The last step, after actually writing your ad, Google will ask about your business and inquire payment info.

There are so many different ways and tools that businesses use to make their brand seen. Personally, I think Google is a great platform and provides the necessary resources to really understand your audiences. AdWords is simple to become familiar with, and there are numerous guides and tutorials online if you were to run into any issues when first starting.