The Ultimate Guide To Google Ads In 2020

It’s a new year, which means only one thing. Over the last week or so you’ve been sat at home, enjoying time with your family and eating one too many mince pies. But odds are you’ve also relaxing, which gives your brain a chance to catch up and start thinking about things it wouldn’t normally think about. Like how you could improve your business in the next year. So you probably have a lot of ideas buzzing around your head – and hopefully one of them is investing in Google Ads. Google Ads is a fantastic tool that not enough businesses are using, and it could deliver huge returns on your investment in it – if you do it right. To help you out, we’ve put together something of a beginner’s guide to Google Ads, to get you started. So if you’ve decided that 2020 is the year you finally tackle Google Ads, or if you just want a bit of a refresher, this is the blog for you.

How Does It Work?

Let’s start with the basics. Google Ads is a type of advertising that allows you to display ads to people who are searching on Google. It’s based around a system called keywords, and advertisers bid on the most relevant keywords for their business, fighting to be seen. The winning bidder’s ad will appear at the top of the Google search results, with a little box that says ‘Ad’ next to it. If a browser clicks on the ad, that’s when the advertiser pays their bid amount. We go into more detail about how Google Ads work in this blog post.

Getting Set Up

Setting up your Google Ads account is the first step to advertising on Google, but it’s also the most important, since a single mistake could cost you a lot of success. The main things to pay attention to at this stage are the currency and time zone, since you won’t have a chance to change these later and they play a huge role in your analytics. Your target region and location are also important to get right, though they can be changed later if needed. Once you have signed up and verified your account, you can start filling in information and setting up your campaigns. We recommend you take the extra step of connecting your Ads account to Google Analytics, so that you can monitor activity, click-through rate and conversion closely on your ads.

We’ve got a more comprehensive guide on this process, which you can read here.

Clicks are King

When you have a campaign up and running, there is one metric you should focus on more than anything else – and that’s clicks. To generate traffic to your website, you need to get as many clicks as possible. This is where a carefully planned CPC bidding strategy comes in. There are dozens of strategies you could use to achieve this (which we go into here and here), but the two most popular and successful are:

Manual CPC Bidding: This strategy gives you ultimate control on how clicks on your ads are being charged, and how much you spend on each ad. Most of the time, your charges will be at maximum.

Maximization for Clicks: With this strategy, you can control your ad budget by controlling your target spend. If your services or product is new in the market and you are trying to create brand awareness, this is the best strategy to use.

Maximising Your Visibility

Now you’re getting some clicks, it’s time to maximise your visibility and really get the message out there. There are a few things you need to bear in mind if you want to do this:

Search page location: Helps your ads pop up on the first page of Google’s search results.

CPM: Stands for cost per thousands impressions, and is a useful strategy if you only want to pay for the impressions shown in your ads.

Target outranking share: Choose a domain you want to outrank and target that.

CPM: Stands for cost per thousand viewable impressions – and allows you to pay for every 1,000 viewable impression s on your ad.

Conversion tracking: See what ads are converting and when, so you can refine your strategy.

Test, Test and Test Again

The key to any advertising strategy is to test and measure, and then make improvements. You shouldn’t just start it running and then ignore it. Instead, keep a careful eye on the performance of your campaigns, check in with Google Analytics and be prepared to change things. Test different keywords to see what performs better, and play with different strategies to find what works well for your business. Even if you’re getting the right outcome with what you have, there is always room to be better.

Working with a Google Ads specialist can also be a great help. At Ad-Extra we have been at this a long time, and we have years of experience and knowledge to pass on to you. With our help, you can start your Google Ads campaigns off on the right foot and increase your chances of success, without having to learn a lot for yourself. If you would like to know more, or just have some questions about Google Ads, we would love to help. Just get in touch with the team today to book your free consultation.