GOOGLE ADS FAQ’s

Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords and Google AdWords Express) is an advertising solution that businesses use online to advertise their services and/or products on Google Search, YouTube and other websites across the web. Google Ads also lets advertisers choose specific goals for their ads, like driving phone calls or website visits. With a Google Ads account, advertisers can customise their budgets and targeting, and start or stop their ads at any time.

Google AdWords and Google AdWords Express are the previous names for the new, improved Google Ads.

Google Ads works by showing your ads when people search online for the products and/or services you offer. By using clever technology, Google Ads helps get your ads in front of potential customers at just the right moment when they’re ready to take action.

You start by choosing your goal, like getting more visitors to your website or more phone calls to your business.

Next, you select the location where your ad should show up. It can be a small radius around your business or much broader, like cities, counties, or entire countries.

Finally, you’ll create your advert and set your monthly budget limit.
Once your ad is approved, it can show up on Google whenever users in your target area search for a product and/or service like yours. You only pay when people click on your ad or call your business.

Search Network campaigns – they are usually in text form, these ads can show up on Google Search results pages when a potential client searches for a product and/or service that’s similar to yours.

Display Network campaigns – they are usually in image form. These adverts show up on websites or apps that your customers visit.

Video campaigns – they are usually about 6 or 15 second videos, these ads show right before or during YouTube content.

CPC (Cost Per Click) or PPC (Pay Per Click) means you only pay for an ad if it gets clicked on.

Other ad models include:
Cost Per Impression, where you pay for your ad based on how many times your ad was shown (not clicks).

Cost Per Engagement is where you pay when someone completes a predefined engagement (like watching your video ad).

Your budget settings determine your Google Ads cost. Google Ads can work with almost any budget amount.

You only pay when someone interacts with your advert, like calling your business or clicking to through to visit your website. With Google Ads, there is no required contract length – you can stop your ads anytime, and there is no minimum spend requirement.

The cost of a click or call varies, based on a few factors.

To get started with Google Ads, click here to sign up. Google’s guided set-up process will walk you through creating your first ad in just a few steps. If you need help signing up, a Google Ads experts are available to set up your new account and even assist in creating your first campaign at no additional cost.

SEO is a longer-term process and involves the correct set up of your website, which will ultimately bring you more referral and organic traffic. You don’t pay for this traffic, but you’ll pay with time and money over time to get it right.

SEO should always be an important part of your digital marketing mix, and it’s often underestimated and overlooked by both web developers and business owners.

Google AdWords is a faster way of bringing in targeted traffic to your website. It is quick to set up, and a far quicker way to generate traffic than SEO (generally). Both are ongoing investments, but you’ll only pay for AdWords clicks when people are usually interested in your product.

With SEO, you have to pay up before you get web traffic. With Google AdWords, you generally only pay when people click through to your website after they see your ad.

Both forms of marketing are important. Some SEO elements will help improve the quality of your AdWords campaigns.

It is essential to understand that running paid advertising with Google will not make any difference to your organic search rankings. However, it may improve the click-through rate of your organic listings (due to searchers subtly seeing your brand in an advert before scrolling down).

Usually when I hear these words about AdWords, the main cause is due to either running campaigns in house without the correct knowledge, or having a bad experience with a “promise the world” agency.

Running an AdWords campaign without knowing how to use the Google Ads platform can be a recipe for disaster. With the first campaign we ran for a client, we saved almost 45% of their ad spend within a few minutes as we picked up they were showing ads for completely wrong search terms. For another client who was running their own campaigns using a generic Google helpline, we almost halved their cost per click from R45 to R25 meaning that they were previously spending twice as much money as they needed to.

It is also not unknown for us to take a self-managed AdWords client account and change the average clickthrough rate from 1-2% to over 10% (and sometimes higher) while getting them results.

Setting up an AdWords campaign is quite intricate if you are doing it well, and involves a good knowledge of the Google Ads platform. It’s not just clicking a few buttons. Setting up a new campaign consists of the following:

• Understanding your advertising purpose.
• Understanding your products and what the profitability of the products are.
• Making decisions on which campaign types are most relative.
• Keyword research.
• Creating the right campaign structure to keep down costs.
• You might need to create several Adwords campaigns to be more effictive – depending on your campaign ideas.
• You need to create many ‘ad extensions’ to make your adverts more effective and compelling.
• Writing content copy for various adverts. (It’s not unheard of for a ‘simple’ campaign to have 100’s of ad variations if done well).
• If using display ads, you should create many different banner adverts.
• Setting up conversion tracking within Google Analytics (this can be very time consuming).
• Minor changes to your website to allow conversion tracking
…and lots more.

This takes a lot of time, but ultimately it means your money will go further, and you’ll get better returns. We’ll set up campaigns, we will definitely save you money, and potentially lots of it.

All of these are useful metrics, but we will also sort out your conversion tracking so you can track monetary values, which is the ultimate metric to measure.

Your campaigns need to be regularly managed and optimised to make them work better over time and save you money.

When managing an Ad account, you periodically create new ad groups and look for new keywords to add to the campaign. Pausing ads and keywords that aren’t working and, making suggestions about new campaigns forms part of the management tasks. Checking if the budget of the campaign is adequate, making suggestions around where to increase it and ensuring that your ads don’t appear for irrelevant keywords is what we would do for our clients when managing their ad campaigns.

The advertising space isn’t static. There are millions of calculations performed in a real-time auction every time an advert is displayed. Optimising the ads and campaigns means your campaigns will continue to improve and save you money. If your initial campaign never changed or was not monitored, and other advertisers started new campaigns, your results could be very different in a week.

Maybe, but probably not if they are reputable. One of the following scenarios could be the issue:

• You may not be entering the keywords that got set up in your ad account. 
• The advertising budget isn’t enough to reach all searchers all the time.
• Your ‘quality score’ is lower due to your website/landing page, so your ad doesn’t get shown all the time. 
• It may be the agency has excluded your internal computer address to improve the campaign performance, or not targeting people in your location.

There are some great staff at Google, but when you call the central helpline, you are unlikely to get the same person to assist you. If you do, they have to help many people and will not be able to help with more specific elements like tracking, return on investment and to discuss the best goals to set up in Analytics to measure your performance.

At Clickmode we offer you all that and more. Our staff is incredibly helpful and knowledgable about all things Googe Ads. We know how to save you money and get the most buck for your bang. Give us a try!