Like any successful multi-billion pound international organisation, Google has laid the groundwork to successfully monetise SERPs with Google Search & Display Advertising placements.
Whilst SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a race to see who can organically follow Google’s best practices to ensure that you’re relevant and vibrant enough to achieve the top spot on SERPs, Google Ads allows users to take a shortcut, paying to be in the right place at the right time.
There are a number of key benefits to Google ads, fundamentally ensuring that your business can target customers actively searching for your products and services, and ensuring that you are only doing that on a cost-per-click basis (which is also why you often hear Google Ads referred to as PPC, or pay-per-click advertising).
Say you Google something, ‘digital marketing Colchester’ for example 😉 it’s usually the first two or three results will have paid to be there (note the little ‘Sponsored’ in the top left corner), and I’m throwing no shade whatsoever, but quite often it’s going to be the people who are paying the most money and not the people who are most likely to be able to help you. But it’s still important to make sure that you have a presence amongst those top bidders so that you can target highly relevant customers and not only increase brand awareness, but also traffic to your website, so that potential leads can learn more about your business.
All well and good, but running successful ad campaigns on Google requires knowledge of the platform's features, settings, and best practices; There are various targeting options, bidding strategies, ad formats, and performance metrics to consider. Understanding and navigating this complexity can be challenging, especially for newcomers or those with limited experience, and so when you first get started, advertising your business can be a daunting task.
Google Display ads allow you to display (Alexa, define 'nominative determinism') your creative assets on a range of targeted placements as banner ads across the web. You may have seen Google Ads from companies you may or may not be familiar with placed anywhere from online news outlets to YouTube and other websites that consumers may be browsing at any time. One of the main benefits of Google Display Ads is that you’re able to target specific placements, and affinities of people in order to make sure you’re garnering the right clicks from the right audience. Display ads are also considerably more cost efficient as they are still pay-per-click, so whereas you’re largely going to be targeting for brand awareness, you’re still only paying when people click through to your website 🤑
Google Ads is one of many platforms that can be easy to pick up, but incredibly difficult to get right, and it’s for that reason that a Google Ads certification is a mark of high regard, purely down to the fact that not a lot of people can succeed with limited knowledge.
Now, I’m not implying that you suck at Google Ads, by any stretch, but not knowing what you’re doing can quite often lead to lost investments, or at the very least, can lead to an uphill battle trying to figure out where you’re going wrong if you’re spending a lot of money without much of a return.
At FUZE, we have years of experience with paid ads, and have a ton of knowledge when it comes to looking under the hood of client accounts (as well as our own) and figuring out how to make the most valuable changes. We also understand that managing your ad accounts is a huge time investment, and isn’t something that you can simply set up and leave to do its thing. Small things like adding negative keywords, figuring out keywords that are and aren’t working particularly well, raising bids on high performing ad groups, lowering bids on those that aren’t doing what they need to do, identifying opportunities to add or change creative or copy, expanding on new ad extensions or even restructuring your account to be more granular - this all takes time.
Whilst there’s never a quick fix, we’re here to help. Even if you need a review, help with setup, some education or ongoing management and support, we are a Google Partner agency with Google Ads certified specialists who are available to ignite the fuze on your ads presence 💣 Give us a call or get in touch online today.
