Hi everyone, today I wanted to take a moment and talk about what I’ve learned about Google Ads. At this moment I’m working on almost 30 campaigns on Google Ads. I feel like with each campaign that I work on I’m learning something new. Or it’s confirming what I already know. As with all things digital, I’ll continue to learn.
So a couple of quick stats that I pulled from online before I started this podcast. There are 160 billion that’s with a “B”, monthly searches on Google. So that’s a ridiculous amount of people that are searching for whatever they’re looking for at that moment. And they’re going straight to Google which has about 70% of the market share as far as online searches. About 86% of consumers use the internet to find local business. As far as advertisers go, there are about 4 million advertisers on Google. About 2 million advertisers on Facebook, and 70,000 on Twitter. So you see that big drop there between Facebook and Twitter. Twitter has been struggling on this subject for a while. Probably the new thing that’s been happening for a while now with online marketing that mobile has taken a big slice of the marketing pie. So you have mobile that’s expecting to take about 72% of all U.S. digital marketing spending. Keep in mind that if you have a website that needs to be mobile friendly. If you’re marketing to keep that in mind. Obviously these number have changed, and will continue to change. It’s just the nature of the beast.
So just wanted to drop a couple of numbers at you. I don’t want to get into all these statistics. As you can see, there is a lot of searching going on here. There is a lot of potential business if you are a business owner. The main way that Google generates profits is by selling advertising space. Mostly they do that by delivering search results to users that are looking for something specific. It could be a product, service, a question on someone is asking. It could be an e-book. Pretty much anything that you’re looking for you can just “google” it.
The place that I always start with camps is, I take a fair amount of time to do what is called keyword research. To back up a minute, a keyword is if I’m sitting in front of my computer. I type in something to find whatever i’m looking for into the search box. Whatever I type in is generally considered a keyword. i want to make sure that I’ve done the research for that and that I’m not overspending or I’m not going after keywords that possibly aren’t going to convert anyway. So there is a fair amount of research done on that.
After that I want to make sure that we set up my ads. I want to have informative and enticing ad copy. Because if you get in front of the right people, they Google what you’re offering, if your ad is right there and they don’t click on it then your ad. Then you just wasting googles time and wasted your time. Be a little creative and spend some time coming up with ad copy that answers questions for people. Make sure that they understand by reading the ad, what you do and what you offer. Also you want to be careful because Google is approving your ads. If you write something that’s false or let’s say you’re a donut shop but really selling tires. Well Google is going to go to your website and see that you don’t really offer that service. They’re going to reject your ad. They want to make sure that everything is on the up and up. I was reading that Google last year reject over 3 billion, what they call “bad ads”. They’re carefully looking at ads and making sure that it doesn’t raise any flags. If people complain about your ads, then you’re going to have all kinds of problems. So try to spend as much some time on your ad copy.
Right now I’m gonna go over things on the surface like I said I can spend days on how to set up and administer an Adwords campaign. You have your ad copy, and you’ve done your keyword research. Then you want to make sure, if you’re a local business, really exciting stuff, you can literally check into the city that you want to target. Then throw a 5,10, or 20 mile radius around it. You can do city by city or zip code by zip code. You could say I want my ads only to run in Hermosa Beach. Or I want it to run in a zip code in Downtown Los Angeles and 5 miles out. Google tries to get it as close to that as possible. You can bring it down to the days of the week to run the ad. Or days and times of the week. Let’s say you have a full time job and then you want the ads to run at night. Or you’re not working during the week and just work weekends. So you can run the ads during the week.
Whatever you want to do. You can set up so that ads shows up on tablets only, or desktops only, mobile only, iphones only. There are all kinds of options to work with them. You’re almost advertising like a laser beam when you work with some of these platforms.
The final thing I’m going to talk about is what Google calls an ad score or ad rank. Basically you have an ad that’s running. Each keyword is given a rank between 10 to nothing. It’s been my experience that if an ad receives a nothing or a 1 or zero or whatever. That ad will not even be shown. That’s just been my experience. They don’t think enough of your ad to show it even. So the ad is not gonna get any impressions. I’m not saying that happens always but that’s been my experience. Again, Google is the first search engine, there have been other search engines doing PPC before. One of the main differences is that they’ve set up their business model is that they have made it user centric. It’s not based on, hey I want to make the advertiser happy. It’s I want to make the user happy. I want to give the best possible search results to the user. So if you’re talking about a pizza shop in El Segundo, and someone wants to buy a yacht in Seattle, it’s gonna make Google look bad. As a user I’m going to get annoyed and at some point I’m getting the right search results. Then I’m gonna use Yahoo or Bing or something else. Keep that in mind that Google is satisfied with your ads.
A couple of ways to raise your ad score. Make sure that the keywords are relevant to your website and to the ads. Make sure that the landing pages are relevant to the ads. Also some things that are kind of out of your hands, is if people aren’t clicking on your ads. If they’re not clicking on the ad, then you can change the ad copy.
I think that’s all I’m going to get into today. If you have any question / thoughts or whatever contact me directly and go to my website thisismysouthbay.com. If you want to get a hold of me click on book now you can set up a 15 minute meeting or whatever on the phone on any questions you might have. Until next time. Thank you!