Search Engine Advertisement

When is it important?

As a marketing manager or entrepreneur, your primary purpose is attracting visitors to the website as soon as money is set aside for paid advertising in Google. We would like to share some ideas to get the best possible result from search engine advertising. We zoom in on the advantages and disadvantages of a Google Ads campaign, so that you can weigh on how to spend your budget on this.

The effectiveness of a Google Adwords campaign succeeds or fails with the goals you set in advance and the strategy you choose to pursue. A quickly and shadily set up a campaign, using too general keywords and little attention to detail are known pitfalls that you can avoid by just proper planning. Because you will probably spend quite some money, you should strive for a well-oiled and successful Google Ads campaign that will generate new customers and make more money than it costs you. Thoughtless and rushed work will certainly lead to an ineffective campaign that will throw your money down the drain.

A strong Google Ads campaign undoubtedly delivers a number of unique benefits, provided your Ads campaign is well thought out and built. Our advice is therefore: Have an eye for detail, take your time and work carefully and systematically.

Google Adwords Campaign terminology

Conversion is the result you want to get out of your web visitors based on a predetermined goal. This can be an order in a webshop,or subscribing to a newsletter are among the common ones. In simple terms, how does your business ultimately turn a visitor into a customer?

Advertising budget is the maximum amount of money you want to spend on your Google Adwords campaign every day. If you know exactly how much each visitor is worth to you, you also know exactly how much you can pay per click.

CPC - Cost per Click is the amount that every click on an ad will cost you.

CPA - Cost per Acquisition is the amount that each conversion costs you. This will always be higher than the CPC because not every click on your ad actually results in a conversion. These are visitors who comes to see but ultimately buy nothing and therefore does not become a customer.

CTR - Click Through Rate is your clickthrough rate. You can calculate this by dividing the number of times your ad was clicked by the number of times your ad was shown, multiplied by 100 to get a percentage. Example: 200 clicks / 1500 impressions x 100 = 13%

ROI - Return on investment is the statistical value of the profit you've made on the ads, compared to how much you've spent on those ads.

Four success factors

With the terminology in our pocket we can talk further. Which success factors play an important role in running a successful Google Ads campaign?

Keyword research

You know your company best. You know the products or services you offer best and you know what the market looks like. Before you start with search engine advertising in Google, it is therefore essential to think carefully about how you would search your product or service in Google. What do you really offer? And is this also what your target audience is looking for?

Do you sell a service? Do you realize that your customers may be looking for a solution that they do not yet know at the time of searching? Give them a hand and formulate a problem or answer to a question in such a way that it covers a wide spectrum of your services.

If you sell a product, it is already easier. Your customers will most likely search by brand, type number, model or other type of specifications. You can respond to this with search engine advertising.

Also ask yourself how you are now found. Do not hesitate to ask your (potential) customers how they experienced your product or service and how they found you. Also, don't forget to ask family members, friends or acquaintances what they would be looking for, and don't put too many words in their mouth beforehand.

Before you start Google Ads campaign, think carefully about how you would like to be found. This will provide you with a list of search terms that you use as a guide to come up with even more specific keywords. You can use the list of words that follows for the further research that should make advertising in Google as successful as possible for you. The goal is to ultimately determine which search terms are relevant and interesting enough to be found on.

The Google Ads keyword planner can be a useful tool to help you select those search terms that you will get conversion from. Google will give you an indication of the search volume, or the average number of monthly searches on that specific search term. You will only get the exact figures for the search volume when you actually start a paid Google Ads campaign.

Targeting / keyword exclusion

If you want to set up an accurate and targeted campaign, think carefully as described above about the search terms that will make your campaign successful. It is equally important to think about which search terms should explicitly fall outside your Ads campaign.

These so-called negative keywords are search terms that are similar to your keywords, but with which Google users clearly search for other products or services. Suppose you run a fashion store, aimed at young and hip audiences. Then it is a good idea to add negative keywords to your Ads campaign for search terms such as 'clothing for the elderly' or 'children's clothing'.

So where regular keywords indicate when your Google ad should be shown, these negative keywords indicate when your ad shouldn't be shown in Google Ads. This can help ensure that customers most interested in your product or service find you best. It also helps to lower your costs and increase your ROI. To give an example: a car company that only sells new cars, for example, can use the keyword 'used' as the negative keyword. This prevents this car company from appearing in ads when looking for used cars.

Advertising planning

With the ad planning function in Google Ads, it is possible to display ads at your desired times. For example, you can only show your ad on certain days or only during office hours, when you are present to answer questions from customers.

For example, suppose you run a web shop that offers school supplies to students, you can, for example, choose to lower the bids in Google Ads during school hours and increase them after school hours. The ad planning tool offers the possibility to see which days and / or times perform best. Data history is required, so you will have to turn on your ad once a day, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to gain insight into your history.

To give a good example: you offer diving holidays in Curaçao and your data history shows that your advertisements achieve the best results on Sunday evening between 20:00 and 23:00, exactly in the time block on which NPO3 broadcasts the television program 3 on Travel. The Google Ads ad planning tool offers you the opportunity to only display your ads around these times on Sunday evenings.

This historical data is an indispensable guideline for effective advertising planning. This gives you the option to disable ads at times that produce relatively many clicks but few conversions. Be careful not to draw conclusions too easily due to a lack of historical data. It is not entirely true that you can turn off advertisements at night: you save little because there is anyway less internet traffic at night and it may be that night visitors concentrate relatively often. Without proper data, ad scheduling can have the opposite effect. So pay close attention to that. Tip: Use Google Analytics as well to determine in which regions, on which days and times the most conversions are generated. This makes advertising in Google a lot more fun and profitable.

Analyzing your results

Your Google Ads campaign has now been kick-started. Advertising in Google has started and you would like to analyze what your ads are generating now. It's time to link Google Analytics to your Google Ads account. Google Analytics is the web statistics tool from Google with which you can measure website visits, collect many types of data and improve your website in a targeted manner. This multitude of data provides a sharp insight into your website traffic and its marketing effectiveness. Simply put, you can see how many people have clicked on your ad, placed an order on it (or any other goal you have in mind with your website) with which you can measure how high the conversion of your campaign is. This is very valuable information because you can add keywords based on this,

Measuring is knowing is our motto. The collection of data with Google Analytics is unlimited.

Google Ads: pros and cons

It seems simple, almost a guaranteed win-win situation: you pay an x amount for a click on your ad and in return you get a visitor who is interested in your product or service. How easy life can be sometimes. Google Ads as the most obvious non-bullshit-but-brushing online promotion out there. We would like to sketch you a realistic picture and also tell you about the ifs and buts that can stick to advertising in Google. What exactly are the advantages and disadvantages?

Disadvantages of Google Ads

Setting up a Google Ads campaign can be complex because you are bound by strict rules about the structure of your ad, you really have to act on the basis of data history and there are quite a lot of choices in the different ways of advertising. The three main disadvantages at a glance:

Short-term investment

Depending on your playing field - your competition and the keywords you want to advertise- the costs of a Google Ads campaign can add up and as soon as you stop investing you are immediately invisible. If your ROI (Return on investment) is good, you can justify these costs with short-term results, but there are regular cases in which those costs would be much lower via other marketing tools. So be careful and do not immediately spend your entire marketing budget.

Lack of knowledge costs money

As mentioned earlier in this blog, an effective (profitable) Google Ads campaign stands or falls with a well thought-out plan. Through a search for relevant keywords, keyword exclusion, ad scheduling and analysis of results, a tightly orchestrated Ads campaign can be a route to success. Fruitful advertising in Google is only possible if you adhere to the success factors that go with it. If you do not have that knowledge in-house, consider outsourcing your campaign to an external party. And the following also applies: know what you want to do and find the right SEA expert who understands and helps you best. Keep control in your own hands.

You don't reach a large group

Up to 70% of Google users do not click on an ad, but on an un sponsored result. Sometimes because of the installation of a program so that no ads are shown, but often also because people are aware of the ads and experience them as very commercial. In addition, experiences with non-sponsored results are often better, because they are arranged on the basis of quality, content and authority, not on the basis of marketing budget.

Advantages of Google Ads

Immediate result

A Google Ads campaign offers almost direct results compared to many other marketing options. You can set up the campaign in a short time and it can be seen directly online. This is a solution especially for websites that are just starting out and cannot or do not want to wait for promotion through content marketing and social media. Note: a good start is half the battle, so build your campaign carefully and not be rushed. We have seen huge budgets burn in Google.

Choose your own visitors

In Google Ads you pay per click and because you can determine your ads, keywords and negative keywords by advertising in Google, you have control over what type of visitors you attract to your website and you keep control over your budget. After all, your ads are only shown with specific keywords and you can keep the costs under control by paying per click.

Market exploration

Advertise search engine with Google Ads offers a very interesting option and that is: the possibility of market exploration. Because you almost immediately collect data from the results of your campaign, this allows you to quickly find answers to questions that you would like to see answered. This useful information about your visitors gives you the opportunity to find out which tone of voice you should use with your audience. How do you best describe your product? What are your visitors sensitive to?

In conclusion

Advertising search engine with Google Ads can be an interesting way to promote products and services. However, only work according to a thoughtful plan to keep a grip on the effectiveness and costs of your campaign.
Don't let your campaign end in an unnecessarily expensive failure. By carefully thinking about your available budget in advance and continuing to maintain insight into your CPA (Costs per Aquisition) and ROI (Return on investment) during your Ads campaign, you can work in a calculated and thoughtful manner. Are you outsourcing the setting up of your Google Ads campaign to us? Then have a good idea of what you expect exactly, communicate well and keep control in your own hands.
And have you come to the conclusion that search engine advertising with Google Ads is not for you at all? Then consider the alternatives. For example, by sharing your knowledge through blogs. With the right strategy, blogging delivers organic traffic that can perfectly match the search intent of your visitors. You do not offer yourself to the visitor, as is the case with Google Ads, but the visitor comes to you by himself. We are happy to think along with you for an alternative strategy in which you share your knowledge with your target group.