Advertising is a key aspect of marketing that has huge potential to expand your business. Here’s how to use Google Ads, the world’s most popular and powerful online advertising tool.
Nowadays, advertising can be seen everywhere. Whether it’s the monotony of American television ads, those pesky ads you accidentally click on while trying to use a movie streaming site, or giant roadside billboards with faces of lawyers plastered all over them, there’s no question that advertisements have long been one of the oldest and most effective forms of making sales.
However, in recent years, advertising has fast become more and more technology-based, with services now allowing you to target specific audiences with ads tailored to their wants and needs.
A pioneer of the modern-day online advertising service, Google Ads has established itself a solid reputation as the most effective and most widely used advertising tool around. But what is it and how does it work? We go through that and more in this comprehensive guide to using ads effectively.
What is Google Ads?
Google Ads is Google’s online advertising programme and is currently the most widely used Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising platform in the world. Millions of businesses across all sorts of industries use Google Ads to advertise their products or services online as it provides a fantastic way to reach new customers and grow businesses large and small. Working on an auction-based system, Google Ads is essentially a marketplace where advertisers bid on a specific keyword with the hope of landing their ad in Google’s top search results.
Advertisers who choose to use Google Ads can target users across two main networks – the Search network and the Display network. It is crucial that companies distinguish between which network they want to mainly advertise on, as these two networks are vastly different in terms of the types of people that they mainly target.
Search Network vs Display Network?
The Search network should be used by companies that are either working on a limited budget or want to advertise an ‘emergency’ product, such as plumbers, locksmiths, or electricians; services that people normally require urgently when they search for them. Ads that are run on the Search network selection will be eligible to appear on Google’s search result pages, and are thus extremely effective in attracting searchers who are actively searching for a specific product or service. In fact, ads run on the Search network typically drive more conversions than ads run on the Display network.
However, the benefit of running ads on the Display network is that businesses are able to reach a far larger audience, as the Google Display Network (GDN) consists of over two million sites that reach over 90% of global internet users, including blogs, news sites, and even more popular sites like YouTube and Gmail. The difference is that the main audience for these ads are people who are not necessarily shopping for a specific product or service, but simply going about their daily Internet activities such as browsing the news, watching video clips, or checking their email. Therefore, in order to maximise the potential of using the GDN, it’s crucial that your ads are flashy and attractive enough to entice Internet users to click on them.
