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Google Ads is an excellent way for businesses of all sizes to reach their target audience. It can promote a product or service, increase brand awareness, or generate leads and sales.
Whether you’re looking for an easy way to start advertising on the internet or take your company’s digital marketing efforts to the next level, here are five ways that Google Ads can help your business succeed online.
How can Google Ads help you advance your business goals?
1) Generate high-quality leads
If you’re a service-based business looking to generate more lead enquiries or booked appointments, Google’s Search Campaigns are a fantastic way to do that.
Let’s take the example of an emergency locksmith. Their target customer is someone in a hurry because they’ve accidentally lost their keys and locked themselves out of their house.
Most people will pull out their phone, head to Google Search and type in “emergency locksmith near me”. This is called a keyword with high intent (a.k.a bottom-of-funnel keyword).
Our job as advertisers is to bid in Google Ad auctions for these types of keywords so that our client (in this case the locksmith) is visible when their ideal customer is looking for their services.
As mentioned above, we call this type of keyword a “bottom-of-funnel keyword”. This means the person searching for the keyword is likely ready to buy NOW.
The downside is that every other locksmith advertiser also values this keyword. In turn, this drives up the demand for the keyword resulting in a higher cost-per-click. Makes sense, right?
Anyhoo, as you can imagine, these ads are extremely powerful for service (and product) businesses.
2) Work out how much it costs to BUY more customers
This is perhaps one of the most shocking discoveries I tell new clients about. But it’ll make a lot of sense in a minute.
For decades, larger companies have used numerous metrics to describe what it costs to buy a new customer. Traditionally, this is known as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
Still, in marketing, we sometimes interchange these terms: Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Cost Per Lead (CPL), depending on the client’s business structure and sales cycle.
Let’s take the example of an eCommerce store that sells herbs. We’ll assume they already have a Google Ads account and conversion tracking on their website.
Given that these conditions are true, ALL sales can be tracked online, and thus you can accurately understand the CPA based on Google’s Conversions metric.
You can do the same for service businesses with leads or booked appointment goals.
But the real difference between eCommerce businesses is that they can track their ROAS or ROI based on every dollar spent.
It’s much more difficult for service businesses to do this because each contract may be bespoke or made-to-order.
For eCommerce, you can explore deeper down the rabbit hole and assign a conversion value to each product.
This means that you can work out how much a customer has spent with you (e.g. it costs us $25 to get a new customer, and they spent $250 in our store).
Therefore, you can work out the return on investment (ROI) or return on ad spend (ROAS) of your ads. Pretty cool, huh?
3) Increase top-of-funnel exposure with brand awareness campaigns
Businesses of all sizes have been using brand awareness campaigns for decades. The Coca-Cola Company created one of the most famous brand campaigns in 1971, now known as the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” campaign. Remember that one?
These campaigns can be done in many ways on Google Ads, but I recommend using the new Performance Max campaign type.
The main goal is to increase the awareness of a brand and its products or services in the marketplace; Performance Max is the perfect vehicle to drive this initiative.
But don’t be fooled by the simplicity of Performance Max because it’s also proven to be a sales powerhouse for both top and bottom-of-funnel sales.
I’ve personally used them with my service and eCommerce clients and have seen excellent results – increasing their conversions by over 40%!
4) Validate market demand for new ideas
Many experienced serial entrepreneurs are familiar with this concept. Test the demand of an idea before you commit to it.
Noah Kagan, the founder of Appsumo, brilliantly demonstrates this concept in a video where he asks friends and industry contacts if they’d be willing to purchase his service idea.
Tim Ferriss (and many others) have also done this with book split testing.
To do this, you would first validate your idea using Google Keyword Planner, Semrush (if you want to be thorough), and of course, Google Ads. You could also use Google Trends, but we’ll leave that for now.
After pulling up Google Keyword Planner, you’ll be able to test your idea by coming up with some phrases you think people would type into Google to find it.
As seen in the image above, you’ll see the search volume per keyword on the right-hand side.
You can gauge whether or not your idea is worth exploring based on the volume vs the competition (high/low) vs the cost per click (how competitive the keywords are).
This is a fundamental way of seeing whether your idea is worth exploring, and if it is, you can run some Google Ads campaigns and test the concept and demand even further.
I’m sure this will have sparked many ideas on how you can use Google Ads to test your concepts without blindingly running with it and harshly discovering that no one wants it.
5) Drive more in-store sales and phone calls
Google Ads has a nifty feature that allows you to advertise your local business. One of the ways is to connect your account to your Google My Business.
This will enable Google to synchronise your location to the ads and allows you to set up location-based extensions.
You can then create ads that show your business’ directions and phone numbers for local searches.
For example, if someone were to type in “first aid course near me”, this type of ad takes precedence if the business location matches the person’s location.
If your current Google Ads specialist hasn’t recommended this to you for your local business, they may not know about it.
That said, you can cleverly use location-based content inside your ads using Google’s dynamic insertion operator known as {{location}}.
For example, a local real estate agent may want to target multiple suburbs, but their office is located in just one of the suburbs.
This is a perfect opportunity to use the location dynamic operator in the ad text, highlighting that they can serve other locations.
E.g. “Find A Real Estate Agent in {{Location}}.”
Please note that the real dynamic tag may look different.
Where it says the location, you can make that dynamically change based on where the person is searching from. This is automatically handled on Google’s end once you set up the operator correctly.
Can you see how powerful this would be for your business?
Another great Google Ads function is the Call extension. This extension works by allowing you to create a trackable phone number that people can call it directly from the ad itself.
I recommend using the call extension if your business is considered to be a commodity or one that receives phone enquiries regularly (e.g. beauty parlours and dentists).
Final thoughts on using Google Ads to advance your business goals
As you can see, there are numerous ways to generate enormous business value for your brand.
If you are still not sure about Google Ads, then take the time to explore each of the topics in this article individually, or contact me over at my Google Ads specialist page, and I can see whether I can refer you to someone or help you out myself.
