Google Ads Search Certification‌

Grow your Business with Google Ads:

Hello and welcome back to another lesson! Today we are going to be talking all about Google and how it can be crucial in expanding your business. Let’s dive right in and begin discussing Google Ads.

How many times have you opened your computer and found yourself searching for information through Google? So many people turn to this search engine to find out the information you are searching for! In this section we will learn how google ads can help you get your information to people when they are searching for it.

Your advertising campaign should always align with the objectives you have set for your business. Google ads can help with that by:

• Drive sales
• Get leads
• Increase website visits
• Influence consideration
• Build awareness
• Promote your app

Getting the benefits of Google Ads is constructed around three principles:

• Relevance: Your ads can appear on Google Search and YouTube when someone searches for a service like yours.
• Control: Google Ads gives you the control to select your budget.
• Results: You only pay for results (clicks or calls).

Google Display ads appear across a network of more than two million sites, reaching 90% of people on the internet. Display campaign is a great tool to maximize exposure and reach audiences with narrowed down interests.

Video ads are another great tool. You know when you are watching a video on YouTube and an ad pops up right in the middle. Well wouldn’t it be great if that ad was yours?

Specialized campaign types:

• Local: Store visits or in store sales.
• Hotel: Display hotel prices and availability.
• Discovery: YouTube, Gmail and Google’s Discover Feed

Explore the Value of Google Search:

Prospective customers are searching for a product like yours in Google right now! With google search campaign, you will be at the top of the list. Before we get started, I’m sure you’re asking yourself if a google search campaign is the right solution for you? Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you want your business to appear when users are researching and comparing different options?
• Do you want your business to be there at the exact moment someone is looking for the kinds of products you offer?
• Do you want your business to show up on search results when businesses similar to yours are showing up?
• Do you want to learn about what users are looking for and the ads they’re engaging with so you can come to an informed decision on how to add more value to their lives?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then let’s get started on a google search campaign for you!

Let’s begin by setting up a search campaign. Begin by opening up your google ads account and selecting your campaign’s marketing goals. Secondly, you will need to select the google search network. Not only will your ads show on google but also on the hundreds of sites that google partners with! Finally, you need to determine the budget for your strategy.

We are now ready to start designing the ad for your campaign. You will need to decide what text, phrases or themes you want highlighted on your ad. Having a key word for your ad is important as this will narrow down the search. When creating these key words, it is best to put yourself in the customers shoes. Ask yourself what words they would put into the search bar.

Understand the Google Ads Auction:

First question that I’m sure you’re asking is what even is google ads auction? Google ads auction is a way of deciding which ads will show and how they’re positioned. It works by ranking the ads that appear on search results and determine the cost for each click that it receives.

You yourself when you are searching something in google only want to see relevant ads and google wants to provide a good experience for their users. Google will rank each ad (Ad Rank) and with this rank will determine which ad gets the highest position.

When you get the highest ranked ad is means you have five factors:

• Bid: You set the best bid for the ad
• Ad rank threshold: Achieved the minimum quality threshold
• Context of query: Have the best context that makes sense with the ad
• Ad extensions impact: Your ad extension impacts your ad in a positive way
• Auction-time ad quality: Information is relevant and useful

There are also three main factors that are used to determine the quality of an ad:

• Expected clickthrough rate
• Ad landing page experience
• Ad relevance

Improving your Ad rank:

Quality score is an estimate of the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. This is composed of clickthrough rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. To improve your ad quality these three factors to focus on can help you out:

• Expected clickthrough rate
• Ad relevance
• Landing page experience

Deliver the Right Message with Text Ads:

Let’s begin by even defining what a text ad is. They are simply an ad made up of text. It’s a very simple but very powerful way to get your business in front of people. A great tip for a text ad is to be informative, relevant and engaging. Think of a text ad as a front door, the most important information should be first and visible. There are three things that make up a text ad:

• Headline
• Description
• URL

First let’s go through the list of how to create a text ad for you!

1. Sign into your google ads account
2. On the page menu, select ads and extensions
3. Select the + button and chose the text ad
4. Enter the three things we just previously talked about
5. When your certain its perfect save it!

Responsive search ads create ads that adapt to show more related information to your customers. After you enter in the headline, description and URL google will assemble the text into multiple ad combinations. The benefits of responsive search ads are:

• Flexibility
• Relevance
• Reach
• Performance

Make Ads Relevant with Search Ad Extensions:

 You may not know this but ad extensions improves the experience and increases engagement. Users are looking for relevant information, information based on their moment, and ads that contribute to their experience. Providing this information not only increases engagement but also better ad quality and more qualified leads.

Sitelinks direct to specific sections of the website. They are added links that appear just under the text of your search. The benefits of these are:

• Increased engagement
• More conversions
• Easy to manage

Asking yourself why you should use sitelinks? Here is why:

• Driving store sales
• Making online conversions
• Raising brand awareness

Callout extensions are 25-character texts. The benefits are:

• Boosts engagement
• Easy to implement

Again, the same reason that you should use sitelinks is the same for callout

Lastly, structured snippets allow you to describe features of a specific product or range of products. The benefit of this is that you get more qualified leads. The reason you should be using these are in you work in the industry of:

• Amenities (Wi-fi, breakfast, pool, gym, or spa)
• Types (Different types of a product)
• Destinations

Increase Efficiency with Automated Bidding:

Bidding is a huge market for online marketing. This can impact how your campaigns perform and dictate where your ads are placed.  When you select to auto bid you need to keep in mind performance, auctions, and user journey complexities.

Here are the benefits of using automated bidding:

Selecting the right bidding strategy will make sure you have the up-most success with your promotional campaign. Next we are going to discuss the strategies that you are able to choose from.

1. Awareness-based bidding- Goal is visibility
2. Consideration- focused bidding- Goal is clicks
3. Conversion- focused bidding- Goal is conversion
4. Revenue- focused bidding- Goal is Revenue

Reach Valued Customers with Search Audiences:  

Google’s Search Audiences will allow you to create audience lists that you want to target. With this you are able to combine the intent, have insights, and have the right bid and message. People expectations for technology has drastically changed over the past few years which means you also need to keep changing and constantly updating along with it.

Let’s quickly go over the marketing goals that you could possibly have for your campaign:

• Awareness: Detailed Demographics, Affinity Audiences
• Drive consideration: In-Market audiences, Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA), Similar Audiences for Search
• Increase purchases and loyalty with your existing customers: Customer Match, Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Google Audience solutions can help enhance your search strategy by variable bidding, keyword expansion and creative customization.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that customers love when they are always in control of what ads they are seeing. They will know why they are seeing that ad.

Affinity Audiences combines the interests that a user has paid attention too and allows them to research more into in through multiple channels.

Detailed Demographics allows you to reach customers based on the activities from google.

In-Market Audiences allows you to reach people that have the INTENT and INTERESTS to buy your product will increase your sales and traffic to your website.

We just previously touched base on the term RLSA but you are probably wondering what it means. It is simply allowing you to serve unique ad creatives and set your ad group bids differently (Skillshop, 2019).

Boost Performance with Optimization Score:

Optimization score is basically a system that assesses how well your search campaigns are performing. It runs on a percentage scale, with the higher the score the better the campaign is running. Not only does google optimization assess this but it will also give you recommendations on how to improve this score.

The benefits of running this kind of program is:

• Instant results
• Customized scores
• Scalable scores and recommendations

Optimization runs on an algorithm that assess key parts of your campaign. These points come from a combination of 50 recommendations of models and simulations to create a score for you.

Increase Conversions with Performance Planner:

The very last thing that we are going to discuss for this lesson is the most important aspects to be able to achieve the most success with Google. Previously mentioned was the importance of always evolving just like marketing is and making sure you are planning. Planning in advance will ensure the future spending, seeing incremental opportunities, setting bids and searching for new opportunities.

Performance planning is a brand-new forecasting tool in google that will help you arrange your campaigns. It simply works by determining bids, budgets and performance.

Choosing performance planner over a traditional method is crucial for growth as it will highlight growth opportunities based on the campaign you have set specially for the google data and the historical performance (Skillshop, 2019).

The best practices while using performance planner every month is to create separate plans for each marketing objectives, set bids and budgets using non-last click conversions and lastly regularly checking your plan (Skillshop, 2019).

Conclusion:

After completing this course, I hope that there is at-least one item that you can take away. For myself coming into this lesson I was convinced that I already know everything there is about google but was I ever wrong! I would have never guessed that google can be so beneficial for my company. One main key that I will keep with me is google auction and how you are able to bid for the best placement of an ad on google.

After seeing my results from the assessment, I know that the learning I just did was valuable, and I did learn lots.

References:

Skillshop. (2019, September 7). Google Ads Search Certification. Retrieved April 4, 2020, from Google website: https://skillshop.exceedlms.com/student/path/18128-google-ads-search-certification

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