What’s the Biggest Advantage of Google Ads
These are challenging times, the news isn’t so much full of doom and gloom, recession, inflation, and other bad news, we all seem to be bounding along as normal. but are we?
I ask this question because I’ve had far higher than normal levels of interest in our Google Ads Services and I am pleased to report – we don’t often lose our Google Ads customers. Most Marketing Agencies expert a level of ‘churn’ with our clients, but fingers crossed we still seem to be quite immune to this problem.
So, Google Ads is growing… but it wasn’t meant to be like this. Anyone following the big tech stocks will know the pressure they are under, with stock prices falling and general faith in tech collapsing. The reasoning behind this is that with a recession people need to work harder, which means less time to play on Social Media.
And that means an interesting state of affairs – fewer end-users buying, but more people working and therefore more people advertising and using Social Media to promote their products. It’s a crazy world, but that’s what these tech companies need for their income to grow, more advertisers fighting it out over fewer customers. Crazy.
But does this apply to Google Ads? And the answer is maybe. But this is all a digression from the point of this Blog Post. What’s the biggest Advantage of Google Ads?
Benefits
Google Ads likes to see itself as the permanent money generator of all time. You pay only for what you need, you have all the control, you choose the keywords, the adverts and the location nd time of day for your ads to show, it’s all up to you. You may as well walk up to the billboard on the M4 into London and post your own poster. It’s a perfect mechanism for Advertising. It’s all about you.
While those benefits cannot be denied, there are subtler and better benefits, you can measure your success if you spend £100 – will you get £400 back, you can add images, promote your products directly on Google Shopping Channels, you can even create those annoying ‘follow-me-around’ adverts that you’re so used to you probably don’t even notice any more.
But you can do better than this even and in our opinion the biggest advantage of Google Ads more than anything else is that you can test to see if your website works.
The Magic of Google Ads
The magic lies in Google Ads’ pre-qualified audience. No other advertising medium can offer this – they put in their keyword, which, must, by definition be something they are interested in or want. The Audience then has to actually read the advert – or part of it at least and make a conscious effort to select it, only if it pertains to their needs, i.e. it meets their expectation.
Very straightforwardly, they want your product or service before they have even seen your website. The job is done. Let’s compare:
- TV – sure you can choose a channel or time of day that might meet your audience’s interests, but how do you go about selecting those options, this works for only a tiny minority of products.
- Billboard – you might be able to pick a location near a school, or in a bus stop that suits your product offering, but at no point could you call it pre-qualified.
- Radio – pick a station and you audience choice is Hip, Cool, Old, Young, Male, or Female.
- Even Social Media tries very hard to force the advertiser to pick their demographics before their advert is shown.
Only Google Ads (PPC) suggests if the audience chooses something show them an advert.
Website Iteration
Now it’s your turn. If you get 100 clicks to the website and spent £250 and then only get 1 sale and £50 in revenue… what’s the problem? It clearly must be the website in some way. But there are lots of potential causes, it’s not quite so simple.
- price point – shoppers are seriously sensitive to price, compare your products to similar found elsewhere, especially on Amazon and eBay.
- photos – if your photos are not up to scratch – what’s the point… if they are unclear, the Internet is all about the visual look of things and people always use a screen to find what they are looking for.
- delivery charges – I hate to say it, but surprise costs are a killer, you can easily see this if your Google Ads brings in 100 visitors and 50 of them ‘add to cart’ and then 20 start the checkout procedure, but only 1 person buys something. What during that process caused such a wholesale collapse in your checkout process?
- design – also plays a massic part, if you have red buttons on your website – consider making them green, it’s an obvious trick, if your website looks bad – compare it to your competitors.
- finally, words and content – are you telling people enough for them to buy your products are services?
Too often clients spend a fortune on their websites and limit their product descriptions to a few measly bullet points. Put yourselves into the client’s shoes, they will want to know everything, how it works, what it looks like, the size of it, the various options, the setting, they want to be inspired and sold to… It’s a sort of no. 1 rule when selling, make the customer feel they know everything about it.
And finally, listen to the customer – Google Ads will bring you visitors and if they have inserted the word ‘bananas’ into their search query – that’s what they want to know about. There’s no point in telling them about ‘apples’ it’s really not what they are looking for.
Conclusion
We have had an influx of new clients wanting to use our Google Ads services, this is lovely and appreciated, however, Google Ads plays a very specific role in the marketing world. It can bring you sales and rewards and generally the more you spend the better the results – however, what it teaches you is often far more valuable and it’s realising those lessons that will really make Google Ads take off.
Too often our clients suggest if we add another keyword or change an advert or spend a bit more, things will work. But that’s just not true – instead, the focus needs to be on the website – You know you’re getting visitors, you know exactly what keyword they used to find your website – why then do they not make the final purchase? And that is in our opinion the biggest advantage of Google Ads – it literally tells you in back and white – what is wrong with your website.