Digital Marketing Blog

Digital advertising has gone from being a niche approach for innovative new companies to being a vital part of any digital marketing strategy.

These days, businesses of all shapes and sizes, from small “mom and pop” stores to huge international brands, are turning to Google ads to bring in new customers through the world's largest search engine.

But just because businesses are flocking to display ads and Google ads, it doesn't necessarily mean that you should blindly follow suit.

Digital marketing is all about reaching potential customers in the right place with the right message at the right time. Using an advertising platform can help you to achieve this, but it can also be a huge waste of money if your campaign is using irrelevant keywords or reaching the wrong audience.

The good news is that if you've been thinking about launching a Google ads campaign, you've come to the right place.

Let's dive on in and take a closer look at the benefits of using Google ads to bring in more traffic.

Why Launch a Google Adwords Campaign?

At its most basic level, launching a Google Adwords campaign is an effective way to drive traffic from the search engine through to your website.

It can also play a vital role in increasing the reach of your marketing campaign, especially if it’s a short-term marketing campaign as opposed to a long-term one, where SEO and other digital marketing technologies can also play a part.

Of course, if you don’t have the expertise in-house, it can be worth hiring a Google Partner to research keywords and to set up a Google search ad campaign or a remarketing campaign on your behalf.

It doesn’t matter who sets your advertisements up, as long as they know what they’re doing and they’re able to monitor and amend your advertisements as time goes by.

Still not convinced? Well, you should be.

People who are exposed to display advertisements are 155% more likely to search for brand and segment specific terms, and the average brand makes $2 in revenue for every $1 that they invest in Google search advertisements.

Organic SEO doesn’t always cut it, either. In fact, for the most competitive keywords, the top three ad spots receive around 40% of all of the clicks on the page.

Google supports both display advertisements, through its two million display network partner sites, and text advertisements, on its search engine results page. It’s estimated that the company has an 18% share of all media advertising, both online and off.

But why might that be?

Read on to find out a little more about the main benefits of Google AdWords.  

What Are The Benefits Of Google Adwords?

1. Outrank Competitors On The World's Largest Search Engine

If your target audience can't find your website, they're not going to buy from your business. That's why many businesses turn to Google ads.

They know that the powerful advertising platform will allow them to pay to climb to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) for selected keywords.

This can be valuable for brand awareness and is a particularly common approach for e-commerce stores, who can bid on keywords related to the products they stock and use it as an ongoing source of leads and sales.

E-commerce businesses can even run Google Shopping ads to reach people who are already looking to make a purchase.

2. Adwords Ads Build A Larger Audience For Your Business Or Brand

Another key advantage of search engine advertising is that you can tap into a huge potential audience.

When a brand first starts out, one of the biggest initial challenges is brand awareness. Back in the day, building a brand was a long, slow process that took time, money and perseverance.

These days, anyone can build a business if they can wrap their head around Google Adwords Express, Facebook ads, text ads and the intricacies of Google's display network.

This is good news for savvy marketing gurus because it levels the playing field. Whether you're an international brand or a local business, you have access to the same pool of potential customers.

Smaller businesses, which don't have the luxury of employing a full-time advertising specialist, can also search for Google partner brands and hire someone to research keywords and set up an advertising campaign on their behalf.

3. Google Ads Are Faster Than SEO

We've hinted at this elsewhere in this article, but it's more than deserving of a section of its own.

In fact, this is arguably the biggest advantage of using Google Adwords Express to reach your audience. Launching PPC ads is like turning on a fire-hose in that you'll start to see the results immediately.

Having an SEO strategy is always a good idea, no matter how large your business is, but SEO takes time and not all businesses have that luxury.

Search advertising helps to bridge the gap between organic SEO and a social media campaign, bringing in immediate traffic and helping you to reach your audience immediately instead of having to wait months or even years for your keywords to rank in the search engine results pages.

Ultimately, most businesses can benefit from a combination of both search advertising and an SEO strategy. This combined approach is usually called search engine marketing and it brings together the best of both worlds.

SEO looks to the future and helps you to reach your audience down the line. Display network advertising, Google ads, social media ads, remarketing, YouTube advertising and text ads are all good tools to bring in short-term, instant traffic.

4. Adwords advertising can be scheduled to reach the right people at the right time

There’s a saying that advertising and marketing are all about reaching the right person in the right place with the right message at the right time.

Different platforms have different strengths.

For example, YouTube advertising can allow you to tap into the awesome power of video, while your remarketing list can help you to reach people who have previously shown purchasing intent.

One of the best things about Google ads, including the display network, is that your advertisements can be scheduled in advance with certain rules.

For example, if your brand has a chain of pizza businesses, you can set up Google ads that promote lunchtime deals during the day and group deals at night. You can set your campaign to stop running whenever the store isn’t open, too.

5. Use A Remarketing List To Reach Your Audience With Specific Pieces Of Content

We’ve talked about remarketing (also known as retargeting) quite a lot throughout this post, and there’s a good reason for that.

Remarketing works by allowing you to create a list of people who’ve visited your brand site and to launch a remarketing campaign to bring them back in. Remarketing can be particularly powerful for ecommerce businesses because they can encourage audience members who visited the site and left to come back and complete their purchase.

One of the good things about running a remarketing campaign is that you can combine it with other types of segmentation.

For example, you can split your audience up based on keywords, Google Analytics data, Facebook data and more. Further, you can develop different types of content for each different audience.

This takes us back to the idea of reaching the right people in the right place with the right message at the right time.

Remarketing can provide a further way to more accurately target people with PPC ads, providing additional relevance and ultimately adding fuel to the fire.

It might not be the cheapest way to bring in search engine traffic, but it’s easily one of the best ways to drive direct conversions.

6. Adwords Are 100% Measurable And Scalable

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, one of the biggest benefits of running a Google Adwords campaign is that, like most aspects of digital marketing, it's fully measurable.

This is especially true if you combine it with Google Analytics and other measurement tools. This holds true for everything from campaign microsites to e-commerce stores.

This is important because while driving traffic to your business website is all well and good, it doesn't achieve anything unless people take an action. You can achieve a high click-through rate and a low bounce rate, but your advertising campaign will run at a loss unless you also achieve a high conversion rate.

Measuring your click-through rate and conversion rate means that once you're satisfied with your PPC advertising performance, you can scale the ads up to drive even more traffic and to further boost conversions.

And if your budget is starting to run low, you can scale them down again, too.

Next Steps

Now that you know why running Google ads is a good idea for your business, the next step is for you to learn the basics of running an ad campaign.

Adwords advertising is approachable to businesses of all shapes and sizes, but its accessibility and ease of use is both a blessing and a curse.

That's because you can launch an ad campaign in just a couple of minutes, and your business will start to benefit almost immediately.

At the same time, though, if you're not careful then your ad spend can spiral out of control. Worse, if you don't get your ads just right, your brand risks reaching people outside of your target audience.

When that happens, your business can end up spending a fortune sending unqualified traffic through to your website. Even when the traffic consists solely of potential customers, if your landing page isn't up to scratch then you can expect to witness a high bounce rate and a disappointing return on investment when it comes to your ad spend.

So if your business is interested in running an advertising campaign, whether that's though display ads, Facebook ads, Google shopping ads or retargeting, it can be good idea to find a qualified partner to help.

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