Google Ads and Google Analytics — GrowthxSplendid
Week 3 Review
You’ve most likely seen a Google Ad appearing at the top of the Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). It looks like other search results but can be clearly distinguished by others because you see ‘Ad’ written. Whenever you click on such ads, someone is paying for it.
In the world of digital marketing, PPC and CPC are common terminologies used mostly for paid advertising. PPC means Per Per Click while CPC is Cost Per Click.
For every time you click on an ad, there is a cost attached to it. Whoever has put up that ad is paying Google a certain amount for every click the ad receives.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the ways advertisers harness the possibilities of reaching many people who are users of various platforms that display their ads.
Organic reach on social platforms is dead as most will say and for you to reach your target audience, you need to pay to run ads that will get to them.
Google has an ad manager just like Facebook. You can create and run your Google ads from there. With Google ads manager, you can run ads that will be displayed on Google SERP, YouTube, and other websites (this is called Display Ads).
Display Ads are those ads that you find on websites that you visit. Websites allocate a portion of their web page for these display Ads from others. By doing this, those who visit these websites can see these ads and if they are interested, they can click on them.
Before getting started with Google Ads, here are some terminologies you need to get accustomed to.
PPC — Pay Per Click: It’s a form of advertising where an advertiser pays a publisher (in this case, Google) whenever an ad is click and it is used to drive traffic to a website.
CPC — Cost Per Click: This is the highest amount you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad.
CPM — Cost Per Mile (Thousand Impressions): This is the amount an advertisers will pay to receive a thousand impression.
CPA — Cost Per Action: This is the cost to an advertiser only when an action is performed by a prospect. This action can be a click, a form submission, a sale or any other action.
CTR — Click Through Rate: This refers to the number of clicks an ad receives in relation to the number of impressions/the number of times the ad was shown. Basically, CTR is the total number of clicks divided by number of impressions.
ROI — Return On Investment: This is the measure of profit or loss accrued from a digital marketing campaign or initiative.
Keywords and Google Ads Manager
Keywords are the life wire of Google Ads Campaign and online ads campaign in general. A campaign could serve any of several objectives, such as traffic, sales, lead generation, conversion, etc. Having the right keywords will help you optimize your Google ad campaign.
There is no limit to the number of keywords you can have. There are also three (3) kinds of keywords you can use: broad, phrase, and exact keywords. You can have a combination of all three kinds of keywords in your keyword list.
With Cost Per Click (CPC), you can bid for certain keywords and set a maximum amount you’re willing to pay for every click of the ad. Highest bidder has the greatest chance of having their ad appear on the first page of the Google SERP.
But this doesn’t mean your ad cannot appear on other pages but it is a known fact that those who need to see your ad and the product or service you’re advertising may not check the second page of the SERP whenever they search for keywords you have included in your ad.
Several tools are available for keyword research. Some tools (and websites) you can use in developing or generating your keywords are:
- Google Ads Keyword Planner
- Google Trends
- Wordstream
- SpyFu
These tools will give you more information about the keywords you plan to use. This includes things like search volume, how much the highest bidder is currently bidding for certain keywords and other related keywords, average monthly and daily budget and many more. A tool like SpyFu does a good job in helping you visualize the data.
Google Ads Manager is not complicated to use. It also suggests some things you can do to optimize your ad. After choosing a campaign objective, the steps from there are easy to follow.
You will need to include the demographics of your audience, where you want your ad to be placed, all your keywords, daily ad budget, cost per click, where you want your ad to be placed, and all other information you will be asked to provide.
After successfully setting up your Google ad, you can leave it for 2–7 days to see how far it goes. If you do run a display ad, you would be able to see all the websites that your ads were displayed on.
No matter the category of ads you run, you will be able to track those performing well and those that are underperforming, same with keywords. You are free to later shut down keywords and websites that are underperforming on your ads.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a special tool by Google for tracking the performance of websites and mobile apps. Previously, it used to be websites only but the new updates now permits mobile apps as well.
You can create a Google Analytics account as long as you have a Google account. With Google Analytics, you can acquire substantial data about how people are using your website.
Asking questions will help you find the answers you need on Google Analytics. For example, a question like, “What are the traffic sources to my website?” can be answered by Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is not the only web analytics tool you can use to extract such data about your website or mobile app. Mixpanel and Amplitude are other common ones.
To cap it all, Google Analytics can help you to also collect important data about your Google Ads. It’s all connected.
Something Extra
You will need an ad copy for your ad description when setting up your Google Ad.
You can check AI copywriting tools out there tools. They can help you generate your copy when you input your keyword into them.
Try them and see what you find.
AI copywriting tools just help you move faster and take care of the copywriting for you and sincerely, they do a pretty good job.
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Have you tried creating a Google Ad? Have you used Google Analytics for your website or mobile app? Share your experience with me in the comments.
Anything that stood out to you here, let me know in the comments too.
Thanks for coming this far and reading through to the end, and thanks to GrowthxSplendid by Splendid Uchechukwu.
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