How to advertise on Google

How to advertise on Google

When it comes to marketing, Google advertising (Adword campaigns) offers you a wide range of benefits. It helps you create measurable and flexible campaigns that attract the exact target market you stipulate.

You can sell your products locally and abroad with very minimal effort. If you set up your Google Adverts up correctly, your advert will appear at the top of the page when people search for the products and services that you offer.

Let’s explore these benefits a little deeper:

1. Pin point accuracy of your target market

Google calls it “targeting”. It allows you to show your adverts to people with specific interests in your products and services. It will only show them ads that are relevant to their needs. You can target your ads even further by adding parameters such as location, age, language, times to display the ad, frequency and devices (cellphone and computers for instance).

2. Control your costs more effectively and measure your success

Google will only charge you when people click on your ads. This is called Pay-per-click. When someone clicks on your advert you’ll also know exactly what they did. You can see if they bought a products, downloaded your app or even called in an order.

3. Save time and money by managing your campaigns

The great thing about advertising with Goole is that you have complete control over your ad campaigns. You can turn them off at any time of the day or night, increase your audience reach, updated your search terms and phrases or even change up your entire campaign whenever you want you.

This is how to set up your Google AdWords account:

To run your Google AdWords Campaign, create a Gmail address for your business by going to mail.google.com and following the prompts. Your email’s address could look like this, yourbusiness@gmail.com.

Now go to Google Adwords: www.google.co.za/AdWords. Google will prompt you for your address and your company’s website as shown below. Once done, click “Continue”.

Once you’ve entered your details, it’s time to set up your first campaign.

Four steps to create your first campaign

To create your first campaign, give your campaign a name, stipulate your budget (TIP: Start small at first, like R100 per day), select your keywords (words you think your target market will use to search for the products or services you offer) and provide your billing information.

The great thing about Google is, if you get stuck at any point in this process, you can simply click on the “common questions” section or “?” icons to be guided by Google’s helpful tips and directions.

Let’s get started…

Step 1: Select your campaign settings

Google will ask you to what type of campaign you want to run. You’ll see the following two options below on your screen.

Since this is your first campaign and you don’t know what will give you the best results, select the “All features” option.

This will give you the options to select Networks, Devices and Locations. The most important selection here is the locations option. If you want to sell a product and service to the people in your area only, then select the “Let me choose” option. Here you can pinpoint the exact areas to target.

Still under the campaign setting, you need to choose how you want to bid for your ads. This platform is highly interactive and educational, if you’re not sure what option you’d like to choose, simply click on the drop down menu and hover your mouse pointer over each of the options. A little explanation will pop up showing you exactly what each option does.

You can select to bid on clicks (when someone clicks on your advert), impressions (the number of times your ad is displayed) or conversions (how many times someone actually clicks through to your site, or buys from you).

Once you’ve set this up, set your budget based on how much money you want to allocate for your AdWords campaign.

You can say what info you want Google to display with your ads:

• Location – Extend my ads with location information
• Sitelinks – Extend my ads with links to sections on my site
• Call – Extend my ads with a phone number
• App – Extend my ads with a link to a mobile/tablet app.
• Reviews – Extend my ads with reviews
• Callouts – Extend my ads with additional descriptive text
• Structured snippets – Extend my ads with structured snippets

Step 2: Create your ad

When it comes to creating your ad, you’ll see the following options. Select the text ads option. Fill in the fields staying within the character limitations:

• Headline – Maximum 25 Characters (TIP: Make this descriptive eg. JHB moving company)
• Description line 1 – Maximum 35 Characters (TIP: Use your most important benefits eg. Affordable and fast, friendly service)
• Description line 2 – Maximum 35 Characters (TIP: Tell the reader to do something eg. Guaranteed insurance, call for a quote.)

To the right of your screen you’ll see a preview of what your advert looks like.

Ad gallery – Choose your keywords

Under the ad gallery, choose your keywords. These are the words you think people will use to search for your products and services.

Tips on selecting keywords

• Start with 10-20 keywords and only put one keyword on each line
• Be specific: avoid one-word keywords. You need to think like your customers do. Choose phrases that customers would use to search for your products and services, for example: Affordable movers Johannesburg.
• By default, keywords are broad-matched to searches to help you capture a wider range of relevant traffic.

Step 3: Complete your billing information

This is a simple step to follow. First you’ll be asked to enter the country you’re in. Then you’ll be asked to enter an account type, you can choose from “Business” or “Individual”.

You then have to insert all your company’s details and select your payment method.

You have two payment options

Option 1: Automatic Payments

If you select this option, your service can start immediately. You're charged automatically either when your balance reaches a predetermined amount, or 30 days after your last automatic payment, whichever comes first.

Option 2: Manual Payments

With manual payments, you manually maintain a prepaid balance and Google deducts the necessary charges. Your service will only begin after your first payment is processed. Your service will stop when the balance runs out.

The importance of testing

Setting up your first campaign is really exciting but remember to keep testing new ads and new keywords to get the best results. If you see an advert is doing so well (it’s expensive or not attracting the right people), simply pause the advert so that you don’t waste money on an ad that’s not working.