You’ve got your website set up and now you’re waiting for your visitors to come? It can take a lot of time to begin to rank well enough to get consistent traffic through your site. Wait no more! You should use Google Ads to start an ad campaign instead.It’s easy to use and even if you have only one dollar a day to spend, it’s worth trying the service to check if you can generate some traffic to your site. Here’s a guide on how to start out with AdWords without using too much of your time and energy.
Set up your Account.
Start a campaign.
Some things you need to know: Your AdWords ads are segregated into Campaigns, which can have several Ad Groups in it. Each of those Ad Groups can hold multiple keywords and ads. Unless your ad needs are very complex, you should keep the amount of Ad Groups small at first. But if you want to experiment with multiple ads to check how various phrases perform, go with multiple Ad Groups. To get started, just click the Campaign tab, then the green New Campaign button. You can choose whether you direct the ads to Search networks (like Google), Display networks (third parties that use AdSense on their websites), or both. In the next step, you’ll name your campaign and implement some key settings. You can choose if you want to advertise on mobile devices and which locations you want to target. It’s possible to include or exclude specific countries, cities or even ZIP codes! At the bottom of that screen, you’ll see the AdWords Ad Extensions, where you can add your phone number, address, or further information, with (mostly) no additional costs.
Set a Budget.
Close to the bottom of the New Campaign screen you’ll be able to set up your budget. There are two components: The Bid and the Budget per Day. The Bid describes how much you will pay if someone clicks on your ad. So if you bid 20 cents, that’s exactly how much you’ll pay per click. To set a limit to this, you can implement the Budget per Day. With this feature, you can set a maximum of how much you’re willing to spend within 24 hours. After you’ve reached that limit, Google will stop displaying your ads until the next day. So think about how many clicks you’re expecting to receive. If you’re an expensive consultant looking for well paying clients, you might expect minimal traffic, but are willing to pay some extra money for each lead. In this case, place a higher Bid! On the other hand, if you’re selling popular widgets for 1$ each, you may not want to pay more than a few cents per click. Always remember that AdWords is not a retail store, but an auction. When you’re bidding for keywords, other businesses are bidding for the same Keywords and Google will decide how they are presented, based on who is paying more. So to get the #1 spot, you often have to pay a dollar or more. Otherwise, your ad will be displayed at lower performing spots or not be publicized at all – at least until the daily budgets of the other advertisers run out. But don’t worry too much about it, you can change all of your settings in the process.
The key to Adwords
Evaluate, change, evaluate, change…… To get the most out of Google Ads you want to always be checking which ads are performing well, which keywords produce a lot of traffic to your site. If you know what keywords are producing good traffic then you want to ensure that your website is targeting those keywords. Once your organic rankings are good for a given keyword you can then turn off Adwords for that keyword and save some money. Sounds good? Or does it all sound complicated? Give it a go and if it all gets too much for you then you can always look to source a local SEO company that will be able to manage your Google Ads campaign for you. If you want to learn more about Google Ads or when you’re not sure if you should get it started at all, just contact us for some further information.
