Google ads

Google ads still rules an digital ads space. The chapter is all about learning of google ads – introduction, campaign outline, google keyword planner, targeting, analysis and optimization. Before going to learn about google ads, you have to know about the history and evolution of google ads

Google Ads History

Initally Google’s advertising program is called google ads previously google ad words. Google ads or google ad words is considered as one of the greatest business model ever. It reaches about 80% of internet users in the world. Probably, rest of the 20% of internet users could be in china where it was banned.

Humble beginnings

When google started in CPC business it was overwhelmingly beaten by a larger search engine called goto.com. Goto.com is the search engine which invented the cost per click business model. In 2001, when google was en-route to make a revenue of $85 millions it was outpaced by goto.com which was having an 3 times revenue of google.

In 2002, google made key changes that had changed the fortune of the company.

Some part of the early history and innovation in google adwords was covered in digital marketing introduction (interlink).

Google goes’ public

Google had IPO’ed after six year from founding in 2004. At the time of IPO, google was valued at $24 billion. If you had brought the google shares back then you would have seen an astronomical growth of over 1500%. As of writing this, google market cap is around $715 billion.

Exit from China

Back to the history, in 2010, google was subjected to wide array of cyber attacks leading to hack of email accounts of human rights activists in china. Google has agreed to run a censored version of google and other google related products to comply with local censorship laws.

But after 2010 cyber attacks, google decide to leave china and stopped the censorship redirecting all of the Chinese traffic to uncensored version of Hong Kong. Chinese government was not happy with the move and threatened to shutdown the google. Ultimately google decided to leave and Chinese government was not willing to give up censorship for the sake of retaining government.

Why google ads are important to business?

For some business google ads or lack of it, became a game changer for example. Even organic SEO ( search engine optimization) for that matter is really important to business. There are occurrences multi billion dollar business got penalized by google for manipulating search engine and they have no other way than to comply it.

Almost all of the e-commerce sites rely on google search ads or merchant centre ads to increase the sales. People search what they want to buy on google, sometime even though they don’t know the name. Google search ads have proven to deliver higher ROI than any other online ad type.

Types of Google ads

In theory google have a lots of advertisement products. However practically these can be split into two types. Intent ads and display ads.

Intent Ads or Search Ads

Intent ads are mainly based on targeting based on user intent. Whenever a user performs an action – performing a search, he/she can be targeted based on the keyword, which you get it from the google keyword planner, We will talk about this next. The ad products that belong to this category is google search ads, google search product ads (merchant centre). Intent targeting means strong indication of the expected outcome and hence intent ads are preferred to use for e-commerce campaign with direct sales, lead gen, hiring ads.

Display Ads

Display ads are mainly showing ads to people based on the demographic, and their overall broad level of interest, and their google search history. The user might or might not be looking for a product/service at the time when the ads are shown. This ad type is more similar to TV audiences. You can read larger volume of users in less time with generally broad targeting. This comprises of google display network, YouTube, android app/games ads.

In addition display ads are best suited for Engagements, creating awareness, Re targeting.

Guide on google search ads

Know how to create Google search campaign – outline

If you know what not to do, battle is already half won. Learn best practices right from naming the campaign, choosing the right bidding strategy to beat the competition. In this lesson, campaign skeleton is being discussed to help you get it right from the very beginning steps of campaign creation.

Know how to use basic demographics to your campaign advantage using the locations settings, device targeting and language targeting. Know how and when to use smart bidding in AdWords and when not to. Know how all the bidding strategies work and how you can use them.

Create a minimum ideal budget for your campaign and choose the right delivery method and start the campaign

Learn more – How to create google search campaigns

Creating Google search Ad Groups – Keywords & Text ad copy  

Keywords are essential part of a google search campaign, which you can easily get it from google keyword planner. Keyword grouping lays a foundation for the google search campaign. Learn types of keywords – intent, information & niche. How to group keywords based on the classification is also explained in great detail with examples. Once you identified keywords types and grouped them- then you have already created an Adgroup.

Google search ad copies are very interesting because you have a less ad real estate, only text ad type to stand out from all the competitors. Learn the nitty gritty’s of search ads and know the hacks that I have learnt over years. To help further, this lesson also contains the standard best practices.

If you know what not to target, battle is half won. Learn how you can avoid unrelated traffic by using negative keywords. Know what is negative keywords, what are negative keyword match types and how you can implement negative keywords in various account levels.

Targeting in google search campaigns

Targeting in google search campaign is simple and powerful. All you have to to is put yourself in the shoes of customer and think of what you might be searching when you looking for product or service that’s being advertised.

Tools like google keyword planner (from google) and SEMRUSH (free & paid) will help you to get other related keywords, provided you provide the one seed keyword. Basically, keyword planner knows every search term history in google about a product or service that getting searched, and also how frequently it’s getting searched. This lesson explains various types of keywords matches and how it works. Real work application of keywords match type is demonstrated with real examples.

In-addition to keywords, negative keywords are explained to help you remove unwanted traffic to optimize the targeting even further. Negative keywords also has types which you can use to exclude the search traffic. Once you know how keywords and negative keywords works in google ads, it’s matter of finding many new keywords, group them together and start ads. At the end of the lesson few ethical hacks on how to discover new keywords in the google keyword planner are also explained.

Google search ads – Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are something every advertiser should incorporate regularly in the campaigns. Google offers various types of ad extensions and it’s completely free. Ad extensions are most scalable when you have to convey a message or to add a sitelink across all campaigns in the google ads account.  

Unlike the ads which needs unit level editing, ad extensions can be edited in account level and applied automatically to all the campaigns. Moreover it improves the click through rate, increases relevancy, helps user to access a specific pages and very importantly helps bring down the ad costs.

In this lesson, all the types of ad extensions are explained with relevant examples. Know how to create ad extensions in google ads

Google Search Campaign creation – Best practices.

Still confused about creating google search campaigns? Follow the best practices to avoid common campaign creation mistakes. As they say, learn from other’s mistakes. This lesson explains why you should do something than how to do something.

This explains the best practices in campaign name, google keyword planner, location targeting, bid strategy, budgets ad extensions & negative keywords. Learn the google search ad campaign best practices.

How to optimize google search ads – using data

Data is everywhere but hardly used by anyone. Knowing how many people click on the ads, on time spent on website, number of conversions are just not enough as a data points to optimize the campaigns. There more than 30 metrics are explained with definition and examples for you to understand.

Along the with data definition, data analysis philosophies such as cohorts & segments are explained.

How to use Negative keywords in google search campaigns

Negative keywords helps you to avoid the irrelevant search queries for which your ad got displayed. By checking your google campaign search term history, you can control the reach of broad, phrase match keywords. You can apply negative keywords in all possible levels of the account. Learn more about how to use negative keywords

Guide on Google display ads

How to create google display ads campaigns

Creating a display campaign in google ads is a long, messy, time consuming & confusing process. How to name it? What could be the campaign objective? Should i automate the bid or not? What is the new targeting options that didn’t exist until yesterday?

Well, I got you covered. This lesson is a run through of campaign creation process with each step in chronological order and each and every option is well explained on- how it works and why should you care. If you’re creating a campaign for first time or relatively new to adwords, this a handy guide to creating google display ad campaigns

How to target on google display

Google display offers a plethora of targeting options. You can target people based on category of website they visit. You can target people based the behavior on your site. You can target based on their affinity, you can target people based on the research they do on google (or internet).

Google uses signals like search query, browsing history , geographical data  and other numerous things to determine the interest of the people. You can choose how you want to target people and let the google do the hard lifting for you.

Know all the available targeting options available in the google display. Also learn how you can use those targeting options using the layered targeting philosophy. When to use target and bid and bid only also explained.  Read – how to target on google display campaigns

Google display campaign exclusions

Google display ads has one dangerous proposition – if targeting goes wrong you could waste tons of money in matter of minutes. Yes, unlike google search, you can go wrong and waste a lot of money easily. Thus it pays for you to know how to use exclusions in google display networks. Exclusions works as same as the targeting except you can use those to exclude people based on options.

Learn how you can exclude people in 6 ways. Also, know how you can avoid the most obvious and dangerous inclusions that preset in google display ads and how you can exclude them to reduce the cost. Learn how to use exclusion on google display campaign

Google display Ad group creation

For a campaign to be successful, it has to be organized as granular as possible using the lower level of campaign hierarchy called ad groups. Ad Groups is not about randomly grouping targeting options and attaching an ad creative on top of it.

Learn how to create an adgroup for the success of display campaigns. Various types of ad types/formats also explained to help you equipped with adcopies.

Google display ads – Bid Strategies

Bid strategies are becoming more popular and promoted by google aggressively. However without knowing what each bid strategy is and how it works, when you implement it, it could hurt campaigns and result in wasted budget.

Know how long you should keep the bid strategy active before judging it’s results. How much data is required for google algorithms to optimize the campaigns. Which bidding strategy to choose for a give goals. To know answer to all these questions, read – google display bid strategies.