Believe it or not, using Google for advertising probably is the best way to benefit your business. Google owns about 75% of search engine share in the marketplace. Every day, people use the platform to search for whatever they need 3.5 billion times, which means that there are about 2.5 million searches occurring every second. It goes without saying that by using Google for advertising, you get lots of opportunities for your brand to be in front of people, such as increasing web traffic, conversions, leads, and sales.

What is Google Ads?

It, originally called Google AdWords, is the online advertising platform developed and provided by Google, where the advertisers pay to display their brief advertisements, product listings, service offerings, and video content. They could be placed in both the Google Search Network as well as the Google Display Network. For example, when the users search a keyword by Google, they get the results of their query displayed on the search engine results page, simply called SERP, which could include a paid advertisement targeting the keyword.

How does Google Ads work?

Google uses a pay-per-click advertising model, simply called PPC. PPC lets the marketers place their ads on a platform for advertising, and the marketers pay the host of the platform every time when their ad is clicked by the viewers. The aim of PPC ads is to lead the viewers by clicking it to the marketers’ website or their app where the visitors could perform a valuable action, like purchasing a product or service. The search engine of Google is an incredibly popular advertising platform, and Google operates its advertising service with real-time bidding, by which the advertising inventory is sold via a private automated auction by using real-time data.

Bidding & setting daily budget

The advertisers who target a specific keyword make the bids on the keyword to compete with each other. The bid you make is called the “maximum bid”. If the maximum bid that you have placed is more than what Google determines for the cost of per click, you will get the ad placement; otherwise, you will not get it. Alternatively, you could set the maximum daily budget for the ad, and you will not spend more than the amount set for the ad per day. In general, there are three options for the marketers to make their bids as following:

Cost-per-click; how much the marketer pays when a viewer clicks on the ad.
Cost-per-engagement; how much the marketer pays when a viewer completes a specific action on the ad, such as signs up for something, watch a video, or others.
Cost-per-mille; how much the marketer pays for per 1,000 ad impressions
Quality Score

Google takes the bid amount to pair it with the assessment to your ad, which is called a Quality Score. Higher Quality Score could lead to lower prices as well as better ad positions, according to Google. The number of Quality Score is between 1 – 10, and the higher, the better.

Ad Rank

As a rule of thumb, your Quality Score and your bid amount together create your Ad Rank, which determines the position where your ad will appear on the search results page. It goes without saying that the more users see your ad, the more possibly your ad gets clicked, and the more your ad gets clicked, the more possibly you could achieve your goal of advertising, such as making a purchase.

Types of Google Ads

Google provides a variety of campaigns for you to choose for your ads, but all of them fall in two category:

Search Network

The ad in Search Network comes out as a text ad on the results page brought by the keyword. These ads are the most common ads that you have seen. They come out in the search result page usually with the green symbol of “Ad” on it. Besides in the Search Network, you could also get your ads in Google Shopping. The benefit to use both is that Google Shopping ads could get qualified leads to showcase the product to customers directly.

Display Network

Google’s Display Network leverages its vast website partners to place your ad on various websites throughout the entire Internet with a wide variety of ways that they could appear. For example, your ad could come out on third-party websites; you could have a video ad coming out as a pre-roll with YouTube videos; also, Google let you advertise the ad on Google’s email platform, Gmail; and you could even have your ad coming out in the third-party apps that are on Google’s app network. The benefits of using Google’s Display Network is its wide reach.

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