This is the fourth in an ongoing series of articles about the digital tools you can use to expand your business. Previously we have touched on topics such as Top Five Must-Dos for Digital Marketing, Capturing New Customers, and Solar Leads: Mastering the Landing Page.
The world is becoming more digital. It might have started slowly but increasingly more and more of daily life occurs online. This has also affected buying behavior. Many people now digitally search for a company, product, and or service that fits their needs. This can range from something simple like deodorant to large complex projects like finding a solar contractor for your home. Digital is a key marketing tool that installers can tap into to grow their business and find more leads, opportunities, and eventually customers.
As the biggest search engine, with an 86.86% market share, Google is a powerful tool that can help enable your business to grow. But, while lots of people may be searching on Google, being on the top of the search page is vital; studies have shown that about 97% of search clicks come from the first 10 results and 71.3% of clicks came from the first five results. So the question is, how do you make sure you’re in the top five results. There are two main ways to do this, one is to optimize your website so that it includes relevant keywords, useful links, and lots of content. As it sounds, this can take a while and is by no means easy. Another option is to use Google Ads. Google Ad’s is Google’s online advertising platform which allows you to purchase ads for your business and run ad campaigns that can get your business’s website to the top of the page. There are lots of great resources available on how Google Ad campaigns work and some of those sources can be accessed at the bottom of this article.
One important thing to note before we dive into the benefits of Google Ads is the terminology Google uses, the most important are keywords and campaigns. Keywords are just the words that you would normally search when using google; i.e if I search bacon on google the keyword is bacon. Campaigns are how you create a Google Ad, you set a goal (like leads generated), how you want your ad to be displayed then create ad content. Google Ads has a lot of benefits above just putting your business as the top search result. The main benefits that we will outline are the customizable ability that campaigns have, the manageable budget that campaigns have, and the insightful reporting that you can obtain from the platform.
Customizable
One of the great benefits of a Google Ad Campaign is the vast amounts of customization that you have for that campaign. You can choose where your ads appear through both location settings and keyword searches. With Google Ads Keyword ideas, you can see the monthly google searches for a selected group of keywords, as well as a price range for each keyword and the competitiveness of the keywords. The competitiveness tab tells you how often people are bidding for that keyword. The higher the competitiveness is the higher the price of that keyword. Because Google provides you with all this information you can craft your Ad strategy however you would like. Focus on a few more expensive keywords that get a lot of searches or a wide range of keywords with fewer searches that are also cheaper. You can customize your strategy to fit your needs.
Manageable Budget
Another bonus of Google Ad’s is that you can choose your daily campaign budget and adjust your budget daily, weekly, or at any time. You set a budget for each campaign and once your ads have been seen and your budget met then google turns the campaign off so you don’t go over budget. This can also allow you to determine which ads are working well, how quickly you are hitting your budget, and any adjustments that you should make. Google can also provide you with a cost per click formula per keyword. Telling you which keywords are leading to engagement and bringing you more potential customers!
Insightful Reporting
Google doesn’t just give you all this information and leave you with no idea if it’s working or not. They have very robust reporting and different metrics that can give you direction if your campaign is effective or not. As mentioned earlier cost per click is one metric they provide but they also can tell you more. Pre-defined reports are set up in Google Ads that can give you simple marketing metrics like ad clicks, conversions, and how many people viewed your ad campaign. The list of pre-defined reports is quite extensive and can even tell you what audiences each of your campaigns are working best with. Unsurprisingly, Google has a vast collection of reporting tools that allows you to easily understand how your ads are doing.
Now while we’ve talked about the benefits of Google Ads it should be mentioned that it can take a lot of effort and can be very time-consuming to create an effective ad campaign. However, if done right it can have a massive impact on your business’s growth and getting you more leads.
There are a wealth of videos that can help in your introduction to AdWords. Some are more in-depth than others, here are just a few: An introduction to Google AdWords, Google Ads 2020 Tutorial - Step-By-Step Google Ads Training | Kyle Sulerud, Google AdWords Tutorial 2020 | PPC Advertising | Simplilearn
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