If you’re going to be promoting your business digitally, you’re likely going to be allocating a good chunk of your advertising dollars to a Google Ads campaign in one way or another. Search, Video, Display, App & Shopping ads dominate the digital advertising market and allow your business to interact with your direct buyer persona in the right place at the right time.
In consideration of various different advertising avenues, we’re often asked by our clients: “What Google Ads strategy should we use?” Needless to say, this is an incredibly loaded question. Each platform has its own unique capabilities that can fit into your marketing strategy in vastly different ways.
To make the choice a little easier, we’ve compiled a list of a few things to consider when choosing the campaign that is right for your business.
Define Your Target Audience
Google offers a variety of audience targeting options for its ad strategies. Remarketing lists that target previous website visitors, and in-market audiences that target users looking for specific products or services are just a few audience segments offered. Understanding how to reach your ideal audience, however, goes far beyond Google’s audience targeting tactics.
As an advertiser, you’ll want to ask yourself questions such as: what do people utilize this platform for? For example, Google Search users tend to use the service to solve a specific problem with their search query. YouTube however is a platform that centers around entertainment and learning, which involves a completely different advertising approach. A B2B business with a focus on lead generation may gear more towards Google Search to help their audience solve specific business-related problems. A gym, however, may want to show the value of its space, classes, and fitness knowledge, and educate consumers through Video ads on YouTube.
Know Your Business and Marketing Goals
An important piece of any advertising strategy is to determine what the KPIs are for your business. This is a particular value that can be used to determine the success of an advertising campaign for your business. For example, creating a specific goal for new qualified leads could be a KPI to help determine the success of your Google Ads campaigns. They are the goal outcomes that you hope to achieve with your specific marketing efforts.
Are you a business looking to generate leads selling large-scale manufacturing equipment to other businesses? Are you a clothing retailer focused on eCommerce sales? Or are you selling life coaching where the goal is to provide a specific service and obtain more clients? Each business has its own unique offerings which require completely different strategies. An educational facility focused on increasing enrollment may choose YouTube as its focus to entice users to enroll by showing the value of its courses and programs. A clothing retailer, however, may be focused on online product sales, making Google Shopping the clear choice to showcase their available inventory.
It’s important to understand what your goals are (sales, awareness, lead generation, etc.) prior to picking a specific strategy. Each Google Ads strategy can be utilized in different ways for specific business goals, but certain platforms may make more sense for your business depending on the goals you have.
Don't Be Afraid to Experiment
Mastering the art of Google Ads can be difficult and can involve a lot of trial and error. Different strategies can ultimately be successful or not depending on your industry, goals, tactics, and more. It’s important to keep in mind that finding the right Google Ads strategy for your business takes time, knowledge, and a little bit of experimentation. Don’t be afraid to expand to new platforms and A/B test new campaigns. If you’ve traditionally focused largely on Search, maybe compliment those campaigns with Display remarketing, or Video ads. Experimentation is a crucial part of the process and can give you extremely insightful data for your business.
Wrap-Up
There is clearly a lot to think about when picking the right Google Ads strategy for your business, and these suggestions just scratch the surface. In fact, there are likely multiple strategies from Google that you will implement to work together in your overall marketing efforts.
Choosing the right Google Ads strategy depends on a variety of factors and goes far beyond the list of topics discussed here. While creating your own strategy can be difficult, the process itself can help you learn a lot about your ideal customer and your business goals. Remember that each business has unique KPIs, buyer personas, and more. Many businesses are multi-faceted, which provides the opportunity to utilize different tactics for different pieces of the business.
Trust us, we know that choosing the right ads strategy and learning the ways of Google can be difficult. When in doubt, you can always contact the pros (cough, like our Paid Search pros here at Page One, cough) to handle all of legwork for you, and give you back that precious time to focus on your other marketing efforts.