The quickest way that your business can get new customers online is through advertising on Google; commonly referred to by its official name Google Ads (As of July 2018, it has been renamed from “Google Adwords” to “Google Ads”)

Google Advertising is paying Google a certain amount of dollars so that when people search for your products and services in a Google Search, your ad will be the first thing to show up in the search results. For example, if you’re a lawyer in Flint, Michigan, then you can pay Google so that your ad shows up when people search for the term “lawyer” in Google in the Flint, Michigan area. You can do this for one search term (commonly referred to as ‘keywords’) or hundreds of search terms.

That’s the simplest way to describe how advertising on Google works. It is absolutely the quickest way to get new customers because you’re forcing Google to show an ad for your business first for your products and services. You could also consider using the on page SEO services from a digital marketing agency, like Victorious, to help your website’s ranking.

Everyone Wants to Be #1, But Nobody Wants to Pay

Everyone wants to be #1, right? Every business wants to be the best. The cream of the crop. The top dog. However, it can be very costly to be the first ad that shows up in a Google search. Everyone is competing to be the first ad that shows up for your products & services, and you have to compete with them.

Google Ads works on a bidding system, where you pay-per-click and the costs can vary depending on the keyword you’re “bidding on”. This means that you only pay if someone clicks on your advertisement, over other ads. That’s great – you don’t pay unless you get a click to your website. The cost for that click varies greatly depending on how many other businesses are running an ad for the same thing. This cost can be anywhere from $1 to $100 per click.

Think of it this way (going back to our example above), if you’re an attorney in Flint and you want to an ad for your law firm to show up each time someone searches for “estate planning attorney”, then you have to pay for the keyword. But you’re not the only person, of course, in Flint that is offering these services. So, other attorneys are also paying for the keyword “estate planning attorney”, which then drives of the cost that you will pay per click. Thus the term “bidding on” keywords. Managing this can be overbearing at times, which is why people hire a PPC Management company fairly often to handle it for them.

Update on Ads on Google

Now, things are starting to change with Google, and they might have one, two or even three ad spots that are the very first thing a person sees when searching on Google. What does that mean for a regular business? That means that Google is pushing down the organic search results. The “organic search results”, meaning your website and your Google Business Listing. All of the good SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work that’s been done over the years is starting to get pushed farther down in search results pages because they’re giving priority to people that are paying them for advertising.

Equally, if there are adverts that appear on your pages that are irrelevant or inappropriate. you can always look into something like, get an adblocker to stop this from happening.

If the first three businesses are actually advertisements, then that means that those are three businesses that are ahead of you in the rankings because they’re paying for it. Google searches are starting to get even more competitive as Google moves to a more advertising-based search results. It’s important that your business doesn’t fall behind in this. Because if they eventually keep expanding the search results and adding more advertising spots to the search results, then that just means more and more of Google’s Search becomes a necessary business cost.

Advertising on Google: A Necessary Business Cost?

A big thing right now with car dealerships is that they’re finding that they are spending way more money on advertising than they did 20 years ago or so – because of the internet. In the past car dealerships did a ton of standard advertising – TV, Newspaper, Radio. Today they are doing the exact same forms of advertising but also doing online advertising on top of it.

Most of their advertising, in fact is moving to online. But because they have to spend as much as they used to on offline – while adding more advertising online – their profit margins are down from where they used to be. Essentially, it’s becoming more costly to run the car dealerships. There are companies out there who use both motifs, both online advertising mixed with offline forms of marketing, to find out more all you have to ask is what is a sales lead?

Now, all dealerships are doing more online advertising than they ever have before. Meaning that they have to pay more than they used to pay to compete with other dealership. So while their margins are down because of this additional spend on advertising, they have to do it in order to be a competitive business. The important point i’m trying to make, with this example, is that it’s very important to adapt to these new forms of advertising and to be able to compete.

So How Does It Work?

How advertising works on Google is pretty simple. We create advertisements for your company, tell Google what searches you want to show up for, and in what areas you want your ads to show up for.

For example, let’s say you have a cleaning business in Tallahassee, Florida. You want your business to show up when someone searches for “business cleaning services”, “office cleaning”, “carpet cleaning services”, etc. These are commonly referred to as keywords. So, our company creates an ad for the cleaning business and then tell Google we want that ad to show up when someone searches those keywords.

Location, Location, Location

In our example above, we would only want the cleaning business’ ads to show up in Tallahassee, Florida because that’s the market they serve. They wouldn’t want to show up in New York City because that would be a waste of money – and they wouldn’t be able to service that area. So, with Google Ads, you only show up in searches for your keywords in the areas that you want to target – or that you operate in.

What is the cost of Google Ads?

Google Ads has a pay-per-click pricing model. Meaning that each time someone clicks on your ad in the search results and goes to your website, it costs you X-amount of dollars. It can be expensive. It can be cheap. It can be in between. The cost-per-click dollar amount is based on the competition (other businesses who are advertising the same thing) and the area that you serve.

For example, if you’re a lawyer in New York City, there’s going to be crazy amounts of competition because the market is huge and heavy with lawyers. You might spend $50 – $100 per click in a market of that size. Whereas, if you’re a Christmas tree farm in Michigan, there’s not a lot of competition and it’s likely that others would not be doing this form of advertising. So, you might spend $2 – $3 per click.

So, the cost of Google Ads is really based off of your geographical and the type of business that you have. Obviously we give estimations on what your business can expect to get, how many clicks and how many customers to your website you can get. But it’s very obviously open-ended based on the type of business that you have.

Video & Display Advertising via Google

• Video: I’m sure you’ve been on YouTube and before your video starts a short ad plays. Usually you can “skip this ad in 5 seconds” or something like that. That is a part of Google advertising. As you know, Google owns YouTube, so on their advertising platform, we can advertise with a video on YouTube.
• Other Websites (“Display Advertising): You’ve probably been on a website before – CNN, New York Times, etc. – and you see an advertisement for a product or service – or company – that you recently looked up online. That advertisement is showing up because it knows what you’re searching for and what you’re interested in. That’s all through Google’s advertising platform as well. What we can do is create image-based ads for your company that click to your website. We essentially tell Google, “Hey put this on CNN, New York Times – whatever it may be. It’s actually a network of 8 million + websites that your ad can show up on. This is commonly referred to as Display Advertising.

In Summary

Google Ads, in a nutshell, is guaranteeing that your business shows up when people search for your products or services immediately. It’s the quickest way to get new customers for your business. The best part of the whole service is that we have 3 packages you can choose from and we handle your entire Google Advertising for you. Then you get a monthly report outlining everything that we are doing for you. If you want to get new customers & leads online today then there is no quicker way than Google Ads.