What is Google Ads
Google Ads is commonly known to be Google’s online advertising program for brands and businesses to reach out to potential customers in order to grow and promote their businesses. It facilitates you to create ads in promoting your products and/or services, by targeting them at your desired audience.
The Rebranding
Previously known as Google AdWords, Google Ads has been rebranded to represent and include Google’s comprehensive range of advertising capabilities starting from 24 July 2018. The introduction of Google Ads functions as an elevated tool to help brands and businesses of all sizes to connect with the billions of people across Google Search, YouTube, Google Maps, Google Play and Google partner sites.
How Google Ads Work
John is looking to buy a new electronic gadget online. He types “drone with camera Singapore” into the search box on Google — “drone with camera Singapore” being the search term. Let’s say you’re the owner of an online drone business in Singapore, because you have included the word “drone” as a keyword in your Google Ads campaign with the geographical location set to Singapore, your Google Ad may be eligible to appear on John’s search results page.
Today’s Curious Consumer
Now, imagine John learns about a new drone brand from a friend. Intrigued, he searches for reviews of this brand on Google and discovers three other interesting drone brands after researching more on the related content. To compare these brands, John then read more reviews and content over the next few days before completing the purchase.
Such curiosity-driven customer journey is more common than ever although no two customer journeys are exactly alike. While the above drone search took about a week, another consumer might take a month of careful searching and comparing.
The evolving customer journey creates opportunities for you to not only deliver better user experiences, but it also creates a smoother guided discovery for consumers to acquire new brands and products through their purchase journey.
The fact is —most consumers do not have a specific brand in mind, hence, before making the commitment to purchase, these consumers conduct extensive research to ensure their money and fact-finding journey is well-rewarded. Typically, today’s consumers are wiser —every purchase is significant with a sea of information out there at the tip of their fingers. Often times, consumers turn to Google Search to garner information in the purchase journey. Even so, consumers are sometimes confused and confounded as a result.
Each time a user searches for a product related to your business on Google, Google Ads applies its comprehensive tools for you to take advantage of displaying your ads to the right people, in the right place and at the right time. At any one day, your ad campaigns can be exposed to billions of highly-demanding Google search users.
Google Ads X Google Analytics
Back in the days, traditional marketing methods are only affordable to big companies with substantial budget for Advertising and Promotion (A&P) in getting their brand message across the mass audience, companies are limited to rely on a handful of broadcasting channels. Such methods incur recurring exorbitant costs and advertising campaign results are often difficult and/or impossible to measure, not to mention there were no control nor customisation in these campaigns.
Understanding your customers is the first step to create an experience that matters to them. Equipped with a clearer understanding of Google Ads, you may find it important to optimise Google Ads by integrating it with Google Analytics. Google Analytics helps you gain a dynamic understanding of how users engage with your campaign, website, content and products. You will get a holistic view of how your ads are leading to conversions and captured lead reports will be at your dispense at any given point of time. Equipped with such accessibility and dissected data, you can constantly measure what happens after users click on your ads, so you can learn what’s working and what’s not, and constantly conduct steps to improve your ad campaigns. For instance, if you’re noticing certain keywords are driving more users to convert, you can increase bids in these high-performing keywords, and if your users didn’t convert, figure out where and why they abandoned. Fortunately, it’s not the end of the story for customers who abandoned their shopping carts, because you can actually build an Analytics audience based on this behaviour and create various campaigns to re-engage them or to deliver a special promotion to them that encourage conversions. Successful marketers convert these useful insights to anticipate intent and deliver optimal user experience to their potential customers at the right time.
Case Study
Challenge
Le Xin, an established brand in the food catering industry, approached us with the sole objective of increasing brand exposure and improving online brand experience for visitors. We included Google Ads as one of our recommendations, as well as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), to drive traffic from Google Search to Le Xin’s website. On Le Xin’s website, multiple Calls-To-Action (CTA) —such as online order forms, contact form, hotline and email address —drove conversions.
Le Xin trusted us to design and create ad-hoc images for their website banner and execute necessary minor changes to details for overall improvement to the aesthetic appearance of the website. Apart from design, we have also enhanced on the keywords used on the website for page optimisation.
Approaching festive seasons —such as Chinese New Year and Christmas, we created remarketing campaigns to visitors who previously visited the website to re-engage them and drive higher conversions.
In the beginning, the client disclosed uncertainties in the virtue of Google Ads and the transparency in the marketing cost spent. However, in the course of the first month, the client is convinced by the tremendous conversions and is convinced to use Google Ads as one of its core marketing channels.
The analytics and insights from these ongoing ad campaigns have shown how differently the trends and keywords can turn on week by week. With these data, we have worked with Le Xin to improve our promotions in order to meet the changing demands of these potential consumers. Le Xin is a forward going brand and is always looking at feedback and market trends to increase her brand delivery. For instance, the insights we gathered revealed that customers who ordered food catering and particularly Tingkat (meal boxes) are health-conscious individuals who are looking for brown rice options on the menu. Hence, Le Xin made additional options to its menu to cater to the needs of its customers and conversions increased tremendously.
Results
Together these strategies drove a 500% increase in E-commerce conversion rate, and a 900% return on ad spend.
Closing Thoughts
There are a variety of methods to boost your conversion rate. With our expertise and experience, the proper finesses are in application —Google Ads is by far one of the most effective and result generating solutions in today’s fast-paced marketing environment. Against the backdrop of modern businesses, every individual business is distinct and unique, there is no standard formula nor strategy to the application of Google Ads. Depending on your business objectives, we ensure the right message (a personalised one) shows up at just the right moment, leading to the valuable impact of impressions, clicks and conversions which translate to growth and revenue.
Today, 80% of consumers say the experience provided by brands is as important as the product or service. Identifying and acting on user insights reveal the detailed customer journey at a whole new level and provide you the opportunity to deliver better customer experiences, and at the most appropriate moment —your ad campaigns can help simplify your potential customers’ buying journey making it meaningful and engaging for them.
As always, we are happy to hear from you.
Etereo is a content, branding and digital marketing agency which collaborates with companies to grow their businesses. We are here to help, talk to us if you require any assistance on any of these Google tools –be it installation, analysis or strategic methods of using them to grow your businesses. And we work on real-time data that resonate in the moment and of course, in your context.
Looking forward to hearing from you – marketing@etereomedia.com.
To your success!
