Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads for Small Businesses: 5 Steps of Strategy

Google Ads for Small Businesses

In this blog, we are going to learn about Google ads for small businesses.

I live in one of the bustling cities of New York. Here, everything is a competition. And the one who stays alert is the one who stays longer. With the right Google advertising, many small business owners here in New York City have made it big.

And that’s what made me write this article on “Google ads for small businesses” so many other small businesses can benefit as well.

We all know Google ads have proven their significance, time, and again in this digitally active world. With Google ads you have better control over your ad spend and receive the desired traffic and reach on your business presence online.

So before understanding why Google ads are necessary for business owners even if they are small business owners, let us see what PPC means.

What is PPC?

In simple words, PPC is pay-per-click advertising. It is that form of digital marketing where you will be required to pay for an advertisement that you have sent out only when someone clicks on it.

The most common example of small business advertising is Google ads and Google shopping ads that everyone gets to see many times a day while searching for various things on Google.

So suppose I want to use PPC for my business in New York City, I will give out an advertisement on any search engine say google, and I will pay only when someone sees my advertisement on the page and clicks on it. Simple and effective right? That’s what PPC means.

However, PPC adverts are not limited to just Google search.

It comprises all the other types of ads as well where you are required to pay per click on your displayed ad comes.

8 Types of PPC Campaigns

Speaking out of the personal experience, and I am sure many would agree, PPC for business owners in New York City is not just limited paid search advertising. It is a vast arena, and being in a competitive space you will have to explore it all. Be it New York or anywhere else.

To help you with this, let’s understand different types of Google Ads. It is sprawled across various categories like

• Search ads (Google Ads, Bing Ads)
• Display Ads
• Social Media ads (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Youtube Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Twitter Ads, etc.)
• Remarketing ads
• Local search ads
• Google shopping ads
• Inbox ads
• Native ads
• Amazon ads
• and many more.

Not every kind of PPC advertising is perfect for every small business.

It varies differently according to what type of business you have, which industry it belongs to, what are your business goals, your budget, your target audience, and many other factors.

What are the Three Steps of Running Google Ads for Small Businesses?

The three steps that form the part of Google ads for small businesses are:

• Creating Google Ads Strategy
• Setting Up Google Ad Account
• Google Ads Management

Google Ads Strategy For Small Businesses

As the name suggests, it includes forming an initial strategy on how to run the online ad campaigns, where to show ads, who to target, how to achieve the goals, and what to show to a user to gain their attention and interest.

This will just lay the foundation for all future online advertising strategies.

It is the map to your destination, so it’s one of the most critical steps.

What comes under Google Ads Strategy?

1. Market Research is an integral part of PPC Strategy.
2. Company research
3. Competitors research
4. Audience researching
5. Keywords research and analysis
6. Target message research
7. Developing a customized target strategy

Google Ads Account Setup for Small Businesses

As per this, then the account is set up, and the first campaign is ready to work its magic. And then, we let the campaign collect enough data as users start interacting with the ad.

What comes under setting up Google ads accounts?

1. Comprehensive keywords targeting (Selecting keywords that lead to clicks)
2. Ad copywriting
3. Audience segmenting and targeting (If you are a restaurant in New York, you don’t want people in Louisville to see and click on your ads)
4. Budget allocation and bid adjustment
5. Ad scheduling — Showing the ad when it makes the most impact (Showing ads for your service company after your business hours)

Google Ads Management for Small Businesses

The biggest thing that differentiates online advertising from other types of advertising is the availability of lots of data.

The ability to see data as your ad campaign is running helps you to make changes in it and steer it in the right direction.

It’s just like driving a car.

You never drive in the same lane or at the same speed without making changes on a roadblock or a slight curve of the road. You also make changes because it’s necessary to reach your destination — the same thing we do in PPC.”

Once we get data and analyze it, we discover many things that are stopping a campaign from reaching its end goals, and we make changes or optimize a campaign.

We do it again and again and again and again…This process never stops because the result could always have been better. As the data changes, PPC strategy changes with it as well.

That’s why there comes a need for management of business Google Ads. You can get in touch with us for a free audit, and we’ll let you know how your ads are performing.

What does Google ads management for small businesses include?

1. Data analysis and insights mining
2. Monitoring & analyzing Search Terms that trigger the ad
3. Optimizing the campaign for Higher Clicks and Performance
4. Honing bid and budget strategy for Better ROI
5. Improving ad copy
6. Testing new ad extensions
7. Optimizing keywords
8. Ad copy testing- A/B split testing or multivariate testing (To find the most effective ad assets)
9. Building a negative keywords list (weeding out all those keywords that aren’t useful for a business. If you’re a high-end fashion clothing company, you don’t want to show your ads to all those users who are searching for cheap dresses)
10. Identifying new areas to target within the account (new location, new device, new demographic)
11. Revising campaign strategy based on the ad performance, data, and goals
12. Exploring new keywords for targeting
13. Experimenting within the current audiences to reach the most useful converters

Why Google ads for Small Businesses are So Popular?

Fast Results:

No other online campaigns show results so soon as PPC campaigns. You can start seeing results within a few weeks, even though it will take a few months before the campaign reaches its goals.

Access to Data

You’ll get to learn a lot about your audience by running PPC campaigns. That data comes in handy to mine valuable, data-driven insights out of it, which can help in giving direction to your business.

More Visibility

This is one of the fastest ways to bring more visibility to your business in this overcrowded digital world.

Always Profitable

On average, any business that spends $1 on google ads gets $2 in return. Most of the companies have consistently reported a profit by running PPC campaigns.

When can small businesses start seeing results from their Google ads?

Even the most perfectly designed campaign needs time to gather data. The longer the campaign runs more data we get, which leads to refined optimization.

The PPC campaigns are always work-in-progress. There is no such thing as a perfect PPC campaign because you can still make it better. You have to make sure that you are always analyzing data and optimizing the PPC campaign. When you stop doing that, your campaign ends up in a spiral of self-destruction.

You may start getting clicks and impressions from the first day onwards of running your small business Google Ads campaigns, but all the clicks don’t translate to leads or conversions.

For that, we do continuously optimize a campaign. Consequently, it takes almost three months to see the real results.

9 Factors That Determine the Performance of Your Google Ads

1. Demand for the targeted keywords, your product/service

Many times the market needs to be created to increase sales; other times, the brand image needs to be corrected to start selling. For example, you may want to target the word online kitchen advisor, but if nobody is searching for that word, it will take more effort and time to send traffic volume there and collect data for the analysis.

2. Landing page or website experience

It is one of the most critical factors to have good UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience). You can have a high budget, amazing ads, but if the users have a bad experience on your website (like it’s not safe, the call to action button is hiding among many other switches, etc.), the results will suffer.

3. Your competition

If the product you are selling has a lot of competition, then it will take longer to get enough traffic or divert traffic from others to your products.

4. Ad visibility or ad budget

Let’s say your budget is $40 per day, and the keywords you are targeting are around $5, then the maximum number of clicks you can get in a day will be 8. Google needs a certain amount of clicks on an ad to analyze its performance and provide us with that data.

A low Budget can impact the data-gathering phase from 1 month to 4 months

Your ad’s visibility in comparison to your competitor’s ad visibility

If your competitor is following all the good practices of PPC and have enough budget, then his ad will appear on top more often, which will steal the traffic that your ad would have got.

5. Quality score

The quality score depends on CTR, relevance, and landing page experience.

It takes time for the right audience to be exposed to your ad, having a good quality score comes after that.

The higher the quality score you’ll have, the less it will cost to run the ads. But to get that score, a company needs more impression and exposure to the ad. CTR helps google in knowing if your ads are relevant for the user and his intent.

6. Ad relevance

If there are not many searches happening for the main keywords, then we have to target some indirect keywords. Or if you are showing the ad for beauty products to all those people who don’t have any interest in cosmetics, then it won’t get enough clicks and won’t produce enough results

7. Campaign goals

Getting web traffic is relatively easier for a news business than to get people to buy a $1000 reclining chair. The more robust the goal is, the longer it will take for the results to show.

8. Type of Business

Do you have a business with a very fluctuating selling cycle like snow boots? If yes, then the data is going to be very fluctuating and won’t prove very helpful when we start the ad optimization process

9. Ad ranking

Your quality score and your bid determine your ranking.

If your ad shows on the first page at the top position, you will get more data at a faster rate (depending on your budget). The Sooner you get data, the sooner the ad campaign can be optimized for the second stage.

6 Steps Small Businesses Should Use to Create Google Ads Strategy

Google Ads for small businesses go through various stages and based on every step, the Google strategy is revised to meet the goals. Google ads strategy is generally customized according to a product/ service as there is no one size fits all.

Here are some of the stages of a search ad or shopping ad campaign, and every step will need a different strategy. Here is the easiest guide to set up Google Ads.

Step 1: Gaining visibility and data

It takes Google a minimum of 7 days to start collecting data, but it takes almost a month for the full data to become available. Before that period, the data can be misleading and can harm the campaign’s long-term results.

When an ad gets to start, the priority is always to get some traffic on the landing page.

To start collecting data of user interaction with ad and with the landing page, which products are selling and which are not, which products are producing the highest ROI, and many other things like that.

Step 2: Ad Campaign Optimization

Once we have data, we are at a stage where we can analyze what is working and what can be improved.

Based on that, we start the process of optimizing the campaigns for improving performance.

We refine the keywords, their quality, prioritize the ones that are working well, and generate good ROI over others.

This stage will witness a dip in sales and impressions, but CTR (how many people click on the ad after seeing it) will start improving, which means the quality of the traffic, conversion rate, profits will start growing as well.

Step 3: Expanding the PPC campaign For Microsoft & Google Advertising

Armoured with data, we can now expand the small business PPC for small businesses in the New York City advertising campaign and target more keywords.

This is the optional stage, but it is very helpful in generating revenues from various untapped areas. This stage always leads to lower results than before, as Google again starts analyzing and collecting data of all those new keywords.

The results might go down for this month and the next month as we enter the data gathering stage, but then they will start rising to a new height.

The data-gathering phase always sees a rise in clicks but a loss in profits. But it’s a small loss for a significant advantage.

Step 4: Increasing the Budget

This stage is optional as well, but now as we have figured out all the keywords that are working and generating revenues, we can increase the budget and give more visibility to those.

This way, we will get more ad impressions than competitors. This stage will also see a loss in profits as more budget means more data, and more data means we are entering the data gathering phase again.

Step 5: Landing Page Optimization

User’s Search Intent = Targeted keywords + Ad copy + Landing Page

If all the three things on the right-hand side match with the left-hand side, a sale happens.

So far, we have been working on the keywords and ad copy; now it’s time to work on the landing page optimization. Landing page optimization, combined with ad optimization, can help you in targeting better.

Different types of testing, including A/B testing and multivariate testing, can be started now. In addition to that, event tracking to see how a user is navigating on your website can give us some valuable results.

This is the stage where you should Start the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process if you haven’t started yet. PPC, combined with SEO, can change the result card of your campaigns a lot.

This will eventually improve your quality score, which is a metric that Google uses to determine ad relevance and ad performance.

You can get in touch with Bizadmark’s SEO strategist to learn more about how it can boost your PPC campaigns. It is also a sound stage for starting retargeting ad campaigns.

The Art of Creating Effective Google Ads

What Google ads aren’t:

It is not throwing some keywords, ad copy, and bidding.

What Google ads are:

Research, Keywords, Bidding, Strategy, Data Analysis, Creatives

As strong campaigns are built on clear goals and business understanding, research, strategy, and data analysis become a must.