This guest post comes from the SpyFu community.
Google Ads is one of the most efficient methods of paid online advertising which is used by thousands of small, medium and large business organizations. Whether you have just started a small business or an e-commerce store, you can build your business through the targeted ads that reach the exact people you want to reach.
Here are some benefits for small businesses using Google Ads.
1. Google Ads lets you get discovered.
Irrespective of any size, every business that is marketing online wants to be found on the first page of Google search results. If you want your product or services to get discovered by targeted and potential customers in a short period of time, then using Google's PPC platform is the best choice that you can make.
It is obviously difficult for small businesses to compete with websites on Google that have been already well established and settled. Well, Google Ads makes it easier for you to go collectively against top domains as the ads appear on the top of the search results. This sponsored layout lets you reach to your potential customers every time they search for your product.
Thus, Google Ads increases the visibility of your product or service in a short period of time.
2. Google Ads allows you to reach local customers.
Google Ads give you various targeting options, so it becomes easy to target the right audience for your small business. These targeting option are really effective if you have a local store and are willing to target customers in that zone only.
If you are focused on a specific local audience–be it city or region–you can benefit by displaying your ads only to people in that area. This is usually referred to as “geo-targeting.” It helps you reach your desired customer without wasting the ad spend on those who are not in your area.
Not only you can choose your targeted location, but you can also exclude the locations where you don’t want your ad to run.
By excluding locations, you can target more precisely with lowered cost and improved ROI.
For example, if you run a cafe, you would not want to attract customers from long distances. Instead, through Google Ads you can show your ads to people who are searching within your area and are more likely to stop in.
3. Google Ads is highly measurable.
Being a small business owner, you have to be careful at every step of online marketing so that there are minimum losses and maximum gains. To keep your campaign efforts positively aligned at all times, you have to track and measure all the details of your campaigns/
Google Ads provides you with detailed information about your campaigns as well as in-depth analysis of reports and results based on your campaigns that are easy to comprehend.
You can derive data from your Google Ads performance based on clicks, impressions, keywords, budget etc.
You can also set and track your own goals based on the ROI, the traffic on your website, best performing keywords, the potential sales and the qualified leads.
4. Google Ads is a flexible marketing platform.
Google Ads fits any kind of business–both in industry and in size, be it small, medium or large. It’s fair to call it a flexible and dynamic marketing platform. That flexibility includes the ability to start, pause or stop any of your ads or campaigns anytime.
You can set the budget for your campaigns according to the amount that you are willing to spend. You also get options to target people placed in different locations and people using different devices.
5. Google Ads can lead to strong ROI.
The most ROI-friendly aspect of this platform is that you pay only for the ads that are clicked by people. Through targeted exposure of your ads, you are aiming at customers who are exactly looking for your product or service.
Hence, being specific with the ads and audience, you are much more likely to generate conversions through a Google PPC ad rather than a general one.
Because Google Ads is measurable, you can further use that information to track and test campaigns to fetch out the best results.
After learning which approach suits your business more, you can easily increase your ROI by shifting more efforts and budget to that approach.
6. Google Ads gives you fast and transparent results.
Google Ads is immensely fast.
Set up a Google Ads campaign today and you can see the results tomorrow.
Google Ads start showing your ads immediately, which means that customers come your way immediately. The combination of speed and targeting allows you to start getting relevant clicks right away.
Moreover, with Google Ads you get nearly-immediate results and reports of your campaigns.
The reports are easy to analyze and include information related to each campaign like clicks, keywords, impressions, costs, conversions and much more.It gives you enough so you can analyze the progress of your Google Ads campaigns and make improvements where needed.
7. Google Ads is faster and easier than SEO.
As SEO is relatively inexpensive it is a popular method of online marketing. However, it can take months to start fetching results for a business.
Further, reaching the top position in the Search Engine Result Page for your keywords can be difficult and time-consuming if you have lots of competitors involved in SEO. Being a small business, you cannot afford to lose that much of time just waiting for the result to come.
Choosing Google Ads over in addition to SEO is a solid choice here as with Google Ads you don’t have to wait for a long time to see the results. You can create campaigns instantly and start getting traffic.
Google Ads is comparatively easy to learn, and it has clear, objective instructions where you can nearly assure yourself a top position if you’re willing to pay for it.
Overall, creating ads on Google that yield good Quality Scores takes much less time than SEO execution would take.
8. Google Ads allows you to control your own budget.
With Google's PPC platform, you have full and through control over the budget of your ad campaigns. You can control everything starting from the maximum bid on the ad to the daily budget of the campaign.
You can also decide how much you want to spend each month and adjust the budget based on the performance graph. When an ad is performing extremely well, you can increase the ad spend on it to increase the desired results. It works in reverse to decrease ad spend on an underperforming ad, but you can also stop it instantly before losing another dime.
Being a small business, remember to start a campaign with a comparatively small budget and increase the ad spend as and when the conversions go up.
9. Google Ads helps you to beat your competitors.
With Google Ads, you constantly compete with your competitors to get your ad displayed on the top. Since they are often rotating or changing, it’s helpful to lean on tools to help discover exactly who your advertising competitors are. (Hint: Try SpyFu!)
Learning from your competitors helps you see the mistakes that others made along the way so you can avoid them. Similarly, you spot ways to improve your campaigns to increase productivity.
With the help of competitor analysis you can find new and profitable keywords for your campaigns.
No matter how good you are with keyword research, at some point there will be a shortage of ideas. So at that time, it is better to look at the terms used by your competitors to regain the idea of keyword research.
The next point to focus is the ad copy of your competitor. You can study them and create outstanding ad copy for your campaigns that gets more and more clicks.
If your ads get more clicks, your CTR goes up which increases your Quality Score and reduces the CPC which will ultimately result in increased ROI.
10. Google Ads builds your brand recognition
It is a common myth that Google Ads can be only used for advertising, generating leads and selling products and services.
It also builds brand awareness and recognition for your business.
Although building brand awareness is tough for comparatively small businesses, Google Ads goes a long way in building brand recognition among your target audience. They start to associate you with their searches.
In addition to the search network text ads, Google Advertising gives you another way to build your brand awareness:
Display Network
Through the display network, your ads are displayed as banner ads across a variety of sites on the internet.
Here, you can also narrow down your targeting options and choose specific users, browsers, locations, languages, devices etc.
Google Ads should be a significant component of your digital marketing strategies as it possess many advantages over other forms of digital marketing. As you start and continue to use it, you will discover and learn more, and the more benefits you will reap.
To your success!
Dinesh Thakur is the co-founder of Ads Triangle which is a Google Partner and Bing Ads Accredited agency. He has over 7 years of experience in pay per click marketing. Dinesh has helped hundreds of businesses to grow their revenues through PPC. He has expertise skills in Google Ads and is passionate about Pay Per Click.
