You want to be at the top of Google search and get lots of traffic to your website. But just as important, if not more so, is the fact that you need to get that traffic to convert from anonymous to identified leads. Google Ads is the most powerful advertising medium ever known to mankind. It can drive immense amounts of traffic to your site for the keywords that matter to you. But it does have a price tag. This scares many business owners because they think it will be too expensive or the cost will quickly get out of hand. Many also have the mistaken notion that their competitors will click on their paid ads over and over and run up their advertising bill to the moon. These needn’t be cause for concern as there are many built in protections to make sure that everything will work according to plan and within budget with a clear ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). However, it is quite easy to end up paying “stupidity tax” which means you are wasting money on a poorly set up and maintained campaign. Google Ads is like a turbo engine. You can crank it up to bring huge amounts of traffic. But there’s another side to the whole idea of online marketing and that is bringing the traffic to a site that is optimized for selling and converting anonymous visitors into paying customers.
COST OF GOOGLE ADVERTISING Being on page 1 sounds great, but what about the cost? Everyone is convinced that PPC is very expensive. Lots of people think that their competitors will click their ads over and over again and spend all their money. These fears are unfounded. You need to get educated if you dismiss PPC (Pay Per Click) with baked in preconceived misconceptions. It comes down to ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). It’s an investment, not an expense and should be judged on the yielded returns.
PPC Benefits
The benefits of Google Ads to the business owner are as follows below:
* It’s extremely precise.
* Eliminates the need for geo specific keywords (city name) in the search.
* Searcher can type “hair salon” instead of “anytown hair salon” and still find you.
* Results rank on the search result page higher than even organic results, the top 4 positions are paid ads.
* The paid ads always show at the very top, this can be important especially for mobile phone users because they are “above the fold”.
* The ad can lead to a specific landing page which can be changed and tweaked to increase conversion rates.
* Google Ads is fast to get up and running and visible, almost immediately. whereas organic SEO methods can takes weeks, months or years.
* Google Ads is a great way to market test a new idea before spending a large sum of money on big advertising only to find out there is no market.
* No contracts, no annual commitment. You can start, stop, pause or resume at any time.
* Can can amplify, diminish at any time. Crank it up when needed, tone it down when not needed.
* Protect your own brand. Google Ads is the best way to keep your brand flag flying high and proud. Compliments your organic (natural) ranking and it works wonders in proving you are the “GO TO” company in town.
* Can specify areas of town where you do or do not want your ads running. You can also declare mobile searches to be more or less important than desktop.
* Google is the #1 way that people look for goods and services.
* Can create a very fast campaign for a specific event and then turn it off when it’s finished.
* Can set your own daily or monthly budget, can change with the seasons.