Google Ads - What is Google Ads? Functions, Elements and How It Works

𝗥𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗰.𝗰𝗼𝗺 ➣ One type of digital marketing that is widely used is search engine marketing, or better known as SEM. Search engine marketing includes all marketing done on search engines, one of which is Google Ads. As a form of paid search or paid search, Google Ads needs to be utilized by all business people to increase their business awareness. 

Google Ads is Google's advertising service that allows you to pay a fee to have your website displayed on search results pages (SERPs) when someone enters certain keywords into a search engine. The SERP will display the ads that you create to bring searchers to your website. You only need to pay if people click on the ads. In other words, you can pay to have your website visible at the top of the SERPs. 

Curious and want to know more about what Google Ads is? Check out the following explanation!

What is Google Ads? 

Google Ads is an online advertising platform from Google that allows its users to create advertisements so that information and links to your site appear in Google search results. This means that people can find your site in the Google SERP with certain keywords that you have targeted. Initially, Google Ads was called Google AdWords before finally changing in 2018. 

Even so, the services offered remain the same, namely advertisers pay per click (CPC) or pay per impression/impression (CPM) obtained from advertisements. Ads that are displayed not only on the Google search engine, but once you place an ad with Google Ads, your ad will appear on the search engine results page (SERP), Youtube, Blog, to the Google Display Network.

Maybe some of you are still confused about the difference between paid search, such as Google Ads, and organic search, or what is often known as SEO. 

Paid search and SEO both appear on search results pages, but they appear in different places. Here are the differences in the location of paid search and SEO.

As you can see, when you enter the keyword “online shopping”, the results at the top are paid search results. While the SEO results are below. To distinguish it, websites that do paid searches, they have a green sign that reads Ad in front of their website URL. 

According to data from HubSpot, only 30% of people will click on a link that has the Ads sign. But does that mean that you don't need to do paid-per-click (PPC) campaigns? 

Actually, not really. PPC campaigns can help your website appear on the first page if your website's SEO isn't very good. This can help you to build an online presence on the internet.

Google Ads Functions and Benefits 

Google Ads has many functions and uses. Not only limited to displaying ads and the opportunity to be seen by many people on the Google platform, you can also take advantage of this one paid search method to give you an advantage. 

Paid search like Google Ads may sound easy to use because you only need to pay, in contrast to SEO which requires you to do the right SEO strategy to appear on the SERP. When in fact you also need a strategy in optimizing paid search. Here are some of the functions of Google Ads as a form of paid search to support your marketing strategy:

1. Test landing pages 

You can use Google Ads to test and optimize landing pages. You can just create two different landing pages to be installed in Google Ads. From there, you can see which landing pages are receiving more traffic. 

This is called A/B Testing, a strategy where you do two different things to see which one works better. Paid search including Google Ads is one way you can do effective A/B Testing, because you can get traffic to the website pages you want and see which website pages have a higher conversion rate.

2. Looking for new keywords 

In addition to landing page trials, you can do paid search to find new good keywords for your campaign. Google Ads can provide a "search terms" report that tells you the keywords where your ads are displayed when someone searches for those keywords. 

For example, if you are bidding for the keyword “red shoes”, Google might show your ad if someone searches for “red sneakers”. Even if you don't include “red sneakers” in your keyword list, it will still be included in your report because it is a keyword many people are searching for. 

Moreover, in the same report, you can see how each keyword is performing. So you can choose for yourself whether you want to include these keywords in the campaign.

3. Ensuring the website is located above-the-fold 

One of the advantages of using Google Ads is that the website can be above-the-fold. What is above-the-fold? Above-the-fold is the part of the website page that is immediately visible without scrolling. If your website appears at the top of the SERP, it can be said that the website is above-the-fold. Websites like this have a greater possibility of being clicked than websites that are below-the-fold. 

How Google Ads Works 

There are three elements that must be present in a paid search campaign or Google Ads, namely keywords, ads, and landing pages. In doing a paid search, you need to tell Google a list of keywords. This will help Google determine which keywords the ads should appear on. 

After that, you need to design ads so that the audience is interested and makes people want to click on them. If someone clicks on your ad, that URL should send them to a landing page. The goal of a landing page is to get visitors and convert them – whether that's buying a product, downloading an e-book, and so on.

To find out how Google Ads works further, you have to know what the elements are in it. Some elements of Google Ads are PPC, Quality Score, Keyword, Account Structure, and Budget. Here's the explanation:

1. Pay-Per-Click Bidding 

If you are familiar with the term paid search, you may have heard of the term pay-per-click or better known as the acronym PPC. Pay-per-click means you won't pay for your ad if it's only shown, you'll only pay if people click on your ad. 

Then how does Google set the price to pay for each click? Google uses a bidding or auction system to set the price. For each keyword, you have the bidder with the highest price. For example, there is someone who charges Rp. 1,000, then there are others who charge Rp. 750,-. Then there are those who set a price of Rp. 500, - and so on. Then Google will sort the website based on the highest auction price. The price of each click itself will be set by Google with the help of machine learning.

2. Quality Score 

Although the bidding price can determine whether or not ads will appear for certain keywords, Google also has an algorithm called the quality score. Quality score is an algorithm that assigns values to ads based on their relevance. This algorithm looks at the accuracy of the keywords with the ads and how relevant the ads are with the landing page content. In other words, Google actually assesses your landing page to make sure that you don't place random ads. 

The reason Google includes quality score as a measuring tool is to ensure that they provide the best user experience for their users. PPC bidding isn't the only reason a website is ranked top. You could say the quality score determines the location of your ads more than PPC bidding. 

Then how does the quality score work? The quality score has a value of 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest rating and 10 being the highest rating. This means if someone bids at Rp. 5,000 but has a rating of 2 while you bid at Rp. 2,000 but has a rating of 9, there is a possibility that Google will give you a higher ranking because your ads are more relevant.

3. Keywords 

In the ads view, you don't want to just select a certain group of keywords and Google will only display your ads when those keywords are entered. Because people may enter different words for the same search. Therefore, Google has three types of keyword matches that can be used; exact match, phrase match, and broad match. What is the difference? 

a. Broad match: Contains all words, may be in any order, and may include other words 

b. Phrase match: Contains all the words, in order, and may include other words before or after the phrase 

c. Exact match: Contains only these words in this order 

For example, let's say someone searches for “red Velcro tennis shoes.” Your ad will only appear if you select the keyword “red Velcro tennis shoes”. 

If the keyword is set to exact match and someone searches using the keyword “men's red Velcro tennis shoes”, your ad will not appear. You are not advised to use exact matches for ads. As a Google Ads user, you are advised to use a broad match. So if someone searches for “tennis shoes”, your ad will still appear.

Therefore, a good keyword strategy is to use broad matches and phrase matches to get traffic. Then look at the search terms report to see which keywords have the highest conversion rates. For the keywords themselves, you really need to do continuous trials to see which ones are the most optimal. Performance keywords are constantly changing and your campaign strategy needs to keep up.

4. Account structure 

Google Ads account structure is very important for the efficiency and success of paid search campaigns. So you have the keywords, you have the list of keywords that you buy from, and then you have the ad that you want to show when someone types in one of those keywords. 

Now you can group together the keywords you want your ad to appear on in order to create highly relevant Ad Copy for these keywords, and increase the likelihood that searchers will click on the ads.

5. Budget 

When paying Google for a PPC campaign, you won't be swiping your credit card every time someone clicks on an ad. The way Google Ads works is that you set a daily budget for the campaign. So for each campaign, you can determine how much money Google can spend on that ad placement each day. For example entering Rp. 200,000,-/day for campaign A and Rp. 75,000,-/day for campaign B. Google will not exceed this amount. 

What if all that money was spent in just an hour or two? However, if you have keywords that are very relevant or very popular, you run the risk of eating up your budget fast. Google offers a feature that allows you to request that the budget is not spent immediately within 1-2 hours. 

The daily budget limit is certainly a useful feature, especially for those just starting out with paid search. You can set a low budget when you start, and then slowly start measuring success and lead quality and try to optimize your campaigns before you invest a lot of money in them.

How to Measure Google Ads Advertising Success 

Now you know what Google Ads is, its functions and how it works. Now, you can learn how to measure the success of the Google Ads ads you make. So, the only way to optimize Google Ads campaigns is to use the metrics and reports provided by Google. Check out the explanation! 

There are four basic metrics that are important for paid search, including Google Ads, namely: 

a. Impressions are the number of times your ads appear when Google users enter that keyword. So impressions can also be said as how many people see your ads. 

b. Clicks are the number of clicks you get from ads. To be counted as clicks, someone has to click on the ads. 

c. Conversion is the number of people who see the ad, click on it, and take the action you want them to take while on your landing page. This action can be a download or a transaction. When you set up your account, you will get a tracking code that can help Google to track conversions. 

d. Spend is the amount of money used for the campaign.

The four metrics above are very important to note. But the analytics that are most important for optimizing your campaigns actually come from a combination of the following: 

a. Click Through Rate (CTR). CTR is the percentage of impressions that turn into clicks. The higher the percentage, the more successful the campaign will be. 

b. Conversion Rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that turn into conversions. The higher the value, the more successful the campaign. 

c. Cost-Per-Click (CPC). CPC is the amount of money you spend for each click. You can calculate the average CPC by dividing the amount spent by the clicks. For this measuring instrument, the smaller the value, the better. 

d. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). CPA is the amount of money spent on each conversion. You can calculate average CPA by dividing total spend by total conversions. Just like CPC, the smaller the value, the more successful the campaign.