Abhishek Chauhan
If you own an e-shop and you have no ads running to promote it, are you doing it right? The answer is probably “no”. In order to run a successful e-commerce project, you have to invest to be seen.
Today, if you choose to attract more paying customers to your web and produce a profit, you have to smart about it and you can’t be afraid to spend some money. If done correctly, you can gain so much more than lose. One possible way is to use Google Ads, which, as its name suggests, are Ads in the Google Search engine.
Paid vs free position in the SERP
The search engine result page (SERP) is a listing with results that may be interesting to a user.
You can find two kinds of listings: paid and organic.
Let’s say you want to buy the new iPhone 11 and you use Google to search for one. The first three listings are paid ads. There is a chance you won’t get to organic links because ads are way more interesting and provide exactly what you want and need – to buy a new iPhone 11.
The difference between an ad and an organic result is that you can display your product via ad almost instantly. You pay and thousands of people see your e-shop.
“But what about the free listings?” you may ask. That’s a great question. You can use SEO to pump up your page, but this usually takes more time, energy, and in a result, money as well. Consider what you need – a stable place or quick exposure. Both are good to have, but if you are looking for a quick sale and you wish to be visible as often as possible, Google Ads is a way to go.
How to start with Google Ads
You can hire an agency to do the heavy lifting for you or you can do it by yourself. You can always go for the “success – fail” method. We all learn by trying. Google itself provides various free tutorials, certifications, and guides so you can manage your ad campaigns by yourself.
First, set up a Google Ads account. You can use your Gmail account. You have to fill in all the necessary information about your business and you can jump right into ads creation.
Understand your audience and what they are searching for for the best ads
The very first thing you have to understand is what your customer is like. What do they like, how do they think, and most importantly, how are they searching. If you sell phones, you don’t know what are they looking for. You have to figure it out by keywords. Keywords ale searches that trigger your ads.
You can manually add keywords you think are relevant to your page and your ads, but Google is there to help you. Keyword planner is a great tool to help you discover new keywords that you can add to your campaigns.
Advantages of paid ads in Google
Now that you know what are ads in the Google search engine and why they are important, understand its positive sides.
- as mentioned before, they are much faster than organic search listings
- if you are a new face in the e-commerce market, paying to get some recognition may be a good head start. It is a generally known rule that it is easier and cheaper to maintain a customer than to gain a new one. So start with the acquisition as soon as possible you can easily measure how your ad is performing. You know exactly how many people click on your ad and how many of these people buy something from you which gives you an overview about how you are handling the creative and the technical part of the campaign and your budget. You know how much you spend and how much you earn.
- surpass your competition. You and your competitor are both selling the same phone, but you provide it with free shipping. Let everyone know why they should buy this phone from you and not from another online store
Disadvantages of paid ads in Google
Sadly, everything has its downside. Even paid advertisements on Google.
- the result is not guaranteed. You may have the best ad there is, but your competitor provides something you don’t. You may end up spending thousands on your ad and the result might be not as expected. Sadly, this is marketing. It is unstable
- it may exceed your budget easily. Just because you have a set budget it doesn’t mean Google can’t bite off more than expected. So be prepared.
- it is time-consuming. Set up everything right, write interesting texts and watch the results carefully. This may take a very long time and you might end up using all of your time and energy just on the most vital things and the rest may be neglected.
Automate your ads easily!
There is a possibility for small and big e-shops how to save time. Automation tools exists and they are here to help you immensely. They take your XML feed and create ads for you within few minutes and with a few clicks. Some of them can even help with Dynamic Search Ads.
