Google was founded back in 1998 with the aim of organising the internet and allowing people to easily find what they need. It was originally called BackRub and should have been called googal if it wasn’t for a misunderstanding with the founders.
Regardless of the name, Google’s focus has always been to serve the results that best match the user’s intent before anything else.
Google works perfectly for us as users of the internet: it’s a free product that lets us find information and settle arguments. However, Google is a business and Google wants to make lots of money, so in order to monetise this free product, in 2000 they released AdWords - also known as pay-per-click ads, served at the top and originally down the right hand side of the organic search engine results page.
Since the inception of AdWords, paid search results have gone through a lot of changes and they have introduced a number of new ad products. As a result, AdWords re-branded to Google Ads in July 2018, and this now encompasses all of Google’s advertising options.
In terms of PPC, the main products that you will probably have seen are text ads and Google Shopping Ads.
Google Shopping works by pulling products from a feed based on the items within your website. It takes your image, title, and price and creates an ad. Text ads didn’t always have the option to include images but since 2020 Google introduce image extensions. You will only be able to use image extensions if your account meets the following criteria:
Google is not the only search engine that offers pay per click ads. You can also run PPC with other search engines like Yahoo, Quora and Bing.
To start using Google Ads, you will need to create your own Google Ads account and billing profile.
We recommend using Expert mode over Ads Express as this will give you greater control over your campaigns, though Google’s machine learning is incredibly useful, human intervention still helps to maximise performance.
In order to appear in Google Shopping results, you need to create a Google Merchant Centre where your product feed will be imported. Depending on your website content management system, you may be able to connect your product feed to automatically update your products in Google Merchant Centre.
There are other options available to connect a product feed to Google Merchant Centre if your content management system doesn’t do this, including using Google Sheets. If you go down this route you will need to supply the following information:
Google PPC ads work on the basis of real time bidding. Much like an auction on eBay, you place a bid for how much you would like to pay when someone enters a search term that you want your ad to appear for.
There are different ways to set your bidding strategies, such as manual bids, where you pick the amount you want to pay for each keyword and Google does the rest; automatic cost per click, where Google will set the bids for your keywords to maximise the results based on your goals; and enhanced cost per click, which uses conversion data and can adjust the bid up or down by 30% to bid on the keywords that are most likely to convert. There are some other methods of bidding you can use, but we will cover these in more detail in future blog posts.
When you set your bid, the amount you choose is not necessarily what you will pay. Like with real life auctions, you just need to out-bid the others in the auction. With Google Ads you will only pay £0.01 more than the next highest bid.
Something that is really important to consider is your ad groups quality score. As we discussed Google wants to focus on giving the user the most relevant results, this applies for ads too. Google assigns a quality score for your ads. This is based on ad relevance, landing page experience and expected click-through rate. The lower the score, the more you will have to pay per click, so it is essential to keep relivancy in mind when setting up your PPC campaigns.
That’s quite a bit to get your head around for starters, so we’ll follow this up with another post in our PPC series coming soon.
For further help and advice, contact us.
