Are you scared of committing budget to Google Ads? It’s daunting to push a campaign live when you know there is a sizeable budget behind it. When done right though, Google Ads can return $2 for every dollar spent in its platform, sometimes higher! To find out more about how Google Ads can help your business, listen to this episode of This Week In Marketing. So you have recently established your business and looking for the next step to increase traction onto your website. Great! Here we have Kevin Chen, our performance marketing lead, to guide you through Google Ads in three concise steps:

1. Think like your customer

Don’t start your ads until you know what people would be searching for and where they’re looking for information and products online. Google Ads is high intent, so it’s important to find the right intent based on what your customers would be searching. The core question you should be asking yourself is: How would you usually find your information online? Your customers are probably searching in the same way.

So how do you do this?

Here are four ways you can think like your customers:

• Do dummy searches pretending you’re a target customer. Note down what you searched to start the process
• Look at your competitors and their ads. They (particularly the bigger competitors) have most likely done their own research and testing to see what works. Use these as inspiration for your own ads
• See if you can get a customer or friend who might be a potential customer. Ask them to start searching for the product as if they’re looking to buy your product or service and take notes of what keywords they’re searching
• Look for similar keywords like this by using the keyword planner tool and similar tools to expand your coverage

2. Understand how Google Ads work

Once you have an idea of how your customers are using search engines to find your products, the next step is to understand how Google Ads works and where it is moving. Initiate this by finding out which elements you need to focus on. This will save you time and money. Additionally and conveniently, the platform is becoming more automated and AI driven. This means, you can stop stressing about your ad copy, Google will write your ad copy. It’ll even find your customers and the ones with the right intent! But with this said, the important factor to keep in mind is the audience data and how you feed into the ads platform. Focus on this. That way you will hit the right audience, rather than wasting time on those with no intent to buy from you.

3. How to utilize audiences as much as possible

So how do you utilize audiences as much as possible? Firstly, define what an audience in Google Ads is. An audience is: A group of users that the platform has been able to identify. It can be segmented and based on things like demographics and/or behaviour. To optimize the results of targeting your audience, take note of these three essential tools for achieving better results:

1. Remarketing: Separate out new and returning users and tailoring messaging and bidding etc for each audience (including different targets for each)
2. Use in-market & affinity audiences: that google provides. You can start by adding audiences on observation and seeing which ones perform better. This will give you a better understanding of your customers, and then you can similarly break them out and tailor messaging.
3. Start thinking about and researching lifetime user value. There’s ways to split your audiences based on how profitable they were. Connect Google Analytics if you haven’t already as Google Analytics, and particularly the latest version, will generate audiences likely to convert which is a great starting point. start uploading these audiences back into Google Ads, which will then generate similar audiences of users who you can target to expand your reach

Google Ads: In summary

To sum up, we spoke about three parts. One, thinking like your customers. Two, understanding how Google ads works. And three, utilizing audiences. Google Ads might seem daunting and confusing at first, but it can be quite simple once you figure out how it works.

Leverage Google Ads with Metigy

Try Metigy today and break down the process of creating Google Ads every step of the way with a simple setup. Our AI recommendations will help you capitalize on missed opportunities through keyword and audience suggestions.