Starting Google Ads for Business- 10 things to Consider

Starting with Google Ads for your business? Consider these 10 factors before you start your first campaign.

Google Ads is a powerful platform to drive potential customers to your website. But driving targeted web traffic to your business website alone will not be enough to produce great results that will transform your business.

You should consider some of these important factors before starting your Google Ads campaigns.

Suitability of Google Ads as a marketing channel for your business – Check the policies first

Google Ads is governed by very strict Google advertising policies.

Based on the nature of business, Google has banned certain business types and business practices from Google Ads platform.

For example the sale of e-cigarettes, or gambling – these are not allowed on Google Ads under present policies.

There are many more business models that are not allowed under the present policies. So check the Google Ads policies first and make sure your business or business practice is allowed under the present policies, and you are eligible to advertise your business with Google Ads.

Google Ads also has some of the stringent data collection policies, so make sure your website or landing page has the required privacy policy, terms and conditions, and disclaimer information. Otherwise your site will be suspended during the review process.

Starting with Google Ads – Evaluate Your target audience

Another thing to consider is your target audience.

Do a thorough market research and try to understand your customer behaviour. Evaluate how many of your potential customers search online for the product or service that you are planning to advertise.

Check the search volume of your main keywords in your targeted geographic area (city, state or country). Make sure Google Ads will be a suitable channel to reach your potential customers.

Your advertising budget

Google Ads traffic is not free.

You will have to pay for each click that your ad receives with this advertising model. Your advertising budget is going to play a very crucial part in deciding the success of your Google Ads campaigns.

There are two common ‘budgeting’ mistakes that can happen during the initial Google Ads campaign launch.

One mistake is spending huge amount of money on a non optimized campaign (without any doubt the results will be disasterous) and the second is starting with a non realistic very low budget, which will not be enough to produce any significant result.

If you are completely new to Google Ads, start with a low test campaign budget. But this ‘low’ budget must be good enough to produce statistically significant results to evaluate the suitability of Google Ads for your business.

Consider the average cost per click of your keywords and the search volume in your targeted area before deciding your Google Ads budget.

Is your website good enough?

You should have clear marketing goals when you start your Google Ads campaign. And your website must be suitable to achieve your marketing goals.

Your site should have enough quality content to help a potential customer to make a buying decision. The navigation of your site should help visitors to find the content they are looking for. And the site should be without distractions to improve conversion rates.

Most of the websites are not designed from a marketing point of view and not suitable for producing good results from targeted website traffic like Google Ads traffic.

So what will you do, if your website is not suitable to produce good results from targeted Google Ads traffic, and you pay for each click?

You don’t have to redesign your entire website here!

A stand alone landing page designed with a strategic conversion funnel, with minimum distraction is the solution. The landing page should have genuine helpful content helping the visitor to make a purchase decision.

Be careful when starting Google Ads – Mistakes can waste a lot of money

Mistakes during the planning, set-up and execution stages of a Google Ads campaign can be very costly.

Mistakes in any part of the campaign (keyword selection, match types, ads, landing pages and campaign targeting and settings) will result in non-profitable ad spend. This can be devastating for your business.

Start your campaigns with a clear, long term strategic plan.

Do you have the expertise to manage your Google Ads account?

Google Ads is a complex advertising platform and it is highly competitive.

You must be an expert in Google Ads if you want to produce good results with it. As you are spending money on each click to bring a visitor to your website, make those visits count. Make sure a lot of those visitors are turning to loyal customers.

Without expertise in Google Ads you will be wasting money with each click. So if you want to run a profitable Google Ads campaign for your business, learn more and more about the platform before you start advertising.

If you don’t have the time or expertise in Google Ads, hire someone knowledgeable to run your campaigns.

The money you will spend on hiring a Google Ads expert will be much lower than the amount that you will be wasting if you don’t.

And with an expert managing your Google Ads account you can expect good results from the beginning.

Analyze your competition

Google Ads gives every advertiser equal opportunity.

But still it will be difficult for small advertisers to out muscle established big advertisers. Most of these bid advertising campaigns will be managed by either dedicated in-house teams or big advertising agencies. So you or the team managing your campaigns must be well versed in the most advanced features and changes in Google Ads to run your campaigns profitably.

Always analyze your competition and learn from them.

Don’t expect magical results from day one

While starting with Google Ads, a lot of new advertisers expect magical results from day one. That may not be the case in reality.

Google Ads is highly competitive and a lot of internal and external factors are involved in deciding the success of a Google Ads campaign.

You can achieve amazing results with Google Ads, but don’t expect it to happen overnight. Every campaign will need time to test, measure and optimize to produce great results.

A long term strategy is needed

Each campaign needs time and optimization to produce the desired results. And meaningful optimization can be done only after getting statistically significant data points and trends.

So start your Google Ads campaigns with all the required caution and planning, and give it enough time to succeed with proper optimization.

Accurately track results from the beginning

Not accurately tracking the campaign results can be the biggest mistake you can make.

You must track your Google Ads campaign results (it can be leads, sales, sign-up, subscription or something else) from the beginning. Use Google Ads conversion tracking tool to track conversions. This will help you to accurately measure the success of you campaigns and optimize it for better results.

Also track all your website traffic activities and user behaviour with Google Analytics.

Give enough thought to all these factors and plan well. Then starting Google Ads campaigns for your business will be an easy task.