Are you a small business owner looking to discover a more measurable way of generating customers and qualified leads? Or are you a marketing manager that basically makes up the entire marketing department for your company? Either way, it’s your job to research and understand all of the opportunities to grow the business by the most effective means possible.
Our team here at Blue Aspen Marketing is very aware that it can be quite overwhelming with all the various marketing options and mediums available. There’s a good chance you’re already aware of the more traditional marketing solutions for growth.
The more common forms of traditional ways to gain awareness and customers are TV and radio ads, banners, brochures, traditional mail and email, business cards, and newsletters. What do all of these forms of marketing have in common? These are all forms of outreach where people are driven to either hear, listen, or view the product or service you are promoting. That can make it difficult to capture a potential customer’s interest in a natural way as opposed to when they’re specifically looking for a product or service you offer.
That’s where the internet comes in. With the advancements and adoption of the internet in everyday life, consumers are now simply searching their needs and even their pain points. Whether they’re deciding to Google a product or pull up their map to see what is “near me,” the internet has become both the easiest and most effective option.
If your house experiences roof damage after a bad storm and you need to find a reputable roofing contractor, chances are you’re going to want to go with someone that you can trust does quality work. You’re most likely going to search for a roofing company and find out how previous customers have reviewed them.
Research by Statista shows that consumers on Google alone make more than 160 billion searches per month. That sheer number shows that user searches are at an all-time high and are trending to continue to climb.
Also, there was a massive update for Google in 2018 when they updated and rebranded their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising platform from Adwords to Google Ads. You may be asking “What is PPC advertising?” Let us break it down for you.
PPC ads, or more specifically Google Ads, have been around some time now. We do, however, still meet many small business owners and marketing managers that don’t understand or are even aware of this very powerful lead-generating alternative.
In terms of general internet advertising, these are paid digital advertisements that direct online traffic to particular websites with very targeted messaging. The business owner (You) then pay the publishers (Google) a certain amount when your ad is actually clicked and the intended action is taken. Now does it make more sense? Pay-Per-Click.
Below are examples of some common Google Ads you may be more familiar with:
You might be asking yourself how effective can these Google Ads really be? Let’s look at the numbers.
PPC ads are considered incredibly effective due to their organic nature. When a Google user begins their their research of a product or service, they will search what they need or also a pain point like “vitamin supplements” or “Knee Pain in Phoenix”. These Google Ads act as hyper-targeted results that a user is actively looking for to make a purchase.
2018 PPC Statistics show that 86% of all American consumers regularly utilize the World Wide Web to search for businesses, especially locally, that match their specified wants and needs.
As these Google Ads grow more accepted, data has revealed that roughly 7% of people viewed pay-per-click ads poorly, meaning they looked at these ads in negative way from 2016 to 2017. From 2017 to 2018, on the other hand, only 1% of consumers held negative connotations to this type of advertisement. A sizable jump in just one year and this positivity is only continuing to trend up.
The ability and creativeness of these Google Ads to seem organic in nature are the keys to their effectiveness in driving users to perspective businesses. They are then able to better understand your company and your offerings that set you apart from the competition. Additional numbers have proven that 46% of internet users can’t actually tell the difference between PPC ads and organic search results.
When trying to understand how PPC and Google Ads work, it is best to look at this form of advertising as more of a digital auction. But instead of simply bidding on a target keyword or phrase, there are two main criteria that factor into your overall ad rank, or where your ad is seen compared to your other competitors’ ads.
The first part of a Google Ad rank is the max cost-per-click you are willing to bid for the ad (there’s the auction lingo you were patiently waiting for). This is just as simple as it sounds. It’s the most you will spend for a click for that particular ad. This is very useful when trying to better measure where your money is going and the exact return-on-investment through ad performance tracking by your digital marketing agency.
The second part is your ad’s quality score. This is determined by how relevant your ad is and how useful your ad is to the user searching. Below is a breakdown of how you can better your quality score.
Both of these criteria then determine your ad rank. The best ad rank then gets the best position of how high up on the page a user will see your ad. It is important for your ads to best reflect the value you can offer to your customers whether that’s through unique services or insightful content. This is why most small and medium sized businesses that perform well with Google Ads have a marketing strategy that also pairs with a complimentary focus on organic efforts (i.e. your website, content, design).
Knowing the growing trends of any marketing will greatly improve your chances of success. Blue Aspen, in particular, offer important insights you can use to guide your content and client acquisition strategies. By understanding these numbers and looking at your own PPC analytics, you can learn everything you need to manipulate and highlight effective marketing strategy around what your customers need to see with your ads in the coming year!
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