When it comes to advertising for your business, Google Ads is an incredibly powerful tool. But, like all tools built to help you with advertising, there are a large amount of different reports and tools to get lost in. So whether you’re new to Google Ads, or jumping back in after a long time away, let’s take a look at the five high-level things to know when starting to use Google Ads!

Target Location – According to Google, “Location targeting helps you focus your advertising to help find the right customers for your business, and will hopefully help you increase your profits as a result.” It’s the setting that allows you to choose the specific locations you’d like to target when reaching your customers. With location targeting, you can set your location to be as large as an entire country, to as small as a set radius around your business. Google can also suggest any possible related locations that may help based on your location settings. Similarly, you can also exclude certain locations or regions if you don’t want your ads to show there. 

Keywords – Google defines keywords as “Words or phrases describing your product or service that you choose to help determine when and where your ad can appear.” Your keyword choices are incredibly important, and you want to make sure you choose relevant, high-quality keywords. This will help your campaigns reach more interested audiences that are more likely to become customers. A well made keyword list focusing on relevant keywords alongside managed bids could help your ads’ performance as well as assisting in avoiding higher costs. When your keywords aren’t as optimized, they can potentially lead to inefficient ad spend and lower ad position. 

Extensions – Google states that “Extensions expand your ad with additional information, giving people more reasons to choose your business.” Extensions have the potential to increase ad click-through rates. Formats for these extensions are varied and can include: call buttons, location information, links to specific websites pages, additional text, and more. Google Ads will select which extensions to show for each individual search through Google. More importantly, it’s crucial to add more content to your ad so that it gets better visibility in search results, which is where extensions come in handy. Luckily, extensions are free to add to your ads, making it hard to resist adding them to help your performance.

Campaigns – Campaigns refer to the entire set of ad groups: ads, keywords, and bids. All of these share a budget, target location, and other settings you’ve put into place. They’re often utilized to organize the various categories, products, and/or services that your business offers. Every Google Ads account can have more than one ad campaign running at any given time, and each one consists of one, or potentially more, ad groups. Campaigns can allow you to organize your ads in a way which could help make viewing data, audience targeting, and managing relevance easier in the long run, as well as managing your budget. 

Landing Pages – Finally, we come to landing pages, which Google defines as “..the webpage where people end up after they click your ad.” For each ad you run, you have to specify a final URL. This will determine the landing page your customers will go to when they click on your ad. Keep in mind though that it is Google’s policy to make your landing page and displayed URL have the same exact domain. Your landing page’s experience is a crucial factor in determining your keywords’ Quality Scores. The experience is usually represented through measures like ease of user navigation, the number of links on the landing page, user expectations based on ad creative, and the usefulness and relevance of the information on your landing page.

These five items are crucial to know about in Google Ads since it can help your efforts be more successful, as well as being key to understanding their impact and relevance. If you have any questions about this topic, feel free to reach out to your account manager, or contact us directly at contact@10thdegree.com.