Google Ads is a pay-per-click platform that gives you the advantage of offering your products to potential customers through advertising on Google Search, advertising on the Display Network, and the Google affiliate network, with pay-per-click billing.
Google ads advertising is recommended for your online store or offline business to reach potential customers looking for/needing your products or services at that moment. Example: a user is urgently looking for “dentist in Sofia on Saturday”.
Search Network Ads
Text PPC ads are shown to users when they are actively searching for products and services like yours on Google.
With search ads, you will have the opportunity to encourage internet users to take action on your site, such as subscribing to a newsletter and making a conversion.
You can use them to increase online sales and traffic to your website and attract more customers.
Search ads can be supplemented with extensions. They can help you provide potential customers with more information about you.
If you have a physical store, you can add a location extension to let people know if you're nearby.
You can also use links to product pages on the online store, display product reviews, and a contact phone number.
To promote your business, if you are just entering the market, you can create a brand campaign targeting keywords with your brand name.
In Google Ads, you are able to create two versions of your search ads to track the performance of each and, when you collect data, easily choose which one to keep and which one to optimize.
You have a dashboard at your disposal that shows you reports, analyses, and suggestions to take to improve your campaigns.
Display Ads
Display Network ads build on Search ads with design.
Search ads only include text and have a limited number of characters, making it very difficult to attract the user's attention and highlight all of your benefits.
Display advertising, on the other hand, is a combination of text, images, video, audio, and your brand logo.
Responsive display ads
Responsive display ads automatically adjust to the available space by adjusting their size, type, and format to appear in as many places as possible and achieve better efficiency.
This ensures that you will show your ads and products to enough potential customers browsing all types of websites.
The advantage of ads is that they do not intrude on users or interrupt them, but blend in with the design and structure of the sites.
For responsive ads to work successfully, you need to upload various assets such as images, headlines, logos, videos, and descriptions to Google Ads.
When you're ready, the optimal mix of your assets will appear on websites, apps, YouTube, and Gmail.
Uploaded display ads
If you really want your ads to be polished down to the smallest detail, you have the option to upload your own.
Google supports JPG, PNG, and GIF formats, but pay attention to the dimensions of the images you upload.
Even if you are eligible to place your ad on a specific placement, it won't show if it doesn't meet the size specifications for that placement.
To make sure you don't have a problem, upload different sizes.
Gmail ads
Google Ads allows you to display expandable interactive ads above the “Promotions” tab in Gmail inboxes.
You will be required to pay when a user clicks on the collapsed ad.
Once it expands, any subsequent clicks on the content will cost you nothing.
The open ad is full-size like an email and the user is able to interact with the included images and text.
Also, the user can, if they decide, save the ad and send it to their contact as an email message.
Example of an expanded and collapsed gmail ad:
Google Discovery ad
Discovery ads are visual ads that allow you to reach a specific audience.
Ads for this campaign type appear in Google feeds on YouTube, the Google app, and Gmail.
Their idea is to help you connect with an audience at a time when they are open to “discovery” of new products and services. The ultimate goal is to get you more conversions.
To ensure that the campaign is successful and the ads are as appropriate and relevant as possible, Google uses its algorithm and online signals/user behavior.
A single user's behavior can include actions such as downloading an app, searching for a product, visiting a website, and watching a video.
Differences between display ads and discovery ads
Images – discovery ads can include either a single image or a chain of images (carousel) of up to 10.
They can be square-shaped, horizontal or vertical.
In contrast, display ads do not include the option for carousel ads.
Bidding - discovery ads aim to bring you more conversions, so the only strategies you can use are maximize conversions or target CPA.
While display ads allow you to bid for clicks, impressions, conversions, conversion value, and ROAS.
Targeting – Both types of ads use retargeting and custom audiences, but discovery ads reach users with higher intent.
Forms – Something that discovery ads have that display ads don’t is the ability to include a form in Gmail. This will allow you to collect data about your users directly from the ad.
Advantages of display ads
Display ads help with brand recognition
If people are yet to learn about you, you need to somehow grab their attention. With display ads, you can introduce them to your brand, and in time, they won't be able to confuse you with anyone else.
It usually takes quite a few encounters with your brand's ads, about 10, until consumers decide to trust you and order from you.
Your display ads will remind them all the time that your business offers a product or service that they might need at some point:
When that moment comes, your name will pop into their head and they will visit your online store.
With display ads you target the right people
When setting up display campaigns, you have the opportunity to select the most relevant audiences for your brand.
You have many audience categories available to help you navigate more easily.
The first categories are related to demographic factors and include “Parents”, “Married”, “Students” and “Renters”.
The second are affinity categories, where you can target audiences like “Shopping Enthusiasts”, “Travel Lovers”, “People who often dine out”.
You also have the choice to show your ads to categories with users who intend to purchase items such as “Clothing & Accessories”, “Auto Parts”, “Baby & Kids Products”, and “Home Furnishings”.
Another criterion by which you can select an audience for your advertisement is life events.
They include categories like “People graduating soon from college,” “People who recently bought a home,” and “People who recently started a new job.”
Once you consider your brand, your products, and think about who the people would be who would need and benefit from what you offer, you will easily target the right category.
Another advantage of the Display Network is the ability to specify which sites your display ads should or should not appear on, thus isolating unnecessary traffic and leaving only the most relevant.
For example, clicks from mobile apps, particularly games, are often unintentional or children click on your ads while playing. Therefore, you can exclude them as placements.
You also have the option to choose which locations your ads will appear in. If you've noticed that people are converting the most in a certain area, target that area.
Display ads bring you leads
Besides giving you the opportunity to attract new customers, display ads have another trick up their sleeve – remarketing.
It allows you to return users who were on your site, browsed a category but left, or also added a product to the cart but did not complete their order.
Through remarketing, after a visitor leaves your site, they will be shown a personalized ad.
It will aim to remind him of what he missed and your advantages over the others, to convince him to come back and complete his order:
Since this user has already shown interest in your product, you only need to engage them a little more to make a deal with you.
Read more about Google Ads for online stores: how are you losing money if you're not reaching your site visitors?
Display ads help you stand out from the competition
Google Ads has an option to create custom segments.
The advantage you have with them is the ability to target users who have visited competitors' sites or searched for their products.
To create such a segment, go to “Tools and settings” and then under the “Shared Library” section, select “Audience manager”.
Click on “Segments”, then on “Custom segments” and finally on the plus sign.
What you are shown is the following:
To target competitor keywords, check the second option – “People who searched for some of these words/phrases on Google” and fill in.
Examples of words/phrases to add include competitors' brands and product names they offer.
In case you want to reach users who have visited sites like those of your competitors – from the other two options below, select “People viewing types of websites”.
Then add the URLs of your competitors' sites in the field.
Display campaigns contribute to the success of your search campaigns
Even if you don't get conversions from display campaigns, as we mentioned, their role is very important for building brand awareness.
Very often, users who have seen your display ad then search for your name on Google.
If you have a search campaign targeting keywords with your brand name, in this case its ads will appear as a search result and there is a high chance that they will click and convert.
Also, if you have shown specific products/categories that you offer through display ad images like these here:
users can also search for them in Google Search.
If you have a search campaign targeting keywords related to products in the “baby sets” category, users will see results with your ads linking to the relevant category/product.
Again, it may turn out that part of the credit, if you achieve a conversion, belongs to the display campaign.
Reasons to trust Google Ads for your online store
-
High return on investment
It is very difficult for an online store without advertising to encourage its visitors to take an action further down the sales funnel.
While with ppc advertising for online stores This can be achieved much faster, as when users search for products and services on Google Search, a large portion of them already have purchase intent.
Also, because Google constantly collects data about your users and their behavior and interests, it ensures that the ads they see will be as relevant and accurate as possible.
-
Increases leads and customers
In most cases, users who visit your store for the first or second time do not convert.
However, this does not mean that you have wasted your money and time, quite the opposite.
There is a high probability that the visitor has become a lead – they have subscribed to your newsletter, sent you an inquiry, and shared their data with you.
The lead is very valuable to you, because once you have their data, you have a greater chance of converting them into a customer.
The moment you start getting more sales, at least 50 in 30 days, to make sure that enough data has been collected and the algorithm will work properly, you have the option to switch to Smart bidding.
With this type of bidding, the algorithm itself suggests a target CPA, with the aim of increasing your sales and potential customers.
Also, when he determines, taking into account signals such as device and location, that the probability of a particular user converting is high, he will offer a higher cost per click.
Conversely, when signals indicate a lower chance of achieving a sale, the algorithm will bid at a lower cost per click.
If you want to understand more about the differences between manual and automatic bidding strategies, watch this video from expert Kiril Yovev:
-
You learn which segments work for your business
Once your account is filled with data, you will have statistics available to help you make decisions about future campaigns.
You have results showing which age groups are searching and ordering from you the most and which ones you can lower bids on or stop completely.
The same goes for locations.
By monitoring the results by location, you can find out in which areas your products and brand are most sought after, which ones convert and which ones you don't need, so you don't spend unnecessary money on advertising in them.
And when you see the report on the audiences you are targeting, you can check which ones are the most successful and look for those closest to them and add them to your campaign.
-
Integration with Google Analytics
In addition to the Google Ads platform, the Google team has also developed another one called Google Analytics.
She even collects more-detailed statistics about your website visitors. Only part of what the platform can show you is user engagement information.
It includes metrics such as time spent on the site, how many pages users visited, and what percentage of users entered the site but then left without taking any action.
Thanks to the integration between the two platforms, you can also monitor these metrics from Google Ads itself, once you link the two accounts.
-
Competition information
The platform can also give you information about who your competitors are.
From "Auction insights” tab shLearn which businesses are bidding on the keywords you are targeting.
Moreover, you will see how many times your competitors were in the top position on the results page, how many times they overtook you, and which businesses showed up in lower positions than you.
-
Fast results
Once you have created a Google Ads account, you will see that In just a few days, you will collect data that you can analyze.
You will quickly get a sense of how your ads are performing and you will be able to adjust bids and see what needs to be optimized.
Unlike the paid Google Ads advertising for online stores, search engine optimization and organic results are very slow to bring results in the beginning.
The time you spend waiting for data to accumulate, instead of wasting it, could be used to test different approaches.
Therefore, advertising in Google Ads is much more effective if you want to achieve quick results for your online store.
Of course, you still shouldn't rush into making frequent changes, as Google works even more accurately and better now that it has more data.
If you have chosen one type of offering, give it a certain amount of time to complete its training.
Once enough information is gathered, only then can you start thinking about changing the strategy if you notice that it doesn't work for your business goals.
-
You have control
In case you think that Google will spend all your money without any results, that is not correct at all.
Google Ads provides you with ample options for controlling and managing your campaigns.
You have the ability to control the following:
- How much will it cost you and what will your bids be worth?
- Enable, pause, and delete your ad
- Setting campaign goals
- Conversion control
- Keyword and audience control
- What to include and how your ads should look
- The way you present your brand
With all these control options, you will manage and optimize your ads and campaigns as you see fit to get the best results for your online store.
Provided you don't need as much control or don't have the time, as mentioned above, you can use Smart Bidding.
With such bidding, if you choose conversions as your goal, Google takes care of everything for you and acts in a way that maximizes efficiency.
If you still want to be aware of the processes and partly change something to your liking, you can do so.
Conclusion
We assume that after all the advantages of advertising through the Google Ads platform listed here, you are convinced to include it in your online store strategy.
In case you want to do it but are not sure you can handle the platform, send us an inquiry for Google advertising for e-shops and we'll talk about your project.
Related articles: How to sell successfully with WordPress for your online store?
