Google AdWords Archives - Resourceful Business

Let the Power of Google Ads Do Your Marketing Heavy Lifting

27 September 2018September 27, 2018Ann Mills2 Comments

In Field of Dreams, Iowa farmer Ray Kinsella walks through a cornfield and hears a voice that tells him, “If you build it, he will come.” The voice inspires Ray to build a baseball diamond in the midst of his cornfield where Ray later meets the spirits of Chicago White Sox legend “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and his own father. At the end of the movie when Ray is trying to decide whether to sell his property to avoid foreclosure, a local writer assures him, “People will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.”

When business owners invest time and money on a website, their hope is that people will come. The importance of understanding and using Google Ads is that they drive website traffic and ensure people most definitely come. Once on your website, visitors can buy from your e-commerce store, fill in a lead form, or learn more about your business.

What are Google Ads?

Google Ads are Pay Per Click (PPC) digital advertising campaigns. The ads are described as Pay Per Click because the advertiser only pays for the ad when someone clicks on it, not per ad impression. There are Search Network ads which are text ads and Display Network ads which are images. In June of this year, Google rolled out Smart Campaigns, a more automated, optimized alternative geared towards small business.

PPC campaigns drive traffic to your website so visitors can see the products and services you provide. When people look at a page of internet search results in Google, it’s hard to distinguish between ads and the organic search results because text ads have only a small “Ad” box near the website address. Ads blend in with search results, and therefore, are a powerful way to get potential customers to a website.

How do Google Ads work?

In its simplest form, you can think of Google Ads as four-layered ad campaigns. From top to bottom:

Campaigns – how much do I want to spend or geographically, where do I want my ads to show?
Ad Sets – what are my different products, services or groups?
Ads – what is my message?
Keywords – what words or phrases will someone type into Google when they are searching for my product or service?

A digital marketer will set up a campaign by thinking about how much to spend, who to target and where they are, and what product or service you are advertising. At the core of every Google Ads campaign is a keyword list, a list of search terms or phrases a person may type into Google when they search for your product or service.

The Google Ads algorithm determines which ads to show, the Ad Rank, based on two criteria: the maximum keyword Bid you have specified and Quality Score which is a combination of ad relevance, Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and quality of the landing page for the ad. The landing page is the website page where the person who clicks on the ad is directed.

How can Google Ads grow my business?

On a desktop computer, approximately two-thirds of all search queries are done on Google. On mobile devices, some estimates suggest Google controls 95% of all search queries. Therefore, by being part of the search results mix, Google Ads drive website traffic. When someone clicks on an ad, it brings him or her to your website and then you’re in the driving seat. You can try to prompt your site visitors to take actions like purchase a product, fill in a lead form, or schedule a demo.

Google Ads Pay Per Click campaigns do some of the marketing heavy lifting by allowing your business to be more visible in search and driving potential customers to your website. PPC campaigns push your message out in a structured, systematic, and targeted way to an audience that has an interest in your product or service.

When it comes to Google Ads, if you build them, people will most definitely come and your business will grow.

Interested in learning more about Google Ads campaigns? Contact us.

Photo credit: Field of Dreams, 1989, Universal Studios

The Essential Customer You May Not Be Reaching

8 January 2018January 9, 2018Ann MillsLeave a comment

According to the United States Census Bureau, Hispanics are the largest minority in the United States comprising 17.6% of the population. By some estimates, in 2060, this demographic is projected to grow to 119 million people in the US, 28% of the population.

Today:

four states have populations that are more than 30% Hispanic
Spanish is second to English as the most-used language in the US, and
the US bilingual population is estimated at 11 million Spanish speakers

In digital marketing, Hispanics are an essential target audience hiding in plain sight. Hiding because they are often not considered in English ad campaigns, and marketing campaigns that target people who primarily speak English may not be accessing the Hispanic population living in the United States.

There are simple ways to broaden your marketing campaigns to include this influential and growing customer demographic. Here are three campaign tweaks that can bring this essential target audience within reach:

1. Include the Spanish language in Google AdWords campaign settings

If your business uses Google AdWords campaigns, within Google AdWords, one of the settings is Languages. It’s defined as the language of the sites where you want your ads to appear. When deciding where to show your ad, Google looks at a person’s recently viewed pages, his or her language setting and the language of recent search queries. Therefore, even if you are running an English Google AdWords campaign, it makes sense to add Spanish to your Languages settings; otherwise customers who have their Google Search Settings configured to show search results in Spanish may never see your ad. This audience is looking at and reading ads with the primary copy in English every day.

2. Target the Hispanic demographic using Facebook ads

There is an easy way to target the Hispanic demographic while configuring your Facebook ads. When creating an audience, under Interests > Additional Interests, you will see several options under Multicultural Affinity.

You can target the Hispanic audience and specify whether the household is bilingual, has the dominant language of English or Spanish, or you can simply choose Hispanic (US-All) for a broad sweep. The Hispanic (US-All) segment currently targets over 35 million people.

Facebook Ads Manager

3. Add Spanish posts to your social media

Especially for location-based businesses, create occasional social media posts for Spanish-speaking consumers. Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have a user-friendly TRANSLATE feature for posts. You can keep Spanish messaging straightforward, and reflect copy from your English posts. The trick is to keep the copy simple but remain true to your brand voice. Services such as Google Translate and Bing Translator work pretty well with simple sentences, and using them avoids the need for a human translator.

The Hispanic population in the United States is an essential, influential audience for business. With a few minor changes or additions, your marketing campaigns can start to engage with this demographic in a more consistent, mindful way. That’s a win-win for marketers and customers alike, or perhaps we should say, ¡ eso es ganar-ganar!

Data Studio Connectors: 4 Easy Steps to More Insightful Analytics

28 October 2017September 12, 2022Ann MillsLeave a comment

Data visualization matters – a lot.

By some estimates, 65% of people are visual learners and process information best by seeing it. To a certain degree, however, we may all be visual learners when it comes to complex data because a well-designed visual can condense lots of numbers into a more readily apparent outcome or trend. Not surprisingly, when it comes to business, data visualization is a critical tool. Timely, transparent analytics in graphic, bite-sized formats can help managers understand their companies better, identify potential customers, and hone in on effective growth strategies.

If you’re a digital marketer, chances are you work with data all the time. But, in reality, your clients may not. Even with mounds of fascinating metrics available in their marketing reports, managers often come back to us and ask, “OK…now what?” The problem is compounded by the fact that marketing data is everywhere – different platforms, different formats, different reporting options, different reference points.

In April of this year, I wrote about Google Data Studio, a tool that pulls data from the Google ecosystem and can be used to populate configurable, visual dashboards. It’s become an absolute mainstay in our client reporting toolkit allowing us to give performance snapshots across a broad range of digital marketing metrics. However, beyond the data you can mine from Google, there are many other important performance metrics to consider – social media ad engagement, email campaign click-through rates, video views – to name a few. Now, with Data Studio Connectors, you can pull all types of data into your Data Studio (DS) dashboard from platforms that are outside Google.

I decided to take Data Studio Connectors for a spin. These Connectors were launched by Supermetrics on September 7, 2017. Now there is no need to first pull all the marketing data into Google Sheets and then into Google Data Studio – you can use the Connectors to pull the data directly. I set myself a challenge – I wanted to layer some social media metrics onto a client report we had already created in Data Studio that included Google Analytics and Google AdWords data.

It worked! My new, improved dashboard report consolidated, streamlined, and visually standardized social media metrics into our current Data Studio report.

Here’s a step by step:

Step 1: Pick a Data Studio Connector

Go to the Data Studio Connectors homepage, scroll through the available Connectors and choose which one you would like. I picked Facebook Insights and clicked the Try now button. On the next screen in the top left where it says Untitled Data Source, I named my Connector data source (Agency Tip: Put your client name in there too, so you know which client) and then click Authorize.

Step 2: Connect your outside data source

I was prompted to choose a Google account, and I did. Once the Community Connector was authorized, I then had to Authorize Facebook Insights, my chosen Connector. I followed a prompt allowing Supermetrics to authenticate and connect to my Facebook Insights, and to be on the safe side, I decided to ensure I was both logged into my Facebook account and had the correct client Facebook business page opened in a tab too.

Step 3: Choose the correct Facebook page

This step is mission critical if you’re a digital marketer as you’ll no doubt manage and be an admin to many client Facebook pages. You are given the option to see all the pages you manage and then you choose the page you want. Once you choose the Facebook page from the drop-down list and CONNECT, the Data Connector will pull data specific to that page.

On the next page which shows all of your data sources, you can edit them (I didn’t) and CREATE REPORT. You’ll notice the portal looks pretty familiar now as you are in Data Studio.

ADD TO REPORT the data source that is being pulled into your Data Studio portal via the Connector.

Step 4: Build Out Your Google Data Studio Report

In the final report building stage, there’s good news, bad news and then some more good news.

The first bit of good news is that all of your data is now being pulled in by the chosen DS Connector and is accessible in a list of metrics. The bad news is that there are a lot of metrics – I counted 123 in total for the Facebook Insights Connector.

If you don’t correctly align the:

Data Source
Dimension
Metric

you will not get meaningful metrics in the dashboard. When you have to choose from People Clicking Your Content, Content Clicks, Post Unique Link Clicks, or Post Other Clicks, it can be a challenge. I toggled back and forth to the Facebook portal to confirm I was choosing the exact metric I wanted and built out the report. If you’ve never built a Data Studio report, read about how to build one in our blog, Google Data Studio: 3 Easy Steps to Your Website Analytics.

The additional piece of good news is Supermetrics is in the process of developing a Facebook Insights Template for Data Studio. The metrics will be pre-selected and split by correct dimension thereby simplifying a currently complex process.

All in all, I thought the Supermetrics DS Connector I used to build Facebook Insights data into our Google Data Studio report was excellent. Prompts guide you through the authorization process and once the outside data source of choice is connected, you can utilize the powerful drag and drop report building functionality and customization capability of Data Studio. And although it’s fun to build reports, in the end, it comes down to data visualization.

If, as marketers, we can present data-driven insights to our clients in a holistic, transparent way, they will run better, more profitable businesses.