You may be forgiven for thinking that the more someone is willing to pay for an ad, the more likely they are to appear at the top of the first page on Google. This is not the case, you can win a higher ad position with a lower cost per click than your competitors.
There’s a process that happens with each Google search to decide which ads will appear for that specific search and in which order they are ranked.
This is called the ‘ad auction’. But it’s not like a standard auction because the winner is not always the highest bidder.
Google takes into account how popular your ad is likely to be
At auction time, a lightning-fast calculation takes place. It looks at…
- The number of people it expects to click the ad
- How relevant the ad is to the context of the user’s search term
- The relevance and performance of the page users will land on
- The amount you’re willing to pay above the reserve price
Your score, combined with the amount you’re bidding determines a value known as Ad Rank. Ads are displayed in descending order according to their Ad Rank.
This is great news for small businesses!
In many cases, large companies are casting their net far and wide. Their main focus is volume and as a result, they tend to pay more for their ads.
Smaller businesses are able to take more of a targeted approach naturally. By focusing your aim on a specific goal you can compete on ad quality and relevance rather than price.
This can be achieved by creating individual ads and landing pages with the sole aim to boost the sales or leads of a specific product or service.
If that sounds like a lot of work, that’s precisely why the larger companies struggle.
Sound too good to be true?
“Google wants to get the most money for their ad space, surely?”
Well, sort of. But that’s not their main objective. Relevance is.
Imagine for a minute that the highest bidder always won at auction time. The results page would be flooded with multinational corporations. They’d simply have the monopoly.
Whilst this might seem like good business sense, the results are not likely to be the most relevant to you and your search term.
How long would it take for you to give up on Google if it returned irrelevant results every time you searched for something?
So what’s stopping you?
Setting up an ad using Adwords Express (a user-friendly alternative to Google Ads) is relatively simple. You just need to:
- Set up an account
- Add your billing information
- Set your bid
- Create your ad
- Press ‘Go’
Making sure that your ad will stand out in a sea of competing ads isn’t quite so simple.
As we mentioned earlier, creating an ad and setting a bid for your cost per click is only a small part of the process. For your ad to rank highly and provide you with a good return on your investment there is more work to do.
Research into the terms which your customers are looking for and content that calls them to action is vital if you want your ad to help your business grow.
These things are time-consuming and can be quite complex, which often deters small businesses from using Google Ads. However, the results when an ad is created properly can be phenomenal.
If you would like to try advertising online but don’t have the time or know-how then give us a shout. We’ll never bamboozle you with jargon or ‘sell to you’ and we’ll only advise using Google Ads if we’re confident that it will work for you.
