As the search service that now runs our whole life, of course the answer is yes. Google has tentacles into so much of our data, that it makes sense to harness the extreme power of the Google platforms to help your business meet its future customers.

And by extreme I mean 3.8 billion searches per day. Google Ads, which you may know as Google Adwords works with a variety of Google’s 250 products, their simple goal is to support the online marketer in their marketing campaigns.

However, Google Ads doesn’t only do search engine advertising. You can use the platform to place different types of advertising, like display advertising (Google AdSense), video advertising (via YouTube) and Google Shopping (that category in the menu bar you can click on when you Google something.)

The price of Google Ads are determined by auctions. You place your bid on certain keywords. When someone enters the keyword into Google, the Google Ads algorithm evaluates the bids. Besides the amount of the bid, the so-called “quality score” is important to the system.

The quality score is a metric created by Google that is used to determine the quality and relevance of an advertisement for a specific keyword. In addition to relevance, benefits and customer focus play an important role, too.

Google uses three things to determine the quality score: the ad, the keyword you are bidding for and the web page you want the ad to link to. That’s why you want to make sure you don’t just optimise your ads, but you also optimise the web page.

To set up your ad, you click on the Google Ads menu. The process of setting up your ad is straightforward, and much like Facebook ads, relies strongly on your understanding of your demographics and what you are trying to achieve with your advertisement – more conversions, more page visits, sales leads, signs ups, app promotions etc. Google will auto-suggest much of the info you need to get set up which helps if you are a newbie, and once you get more seasoned you can tweak around and get more nuanced with your approach. For more information, check out Google’s official documentation to get you started. Once all your demographics, keywords, bidding and ad triggers (an ad trigger determines when your keyword is relevant for an auction and when it isn’t) are done, you can upload your visuals and copy. If you don’t have these already designed, you can use a tool like Canva to create your own.

Don’t forget: A/B testing is important to validate your hypothesis around the visuals and content of the ads you’ve created. Play with different keyword sizes, different ad triggers and much more. Run a variety of ads and use the analytics function to see which ones are your best option for getting a click. Start with a small budget and keep close track of your results, then you can increase your spend in line with your overall marketing goals and strategy.

And finally don’t forget that one of the simplest and FREE ways you can optimise your relationship with the Google machine is to complete the Google My Business profile which will instantly push your business when potential customers are searching for your sector.