How To Run A Google AdWords Express Ad

How To Run A Google AdWords Express Ad

We all know that the higher your business is ranked on Google’s front page, the more clicks your website is going to get.

But what if you wanted to give your business a little boost while your organic rankings climb the front page ladder?

Enter Google AdWords, the most-used pay-per-click advertising program available and responsible for approximately 70% of Google’s revenue.

By creating a Google AdWords Express Ad, you can quickly spread the word about your business to the geographic areas that are most important to your business. Getting ranked at the top of Google organically can take time, but an AdWords Ad can help speed up the process of driving in customers.

In this article, we’re going to show you how you can create your own Ad to promote your business.

1. Getting Started With Google AdWords Express

To start, go to the Google AdWords website and sign in. Note that when you sign in, it’s best to use the account that is associated with your Google Business page.

If you don’t yet have your business set up, the first thing you’ll be asked to do is enter your business name and website. Once this is done, you can start creating your goal.

2. Choosing Your Goal

Once you click “Create Ad”, you’ll be taken to a screen where you can select the type of ad goal you wish to reach.

Google AdWords Express has three options to pick from: Calls to your business, visits to your storefront, and taking action on your website.

The option you select depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with this ad. If you want to primarily get customers over the phone and/or talk to them before setting up an appointment, choosing the “Call your business” goal is going to give you those results.

(Side Note: if you want to track how many calls you’re getting from your Google Business page, check out this article on how to do so)

Similarly, if you want your first interaction with a potential customer to be face-to-face and you have a physical business location that you want people to visit, the “Visit your storefront” option is the perfect goal to choose. Or perhaps you simply want to see more results coming from your website. If this is the case and most of your business is done online, or you want to track an action such as a sign-up or purchase, then the “Take action on your website” goal is the one for you.

The choice is yours. The goal that you select will be whichever is most important to your business right now.

Once you’ve found the goal you want to move forward with, click “pick goal”.

3. Creating Your Ad

A) Location

Determining where you want your ad to show is the next step to creating your ad. For example, if we are an SEO company in Guelph, we are going to begin by targeting some of the larger markets around us.

We have the option of targeting these locations either by the distance from where we are (in this case, Guelph) or by manually selecting the cities and regions we want our ad to display in.

As you can see from the screenshot, not only are we going to be targeting Guelph, but we’re also going to have our ad display to people searching in Kitchener, Hamilton, Cambridge and Milton. By targeting these cities, we’re reaching a potential audience of more than 2.4 million people each month. This obviously increases our potential exposure as opposed to if we only targeted Guelph.

A neat feature of Google AdWords Express is that during the entire time that you’re creating your ad, you can view your potential audience size. Everything you do to your ad will have an effect on this, so be sure to keep an eye on it throughout the creation period.

B) Your Offerings

Once you’ve locked down the area(s) that you want to target, it’s time to start specifying your ad. First, you’ll have to select the language you want your ad to display in as well as key in on what you want to promote. For example, being an SEO company we may want to advertise “SEO Services”.

Once we pinpoint what we want to promote, we can specify when we want to appear depending on the keywords people are using.

C) Designing Your Ad

This is where you can tell your customers about what you do and what you have to offer. By filling out two headlines, a description and listing your website.

Note that you only have a limited amount of space for your headlines and description, so make sure that you are telling your customers exactly what you offer.

You can also add your business’ phone number to the ad, making it simple for people to phone you directly from it.

It helps that while you’re filling out this information, a preview of what your ad will look like updates as you go.

4. Setting Your Budget

The final step in getting your Google AdWords Express Ad live is to determine how much you want to spend. Google requires that you spend a minimum amount of $70.00 per month with AdWords Express. Obviously, the more money you put towards the ad, the larger exposure it will have.

While determining the amount, you can see the per-day average it breaks down to as well as the estimated ad reach, which is based on businesses like you that are spending a similar budget.

5. Review & Launch

Lastly, you can review all of the settings that you’ve chosen for the ad before finalizing it. Once you confirm the ad, you’ll have to enter your billing information so that Google can charge you when people click on your ad. If you already have your billing information setup, you’re all finished!

Conclusion

If you’re in the process of improving your organic search results but aren’t yet where you want to be, or you simply want to give yourself a bit of a boost, an AdWords Express ad can be very beneficial to your business.

If you want to have us review your website and give you a free 30-minute consultation where we show you how to generate more local customers from your website, click here.