Running a small business isn’t easy.
To put it more bluntly, it’s hard.
Your dreams of starting a business and making lots of money and life being wonderful and becoming a big-shot profit mogul are quickly quashed when you get your first taste of that kind of customer.
You know, the difficult one.
Or, when you fail to meet your profits for the first time after a few good months to start.
Or, when you get your first “your bill is now overdue, please make payment immediately” email from a supplier.
Yup, running a small business is tough. However, it’s not only tough! It’s fun, it’s exciting, and it’s thrilling. Best of all, there is help available to anybody that may be succumbing to the toughness.
In today’s world, we have access to an array of useful tools and resources to grow our businesses. The internet has made it so easy to learn new skills and tap into new avenues of influence and growth. One such avenue is Google Ads.
What are Google Ads?
Google Ads is the leading PPC system online and by far the most popular, too. Because Google is the most popular search engine, businesses create advertisements through Google Ads services in a bid to get their websites to appear higher up on the Google search results page.
The pay-per-click method means that advertisers pay a small fee to Google for every click they receive on their ad, which results in someone visiting their site.
So, how do you get your ad to the top of the list?
Well, every time someone searches something, Google scours the different Ads advertisers and selects a few winners to hold the top ad spots on their results page. There are a few keys to getting selected, however.
We’re going to look at five of these for the rest of this article.
Are you in? Let’s do it.
Define Your Budget
One of the reasons PPC Google Ads has become popular and useable is its cost-effectiveness. Google Ads pricing in South Africa is not expensive, which means any small business, no matter how small, can do it! Yes, even yours.
The best place to start is to define how much money you want to spend on your campaign and then tailor everything around that budget. This will help you stay in line financially and not haemorrhage any money on your ad campaigns.
Keywords, Keywords, Keywords
Keywords are specific words or phrases in a piece of copy that can trigger certain target markets’ attention, and hopefully, attract them to your site. Using the right keywords in your ad copy is the first step in your ads’ journey to ranking higher on a Google search.
The right keywords are the ones that have a high volume of searches relating to them but don’t have much competition in the form of other ads using them.
Finding the right balance between keywords that are relevant, but also have a good amount of reach, is a great way to maximise your ad budget and make the most of your campaign.
Geo-Targeting
The last thing you want from your Google Ads in South Africa campaign is to have to pay for a bunch of clicks from Iceland. Unless you service Iceland? Whatever works for you!
Most small businesses in South Africa do not service Iceland, therefore it’s a good idea to target specific areas or locations that you do service so you get more bang for your buck, as the saying goes.
By targeting specific locations, you may get fewer clicks, but the clicks you do get will be hugely relevant and may even bring in some decent business.
You can also add negative locations to your ad so you don’t attract any Icelandic people etc… not that Icelandic people are negative (we’ve heard they’re lovely), but if your business doesn’t service Iceland, why waste your spending on your ad reaching locations so far away?
Landing Pages
Let’s say your ad absolutely dominates the search results page and you get clicks on clicks on clicks. That’s great! One issue, however, is that your landing page from your ad is slow and pretty unclear.
That’s going to be a problem.
You’ve got to make sure that your landing page is up-to-scratch so that when a user visits your ad page, they have an enjoyable and seamless experience. Getting the click wins you the battle, but keeping the click wins you the war.
Stay Active
A common problem that advertisers make is once they’ve set up their campaign, they don’t check their Google Ads manager account and they forget to do any form of monitoring on their ad.
The best way to achieve your ad goals is to constantly maintain and update your campaign when tweaks are needed. Yes, tweaks will be needed.
If this sounds like “too much admin” for you to think about, consider hiring Google Ads specialists like BRBD to maintain and manage your campaign for you.
In Closing
Your money is valuable, and so is your small business. Although things can get tough, especially financially, we think a tool like Google Ads is becoming more and more necessary to utilize as the world continues to move steadily into the digital age.
We’d advise that you start looking at what you’d need to run an ad for your business and get on it right away! There’s a world of customers out there waiting for your unique service.
Good luck!