Google advertising is a great marketing strategy for small businesses. You can show an ad for your business to people who are searching for your type of business at that very moment and who are looking for businesses in your area. This type of targeting makes most small business owners want to advertise on Google.

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What Is Google AdWords?
Google AdWords (now Google Ads) is an online advertising service that allows businesses to have their ads run on Google’s search results page. The ads look almost identical to the normal search results, with the only difference being the small word “Ad” in green. Google ads will show at the top and bottom of a search results page.

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Example of Google Ads

If you are interested in learning more about how to rank highly in the organic search results, read our 7 steps to increasing Google page rank.

How Advertising on Google Works
When a consumer searches for a term or phrase, Google will show the consumer relevant ads based on the keywords used in the search. Websites that want their ads to show on the results page bid on keywords that they believe people will use when looking for their type of business. For example, a plumber located in Atlanta might bid on the keywords “plumbing atlanta,” “plumber,” or “broken toilet.”

Depending on how much you bid compared to other plumbers in the area, your ad may show up on the results page when people search for the terms you bid on. In addition to how much you bid, Google also takes into account the relevance and quality of your ad and website. So even if you have the highest bid, the ad for your plumbing company will probably never show when someone searches “flower store.”

We will go into more detail below on how Google determines which ads to show on the results page and how much advertising on Google costs. If you want more help with Google advertising, you should look at Adzooma. They offer an easy and intuitive Google ad builder, a simple performance report dashboard, and insights to help you improve your ads. Click here to check it out.

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The Advantages of Advertising on Google
There are three primary benefits to advertising on Google:

1. Searchers Have [Local] Buying Intent
People searching Google are actively seeking what you offer. For example, it is not too presumptuous to assume that a user searching on “pizza nyc” is looking for a place to get pizza. Since you can set the geographical location that you want your ad to show in, you can make sure only people in your area are seeing your ad. For example, you can tell Google to only have your ad show to people located in New York, or in a 5-mile radius.

Compare this to advertising on Facebook. Even though you can show an ad for your restaurant to someone who is a known pizza enthusiast, you can’t show it at the moment they are looking for a pizza restaurant. Instead, you are targeting them when they’re browsing their news feed, not the moment they are hungry for pizza.

This is what makes advertising on Google so successful and unlike any other type of advertising. You are specifically targeting people who are in the market for your goods or services at the moment they’re seeing your ad. Not only that, but you can target only those people who are located in your area, which is a huge plus for local businesses.

2. You Only Pay if Someone Clicks on Your Ad
Another enticing factor is that you only pay if your advertisement works. Since Google uses a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising model, you only pay if someone is searching for the keyword you have bid on and is interested enough in your ad to click on it.

You can set how much you are willing to pay per click on your ad and set a maximum daily budget. This differs from traditional advertising, which costs you a set price to display your ad and does not consider whether or not someone even looks at it.

Google AdWords has revolutionized the way advertising works by only making you pay when the user has taken an action to view your site. We will go into more detail about how much it costs to advertise later in the article.

3. Advanced Tracking Ability
With the Google Ads, or AdWords, dashboard, you can track how many people see your ad, how many click on your ad, and how many take an action once on your website. That way, if you notice that a lot of people are clicking on your ad, but no one is buying anything once on your site, you know you need to edit either the landing page or the ad itself. By keeping a pulse on how your ad is doing, you can make any necessary adjustments quickly in order to have a successful ad campaign.

The tracking capabilities with advertising on Google is a huge plus for small businesses.

Imagine you own a flower store and decide to buy a billboard advertisement. Unless a customer told you, there would be little to no information telling you if anyone came to your store because they saw the billboard. You would be making a big investment without really knowing if it was yielding a positive return.

With Google Ads, you can track exactly how many people visited your site because they clicked on your ad. There is little risk since you can stop running an ad at any time if you notice that you’re not getting the results you want. We will explore the best ways to track your ads a little later in the article.

How Does Google Determine if Your Ad Will Show on the Results Page?
Google Ads uses an algorithm to determine which competing bidder’s ad gets displayed in relevant search results. While Google Ads is a type of auction, it’s not simply the highest bidder whose ad gets the top ad positions. Instead, Google considers how good of a search result your ad is for a user performing a search, and with that, how likely they are to click your ad. Ads that have high bids and are deemed good search results are those that get placed.

Google uses these three primary factors to determine when an ad shows on the results page:

Bid – The bid is the price you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. You bid against other websites on keywords that you believe people search for if they are interested in your product. A flower store might bid on the terms “roses,” “cheap bouquet,” or “wedding flowers.”
Quality Score – Quality score is a number Google assigns to your ad that reflects its relevance to a keyword. Your ad needs to be relevant to the search being made in order to show on the search results page. If someone searches “wedding flowers,” it wouldn’t make sense for Google to show an ad for a nail salon. You want to make sure you have a lot of the same keywords that you are bidding on in the ad itself, so Google can tell your ad is relevant to the search.
Landing Page Experience – When someone clicks on your ad, the landing page that they are sent to should have similar content as the ad itself and the keywords used in the search. If you own a salon and are advertising manicures, you’ll want to link directly to a page that has more information on manicures, instead of to the homepage that includes all of your services.
How Quality Score and Bid Determine Ad Position
Google uses quality score and your bid to determine how each competing company’s ad will rank in Google’s search results. Quality score is measured by Google, and considers your ad’s relevance to the keyword you are bidding on and landing page experience in an overall effort to consider how good of a search result your ad is for the user.

To determine which ad will rank at the top of search results, Google multiplies your quality score by your maximum bid to find ad rank. Those with the highest ad rank will land in the coveted first ad position in Google.