What are Google Ads?
You've almost certainly seen them before. Google Ads or Adwords are those little ads you see on the right side of your search results whenever you search for something on Google. They also appear on other Google related pages like Youtube (the ones that pop up when you play a video) and my blog (those ads on the top right). It's one of the most popular places to advertise on the web.
(here's a delicious example)
Here's how it works:
Google Adwords lets you set the advertising budget to whatever you want. The placement of these ads works like an auction. You place a bid for how much you’d pay for someone to click on your ad. Everyone else who is targeting your audience and topic is bidding against you. Each time someone searches for something related to your topic the auction begins for who’s ad will be shown to them. (Keep in mind these auctions happen billions of times a day). You might not win every auction but you’re bound to win some as competing advertisers use up their budgets or change their bids, etc. It all depends on how much you bid and how popular our targets and topics are.
For example, let's say we set a daily budget of $5. Then we set what our maximum auction bid is per auction is. Let's say $.50. Assuming our bid amount wins some of these auctions, once 10 people clicked on our ad, our ad would stop being displayed for the day. Then it all resets the next day.
Google Adword ads can cost whatever you want. However, how many clicks you get is dependent on how many of these mini auctions you win.
So is Google Ads worth it?
A few months ago I got a coupon for $100 of free advertising to use with Google Adwords. So I decided to give it a shot for a company I've been working for. Google tends to send these coupons out when you start using Google Analytics (a topic for another day).
What I found is that Google Adwords works exactly as advertised. The ads go out and people click on them. But it might not be worth it.
It all comes down to how much each click is going to cost you, and how much you're willing to pay for it. With the ad that I tried, I had a daily budget of $5.00 a day and was getting 10 clicks daily ($.50 a click). If I bid less, I would barely get any clicks. $.50 seemed to be the sweet spot.
I found that in my case it wasn't worth paying $.50 a click. However, if I was paying $.10 then it might have been worth it or if I had a budget of $1000 a months instead of $100. For a different topic/brand it could very well be the best way to advertise. If you ever come across one of these free $100 coupons then it's definitely worth it.
What I can say for sure is that using Google Ads will definitely increase brand awareness. $100 and within one month my ad was seen over 355,000 times. It's definitely worth a shot.
