Your business growth and Google Ads

Image Credit: Benjamin Dada via Unsplash

Google Ads today

Today, multiple platforms and tools partnering and owned by Google make it possible to fully manage a business online while catering for every step of the customer journey. Where traditional advertising could not offer insight as to who is viewing and searching for your service offering, platforms such as Google Ads and its affiliates guarantee an insight into users who engage with adverts to who is buying your products. With technology like offline to online (O2O) conversion tracking, lead generation advertisers are now also able to track – which action led to a conversion and, ultimately, a sale by sending business data back into Google Analytics with an API, Google Click ID (gclid) or manual upload.

I often find myself reminiscing about the past Google Ads interface to what it is today; remembering an ugly green-coloured platform that mainly focused on only high-level data and conversions. Later, devices became standard and many other elements we adore about the platform today such as audiences, shopping ads and many more new elements that assist businesses to make informed decisions as well as to define future marketing strategies.

The historical data

As a previous campaign manager, who has set up 100s of successful Google Ads campaigns (admittedly some not as successful), there is always one element that sticks out: historical data!

Whether your first attempt at Google Ads has failed or not, if your account is tracking your success signals, your historical data can tell you almost exactly where you went wrong, who is buying and who is not, as well as who is searching for your products or services and where they dropped off during the customer journey. Testing and learning models have proven to be a winner when it comes to continual optimisation and business growth. To ensure continual business growth, data like this can be found in platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Business Manager and Google Analytics to name a few and has become invaluable to the success of any online marketing campaign.

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Google Ads for SMEs

According to a study done by MDPI Journal: Sustainability Through Digital Marketing Tools, they pose that SMEs “on their way towards assuring growth and long-term sustainability, many modern small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from the European Union have set building a stronger brand as one of their primary goals.” (Dumitriu *, Militaru, Deselnicu, Niculescu and Popescu, 2019: 1). Google Ads has managed to effectively create brand awareness and reach for many SMEs. The result hereof can be seen in the increase of Google searches for a brand.

Google itself has more than 17+ million reach of users in South Africa alone and is increasing. They also own about 90% of the online ad space available on websites and apps today, making it one of the best platforms to reach most users with your service or products in South Africa (I believe).

About the author

Currently paid search director for iProspect South Africa, Kyle van Rooi has seven years’ experience in digital marketing and two years in IT (server/client).

Van Rooi specialises in all things search marketing and strives at handling and leading competitive lead gen and e-commerce campaigns from strategy to conversion.