As you may recall from our Digital Marketing 101 guide, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses in the Philippines to have a strong grasp of the ins-and-outs of digital marketing, especially as over half (55%) of Filipinos have indicated that they are looking to increase their online spending, and e-commerce growth in the country is expected to expand to US$1,383m by 2023. One important component of digital marketing in the Philippines is Google Ads (sometimes known as PPC marketing), particularly through search engines.
In the Philippines, Google occupies 96.9% of the search engine market, which means that a clear understanding of how to use Google Ads is vital for any business desiring to capture the Filipino market. However, navigating Google Ads can be confusing and overwhelming, even if you are experienced at marketing.
Thus, in the Ultimate Philippines Guide to Google Ads Marketing, we’ll be guiding you through the basics of using Google Ads, teaching you how the measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, and highlighting some important factors you need to take note of to maximise the effectiveness of your Google Ads marketing strategy.
Introduction to Google Ads
Google Ads (or Google AdWords, as it was known before a name change in July 2018), is a form of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. PPC marketing is a model of digital advertising that allows marketers to pay only when their ad is clicked (or otherwise interacted with) by an online user.
There are four different forms of Google Ads: Search Ads, Display Ads, Video (YouTube) Ads, and Mobile Ads. The first three of these forms involve the location of where your ads will be shown. The final one of these, mobile ads, involves the device that you want your ads to be viewed on.
Creating A Google Ad Campaign
The process of creating a Google Ad has been improved upon by Google over time. With the newest set of updates involving step-by-step guidance at every step of the campaign creation process, it is now easy to create a Google Ad campaign even if you’re completely new to it all.
For example, clicking ‘Start Now’ on the Google Ads homepage directs you to this screen, where you are simply asked what your main advertising goal is:
In other words, Google Ads tries to guide you through the process of setting up a new campaign if you’re unfamiliar with it. If you already have all the basics down, you have the option to jump right into the thick of things yourself (see: “Experienced with Google Ads?”).
Apart from having you indicate your advertising goal, Google Ads asks for your desired reach (or the locations) for your advertising campaign, the exact message you’d like displayed on your ad, and your monthly campaign budget. In general, the process of campaign creation is streamlined, simple, and does not require any sophisticated technical knowledge of the system – phew!
Measuring the Effectiveness of Google Ads
The easiest way to measure the effectiveness of your Google Ad is by checking your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). This rate tells you the ratio of how often people who see your ad end up clicking on it. Your CTR tells you which ads are working well and which aren’t, since ad campaigns with a higher CTR are making more of an impact and drawing more people to your website.
In addition to comparing each of your campaigns CTRs, it is also important to benchmark your CTR to the average CTR of the industry your business is in. Here’s an extract from a table detailing the CTRs of various industries:
As you can see, there can be substantial differences in CTR rates between industries, which ought to impact your self-assessment of how well your Google Ads are doing. For example, a 3% CTR would be excellent in industries such as Consumer Services or B2B, but would be below average in industries like Auto or Advocacy.
Apart from analyzing your CTR, you should also be looking at your Cost-Per-Click (CPC) as a part of measuring the effectiveness of your Google Ads campaigns. Your CPC rate is related to your CTR, in that it tells you how much on average you are spending on each potential customer that is drawn to your page. This way, you can tell, at a glance, how much value for money you are getting on each of your Google Ads campaigns. Like with CTR, it is important to benchmark your CPC rate to the standards of your industry.
Finally, another way of analyzing how effective your Google Ad campaign is by assessing your Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA). This is perhaps the most important metric of effectiveness of all. CPA refers to the cost of acquiring each new customer that has come to your business in relation to the total budget you spent on your Google Ad. Ultimately, even if your CTR and CPC is excellent, if the potential customers you draw to your page don’t convert into actual customers, your campaigns are not fulfilling their intended role of increasing revenue.
Maximizing the Effectiveness of Google Ads
So far, we’ve learnt that while setting up a Google Ad campaign is easy, it isn’t always easy to have a really effective ad campaign. In this next section, we’ll be walking through some important things to keep in mind when trying to maximize the effectiveness of your Google Ad campaigns (and the budget you’re spending on it).
Know Your Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is essential for generating a successful Google Ads campaign. The keywords you choose should be specific and targeted to the service you are offering. By making sure that you only target the keywords that are most relevant to your business, you will ensure that your ad is seen by people who are the most likely to patronize your business in the first place.
For example, suppose you offer a subscription service for pet food. You probably don’t want to only target the single keyword “pet”, since that would connect you with a multitude of searches that have limited relevance to you (like “where to buy a pet”, or “pet sitter”). Instead, try “pet food delivery”, and your ad is going to be seen by people who are already looking for what you offer. In the Philippines, you ought to also consider keywords in the Tagalog language, as well as English. For further support in choosing keywords, consider using the Google Ads Keyword Planner, which exists specifically to help you choose the best keywords for your service.
In addition to choosing the right keywords, it is also important that you eliminate the wrong ones. You can do this by using negative keywords. Negative keywords pick out irrelevant searches that may be linked to your ad, and ensure that your ad isn’t shown in relation to those. For example, to return to the pet food subscription service example, you could put “-allergy” to ensure that you don’t get searches for “pet food allergy”, which will not be relevant to your business.
Beyond choosing your keywords carefully, you can also specify match types to ensure greater precision with who your ads are shown to. By choosing “Phrase Match” or “Exact Match” instead of a “Broad Match”, less people may see your ads, but the ones that do are also more likely to become your customer. Negative keywords can also use broad, broad match modifier, phrase, and exact match types to control the traffic that triggers your ad.
Know Your Demographic
Google Ads gives you the option to restrict or modify your bid options along categories like geographic location, device, and date and time (dayparting).
Location targeting is rather self-explanatory. For each ad campaign, you can choose the locations where you want your ad to be shown. In the case of the Philippines, you’re likely to want to narrow your location search down to the Philippines. If you’d like, Google also gives you the option to narrow down your search to cities like Manila or Luzon.
Device targeting is also important. Google Ads gives you the option to set targeted bid adjustments for tablets, mobile phones, and desktop computers. The percentage of the Philippines using a smartphone is currently (as of 2019) 65%. Furthemore, data from the end of 2017 discovered that 25% of all mobile phone users in the Philippines made a purchase via mobile phone. Thus, you might consider focusing on mobile devices. That said, some businesses observe that conversions are higher on desktop rather than mobile. It is thus important to tweak your ad targeting strategy to one that best fits your organisation.
And now, dayparting. Dayparting is a fancy word used to describe specifying the specific days and times of the week where you want your Google Ads to show up. It would make sense to ensure that your ads run more aggressively when you are most able to respond to queries quickly, such as during peak office hours, or when people are most likely to be online. With people in the Philippines using the Internet for an average of 10 hours a day, you might think that you don’t really have to worry about the latter. However, it’s still worth taking note of the hours where people are the most active, and you can do so by running an hourly report through the Google Ads platform itself.
Choose Your Words Wisely
When using Google Ads, the ‘copy’, or text used in your advertising, is the first point of contact that your potential customers have with your business. And making a good first impression matters. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website based on its design. How long it takes for people to form an impression of your website based on an ad is likely to be similarly quickly. Thus, making sure that you have good copy written for your Google Ads is absolutely vital to maximizing the effectiveness of your ad.
While we can’t go into too much detail about all that goes into writing good marketing copy right here, a few best-practices that you ought to abide by when writing marketing copy include:
- Keeping the verbiage short and succinct
- Highlighting what sets you apart from your customers
- Showing off your positive Google seller ratings to drum up legitimacy
- Being specific! (use Keyword phrases and similar words in your copy)
- Including prices, promotions, and other special offers
- Including an compelling call-to-action
Send People to the Right Place
Once people click-through on your ad or attempt to contact you after having seen it, what they arrive at determines whether or not that potential customer converts into an actual customer that does business with you. How does one define a ‘good’ destination for your customers to end up at? There are two important elements to this:
- Website URL
If you offer a range of services but are advertising one more heavily on Google Ads others, be sure that the click-through link associated with your Google Ad links directly to the specific service touted on the ad. For example, if you’re a florist, and your Google Ad is about your red roses, make sure that the link on your ad brings your customers directly to where they can find out more about roses, as opposed to dandelions, daisies, or a generic home page. - User Experience
When’s the last time you reviewed the way your website looks? A website that looks outdated, unattractive, or overwhelming might lose you a customer that you could have gained otherwise. Investing in a website overhaul may be worthwhile if you feel that it could be inhibiting your ability to gain new clients.
Want more help? We’re here for you.
Here at DigitalMarketers.ph, we have a wealth of knowledge on Google Ads and other elements of digital marketing that we’d love to share with you, as well as ready access to the Filipino market — 1.6% of the world’s billions of Internet users.
Get in touch today, and we can start working together on a tailored strategy that will help your business harness the power of Google Ads, but with none of the fuss!