What Is Google Ads (AdWords) and How Do You Use It?

Google AdWords, now known as Google Ads, is Google's advertising platform: easy to pick up, yet it opens into entirely different dimensions in expert hands.

With Google Ads, website owners can pay to appear in the rankings for the keywords they target. This makes it possible to generate financial returns and measurable success quickly, even in the short term.

Today you can see that many of the internet's biggest sites use Google Ads, which shows just how far the platform reaches. With Google Ads, you can run advertising on pages visited by millions of people every day.

How do you advertise with Google Ads?

Google Ads offers many different ad models and campaign setups suited to your target audience. These include the Display Network, mobile ads, Search Network ads, call-focused ad models that count phone calls as conversions, Shopping ads, video ads, and many more.

What matters here is to define your target audience first, then work out which ad model matches that audience precisely, which model will reach the most people, and which will convert that reach into sales and commercial results.

Consider an example scenario: you run an e-commerce website. The products you sell are mostly gift items, things that entertain people and make them happy, but that nobody strictly needs to get through daily life.

In this case, your primary target audience is young and middle-aged consumers who want to buy gifts for each other and who are comfortable with e-commerce and internet use in general.

Try to find out where this segment spends the most time, which areas they share in common, and which searches they collectively run on Google.

By the end, you have a search list and a defined target audience. Since you now hold the keywords your audience actually searches for, you can build a Search Network campaign. That way your ads appear in front of the users in your target audience as they search, and you can turn those impressions into sales revenue.

Defining your target audience in Google Ads

With Google Ads you can build campaigns that account for many different factors such as age, gender, interests, and education. Detailed reporting lets you see exactly how your campaigns perform and chart a new course accordingly. The sheer size of the publisher network is a major advantage here. You can start advertising by selecting placements that directly match your criteria, which means you use your entire budget, large or small, as effectively as possible without waste.

A solution for every budget

One of the reasons Google Ads is so widely loved is that the process is budget friendly. Companies with advertising budgets in the millions use the platform, and so do individuals running personal websites. The result is a rich ecosystem of advertisers and publishers, which makes it possible for you to choose exactly where you want your ads to appear.

How do you use Google Ads Keyword Planner?

First, follow the steps shown in the screenshot below to open the Keyword Planner panel.

Two different sections then appear. The Discover new keywords section on the left can generate a wide range of keyword suggestions around a single keyword. This makes it easy to find the keywords your target audience searches for that you were not yet aware of.

The section on the right lets you upload keywords in bulk and get performance forecasts for them.

The Discover new keywords section in Google Keyword Planner

To find new keywords, you need to give Keyword Planner at least one or two seed keywords. Keyword Planner then researches alternative and related versions of the keywords you entered and presents them as suggestions.

Enter your keyword in the area marked in red in the screenshot to start receiving keyword suggestions from Keyword Planner.

When entering keywords into Keyword Planner, make sure you choose terms that are neither too broad nor too far off topic. The reason is that Keyword Planner builds its suggestions directly on the keywords you enter.

If a car dealership enters only the word "car", Keyword Planner will struggle to return targeted results. The results for "car sales", however, will be the keywords the dealership's target audience actually searches for, and the ones the business will want to appear on.

Google Ads specialists

Google Ads campaigns should be run by people who are experts in paid advertising, with PPC (pay per click) values properly optimized. Because Google Ads is entirely a matter of paying Google for advertising, incomplete or flawed campaign setups can put you directly into financial loss.

Professionals who run ads on the right keywords, show them to the right target audience, and carry out proper campaign and account optimization are called performance marketing specialists or Google Ads specialists.