Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is Google’s advertising platform. This advertising network allows you to serve different kinds of ads, including text ads that we focus on here.
As in this example, it happens that a fairly large group of ads comes to place before the first positions of the natural results. The pages referenced organically (via natural referencing) under then located under the “fold”, and it is then necessary that the user scrolls with his mouse to see them appear.
Let’s move on now to the steps of building a text ad on Google Ads:
1. Indicate your company name and audience
First step: create a Google account. Then, from this page, you can launch an advertising campaign. Click “Get Started” at the top right.
You must then specify what your main advertising objective is (receive calls, boost your sales, attract more visitors). For an e-commerce site, we usually choose the second objective.
Next, indicate the identity of your company.
Then comes the definition of your audience. At this point, you define the geographical reach of your Google Ads campaign.
The choice of keyword themes is essential. If your Google Account is linked to a Google My Business account, Google Ads already suggests keywords.
2. Write an ad
In this2nd step, you write ads. For each of them, you must complete:
- Titles 1, 2 and 3 (30 characters maximum per title).
- Descriptions 1 and 2 (90 characters maximum per description).
Finally, you must provide the URL link of the landing page of these text ads. This is simply the page that will welcome people who have clicked on your Google Ads text ad.
A preview tool allows you to view your potential ad in Google’s search page results (the SERPs), on Google Maps, and on Google partner sites.
Example of an ad on Google Maps. The Nantes store “Méphisto Shop” is in first position of the search results on Google Maps on the query “shoes”. On the map, its indicator appears in purple.
3. Set your Google Ads budget
Google Ads works on a pay-per-result basis. In short, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad or calls your business (depending on the goal set in the first step).
The question of the budget is recurrent. You can plan a minimum budget of 1000 € / month, spread over 3 months. This duration is interesting to optimize your campaign, that is to say eliminate the least profitable products, boost those that are successful or refine audiences.
4. Set up your payment information
Google Ads here asks you to create your payments profile and fill in your tax information, your payment method, etc.
5. Combine Merchant Center and Google Ads
Google Merchant Center allows you to spread information about your store and products on Google to prospects.
If you sell a lot of products, you can connect Google Merchant Center to your Google Ads account. The point: easily and quickly transfer information about your products to your Google Ads campaigns.
It’s also great for creating Shopping campaigns (another form of ads offered by Google.
6. Integrate the conversion tracking tag
Also called pixel, this tag allows you to track the conversions generated on your e-commerce site thanks to your Google Ads ad. In other words, this tag is used to make the link between the ad and your online store.
Google Ads provides you with a tracking tag (in code form) only when you create a conversion action in your Google Ads account. This tag must be implemented in the code of your website.
Knowing and quantifying the conversion performance of a site and its ads makes it possible to optimize them and to note the results inherent in each modification.
7. Publish and sell
Your setup is ready, you’ve attached Google Merchant Center to Google Ads, and the pixel is installed. So you can launch the campaign!
8. Analyze and improve
Google Ads allows you to analyze the status of your campaigns live. You can also generate reports for an overview.
The interest? Continuously improve your campaigns by:
- The selection of the products that sell best.
- Rewriting titles and descriptions to make them more engaging.
- Targeting more efficient keywords (according to the cost/result ratio).
Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner allow you to find keyword ideas, based on their average number of monthly searches, their suggested bid value and their level of competition (competition from other advertisers on the keyword).
You can also use external tools, such as Ubersuggest which gives you information on keywords in paid referencing (SEA).