How To Advertise on Google Search: Leveraging The Traffic You Control

Google is a great place for customers to find your product or service. However, Google  Search Ads can be a bit trickier to understand than other ad platforms like social media. 

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can be intimidating, but once you learn the basics and a few expert tips, you’ll be ready to jump in!

Here at ClickFunnels, we specialize in guiding users through the sales funnel, which includes getting traffic to your funnel. 

There are three types of traffic that are discussed in Russell Brunson’s DotCom Secrets. 

• Traffic you control: from paid ads or other sources where you control how and where the user lands.
• Traffic you don’t control: organic traffic or traffic from others’ blogs where you can’t control where the user will land.
• Traffic you own: your email lists, customers, and followers that you can send specific content or offers to.

Google Search Ads fall into traffic you control because you decide where users end up on your site.

It is crucial to leverage the traffic you control from your Google Ads campaigns by getting visitors’ email addresses through a squeeze page and turning them into traffic you own. 

In this article, we’ll give you some of our best tips to successfully advertise on Google.

But let’s start by covering some of the basics.

Google Ads Basics

There are a couple of things that are important to understand about Google Ads before you dive into the platform. 

Targeting

First of all, with SEM, you don’t pay to show ads to certain demographics or groups. You bid on keywords, meaning that when someone inputs a search query that matches your keyword your ad would show up.

When you bid on keywords, you choose which match type you want to bid on. The options are:

• Exact Match: the keyword exactly as you typed it.
• Broad Match: any search query that includes any word in your keyword in any order
• Broad-Modified Match: search queries that include each word in your keyword,  but not necessarily in the correct order and with words in between 
• Phrase Match: variations of the term with your keyword intact but with extra words before or after the keyword

We’ll help you choose which keywords to bid on later, but just keep that in mind.

Structure

The campaign structure in Google Ads can be confusing if you don’t know how they define the terms that they use.

The structure is broken up into the following parts, starting from the highest level:

• Account
• Campaign
• Ad Group
• Keywords

We already mentioned Keywords. They’re the level you bid on. So, the more keywords you bid on, the more you would need to spend to show up every time they are searched.

Ad Groups are groups of similar ads and keywords that you choose to combine and share similar targets.

When a user searches any of the keywords in the group, one of the ads in the group will show up at random.

Campaigns are groups of Ad Groups. Each Campaign will cover a broader topic, with the Ad Groups it contains covering the subtopics.

The Account level is to differentiate each business or website, so if you only have one business, you will only have one Account. All of your campaigns for the site will be in the Account.

Bidding

The bids function like an auction, so whoever has the highest bid and the best quality ad gets the top position. 

Google defines the ad quality score as a combination of these three characteristics:

• Relevance to the keyword
• Expected CTR
• Landing page experience

These three factors are combined with your bid to determine your Ad Rank. 

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) on search ads goes down almost exponentially from rank 1 to rank 2 and from 2 to 3, so it is important to rank as high as you can.

In order to ensure you have high quality scores, make sure your ads use the keyword and other words relevant to the topic. Communicate value to the user so that they will want to click on your ad, and craft a landing page that is easy for users to understand.

ClickFunnels is an easy and effective way to craft landing pages that will walk the user through the sale, creating a great user experience.

Tips for Success With Google Ads

Choosing the Right Keywords

The concept of bidding on keywords may be foreign to business owners without experience with SEM, but it is easy to catch on to with the right strategy.

The key to choosing keywords is to put yourself in the user’s shoes. What would you be typing into Google if you need the product or service that you’re selling?

Think of keywords people use to search about the problem that your product or service solves and keywords they would use to search for the solution.  

Those are the types of keywords you should be bidding on. 

If your business is new, the odds are no one will be searching for your brand name, but you should consider bidding on it if you want to increase brand awareness or if your brand is known to some people who may search for it. 

You may also have competitors who bid on your brand name. In that case, you’ll definitely want to reclaim that ad space. 

Google Ads has a Keyword Planner tool that you can use to find out how many searches per month a keyword query has and how expensive it is to compete for the terms. 

The tool can also help you find more keywords related to your product or service.

Using the Right Landing Pages

The landing page can make or break your Google Ads campaign. 

You may have great ads that entice users to click through, but if the page they land on is confusing, they will bounce off the page, go back to the search results and probably click a competitor’s ad.

With Pay-per-Click advertising like Google Ads, you pay every time someone clicks, not every time someone purchases. 

So if people are clicking on your ads but then bouncing from your confusing landing page, that would be a horrible waste of money. 

This is the exact problem that ClickFunnels solves. 

Building landing pages the traditional way requires web development and design, which takes a lot of time, effort, and money. 

That’s why a lot of small business owners without large budgets end up with landing pages that confuse users, causing them to bounce and in turn waste their marketing dollars.

ClickFunnels is a software that makes it easy for you to create your own landing pages that look great and are easy for users to understand. 

Creating a landing page with ClickFunnels doesn’t require any coding or design, so you can save time for once as a busy entrepreneur!

ClickFunnels landing pages are made to simplify the process of getting leads and making sales. 

Each landing page is crafted to ensure that users will not get confused about what to do or where to go to become a customer. 

Visitors will be guided through the sales process step-by-step so that you don’t lose customers along the way due to a confusing website.

Turning Traffic You Control into Traffic You Own

As discussed in DotCom Secrets, “Traffic you own is the BEST kind of traffic.” 

Owned traffic is your email lists, customers, followers, or anyone else who has given you their contact info so you can now send them newsletters and offers specific to them.

The only way to get owned traffic is by turning the other two types of traffic into traffic you own. 

The tips above will help you get users onto your site, but that is only the first step. 

ClickFunnels is a way to ensure that users are guided through the sales process, becoming traffic that you own.

For example, when a user clicks on your Google Ad, it can direct them to a squeeze page with a call-to-action that encourages them to enter their email address in exchange for the value you will provide them.

Then, even if they don’t make a purchase today, you can send them email newsletters and offers so that they will remember to come back and make a purchase in the future.

If you aren’t successfully turning traffic you control into traffic you own, you are losing a lot of potential sales over time. 

If you’re ready to start leveraging the traffic you control, try ClickFunnels’ 14 day trial!

Recommended Reading

• How to Market Your ClickFunnels Sales Funnel
• Dynamic Search Ads & ClickFunnels: How Dynamic Search Ads Can Generate More Qualified Traffic to Your Funnel
• Target Analysis & Customer Demographics Marketing