Want to know how much Google ads cost? Many business owners may feel that they need to have a high amount of capital to remain competitive with Google Ads, but the reality is not what it seems. The actual cost of the ad depends on many factors like the type of industry you are in, the quality of your ad and the time of day and week that you post it among other factors. Want to know the best practices to keep your costs low? Read on to learn the Google Ads Auction works and how you can use it to your advantage!
How The Google Ads Auction Works
To know how to save costs, you first have to learn about the process that Google uses to select and price ads. Google uses an auction system, similar to Facebook and Youtube ads, to determine whom it awards ad space to. The cost of placing an ad can come from a variety of factors including:
– Your bidding model
– The Quality of your ad
– The keywords you are using
– How much is your competition bidding
– Effective ad extensions
We will go in more detail about each of the bulleted points:
Bidding Model
Google offers various ways to make bids for your ads. Depending on what bidding model you choose will have a big impact on how much you will spend on ads. There are three types of bidding models:
– CPC or Cost per Click, where you pay for every click your ad generates
– CPM or Cost per Thousand Impressions, where you pay for every 1000 views your ad generates
– CPA or Cost per Action, where you pay every time someone takes action
Whatever you choose will depend on what your overall goals are. If you want more people to be aware of your company and brand, you should choose CPM as your goal. If you want more people to visit your site, then CPC would be the appropriate choice. If you want more people to take action on your site like filling out a form, then CPA would be your best choice.
Industry
Whatever industry your business is in is also a huge factor in your overall price. The business services industry, for example, has one of the highest CPCs out of any industry with their prices going up to 50$ per click. It is a very competitive landscape, but it is so because just one client can generate thousands of dollars, the cost tends to be higher. The average CPC, however, tends to range from 2.41 to 6.05 for search ads and from .39 to 1.08 cents for display ads.
Knowing how competitive an industry is can help you determine how much are ads on Google
Keywords
Using targeted keywords can help make your ad become competitive without you going over budget. To start, choose what ad group you want your keywords to be displayed in. Here is an example below:
Ad group: Gardening Tools
Spades
Gardening Gloves
Rake
Watering Gear
Loppers
Ad Group: Garden Plants
Biennials
Deciduous
Evergreens
Vines
Aquatic Plants
You want to choose between 5 to 20 keywords that you plan to use for each ad group. Make sure that your keywords are related to each other. For example, if you are planning to sell gardening tools, make sure you choose keywords like best spades and high performing loppers to keep it varied. Creating a varied number of keywords has the potential to reach a broader audience. Don’t know where to start? There are plenty of great tools out there to help you pick out the best keywords. One of my favorites is Ubersuggest by marketing guru, Neil Patel. The tools help you see if your keywords have high search volume, and how much your competitors are bidding for that keyword. You want to have keywords that are targeted, have high traffic, and have a low cost. You also want to make sure that the competition is creating content similar to what you plan to create.
Competition
What you pay sometimes depends on what your competitors are paying. In highly competitive industries, you can expect to pay up to 50 dollars per click, but that is on the extreme end. You would usually pay around 1- 10 dollars on average. If you plan to get about 10 clicks a day, then expect to pay about 100 dollars per day. The payoff is great if you spend that much, because there is a higher chance of getting more traffic and people who are willing to buy your product or service. There is another way, however, to remain competitive without having to spend more money.
Much like playing chess, observing your competition is crucial in knowing how much Google ads cost and how to lower it
Ad Quality
Google also gives you an ad quality score from 1 – 10 to determine how much you will pay for the ad. One of the factors that goes into ad quality is the keywords that you use and whether they are competitive. They determine the quality by looking at the amount of impressions your keyword generated, or the amount of views.
Expected CTR
Google also makes predictions on how many times your ads will get clicked based on past performance.
Landing Page Experience
How navigable is your landing page? Does it load fast? These are some of the factors that Google inspects to see if your page is welcoming to the user.
Ad Relevance
Does your ad match up with what the user is searching for exactly? If your ad is relevant to your target audience, that means that it has a high chance of being clicked on.
If you have a small budget and don’t want to spend additional costs to remain competitive, then increasing your ad quality can help you get higher consideration. Make sure that you work on your landing page to make it more attractive, make your ads as relevant to your target audience as possible, and include calls to action to help entice viewers to engage with your ad. The higher the number of people that click on your ad, the higher the score may be.
Ad Extensions
Ad extensions are features that you place on your ad to give viewers additional information about your company, service or product. It can contain phone numbers and location as well as announce offers and links to specialized landing pages. Using ad extensions can help make your product more relevant to your target audience, which is an important factor in lowering Google Ads cost. Including them can help you get more qualified leads, which means that you can get a higher chance of making a sale.
Ad extensions can help narrow your audience to those who are most likely to make a purchase
What to spend on Google Auctions
Google Ads CPC can vary by industry, but the average cost can come to about 1 to 2 dollars. The higher the profits of a particular industry the higher the cost of an ad can be and vice-versa. If you are from an industry below which pays less cost overall, you should spend no more than 1 – 2 dollars per ad. If your industry is making a decent amount of profit, then you can expect to pay about 10 dollars per ad. It is recommended that you start with a low daily budget and plan to get around 5-10 clicks a day. If you plan to spend 1-2 dollars, this will amount to about 20 dollars maximum or 100 dollars if you spend about 10 dollars per click. To keep costs low, try to narrow down your audience as much as possible and see what devices they are using to try and target them. Most people are on smartphones, with 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide, so it’s also important to make sure your ads are as optimized for mobile users as for desktop users.
Take the leap!
Now that you know how Google determines how much an ad will cost and what you can do to lower it, it’s time to take the leap! Still thinking about it? No problem! One of the most important things you can do to gain success from Google Ads and ads in general is to establish your brand. We at coach.today provide excellent service in helping you stand out from the competition. Schedule a consultation with us to learn more. We provide brand & website design, client attraction automation, strategy & consultation and more! We hope you enjoyed this article! To learn about more topics related to small business and life coaching, visit coach.today/blog.
