Digital ads are an essential digital marketing strategy to reach your business goals. They are great for many things, from increasing sales to increasing brand recognition, having a social media ads strategy in these times has come to be a necessity for brands and companies all around the world.
At Colibri Digital Marketing, we love using Google Ads and Facebook Ads to boost our client’s brands and sales. Since we think you should be experimenting with them, we’ll teach you how to create ads on both platforms on this blog post.
Google Ads: Should I Advertise With Google
If you need reasons to start advertising with Google, we’ll give you nine:
- Ads are scalable. You can reach as many people as your budget lets you.
- The results are measurable.
- The actual ads are flexible. You can add extensions, specific keywords, target to your audience.
- It’s faster than SEO.
- It’s taking over the SERPs. Ads are the first results on almost every Google search.
- Formats can be more engaging and dynamic than organic results.
- Traffic might convert better than organic traffic. With Google Ads, you get targeted traffic.
- It complements your other marketing channels.
- Increases leads and customers.
We created a glossary with all the terms you should know to start advertising on Google Ads. Here are the most important words you should start learning:
Keyword: a word or phrase the user searches for and then sees your ad.
Impressions: number of times your ad was seen.
Reach: the number of people that saw your ad.
CTR (click-through rate): percentage of the number of times the ad was clicked per impressions.
Budget: the total amount of money you’re willing to spend.
Bid cap: maximum amount of money you’re willing to spend per click (av. $2.66).
CPC: cost per click.
CPA: cost per acquisition (based on conversions).
Conversion: every time the user took the action you wanted him to make.
Quality score: score from 1 -10 that Google Ads give your keywords based on the ad, the clicks, conversion, and landing page.
How Google Ads Work
On Google Ads, you only get charged for each click your ad gets, no matter how many times your ad is shown on the internet.
How it works: When many people think of an auction, they often think of a prize being sold for the highest bid. But Google’s ad auction uses both quality and bid to determine your ad’s position. So, even if your competition bids higher than you, you can still win a more elevated position – at a lower price – with highly relevant keywords.
You’ll often pay less than your maximum bid because you’ll only pay what’s minimally required to hold your ad position.
What Are Keywords for on Google Ads
Google Ads recognizes four different types of keywords:
| Match Type | Symbols | Matches to: |
| Broad | Example keyword | Misspellings, synonyms, related searches, close variations |
| Broad Match Modifier | +example +keyword | Search terms that include all words preceded by “+,” or a close variant |
| Phrase | “Example keyword” | Search terms that include the keyword phrase without any words in between, or a close variant |
| Exact | [example keyword] | Search terms are only that keyword or a close variant |
Create Your Google Ads Campaign
Campaign Type
There are five different Google Ads campaign types. You will be able to select any of them:
Search: reach customers interested in your product or service with text ads.
Display: run different kinds of ads across the web with images.
Shopping: promote your products (eCommerce).
Video: reach and engage viewers on YouTube.
Apps: drive app installs across Google’s networks.
Campaign Goal
After selecting your campaign type, you will be able to choose the goal that will work the best for your brand:
Sales: drive sales online, to the app, by phone, or in-store.
Leads: get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action.
Website Traffic: get the right people to visit your website.
Product and brand consideration: encourage people to explore your product or services.
Brand awareness and reach: reach a broad audience and build awareness.
App promotion: get more installs and interactions for your apps.
Campaign Network
Google Ads also offers you the option to choose what networks to advertise on. Networks are where Google shows your ads. You have two options:
- Search Network: ads can appear near Google search results and other Google sites when people search for terms that are relevant to your keywords.
- Display Network: expands your reach by showing ads to relevant customers as they browse sites, videos, and apps across the internet.
Campaign Location
You can now select the geographic locations you want to target. You can choose the predetermined:
- All countries and territories
- United States and Canada
- Unites States
Or enter another location to be more specific. You can also exclude particular locations you don’t want your ads to be delivered to.
You’ll be able to choose to target people who show interest, live, or search for your location (you should decide what makes sense for your brand and services).
Campaign Languages
You can choose as many languages as you want. This will deliver the ads to people whose primary language is the one you choose.
Campaign Audiences
Select audiences to add to your campaign. These audiences are not as varied as the ones on other platforms (like Facebook). You can choose predetermined aspects to target to, like who they are, their interests and habits, what they’re actively researching or planning, how they have interacted with your business, and combined audiences you can create beforehand.
After choosing all the options that go along with your ad/brand, you will be able to determine whether you want to narrow the reach of your campaign to the selected audiences or just want to take these audiences into account but still show the ad to other people.
Campaign Budget and Bidding
In this area, you will be able to define how much you want to spend and how you want to spend it.
You will be able to manually select how much money you will like to spend per day. With this option, you won’t pay more than your daily budget times the average number of days in a month. It doesn’t mean that you will spend the same amount of money every day, somedays you may spend less than your budget and others more.
You should also choose the metric you’d like to focus on your campaign:
- Clicks
- Conversions
Once you choose what option to focus your campaign on, you’ll be able to set your target CPC or CPA. Once the campaign starts running, you’ll have the opportunity to change it.
Campaign Ad Extensions
You can show additional information on your ads, such as:
- Sitelink extensions: add additional links to your ad.
- Callout extensions: add more business information to your ad.
- Call extensions: add a phone number to your ad.
- Location extensions: you can add information about the physical location of your business.
Once you’ve selected the campaign settings, you will be able to set up your Ad Group.
Campaign Keywords
When creating a campaign, add as many keywords as it makes sense for your ads (it’s essential to make sure that the keywords always relate to the ad’s content). Create a mix of broad, phrase, and exact match keywords.
Separate each keyword with “enter.”
Create Your Ads
For each ad group, we recommend creating at least three ads that closely relate to the theme of your keywords.
The ad must have:
- Final URL
- Headline 1 (30 characters)
- Headline 2 (30 characters)
- Headline 3 (30 characters)
- Display path (2 of 15 characters). The path will help you include more information on the displayed URL.
- Description 1 (90 characters)
- Description 2 (90 characters)
Once you’ve created the ads, you can confirm the campaign, and Google will start reviewing. Check back in 2 – 24 hours to see if your campaign was approved and started running.
Recommendations to Implement for Your Google Ads
Here are our team’s top six recommendations for creating your first Google Ads campaign:
- Start small and adjust.
- Check daily, set a time to review.
- For the ads: check how many clicks and conversions they had, which one is performing well. Test twitching some words.
- For the keywords: check the conversion rate, the quality score, and clicks.
- Play with the cap bid: if the cost of ads lowers, lower a little your cap bid. If you start recording clicks/conversions, increase it.
- Since you’re starting, keep track of the results and changes you’re making to look back on results.
- Important: keep track of your budget! Since ads are running on a daily budget, the budget can go over if you stop checking.
- Be meticulous with the changes and start playing small. It’s money you’re playing with, so until you fully get a grasp, don’t spend more than a couple $ per day.
Facebook Ads: Should I Advertise With Facebook
If you need reasons to start advertising with Facebook, we’ll give you nine:
- People spend much time on social media.
- Facebook has over 1 billion users.
- It also advertises on Instagram.
- Facebook’s organic reach is pretty much dead, which makes advertising the way to go.
- Highly scalable content promotion.
- Targeting is terrific, the best social media advertising platform when it comes to targeting.
- Managing ads is super easy with Business Manager.
- The least expensive ads.
- Great for brand recognition.
We created a glossary with all the terms you should know to start advertising on Facebook Ads. Here are the most important words you should know the meaning of:
Business Manager: Facebook Ads’ dashboard to manage ads and campaigns.
Campaigns: the major level within the structure of a Facebook ad. You’re able to control a campaign’s objective.
Adset: campaigns are made up of adsets, and the adset includes one or more ads, a budget, a target audience, and a schedule. Each adset within a campaign has its separate budget.
Ad: an individual ad includes it’s creative (ex: the image and text it uses).
Lookalike audience: this is a type of audience created by Facebook to help advertisers reach people who are similar to an audience they care about (like your MailChimp list).
How Facebook Ads Work
Facebook ads are targeted to users based on their location, demographic, and profile information (best targeting when it comes to ads). After creating an ad, you set a budget and bid for each click or thousand impressions that your ad will receive.
Facebook ads come in several varieties: you can promote your page, posts on your page, events, or your website itself.
Creating Your Facebook Ad Campaign
Business Manager
Go to business.facebook.com and click your ad account. It will open up your Ad Manager, where you’ll start creating your new campaign.
Choosing Your Marketing Objective
Awareness
Brand Awareness: Increase awareness for your brand by reaching people who are more likely to be interested in it.
Reach: Show your ad to the maximum number of people.
Consideration
Traffic: Send more people to a destination such as a website, app, or Messenger conversation.
Engagement: Get more post engagements, page likes, event responses, or offer claims.
App installs: Get more people to install your app.
Video views: Get more people to view your video content.
Lead Generation: Drive more sales leads, such as email addresses, from people interested in your brand or business.
Messages: Get more people to send messages to your business in Messenger, WhatsApp, or Instagram Direct.
Conversion
Conversion: Drive valuable actions on your website, app, or Messenger.
Catalog: Create ads that automatically show items from your catalog based on your target audience.
Store traffic: Drive visits to your physical stores by showing ads to people who are nearby.
Campaign Optimization
To optimize your campaign across your ad sets, indicate your Campaign budget, whether it be a lifetime or daily budget. You’ll also be able to select your bid strategy:
- Lowest cost: get the most results for your budget.
- Cost cap: control your costs while getting the most volume of results for your budget.
- Bid cap: control your bid in each auction.
Creating Your Adset: Audience
Define whom you want to see your ads. Facebook offers the best targeting opportunities for social advertising; you will be able to choose the following:
- Locations (as specific as you would like)
- Age range
- Gender
- Languages
- Detailed targeting (demographics, interests, and behaviors)
You’ll also be able to create lookalike audiences, based on previously saved audiences or customer lists (MailChimp).
Placements
Automatic Placements: use automatic placements to maximize your budget and help show your ads to more people. Facebook’s delivery system will allocate your ad set’s budget across multiple placements based on where they’re likely to perform best.
Manual Placements: manually choose the places to show your ad. The more placements you select, the more opportunities you’ll have to reach your target audience and achieve your business goals.
Audience Network
Messenger
Stories
Optimization & Spending Controls
Define how much you’d like to spend, and when you’d like your ads to appear.
Here, you’ll be able to choose the start and end date for your ad.
You can also choose whether you would like to optimize for ad delivery for:
- Landing page views
- Link clicks
- Daily unique reach
- Impressions
Creating Your Facebook Ad:
Choose the type of ad you would like to create: carousel, a single image or video, or collection.
Your ad should have:
- Media
- Primary text
- Headline
- Description
- Website URL
- Call to Action
You may add language translations to your ad.
It’s crucial always to make sure you’re tracking conversions through the Facebook Pixel.
Now you can confirm your ad and wait until Facebook reviews and approves.
Recommendations to Implement for Your Facebook Ads
Here are our team’s top four recommendations for creating your first Facebook Ads campaign:
- Start small. Although Facebook ads are not as expensive as Google Ads, you’re still playing with money.
- Check daily:
- Check your audiences: which ads and audiences are performing best.
- Check your ads: explore with different images and captions.
- Check the cost per result to help you choose which ads to modify.
- Since you’re starting, create a couple of ad sets with different segmentations, and different creatives for each to see which one performs best.
- Keep track of the results and changes you’re making.
Send us any questions you may have about social media ads to [email protected]. We’ll love to help you out with your Google and Facebook Ads campaigns.
