Google Ads is the name of the game most of us play to get our products & services in front of our audience – but do you really understand the rules? Whether you are already turning a profit or your financial goals are falling short, you’re no doubt eager to learn how to play the system. Today, we’ll talk about the stakes, the players, the rules, the tells, and how to know when you’ve played a winning hand—how to know when to raise and when to fold—and most importantly, how to wring out as much profit from your PPC ads as possible.

Profitability

No matter what the nature of your business may be, no matter how much or how little you’re spending on Google Ads each month, regardless of whether your PPC ads send you tens of thousands of customers or one every few weeks, the question to ask yourself remains the same: Is your investment in Google Ads profitable? It may feel like you’re winning with your investment or it may feel like you’re throwing money away month after month. But feelings don’t matter—numbers do.

How often do you sit down after closing a deal and determine where your relationship with that customer began, how it developed and culminated in money in your pocket? If you’re working with the right tools or the right team, figuring this out should be relatively easy, but even if you’re not it’s important to work out. After all, how do we scale business if we don’t understand where our customers are coming from?

Understanding the Game

When you play the Google Ads game, you’re not competing with Google, even if they’re the one taking your money—you’re competing with other businesses trying to place their PPC ads where you are targeting – keyword phrases, audiences, placements, etc. If you’re not already investigating the competition for your PPC ads, it’s time to start. When you sit down to play a game of poker, it’s not enough to watch the dealer, after all; you have to watch the other people around the table. If the extent of your understanding of the competition is knowing how much you have to bid for different ad positions, that’s not enough.

After all, bids on Google Ads aren’t a simple matter of ‘who spends the most’. Google prides itself on quality. The quality that’s made it the top search engine and made the company the beginning and end of web marketing. More on how Google Ads Works.

Playing Against the Competition

Let’s revisit our poker analogy now that we know the game we’re really playing. When you sit down at the table, you buy in to the game—that’s the cost-per-click you’re paying. The house takes a cut of all the money moving across the table, yes, but it’s not a significant amount if you’re playing right (if you’re not getting a good ROI, this part of the analogy breaks down, but if that’s the case you need to go back to basics anyway). You win when you come out ahead—as far ahead as possible, at the expense of the other people sitting at the table, not the house. Google is always going to win its share; savvy competitors know that they take their cut from the competition.

Winning this game means researching the competition, outplaying them with superior content, ad copy, and keyword selection. If you find you’re struggling with that, Google Ads have an advantage over any game in a casino: you can get outside help from serious experts, the kind of people that would be banned after a day of counting cards and working the system.

Ready to pick up a few of these Google Ads masters and start crushing the competition in every matchup? Contact WebTech Marketing today and get started.