If you want to advertise your products and services on the Internet, you can't avoid using Google Ads. True to the marketing principle that every effective advertising measure should take place where the target group spends the most time, the search engine portal almost imposes itself. Google Ads appear above and next to the so-called organic search results in the hit list and are easily recognizable by the clear and bold indication "Ad".
These ads, known as Google Ads, can be placed by any website operator in the portal of the same name (formerly Google Adwords). They appear in addition to the organic search results when the user enters the previously stored search terms (keywords) in the search engine. The ad, which in its simplest form contains a title, an ad text and a link to the user's own website, is not placed by Google for free: Google is paid for every click on the ad, so the currency of the digital ad business with Google is the cost-per-click, which defines the marketing costs in Google's ad portal.
Google's Ads service works in principle just like the newspaper you receive unsolicited in your mailbox every week: These so-called ad papers are usually financed almost exclusively by selling their ads to local or regional businesses. However, since in most households these newspapers are still used at best for peeling potatoes, the modern advertising business has largely shifted to the Internet. Google is more or less the monopolist here, while Microsoft is valiantly but rather unsuccessfully holding its own with its Bing search engine and the eponymous Bing Ads.
In order to effectively promote one's own offers and content, es recommends developing a carefully planned strategy for the use of Google ad campaigns. Which products should be advertised to whom and how? Careful strategic planning and precise knowledge of the target group are therefore also part of every good ad campaign on Google: Google ads are placed according to keywords, which may be highly competitive: For example, many tourism companies are fighting over "vacation mallorca cheap", which drives up the price (cost per click) for these keywords.
Advertising with coveted keywords therefore works like advertising on coveted billboards or in TV spots before soccer matches: Good keywords are expensive and must either be paid for or bypassed as part of a good strategy. When optimizing Google Ads, the selection of keywords for your own ad campaign is therefore of particular importance. A travel company specializing in sophisticated finca stays in the south of Majorca can do nothing with the mass keyword "vacation mallorca" - es would simply be too expensive and addresses the wrong target group. "quiet finca vacation mallorca", "finca mallorca south coast" or even a specific location, on the other hand, are far less desirable keywords, but fit better to your own offer and much better to the intended target group. The target group is not looking for a cheap package vacation, but for high-quality travel offers beyond the bed castles - at least in this example.
Compared to professionally planned and executed content marketing, ad campaigns with Google Ads have one serious disadvantage: they can quickly become quite expensive, especially in market environments with strong competition. If a competitor or several competitors together have a larger budget than they do, a bidding war can break out over the decisive keyword, from which ultimately only Google benefits. A good Google Ads strategy should therefore always be accompanied by a professionally planned content strategy. Websites that have poor content or no content at all are also ranked lower by Google's algorithm. In this case, the so-called quality factor decreases and the ad is played out less frequently in relation to ads of the competition with a better quality factor. In order to improve the quality factor, a rough rule of thumb is that the content of the ad should match the content of the target website (landing page) as closely as possible. In a nutshell: If you want to advertise car tires with Google ads, you should not have any content about poultry on your website.
Well-done and sustainably planned SEO in conjunction with a content strategy is therefore often superior to Google Ads: Not only do many potential customers and experienced users deliberately avoid the ad spaces on Google - those who use an adblocker do not even see them. The best attention is guaranteed if your own website is at the top of the Google results list due to the quality of its content and its offer via organic search.
A focus on organic search therefore has a cost advantage over the use of Google Ads - at least superficially. Because good and sustainably successful content is not to be had for free or very cheaply - after various updates, the Google algorithm can no longer be duped so easily.
However, especially if an aggressive strategy to penetrate an existing market structure is intended, for example with a price-competitive online store, a Google ad campaign offers massive advantages: It can quickly and easily generate awareness for one's own brand and build advertising pressure. However, this should not be done without a coherent content strategy, as a good Adwords strategy and sustainable content development are always mutually dependent.
So, as is so often the case in marketing, es is no use betting on just one horse: the strategy regarding the content and the offer must be coordinated with the strategy for creating, executing and optimizing the ad campaigns. For good online marketing, therefore, even with a large budget for ads on Google, organic search must never be ignored. A website with a solid content concept is the foundation on which a successful Google ad campaign is based and can develop positively in the long term.