Before starting the topic, I want to know what you think.
Google ads are expensive or not?
Why because there is a serious debate going on between business owners and PPC experts. Where business owners are claiming that google ads are expensive for their small businesses and on other hand, PPC experts are saying that “it’s not expensive, it’s costing high because business owners are not optimising it correctly”.
So what’s the real answer, is google ads really expensive?
Let’s dive into this article and find that out.
If you wanna know what my stand on google ads price is.
I would say, google ads are more costly than other ad platforms, no doubt about that. But if you optimize your ad campaigns and follow some tips from PPC experts like us, you can save a lot of money from Google.
FYI, I have published a blog article on “Don’t follow google ads auto applied recommendation”. If you read this article, you would understand how we can save our ad budget from google.
Check the article here – Don’t follow google ads Auto-applied recommendations.
Having said that, let’s find out why google ads are more expensive than other ad platforms.
4 reasons why google ads are expensive
-
Google is a monopoly
Let me put it this way when you want to search for something on the web. What would you do?
You’ll search for it on Google.
In other words, you’ll google it. See how google becomes a verb here.
That’s the market share of Google in the search engine industry.
According to research, Google owns around 87% of the Market share in the search engine industry, followed by bing and yahoo.
Since more people prefer google to search for any information and other valuable resources, advertisers also prefer google to advertise their business’s products and services to their potential customers.
Since Google acts as a monopoly, it can set whatever price it wants. However, don’t worry, if Google increases the price so high, which you and I can’t afford, they know we would switch to other advertising platforms. They don’t want this. So it won’t increase the price drastically.
But we can’t expect that prices will stay the same all the time, as competition is getting high on google, prices are going to rise anyway. Competition is one of the major factors why google ads are expensive.
I will discuss bout it in upcoming sections.
And the next reason why google ads are expensive is …
-
More qualified clicks
Let me put one more question for you. When would you google something?
Maybe you want to buy something, or you want to know some information on a topic, or much more.
For example, if you are googling “Dell laptop i5 price”. Most probably you would search for this when you already have a buying intention in your mind, right?
And if you see some great offers, most probably you would buy that product.
But not other platforms like Facebook ads, work like this, the primary purpose of checking Facebook is for leisure and to maintain a social connection. Not to buy something.
However, platforms like Facebook perform well and advertisers prefer them only because of the number of users and data it has. That’s why they are still surviving in the market, however, the quality of clicks is relatively higher in Google ads than in Facebook ads.
Users clicking the ads with the buying intention is the second reason why google ads are expensive. Because it can give more qualified leads to your business than other ad platforms.
Now, let’s jump into the third one,
-
Google has enormous data
With around 87% of searches happening on google, google can get tons and tons of data from the users. It has wide categories of audience data, that might be relevant to your business to target.
With this big Market share in the search engine industry and people googling at least once or twice a day, google has collected enormous data about the users.
On that note, How many times a day do you use Google to search for something? Let me know in the comments.
More the data you know about a user, the more efficiently you can segment them and target them. That’s why advertisers prefer google to target their audience.
And this is a reason why google ads are expensive to advertise.
Now, let’s Focus on the last and most important factor why google ads are expensive.
-
Competition
Even if you never advertised on google before, after reading all the above reasons, you might give a thought to advertising on Google.
Like you, there are millions of businesses competing for the google ads spot.
The more the competition, the more the demand for the top ad spot position, and the more expensive the google ads will be.
For example, let’s assume you are owning a real estate business and you are the only real estate business now and you wanted to advertise on google, so whenever someone searches “best real estate agency”, your ads will appear in the top spot on google. You pay some amount to google to rent that spot. Let’s say 1$.
Now, you got one competitor, who is also doing a real estate business and he also wanted the same top spot for the same keyword, but he is ready to pay 1.01$ for that spot. Assuming he also has the same quality score with his website. (quality score will be discussed in the later part of this article)
Google will give that spot to your competitor until you raise your bid over your competitor.
Like this there are thousands and thousands of businesses and brands in each industry wanted the top spot on google, they keep on raising their bids, and this is the main reason why google ads are expensive.
So now, you have a clear idea of the reason, google ads are expensive. Now let’s find some ways to reduce the cost of google ads.
What can be done?
As I already promised, there are some tips to follow to save your money from Google ads.
Here are the ways you can save your money from Google.
Properly optimise your campaign
By optimising several factors and strategies in google, you can save your ad budget from Google.
And if you are a beginner in setting up google ads campaigns, you are lucky. Because I have already shared a blog post on how to set up an effective google ads search campaign for your products.
Check out that articles and follow those steps.
You are done. You will save your budget from google.
Let’s discuss some of the most common practices
Targeting the long tail keywords:
Long tail keywords are less competitive.
For example: “SEO agency” is a normal keyword, but “On-page SEO agency in Sharjah” is the long tail keyword. you can check the cost of these keywords in the Google ads planner. Most probably the cost of long tail keywords would be lesser than the normal high competitive keywords.
And most of the long tail keywords are from niche industries. You might have heard this
Riches live in the niches
By targeting and bidding on the long tail keywords you can save your budget from bidding on the highly competitive keywords.
Adding Negative keywords:
Negative keywords are the holes, where your ad budget is leaking into Google’s pockets, if you are not adding unwanted and irrelevant search terms into the negative keywords, you are gonna lose your budget to Google.
So make your ad campaigns leakproof by adding all the possible negative keywords.
Experiment with keywords match types:
I have already explained what are the different match types available in the google ads in this article, do check this out – how to set up an effective google ads search campaign.
Most of the time broad match types might bring more irrelevant clicks to your ads, which wastes your ad budgets. So it’s better to use exact or phrase-match keywords.
However, sometimes exact and phrase match keywords cost higher than broad match keywords.
So you have to experiment with the keyword match types and choose the most effective option for your google ads campaigns.
Change your bidding strategy:
If you have been using Maximise conversion or Maximise clicks as your bidding Strategy, then the chances of you spending more are high.
Instead of those, I would recommend going with “manual clicks” as the bidding strategy, but again this requires a lot of research and time to monitor the CPC all the time. It’s your call, if you have time, you can choose manual CPC and monitor it often or you can hire an agency or PPC expert to monitor your CPC.
Moreover, you can reduce your keyword bid and experiment to find out the minimum bid amount to the rank top position, by this also, you can save money from google.
Focus on the keyword’s quality score:
More the quality score of your keywords, the lesser will be the cost of the bid.
You can check the quality score of the keywords in the keywords section of your google ads campaign.
Try to optimise your landing page and keywords by adding your keywords to them, so that they are highly relevant to your ads to get a high-quality score.
Target 2nd and 3rd positions:
I would recommend this strategy in extreme cases like you can’t spend more when you already reached your spending limit.
Then target to 2nd and 3rd positions,
According to Backlinko, “In fact, we found that the top 3 Google search results get 54.4% of all clicks” the number of clicks might be less than that of the 1st position, you can reduce your bid amount much. Still, people will check 2nd and 3rd ads also while researching the purpose.
Add more extensions:
Google claims that adding more extensions can increase your ads performance by around 30% on the same budget.
Practically, adding more extensions will increase the real estate of your ads on the Google search results page. So the chances of your ads getting more clicks are relatively higher.
These are some of the most commonly used practices to keep your google ads tight and effective.
Key Takeaways
There is a serious debate going on on the topic of whether google ads are expensive or not.
For most industries, Google ads are more expensive than the other ads platforms
The 4 main reasons why google ads are expensive:
- Google ads are a highly competitive space.
- Google has enormous data and a wide category of audience.
- Google acts as a monopoly in the search engine industry.
- Clicks from google ads are more qualified than that of other platforms.
However, there are some practices which can make google ads less expensive
- Targeting long tail keywords
- Experimenting with different keyword match types.
- Adding more negatives keywords
- Change your bidding Strategy
- Focus on the keyword’s quality score
- Target 2nd and 3rd position
- Add more ad extension
If you have more doubts about setting up an effective campaign to get more leads from Google, ping us at info@thecreatives360.com. we are providing free google ads consultation on setting up an effective search campaign.
Cheers,
SEO specialist,
