By John Eberhard
I recently wrote an article entitled “I Started My Marketing Career Before Google Existed.” I am going to expand on some of the ideas touched on in that article.
The Internet started in the early 1990s, and started becoming a marketing vehicle around the middle of that decade, with the advent of search engines like Yahoo and Alta-Vista, which was the dominant search engine in the late 90s.
Google was founded in 1998, eventually transforming online marketing through their system of search rankings and advertising.
Google’s big innovation was PageRank: a system that judged the importance of a webpage largely by looking at the links pointing to it, rather than relying mainly on the words and metadata on the page.
Before Google, search engines such as AltaVista relied heavily on things like:
- Keywords appearing on a page
- Keyword frequency/density
- Meta tags
- Page titles
- Text on the page
AltaVista’s system made it relatively easy for webmasters to manipulate rankings by stuffing pages with keywords.
Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came up with a different idea: a link from one website to another could be treated somewhat like a vote or academic citation. By 2002 Google became the dominant search engine.
In 2000 Google launched AdWords, now Google Ads, and in 2002 changed it to a pay per click model, where advertisers bid on the keywords they wanted to target, and paid every time someone clicked on their ads. By 2004 Google AdWords became a major marketing channel.
I started managing AdWords accounts in 2005, and the early days were great, as there were plenty of consumers searching on Google, but it was not heavily saturated with advertisers yet. I recall getting leads for a realtor, of people looking to buy a home, for about a dollar apiece in total ad costs.
Since then a lot has changed.
One major change has been that there are a lot more advertisers on Google today. And the more advertisers there are competing for a given keyword, the higher the bids go and the more you pay for each click. In some industries it has really gotten out of hand, like in some home improvement specialties where I have seen the bids go as high as $40 or more. That means every time someone clicks on one of those ads, the advertiser gets charged $40.
Of course that benefits Google, as the more advertisers there are competing for specific keywords, the more money they make. And thanks to Google Ads, Google has become one of the richest companies in the world. Google Ads funds all their other activities, and I’ve read of their paying programmers outrageous salaries and employees enjoying perks that would never be seen in traditional companies.
In 2003 Google introduced display ads, which are shown on sites other than Google that give their permission for ads to appear. These ads include images, and they developed interesting ways for you to target who sees your ads.
In 2006 Google acquired YouTube, and in 2007 they introduced YouTube ads, where your video would appear before the video someone was going to see, and you get charged money if they watch more than a certain number of seconds.
I would say in general Google has made Google Ads more complicated and technical practically every year.
Today, I find that it is vital to do certain things on Google in order to be successful, including:
- It’s vital to set up conversion (leads) tracking. This sends a message back to the Google Ads interface whenever someone fills out a form for more info, and that then shows you which ad they clicked on, which landing page they went to, and even which keyword they typed in. This allows you to manage the account in terms of what is working, and reinforcing that. And by the way, this is one of the things that Google makes more complicated every year.
- Including what are called negative keywords in your campaigns, to weed out people who are not real prospects but could waste your budget clicking on your ads. An example of this would be advertising for a home improvement company, and including negative keywords like “DIY,” “how to,” “jobs,” or “salary.”
- You have to be aware of how many other companies are competing for your keywords. You can’t see this directly in Google’s interface, but there are clues such as the system telling you that your bid of X will not result in your ad being shown on page one. Some keywords are terrifically expensive and you have to avoid those, and in some cases avoid Google Ads entirely if your industry is too saturated with advertisers on Google.
- You have to use customized landing pages, not having people land on your home page or one of your other pages on your website. Even ChatGPT and Gemini recommend this, but I still see a lot of advertisers sending people to their home page. One of the important things about this is that you don’t want to have navigation buttons on your landing page. You want them to stay on that page and respond to you, either by calling a trackable phone number or filling out the form. I have found in over 20 years that not having navigation buttons always performs better in terms of number of leads.
- You need to use a trackable phone number on your landing pages, because a lot of your leads will be by phone, and being able to track those gives you an accurate cost per lead.
Google currently has 48% share of the market of pay per click advertising, and Bing Ads having roughly 5%. The Bing Ads system is almost identical to Google, and despite much smaller numbers, you can still get good results on Bing. It’s worth it to at least test a campaign on Bing.
Facebook is of course another competitor to Google, and Facebook has about 35% of social ad spending. Their system works differently in that your ads are not shown to people typing in keywords. They are image and text ads, and you can target who the ads are shown by according to various targeting criteria.
Get a free consultation on pay per click advertising on Google, Bing or Facebook. Contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429, or fill out a form here.
