REVEALED: What are the charges for Google Ads

Charges for Google Ads Explained

Google Ads is one of the best advertising platforms which can send highly targeted traffic to a website. Before beginning your Google Ad campaign, it is important to understand how much are the charges for Google Ads.

As an advertiser, Google gives you complete control over how you want to be charged. You configure your ad either to be charged either according to the number of views (CPM), the number of clicks (CPC), the percentage of users who click on an ad (CTR) and the cost per customer acquisition (CPA). Let’s take a detailed look at each.

Ok Google: “Help me understand charges for google ads”

1. CPM: Referred to as Cost Per Mile or Cost Per Thousand Impressions, CPM is the amount Google charges for every thousand views an ad receives. It does not take into account how many users click on your ad. CPM based ad campaigns are used for building brand awareness.
2. CPC: Cost Per Click is the price you pay for every click that your ad receives. These campaigns guarantee results as you won’t be charged unless someone interacts with your ad. CPC campaigns are used for driving visitors to your website through ads.
3. Click Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of your total viewers who click on an ad. CTR is calculated by dividing the number of clicks your ad has received with the number of times your ad is shown. A CTR campaign aims to achieve a balance between the number of ad impressions and the number of clicks.
4. CPA: Cost Per Acquisition is the maximum amount you will pay for turning an ad viewer into a customer. These campaigns are useful where the user must take an action, for example, buying a product or downloading an app.

Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) ads guarantee results and are hence the most expensive of the bunch. Click Through Rate (CTR) based ads follow next, followed by Cost Per Mile (CPM) ads in the end. At present, 66% of the ads campaigns are CPC based while the remaining are that of others.

Besides the campaign goal, the charges for Google Ads will vary according to the following parameters:

1. Target location: The ad charges can be as low as $0.10/click in Brazil and it can be as high as $800/click in the United States. The charges will be higher for countries with higher spending power.
2. Target Device: The charges for desktop ads are the highest because of lower amounts of traffic from desktop devices. Almost one of every three users are from large screen devices. The ad traffic from mobile and tablet devices is 35% cheaper than the desktop counterparts.
3. Target Niche: Google Ads charges also vary as per the interests and the type of people you want to target.charges. The rule of thumb is that if there is a broad audience for an interest, an advertisement targeting that interest will be cheap. As the audience decreases, the ad rates will climb. For example, an ad targeting Kim Kardashian fans will be cheaper than the one targeting Anne Hathaway. Besides the audience, ad rates are equally influenced by the number of advertisers. In a competitive niche like insurance or education, the cost per click can be unbelievably high. For the insurance industry, bids of $500/click are common owing to the large competition and high LTV (long-term value) of customers.
4. User Intent: We can map it in terms of the likeliness of users purchasing the product or services. The charges would be less for low intent keywords like “what is the meaning of web hosting” and would be high for intent keywords like “buy web hosting”.

Charges for Google Ads are so easy to understand

Now that you have a basic idea of how the pricing of Google Ads works, you can experiment by tweaking parameters like target country, target devices, and enter your keywords in it.

To plan the keywords, I would suggest using Google’s Keywords planner. It would give you a complete list of similar keywords with their average CPC. The CPC values in Google Keywords planner can be much lower than the actual value but should be fair enough for comparisons.

After selecting the target keywords, start the actual ad campaign to get real data on your advertising costs. I would recommend starting with a lower bid and increasing it until you meet the desired goals. Also, if you feel that the charges for Google Ads are too expensive for you, then you may expand your target location as the charges vary among different areas.

Don’t forget to share your Google Ads experiences by dropping a comment below!

Originally published at https://www.hirecream.com.