In 1998, Google was processing slightly more than 10,000 search queries daily. By late 1999, just one year after it was launched, this number rose to 3.5 million search queries a day. Want to know where this number stands today? A whopping 9 billion searches daily!
No wonder paid Google search or Google Ads has become one of the most effective types of online marketing and advertising.
However, since the method involves paying the search engine giant to advertise your content on their search engine results pages (SERPs) for the chosen keywords – this means that there’s huge demand for the best ad rankings for a particular set of keywords – you can bet your competitors are gunning for the same keywords too.
How do you stay competitive? How do you get the most from your Google Ads budget? To know that, we should discuss some basics around Google Ad costs.
What are Google Ad costs?
If you’re already aware of costs for Google Ads, then that’s great – this article will act as a good refresher. If not, this information will serve highly invaluable as it will help you better optimise your campaigns.
The CPC (cost per click) for Google Display Network (within the B2B industry) is $3.33, $1.16 (eCommerce) and $3.80 (technology). Similarly, the CPC for Google Search Network for the above three in the same order is, $0.79, $0.45, and $0.51, respectively.
Even though the PPC average is anywhere between $15 and $800 per month, you can decide how much you want to spend on each campaign.
Now, we should understand a few common acronyms associated with Google Ad costs:
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CPC
Cost per click refers to what you pay for every click you receive on your PPC ads. For example, if a visitor clicks on your ad (which they see on Google’s SERPs), you would be paying a fixed price whenever the ad is clicked. So, if you set aside $100 for the ad and it is clicked on a hundred times, then your CPC would be $1.
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PPC
Pay per click is an ad strategy where marketers pay for ads to appear on Google’s SERPs for chosen keywords or phrases. These keywords must be bid on, where high-ranking or in-demand keywords are awarded to the highest bidder, and hence, their ad would be more visible than other bidders.
Both CPC and PPC are unique because PPC is a way of marketing while CPC is merely a metric which is used to measure how effective your PPC strategy is. The CPC average for Google Display Networks right now is $1 or just under that. What this means is that for potentially less than a dollar, your ad will be displayed on any one of the two million or so websites Google has on its network – it’s nothing to worry about because Google will target the right audience.
The CPC for Google Search Network is a maximum of $2 per month. The price is almost twice in this case because these ads are displayed right at the top of SERPs, so naturally, there’s far more competition for those top spots.
The question you’ve got to ask is this: what are my competitors spending on ads? The Google ad spend for most small-medium businesses, for instance, is between $9,000 and $10,000 each month. Bear in mind though that this is the median – you can set your campaign budget on Google however you like.
Not sure where to start in terms of Google Ad costs? Our team can help you better understand these costs and optimise your ad campaigns for maximum ROI – contact us now for a free initial consultation.
