What Is Google Ads?

Google Ads is Google's own advertising platform. It manages the purchase of ad space on Google Search itself, on the Google Display Network, on YouTube and inside apps. Along with advertising on other search engines, it forms the main channel of what's known as SEM, and it's now the standard tool for running SEA campaigns, paid advertising inside a search engine.

Until July 24, 2018, the platform was called Google AdWords. On that date Google officially renamed it Google Ads. The change went beyond cosmetics: the old name pointed to keywords, the "Words" of AdWords, while the product had for years offered formats that had nothing to do with text, image ads, YouTube video ads, app promotion. The new name reflected that broader advertising ecosystem.

Every ad runs through an auction that weighs the advertiser's bid against ad quality, a targeting mechanism by keyword or audience covered in more detail in the article on SEA.

All these formats share the same account, but each one uses a different bidding model and targeting criteria depending on where the ad appears.

At its core, Google Ads runs an auction that repeats on every search, or every time a user matches a campaign's targeting criteria. The advertiser sets how much they're willing to pay for a keyword, and that bid feeds into the auction alongside the ad's quality. The advertiser also sets each keyword's match type, tighter or broader, which decides which exact searches the ad even enters that auction for.

Final position depends on Ad Rank, a value combining the bid with the keyword's Quality Score: expected CTR, ad relevance to the search query, and landing page experience. An ad with a high Quality Score can outrank a higher but poorly optimized bid, a mechanism covered in more detail in the article on SEA. This calculation runs fresh for every single auction, so the same ad can land in a different position from one search to the next depending on who else is competing at that moment.

Billing usually runs per click, but some campaigns, especially Display or branding ones, are billed by CPM, a fixed price per thousand impressions instead of per click received. Cost per click fits when the goal is qualified traffic to the site; CPM makes more sense when the goal is brand visibility, regardless of whether it produces an immediate click.

CTR is the benchmark metric for judging whether an ad works: how many of the people who see it actually click. A low CTR pushes the cost per click up and drags the Quality Score down, so it feeds directly into how much every conversion ends up costing. Comparing CTR across different ad groups also reveals which messages actually connect with the audience and which ones are worth pausing.

The platform ships with its own campaign features, such as retargeting, which serves ads to people who already visited the site, and specific tactics like brand bidding, bidding on your own brand name or a competitor's.

None of this can be measured without proper tracking. The account depends on a tracking pixel or a cookie installed on the site to record which click ended in a real conversion, the foundation for any optimization that follows. Without that data, raising or lowering a bid turns into a guess rather than a decision grounded in the actual cost per conversion each keyword generates.

• Set up conversion tracking from day one, before putting real money into bids.
• Separate brand campaigns from the rest to measure their performance on its own.
• Check the Quality Score of top keywords weekly, in addition to spend.
• Turn on retargeting for visitors who didn't convert on their first visit.
• Pick the bidding model, CPC, CPM or CPA, based on each campaign's actual goal.
• Review the search terms report regularly and add negative keywords to cut irrelevant spend.

• Launching campaigns without setting up or verifying the conversion tracking pixel, then optimizing the account blind.
• Mixing brand and generic campaigns in the same ad group, which distorts each one's real CTR.
• Competing purely by raising the bid and ignoring keyword Quality Score.
• Leaving the same budget and bids running for months without reviewing performance.
• Skipping negative keywords, so budget leaks into searches with no purchase intent.