How to increase brand awareness with Google AdWords

When we talk about advertising on Google AdWords we tend to focus on selling products or services. The buying intent behind Google searches is usually higher than other PPC channels and you want to make the most of that by maximising sales.

Selling products isn’t the only reason to advertise on AdWords. There are times where your goal is to increase brand awareness and catch leads at an earlier stage of the buying process. So today we’ve got some tips on how to do this effectively in AdWords.

Start with the Display Network

The most obvious place to start with your brand awareness campaigns is the Display Network. Google has refined its targeting options over the years, which means you can narrow down your target audience with a combination of settings:

• Keyword targeting: Target pages on relevant websites containing your chosen keywords.
• Topic targeting: Target websites based on the topic of their content.
• Placement targeting: Target specific websites, known to be of interest to your target audience.
• Affinity audiences: Target users who have shown an interest in certain topics or products.
• In-market audiences: Target customers who are actively searching for products or services related to your brand.
• Location and language targeting: Target languages and specific countries, regions or cities.
• Device targeting: Choose which device types you want users to see your display ads.
• Demographic targeting: Target users based on gender and age.

That list gives you a lot of control over who sees your display ads – so you can really hone in on the kind of people you want to introduce your brand to. You can also combine a number of those targeting options, depending on how narrow/specific you want your reach to be.

Use the Search Network to build brand awareness

Google’s Search Network may not be the most obvious place to build brand awareness, but text ads can be one of the fastest ways to reach a wider audience. The first thing you need to do is to create a new list of keywords – search terms that will give you an opportunity to reach your target audience, even if there’s minimal buying intent.

Most of these will probably be long-tail keywords, but they’re the kind of queries that should already be inspiring your blog content anyway. However, for these campaigns, you’ll want to step up the content efforts even more and create something noticeably better than everything else that appears on page one for each keyword. Create eBooks, video reviews, detailed guides and put the time into creating headlines that really grab attention.

Next, you’ll promote these pieces of content with AdWords text ads. The great thing about this approach is your content will jump right to the top of page one and, assuming your content is good enough, people won’t hesitate to click for a moment.

Now for the magic part. Before your ads go live, set up AdWords remarketing on each landing page so you can continue to target them even after they’ve finished with your content.

This approach is doing three things. First, it introduces your brand to a wider audience and then it provides them with content that actually has something to offer. Second, remarketing means they see your ad as they continue to use the web, reminding them about your brand for a set period of time.

Just remember to use frequency capping and end date for remarketing to stop people getting fed up with seeing the same adverts.

So there you have it – AdWords isn’t just for promoting product and services pages. You can use both the display and search networks to build brand awareness and get those leads at an earlier stage of the buying process.

Finally, you’ll want to look into measuring reach and frequency to see how much your campaigns are increasing brand awareness. And, of course, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you stuck with anything – our team is here to help!

Get our AdWords Guide

Search Ads, Display, Customer Match, Dynamic Remarketing…the list of Google advertising products goes on and on, and it’s not always easy to work out what’s what! So, we’ve put together a guide that clarifies:

– How each tactic works
– The 3 main benefits of each tactic
– Where in the sales funnel they work best

Get the guide here