General
What Is Dropshipping & How Do You Get Started?
Understanding dropshipping and steps to launch your own online business
May 2, 2024
16 min read
Today, you will learn how to run Google ads for your dropshipping store. I will provide you with a step-by-step process that will take you from start to finish. Understanding how to create Google ads is crucial for successful advertising.
In addition, we will discuss:
In the end, I am confident that you will be fully equipped to run Google ads for your dropshipping store on your own. Please note that this article is not about a magic advertising formula (there is no such thing). If you are ready, let us begin!
For context, the revenue of Google Ads in 2023 was a staggering 237.86 billion USD. In comparison, Facebook was at $153.76 billion. As you can see, Google is not even a social media company, and yet it is the biggest advertising platform in the world, largely thanks to the comprehensive google ads platform that facilitates creating, managing, and optimizing ad campaigns across its vast network.
Unlike social media sites, Google Ads has audiences on many platforms, such as:
So, depending on the type of user you want to advertise to, there is a proper platform in the Google Ads network where you can show your dropshipping goods.
Here are some more key stats you should know:
As far as advertising networks go, Google is the KING of them all. The key to succeeding in Google Ads is the appropriate placement of your ad. In addition, keyword and audience selection is critical—Google can reach 90% of the world’s population, so you have to leverage audience selection meticulously.
Google Ads may seem like a foreign territory to many dropshippers, but I can say that it has more reach and power than social media. Everyone uses Google, while Instagram, TikTok, and other social media channels have specialized audiences.
In this section, I will provide more reasons why you need to advertise on Google Ads and what benefits you can expect. Having successful Google ads campaigns involves strategies that focus on driving clicks, conversions, and brand awareness, which are key factors for optimizing your dropshipping campaigns.
Anybody who uses the internet knows what Google is. Google is a household name, and it is this fact that makes it reach a massive amount of people.
In Search alone, there are over 8.5 billion searches that happen each day. On average each person does three to four searches for the same period.
What does that mean? It means there has to be someone in this world searching for something related to what you sell. Google owns about 92% of all searches in the world—all the rest, like Yahoo! and Bing, do not even come close. This dominance in the search market underscores the potential reach of Google Ads campaigns, highlighting the importance of leveraging these campaigns to target and personalize ads for different audiences effectively.
Google Ads offers so many ways that you can create a target audience for your dropshipping ad, particularly through the precise targeting capabilities of ad groups.
Here are some:
Ad groups play a crucial role in this process, allowing for the organization of campaigns by grouping similar ads, keywords, ad text, and landing pages. This structure facilitates audience segmentation, enabling advertisers to target different audiences with tailored products more effectively.
If your ad is a video, it makes sense to show it on YouTube. If your ad is an image, it makes sense to show this on blog sites or mobile apps. Whatever your ad is, or whatever your product is, there is an appropriate segment of Google users that you can show it to.
Do not worry about competing with giant companies that have millions of dollars in advertising budgets. Google has a fair algorithm that will show your ad to a target audience, even at a small cost. Tailoring your budget for each Google Ads campaign allows for flexibility and optimization to meet your specific advertising goals.
Google does not require a lot of money when it comes to ads. In my experience, the minimum ad spend that the system requires only gets bigger whenever I advertise to the US. It is because the US is a huge market, and many advertisers are competing for the same eyeballs.
If you advertise to other countries, however, you can advertise for as little as $5 per day, or even lower. The trick here is to find a different market rather than just relying on the US as your primary customer base.
Finally, Google is where you can advertise based on what a potential user is looking for. If you go to Google Search and you type a keyword like “how to train a dog,” what do you see?
Here is what I got:
The first two results on top are sponsored ads, also known as search ads. These search ads are a powerful tool for business owners or marketers who want to capture the attention of users actively searching for related products. By bidding on relevant keywords for search ads, such as “how to train a dog,” advertisers can ensure their products are among the first seen by potential customers.
As a dropshipper, you can leverage search ads on Google Ads to target people based on user intent. In my case, I intended to train a dog and used the keyword, “how to train a dog.”
If your product is a toy drone, you can target keywords like toy drone, drone for kids, drone for beginners, etc. With this approach, Google will show your ad to people who are already looking for your product through search ads, and thus you are likely to make a sale.
To start advertising on Google Ads, you have to go to [https://ads.google.com/home/] and you will see this:
If you already have a Google account, click on SIGN IN at the top right. If not, click on START NOW. After signing in or creating an account, you will finally find yourself in a Google Ads account dashboard like this:
To start, you need to click the CREATE button at the top left (big PLUS sign), just beside the OVERVIEW tab. This is what you will see:
What you need to do is to click on CAMPAIGN, and you will see this:
You have to choose SALES. You can also use WEBSITE TRAFFIC as your campaign objective, but SALES is better. Choosing sales means that Google will particularly select an audience based on their shopping activities. This step is crucial as it opens up a variety of ad campaigns, including remarketing campaigns and various Google Ads campaigns, that can be strategically used to optimize your storefront and track performance using essential metrics.
After clicking on a goal, click on CONTINUE at the bottom right. The page will expand, and you will see this:
This is the page where you choose where you want Google to show your ads.
Here is a shot guide:
What I am going to choose for this demonstration is DISPLAY. As dropshippers, we want to target areas where people or users have visibility on our product images. Choosing the right google ads campaign type is essential for achieving specific advertising goals, and understanding the variety of google ads campaigns available can significantly impact the success of your advertising efforts. After clicking on DISPLAY, scroll down and you will see this:
Google is huge, and there are so many metrics you can measure to find out if your ads are effective. These options come at a cost: confusion.
To prevent this from happening, I will explain only the most important metrics you must check in your ad reports, what they mean, what you should achieve, and how to fix common problems.
Impressions refer to the number of times your ad was shown to a user. A thousand impressions do not mean a thousand people saw your ad—it only means Google showed your ad a thousand times.
The higher the impression is, the better it is for you. If your impression count is low, the two potential problems are:
To figure out what is wrong, you need to first expand your audience. For example, if you are targeting California, you may perhaps want to add other states. If this does not solve the problem, then it is your budget that is the issue.
A click is measured every time a user clicks on the URL link of your ad. This click will take this user to your website.
Click-through rate is the percentage of clicks over the number of impressions. If your impression count is 1,000, and it received 100 clicks, your CTR is 100/1000 x 100 = 10%.
Your goal is to have a high CTR, and as you can see from the formula, you will get a high CTR if you get a lot of clicks relative to your impression count.
The main problems with low clicks are:
For bullet one, ensure that your images and videos are clear. There is no excuse for low-resolution graphics today. In addition, make sure that the content itself captures a user’s attention.
For your headline and ad copy, you have to give the viewer a reason to click your link and visit your website. Some common examples are sale offers, introductory prices, new products, etc.
Finally, make sure you are showing your ad to the right audience. For example, in our drone ad, we chose HOBBY as an interest. It does not make sense to choose FINANCE as an interest if we are advertising for a toy, right?
Then, there is the average CPC, or what we call cost per click. This refers to the amount of money you spend for each click (on average).
If your total ad spend is $100, and you have a total of 26 clicks, your CPC I $100/26 = $3.85. It means that you are paying Google $3.85 per click. What you want for a CPC is to be as low as possible.
If you set up your Google Pixel and tags, you program the system to measure your conversion. It is a tad difficult to set this up, so I will refer you to these guidelines.
Conversion refers to the actual purchase that a customer made. This has to be programmed from the back end of your store, along with the code you will get from Google.
Cost per Conversion is the amount of money you spend for each conversion. If your total ad spend is $100, and only two people made a purchase, your cost per conversion is $50, which is too high. The higher your cost per conversion is, the more money you are spending to acquire a customer.
Here is a bonus: if you go to your reports overview, you will see something like this:
I want to draw your attention to the chart on the right—the one I highlighted. This chart shows my ad performance for clicks.
As you can see, 50.2% of all the clicks I got were from my ad shown on YouTube. Them, 28.7% came from the display network. It tells me that people who saw my ad on YouTube were more responsive. My click count is tougher on YouTube than on blogs and websites. So, in this case, I can say that my best course of action is to scale my advertising budget on YouTube.
There are no best places to get ideas for Google Ads because Google pretty much covers everything. If it were up to me, I would focus my efforts on learning marketing itself. Specifically, I would study the psychology of buyers, and also become good at copywriting. Video ads, particularly on platforms like YouTube, have proven to be highly effective in capturing audience attention due to their dynamic and engaging format, differentiating them significantly from traditional display ads.
In this case, I recommend that you pay attention to the ad formats and dimensions that Google requires for your ad type, including the unique opportunities presented by YouTube ads for reaching audiences on YouTube through the Google Ads platform.
In addition, you want to read as many articles as possible about:
There are so many ad types on Google that it makes much more sense to learn how to attract the audience than to just copy a Google ad from the competition.
Like other advertising networks, there are certain approaches, tactics, and techniques to make your ads perform better. Some of these seem obvious, but curiously enough, they often are the most common reasons why ads fail.
Here are some tips to make your Google ads succeed:
Another thing I strongly urge you to do is to integrate Google Analytics (GA) into your store. You will find invaluable data and insights from this tool, and you can create ads based on the stats you see from the reports. Utilizing Google Ads for your dropshipping venture offers significant advantages, such as targeting specific audiences, testing marketing messages, and creating highly targeted campaigns, which can effectively drive traffic and increase conversions.
It works in the same way you advertise on social media. However, Google has a wider reach and more platforms where you can show your ads.
To run paid ads, you must have a Google Ad account. From here, you can now follow the instructions we have in the article.
Yes, you certainly can. All you need is your Shopify store URL and images or videos of your products.
Google Ads is the biggest advertising network in the world. With it, you have access to billions of people from all walks of life. You can access an audience of gamers, hobbyists, fashionistas—everybody.
This is not to say that social media is bad. It’s just that social media has specific user behaviors and types. For best results, separate your ads according to your target market—always take the time to advertise slowly and then tweak what is necessary before scaling.
Understanding dropshipping and steps to launch your own online business
Learn about several proven methods to increase your store sales
Increase sales with proven tactics like free shipping, bundles, reviews, and more
Techniques for creating compelling product descriptions for your store
