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Google Ads

Google Ads
Formerly AdWords

Overview

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.

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Recent Reviews

Ad Management with Google Ads

10 out of 10
January 23, 2023
Google Ads is a very platform to manage paid advertising that is sought to be shared within the Google search engine as well as the allies …
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Best Ads Campaign Tool.

9 out of 10
October 12, 2022
We use Google Ads to reach prospects with very high intent. We have been using this for more than five years now, and it has always worked …
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Google Ads = ROAS

8 out of 10
May 17, 2022
Incentivized
We use Google Ads to support priority campaigns to drive traffic to certain areas of our site, specific products, etc. The platform offers …
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Worst customer service ever!

1 out of 10
May 04, 2022
I use it to advertise my services. The problem is that my ad was suspended and it is impossible to get in touch with a human to figure out …
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SAVE YOUR MONEY THEY ARE A SCAM

1 out of 10
March 17, 2022
SAVE YOUR MONEY!!!!!!!!! THEY ARE THIEVES. FIRST THEY OVERCHARGE FOR PPC ADS, THEN THEY WILL SUSPEND YOUR ACCOUNT FOR NO REASON AND WHEN …
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Awards

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Pricing

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What is Google Ads?

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.

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  • No setup fee

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  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Product Demos

5 Minutes Guide: How to Setup Google Ads Account [2021]

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How to create Google Ads Tracking Template URL with example? Campaign URL Option in Google Ads 2021

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Upload to AdWords (Demo)

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Google Analytics tutorial for Beginners

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Google Web Designer for Google Ads Demo

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Quick Start Guide To Google Ads For Beginners: Create Your First Campaign In 20 Minutes

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Product Details

What is Google Ads?

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear. There's no minimum spending commitment, and the program can be paused or stopped at anytime. With Google Ads the user reaches people as they search for words or phrases as they browse websites. Ads can appear in Google search listings and on partner websites. Remarketing and retargeting techniques can be applied to increase return traffic and make sales. With cost-per-click (CPC) bidding, Google Ads charges users when visitors click on ads.

Google Ads Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is Google's pay-per-click online advertising program. With Google Ads users set their budget and choose where their ads appear in search listings, and on partner websites. Google Ads uses cost-per-click (CPC) bidding.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 8.9.

The most common users of Google Ads are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings

(1282)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-16 of 16)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Ads to advertise our products and services in Google search. It is relatively easy to use and provides us the optimal results. One of the main advantages is its integration with Google Analytics and tracking the conversion rates. Keyword Planner is another helpful thing we found in Google Ads, its so powerful, and we also use it for targeting organic traffic. For a beginner, the resources you need are readily available in the tool itself. So overall, we like using Google Ads since it gives us the results we expect.
  • We can create ads targeting specific keywords relevant to our products/services.
  • We can run different campaigns for targeting different keywords at the same time.
  • We can adjust ad spending according to our budget.
  • A detailed overview/insight of every campaign is produced so that we can plan more efficiently for the next campaign.
  • Since optimization scores are valuated by AI, sometimes ads may get disapproved.
If you are looking to generate some traffic desperately, Google Ads is the best solution. You don't have to wait for the organic traffic. Google will suggest the best title and description so that it will be helpful for potential customers and us to know more before clicking. Companies that have a fixed budget can use Google Ads with maximum trust.
Darien Chaffart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As a non-profit organization, we use Google Ads through the Google Ads Grant and as such have setup numerous search ads to help people discover our organization or to promote big searchable events. Currently, it is only used within our communications/marketing team, but we plan to expand usage to create targeted ads for each individual area of interest within our organization, as well as to eventually run ads targeting questions people frequently ask about Christianity and religion that would link back to an in-depth article about the subject in question.

Google Ads helps address the problem of getting our organization in front of potentially interested people, and has helped boost us ahead of other larger organizations that currently rank ahead of us in terms of SEO.
  • Keyword Research - Google Ads has a handy built in tool that helps determine important keywords to target both for Ads & SEO
  • Intuitive Analytics Dashboad - Google Ads makes it fairly simple to see and analyze important metrics on how your ads are running week after week
  • Intuitive Setup - Google Ads makes it easy to figure out how to run ads with little to no training (although training is highly recommended to run effective ads), as their interface is clean and easy to figure out (unlike competing products).
  • Google Ads allows you to make and manage multiple ads accounts; the downfall being that if you ever click "New Ads Account", that accidental account can seemingly never be deleted/removed from your login page.
  • Google Ads offers two separate dashboard views - "Summary" and "Detailed". Both are useful, however summary seemingly removes 3/4 of the features I frequently use. This only became an issue however when Google Ads first decided to change me to "Summary" view without asking my permission or informing me how to return to the "Detailed" view.
  • No matter what kind of Ads account you setup (using the non-profit grant or not), you get the exact same Google Ads account - with all the features. For non-profits under the grant, this means you have to be careful not to test that cool new feature Google is promoting that will immediately disqualify you from the grant.
  • Google Ads tries to make things simple by giving you suggestions, and will sometimes penalize you if you ignore their suggestions. The issue is when their suggestion is to add misspelled words and improper grammar into your ads - which, if you ignore, decreases your optimization score, and comes back no matter how many times it is reported.
As we only use Google Ads for search ads (under the Ad Grant), I cannot speak to their display, discovery, smart, shopping or video ads. However for our goals, which is to help people searching for an organization such as ours get connected to us, with proper setup Google Ads is very effective. We have had great success running Ads for our organization, helping hundreds of people click on our website and visit our location; and we've had great success running ads targeting big events we put on for things such as Easter and Christmas.

The only time Google Ads would not be appropriate for our usage is if we were to use it to try and target something people weren't searching for, or if we did not do our due diligence in keyword planning.
Sarah VanDunk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I decided to try using what was then called AdWords, about a year ago, as part of my marketing campaign for my real estate career. Unfortunately, it did not work because I got calls from Paterson, a city an hour away that I do not work out of. There was no way to focus the leads any closer. So every time someone even just googled my keywords and clicked on my link in Paterson, I was being charged for it.

So I canceled. Fast forward approximately a year later, I find out that Google Ads, which it is now apparently called, had been charging one of my rarely used credit card accounts for 3 months! Even more so, the account they charged was NOT the account that I had even used back then. They somehow, without authorization, acquired it and proceeded to charge me month after month for a bogus campaign I had absolutely no part of!! What a nightmare. Beware. And they to this date, refuse to delete the campaign so that it doesn't happen again.
  • It could help people find your business.
  • If you have unlimited funds and time, it could be a good tool to obtaining leads.
  • Many leads came from way outside the acceptable geographic radius
  • You must pay for those clicks, calls, etc.
  • The program (ad campaign) has a major glitch so beware, I was charged for a campaign that I never created
  • It is difficult to stop the campaign once created.
  • You can only "pause" a campaign. There is no option to delete a campaign.
  • This is problematic because somehow, these campaigns will start on their own, meanwhile without knowing, you are racking up tons of charges for leads that you never had any interaction with
If you do not have the advantage of having access to a good amount of funds, you will spend more money than what you will see in return from leads.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Google Ads for paid ads on Google Search. Google is the biggest driver of traffic to our website and has the highest volume of monthly searches for keywords relevant to our product offerings, so Google Ads has been a good choice for ensuring that we top the search results, especially where we don't rank via organic terms.
  • Helpful Resources - Given how long Google Ads has been around, there are a lot of resources you can tap into to get started and create high-performing campaigns
  • Easy to Set up - Overall it is easy to set up and get started with Google Ads
  • In-Depth Reporting - Google Ads has some very in-depth reporting capabilities. It can be overwhelming at first, but once you understand the reports you can find some really actionable information
  • Google Ads can get really pricey really quickly. You need to monitor the account and really think about ways to optimize your spend
  • Best practices are not intuitive. Although getting started is really easy, it is not intuitive to follow best practices. Going to a class (in person or online) can be very beneficial.
If you have search traffic coming from Google, you should really consider using Google Ads to augment your search efforts. This is especially true for keywords or phrases that you are not ranking highly for organically. Investing properly in Google Ads can drive high-quality traffic to your site and boost your performance overall.
Chad Carman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Google Ads is currently used in a paid and a grant application for us. We utilize the nonprofit grant system to bolster our search rankings and guide people to specific pages based on their keywords. We utilize paid ads to run pre-roll and video discovery ads related to our YouTube videos. The marketing department is the only group that utilizes it.
  • Large-scale distribution.
  • Options to highly target the audience.
  • Cost-effective compared to other forms of advertising.
  • It can be daunting to get it working.
  • The "educational" aspect to learn how to use it is lacking.
Google Ads is great if you have the budget and the knowledge to adequately target smaller groups of people. It can get very expensive, very quickly if not targeted. Smaller-scale shops can utilize it in smaller markets but the cost to advertise, like any marketing medium, will depend on how saturated the market is.
Jordan Harpst | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our marketing department primarily uses Google Ads to serve relevant ads to prospective leads via search. We do some display advertising, but it is only a small fraction of our budget and it's all related to remarketing. With Google Ads we can get to the top of SERPs when we don't have strong enough content to rank for a search term organically.
  • Integrates seamlessly with other Google products (like analytics)
  • Makes it clear how you can improve your ROI through more relevant content, better landing page experiences, etc.
  • Continuously adding new features
  • Not very clear how automated bidding works...could do a better job of illustrating exactly how automated bidding will outperform manual bidding.
  • Quality Score metric is informative, but not always actionable. Google has taken steps to improve this by being more specific about how we can make our landing pages better, keywords more relevant, etc. But improvements we make aren't always reflected in the quality score.
Google Ads is great for running advertisements to generate new leads, but also helpful for remarketing purposes (whether to website visitors you want to bring back, or more specific cases like upselling to existing customers). We haven't tried running video ads yet, but expect we will in the future due to the growth in video marketing. I expect Google Ads does a great job of managing that as well, given their ties to YouTube.
Justin Higgins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AdWords is used by our paid marketing department, and is one of our primary and most reliable marketing channels. We use it to acquire leads at multiple stages of the funnel, from people who are specifically searching for what we do, and those who are searching for things that make them likely to be interested in what we do. It helps us ensure that searchers are finding us and works well in conjunction with our SEO efforts.
  • Essentially it's the only game in town for paid search - it gets more volume than Bing, and generally more reliable quality.
  • It provides pretty good capabilities for testing a variety of ads and keywords.
  • It integrates very well with Google Analytics in terms of being able to get additional insights into what's performing well.
  • Keyword research is a bit obfuscated and it can be difficult to tell what real volumes are. You really have to run things to see how they'll do for you.
  • It would be nice to see some more creativity in terms of new ad formats - the core hasn't really changed much, and what has changed has mostly been more room for text.
  • Would like to see more tools to tie performance together throughout the funnel, especially with retargeting ads.
Again, AdWords is the 800 pound gorilla when it comes to paid search advertising. It's really the only game in town - we have also used Bing Yahoo, but we typically can't get the same volume from it, and of the volume we do get with it, the quality of leads is more hit or miss.
Tony Phan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AdWords are used to promote our cross-border shopping service on Google's search engine. This digital marketing channel is proven to be effective when allowing us to reach a larger market audience which is searching for our services online. It suggests our website to our customers when they use a specific keyword to search for our service on Google's search engine.
  • If you are offering your services/products to a niche market, it is a perfect channel since users of that niche market normally use Google Search to search for their required service/products and this is where AdWord comes in and promotes your services/products to those users.
  • Equality between advertisers: In AdWords, the one with more money does not always win since it uses different measurements to measure the quality of an advertisement on AdWords. So even if you spend less than your competitor but your ads are relevant and informative to users, your ads will be prioritized when customers enter a search query on Google search.
  • Easy to set up: all you need is a credit card and a set of keywords along with content for your ads (which is also familiar since it looks like a search result on Google Search).
  • Payment Method: Currently only credit cards are allowed for making payment for the ads. It would be nicer if more payment options were available.
  • Optimizing your ads: While setting up Adwords is easy, optimizing your ads to reach out more effectively to a customer is more advanced and more difficult. It would be nice if it was simplified so new users (or new business owners) could learn it fast and more easily.
  • Google will have the right to change the regulation of AdWords at any moment. So what works well for your ads today might be taken away at any time in the future since Google decides its rules.
AdWords is useful when you are tackling a specific product/service that a lot of customers are searching for it. When searching for what they want, usually they will go to Google Search first and you can convert them to sales volume right at this stage. Also, the popularity of Google Search is another factor that you might want to consider before using AdWord, since almost everyone will search for something on Google Search, especially for the things that they will spend money on.
Richard Kaiser | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
AdWords is being used to find high intent traffic to drive to the site.
  • Create A/B test messaging for very targeted high-intent audiences.
  • Geo-targeting capabilities in AdWords are great.
  • The scale obviously here is unmatched.
  • There are limits to search marketing in general. Paid clicks seem to be lower quality than organic.
  • There can be dual intent keywords that are near impossible to negative keyword out.
  • If there is any uncertainty in the business around product-market, you can potentially get taken to the cleaners in high CPC because of low quality scores.
AdWords is great when there is an exisisting market interested in your product. It is not so great when you are trying to create a new market.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AdWords is the client software for the primary lead generation channel for our organisation. It is used by an in-house PPC team of 3 members within the marketing department. Is is used as a necessity to manage AdWords campaigns which in turn are critical to generating lead flow for the business.
  • It provides a wealth of data essential to good PPC management. This includes impression share data, quality score, clicks, impressions, conversion tracking and so on.
  • It is fairly familiar to anybody who has worked in the PPC industry understands its functions and metrics are therefore as close as you can get to a universal language.
  • Our organisation is often approached to take part in betas for new functions such as new demographic targeting tools etc., which we are able to leverage to great effect.
  • Observing differences between ad performance on a large scale can often requires time-consuming manipulation. There is no easy export function which you can utilise.
  • Removed campaigns, keywords etc. can still visually persist within the client, even years after they were last active and removing them requires a filter which could perhaps be set up as default.
  • The geo-location is very useful, but when radius targeting for smaller areas, it might be useful to be able to manipulate the circle and move it around on the map rather than just adding size and centre location.
  • Scripts seem to hold a lot of potential, but there isn't an easy room in for those with little scripting experience. Perhaps some basic scripts provided by Google themselves which can be edited would be helpful.
AdWords is basically essential for lots of companies but the decision on whether to use the client primarily instead of a third party software like DoubleClick comes down a lot to the size of the budget and usage of other search engines. For very large companies, the need to make en masse bid adjustments can make AdWords insufficient. That said, any company which spends even a moderate sum on AdWords should have a PPC professional overseeing the spend, and they should in turn be very familiar with and often use AdWords. For very small companies, control can be handed over to Google themselves to run.
Debora Ramos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used solely by the PPC department. It helps us achieve a considerably high number of conversions at a really high revenue.
  • Brand awareness via Display ads
  • High increase in traffic
  • Full management of ads and keywords
  • Full control of company budget
  • High number of conversions that otherwise we would never achieve
  • Bulk changes that can only be done on the editor software
  • Having several accounts it doesn't allow users to look at the keywords at that level. We have to enter each account to see the respective keywords, ads, campaigns etc
  • Auction Insights is a good tool that let us have a rough idea of what is happening but it is very basic. It would be nice if it could bring more info.
  • Quality Score is something hard to understand. Sometimes similar keywords with same ads have really different QS.
  • Google shopping image ads are not available for lead generation business where products are bespoke
  • It can be very expensive depending on the keywords we are bidding in. Some keywords might easily reach £20 per click
I would say it is not suited for small business where the profit margin is small as it can be really expensive. £75 voucher disappears in just half an hour and it isn't guaranteed that a sale will happen. For companies where the margin is big it is well worth as even if the cost per sale is high you will still get some profit out of it and you are more likely to have far more sales.
It is normally ideal for e-commerce websites with off-the-shelf products as you can use the full capacity of what Adwords has to offer, such as Google shopping.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AdWords was at the core of our search marketing product offering, and integral to our day-to-day. While other paid search providers exist, no other matches the options, completeness, and value of AdWords. Last I checked, AdWords controls > 75% of the search market. Given that paid search is a low-funnel, high-intent channel, it's critical that businesses both large and small be in the AdWords marketplace.
  • Ease of use.
  • Innovation/Feature Development.
  • Reporting Functionality.
  • Sometimes features are released too soon/before complete functionality.
  • AdWords Editor does not always contain latest features.
If you're looking for a low-funnel, high efficiency, and scalable platform for driving new business, AdWords is always appropriate.
Tom Bonanno | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
Being used by any of our clients interested in running paid search campaigns. In the past it was the exclusive channel we advertised on, but because of pricing structure and cost restraints, we've expanded onto Bing and Facebook too. Along with organic search it's one of the two top mediums in generating leads for our clients.
  • Custom messaging in ads
  • Dynamic Search, triggering ads based on your website's content
  • Ability to run search and display ads separately
  • Ability to run YouTube pre-roll ads
  • Everything located in one account; an MCC allows you to manage multiple accounts with multiple credit cards in one location
  • Geo-modifiers- while certainly beneficial to use for local search, not a clear explanation of the best way of targeting (by radius, town, zip?)
  • Adwords Certification- shouldn't indicate a user's expertise since some areas included on test may not be essential to run a successful campaign for your space
  • The ambiguity of Quality Score
Yes - important question to ask is: What the industry is (some are more competitive than others and average CPCs are astronomical)?In the case of a very competitive business and a client with a smaller budget, in 2015 I'd suggest running on Bing first. A lot of cases you'll see similar results for significantly less cost. Less competition there and less expensive. However, Google still holds the lion share of searches and you'll almost never get the volume on Ad Center that you will on Adwords.
Derek Allard | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I primarily use Adwords for clients who are looking to direct focused traffic to their websites. Adwords is a good option for clients who have a new website with no search engine presence or those who have an existing website with low traffic. I find it particularly useful for targeting relevant users as well.
  • Highly targeted traffic based on client keywords. Because there are rather advanced targeting options (geographic, time of day, etc.) and you're bidding on specific keywords, traffic from Adwords tends to be better converting than other marketing options.
  • Can easily control costs. Obviously if money is no object then you can attract a lot more traffic but even for clients with smaller budgets we can set a smaller daily budget and hold to that. In such scenarios I'm usually looking for low cost keywords that have a good bang for the buck.
  • Experimenting to explore potential popularity. I've used Adwords as a test bed for some clients to see if an idea or a product actually has a market. It's a quick and dirty way to answering is there an audience for this (if nobody is searching a given term, likely not).
  • For the inexperienced Adwords can easily get out of hand. There are always suggestions for additional keywords to add, etc. however often times those keywords can break a client's budget (let's be real, Google wants to make money here). I actually, over time, tend to hone in on a smaller number of keywords that are top performing.
  • The quality score of keywords is a bit of a dark art that doesn't always make sense to me. The quality score is an algorithm that determines if you ad will show for a given keyword. From time to time I see keywords get dinged for low quality score even when the landing page and ad contain relevant keywords.
  • In my experience you do have to babysit the campaigns to make them most effective. There is some automation that has been added over time but you're still far better off coming back and regularly checking on keywords / ads that are performing well and pausing those that aren't.
I will say with some clients I've had great success (I can think of one client that gets a majority of his business from just running Adwords) and I've had scenarios where it really hasn't panned out well. In my experience I think the more specific an item / service you offer the more likely you'll be to have success. Clients who haven't had great luck with Adwords are those that are more general in scope and serve multiple areas. What I'm trying to say is that it's not a perfect fit for everyone but you really won't know until you try it. The good news there is that there is a really low cost of entry to experiment a bit.
May 16, 2014

AdWords Added Up

Kevin Whalen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
AdWords was used in order to generate application leads for our recruiting and talent acquisition department. It was used only in our department by two to three employees. It allows us to target the large majority of people searching on Google for job opportunities. We were able to customize campaigns for keywords we knew certain job seekers that we wanted to target would be searching.
  • Keyword suggestion
  • Analytics
  • Reporting
  • Feedback on quality score improvement
  • Betters alerts on campaigns, groups, or keywords that were performing poorly
In terms of recruiting, depending on your competitors you may need to try to claim a niche set of keywords where your CPC will not be drained too quickly. Some of these major corporations have budgets that will leave you broke fast if you try to compete over obvious keywords.
Max Kalles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller
We use Google Adwords to market our own business, and to help our clients across many industries generate leads and grow their business.
  • Target specific niches in targeted regions
  • Research and select appropriate keywords
  • Track and analyze the results of your campaigns
  • Expand your customer touch points with remarketing to existing site visitors
  • Better updates are needed when new product features are launched, but considering the volume of new features that are always being added to stay a leader in marketing, they do a fairly good job at keeping you updated.
When a client is looking to generate leads from the internet we have found that Adwords is typically the best place to start.
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