Google ads are a powerful tool for any gym owner looking to take their advertising game to the next level. This form of marketing can be very efficient and profitable, generating $8 of value for every 1$ spent on average. Businesses all around the world have been benefiting from Google ads for the last 20 years. In this detailed guide, we will cover how Google Ads can benefit your gymnastics center as well.
What Are Google Ads
Google ads are displayed in many places across the internet, but the most recognizable location is at the top of Google’s search results. We have all seen these while we are shopping or looking for specific services or products. They normally take up the first 3 results above the map pack shown below:
Additionally, Google ads can also be displayed in the display network and across YouTube. The display network is a collection of websites that are partnered with Google, so your ads could show up on millions of other websites. However, among these three methods, advertising in the search results is normally the most reliable and profitable.
What Exactly Makes Google Ads So Powerful?
Google ads are unlike many other forms of advertising because they are shown to the customer at the exact moment they show interest. Advertising this way through Google allows you to put your business in front of potential customers at the most crucial moment. Every day people are searching for new products and services, by paying through Google you can ensure that your business is shown first.
This incredibly direct form of advertising helps us to find new customers that would have been lost previously. It also allows us as advertisers to perfectly match what we offer to customers looking for our services.
In contrast, many other forms of advertising are based on an educated guess. For example, a more traditional television ad or radio ad has only a small capacity to guess the interests of its viewers.
With Google ads on the other hand you can target both specific keywords and customer intent. You can advertise to a specific term like “Gymnastics classes in my city” and only show your ad to customers in your area looking for your services.
This trims away much of the extra expense because you are only showing your ad to the people who are already interested. In this way, every dollar you spend is working efficiently for your Gymnastics Center.
What is the difference between Google Ads and SEO?
Google Ads and Search Engine Optimization both work towards the same goal, to rank higher for search terms, but they do it in very different ways. Google Ads depends on monetary investment while SEO depends on optimization and content. Since these two practices overlap it can be difficult to decide which one you should invest in, or if you should invest in both.
SEO can often be a slow and difficult process of producing content, building backlinks, and optimizing your website. All of this work takes time and as we all know time is money. So, even though you are not required to spend any money on SEO to rank well it still has many hidden costs.
Google Ads on the other hand are instant. You turn on a campaign and just like that you are generating traffic and pushing interested customers to your website. This can be a powerful asset for your business depending on your gym’s goals and marketing budget.
Both SEO and Google Ads can greatly contribute to your business’s digital marketing progress. It is best to be investing in both at the same time to multiply your results. Every gym will benefit from these practices so it just depends on what budget and time you have available to invest.
1) Create your Google Ads account
Getting started with Google ads is luckily fairly simple and straightforward. Go to this link to set up your Google ads. Select your goals, location, keywords, and campaign. Below are some more details on setting up the correct campaign structure and overall bidding strategy for your gym.
Google Ad Campaigns
There are 5 overall campaigns that you can run for any business:
- Search ad campaigns
- Display ad campaigns,
- Video ad campaigns
- App ad campaigns
- Shopping ad campaigns
In certain situations, all of these campaign types are incredibly useful. However, most gymnastics facilities will not fit into the app campaign or the shopping ad campaign. These campaign types are mostly made for different vendors and stores.
The best advertising campaigns for the Gymnastics Industry are Search, Display, and Video.
Search campaigns are overall the most reliable and trustworthy. We recommend always starting with a search campaign to keep things simple. Then once you are more experienced start experimenting with the display network and video ads.
Video ads can be an interesting medium because they are high cost, high reward. High-quality videos can be difficult to produce, luckily it is getting easier every year, but they can still take a great time commitment to make. At the same time, customers love to consume video content over most other forms of media. Video ads can generate great results for your gym.
Google Ads Bidding Strategies
There are two major bidding strategies available through Google ads, Manual and Automatic.
Manual Bidding – This bidding strategy is best for those who want to save as much money as possible. Manual bidding will allow you to set the amount you want to pay for each ad to be shown. This gives you overall more control, but it could come at the cost of losing some bids for ad placements.
Automatic Bidding – This bidding strategy is based on allowing Google to run your ad budget for you. The only problem is that Google does not care about how much money you spend. There are ways to cap how much Google spends, but overall Automatic bidding will cost you more money, however, your ad will also be shown more.
Choosing between these two bidding strategies comes down to what position your gym is currently in. If you are looking to boost business and quickly generate results we would recommend automatic bidding. However, if you are looking to test the waters and save a little more money then manual bidding will be best for you.
Once you have gone through all of these options you will be ready to move onto the next steps of finishing your ad and starting off your campaign.
2) Understanding Keywords Research And User Intent
One of the most important parts of success in Google ads is to understand keywords and user intent. By understanding these two concepts we can learn what our customers want to see and why they are searching.
What Are Keywords
Keywords can become incredibly complex, but at their basic level, they are fairly straightforward. They are the terms or words that people use to find what they are looking for on search engines like Google.
This is very important when it comes to Google ads. If you are paying for the wrong search term you could be missing out on a large number of your potential customers.
For example, if you are trying to get more kids to sign up for your team program you might target ads towards terms like “team gymnastics”, and “team gymnastics near me”. However, you might find that people are actually searching for “competitive Gymnastics” rather than the team. This small difference could render your campaign much less effective.
Putting in the research and time to choose the correct keywords can help you to avoid simple mistakes and optimize your campaigns much faster. To learn more about keyword research read through this informative article by ahrefs.
User Intent
User intent is much like what it sounds like it would be. It is what a customer wants to do with the keywords that they are using to search. There are 3 major categories of user intent:
Informational Intent – These customers are looking mostly for free information
Navigational Intent – These customers are looking for specific websites
Transactional Intent – These customers are looking to purchase a product
Nearly all Google ads campaigns are based around transactional intent because that is where the money is.
Customers are ready to purchase, you just have to find them at the last step. This method can have the greatest return on your investment, but it can also be overfilled with the competition. Luckily gymnastics is not often too overcrowded, other industries such as law and insurance sales could cost an arm and a leg.
As an alternative method, you could also experiment with finding customers in the informational intent phase of the purchasing cycle. This generates slower results, but the overall competition will be much lower as well as the price to run your ads.
3) Creating Your First Ad
Now that you have created your Google advertising account and you understand your target market’s keywords and intent the next step is to create your ad. Creating an ad can be nerve-racking for the first time.
Just know that no ad campaign is perfect right out of the gate. It all starts as an educated guess based on research and understanding. From there you can analyze the results and double down on what is working while trimming what is not.
Three Basic Components Of Google Ads
Title – The title is going to be the main attention-grabbing tool that you have at your disposal. Unlike many other advertising platforms, there is no visual photo that will run alongside your copy. This means that there is extra value placed upon the title of your ad. Try to make your title direct and to the point without overfilling it with keywords or unnecessary text. People should be able to look at it for 0.5 seconds and understand exactly what you are offering.
Description – The description is your brief chance to elaborate on what your title mentions. This will be a great place to expand upon your title and pull customers in to see more.
Ad Extension – The ad extension is the last bit of information that you can include in your campaign. Ad extensions are much like what they sound like, they add more information to your original advertisement. You can choose to attach one of the following: extra links, offers, call extensions, and app extensions. All of these are free extensions that help to gain more exposure for your ad.
4) Creating your landing page
Getting someone to click on your ad is only half of the work. Once the customer clicks you will need to finish the sale through your landing page and sign up/purchasing process.
It is important that your landing page is optimized for ease of use and simplicity. Try to only optimize your landing page to sell only one thing. Keep it short and sweet. This will make it simple for customers to understand exactly what they are signing up for.
Here is a quick checklist of everything that you should have on your gym’s landing page:
- Sales Offer
- Call to action
- Explain What your service provides your customer
- Images/video to visually show the service in action
- Customer testimonials/athlete testimonials
- FAQ
- Business Information (email, phone, address, etc.)
- Contact Us
All of these parts together help to build overall trust with your soon-to-be customers. An optimized landing page along with an amazing ad campaign is sure to bring your gym great results.
Take time to build out your landing page and always come back to improve and edit its content. Like many things, no landing page is ever really as good as it can be. Try small changes and mix things around to generate better results and test to see what is working best. By doing these experiments you will be able to get a good idea of how to generate better landing pages in the future.
5) Optimizing And Tweaking Your Performance
Once you have made your ad live you can start to collect the results of your effort. You can then use the data that you have collected to improve your campaign and make changes. Try targeting different keywords or even test running ads through the display network.
This constant process of testing and refining will be what ends up improving your ads and creating meaningful results for your business.
Conclusion
Google ads can be complicated, intimidating, and expensive, but with the methods discussed in this article, you can reduce all of these concerns. Google ads are a great tool for any Gymnastics center no matter how large or small. All gyms need new customers and Google ads are one of the best ways to find them. If you want any additional assistance contact us here and we would be happy to answer any questions or concerns.
If you enjoyed learning about Google Ads for your gymnastics center we highly recommend reading our extensive article on the other 15 best gymnastics marketing methods of 2023.
