Google Ads Malaysia: The Ultimate Guide For 2022

Did you know that for every RM4 that you spend on Google Ads Malaysia, you could earn up to RM32 in return?

If you’re not investing in Google Ads for your business, you’re missing a big opportunity in getting qualified leads that can be turned into paying customers for your business.

In this article, we will share all the information you need to know about Google Ads and get started with this result-driven digital marketing strategy. In this guide, we will answer all your Google Ads related questions like:

• What is Google Ads?
• How Does Google Ads work?
• How do I launch a Google Ads campaign?
• Why should I use Google Ads?

Google Ads Malaysia Definition

Google Ads is a paid search marketing strategy that helps your business to get traffic from Google and Google affiliated networks. Although Google Ads primarily focus on helping your business appear at the top of search results when people search for keywords or terms related to your business, there are other types of advertising campaigns offered by Google Ads which includes:

• Search network campaigns: Help your business reach your potential customers that are searching for your products and services on Google search engine. It works well for all types of businesses that are looking to drive leads, sales, and traffic to their website.
• Display campaigns: Help your business reach your target audience with visually engaging ads. The ads are displayed across millions of websites and apps.
• Video campaigns: Help your business reach your target audience with video ads on YouTube and other websites. This ad campaign mainly focuses on building brand awareness.
• Shopping campaigns: Ideal campaign for online stores or eCommerce sites with product inventory. Shopping ads appear on top of search results and the Google Shopping tab.
• App campaigns: Help your mobile application to find new users and increase sales within your app. This campaign type often shows the ads across many online platforms which includes YouTube, Google Discover, Search, Google Play, and over 3 million sites and apps
• Local campaigns: Help you bring your potential customers to your physical stores. You need to have your Google My Business page connected to Google Ads to utilize this campaign.

In this guide, we will discuss more on search campaigns as it is one of the commonly used campaign types.

How Does Google Ads Malaysia work?

Now that you know the definition of Google Ads, let’s look at how Google Ads works.

When your potential customer searches on the Google search engine, it crawls and analyzes the pool of advertisers bidding on the searched keyword or term. Google considers various factors of each ad, but these factors are the most important ones that you should be aware of:

Quality Score

There are 3 main components in the quality score which are:

• Ad relevance: Google will analyze whether your ad copy is relevant to the keywords or phrases searched by people and whether it matches the search intent of users.
• Expected Click Through Rate (CTR): Google will determine the likelihood for your ad to be clicked by the users when shown on the search result pages.
• Landing page quality and experience: Google will analyze whether your landing page provides relevant and useful information that reflects the user’s search queries.  
• Overall historical account performance: If you’re new to Google Ads, this factor won’t be considered. The performance of your ad campaigns will have an impact on your future ad campaign’s Quality Score

Quality score usually will be used as a benchmark to improve the quality of your ad copy and it is not necessary to get a perfect score for it. However, studies show that a high-quality score will help you:

• Reduced costs: If you manage to get high Quality Scores, Google will lower the cost per click (CPC) which helps you to improve your ROI.
• Better reach: When you have higher Quality Scores, Google will display your ads on search result pages more often. This enables you to get more clicks that lead to better conversion without needing to increase your bids.

Bid Management

Google Ads bid management is the process of increasing and reducing your bid for chosen keywords that are related to your products and services. The main objective of bid management is to make sure you’re getting the best results from Google Ads. So bid management is one of the important factors as it determines where your ads show up in search results and how much you’ll be paying when someone clicks on your ads.

If you’re just starting with Google Ads, you may find bid management to be tricky. Sometimes experienced Google Ads managers find it difficult to manage the bids when they work with large ad accounts.

We will cover the bidding management process in the next section.

How Do I Launch A Google Ads Campaign in Malaysia?

Now you know what Google Ads is about and how Google Ads works. In this section, you’ll learn how to launch your own Google Ads campaign.

Here are the steps you should follow to launch a successful Google Ads campaign:

Perform Keyword Research

The success of any Google Ads campaign relies on keyword research. You need to choose the right and relevant keywords for your products and services. Only the right ones will bring you clicks and conversion. Moreover, you don’t want to drive the wrong people to your website and waste your ad budget. Keyword research is all about identifying the keywords or phrases that your potential customer is typing into the search box.

Start your keyword research process from your website’s landing pages that your ad copy will be linking to. You need to analyze each page and identify keywords from the copy (we assume that your website pages are well-written with high quality and relevant copy).

You can categorize the keywords in the following groups:

• Brand group: keywords that contain your brand name.
• Generic group: keywords or terms related to products and services.
• Related group: keywords or terms that are not directly related to your business, but people still want to try your products or services.
• Competitor group: the brand name of competitors offering similar products and services.

For example, if you’re conducting keyword research to advertise “Adidas running shoes“, your list of keywords might look like this:

Note: If you don’t have enough budget, avoid bidding for competitors’ brand terms. It’s usually expensive. Think carefully before targeting those keywords and determine whether it’s worth the investment.

Next, put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. Think about what kind of queries they will type into the search box? What kind of keywords will be running in their mind if they want to purchase your products or services?

Once you listed down all the keywords that you can think about, refine the list with keyword research tools. There are a variety of tools available online and you can choose one that suits you the most. If you don’t have the budget to invest in paid keyword research tools, you can use Google Ads Keyword Planner instead.

Each keyword tool has its very own functionalities, but we’re just looking at the search volume and level of competition. Each tool offers these two important criteria.

As you can see from the Google Ads Keyword planner screenshot above, it shows the Keywords list, average monthly searches, and competition. High competition indicates that a huge number of advertisers are bidding for the search term. It means you must bid higher and compete with others to get your ads to the top position of search results.

Keywords with high volume and low competition should be your ideal choice. But it’s extremely hard to find such keywords as more and more businesses are actively advertising using Google Ads.

You also want to look at additional keyword ideas suggested by keyword research tools like Keyword Planner. These keywords have the potential to bring in the right customers to your website.

Be careful with the keywords you choose. Don’t choose highly competitive keywords that can eat up your ad budget or low competitive keywords with little to zero search volume. Just look at something in the middle. Make sure the keywords you target are relevant to your products and services and help you convert the people that land on your website.

One of the common mistakes that people do with their Google Ads campaign is that they forget to add negative keywords. Negative keywords are the search terms that you don’t want your ads to appear.

When you look at the keyword list, there are three types of keyword matches which are Broad, Phrase, and Exact. Usually, the exact match keywords will have the lowest volume as the ads will only show up when people type in the exact keywords on the search box. Whereas broad and phrase match usually includes other additional words along with the keywords.

We often suggest our clients avoid exact match keywords because it does not bring in enough traffic and people to your website. And most people searching for your products and services would not search using exact keywords. So, going with phrase and broad match is always recommended. For example, you’re selling “baby skincare products” but you appear for baby products which include baby toys, baby items, and other things.

Use these methods to identify negative keywords and add them up to your Google Ad campaign:

• Analyze your search query reports: At times you’ll be unable to identify negative keywords before running the ads. Once you’ve started your campaign constantly look at your search query report in your Google Ads account. If you see words and terms that are not related to your products and services add them to “Negative keywords”.
• Careful with your negative match types: When you assign the keywords or terms as “negative keywords”, make sure you’re choosing the right negative match types. Use broad match negatives for terms like “free”, “easy”. If you’re sure that some terms are irrelevant, use the phrase and exact negative match.
• Identify negative keywords before launching your ad campaign: When you identify negative keywords and add them up before launching your campaign, you’ll be saving a lot. Many online paid tools can help you identify potential negative keywords based on the keywords that you’re targeting.
• Never overdo it: Negative keywords are important, but if you make unwanted errors, it can severely affect your campaign by reducing your impressions and clicks.

Choosing Your Bidding Strategy

If you want to beat your competitors and appear on top of the right keywords, you need to get your bidding strategy right. Google gives various ways to bid for your ads and it solely depends on your campaign goal. Businesses commonly focus on impressions, clicks, conversion, or views (for video ads).

Every single time when there is an ad spot available whether in search result pages or websites (for search and display ads). All the advertisers bidding for them will be put in the auction and the most appropriate one gets the spot they deserve.

As we’ve mentioned earlier, there are various ways to bid for your ads depending on your goals. We’ve listed the bid options available for you to choose from depending on your business objectives and goals:

• Maximize Clicks: Google Ads will set your bids automatically to get the most clicks within your ad budget. This is one of the best bid options if you have a high performance landing page that converts well. If you want to increase clicks to your landing page, this bidding option is for you.
• Maximize Conversions: If you’re looking to increase your leads and sales, you can choose to get the most conversion from your ad budget. This bidding strategy works well if you have a huge amount of money to be invested in your Google Ads campaign.
• Target Impression Share: This bidding strategy works well if you want to improve your brand awareness. Your bids will be set automatically and increase the chance of appearing at the top spots of search results.
• Target ROAS: Are you looking to get the most Return on Ad Spend? This bidding strategy is what you should try out. To be successful with this bidding strategy, you should be ready to spend 2 to 3 times your average daily budget for Google Ads. Target ROAS works best for eCommerce stores that do not have budget limitations. It’s all about increasing profit.
• Target CPA: If you want to get the best results with this bidding strategy, you need to have historical conversion data. This is because when you set the Target CPA too low, you might end up getting very few leads from your campaign. You need to have an ideal Target CPA to run a successful Google Ads campaign with this bidding strategy.

Despite having so many bidding options to choose from, you might get frustrated and have a misconception that Google favors advertisers who are willing to pay the most for Google Ads. Well, that’s not the case. Other important factors that determine the success of Google Ads campaigns include:

• Quality Score (discussed earlier in this article)
• Location
• Keywords intent
• Time of day
• Device
• Audience behavior
• Expected Click Through Rate (CTR) of your ads

Even if you don’t have a huge budget for Google Ads, you can still reach your goals by choosing the right bidding options and considering other important factors.

Important tips: You need to adjust your bid amount until your ad shows at a frequency that it generates results. Avoid bidding high for the keywords and terms when you’re just starting. Start small and gradually increase your bid amount until you see your ads performing.

Develop Persuasive And Compelling Ad copy

Developing or crafting compelling ad copy for Google Ads isn’t rocket science, but to get it right, you need to use the combination of science and arts. We need to fight through a battle to get potential customers to click on the ads that show up on search result pages.

When you’re writing an ad copy for Google Ads, you need to be aware and think about the experience your visitors will be having from search query to landing page.

You just don’t want your visitors to hit on the back button after reaching your landing page. And the worst-case scenario is when your prospect conducts another search and finds another solution provider (most likely your competitor) that can solve their problem.

Although the issue might be related to other factors, 90% of the time it has to do with your ad copy. If you’re not using the right ad text, your potential customers might skip yours and click on other ads.

So, what you should do to drive your target audience and improve your overall results?

• Understand your audience: Most advertisers focus too much on keywords and terms and forget about the message they’re looking to deliver through their ad copy and encourage their audience to click. It depends on your niche. Identify what your target audience is looking for and get it in front of them. You can continuously test the type of message you want to deliver and analyze what works best for your audience.
• Use the right keywords in your ad copy: You need to include your primary keywords in your ad copy, especially in the headlines. But don’t overdo it and make it look spammy. Don’t repeat your keywords in your ad copy as it will turn off your potential customers. If you’re providing your services at a specific location, you can also add the location to your ad copy.
• Leverage the power of Ad Extensions: There are various ad extensions available for Google Ads which include Sitelink Extensions, Location Extensions, Structured Snippet Extensions, Call Extensions, Message Extensions, App Extensions, Callout Extensions, Price Extensions, and Promotion Extensions. Just use the ones that are appropriate to your products and services. Do not abuse the ad extensions!
• Analyze your competitor’s ad copy: When you look at your competitor’s ad copy for the keywords and terms you’re targeting, you’ll get more ideas on crafting a better ad copy. Don’t just copy your competitors. Just reverse engineer their ad copy and make yours better by identifying what they’re missing.  
• Stand out from the crowd:  With limited characters, you won’t be able to express everything about your products and services in your ad copy. Rather than being straightforward with your offer, you need to get a little creative. Just focus on stimulating the curiosity of your audience and encourage them to click on your ad. Do something different to stand out from hundreds to thousands of competitors.

You can check out the following resources to learn more about crafting compelling ad copies:

• Create Better Google Ads with the Help of These 11 PPC Ad Copy Examples
• 7 Ways to Write Super Effective Google Ads (with Real Examples)

Create Dedicated Landing Pages For Google Ads

Driving traffic from the Google Ads campaign to the homepage of a website is one of the common mistakes by beginners. A perfectly crafted homepage of a website has the potential to convert visitors to paying customers. But in most cases, people that visit the homepage of a website often get turned off as it is not something they expect to see.

A dedicated landing page for Google Ads is developed to improve the conversion rate. The right landing page will have all the important elements that will persuade the visitors to take a specific action that the advertiser wants.

Many studies show that landing pages play a vital role in running successful Google Ads campaigns.

When you use dedicated landing pages for your Google Ad campaigns, you’ll get great benefits like:

• Landing pages support your ad campaign goals: Rather than covering every single product and service, focusing on one element will help you narrow down your target audience and cater to the solution they are looking for. It will be easier to encourage the people to take a specific action on the landing page like filling up a form or sign up for a mailing list because the page offers what they are looking for and they will do whatever it takes to get the solution.
• Landing pages increase conversions: Your website might have the information that influences and persuades your visitors to take an action. A landing page will do the same but with better effectiveness. And it’s easier to encourage visitors to take action on landing pages when we use the conversion element which is known as call to action (CTA). Sending your paid search traffic to dedicated landing pages will increase the number of actions taken. The increase in conversion will help you get more customers which results in more money for your business.
• Landing Pages Generates Data and Insights About Your Target Audience: When you add the URL of a landing page to your Google Ads campaigns, you can determine the campaigns and landing pages that bring you the most leads. Tracking and understanding user behavior is one of the most important elements that can help you improve your landing pages. Getting insights into your potential audience can help you make changes to your campaign strategies and landing pages to improve the overall effectiveness.
• Landing pages improve business credibility: Landing pages are focused on specific objectives rather than needing to put in everything like how it shows up on a website. You just need to focus on persuading your visitors to take clear action and that action should solve their problem. And that’s why you need to add social proof (testimonials of existing customers) to your landing pages. When you show the success of other people that used your products or services. This will influence the visitors to take the right action.

You can learn more about developing dedicated landing pages for your Google Ads campaigns from the following resources:

• How to Setup A Landing Page That Converts
• Google Ads Landing Page – Create High-Quality Landing Pages for Google Ads
• Google Ads Landing Pages: Best Practices, Real Examples, and Templates

Why Should I Use Google Ads Malaysia?

So, you want to know the answer to “Why I Should Use Google Ads?”

Well, there are huge benefits that can take your business to the next level. Here are some:

You will reach a huge audience with Google

Did you know that Google has evolved from a brand to a verb?

Try searching for the term “Google” in the Merriam Web Dictionary

When people look for answers to questions, Google is the first thing that comes to their mind.

For any problems, Google is the first thing people browse and search for solutions.

Google search engine gets approximately 2+ trillion searches per year. That’s almost 5 billion searches per day.

So, your potential customers are searching for your products and services to solve their problems. And you need to get your business in front of them. As SEO takes more time to get your website ranked for your desired keywords, launching a Google Ad campaign will help you position your website at the top of the search result pages.

Reach people with purchase intent

The huge difference between the audience you’re reaching with Google Ads and the audience you’re reaching with other advertising campaigns is the intent of the audience.

When you look at social media advertising, the people that you’re trying to reach are not actively looking for your products and services. They are not searching for the solution to their problem on social media sites. When you advertise to people that are not interested in your business, you’ll be wasting a huge sum of money without any results.

With paid search advertising like Google Ads, you’re getting your ads in front of people that are interested in your business. As your potential customers are searching for something specific, you would not be interrupting their browser experience and showing the answers they are looking for.

Although many consider Google Ads as outbound advertising, we consider them as inbound marketing afford because you’re getting in front of people that already have the intent to associate with your products and services. Using Google Ads encourages your potential customers to come to you rather than needing you to haunt them. It is easier to position your business and earn money from your customers when you appear in front of them at the right time and place.

You have complete control over your Google Ad campaigns

With Google Ads, you know what you’re doing. You know your ad copies, you know the keywords you’re targeting, and you can allocate the right budget for paid search advertising purposes. You have full control over these things. It’s hard to have complete control over other paid advertising channels.

You’ll get quicker results than SEO

SEO remains one of the best digital marketing strategies for any website.

But it takes time.

It can take around 6-12 months for your website to rank for the keywords or search terms that you’re targeting. And if you don’t do your SEO right, you might not see your site ranking at all.

While working on your SEO strategies, start running Google Ads and increase your odds of being found on search result pages. Moreover, with the right Google Ads strategy you’ll be able to appear above the fold of the search result pages like the screenshot below:

If you’re still not sure why you should be using Google Ads, then you need to answer the following questions:

• Do you want to increase your brand awareness and reach your target audience?
• Do you want to get qualified leads for your business?
• Do you want to increase your conversions and revenue?
• Do you want to have control over your paid advertising?
• Do you want to get the most out of your advertising budget?

Need help with Google Ads Malaysia?

Now you know that Google Ads can help you get your business in front of your potential customers. However, it’s a challenge to create and manage Google Ads campaigns from scratch if you’re just starting.

If you’re looking for a reliable search marketing agency for Google Ads campaigns, Magnes Marketing can help.

At Magnes Marketing, we have a team of certified digital marketers that can take your business to the next level with Google advertising campaigns. We’ve managed more than 50 Google Ads campaigns over the last year and generated more than RM2.3 million in revenue for our clients.

Feel free to contact us using our contact form to learn more about our search marketing strategies.