Google Ads in Nepal

Bivek Khatiwada

Published at : December 18, 2018

Updated at : December 18, 2018 10:41

Digitalisation has been the new age model for the businesses with the advent of growing use of internet. The progression towards the digital business idea has been specially a game changer for marketing, which has also been adopted by a number of Nepali entrepreneurs in recent years. Promotion and advertising of brands through social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram has been an ongoing trend but formulating a full-fledged marketing strategy through Google Ads by these businesses is still a rare phenomenon. With a clear approach to digitalisation, Google Ads can be a great help for an advertiser to create brand awareness and an upsurge in sales.

Types of Google Ads

The main objective of an advertiser is always to have their brand and products or services to be recognised by a wide group of people that in turn results in maximum sales. Google Ads, if implemented right, can bring that sort of success to the advertisers quite easily.

There are three types of marketing strategy to grow business and to increase brand awareness via Google Ads: Search Ads, Display Ads, and Video Ads. An effective and proper combination of these strategy techniques can help an advertiser make a difference in their business.

Search Ads are the type of Ads, which appears on SERPs (search engine result pages). These Ads that appear on the SERPs with the ‘Ad’ in front of their URL, can appear on the top in SERPs ahead of the organic search results if done right. Display Ads, on the other hand, appears only in the monetized websites, which has implemented Google AdSense. Similarly, Video Ads appear on YouTube in different ways in form of Skippable Ad, Bumper Ad, and Display Ad among others. Moreover, these types of Ads can be implemented in two ways, one on a PPC (Pay per Click) basis and other on an impression basis.

In the PPC based Ad campaign, the advertiser is charged for their Ad on a per click basis. The cost for each clickdepends upon Ad rank the advertiser is targeting, quality score of the landing page, and the competition of the keywords chosen. In simple words, if Bose has bid for the keyword ‘best headphone in Nepal’ for $0.25 and if Sennheiser decided to create a campaign for the same keyword, it has to pay more. But the advertisers have to pay for such Ads only if a visitor clicks it. These Ads are more functional to the advertisers whose main target is sales rather than brand awareness to get maximum ROI (return on investment).

The impression-based campaign usually suits the advertisers who want their products or services to be heard and recognized by a large number of people. These kinds of Ads appear on SERPs, websites or YouTube videos depending on the type of Ad campaign chosen. However, unlike the PPC Ads, the advertiser has to pay for the advertisement depending upon the number of times the Ad appeared on the certain platform (SERPs, website, YouTube). And these kinds of Ads works on the CPM (cost per thousand impressions/views) basis. So if the main purpose of an advertiser is brand awareness, using these types of Ads is the way to go.

Scope and Benefits of marketing through Google Ads

When it comes to the internet, Google is widespread. According to StatCounter, a web traffic analysis tool, Google has a whopping 90.9% of global market share when it comes to the search engine. The 2016 statistics shows that there were on average 2.3 million searches per second. The search engine giant also has its own Android mobile operating system. Android OS has 76.8 percent mobile market share worldwide. Android OS has all the Google Apps (YouTube, Chrome, Gmail) pre-installed and are the default apps in the most cases. So there is a significant number of Google usersbecause of which Google is experiencing billions of search queries every month.

Even in the context of Nepal, Google’s ecosystem flaunts a significant share of internet traffic in Nepal. Quoting from Alexa, youtube.com is the most visited website in Nepal followed by google.com, indicating a huge potential in marketing via Google Ads even in Nepal. However, Nepali advertisers are more inclined to advertising their businesses and services through the social media platforms. It has been reported that Facebook Ads is receiving CTR (click through rate) of 0.9 percent on an average while it is 2.7 percent in case of Google Ads, demonstrating its greater benefits to the advertisers.

Since people mostly use Facebook to view photos and posts from friends and relatives or scroll through the news feed to find entertaining contents, the Ads seems to be ignored most of the time.

However, people make Google searches and browse through the pages mostly to find the answer to the things they are curious about. For such users, Google shows Ads based on their interests and browsing pattern and history. If a user searched ‘remedies for a toothache’, Google might show the name of the nearby dentist or a dental hospital.

According to the recent data from Nepal Telecommunication Authority, internet penetration in Nepal has reached 63 percent. Most of the users use the internet from mobile devices. And with the affordable mobile data and expanding 3G/4G internet coverage on different parts of the nation, we can expect the number to grow even further. So this can be a huge advantage for the advertisers to reach out to a large audience and through the effective means.

Apart from the advertisers, using Google Ads can also help the content creators as well as the users. A relevant Ad can also save a user’s time while also helping content creators (websites/YouTube channels) by providing revenue opportunities. A certain percentage of Ad click goes to the content creators, which encourages them to create more posts or videos.