Perhaps you're a small business owner hoping to do what every business owner hopes to do... grow your business your way, and build or maintain a happy, healthy lifestyle! Hooray for being on the entrepreneurial journey with the rest of us.

To accomplish this goal, you're interested in marketing and you want to get more eyeballs onto your business. You know a lot of people utilize Google, and you're determined to do what is necessary and commit to increasing ad views through Google search visitors......except there's a problem.‍

Does increasing ad impressions (Google's way of saying views) pay your utilities bill? Does increasing ad impressions ensure your employee 401K's (and yours too, btw) are safe and secure?

Unfortunately no, ad impressions (or ad views) don't equate to making you money and this is something crucial to consider as you search for the best Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) partner for your needs.

Marketing is More Than Ad Impressions

The objective of good marketing is to identify and target the best audience for your product or service. What that means is that ad impressions mean nothing if they aren't from your target audience. If your primary customers are women, age 45-56, in a specific zip-code, do you really want to pay wads of money for your ads to be shown to 17-25 year-old men across the country?

Obviously no, but the reality is there are less-than-ethical firms out there hawking bulk PPC services who don't care what the quality of the ad impression is, they just want to sell you on it by promising a boat-load of ad views."WE'LL GET YOU AS NUMBER ONE ON GOOGLE ADS...""Well okay, but for which search terms and to what audience?"...should be your response to that claim.

But Impressions Do Have Some Value

On the other hand, an ad impression isn't a meaningless metric. Behemoths like Apple and Coca-Cola put their logo on as many things as they can because they understand the power of brand awareness. So what's the balance?

In the world of Paid Search Advertising, the balance is building an account in Google Ads (AdWords) that targets both Top of Funnel visitors (TOFU - people just beginning to consider your product or service) to raise brand awareness as well as Bottom of Funnel visitors (BOFU - people already invested in purchasing your product or service who are researching where to buy it) to land that sale.

This is one of the reasons we at ZATO build accounts targeting both TOFU and BOFU terms. This strategy allows us to do our best to both raise brand awareness to build a target audience, as well as invest in owning the search keywords people who are already in your target audience are actively searching for.One thing to note if you have extremely limited budget, is that it makes more sense (and this is reflected in our initial setup strategy) to initially target the low-hanging fruit of BOFU visitors.

Practically, this looks like: (1) owning your brand terms when competitors are bidding on them, (2) targeting remarketing visitors when applicable, (3) targeting lower funnel search terms [buy product SKU keyword]

The key here is that you want to ensure you are utilizing conversion tracking to actually identify where your sales are coming from so you can sacrifice impression volume by bidding higher on terms you know will actually lead to sales.

So, to wrap up, remember the age-old adage I just made up: Sales pay your bills, not Ad Impressions!