In the marketing community, they have a saying:
“Google Ads is a monster — whether or not it works for you, depends on you”
The monstrous complexity of Google Ads interface is no news for you. Maybe you logged in and logged out? Maybe you tried to dabble with it? Heck, you might have managed to launch a campaign or two on Google too?
The Google Ads application is just like Photoshop — the complexity never ends. For most users, that complexity isn’t even required. But the software is kept the way it is so that users of all experience profiles can use either of those.
We’ve covered a lot on Google Ads for a while now. Here are a few posts, for your reference:
How to Start & Run Your Campaigns On Google Ads
Lesser known features of Google Ads To Get You More Results For Less
Mandatory Reports Within Google Ads To Help Maximize Your ROI
How Now to Drain Your Google Ads Budget
Before you go deep into Google Ads and start working on your campaigns, there are a few things you should do:
You’ve got some numbers to crack first
You don’t just log into your Google Ads campaign manager and launch campaigns. That’s just not how it’s done.
Before you go anywhere near Google Ads, you’ll have to calculate a few numbers.
This depends on your business, products, services, and your pricing. But let’s take a dig at it:
Make certain calculations (since each digital channel has variable conversion rates). For instance, incoming phone calls convert higher than leads generated on landing pages. Or email converts better than social. Or Facebook Messenger converts better than email.
- What price point do your products or service sell for?
- What’s the profit margin on each product you sell?
- What’s the average lifetime Value of every customer you get?
- What is each lead generated on my landing page worth? If you have multiple products at multiple price points, calculate an average lead value for each.
- What is each incoming phone call worth?
- What’s each chat (followed by email capture, and then meeting booked) on your live chat software worth?
- What’s the maximum I can spend on generating a lead (across the above channels)?
- If I spend X, how many leads do I generate to create Y revenue, and hence Z profits?
Once we have all the information we need for your business, you can plan our campaigns better, spend only what we need to, and do what we can to generate leads, phone calls, shopping sessions, etc.
Set up your campaigns right
We’ve written about how to set up your Google Ad campaigns right earlier.
Whatever you do with your Google Ads campaigns, don’t use the defaults. It applies to everything from choosing your locations, excluding locations, rotating ads, applying budgets (CPC, for instance), and how you add your keywords for your campaigns.
As a ready reckoned, here’s what you should typically do while setting up your campaigns:
- Start with the lowest possible budget (just enough to move the needle)
- Instead of choosing an entire country (such as the United States), choose only major cities.
- Choose “People Living In…” your [Chosen Location] and not the default “People Interested In…”
- Always create your Ads in pairs (for split testing).
- Depending on your business, make good use of day parting ( the ability to show your ads during particular days of the week or hours of the day)
- Since you are split testing your ads, don’t choose the default “Show the best ad….”. Instead, “choose to rotate ads evenly…”
There are many default Google Ads settings that you should be careful about [that makes it a completely new post for later]
Use extensions
We cannot stress the importance of using ad extensions while launching your Google Ad campaigns.
While it’s the easiest thing to do to maximize the impact of your ads, it’s also the most neglected. More than 70% of the Google ad accounts we see here at DoneForYou don’t have extensions.
That’s literally throwing money out into the drain.
Look at the Google ad above.
Do you see how those extra links give more juice for your ad? Do you realize that just by using extensions, you are able to increase the real estate your ad takes up on the Google search results page?
Ad extensions let your ad take up more space, look bigger, provide more context to your ads, and they don’t cost you a dime more.
Track Your Inbound Calls
Say you did pay attention and use your “call extension” on Google ads. So, what exactly happens when you include the call extension on Google Ads?
Some of your potential customers could look at the number and place a phone call.
With thousands of potential customers seeing that number and placing phone calls, how do you track those phone calls and attribute conversions to those?
Most businesses don’t.
Did you know that the humble mobile search alone drove approximately 73 billion phone calls in the year 2018?
Now, that number will only get bigger as we go by.
But then, it’s shocking to see just how many businesses don’t track their incoming phone calls. According to BIA Kelsey research, around $64.6 billion is being spent on localized ads that are meant to generate phone calls for businesses.
With over 150+ billion being spent on local advertising in the United States, about 12.6 % of that spending is on pure-play mobile ad spend.
Put your phone numbers on your website, your Google Ads (and also on Facebook ads). Then, use a good phone call tracking software to track incoming calls along with all sorts of other caller data such as the name of callers, duration of calls, the source of calls, and more.
Make no excuses with email (and marketing automation)
Email gets you an ROI of 4800%. Just stop there and think about it.
Email Marketing automation isn’t complicated at all — it might look like it is, but it isn’t. You don’t have to be a tech genius to figure out and use marketing automation for your business.
With the kind of technology available for business of all sizes, your excuses are no longer valid. There are all sorts of marketing tools (that’ll make up the most of your marketing stack), there are specialist agencies that can help you with it all, or there are specific solutions even for agencies, large businesses, and enterprises.
Marketing automation helps take your hands off a few aspects (where possible).
Embrace text messaging
In the rush of everything digital, we all conveniently forgot about the humble SMS. Your potential audience could miss your push notification messages, emails, social updates, the latest blog post, and pretty much everything else you throw at them.
Chances are that they won’t miss reading their SMS messages. Some companies like Skipio claim a whopping 98% open and read rates for SMS messages.
Wishpond has an infographic that shows you just how effective SMS can be as a channel and explains over 25 different marketing automation use cases just by using SMS.
You could use this channel well if you take care not to come across as spammy and shady. Not every SMS message you send should be a pitch.
Instead, use SMS as a channel but use email marketing best practices such as meaningful engagement, asking questions, and providing value.
Get professional help
Google and Facebook want you to truly believe that rolling out an ad is incredibly easy, and it is. There’s no denying just how powerful these platforms are (under the hood) while making it seem so easy to launch a campaign.
If you aren’t too careful, you’ll only end up spending your money for nothing.
Google Ads management is a full-time job — it takes a lot more than you think and it’s not for the faint-hearted. There’s the right way to setup campaigns (above), an effective way to use keywords, arrange your ad groups, managing budgets, and more.
Plus, there are landing pages, funnels, email marketing automation, split testing, optimization, and tweaking your campaigns continuously.
Don’t try it at home.
Looking for help with your paid marketing campaigns, landing page funnels, ads management, and your digital marketing strategy? Fill out this form now and allow us to help you out.