How to successfully harness Google Ads

Richard Conway serves up some valuable tips for small business owners thinking of trying Google Ads for the very first time.

My first Google Ads campaign was in 2002, just two years after Google first released the product. This initial foray and the remarkable results it achieved had a profound impact on me and led to a career in digital marketing. 

Nowadays we all use the Internet and Google to find products and services daily and many of us are already running Google Ads, social media or other types of marketing. 

Let’s look at some of the basic strategies that a small business owner should think about implementing when venturing into Google Ads for the very first time.

What do you want to achieve? 

Before you even create a Google Ads account, it’s a good idea to define your goals.  

Are you looking to increase website traffic? Do you want increased newsletter sign-ups? Do you have an e-commerce website and therefore want direct sales? Do you have a limited-time promotion running that you want to drive enquires to? 

Whatever your particular goal, this should permeate every decision you make when setting up the campaigns. At every stage of the process you should be thinking: will this help me achieve the goals I have set out for myself?

Market research 

Like any well executed business or marketing strategy, research is key to ensuring you get the best return on investment for your marketing dollar. Look at Google Analytics and Search Console (both free Google tools) to see which keywords are already bringing in visitors to your website. Are there location or demographic considerations you need to think about?

Type some relevant terms into Google and have a look at which competitors are already featured in Google. Look at their adverts, landing pages, calls to action – what do you think they are doing right, and what do you think you could do better? 

Speak to your customers and read reviews of yours and similar products and services online. Think about how to speak to these customers online and what messaging will resonate with them.

Budgets

How much do you want to spend? What would be a good cost of acquisition for a new client? 

It is quite easy to start with a modest budget on Google Ads and then, over time, increase it depending on the results. 

It is important to work out your daily budget – that way you can specify how much you are prepared to spend daily on Google Ads. It can be as low as a couple of dollars or up to thousands! The sky is the limit.

At Pure SEO we spend between $4,000 and $6,000 per month. I know (by looking and optimising the results over time) that it costs us approximately $223 for a form to be filled in on our website. From that we have about a 20 percent conversion rate (so about $1,115 for a converted lead). For our business this is profitable; we therefore have an open budget, but because we have optimised it and understand which keywords convert, the budget never really exceeds $6k.

Get organised

Once you start creating a Google Ads account, it is crucial you structure it correctly. This will make it easier to manage, optimise and improve. Start with thinking about the campaigns, this is a set of Ad Groups that share settings like ‘budget’, ‘product offering’ and ‘location’. So in Pure SEO’s example we have different campaigns for different offices (Auckland, Wellington and Melbourne). 

Within a campaign you would have different groupings of Ads (knows as Ad Groups). 

With Pure SEO it could look like this:

Campaign: Pure SEO Auckland

Ad Group: Search Engine Optimisation

Ad Group: Digital Marketing

Ad Group: Search Engine Marketing

Then there’s geotargeting: Geo Targeted to Auckland and surrounds.

Keywords 

Once the campaign structure is formulated its time to select the keywords. Remember that some keywords may have huge search volumes but could be very expensive. Google Ads is an auction system, whereby if everything is equal, the person bidding the highest will appear in the higher position in the search results.

Select keywords that you believe your customers will be utilising to find businesses like yours. When selecting keywords, you will be asked what type of matching option you use. It is advisable to stay away from broad match (if you have a limited budget) as this gives Google the ability to show your ads for similar and variants of your keywords. 

Better options are:

Exact Match – This means the ad will only show for exactly the same keyword as you have chosen.

Phrase Match – These are phrases that may include additional words to the ones you have chosen. 

Negative Match – These are keywords you don’t want your ads to show for, even if someone has typed them in with keywords you have chosen. A good example could be ‘job’; you may not want to pay for someone searching for a job in your industry.

Broad Match Modifier – This allows you to appear for the term you select or close variants or synonyms.

Relevancy

It is absolutely critical for the keywords to be relevant to the adverts they trigger and the landing page the customer lands on. It is good to have a click-through rate (CTR – the number of people that view your ad divided by the number of people that click on the ad) in excess of one to two percent. You should also look at Google’s quality score (measured 1-10 with 1 being the lowest). The higher the quality score, the lower you will pay per click. 

Adverts

Make sure your adverts are relevant to the keywords that the user searches for and that they have good messages and calls to action. Split test the adverts with at least two variations (three is better!) and test the results.

Make your adverts compelling and try and give yourself an advantage over your competitors with a compelling offer or message.

Measure the results

Whilst Google Ads can bring in lots of traffic, you need to ensure it is the right traffic. Make sure you are measuring conversions and the cost of each of them. It is important that you establish the lifetime value of a customer to you to see if the customers you are buying through Google Ads are profitable.