Introduction (00:00-00:20)
Topic (00:21): How do you know if your Google Ads are a good investment?
If you have been on the fence about running Google Ads, this is your opportunity to learn and take some notes on what they can do for you. Figuring out if your Google Ads are a good investment for your business is twofold: One, it depends on if you are running good ads or not. Two, if it’s generally the right route for your brand.
Why Google Ads, Anyway? (1:13)
To begin answering those “if’s,” let’s start by looking at a simple statistic about where Google fits into the digital world’s marketplace and how we’re using the internet. Google, as a search engine, still owns over 70% of the market share. When someone goes to the internet and does a search, they typically initiate that search on google.com seven times out of ten. The second-largest search engine globally is YouTube, which is owned by Google, and you can run ads on YouTube. So, the first important thing to remember when considering Google Ads, is that Google is dominant.
When people go to Google to do searches, it’s different than when they encounter a Facebook or Instagram ad. When they go to Google, and they type in something into that little box to do what we call a query, they are proactively searching for your product or service. It is very different from an ad that appears on Facebook because maybe they’re interested, but they weren’t looking for it at that moment. So, already you have the opportunity to get in front of people who are actively looking for what your business offers.
Locate Your Audience (2:40)
Here is something else important based on what your product or service is. Before you even launch into ads or while auditing campaigns that you already have running, you need to find out if your customers or potential audience are using Google as a place to look for your product or service. Is it even a platform you could reach them on? Once you have answered that basic question, then you can start assessing if this is a place where you could make a good return on your investment.
Data Is Your Best Friend (3:13)
Whether you are already running ads or thinking about starting, you need to make sure that you are effectively measuring their impact. Meaning, make sure that, if your company doesn’t have it set up already, you have a Google Analytics account in place. Make sure, as the marketer or owner of the business, that you have access to that Google Analytics account, and that you link your Google Analytics and Google AdWords together.
You also need to have some type of tracking in place and set up. That can happen on the Google Analytics side, where you can have goal tracking or event tracking set up. If someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website, and they fill out a form or make a purchase, you know exactly what ad campaign that came from because you have tracking in place. How do you put tracking in place to measure that? You need to go to your Google Ads account and set up conversion tracking:
Step 1: Determine Your Google Ads Conversion Goal (4:46)
Some companies are only revenue and profit-driven so they measure based on sales made, while some companies may also prioritize getting people into their marketing funnel. When running Google Ads, the goal is often to get people in the funnel, maybe to get them as a lead or as a new appointment set. So, if that’s the case, then the way you measure that conversion will be based on leads obtained rather than just straight revenue. The investment impact is a little different. If you know your business has a longer pipeline and not necessarily about making an instant sale, that lead can be just as valuable if you nurture it properly.
Step 2: Set Up Conversion Tracking in Google Ads (6:12)
Conversion tracking will be critical to know if Google Ads are a good investment for you. If you are new to advertising in Google, getting conversion tracking set up needs to be one of the first things you do when your account is created, ideally before you launch your first ad. There is a place in the menu on Google Ads that allows you to do that. It’s a bit of JavaScript, so it looks like HTML code. Send that to your web developer to put on your website, and that ensures that you’re able to track it accurately.
Step 3: Measure Your Return (6:47)
Once you are good to go with your conversion tracking, then it’s just a matter of measuring the conversions and figuring out if what you’re spending on your ad campaign makes sense with the returns you’re seeing. For example, say we created a simple ad budget of $1,000 per month. We will look at how many new leads we got out of that $1,000 per month. What was the cost per lead? If we spent $1,000 and got 10 leads out of it, then we spent $100 per lead, right?
This gets into a little bit of basic math, 10 divided by 1,000. Then you might go a little deeper and not just look at how much that lead is worth to us or the value of that lead, but what the quality of that lead is. Is that a lead that we might actually convert? Or was it someone who clicked on our website, but maybe it wasn’t what they thought it was going to be, so not the right lead for us? We want to go down that rabbit hole a little bit when we’re measuring impact and measuring investments to see if it makes sense.
Choosing A Type Of Google Ad (8:09)
Number one is to make sure you pay close attention to what type of Google ad you’re going to launch. There are a lot of options in Google. You can run Search ads, Display ads, Shopping ads if you sell retail items, or run video ads through YouTube.
If you run one of the most popular ad types, a search ad, one little thing we caution about in your settings is that when you go to create that ad, Google will ask you, “Would you also like to run your search ad,” which is a text ad, “on the display network?” The Display network is a visual network where banner ads appear. Well, text ads don’t always do so well on a display network. We recommend that 9 times out of 10, uncheck that box unless you want brand awareness. But if your goal is to get conversions and sign-ups and sales, you don’t want a search ad running on the display network. It is a costly mistake and can hurt your investment sometimes.
Ad Extensions On Your Google Ads (9:44)
Ad extensions have the ability to boost your click-through rate more than three times. They are simple little callouts that can appear below your ad. It allows you to get more text in your ad, such as multiple links people could click on from your ad that might take them to different places on your website. It also gives you an opportunity to showcase details and share promotions. There is even a messaging extension where you could get text messages rather than phone calls or do a call extension and get phone calls generated for your business. So not running extensions sometimes can impact your investment. Ideally, again, if you run search ads, make sure you turn those extensions on.
Keyword Research For Your Google Ads (10:35)
Keyword research is so important. No matter what type of ad you run, many are built on using keywords. If you are not finding effective enough keywords, not using negative keywords when you set up your ad campaign to weed out things that you don’t want to pay for, not using match types (what we call broad match or broad match modifier, exact match, or phrase match), or not incorporating other keyword match types into your campaign, then you may find over time that you are overspending.
Your Google Ads Quality Score (11:14)
One more metric that could impact your investment is a low Quality Score. This metric is on a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (excellent). If your Quality Score is consistently below 5, it often means you are paying a higher cost per click than many of your competitors.
The Big Take-Away? (11:53)
If you are already running ads, go audit for these tips. Look at your Quality Score, make sure your keywords are up to par, make sure you are running ad extensions, make sure you’ve got your conversion tracking set up, and then start calculating and figuring out what your return is based on how many leads you’re getting and how much you spend. That’s great for people who have already started. And if you’re new to running campaigns on Google Ads, remember to get your conversion tracking set up right away, make sure you got a quality campaign set up, good keywords, and that your audience is actually using Google to search for your product or service.
Closing (12:31)
Read more about this topic as well as others like it on our blog, where you can get lots more information around social media, digital marketing, and tips for businesses big and small! And, as always, check us out or contact us on social media any time. If you’ve got a question or if you’ve got another topic you want to hear for an upcoming 10 Minute Marketing podcast, just let us know!