Leveraging Google Ads for Local Business Growth (Part 1)

Craig Graham [00:00:00]:
Today, advertising is very expensive and you need to do every single thing you possibly can to be able to have your brand stick in people’s minds. 

Jeffro [00:00:15]:
Welcome back to digital dominance. If you own a business for any length of time, you’ve probably tried Google Ads at some point and if not, you’ve thought about it. Google owns over of the search engine market, which means there’s a huge audience that you can get in front of. But what tends to happen is that you get all hyped up and you set your first campaign, you spend a few hundred bucks and then that’s it. You give up and say, it didn’t work for me. Maybe it was too steep of a learning curve, maybe your targeting was wrong, or maybe you hired an agency that screwed you over. Yet somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that countless other companies are using Google Ads successfully. So maybe it was just easier not to admit that you had something to do with it not working.

Jeffro [00:00:53]:
And that’s not a good place to be. So I’ve invited Google Ads expert Craig Graham on the show to walk us through how to leverage Google Ads for local business growth. This is going to be a two episode deep dive, so buckle up. Craig has been leading, he’s been a leading figure in the world of lead generation and direct to consumer ecommerce marketing for over 13 years. He’s the co founder and CEO of Gray Vault Consulting and he has collaborated with top brands such as Big Blanket Co. Sheer comfort seat covers, keratin hair care and OMG commerce. So please welcome Greg Cramp. Let me say that again.

Jeffro [00:01:27]:
Please welcome Craig Graham, everybody. Thank you for joining us, Craig hey.

Craig Graham [00:01:31]:
Thanks for having me. Jeff Row, excited to be here.

Jeffro [00:01:34]:
Definitely. Well, I am a little tongue tied apparently, but we recently connected on LinkedIn and since then I’ve seen your daily posts that give detailed, practical tips about the Google Ads platform. It’s clear that not only are you very good at this, you’re also very passionate about it.

Craig Graham [00:01:50]:
Absolutely. It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time. It’s something that I failed a lot at early in my career, which taught me a ton. And now I’m able know, help others learn and adapt and get better at Google Ads. Take some of my learnings.

Jeffro [00:02:10]:
So let’s maybe, can we start with giving us your high level philosophy when it comes to getting started on Google Ads?

Craig Graham [00:02:18]:
For sure. High level philosophy. I mean, there’s two things that are really critical. You need to have a clear understanding of your brand. And kind of gone are the days where you’re able to just have a landing page and a page to send traffic to and not much of a brand presence today, advertising is very expensive and you need to do every single thing you possibly can to be able to have your brand stick in people’s minds. So having a really clear idea and understanding of what your brand is, who you’re selling to, what products or services you’re offering are critical. And then the second most important thing that it all comes down to is understanding your profit and losses and your profit margins so that you’re able to actually advertise effectively and profitably.

Jeffro [00:03:11]:
Right? And this is a commitment, right. When you’re starting to do ads, it shouldn’t be something that you’re just like, well, let me try this for a couple of days and see how it goes. It’s like, no, take this seriously. And once you figure that out, okay, it’s going to take a little while. Some tweaking optimization and all of that. Good stuff.

Craig Graham [00:03:27]:
Yeah, 100%. It’s not a one time thing. You shouldn’t really look at it that way because when somebody’s looking for a product or a service online, they’re not usually just looking one time, they’re usually checking several different websites, going to know, looking on social media, looking on Google, looking in various different places. And the idea is that you’re probably going to want to connect with them a few times and allow them a few opportunities to research your brand, look you up, look you up against your competitors before they might end up actually calling or submitting a lead form or purchasing one of your products.

Jeffro [00:04:06]:
Right? So let’s say you’ve decided, okay, I am going to commit to this. I’ve got a decent idea of my approach, my budget and all that. So how long does it typically take to get a new campaign off the ground with a positive return on ad spend?

Craig Graham [00:04:19]:
I would say it probably takes anywhere between one and three months to start seeing good, continued, long lasting success with Google Ads. That’s typically the window that I would give it. Usually the first month is just understanding what settings are going to work, what ads are going to work, the keywords you’re targeting. If you’re inside of Google Ads, if you’re using local services ads, then you’re seeing what that cost per leads are looking like and how many leads you’re generating. So there’s kind of this upfront optimization process that goes on in the very beginning stages. And then once you have a clearer understanding and picture, know your baseline, then you can start to optimize from there and adjust both on the Google Ad side, but also on your website, on the services offerings and various things like that, to be able to move the needle.

Jeffro [00:05:18]:
Yeah, and I want people to hear that really well. It can take one to three months before you’re having a positive return on ad spend. And if you don’t have that understanding going into it, then of course you’re going to give up early. And if you don’t have enough budget set aside to handle that, you’re going to give up early and you’re just going to be frustrated that it didn’t work. So even Craig’s been doing this for 13 years. He’s still saying it takes a little time, guys. So you have to be patient with it and make sure that you’re willing to work through that process in order to reap the benefit of the ads going forward. Because once you’ve gotten to that point, it will pay for itself.

Jeffro [00:05:56]:
Right. Because now you’re set. But you do have to get through that initial period.

Craig Graham [00:06:01]:
Yeah, that’s the idea. I would have, like an initial goal in your first month to maybe break even or even have a slight loss or expect a bit of a loss, so that by month two and three, you’re hopefully starting to achieve some profitability. And three and beyond, you’re profitable and scaling. And that’s the ideal situation. But remember, it really comes down to your brand and your profit and losses and your profit margins. You got to have a clear understanding of those things, otherwise it’s not going to work for you.

Jeffro [00:06:34]:
Right. If you’re hiring an agency and they say, okay, it’s going to take 90 days to really kind of get this solidified, that’s okay, don’t be scared by that. But make sure that it’s not 90 days go by and then they get back to you and say, hey, it worked, right? No, there should be communication along the way, there should be feedback back and forth. There should be optimization changes that need to be made, questions, updates, all of that should be happening along the way.

Craig Graham [00:07:02]:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I wouldn’t work with an agency unless they have a clear understanding of your brand in the first place and your products or services, the target market that you’re selling to. There’s a lot of clarity that an agency needs to have in order to run your ads effectively. And it’s not all to do with just what happens inside of Google Ads, really. They’re selling your business, they’re putting your business forward and placing that in front of customers. Eyes. So you need to make sure that definitely there’s tons of communication and they have a very good understanding of your overall business and your brand.

Jeffro [00:07:36]:
Yeah, definitely. All right, so now that we’ve hammered that point, let’s talk a little bit about local targeting. How can owners best take advantage of the way that Google targets their search results to certain areas?

Craig Graham [00:07:49]:
Yeah, for sure. One of the best places to jump in if somebody was getting started for the first time is probably local services ads. That is a separate component from Google Ads, but can be used in combination with Google Ads in order to get your ads served in the right places at the right times. So one of the benefits of local services ads is that you actually pay per lead, so you can set a budget and instead of paying per click like you do on the Google Ad side, you’re actually able to set the amount that you were willing to pay for a lead. And you’ll only pay if you actually generate a lead. So you get a phone call or somebody messages you. And currently Google has this available for a number of different local business types. Whether you’re carpentry or an HVAC installer or trash removal, there’s a ton of different ones, as well as on the professional side, if you’re a lawyer or a realtor and you want to drive more leads to your business, there’s options for you there.

Craig Graham [00:08:47]:
So that’s one place that gets a lot of visibility in search results that are for highly relevant placements. That is a really straightforward and quite simple way for you to get started. I would just ensure that you have a budget in mind that you’re willing to put together and spend. And having an idea of your margins gives you some insight into what your cost per lead should be as well. And then on top of the local services ads, using Google Ads to actually target very specific locations. If you’re in a little bit of a more advanced mode, the targeting can be very granular or it can be very broad depending on what you’re offering. So Google allows you a lot of flexibility to reach the people that you want to reach.

Jeffro [00:09:35]:
And that makes sense for the local services ads too. I just wanted to touch on a couple of things there. It does give you the opportunity to provide feedback to Google on those leads as well. So afterwards you can say, hey, this person turned into a customer or no, that was a bad lead. And that’s information back to Google’s algorithm, whatever it’s doing to decide how to show your stuff, to hopefully give you better results next time. But the pay per lead aspect of it is really helpful when you’re starting out for that smaller budget because again, you’re only paying when you get someone coming through. So as long as you know how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer, it’s a great option. And really it’s know, local services ads that kind of assumes you don’t want to get in there and mess with your campaigns.

Jeffro [00:10:17]:
You just want Google to take care of it and send you people and you want more business, whereas the main Google Ads kind of assumes you know what you’re doing, which means you can do awesome things, but you can also do really dumb things, and that’s kind of on you. So those are some other distinctions to be aware of.

Craig Graham [00:10:33]:
Definitely. Yeah, exactly. Google Ads is more of the advanced service, but they can be used in conjunction. So let’s say you’re using your local services ads and you’re getting good leads coming in and a good flow of leads and you want to scale up. I mean, Google Ads would probably be the next place you would look. And like you said, definitely want to make sure you know what you’re doing before you start spending money there, because it is a pay per click environment, not a paper lead.

Jeffro [00:11:03]:
Right. I guess this is a good time to talk about it. There’s actually, I think, nine different types of Google Ads total. So there’s search ads, display ads, shopping ads, video ads, app ads, discovery ads, performance max ads, smart ads, and then the local service ads which we just talked about, those are actually managed in a separate hub. Everything else falls under the Google Ads umbrella, the main platform. Can you talk about some of the differences between those other types of ads within the platform?

Craig Graham [00:11:32]:
For sure, yeah, I’ll try and hit as many of them as, I mean, within the Google Ads platform itself, primarily, when you think about Google, you’re thinking about search most of the time. And so search is one of the core components of Google Ads. And when you’re using the search channel, you’re actually targeting, most of the time you’re targeting keywords. And so let’s say when somebody searches for, I don’t know, an HVAC contractor near me, for example, might be a keyword, they would look, can you can have your Google Ads account set up in such a way that when somebody searches for that keyword in the location that you want to serve ads to, that keyword triggers your ad to come up in the search results. And then usually at the top, there’s usually like between one and three results. And sometimes there’s some near the bottom of the page as well. And then I’ll actually say ad next to it. So you know it’s an ad and not an organic search result.

Craig Graham [00:12:33]:
That is where search results, sorry, that’s where your keywords tend to trigger search results for. And somebody clicks on that and then they’ll come to your website or they could even click. There’s sometimes click to call ad extensions on there as well and various other ones where they can see your local business listings. Lot of different things you can do with search, but that’s primarily how the search ads work on the shopping side, which can have some relevance for local businesses because you can actually have local inventory ads come up in shopping as well. Shopping is a whole other thing where if somebody’s on Google, you can actually click the shopping tab and that opens up all of the ad space for where people are serving shopping ads. Sometimes shopping ads will also serve up in the main search engine results pages alongside your search ads. So they can have a couple of different placements and there is some overlap. But typically shopping is for ecommerce brands and then some brands that are doing local inventory ads and things like you.

Craig Graham [00:13:41]:
Even if you deliver locally, you could even run shopping campaigns and they work in a completely different way. You need to create a feed, you need to create a Google Merchant center account, and all those things work together to be able to actually create and serve ads where they’re relevantly placed.

Jeffro [00:13:59]:
What about the display ads? Are those something that can work as well? Because those show up on other people’s websites, correct?

Craig Graham [00:14:06]:
Yeah, for sure. Google, I mean, they’re everywhere. I think pretty much they have access to 90% of all of the web inventory, I believe, through display ads. So how it works is if a website, let’s say you’re on, I don’t know, the weather network or something, checking the weather, they’ve opted into what’s called Google AdSense. And Google AdSense is a program that actually pays that weather website a little bit of money every time somebody clicks on one of the ads that displays on their website. So if you’re on the weather website checking the weather, you might all of a sudden see an ad for a local business or a brand. Those are all served through Google display ads within Google Ads, and they can be really effective from a local side for remarketing purposes. For example, you can target people who have been to your website and then serve them ads as they browse other websites to kind of keep reminding them about your brand or try to sell them on promotion or something like that you have going on.

Craig Graham [00:15:20]:
So it’s a great way to reach people. You just have to understand it’s just reaching people in a different way when they’re doing a different thing, like search, they’re actively searching for something. They have something in mind when they’re doing it. And then you have an ad that shows up that speaks very specifically to the thing that they’re searching for and provides an answer for that. So typically you see better direct action results from those types of ads, whereas display, it’s a little more passive. And so it just tends to work by reinforcing whatever message you’re sending to those people through other channels as well.

Jeffro [00:15:57]:
Got it. Or you just have to be very specific about the types of ads you’re running on those platforms too, because while search ads have the intent already, the other platforms don’t necessarily, but you can still position yourself to be relevant. So on the example of weather, if you’re a roofer and you’re advertising, hey, secure your roof for hurricane level winds, and the forecast is saying hurricanes coming next week, right? You’re going to be like, oh yeah, maybe I need to call these guys and have them check my roof. So even though there isn’t intent there, they are interested in the weather that’s coming and probably would want to make sure their roof is intact.

Craig Graham [00:16:34]:
Yeah, that’s a great use case. Exactly. And that’s something where your traditional marketing and just being savvy and good at marketing is going to come in handy, whereas your marketing sense is really important when it comes to Google Ads, just like any platform. So. Yeah, great points.

Jeffro [00:16:54]:
Okay, can you talk about the performance Max and the smart ads for a, you know, I mentioned the local services is more of like, I just want to be hands off. It kind of sounds like a smart ad would do the same thing. And I know when you’re kind of giving Google some information, say, this is what I want, please make it work. But is there a little more to it than that? How can you use those effectively?

Craig Graham [00:17:16]:
So I don’t typically recommend smart ads because I’ve never actually seen them work effectively. So it’s not actually something I’m able to speak to significantly and that I don’t really recommend, but good question. Nonetheless, I would prefer to stick with if you’re just getting started, probably like local services ads to begin with and then reach out to somebody who can help you set up on the Google Ad side if you want to continue. But to speak to performance Max. Performance Max is really cool. Typically, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that as a place to start for a local business, but if you were to work in a performance Max campaign, it’s almost like an entire Google Ads account in one campaign. So you’re able to serve ads to people in every channel where Google serves ads. So search, shopping, display, so across the web, YouTube, Gmail, Discovery Network, which is turning into demand gen, which is like basically every other channel that Google has access to.

Craig Graham [00:18:28]:
So it’s a really straightforward campaign type, but it’s actually pretty complex in the way that it works and functions and drives results. And the way that it has a benefit over other campaign types is that because it amalgamates the entire account into kind of one campaign, it’s able to more easily target and retarget and send traffic, show ads to the right traffic at the right time, and uses machine learning algorithms to be able to do that super effectively.

Jeffro [00:19:09]:
When did performance Max ads come out? Because they haven’t been around that long, right?

Craig Graham [00:19:15]:
No, they’re pretty new. I believe they came out about two years ago, if I’m not mistaken, a year and a half to two years ago, and they actually replaced what were called smart shopping ads. So if anybody who was using Google shopping for a while remembers smart shopping, smart shopping sunsetted about a year and a half to two years ago, and then everybody was forced to use these performance max campaigns and they’ve continued to evolve over time into what they are now, and they’re used quite prevalently.

Jeffro [00:19:52]:
That makes sense. Yeah. And really another thing I want people to take away is that local services ads is probably going to be the closest to a set it and forget it option. All these other things might work for a while, but you’d need to be paying attention because sometimes your results can drop off for various reasons. Right. Something could have happened in the market or some other competitor could have started running ads is doing a better job than you, and so you need to kind of stay on top of it and make changes as you go.

Craig Graham [00:20:20]:
Totally, yeah. That’s where the optimization comes into play. It’s important thing to keep maintained. Definitely, yeah.

Jeffro [00:20:28]:
That’s another reason why an agency would have a retainer.

Craig Graham [00:20:31]:
Right.

Jeffro [00:20:31]:
Because that’s their job, is to keep doing this for you on your behalf every month and let you know if they’re seeing problems before it becomes a problem and make sure that you’re getting those leads that you need to keep.

Craig Graham [00:20:41]:
The business moving forward 100%. Yeah. Proactivity from your agency is something that I think you should expect and then also when it comes to running ads for your local business, I think that agencies need to have a role in ensuring the leads they’re actually generating for you are of quality nature. So not only, I don’t think the relationship should end at like, here’s the lead. It should be, here’s the leads. Now let’s make sure they’re good leads for you. Why are they good leads? What makes a good lead? And then how do we continue to adapt our strategy to push more of that type of lead for you?

Jeffro [00:21:20]:
Right. And there should be that conversation happening, because what happens a lot I’ve seen is an agency is like, hey, guess what? We did a great job. We got all these clicks. We’re holding up our end of the bargain. And over here as a business owner is like, these are terrible leads. They’re not my target audience. Why am I paying you guys? And so there’s a disconnect. So you need to make sure that it lines up.

Jeffro [00:21:42]:
And this happens when there’s confusion between similar keywords. So, for example, if you do exterior house cleaning, like maybe the windows and the walls and stuff, someone’s searching for house cleaning. They really wanted a maid service, but they got you. So of course, they didn’t schedule a call. Right. And so your ads agency or your media buyer, whoever’s doing it, needs to figure out negative keywords or how to phrase things to make sure that the people that are seeing the ads are the actual right people the business cares about 100%.

Craig Graham [00:22:09]:
Yeah, well said needs to be incredibly relevant. Make sure that right from the keyword that somebody is searching for, that you’re targeting it correctly. Make sure the ad reflects what you’re actually serving, and then all the way to when they click through to the landing page, that the page itself is actually reflective of what they searched for in the first place.

Jeffro [00:22:27]:
All right, folks, we’ve covered a lot of stuff so far, and yet I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface because Google Ads is such a huge topic. Luckily, we get to continue this conversation in part two next week. So take this opportunity to connect with Craig on LinkedIn, follow his daily tips, and we’ll see you in the next episode.