Leveraging Google Ads for Local Business Growth (Part 2)

Craig Graham [00:00:00]:
Some of the metrics that help you identify whether or not you’re on the right track are going to be things like impressions. Are my ads showing up to people at all? 

Jeffro [00:00:18]:
Welcome back to digital dominance. This is part two of our deep dive on Google Ads with Craig Graham. If you haven’t listened to part one yet, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode first, then come back to this one so you aren’t totally lost. Last episode we started talking about Google Ads philosophy, getting a campaign started, local targeting and some other related topics as well. So we’re going to jump in and pick up the conversation right where we left off. So let’s shift gears for a second here. Let’s talk about how a lot of business owners may also be doing SEO. So can you talk about the interplay between doing SEO and Google Ads in parallel, how those can work together?

Craig Graham [00:00:56]:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I guess how they work together is that if you’re present in both places, then you can really dominate the entire Google ecosystem, essentially with your brand, with your offerings, with your products and your services. So if you’re only running Google Ads, you are only showing up where Google Ads can be placed. And if you want to ensure that you’re getting as many leads as you possibly can, you also want to show up organically where possible as well, and should be part of your overall cohesive marketing strategy. And another thing to keep in mind is that while you’re working on your SEO, which takes quite a bit of time, depending on what industry you’re in and a lot of different factors, you don’t typically see a lot of positive benefit from SEO for many months, sometimes longer. And so while you’re working on your SEO to build up and grow, one of the ways you can kind of supplement your need for leads in the time being is by running paid ads as well, which you can get going quite a bit faster than your SEO programs. And then once your SEO starts taking off, you can start understanding a bit like where your, you can understand better where your leads are coming from, how those two different components are working together. Maybe some people are coming in via ads and then they’re also reading some of your organic SEO articles and things like that.

Craig Graham [00:02:36]:
So there is an interplay that’s important to understand and be a part of and have as your overall marketing strategy.

Jeffro [00:02:43]:
So should you be targeting the same keywords in your SEO campaigns as in your ads, or is there some strategy there?

Craig Graham [00:02:53]:
Yeah, it’s a really great question. So I guess you kind of want to think about it in different ways. Like what are my customers or potential customers searching for at different times when they’re in their buying journey? Like if somebody’s never heard of my brand, for example, but they are looking for an HVAC repair person, just the keyword intent there is that they probably want someone right now, like HVAC repair near me or something like that. It’s pretty indicative of somebody who needs something right now which would serve well for a search ad, a local service ad, and then maybe like your service page, for example. HVAC repair service page on your website could be optimized for those types of keywords, for example. But if somebody is in a different part of the journey, maybe they’re searching for HVAC companies, for example. So they’re looking at different companies and comparing them to each other. Then maybe you have a resource on your website that speaks to the differences between your company and some of the other competitors in your industry that outlines that.

Craig Graham [00:04:21]:
So you’re answering that query with some organic search results instead. So it’s just like you really want to think about the intent of the person searching for those keywords where they are in the buyer journey, and then you can create the appropriate content to kind of match that, if that makes sense.

Jeffro [00:04:40]:
Yeah, and that makes sense. Just kind of having that similar mentality of knowing what your buyer is going through. And that way you know when you’re getting in front of them and what content you’re putting in front of them at those different points in time. Can you talk a minute for, about the different metrics for a campaign? Right? There’s impressions, there’s clicks, there’s conversions. Obviously, to know conversions, you’ve got to have that integrated into your website if that’s going to be accurate. But talk about how you look at that and optimize campaigns when you’re working with a company.

Craig Graham [00:05:14]:
Yeah, for sure. Great question. I mean, there’s a couple of things that you want to keep in mind. Number one is like your budget. You obviously have a budget set out, or most of the time, you also have an associated cost, either cost per lead, a cost per acquisition, a return on your ad spend. Those tend to be the two of the things that you monitor most closely, like your performance goal. We’ll call it your cost per lead, for example, and then your budget and ensuring that those things are managed effectively. And you’re trying to get as much relevant targeted traffic for as low cost as possible.

Craig Graham [00:05:57]:
That’s what’s kind of guiding you when you’re doing good campaign and account optimization. And then some of the metrics that help you identify whether or not you’re on the right track are going to be things like impressions, are my ads showing up to people at all? And when those types of things, and then you think about your clicks, how many people are actually clicking through my ads coming to the website and your click through rate. Out of all the people that are seeing my ads, what percentage of people are clicking on my ads? And if there aren’t very many, that gives you an area to investigate. Or your cost per click. How much is every click costing me and how does that relate to my budget and my budget getting eaten up or maybe not being used up enough? So there’s many, many different factors that you can look at, but those are some of the main ones. And then of course your conversions, which if you’re trying to generate leads, you’re going to want to keep a good eye on how many conversions you’re actually generating and then your cost per conversion. And of course, I highly recommend you’re tracking conversions. If you’re not, you’re probably flying blind.

Craig Graham [00:07:14]:
But it is something that typically, if you don’t have a tech background or a lot of website background, you’ll want a professional or developer to be able to install that for you properly.

Jeffro [00:07:28]:
Do you find that the Google Ads platform and Google Analytics have enough reporting capabilities for you to make informed decisions about this? Or do you often work with external tracking platforms like Whoopra or Hiros where you get additional external information on the customer journey?

Craig Graham [00:07:47]:
Yeah, so it’s a really good question. I think that for people just starting out, typically you are good to go with Google Ads, Google Analytics and your website internal reporting for the most part. But once you start to scale up, once you start to get a baseline, you might start to have additional questions that the data inside those platforms aren’t able to answer. So especially like, if you’re generating leads and you want to understand more about the leads and the lead quality, you might want to be listening to some of the call recordings of some of the leads that are coming in. And so maybe you use an external platform like CallRail is one that I’ve used many times. That’s quite good and that allows you kind of a system of analyzing the leads, post, click, and after everything that’s happened on the Google Ads side, that Google Ads or analytics aren’t going to be able to tell you about. So that’s one example that comes to mind. On the overall data side, if you were in e commerce, for example, a platform like North Beam or Hiros or triple whale are definitely things that I would look at if we were looking at very large budgets and multiple different traffic channels, sending traffic to the website from Meta and Google.

Craig Graham [00:09:18]:
And maybe you’re running also email and maybe you’re running sms and various other things, but for people kind of in the starting stages, you’re probably good just with the analytics and Google Ads.

Jeffro [00:09:31]:
Yeah, and you can probably get pretty far with that. I was also curious if you’ve seen a difference in conversion rates across the board when it comes to using form extensions on Google Ads versus your HubSpot or your CRM form that you’ve put on a landing page somewhere. Any differences?

Craig Graham [00:09:51]:
Yeah, those, those lead form extensions in Google Ads that I. So I find that I don’t usually see a ton of results from the lead form extensions and it really kind of depends on the individual business and what they’re selling. I think they’re good to have because they’ll show up and if somebody chooses to use it, then that’s a lead and you might as well take that. But I think it’s better to have both options in my opinion, because then Google can also optimize its algorithm to kind of show lead form extensions or call extensions or just send people right to your website at different times based on what it’s anticipating is going to be the best option for that.

Jeffro [00:10:34]:
Interesting. And so that acts as kind of more data in the feedback loop for Google to improve when it shows your algorithm to. I mean, this is all really interesting. So depending on what you’re selling, obviously your ad strategy should change. If you’re selling a $40 widget, then you need to get to the point and make sure you’re not spending too much because you don’t have a lot of wiggle room on your ad budget. But if you’re selling a $3,000 service, then you have more wiggle room in terms of what you can spend to acquire that customer and you can get fancy and do things like retargeting and some of these other use these capabilities that Google Ads has. So how do you kind of figure out what is the best conversion focus strategy for what you’re selling?

Craig Graham [00:11:18]:
Really good. Really. Like you said, it’s going to depend on so many different aspects, but average order value or like the cost of your product or service are humongous component. When you’re thinking about that for sure you’re going to want to consider your profit margins probably first and foremost, how much you’re willing to actually spend in marketing for that sale or for that lead. And with that information, you’re going to be able to then develop your budget and consider how much am I willing to spend on a daily basis, on a monthly basis to be able to try and achieve this cost per lead, cost per sale or my return on ad spend that’s going to be profitable. And looking at it from that perspective, you can then say, well, how much money am I willing to lose here while I get started and generate data? Because that’s typically what you’re doing in the initial days. Every business is different, every industry is different. There is no Google Ads template for everyone, so it really is individual experience and the strategies are going to really vary depending on what data is coming at you.

Craig Graham [00:12:48]:
And one of the kind of the first things you want to do is kind of have like a minimum viability. If you’re already generating business and you’re generating some leads, you know your business is viable. You have a pretty good sense that if you start advertising for keywords, for example, that people are looking for when they’re looking for a service that you offer, it’s pretty good chance that you’re going to convert some people. That’s kind of a good way to think about it is like, what’s my lowest possible hanging fruit, let’s say, of a way that I can generate some leads or some sales relatively quickly to be able to get that feedback loop so that I understand what I’m doing is like good or bad kind of thing, right? Does that answer your question?

Jeffro [00:13:38]:
Yeah, I think so. And it kind of goes back to what we’re talking about. You need that first couple of months to figure out your campaign and get it profitable because there are so many variables involved with that in mind, is there a minimum ad spend budget that you would recommend for an owner who’s just getting started with the platform to make sure that they are generating enough data to make these decisions and that it doesn’t drag out six months? Right?

Craig Graham [00:14:03]:
Yeah, for sure. Good question. It’s really individual. I would go with a budget that you’re comfortable with losing to think about it from that way. Don’t set your expectations too high, thinking that it’s going to be some kind of a magic bullet. Like you said, it’s going to take a little bit of time. So make sure that you’re prepared to lose a little bit of money, whatever budget you’re comfortable with. Right.

Jeffro [00:14:37]:
But if I come to you and say I can only lose $100 a month? And are you going to feel confident that after three months we’ve got enough data to ramp up and suddenly spend more? Because that seems like you’re not going to get that many impressions, so you might not really have a great understanding yet.

Craig Graham [00:14:54]:
Understood. Yeah. There definitely would be kind of like a minimum barrier to entry. I’d say $100 a month isn’t going to be worth your time to spend on Google Ads. I would be closer to the let’s go with the $40 to $100 a day kind of minimum spend on Google Ads, most likely prolonged over a period of weeks and months. Okay.

Jeffro [00:15:23]:
And that’s good. I just want to give people an idea that what am I committing to if I want this to be effective in any reasonable amount of time? And this is why there is that minimum budget recommendation. It’s so that the ads can get in front of enough people. If we say, all right, we put out five people, saw our ads, did it work? Well, we didn’t get any customers out of it. No, I guess not. Maybe we should change the headline. You’re kind of flying blind at that point. So you do need that additional data to make informed decisions and turn it into a campaign that’s going to work long term.

Craig Graham [00:15:54]:
Totally. Yeah, exactly. I would be trying to generate hundreds of clicks before you call something successful or not. You definitely need some volume of data of information to be able to make those decisions.

Jeffro [00:16:13]:
Can you talk a little bit more about budget management for an ongoing campaign? When to increase or decrease or how to spread your budget across different types of campaigns if you’re doing multiple things?

Craig Graham [00:16:24]:
Yeah, for sure. So I like to do kind of a bottom up build approach in my account building, which is the first thing that I want to spend money on are the things that are most likely to generate the most money, the fastest at first. So doing things like setting up, this is why I was suggesting creating local services ads to get started. Because if you have a budget in mind and you know what your cost per lead is, that is good for you, then that’s great. It’s kind of like kind of a set and forget kind of setup that has consistent results for you and a consistent budget outside of that. If you’re inside of Google Ads, the first thing I would probably do with a local business would be to start thinking about what are the keywords that I could target. And this involves also doing some keyword research, which you could use keyword planner inside of Google Ads for is super helpful, for example. But what are the keywords that somebody might be looking for when they’re in immediate need for the type of service that I’m offering, because those are going to be the types of keywords that probably generate leads for you much quicker and potentially give you some ROI much quicker.

Craig Graham [00:17:48]:
And so the way I think about it is set your budget at first to start generating your leads. And then once you start generating some leads, you can start scaling up your budget and seeing, oh, maybe I can either create another campaign or ad group or something like that and target some more keywords. Maybe I’m not hitting my maximum budget every day that my existing campaign can hit. So I can increase the budget just for that campaign and scale that campaign vertically a bit and then leave it and then see what your results are. And if they’re good and they continue, then you can consider thinking about scaling some more. So it’s like scaling from the profit you make is the way that I like to look at it. Generate your leads, start making some profit, use that profit to reinvest in your advertising and scale that out and continue.

Jeffro [00:18:49]:
Awesome. Well, that makes sense. And we’ve covered a lot of territory. Obviously, there’s a lot more we could talk about for Google Ads. I mean, there’s Google Ad grants for nonprofits. There’s all sorts of fun things we could talk about. But I think we’ve kind of done a good job right now talking about how to get started if you’re a local business, especially local service business, what some options are and what to think about when you’re starting this, what you’re committing to, how much budget, how to decide if you’re working with an agency and keeping them accountable, the communication that needs to happen there. So these are all really helpful things.

Jeffro [00:19:22]:
I hope you guys have been taking notes. Craig, thank you for this masterclass. I appreciate you being willing to walk us through all these details. So guys, go follow Craig on LinkedIn. His daily posts are a great way to learn more about the Google Ads platform. You can either apply that knowledge yourself or you can use it to ask better questions of your Google Ads partner. So final question for you, Craig. I don’t know.

Jeffro [00:19:44]:
I’m tongue tied today. I don’t know what it is. Anyways, do you have any resources or recommendations that you want to leave with us?

Craig Graham [00:19:53]:
Any resources or recommendations? Make sure you know your brand, who you’re targeting and your advertising, and have a really good understanding of your profit margins, and then you’ll be able to make success with Google Ads.

Jeffro [00:20:08]:
Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here, Craig. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you like this deep dive format, please leave a review and let me know what was something that you learned? But that’s it for today. Hopefully you feel much better equipped to deal with Google Ads now. Take care and I’ll see you in the next episode.