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Do You Advertise Your Local Business on Google —The Right Way?
Google makes the bulk of its money selling these simple Pay Per Click (PPC) ads all around the world.
They make so much money simply because the advertising works — so very well.
And Google has been heading more and more towards making these ads super local.
Research shows that local is the hot spot for active buyers searching for things on Google. Things they need now. Things and services they will pay for, now.
Get Bigger Google Ad Space Without Spending More
Google has integrated their ads and local pages via Google+ and that’s how smart advertisers are getting those extra lines and links included into their ads.
Look at the personal injury lawyer example above. Those 3 ads are costing about the same amount. Yet the middle ad is only getting 3 lines. The other 2 are getting 2 extra lines —and therefore much bigger ads— simply because they know something that the middle advertiser is missing.
You want bigger ads, don’t you? Especially when they cost you no more money.
Each extra line makes your ad bigger and you can see there’s another extra effect in the third ad. Its Google+ followers are included at no extra cost. That line increases their overall ad size.
Plus, (not Google+) it will also help them to get extra clicks because they are the only one with any followers.
As a local business, you can get lots of advantages from Google PPC campaigns and you can be getting leads within hours of posting your ad. You can do even better, perhaps two or three times better, if you don’t just run an ad. Add marketing.
Good marketing nouse will get you much, much better results — at the same cost.
Google ads are a pretty simple and attractive honeypot for lots of businesses and Google wants to keep it that way because there are some very costly traps for the unwary.
If you don’t know what you are doing, you could easily be running up a hefty bill for clicks that are not sending you leads or sending you poor leads. As a result, your leads could be costing you more than you are making off them — because you are buying too many clicks before you land a lead.
Good marketing will turn your clicks into more leads and that reduces your cost of getting those leads.
Which in turn, gives you more money to buy more leads.
The Strange Trap For Unwary Google Advertisers
Of companies spending less than $5k a month on AdWords, 50% don’t even look at their account once a month.
A quarter of them have done no work on tuning and managing their account in the past 3 months!
- Customise campaigns to the right network: Search/Display
- Focus on the most profitable geo markets
- Consider the right languages for target markets
- Track profitability of campaigns, ads and keywords
- Run multiple ads in your ad groups to sharpen targeting
- Use match types to control what’s hitting and missing
- Add negative keywords to stop spending on the wrong ones
- Use Ad Extensions for extra links, bigger ads and CTR
These are the figures according to WordStream, one of the world’s biggest PPC management companies.
Even more shocking is their claim that the same depressing figures apply equally to companies who manage their own AdWords account as they do to agencies who are paid to manage accounts for clients.
It is easier to understand why busy companies with very little PPC knowledge are not getting around to tuning their ads. It is inexcusable that those who are paid to do the job for them are — at the same rate —failing to do that work.
The real seduction is when your Google ads are actually working. That may sound a bit strange, but it’s not.
You may not have the time or know how to tweak your campaigns to fine tune their effectiveness and returns. In that case you are paying too much because you are doing nothing to raise the conversions — getting more clickers to actually contact you. You can get really great ROI when you concentrate on raising conversions to increase the number of your leads, an exercise which will reduce the cost of getting them.
That’s the trap.
Your ads are running and you are making money off them. You are busy and grateful so you can’t afford to stop or risk doing worse than you already are, and that’s where Google wants small business to be.
But it’s not just small businesses that fail to make the most of their Google ads.
My quick check on the keywords –personal injury lawyers– shows that even big ticket businesses are missing out with their Google advertising.
In general, you want to be in the top three placings because they get the lion’s share of clicks. You have to be high among the top bidders to get there.
According to Google’s chart below, you would be paying over $30 for one click — and that is not a lead, it’s just a click and you would need lots of clicks before you get one lead that pays you the money that covers all those clicks.
Click for a bigger view of Personal Injury Lawyer PPC information as supplied by Google.
You can see lots and lots of advertisers on the pages connected with that -personal injury lawyers- keyword phrase, so you can bet they are not making a charitable donation to support poor old Google.
They are buying those expensive clicks because it makes good business sense; the leads they are already getting is paying for the ads and they are making profit after that.
Those Companies Paying $30 Per Click Must Really Know What They are Doing, Right?
Yeah, Right.
It’s obvious to see why you may think so, but a quick analysis shows that they could easily being doing two times better.
If they knew about marketing.
Even simple things are obvious. Very few of them even have their phone number in the ad.
Unfortunately, Google is onto this little trick and I am told there are changes imminent that will make it hard to do in future.
Why would you want your number there? Why does Google NOT want it there? It’s the same question.
Google puts the 3 highest paying ads right in the hotspot for searcher eye movement
Google ads are great because anyone typing in that phrase is most likely to be ready to shop. They are a red hot prospect. Think about it.
As a buyer, whenever you type a search phrase into Google, you are looking for that particular service, now, and your wallet is on stand by. As a business owner, it makes sense to get yourself in front of such a hot prospect, front and centre.
The phone number allows the shopper to phone from your ad without clicking it. That’s bad for Google and good for you. No wonder it’s going.
But wait a minute. A local business with a verified Google+ page (where Google has made sure they know you really are at that address) will still have the chance of having their phone number show up. Big players don’t have an office in your street or suburb, do they?
What Can You Do to Be Better Than These Big Spenders?
The big, big missing piece to every one of these sites that I looked at is that they don’t use a landing page. They all send the expensive click straight to their website front page. Straight to confusion and endless options to wander around. Don’t do that and you will be streets ahead.
Speaking of streets, if you met someone who was a potential customer, would you send them to your suburb or to the best salesperson in your business? It’s the same thing here.
(1) Use a landing page. It’s not some Tullamarine alternative, it’s a dedicated page with the clicker in mind. They searched for whatever phrase you are paying Google for, so the page they land on —after they click your ad— must be about that exact topic. Otherwise they will have what is called a moment of cognitive dissonance.
You don’t want them thinking of anything other than you and what you are offering them to satisfy their search objective. You don’t want them wandering around your business nooks and crannies. You want them to contact you now, before they get distracted by some other option.
None of these big companies seem to know that fundamental point. And I’m sure it’s the same with your competitors, too.
They send their clicks to pages that are filled with all sorts of extraneous stuff, who the partners are, every other branch of legal discipline other than a clear statement about personal injury.
When your prospect starts to get confused with too many options, they will go chasing the idea rabbit down their burrow and forget why they are there. Alternatively, they will just click to someone else or simply give up when they can’t easily find what they want.
Don’t confuse your clicker. Give them what they want and tell them why you are the perfect answer to their prayers — but do that with crisp reasons that are not simply look-at-me chest thumping.
(2) Have a clear call to action. In other words, ask them -in big, obvious letters- to phone or fill in the enquiry form. Make it easy for them to connect with you so that you can answer their questions in person. None of these big law firms does that either. Do it several times on the page because repetition has been known to work in advertising since the dawn of time; maybe even earlier than that.
(3) Commit to a regular pattern of advertising and be consistent with your focus. Only change when you can see that you have a better performing ad to replace the one you started with.
(4) Monitor your performance. Regularly look at the figures of the ads and your spending.
(5) Test. Test. Did I say, Test? Try small changes to test against the ads you are running so that you know what change worked. You will never know why for sure and it doesn’t matter if you do or do not. You just want to be spending money on the better performing ad and not on the one that did not work as well.
Small improvements can have a massive ripple through — all along the path to a lead and a sale.
A better ad, a landing page that sends more people to you, better call handling at your end — that all builds improvements and momentum. Look for better performing keywords on which you can also trim the cost of clicks. Cut out or cut back on keywords that lead to higher costs of conversion. Train your in-house staff and help them to close more leads.
These 5 steps will have your ads and your budget working like a perfectly running machine.
If you are spending good money every week on Google ads and you can now see how much better you can do to expand your business, give me a call.
A chat is free and I am very happy to have a look at what you are doing now and give you some tips on the call. It doesn’t matter which country or state you advertise in, it’s the same Google and the same process.
We can connect for free on Skype so there’s nothing to stop you getting more leads this week.
Fill in the form now and let’s double the value of your leads. Worth a chat?