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One of the most frustrating things as a business owner is to see a good ad budget vaporise with little or no results. Particularly when you can see there are people looking for your product or service, failing to get the results you should, massively undermines your growth and profitability.
So let’s get to work on fixing your PPC…
Before we do… if you’ve already got your ads and targeting dialled in, you may want to skip to the ‘Make Clients From Your Clicks’ section.
Whether it’s Google, Facebook, LinkedIn or other ad provider/manager, chances are, that they’re only ever going to give part of the information that you need to reach the best levels of success from your ad campaign.
Why? Because the part of the process they specialise in, is getting you clicks. As a result, advice they will provide will more often be focussed on ad budgets, search terms, and everything else click related. Coincidently, the clicks is where they make their money… however, you, as the business owner don’t make money until that click becomes a customer.
When doing PPC (pay per click) advertising, it is wise to constantly remember:
Clicks are where the cost is, customers are where the profit is.
To maximise returns then, it’s vital to ensure we make the most of the clicks…
Too many ad budgets are suffering from the Enquiry Generation Gap (EGG). This is where you pay for the ad click, but then you don’t get anything from it… no enquiry, no response, and as a result, no customer. Whilst not every click will provide a customer, there certainly are keys to minimise the gaps and greatly improve your enquiry rates…
The rest of this report will focus on preventing your ad budget getting EGGed.
Before embarking on any advertising campaign, or when reviewing an existing one, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve in detail. The clearer you know what you’re after, the easier it is to go find it.
When I go shopping for clothes, I know what I want. I know the colour, the style, the size, where to look for it and usually even the brand. This way, I can usually buy the shirt I want within 15 minutes. On the other hand, I’ve been on shopping trips when the goal wasn’t so clear… several hours later, we had lunch, then shopped some more, and eventually sort of found what we were after. We got there in the end, but it was a very hit and miss way to go about it and a lot of time and energy was consumed in the process.
Are you finding that your ads only, sort of, get the customers you’re after?
Which shopping trip method are you using to find your new customers?
Creating the plan…
So let’s get practical and confirm you’re clear on what you want from your advertising.
The best plans are specific, so don’t be afraid to get detailed and don’t generalise. Go for the bullseye and work out your ideal scenario, the clearer the better.
Why not do this now and equip yourself to get the most from this guide:
#1 – What do you want?
#2 – Where you want it?
Know the geographic location you’re targeting.
#3 – How much you want
#4 – Why you?
If you completed the plan, great work! You’ve taken an important step to getting better results from your advertising and growing your business. Should you have any questions on your plan, or how to refine it, you can contact me via the details at the bottom of this report.
Let’s take that plan and put it in action…
Once you’ve got a plan, you’re ready to advertise (or review your current ads). Let’s go through the steps from getting the clicks to creating a customer.
A great advantage of pay per click advertising is the ability to be found by prospective customers, right at the point where they start looking for your goods or services.
Here’s a few keys to making sure you’re there:
(for search engine pay per click ads)
When you know the ideal customers you want, the next step is to think of how they’ll look for you.
If you’ve got a good ad manager, they should help you with this, especially if you’ve made clear the type of customer you want.
For self-managed ad campaigns, brainstorm a list of search terms and then use keyword tools such as Google’s keyword tool to verify the traffic and expected costs.
Focus your ads on search terms to maximise relevance. Think of what your prospective customer will be looking for in your product or service and what key benefits you provide.
Ensure you have a great problem solving headline that includes the relevant keyword. If you’re a plumber wanting more customers for hot water systems, your headline could include “Fast Hot Water System Installs”, then in the ad body you might include “Enjoy hot showers today”
Including relevant items such “2hr response”, “2yr g’tee”, “fully licensed” or “avail on 36 mths interest free”, are all great for proactively addressing potential concerns about service, reliability, quality and payment options.
Tailor your ads to your ideal customers and stand out from other advertisers.
You want your ad to be seen, and to do this, it needs to appear with good page position.
For Google AdWords, getting good placement is related to ad bid, quality score and who else is bidding (competition).
It’s easier to justify higher click costs when you’ve got clear, measurable results and good click to enquiry conversions.
The more you’re paying per click and the more competition you have, the more important it becomes to ensure all the areas of your campaign are optimised.
Don’t ignore Google’s quality score or you’ll pay more for your clicks. In some cases you can improve your ad’s position, simply by retaining your current bid amount and improving your quality score through adding a privacy policy, terms of service and improving the relevance (keyword consistency) between the search term, the ad and the landing page (more on landing pages soon).
Screening out search terms that aren’t relevant are as important as finding search terms that are. Recently I saw an ad for a roof tiler showing up in a search for ‘car roof lining replacement’. Clearly, anyone searching for a car roof lining is unlikely to be searching for a new tile roof for their home.
If you are a roof tiler, the word “car” could be added as a negative keyword, thus eliminating showing up in any searches related to car roof linings.
For prestige services, you may consider “cheap” or “budget” as negative keywords, as your preferred clients will not be the ones using these words in their searches.
Taking the time to identify a few negative keywords can help significantly in better targeting your ads for your ideal audience and reduce clicks from irrelevant searches.
A local locksmith in Brisbane can do little to assist someone locked out of their house in Perth, and so if their ad appeared in a search there, would likely frustrate both parties.
Targeting your ads to appear in only relevant locations, or geo targeting, is the remedy to this, and an important step in refining the efficiency of your ads.
For franchisees with defined territories, if you handle your own advertising, you may want to take the step of geo targeting based on the specific suburbs you can service.
Once someone has clicked on your ad, the page they see next can make or break the success of your ad campaign. This page is commonly referred to as the ‘landing page’ because it’s the first place your prospective customer ‘lands’ after clicking on the ad, but I quite like calling it the ‘enquiry page’ as it more clearly denotes why it exists, namely to convert your click into an enquiry.
Having clicked on your ad, your prospective customer is not a prospect until you can have a conversation, and to converse you need contact details… so your number one priority should be to get their details, and to do so in a way that is compelling, positioning you as the solution to the problem they had in mind when they clicked on your ad.
Effective enquiry pages serve one purpose, they have one goal, fix one problem and prompt one action. Consistent research and testing, from sole traders to multinational corporations, has proven that this is the only way to truly optimise your results. Do it well and you’ll notice profound improvements in your enquiry rates… ignore it, and many people will click on your ad, see your page and go no further (except perhaps to click on the ads of your competitors).
If you have a business that both installs and services a particular type of equipment, and you advertise for both installs and servicing, you should have two enquiry pages. Why? Just as an install is a different process to a maintenance call, so the enquiry is a different conversation. Put simply, if you’re going to have a different conversation, you need to use different words, and in this context, that means a dedicated enquiry page.
Enquiry pages are a specialised tool that create massive leverage for your advertising. Enabling business owners to get them right has been a driving motivation for developing the AdSmart platform, for which you can find out more by contacting us on the details at the end of this guide.
The staple contact details of most enquiry forms are: name, email and phone number. There may be times that you ask for less than this (e.g. name and number would suffice for an urgent repair enquiry, or a name and an email address might suffice for online book sales).
Remember too to make it clear why you’re asking for the details (e.g. to be contacted for a quote), and what will happen next (e.g. our design specialist will be in contact within the hour). Having a privacy policy link on your enquiry page is also highly recommended and has added advantages with ad providers such as Google too.
Understanding how much customers are worth to your business, and how much it is costing to get new customers, are both vitally important.
Nothing is more liberating than being in a position where you reliably control the flow in your business, through a well systemised marketing campaign, giving you the option to balance business growth and lifestyle according to your priorities. The goal of effective marketing is to empower you to do exactly that, and pay per click advertising can play a great part in making this reality.
Thanks for taking the time to read this guide, trust it has been a great reminder/resource to get your business to where you want it to be.
To get the most from your advertising, this guide covered:
Perhaps you have some questions or comments from what we covered, and if so, it would be great to hear from you.
To find out more about more about improving your results in generating enquiries online, contact Ian today
