Planning ahead to boost your business for 2019 takes planning and strategizing with your sales team. Once you determine your plan and set a goal for sales, take time to set your Google Ads budget to achieve your plan.
If you are currently selling products or services that generate $200,000 and your plan is to achieve a 20% increase in sales, make sure that your Google Ads budget has an equal increase or a specific plan to generate additional low click cost activity such as in the Display network.
It is crucial that your ad spend be increased to help your program achieve success. Many clients will set a Google Ads budget and then not do a yearly review . It is a good plan to every January review your last year ad expenses, gross sales, sales attributable to Google Ads and your growth plan for the next year.
At the minimum, I would encourage a 10% increase in your Google Ad Spend budget if you have been successful in having Google Ads drive phone calls, emails, and other beneficial actions on your website.
If you need help with your Google Ads plan and want to jump start activity in 2019, I invite you to visit our website to see if our services would be a good match for your needs.
In Google Ads, you can compete effectively against large competitors who are spending a lot of money on Google Ads with a few creative approaches.
First, consider taking the gloves off. We will routinely target competitor names in very competitive spaces. Our ad text will show dynamic keyword insertion and phrases in the ad text like (Competitor’s Name) Too Expensive? Check out (Your Company Name) and then showcase features. Similar to (Competitor Name) is also another great way to get traffic and bleed off prospects who may have never known about you and were searching for your competitor.
Be watchful about the time of day your ads show. If you are competing against a company with a very large advertising budget, consider bidding down slow times of the day or times that do not typically convert for you and show your ads at your regular cost per click in peak times. This strategy keeps your name out there but focuses budget in peak decision making times.
Consider Display advertising and use In Market as a setting. This will show your ads in the Display Network and targets readers or browsing prospects that are actively looking for your competitor or services you offer.
If you are looking to boost your Google Ads exposure and be more competitive in your marketplace, I invite you to visit our website to find out more about McCord Web Services and what we do.
In our new world where over 65% of all Google.com searches are done on smartphones, what happens to a website that is not mobile-friendly in regards to lead conversions, store sales, and organic placement?
The PPC Picture
Google has lots to say on this topic of mobile friendliness. For sites that are not mobile-friendly and the business owner is advertising in Google Ads, Google flags the account with messages such as this:
“Avoid losing customers on mobile devices by improving your mobile site. Recommended because 98.57% of your mobile clicks go to non-mobile-friendly pages on your site. 68.97% of clicks from all devices come from mobile. 98.57% 138 of 140 clicks go to pages that are not mobile-friendly.“
As Google Ads is incredibly focused on relevance and offering the best user experience, I expect in the future ads that are not showing mobile-friendly pages to start to receive very poor quality scores driving up the click cost and reducing exposure due to a low ad rank.
Google has been pretty forthcoming in regards to page speed as well. A 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. For a store generating $60,000 in sales a month, that is a loss of $4,200 in monthly sales. In a year, that translates into $50,400. A non-mobile friendly site is not optimized for speedy download and may be virtually impossible to use on a smartphone driving away potential customers. Many will never come back to visit. This is a very serious impact for Google Ad activity.
For sites that do not have a mobile-friendly website, conversion numbers are dropping in Google Ads. Mobile activity is a very big part of the conversion path now for sales and leads.
For some websites that are not mobile-friendly using Duda Mobile to do a scripted redirect to a Duda Mobile mini site worked – but no longer. Google Ads is aggressively disapproving ads for our clients that are using this approach and we are now having to remove the code from those websites effectively making them now not mobile-friendly for organic or for pay per click activity.
The Organic Picture
For organic traffic, know that Google now spiders the mobile version of a website and this is the content that now determines your site’s organic ranking on Google.com for all devices, not just mobile.
Additionally, Marketing and Growth Hacking states “Based on the blogs Google is putting out, we can confidently assume companies who don’t optimize for mobile will see their rankings disappear. At the same time, companies who adopt and take advantage of mobile-friendly sites early-on have and will continue to see higher rankings.”
I agree that if you mean to be in business, grow sales, and compete effectively, your website and store must be mobile-friendly.
For more information about our services please visit us at www.McCordWeb.com.
New to Google Ads are responsive search ads. Not all accounts will see this option yet, but for many of our big accounts we are starting set up now.
A responsive text ads consists of the following items.
Six 30 character headlines.
Two 90 character descriptions.
A final URL.
Two 15 character paths.
Additionally Google gives some additional best practices for setting up your responsive search ads.
Google recommends only using a keyword in your account or dynamic keyword insertion in two of your six headlines. They recommend that other headlines mention, price, shipping, a unique feature, or a special promotion.
When Google Ads renders the ads your ad assets can be bundled in any number of ways by device. You may see three headlines, two headlines, or one head line and a description, or even two headlines and one description. It is all Google Ads choice.
Setting up the responsive search ads take about 12 to 18 minutes each. We are currently testing versions in client accounts. Will they convert better than a typical search ad? Google Ads says yes, so the time investment to create them is valuable.
As an experienced AdWords Manager I understand the value and issues of using broad match keywords, do you?
Here is a easy to understand tutorial about broad match and when you should and should not use them in your Google AdWords account.
Broad Match Keyword Match Type – this is the most used AdWords keyword match type and the most unfiltered type. It is used almost exclusively by inexperienced AdWords managers.
AdWords loves the broad match keyword match type as it generates lots of traffic, many clicks, and increases their payment.
I personally do not like to use broad match and prefer to use instead broad match modifier which looks like this in the AdWords control panel +keyword +here.
Here’s what Google AdWords says about broad match keywords:
“When you use broad match, your ads automatically run on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists. This helps you attract more visitors to your website, spend less time building keyword lists, and focus your spending on keywords that work.”
“Broad match is the default match type that all your keywords are assigned if you don’t specify another match type (exact match, phrase match, or negative match). The Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, including synonyms, singular and plural forms, possible misspellings, stemming (such as floor and flooring), related searches, and other relevant variations. To help deliver relevant matches, this match type may also take the customer’s recent search activities into account.”
What Google does not say is that if your broad match phrase is GPS fleet management, for example, Google would show your ads and generate click charges on broad matched keywords like: adware gps, air lq fleet, at&t fleet oakland park blvd, azuga device, blacklist gps, cyntrx customer service, dash cams for fleets, digital fleet, usft, fleetsharp instructions. These are real keywords and real terms found in an AdWords account that are showing ads and accruing clicks. I personally find these terms very untargeted and I would not want my clients paying for clicks for those terms.
When is it time to fire your AdWords manager? When you see things in your account that do not jive with what you have told your account manager to do.
Budget
This is a huge issue. Look at your account from the campaign tab. Look to the bottom to see what your AdWords manager has set your account to spend by day. Multiply that number by 30 and that is your scheduled 30 day ad spend.
In the case of the review I was doing for a client to evaluate the performance of their AdWords account manager, the daily budget was $2,000. That means the client was scheduled to spend $60,000 per 30 day period. I asked the client did they want to spend $60,000? The client said NO, their budget was $30,000 a month and they considered that a scary number already.
Based on a last 30 day review of the account the client had already been billed by Google for $54,000. Well over the $30,000 cap the client thought they had.
This is a huge issue and one I see frequently taken by so called professional AdWords managers. When they do not get performance in an account, they increase the budget hoping that in reality Google will not spend that amount thinking that poor performance is an issue of ad serving. Instead the action to optimize the account should be taken. In some cases a total revamp of keywords, landing pages, and ad text should be done and a new bidding strategy taken. If the issue is budget then buy-in from the client for a limited time period test with statistical evaluation provided at the end of the test period should be done. I never advocate creating a “fake” budget for AdWords.
In my experience AdWords can spend all that you have scheduled it to spend. If your account manager is fooling around with your budget hoping Google won’t charge you, I consider that grounds for firing.
If you need professional help with your AdWords program from an experienced AdWords manager, certified professional and member of the Google Partner team at McCord Web Services, I encourage you to call now!