020: Using Google Ads To Grow Your Business

Title: Using Google Ads To Grow Your Business

Guest: Chris Goldman

Peter: Welcome to the Biz and Life Done Well podcast, where we explore what it means and what it takes to do business and life well. I’m your host, Peter Wilson. If you’re like me, you’re intrigued by stories of common people who have achieved uncommon success in business and life. Join me as I interview fascinating people about how they got started, their successes and failures, their habits and routines, and what inspires them.

Peter: Thanks for joining us today. I am joined by Chris Goldman. Chris.

Chris: Today, what we want to talk about specifically is Google Ads and how they can help your business grow. And so today, I have the privilege of getting to interview Pete. This is in our team. This is one of the areas that Pete is definitely the specialist in. So, Pete, get us going here.

How do Google Ads help my business grow?

Peter: I think that’s one of the big questions that I get all the time. It’s really three ways that Google Ads help. So one of the things that Google does, and this is probably the reason why they’re the most effective at doing what they do is they put your business in front of people who are actually searching for the products and services you offer at that time when they’re most interested. So when they are searching, you have an opportunity to put your ad right in front of them. The next thing they do is they remind people about your business products and services after they visit your website.

So there is a way to

Chris: They remind us.

Peter: Lastly, so the way they work basically is, people see the ads, they click on the ads, they interact with your business and buy. Now, it’s not quite as simple as that. But ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to get people to click, visit your website, interact with your business and buy your product or service.

Chris: And there’s two main types of Google ads that we can buy. So kind of explain those to us, Pete.

Peter: Sure, you bet. So the number one type of ad that Google sells, and it’s the reason why they’re one of the largest companies in the world, is paid search ads. These are the ads that show on top of the search results when you search for something. And we’re going to do a deep dive on both of these in a moment. But I just wanted to give you the two main types.

There’s other types as well, but these are the two main types. The second type are the banner ads, display ads that show up on other websites while you’re surfing the web. So you’ll see them, you may go to the New York Times, you may go somebody’s blog and you’ll see ads pop up. They’ve actually put some code on their site to allow Google to serve ads to you and then they make money in that way.

Chris: Okay. And what do they share in common and what kind of makes them unique?

Peter: Yeah, so both of the Google ad types, what they do is they’re both pay per click. So your business or whoever is running the ads, they only pay when somebody clicks on the ads. And they use a cost per click model and there’s no set cost per click that you pay for. It varies depending on the competition in the market for each click, depending on the type of business that you have, and, the specific geography where you’re located. So for example, if you’re a personal injury attorney and you are in Los Angeles, you may be willing to pay $100 per click.

Whereas if you’re a dental practice in the Seattle area, maybe you’re going to pay $6

Chris: per As a business owner, could make you pretty nervous. How do we kind of keep that from getting out of control?

Peter: Yeah, that’s a good question. So one of the things you can do is you can set a budget. So you can set a daily budget and monthly spending limits for your ads. And the other thing you can do so this is all types of Google Ads. You can do this is set geo targeting so you can target your ads right down to specific zip codes, cities, counties, states, countries.

And most of the ad types that we run are targeted at the zip code level or the city level. So that’s kind of the overview. That’s the beauty of it is you only pay when they click and you can control the budgets and the targeting on it. So let’s do a quick look at the search ads. So Chris, let me ask you this.

When was the last time you searched Google for something?

Chris: About five minutes before you started this webcast. It’s amazing. It is part of our lives. We just do it all the time.

Peter: So have you ever looked for a car online?

Chris: Yes, I have looked for a car online.

Peter: Then you searched. So I did a search for a Ford Explorer for sale and I just wanted to use this as an example of what the ads are and kind of what we’re dealing with here. So this is paid search ads. So you can see that I searched Ford Explorer for sale. I actually did this earlier this morning.

The first thing I want you to be aware of is look at point number one, there was 104,000,000 search results.

Chris: Wow.

Peter: Isn’t that crazy? So the chance of you showing up for one of those, for somebody finding you in that 104,000,000 results is slim unless you do advertising. The cool thing is the ads get up on the top. Now, one thing everybody tells me is that well, people don’t click the ads. I don’t click the ads.

I never click the ads. Well, the truth of the matter is, again, that’s how Google became one of the biggest companies in the world because people do click the ads. And one thing I wanted to point out here is that these search results in particular contain three different types of advertisers. One is an actual dealer in Port Orchard. So for some reason, they decided it was smart to advertise to me, even though I live in Edmonds, Washington.

The next ad there is a regional for dealer association, an advertising association that actually has money to spend on Google Ads. And then the last one is the Ford corporate. So you see that there’s a bunch of different people here. They bid for these spots and Google decides kind of in real time who gets which spot. So let’s take a deeper dive into look at what is exactly contained in this one little text ad here.

Chris: I love this. For everybody on the podcast, I want you to really pay attention what Pete’s gonna do now because first time we did this together, it was just really simple and profound to me. So watch this as we walk through the elements of the paid search ads. It’s incredible.

Peter: So this is that same ad for the Port Orchard Ford dealer. And so this is everything that’s contained here. And this is something that either they programmed or a marketing agency like our company did for them. So the top line identifies it as an ad and Google puts that little bold ad there. And then there is the URL for the page that you’re going to go to if you click on the ad.

You can click anywhere in this ad and you’re going to end up in the same spot. And then the last thing, there is a phone number. And now the phone number is very interesting because it’s most likely a trackable number. So if you were to actually look at the ad and call that right now in real time, that is most likely not their phone number. And it’s going to go through a tracking system and then they’ll know, oh, you saw the ad and you called.

So that’s one of the ways that they provide accountability. The next line is the headlines. You get up to three lines of 25 characters of text there. So you see where it says buy your next car 100% online, new Explorer for sale. That’s really the one that captures your attention the most.

And they want to make that one relate a lot to whatever you typed in. So I said for sale in my search and notice it says new Explorer for sale. So they’ve actually programmed a set of ads that said, if I said for sale, their ad is going to say for sale. The next line there is two ninety character descriptions about the product or service. So this is where you can really get into a little bit of a description about your business.

So in their case, it says three months payments are deferred and other three are covered. Pick any model from our inventory, build your own military incentives, out of state guaranteed trade in, pet project. I don’t even know what pet project is. So that’s a description that they program there. And then the next thing is these things called site links.

So these are site links to other parts on the site. So one says get pre approved now. That probably goes to their finance section. Express purchase may be a way to speed up the process and then Value Your Trade is a trade valuation tool. All of this is going to go to their website, though.

And then that last link there is their location. That’s actually linked to their Google My Business profile. So I

Chris: see the ad and I click on it. What happens next?

Peter: Good question. Here’s what happens. Here’s what happens next. You go to their website and you land on what we’ll call a landing page. So you may go to their homepage or you may go to a specific page about the product or service that was searched for.

That’s probably more likely that they’re going to land you on, especially car dealers are very sophisticated with their advertising. So you’re going to go to that land page. It’s probably going to be a specific page on the website. So for example, if you have a business and you have three types of services that you offer, your dental practice and you offer various services. When somebody searches for a specific type of service, you want to make sure you land them on the page that most closely describes that service they were looking for.

So that’s something really important. And the reason you want to do that is you want to as closely as possible match the search because it feels like, oh, I’m in the right place. Okay, so I’m going to stay here. A couple of things I want to point out on this page. Tracking phone numbers.

Again, there’s a different number there, (360) 329-9042. I guarantee you that is a tracking number and it’s a unique number that is shown on the website only to people who clicked on the Google ad. So if you came to this website from a Facebook ad, you’d probably see a different number. If you came from the local newspaper website, you’d probably see a different number. So what they’re trying to do is make sure they know exactly which people are coming from where and then who is actually taking action so they can see, they can create accountability for the ads.

Chris: Okay. Now I’m gonna pause you here and Yeah. We’re gonna go to number three, but I’m gonna make you explain something a little bit further because this is important for all of your clients. As I’ve looked at your clients, they don’t just want good looking ads. They want it backed up with data.

What role is this playing in a marketing person like yourself in actually giving your clients data? Explain that connection.

Peter: Sure. Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, there needs to be accountability for the money is spent on the ads. And so the data creates this accountability loop and there’s one number that most of our clients care about and that’s cost per lead. And what we’re able to do with data, with the tracking phone numbers and the form tracking where if somebody clicked on a form and they filled out their name, we’re actually able to then go back and create a report that says that this number of leads was generated.

You spent this amount of money this month. Let’s say you spent $5,000 I would expect the Ford dealer to be spending about 5,000 a month or more. And it generated this number of leads. Now, as a business owner, you’re going to say, well, leads are great, but I want sales. Right?

Chris: Obviously, yes.

Peter: So there’s only so much I can control as a marketer for a business. Now, the question is, are we generating quality leads? That’s a fair question and we have tracking so we can actually go through the leads with the business owner and say, well, this was a phone call you received. We can even record the calls as well and actually visit those and understand whether or not they’re actually quality leads. But at the end of the day, it’s actually really important that the business owner has somebody who is answering the phone and consistently following up on the leads as quickly as possible.

Chris: Yeah. So this is really important because as a business owner, those of you listening here, every dime matters. Right? Every dollar matters, and you’re wanting to invest it. And it’s not just that an ad looks good or it’s in the right place.

It’s that it actually leads to leads. And once you have the lead now, you’ve gotta decide what you’re gonna back that with. Now, point three, what is form tracking and also talking about the leads data?

Peter: Sure. Form tracking is if you click on the big green button there, I’m guessing that a form pops up where you start the buying process. The first thing they’re going to want to know is your name, your phone number. It’s typical. I just bought a car last January and we went through the process with a local dealership and that’s what I did.

It was sort of comical because I filled in a fictitious email address for my business that I would still receive because I get any email addresses that aren’t valid. And when I went to buy the vehicle, they said, Oh, is this your email address? This fictitious one I created. As I’m signing the papers, I’m like, No, that’s not. And I had to give them my correct address.

But anyway, you’re going to fill out a form and that’s a way that you’re going to generate a lead. The cool thing is that then we’re going to take all this data that we’ve collected using some tools that Google provides and we’re going to feed that data back to Google Ads for the positive. So what we’re creating is a positive feedback loop or a positive data loop. So Google is then going to use that data to optimize the ad campaigns to drive down the lead costs using something called machine learning. And I’ve heard folks from Google say they’re using over 5,000 data points in real time to determine which person that’s searching for something is potentially going to be result in a lead.

And when they run across that, they’re going to actually bid more money. So we let Google do the automatic bidding for the keywords and it’s amazing. We put this in place a couple years ago and in one month we saw a 20% drop for one of our clients in cost per lead.

Chris: Wow, perfect.

Peter: Okay, so

Chris: let’s shift to display ads because we wanna explain about what we mean by display ads and how that all feeds into what you’re doing for your campaigns.

Peter: Sure, yeah. So display ads are these banner ads here. So this is one of our clients, American Crawl Space and Pest Services. So these look like pictures normally, maybe they have a button, what looks like a button you could click on. So this is not something that I would see on Google search results while I’m searching.

This is something I’m going to see when I’m surfing the web. So I may go to the Seattle Times, New York Times, local King five news website and these ads pop up. So they used to be called banner ads. But remember, these are pay per click as well. The interesting thing that you can do with this is you can use some targeting and the targeting is called remarketing.

So I hate to tell everybody you probably already know this, but you’re being followed anonymously. And what we’re doing is using a cookie that we put on the website. And once you visit the website, we’re going to put the cookie on your browser. And then when you go to another website, that website is going to see that you have that cookie on your browser and potentially serve you this ad.

Chris: Yeah. I get them all the time. And if I’ve done a search, it’ll go across my platforms.

Peter: And

Chris: often one of my family members will say, so you were looking at new bicycles apparently. Right? Cause it’s gonna pop up and show that. So it’s really interesting. Now this following up to eighteen months, what does that mean?

Peter: Well, so what that means is if you came to my website a year and a half ago, I still have the cookies flush after eighteen months on Google Ads. Now on Facebook, they use cookies as well, but it’s only six months available. So this is kind of cool because if you have a seasonal business and you have a customer that was interested in your product one season, well then the following season you’d have your ads that you could be showing them as well in the next season.

Chris: Okay. The next slide shows us a kind of different shaped ad kind of coming across, but it’s more than just that.

Peter: Right. Yeah. So there’s different types of targeting you can use on your ad. So I just described remarketing where you’re planning a cookie on somebody’s browser. But you can also do custom intent.

So there’s some more sophisticated targeting that you can use through Google. So custom intent will actually allow you to target people who recently searched for something, not necessarily. So I recently searched for that car just in that example. And then all of a sudden this Duane Lane Auto Family ad popped up. So because they knew that I was searching for a vehicle and that’s why that ad, even though it wasn’t for that business that I had visited their website.

The other thing you can do is just basic demographic targeting by age and gender, etc. So there’s different types of targeting you can do. Here’s the benefits. Did you have any questions about that?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, because this is exactly where I wanted to ask you about because, obviously, as we’re reading our articles and I’ve been looking at a bunch of new sites like a lot of people have this week, seeing how things are unfolding in our nation this week. So I’m seeing more and more ads and paying attention to them as we prepared for this. What are the actual benefits for a company? How does

Peter: it Yeah. So here’s the sad truth. 80% to 95% of the people who come to your website don’t buy, at least not the first time. So this offers you an opportunity to reach them. A lot of times it takes more than one interaction or one experience with your website for somebody to actually pull the trigger and contact you.

Or they may be searching on their couch. Sometimes if we’re sitting around as a family and we’ve got some show on, it’s 10:00 at night, I happen to be random searching around for something. The business is closed. I’m not even going bother to reach out to them at that time if I’m interested in their product. So this allows you to really reinforce your brand with people who may not have interacted with you, but they did go to your website or build your brand with your existing customers.

Again, if you offer different seasonal things like a restaurant could use this, they could do it on a weekly special because you can change these ads as often as you want. So you could offer seasonal specials, new offerings, and you can grow your brand in your existing customers eyes, especially good for businesses that have repeat customers. And then, again, using the in market shoppers, you can reach those people with the smart targeting that we talked about earlier, that they may not be actually searching, but they may have visited a few websites and you can use some information to track them down.

Chris: Okay. So we’ve a little bit more to talk about, but we do want to remind you that we have Q and A coming up. Yep. As you’re going through this, if you’re like me, a lot of this is a little bit of a foreign language. Some of it’s not quite clear, and you wanna clarify that.

You can start putting those questions in there as we are unfolding this webinar and start submitting those to us. But, Pete, I think what everybody’s going to be asking is what you want to talk to us about next is what are the best type of ads to purchase? Where do we get the most bang for our buck?

Peter: Right. Well, don’t want to say it’s tricky, but it is. But I do have some relative straightforward answers. So paid search ads are really best for businesses that want to quickly get in front of potential customers who are actively searching for their goods or services. Now, said that, as a business owner, you must have a way to track inbound leads or at least correlate what happened with them because I can give you a list of phone numbers or a list of names of people that contacted you.

But if you don’t have the processes in place in your business to see how those were handled, then you probably shouldn’t do this yet. So it’s really good if you want to, especially if you have a new business. We work with some companies that are popping up new locations around the country. We’ve seen some amazing results, brand new business, nobody knew they were around. Within two weeks, they had filled up their appointment book just using paid search ads.

Go ahead.

Chris: A little hit and miss. This is something that we want to make sure people understand. And the reason it’s so important you have somebody, either yourself or somebody like a a Pete at Biz Marketing that’s tracking the data. You can develop a great looking ad and pay to have it out there and you’re not getting a lot of bang for your buck. And a good example of this is we had I won’t divulge the company, but we were working with a company that completely isn’t doing anything with pets.

Okay? They do nothing with pets.

Peter: Right.

Chris: But they wanted an ad with a cat looking out the window and that ad took off. So you never know what’s going to catch people’s attention and actually make them grab and click and come into a lead. So it is a little hit and miss and that’s why tracking is so important. Paid search ads are one display ads. Talk about that a little bit.

Peter: Yeah, so display ads, if you’re going to run paid search ads, you absolutely should run display ads in a remarketing or retargeting sense. So it’s kind of a backstop. So if you’re going to spend money to drive traffic to your website, it’s kind of a no brainer to run remarketing ads where you’re going to target those, like I said earlier, 80 to 95% of the people who didn’t do anything the first time they came to your website. And in addition to that, one thing I do want to point out, though, is there are restrictions on using retargeting for healthcare related businesses. And Google really is fairly diligent about this particular thing.

We’ve had some dentists kind of fly under the radar for a while and not get their remarketing ads turned off. And then over time, Google finally figures it out and they turn them off. But for some reason, Facebook is not as restrictive on retargeting for health care. I don’t know why that is, but that’s just a fact.

Chris: So a question here.

Peter: Yeah.

Chris: And we’re open now for Q and A. So if you guys have questions, start submitting those. Here’s one question that comes up is, if I’m gonna spend money, how should I feel about spending the money for ads? So I wanna let Pete think about that for just a moment, but I wanna also address this. How many of you remember the Yellow Pages?

Right? Back in the day when we had a thing called Yellow Pages. I remember the last Yellow Pages ad I purchased was in the Sacramento area region, and we had a little tiny ad. It did have one line of color on it to make it stand out, and it was just maybe about an inch and a half tall. And I remember our annual budget for that was $14,000 for that last year.

It wasn’t targeted marketing. It wasn’t anything other than just being in the phone book in the yellow pages. Now let’s roll the clock forward to today. Pete, if I’m investing money Yeah. How much money should I expect in order to get a return on my investment?

Peter: Well, you’re going to have to be willing. I mean, if somebody just doesn’t have any idea what the budget is or how much they need to spend, you need to be prepared to spend at least a minimum of $500 to $1,000 a month on paid search ads if that’s the type of ad that you want to go after. Now, one of the things that we have to look at is what we’ll do for a business is we’ll turn on their ads and we can quickly shut them down or dial it back if they get overwhelmed with leads. Most business owners that I know are happy to be overwhelmed with leads. But I would say just generally speaking, would just in order to get an idea of what’s happening in your market, I would recommend that amount.

Now, I can tell you that just generally speaking, types of leads cost different amount of money. You’re not paying for click, but I’ll give you a cost per lead. And then we translate it into how much you should spend. So if you’re a roofing company, you’re going to spend, say, $2.50 per lead to get generated through these systems. Now, one roof, how much does a roofing company make off of one roof?

Thousands of dollars. They don’t make thousands of dollars, but it’s revenue, thousands of dollars. Whereas if you’re a different type of business like a dental practice, they may be paying per new patient lead, dollars 75, they’re certainly not going to be charging you several thousand dollars for the first visit, hopefully. But they look at it more as a lifetime value. So one of the things you really have to understand in your business is how much money you’re willing to spend to get one more customer.

Chris: Okay.

Peter: So that’s sort of the key thing that we challenge a lot of businesses to think about is how much money are you willing to pay for one customer? Okay, I’m willing to spend $500 for a new customer. Okay, so how many leads do you need to receive to land one customer? And of course, everybody thinks, oh, I land them all, but that’s not the case.

Chris: Well, leads me to this next question. And this is very similar to a business owner we just talked to the other day. What if I’m getting lots of clicks, lots of leads, but I’m not signing up new customers? What does that mean?

Peter: Well, I would look at a few things. One would be your offer. I would also want to know why, what sort of post lead interaction do you have with folks? Do you have somebody who’s doing surveys to find out why you didn’t get the deal? I would look at that particular process, especially to make sure that there’s nothing broken there.

The other thing is I would look at how well you’re qualifying the customers through the path. And, for example, maybe your form only has two questions on it and we may need to add some questions to your form, which is going to mean you’re going to get less people filling out forms on your website. But those who go through that process are going to be more qualified.

Chris: Yeah, it could also mean that on the answering the phone end, your people there need some training on how to convert it from a lead to a client. That could be where the ball is being dropped. So you wanna look

Peter: at That’s probably one of the biggest opportunities that I’ve seen with a lot of businesses. We’re spending all this money to drive all this traffic, to turn them into leads, and then they don’t answer their phone. And I have one client, when we first started working with them over a year ago, they were just super busy. They weren’t able to answer their phone. I said, you’ve got to answer your phone.

Somebody’s going to bother to call you, they want to talk to somebody. So now there are systems in place that we’ll be talking about later that if you can’t answer your phone, there are some things where you can engage with text messaging and things like that. But yeah, you’ve got to if somebody goes to the trouble to interact with you, you’ve got to be ready to respond right away.

Chris: Okay. Okay. Last question. We wanna honor everybody’s time. We know you’re on lunch break here.

So last question comes into us is you mentioned getting a report to your clients about their Google Ads. Talk about what kind of report should I be getting if I’m paying for Google Ads in order to maximize my effectiveness?

Peter: Right. That’s a great question. Well, first of all, you want to see some historical data. So depending on how long you’ve been running, you’d want to probably see up to thirteen months of data so you can compare the trend month over month for the year to year and then look at the trend for the last twelve months. So that’s first thing.

You’d want to look at your spending trend. You’d want to look at your lead trend, like how your overall leads are trending. And then you’d want to look at your cost per lead trend month over month. And that type of reporting is something that we do have available. We also go in a little deeper than that.

We share some data that starts to get a little deeper. One of the things we look at is how many leads were generated from people who came to your website from mobile device versus a desktop. Right? So one of the things that we see is consumer oriented products, tons of people are coming through mobile. We’re seeing up to 80% of the leads generated through mobile device now.

And three years ago, it was like just approaching 50%.

Chris: And that’s shaping everything we’re doing from creating websites, being mobile friendly to really focusing on that as a primary, not just a secondary, and making sure we’re doing it. Okay. All of this, bizmarketing.com/resources. But one more time because this is a little bit more of a technical conversation we’ve had just like the SEO. It may take a couple of times to go through it even while you’re mowing the yard.

I love listening to podcasts while I’m mowing my yard. Put on my speakers, I listen to it, can get a couple of podcasts in. Remind us where to go for the podcast, Pete, if you can post that and talk about it one more time.

Peter: Yeah. Biz marketing, actually I’ve got one more slide here I can share.

Chris: Oh, please do.

Peter: Yeah, we’ve got this bizmarketing.com/resources. So everything you need to see with regard to the podcast and everything is just right there if you want to do the videos. And on this particular one, I’ll make a PDF copy of the presentation available. I realize we didn’t go super deep this week, but we did. This is a huge topic.

And I think a lot of businesses just want to get a basic fundamental understanding of it. I think even if it’s just like a cocktail party conversation that you have, you need to have at least as a business owner, you should have some understanding of Google Ads. And hopefully we’ve been able to give you a basic understanding of the types of ads and which may work well for your business. If you want to have a conversation about this, there’s a big button on our website. You can schedule a free consultation and we can chat about it.

Then we’ll do a free consultation with you. We can audit your Google Ads if you’re already running them.

Chris: And one just point for everybody is in our specific area, counties are starting to open back up, economy is starting to open back up. We wanna do all we can to help you be prepared to reopen and finish this year strong. We know the front part of the year for many of your companies has been one of the slowest on record. It’s time to dive back in and go forward. Remember that we’re here to help, bizmarketing.com.

Pete, thanks for your time. Thanks to Biz Marketing team, and thanks especially to everyone tuning in and listening to this podcast, to this webinar today. We appreciate your time. Pete, I’ll give you the last word.

Peter: Chris, thank you for being the energy, the driver behind the conversation and keeping me on track. Thank you. See you, everybody. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms.

Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.