Google Ads Management Agency
Leveraging Paid Search Ads to Increase Sales Conversions.
Webology is a top paid search agency located in Birmingham, Alabama. We help connect brands with customers through Google Ads. Our team is committed to delivering the best ROI to our clients by eliminating ad waste and split testing landing pages to deliver the most qualified leads.
Experienced Digital Marketers understand these industry shifts, and can help their clients leverage a multi-channel effort that combines organic and paid search in a way that maximizes brand exposure on Google.
The other reason you should be using Google Ads is expediency. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of earning a high ranking in organic search results. It’s obvious downside is the time it takes to deliver results.
Even the best SEO agencies aren’t miracle-workers. SEO takes time and continual improvement. Google Ads also require constant monitoring and work. The difference is, with ads you immediately jump past the need to earn top-level impression shares and immediately start working to improve your ads.
To Recap: You need to run Google Search Ads for your business or non-profit because:
-Most potential customers will search on Google
-Ads will continue to take a large share of clicks because well…Google has shareholders to keep happy!
-Google Ads provide a more immediate ROI than SEO in almost every case
-The two work really well together!
If you’d like us to get to work immediately, start by scheduling your free initial consultation on this form. A member of our paid ads team will reach out to schedule a call and learn more about your project.
We believe in 100% transparency when it comes to Google Ads performance. If you choose to work with our team, you’ll get 24/7 access to login and view your campaign performance.
Why Use Google Search Ads?
The answer to that is simple. Potential customers use Google to find businesses like yours every single day. Google Ads get somewhere around 41% of total search traffic from the 81% of potential customers who use search to make a purchasing decision.
It gets way more complex than that when we look at how search is evolving over time. The trend towards ad clicks taking over a bigger share of total clicks will only continue…
It’s in Google’s best interest after all to sell more ads.
Not only that, but the trend towards mobile search leaves less and less room for organic page #1 results.
Do Google Ads Really Work?
Google Ads can work as a primary lead generation tool for brands in almost any industry. They work well in both B2B and B2C sales pipelines, but really do excel in B2B sales where keyword targeting will often outperform the audience targeting methods available in Social and other marketing channels. An exception to this would be LinkedIn where social media really shines at B2B sales. Many decision-makers have had bad experiences with paid search though. It’s definitely a possibility that Google Ads isn’t right for your business. However, it’s much more likely that a prior bad experience was a direct result of one of these common scenarios:
Attempting to manage paid search internally without the right skillset
This is more common among small business than it is larger brands with internal marketing teams. The business owner will see the value of Google Ads, but they often don’t have the time to learn about the ad management process. It gets passed off to an employee as a secondary duty, and gets neglected.
Without the attention it needs for optimization and split testing, the campaign performance often fails to meet management expectations leaving the owner convinced that ‘Google Ads didn’t work for us’.
Low Budget / Short Duration Campaigns
Hesitant to risk money on unproven strategies, many decision-makers will test digital marketing with a very limited budget. When it doesn’t deliver results in a few weeks, they assume the issue is with the platform and not the budget or strategy.
Given the right strategies which we will discuss in another section and enough time to dial-in results, Google Ads will almost always deliver an excellent ROI. However, low budgets can make it difficult to earn enough top-level impressions to deliver the desired level of leads. Additionally, marketers require time to reduce click costs and thereby increase leads by:
-Discovering new keyword opportunities
-Using those opportunities to increase ad relevance
-Discovering negative keywords to prevent irrelevant clicks
-Split testing landing page experiences (Conversion Rate Optimization)
-Optimizing ad text based on past data (Pro Tip – Always select ‘Prefer Best Performing Ads’)
If you’re not ready to invest the time and money it takes to tune in a high ROI from Google Ads, it may be best to work on growing your brand through other channels first.
Inexperienced Agencies or Freelancers
This last reason is a tragic reality of the digital marketing industry. The allure of high-dollar retainers attracts many newcomers every year. Inexperienced, yet well-meaning, PPC managers might not be ready to handle a complex account that requires more than just a knowledge of basic Google Ad settings.
The best marketers look at fundamentals. They do buyer persona exercises and ROI modeling work to craft the best Google Ads campaigns. Plus, you probably also want to hire someone with experience marketing in your industry, but more on that later…
Why Should I Hire an Agency to Manage Google Ads?
You just decided Google Ads is the right place to promote your brand. You reached out to several vendors for price quotes…Now comes the sticker shock: “What’s this management fee and why is it so high?” At this point, many business owners will decide to cut out the ‘middleman’ and do Google Ads in house. It can’t be that hard to setup a few ads after all, right? Sounds logical, but the reality is that Google Ads management is a highly specialized field of study. Management fees buy you expert time to help you save money on ad costs. Here’s a perfect example: This was our month # 1 results for a new ad group we setup:
We made two strategic changes to this ad group going into the next month:
Expert management over time reduces Google Ad costs. In 30 days we were able to:
Over time, your management fee more than pays for itself by reducing ad waste and increasing efficiency. Plus, you’re not wasting your time trying to master an entire career field when that time’s better spent focusing on the core business.
What Makes Some Agencies Better Than Others at Google Ads?
To make a long story short, experience…
As I mentioned above, there’s a definite advantage to working with a PPC agency that has experience in your particular industry. The first and most obvious reason is that they understand your buyers and the psychology behind their decision-making process.
Beyond that, Google Ads offers a marketer plenty of opportunities to collect and exploit data over time. Agencies that focus on one or a few particular verticals are able to build out massive negative keyword lists that they can copy and paste from campaign to campaign.
Example: If an agency manages a lot of roofing contractor accounts all over the US, they probably already identified that automotive-related searches often waste budget on irrelevant clicks. People looking for a roof rack or a replacement sunroof will accidentally click on your ads and waste your budget. Agencies that know this will upload a negative list of words like these to save you money on day #1.
-jeep
-car
-truck
-moon
-sun
That’s just one small example of the sort of efficiencies an agency can get when they scale-up data tracking within an industry.
How do I Determine the Right Budget for Google Ads?
It’s best to start with a realistic assessment of the average Cost Per Click (CPC) in your industry when planning your PPC budget. Make a realistic budget and setup realistic Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) with your ad agency.
In most cases we recommend setting up call tracking and recording with your Google Ads to provide an objective measure of:
-Total Leads
-Lead Quality
-Conversion Ratios
You can also track leads through form submissions, and forms offer a unique opportunity to improve lead quality over time. You can add qualifying questions to your contact forms that weed out bad fits and save you time. If you only want to work with customers in a certain price range, add a drop-down that says ‘select your budget’ and only include price points you’re comfortable with.
Those metrics should give you a great starting point and as you collect data from your campaign, budgets can be adjusted to better meet the needs of your business.
What Else do I Need to Know About Optimizing Google Ads?
The reality is, this section could go on and on. It deserves an entire book of knowledge, but we will leave you with some of the more important tips in case you do manage your own ad spend.
Farm Negative Keywords Each Month
Go to your keywords section for each and every campaign. Look under search terms. These are the words actual people entered into search in order to trigger your ad.
You want to find the word that makes each term not relevant to your business and add it to your negative keywords list. This will prevent that word from ever triggering your ad again.
Ad Copy Optimization
Earlier on this page, I advised you to allow Google to auto-rotate through your ads and select the best performing ones. You need at least three different ads in order for their software to do this successfully.
However, you shouldn’t just stop there. Let Google find the best performing out of the first three ads you create. Use it as a guide to see what text or characters cause more people to click on your ad. Write new ones and let Google add them into the mix. Over time, your ad click through rate will improve as your message becomes more in tune with your audience.
Geographic Reach and Impressions / Costs
You need to realize that Google paid clicks generally get less expensive when you set your geographic reach wider.
While geotargeting is one of the big advantages for local business, it’s important to remember that you need a wide enough audience to get the daily impressions required to be effective. Local businesses should find the service that brings in the best ROI, and increase the geographic reach of their ad targeting around those particular services.
Excluded Locations
Shhhhh! Don’t tell Google we told you this, but their software isn’t perfect. We’ve seen real-world examples of ads showing outside your targeted area on more than one occasion. It’s especially bad if your target location has a sister city somewhere else in the world. If you manage ads for an attorney in Birmingham, Alabama? You better make sure Birmingham, England is added to your excluded locations! We actually try to exclude any and all locations around the globe that we don’t want to target. It’s just an extra measure that helps make sure you’re not wasting budget in the places you can’t do business.
Split Testing Landing Pages
This falls under conversion rate optimization which is a marketing discipline highly dependent on an understanding of psychology and behavior. Observe a few people when they first land on your webpage. Watch their eyes closely. You want site visitors to naturally gravitate towards a compelling call to action as soon as possible. With heat-mapping software, we’re able to aggregate data on where your users click or tap on a page and we can adjust that landing page experience to produce a higher ROI over time.
You have less than 3 seconds to capture attention. Use it wisely. And once you think you have it right, build out a 2nd landing page experience. Test it against the data you collected on the previous page. Try to remove all possible variables from your experiment so you get the most accurate and empirical data possible.
This is both science and art. Doing it right requires weeks of data on both landing page experiences to come to a logical conclusion on which page performs best.
WOW! That’s a lot to take in!
Still with us? If so, you’re probably thinking about the complexities of managing all this. If you want to give it a shot, we salute you! Check out our blog for occasional tips and updates on PPC management.
However, if you’ve come to the realization that you need to outsource your ads and focus on what you do best, we’re here to help. We can schedule a free initial consult as soon as you’re ready.
Reach out to Webology today and start leveraging Google to grow your business.
