Google Ads

Marketing 101:

Don't hide when customers are looking for you.

Get in front of customers

when they’re high in the buying-cycle and searching for businesses like yours.

Only pay for results, like clicks to your website or calls to your business.

Who is Google Ads for?

Google Ads works especially well for B2C local-level service situations. Think ‘window washing Vancouver’ or ‘Chilliwack Renovation Contractor’. Google Ads can also work well for products, but the client-lifetime-value needs to make sense… as do margins.

If you want to 'own' a specific vertical.
If you're looking to increase sales, leads, or website traffic.
If your business is structured for additional growth.
If your product or service is brand new and nobody has ever heard of it.
Generally Google Ads provides the best results when deployed by local businesses who provided local goods & services.
National campaigns can be successful, but revenue potential must justify the increased expense of a larger geography.

Who SHOULDN'T deploy Google Ads as part of their marketing strategy?

If what you are wanting to advertise has low margins, or is low value – or spending $1500 a month on customer acquisition would leave your family going hungry – you shouldn’t consider Google Ads as part of your marketing strategy.

If you who sell low-margin, low cost goods or services.
If your business is 100% referral-based, and it will never be anything but.
If customer Lifetime Value (LTV) does not justify customer acquisition cost.
If margin doesn't justify customer acquisition cost

When should Google Ads be used?

Google Ads is agile and can be turned on or turned off in real-time. Budget can be increased or decreased based on performance. That means it works well when it comes to seasonality or changes in business operation.

We suggest Google Ads as an initial tactic, deployed before SEO or at the same time as social ads.
Google ads can work as a single tactic, or can work in concert to inform other tactics such as Search Engine Optimization.
When margin justifies customer acquisition cost.
When customer Lifetime Value (LTV) justifies customer acquisition cost.

How much do Google Ads cost?

The primary answer here is “it depends on how much traffic you want”. For local campaigns, you can count on budgeting a minimum of $1500 per month.

How long does it take a Google Ads campaign to start generating revenue?

Although results can often start being realized almost immediately, campaigns generally start performing their best after the 3-month mark.

Google Ads Overview

How does online advertising work? How is online different than offline?

It can be notoriously difficult to understand exactly what you’re paying for when it comes to managing ads.

In the past, you might pay for a billboard. You’d be promised a certain amount of car “traffic” that passes that billboard, and the higher-traffic the area, the higher the cost. Some billboards cost $500/month and some cost $10,000/month.

Online works a little differently. When you put an ad on Google or Facebook, you only pay when someone CLICKS on your ad and goes to your website. You don’t pay just because someone “saw” your ad – they HAVE to take some sort of action.

Here’s an example of what a Google Ad looks like, and how it has helped one of our clients “own” a specific vertical:

High Level Management Overview

What Makes A Successful Google Ads Campaign Tick?

Here’s a high-level overview of what makes your campaign successful. When you hire One Yellow Tree to work on your Google Ads campaign, we end up working on each of these 5 areas.

1.
Strategy

Having a solid grasp of the business strategy behind our marketing campaign means that we can drastically reduce the chance of failure before it happens.

Once the initial heavy-lifting is done, we’ll know whether a campaign is a go or no-go. Our primary objective is not to sell you a Google Ads campaign, it’s to define whether you even need one in the first place.

2. Conversions

We need accountability on the campaign so we know where our leads are coming from.

Conversion tracking allows us to see how many leads and customers we’re getting from our ads.

3.
Targeting

Who actually sees your ad is one of the most important aspects of your campaign. If you’re a lawyer advertising law services, you probably don’t want your ad shown when someone is searching for “party clown for kids”.

Making sure we target the right person (someone who could become your customer) at the right time (when they’re searching for you) is vital.

4.
Ads

How well our ads are written can be the difference between a mediocre campaign and a thriving one.

We constantly test dozens of different ads, all touting the benefits of your company, to see which ones perform the best.

This actually provides decent market research to help you understand what you should put on your website too.

5.
Landing Pages

The landing page is where your visitor goes once they click on your ad. Having a good one is VITAL for a profitable campaign.

Strategy

The Most Important Part Of Your Campaign

You can manage the heck out of your ads, but without a winning strategy…

It’s vitally important to understand that STRATEGY is going to be the main determiner of whether your campaign is profitable or not.

Many businesses have felt the money drain of a poorly managed campaign – some have even concluded that you “just can’t make money with Google Ads”.

Here are some strategy items that, if done wrong, will wreck your campaign:

Does the offer make sense?
- It’s clear
- It’s compelling
- It resonates with the customer
Is a visitor likely to actually take action based on everything we’re doing?
Does the lifetime value of this type of customer justify our advertising costs?

Conversion Tracking

Your Most Valuable Data Point

Calls, Emails, Other Valuable Actions

What would you rather know:

How many people saw your ad?

How many people became a customer because of your ad?

The answer is obviously the 2nd one, and conversions are how you track new customers

Here are the conversions we can potentially track:

Calls: we can record calls, transcribe them, and categorize them based on the content of the call (ex. If someone says “book an appointment” in a call, we could tag them as a good lead). We can even provide an MP3 recording of the call if requested.*
Emails: If someone fills out a form on your website (ex. “Book a free consultation”) we can track that as a conversion.
Goals: if you have any action you want someone to take on your site (such as “visit 3 pages” we can group this as a conversion). This is useful if you want engaged users to be flagged as valuable.
Clicks: If someone clicks on a particular link on your website, we can track that as a conversion.

We can link any of these conversions to our Google Ads account so we know exactly which keywords drove that conversion.

As you can see, conversions are actions that actually matter – so that’s what we optimize every campaign for.

*call recordings can include a whisper message stating “this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes” depending on your state’s laws, or we can disable call recordings entirely if your industry or business requires it.

Campaigns Get More
Profitable Over Time

The beginning of the campaign is the least efficient

Let’s start with an example. Say we have a small campaign for a Law Firm with about 300 keywords in it. At the beginning of our campaign, we’ll see something like this:

Campaign Start

Keyword	Phone Calls	Spend
Law firm near me	0	$0
Hire a lawyer	0	$0
Law company	0	$0
Personal injury lawyer	0	$0
Auto lawyer	0	$0
(+295 more keywords)

Because we’re running conversion tracking, over time we’ll start to see which keywords actually get conversions (versus how much we spend on them).

After 6 months, we might see something like this:

After 6 Months

Keyword	Phone Calls	Spend
	47	$4100
Law firm near me	3	$200
Hire a lawyer	0	$300
Law company	24	$800
Personal injury lawyer	20	$1200
Auto lawyer	0	$1600
(+295 more keywords)

Now we’re going to delete keywords that aren’t profitable, including most of our original 300 keywords (most of them never would have gotten traffic, but we never know until we try).

We can see that the keywords “hire a lawyer” and “auto lawyer” haven’t gotten us any business, yet we’ve paid $1,900 combined on them.

If we pretend our total cost of the campaign is just these 5 keywords, totalling $4,100, by removing those 2 keywords we would only pay $2,200 on the exact same amount of customers.

Wow. Now we’ve made some real savings in our account, so we can spend less on advertising, right?

…wrong! Now you have more budget to allocate to top-performing keywords. This is how we build a snowball of leads for your business.

Let’s look at the same keywords after we’ve deleted these keywords:

After 12 Months

Keyword	Phone Calls	Spend
	89	$4100
Law firm near me	5	$400
Hire a lawyer	0	$0
Law company	44	$1300
Personal injury lawyer	40	$2400
Auto lawyer	0	$0
(+35 more keywords)

Same amount of ad spend, way more conversions.

This is just an example to illustrate how a campaign may become more profitable over time. We do similar optimization based on locations, time of day, day of the week, devices (mobile, desktop, tablet) and much more.

Getting On Google’s First Page

It's more complicated than you think

You know that “the first page of Google” is where your business needs to be. But what exactly is the “first page”?

It’s not as simple as it sounds because of this: there are trillions of different “first pages” on Google (because each search you make gets its own “first page”).

If you search for you own business name, you likely show up because there’s no competition. Easy! Now you’re on the “first page”.

Unfortunately, not a lot of people will be searching for your business name compared to other search terms in your niche.

To illustrate, here’s some real data from renovation construction client. We’ve removed the company name, but all the other keywords are preserved.

Keyword	Searches
(company name)	373
Bathroom redesign	3976
Renovations Abbotsford	1446
Bathroom remodel designer	1417

This account has dozens of other keywords in it. As you can see, the company name hardly makes a dent in the overall traffic, compared to more generic industry terms like “bathroom remodel designer”.

So while you may rank for your company name, it doesn’t mean much in the overall market because anyone who is searching for your business name probably already knows about you.

It’s much higher value to capture someone searching for your TOPIC (ie. “Renovations New York”) than for your name.

Part of Google Ads management is to make sure you’re on the “first page” (and first PLACE) for dozen of different search terms.

Landing Pages

A good landing page can easily 2x or 3x your profit

Which page on our site do they go to after they click our ad? Whatever page it is, we call that a “landing page”. It’s best to have a landing page specially developed for your campaign to maximize your conversions.

The quality of our landing page will directly impact whether a visitor chooses us or the competitor. We’ll audit the landing page at the beginning of any campaign, and suggest changes that we’ve seen improve conversions.

If you haven’t had a conversion-focused landing page just for your campaign, you’ll really want one (see the above link for the reasoning behind that). We can build that for you for a fee.

We do the writing and the design on new landing pages to make sure it’s in sync with the advertising we’re running.

Some questions we ask about the landing page:

Does it match our marketing message?
Does it compel the visitor to take action and do business with you?
Does our page showcase why we can solve our customer’s problems better than anyone else?

The landing page:

Should be optimized for conversions (see our Landing Page Optimization Checklist)
Should not be your home page (one of the top mistakes we see people make).

“What’s The Main Goal Of PPC Management?”

Getting Rid Of Unprofitable Ads

You’re paying us to manage your ads. But what is “management” anyways?

Managing your ads is the science of making sure we ONLY spend money on ads that drive leads. That means cutting out expensive parts of our campaign that doesn’t drive business.

Imagine if you could pay for a billboard, but you didn’t have to pay for anyone who didn’t call after seeing it. That’s impossible offline, but online it becomes possible.

We’ll start with a lot of keywords/ads/other targetings, and then slowly delete the ones that aren’t driving leads.

But how do we know what drives leads? That’s where tracking comes in.

Seasonality

Online is the same as offline

If your business is busy in July and slow in December, that trend will happen exactly the same on Google. Conversion rates tend to go up in busy seasons because people are more motivated to buy, and vice-versa.

Just like everything else, online advertising has its ups and downs. The idea is for the overall trend to be profitable, so it’s best to review your campaign performance quarterly or yearly, not monthly.

Reporting

Monthly reporting that focuses on data that matters to YOU

We’ve seen gigantic campaigns managed where the report you receive has 20 pages of miscellaneous data that no business owner would understand. In fact, we couldn’t really understand the relevance of seeing 800 keywords in a giant PDF either.

It doesn’t help you understand the basics: is my campaign profitable?

We do things differently. Every report we send has just the basics that you need:

How many people SAW your ad (known as “impressions”)
How many people CLICKED your ad (“clicks”)
How many people took a valuable action, such as called your business or gave you their email? (“Conversions”)

Ps. Conversions are the most important metric.

If we make any important changes, we’ll also include some notes so you get an idea of what we’re working on. That being said, we’re regularly doing optimization that isn’t worth mentioning in every email.

Here is a sample report so you get an idea of what is to come. You’ll note that it’s very simple – no fancy bar charts or graphs meant to confuse you: just data that MATTERS in a simple format.

You can see how we’ve sorted this data into a simple funnel. At the top we have the least important metric (impressions) and it trickles down into the most important metric at the bottom (calls). This is the simplest way to understand whether a campaign is performing.

Scope of Work

What’s included in your management fees?

Here are the main activities we work on for the basic management of a campaign:

Strategy audit

Offer audit
Landing page audit (with recommendations on how to improve your landing page)
Customer LTV VS
Conversion Cost
Thank You page audit & template

Account Setup

Conversion and call tracking setup
Conversion linker
Insert relevant scripts, authorize and schedule
Conversion testing and code verification (Google
Tag Manager, Analytics, Remarketing, Conversion Tracking, Call Tracking)

Google Ads campaign creation

Ad creation in multiple formats (different formats for different networks)
Keyword research
Campaign creation
Market research
Set bid strategies
Setup conversion/call tracking on website (monthly fee not included)
Campaign monthly optimization (cut keywords, targeting, ad testing, other optimization techniques)

Regular campaign audits

Occurs monthly and deeper quarterly as data comes in.

Monthly campaign optimization

Split test different ads
Manage keywords. Add or delete based on performance
Add negative keywords based on search queries
Manage bids
Optimize keywords, time, location, and other metrics for conversions as conversion data comes in
Much more based on judgment while auditing campaign

Call Tracking Analysis

Call tracking is usually around $75/month USD raw cost, billed directly to your card. This provides us with:

recordings of the calls
transcriptions of the calls
automatic tagging of calls (can grade calls automatically and rate them as leads or duds)
other tagging of calls (we can tag calls based on topic. So if someone says “book an appointment” in a call, we can tag it as an important lead).

Out Of Scope

What’s not included?

While we can do these for you, the following is NOT included in our flat monthly management fee quoted below (unless otherwise stated):

Landing pages or any other web development work
Copywriting on your website
Email marketing management or copy
Call tracking costs
Graphic design
Photography (custom or stock)
Videography