“I’ve dumped thousands of dollars into Google Ads and I’m not getting any leads!” – These are the words I have heard countless times from my clients. The process is usually pretty similar, they will create a Google Ads account, walk through the process of creating an ad or two, pick a handful of keywords like “Law firm” or “Personal Injury Law” and than point those ads to the home page of their website. After a couple of months and thousands of dollars spent, they throw their hands in the air frustrated that “Google Ads just don’t work!”. Fortunately, while frustrating, this problem is easy to solve and today I am going to show you how!
The first mistake many of my clients who are new to Google Ads make, is making their ads much to broad. Before you create your first ad it is crucial to understand just who your ideal client really is. For example, do you specialize in personal injury law? Think about who your clients are. Are these traffic accidents? Workplace accidents? By narrowing down your target audience you can create a more clear and focused ad they are likely to relate to and click on. If you have more than one type of customer you want to focus on, these can be placed into distinct campaigns.
Now that you have taken some time to consider your ideal client and have written clear ads targeting them, you need to start thinking about the types of searches these clients will do. For example, a potential client may search for “I’ve been in a car accident” or perhaps “I’m injured and can’t go back to work”. When selecting keywords it’s important to be aware of the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords; short-tail keywords as their name suggests are shorter and therefore more broad keywords they cast a wide net but may lead to less qualified leads they also tend to cost more per click as more of your competitors will use them. This is in contrast to long-tail keywords which tend to use three to five words and are more focused on lowering the cost per click and increasing the likelihood of a qualified lead.
it is important to consider where you are sending them once they have clicked on your ad.
Now that you have ranked for a specific search, and have attracted your potential lead, it is important to consider where you are sending them once they have clicked on your ad. It may be tempting to send them to your website’s homepage but this is usually not the best thing to do! Your homepage talks broadly about your products and services at a high level and provides many opportunities for your lead to get distracted, lost, and ultimately lose interest and leave. Instead, you should be driving traffic to a dedicated landing page that clearly outlines their problem, how to solve it, how you can provide that and crucially how to get it. These types of landing pages can live on your existing website but may look dramatically different than your other pages. You also may consider omitting your regular navigation to prevent your customers from getting distracted and leaving.
The final step to improving your leads is budget and there are two ways to optimize this: increase your budget or decrease the number of campaigns you’re splitting it between. Let’s start with the easy solution, increasing your budget. By increasing your budget you are increasing the amount you are willing to bid for each matching search result. The more you spend, the more likely you are to show up, the more likely you are to get that lead. If you’re finding you seeing very few impressions on your ads this could be the cause as your competitors may simply be spending more. But how does having multiple campaigns become a problem? It’s important to know that your budget is split between each campaign which means you are bidding less for each campaign you have. If you have too many campaigns you may find your response rates drop as your ads are less likely to be shown.
Managing your Google Ads effectively is just one aspect of the many ways your online marketing can be driving leads. If you’d like to learn give us a call and we will show you how to turn your website into a lead generation machine.