By John Eberhard
Running ad campaigns on Google Ads can produce some great results. But it can also produce some terrible results too, where you end up spending a lot of money and get little or nothing for it.
So here are some important things to do to make sure you get the best possible results from Google Ads.
- Determine whether you should be on Google Ads in the first place. It doesn’t work well for everybody. See my article What Works on Google Ads.
- Create custom landing pages for people to land on. Do not land someone on your home page and make them find the right page on your site. Your landing page should be on exactly what you ad is about. Don’t put navigation links on your landing page. You don’t want them wandering all around your website. Just put a response form and your phone.
- Use a trackable phone number on the landing page. A lot of your leads will call, so you need to know exactly how many people called, which factors into your accurate cost per lead. I use a service called Callrail, which gives you a number to use, then bounces all calls over to your main number, and tracks all the calls.
- Recently I did some research on YouTube and found some videos talking about landing pages. They advised to put these things above the fold (what you see before scrolling) on your landing page: an image of someone happy using your product or service, a headline with a benefit, some text, a phone number and response form. All above the fold. I tested some pages using this concept and with one client, doubled his leads.
- You definitely need testimonials, specifically on the product or service you’re promoting. But you can put them below the fold.
- Having a video on your landing page can be helpful. Below the fold.
- A lot of people just use Google Search, which is where your ads show up on Google when someone searches for a keyword. But Google Display, which is ads with images, that show up on other sites where the site owner allows Google ads to show up, can be a lot less expensive per click. And I have had great success with some clients using Display. It doesn’t work for everyone but it is worth testing.
- You can run ads on YouTube, where your short video shows up before the video that someone wants to see. You get charged if they watch more than 30 seconds, and you can put a button below the video for the person to learn more, which goes to your landing page of course. Worth testing also.
- Roughly 50% or more of people seeing your ads are on their mobile phone. You can make a landing page that is specifically designed for mobile phones. And you can create a campaign on Google that will display only to people on mobiles, and send them to that landing page.
- Track your number of leads from each campaign, and the cost per lead for each campaign. Those are the most important statistics to measure your success. Whenever you make changes to your campaigns, then watch carefully to see if the change made your statistics go up.
If you’d like a free consultation on Google Ads, contact Real Web Marketing at 661-441-2429, or fill out a form here.
