So, you’ve dabbled in Google Ads and you’ve had a pretty successful conversion rate. You’re thinking about increasing your ad budget to get even better results.
Not so fast!
Making a sudden increase in your budget for Google Ads can be risky business because it can result in your CTR, or click-through rate, taking a massive plummet which will result in your CPA, or cost per acquisition to increase.
How exactly does throwing more money at Google reduce your ROI?
Studies show that when you first start using Google Ads, you will likely get good results in the early stages of those ads and the longer you run those ads, the harder it is to maintain good results.
This is because Google tracks the browser activities of your potential clients. When you run your first ad, Google recognizes your ideal customers and dishes out your ads to those clients that are most likely to respond to your ad. Tada! That fantastic conversion rate is the result.
However, when you scale up your ad campaign, it is possible that Google already exhausted all of your ideal clients, and they won’t want to keep showing the same ads to the same set of people over and over.
So, what happens is Google starts looking for other possible people to send your ads to. The more money you spend and the longer you run your ads, the more untargeted your audience will be.
With all of that being said, however, it is possible to scale your Google Ads and make it profitable with the right techniques.
Here are a few tips for protecting your bottom line while increasing your Google Ads budget.
1. Increase revenue and conversion rate with remarketing
Typical remarketing doesn’t usually involve personalization. This means you show the same ad to all the people regardless of what page they looked at on your website.
Dynamic remarketing, on the other hand, shows different ads to people that viewed your website and didn’t convert on Google’s sister websites. The ads are personalized based on the webpage the user viewed and draws people back to your website to finish what they started.
To set up dynamic remarketing take a look at Google’s Guide. Keep in mind that to run a successful dynamic remarketing campaign, your website needs to have a considerable amount of traffic, so if you are only getting 50 hits or so per day, you need to spend more time and money getting more traffic to your site before running a remarketing ad campaign.
2. Use RLSA campaigns to raise revenue
RLSA stands for Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. These campaigns make it easier for you to serve search ads on your website by targeting visitors when they are searching Google or their partner sites. RLSA campaigns should target broad keywords that are related to your services and have been previously search by your target clients.
Broad keywords can be costly and competitive, but if you are using them to target people that have already visited your site, they can be very successful at converting. Another RLSA campaign strategy is to target competing brand keywords. This strategy is often ignored and can be very successful. To learn to set up a RLSA campaign, visit Google’s Guide.
3. Bidding on branded keywords
This may sound similar to the previous strategy, but instead of bidding on your competitors’ brand, you are bidding on your own. Your organic search results for your branded keywords is likely to make your website appear at the top of the results, but it is always a good idea to secure the paid results as well. This will also prevent your competitors from running campaigns that have your branded keywords.
If you don’t bid on your own keywords and your competitor doesn’t either, you may not have to worry about this type of campaign strategy. To bid on your keywords, simply create a new search campaign and then input the branded keywords you are targeting.
So, how do you know if you’re getting 100% of the clicks? Google Webmaster Tools’ keyword data section allows you to search for your branded keywords. If the click-through rate is only 65 percent, that means that other listings, likely paid ads, are appearing before your brand and taking away 35% of your clicks.
4. Improve conversation rates with higher search impression share
Impression share is the level of impressions you make for a specific term. For example, if elder law attorney is searched for 80 times per day and you appear in the search 45 times, this converts to a 56% impression share.
If your impression share isn’t high enough, there are two likely reasons for this. If your ad budget is fairly low, you may reach your limit by 6 p.m. This means you lost out on everyone that searched after 6 p.m. If your ad rank is low, you will also miss out on impressions. Your ad rank is determined by multiplying your quality score by your CPC bid. This means it is important that your landing page and advertisements are pertinent to your customers and high quality.
People aren’t usually fans of ads anyway, but particularly those that don’t relate to them or that are poorly made. To determine your impression share, go to your Google Ads dashboard and look under the section “Search Impr. Offer.” This is where you will see your score. It is advisable to keep your impression share 50 percent or higher.
5. Increase your budget
This sounds pretty obvious, but to scale your Google Ads you will have to spend more money. You don’t want to do it all at once, but each time you change up your bid strategy significantly, Google resets their learning stage.
This is the period of time that Google gathers info that it needs to optimize your ads. This is typically a seven-day period and during that time your spending will decrease, but your cost per acquisition will increase. Try to avoid a shock to their system by only increasing your budget by 10 to 15 percent at a time.
6. Have a designated landing page
Be sure that you have a designated landing page that a Google user will be sent to if they click on your ad. Rather than sending them to the homepage of your website or your Facebook business page, consider sending them directly to a landing page.
A homepage can be overwhelming to a visitor, especially if it is poorly designed, or offers too many services. Plus, it’s difficult to make a homepage that appeals to everyone.
Instead, create a landing page for your Google Ad so that clients will be directed to take an action for one particular service that you are offering, such as a seminar, complimentary consultation, etc.
Conclusion
There you have it. Effective and efficient ways to scale your Google Ads campaign. Even if you are already having a lot of success with Google Ads, there are always ways that you can reach a larger audience while still protecting your ROI.
Keep in mind that Google drives 95% of all paid search ad clicks on mobile devices and 63% of those people say they’d click on a Google ad. Those are statistics you don’t want to ignore when determining your marketing and advertising budget.
These tips will help you continue to grow your practice all year long!
At Bambiz, we work with elder law and estate planning firms and have extensive experience in developing social media marketing strategies unique to your firm, location, and potential client base.
To learn more about how we can help grow your business using online marketing, schedule a free 15-minute call with us.
