Q: How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Holidays & Promotions Promotions Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion. Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same. Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below). Holiday Campaigns Here is a recommended strategy example surrounding Valentines Day with a $15k spend on holiday-specific ads: Spend $3k three weeks prior to V-Day & then spend the remaining $12k during the last two weeks. Swap out the landing page used in the Branded Campaign to the holiday-specific page temporarily so that anyone familiar with the brand can learn about the limited-time products. Set up a new Smart Shopping Campaign for the holiday-specific products. (If the products are new, then start with a regular Shopping Campaign in order to build conversion data first and then switch to Smart Shopping. See the Bidding Strategies FAQs for more on this.) Set up a new Display Campaign for holiday-specific products. Do not set up a new Search Campaign targeting V-Day Gift search terms (not product specific).

Question 1

Is my branded campaign stealing all my traffic from organic search?

Accepted Answer

In some instances, yes.

If you have a good organic ranking and good organic traffic, branded campaigns can steal your organic traffic. The way to subvert this is to bid very low ($0.05 per click) so it's not costly.

**But, the pros far outweigh the cons: **

First, running a branded campaign protects your brands from competitors.

The first four spots on the Google search engine results page are all Google Ads listings. So, competitors who bid on your name can show as the first listing.

And because the highest you can rank organically is #5 on the page, all your organic traffic in this case would end up seeing your competitors first.

Let’s keep in mind that the #1 spot on Google has an average 20% click-through rate. So, competitors who bid on your name can be detrimental to your brand.

Suffice to say, you should always want to be #1 on Google for your brand name.

Next, running a branded campaign gives us the ability to see what keyword a user searched to get to your site (before leaving and coming back to search your brand name next).

This allows us to bid efficiently on keywords that introduce your brand to the masses, and also brings them back to the site to convert.

Question 2

I Googled a keyphrase for my campaign but I don’t see my ad—why?

Accepted Answer

A: Ultimately, the answer depends on your unique campaign—but there could be a few potential reasons for this:

You are in a competitive industry and/or have a limited budget:

You can bid to be at the top of the page (in which case you may spend your entire budget on one click per day)
You can opt for more selective bidding, resulting in more leads

Setting a lower budget allows only the right people to find you, instead of paying a lot of money to claw to the top of the page.

You have other keyphrases that have proven to convert

Low search volume

Where did you Google from (physically)?

From here, you have a couple options to get to the bottom of why you aren’t seeing your ads:

Check out the “Ad Preview Diagnosis” tool in Google Ads. If an ad isn’t showing, this should tell you why—or, it may tell you that your ad is, in fact, showing up in Google search results, but you just haven’t seen it yet.
Still feeling uneasy? Just reach out. We can give you the reason why you aren’t seeing your ad; but chances are, there is a strategy behind it—and we’re happy to go over it with you.

Question 3

Why don't my ads appear at the top of the page when I search on Google?

Accepted Answer

First page, top of page, first position CPC bid can be very expensive in competitive industries. A high CPC and low budget would take a while to make a conversion (get a click, make phones ring). So, shut off more expensive high quality keywords that you want to test now or later so they do not eat up your budget early on.

Start by aiming for a lower position (say #2 spot) with keywords that are high quality (related to ad relevance, landing pages, click through scores, etc.) but have lower CPC. Over a few weeks, you will learn and gather data on the quality keywords with good conversion rate and CPA.

Then you can begin to optimize. Bid more aggressively on quality keywords for top of page position and shut off keywords that have not been producing results. Reallocate that money to keywords that are producing results which will gain those type of conversions more quickly.

When you use a low budget and spend less than what you believe you should bid because your campaign has good quality score, good ad relevencey, good landing page experience and good expected click through rate, you pay a lot less than everybody else would to get a good spot and generate leads. Taking this smart approach allows you to see how things will progress.

As you test more aggressively, use Enhanced CPC which will help increase conversions. Enhanced CPC tells Google to enhance the bid (that it can spend) up to 150% of your current bid to get a click. So a $10 bid will turn into a $25 click if Google sees a conversion can come from it.

You could see your max bid is set at $10 'enhanced' but your average CPC may be $18 and you are getting good conversions and placement. Take your $10 bid and turn it up to $20 and you will get to see a predictive indicator of where to start to spend more money/increase bids without increasing the budget.**

So, start small, generate leads, see where conversions come from without asking for more budget or stretching too thin in the right amount of time.

You can get more aggressive by adding more ad spend to accelerate the process (get phones to ring and buy data) and then you can start to back the spend down in line with a targeted monthly spend.

Summary:

Start with lower price and page listing
Shut off expensive waste
Get click then that's a great keyword to use as a predicitive indicator to more aggressively bid
Start to scale
Optimize
Convert quicker

Why wait to do SEO until after Google Ads Campaign?

Question 4

Why is my cost per click so high?

Accepted Answer

Having a high CPC (Cost-Per-Click) usually stems from competiting against many other competitors going for the same targeted keywords.

We can break this down for you by going to your "Auction Insights" and showing you what competitors are targeting the same keywords you are, and where they are on the SERP (Search Results Page) relative to your position.

Generally, here at Solutions 8 we aim to give you the highest ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) possible. This means we target keywords that are most likely to lead to conversions (Phone Calls, Purchases, Form Submissions, etc.).

If these profitable keywords also have high competition and high CPC, we need to "play the game" and bid competitively to appear near the top of the page to attract the most likely to convert customers that are looking for your products & services.

Our initial strategy is to start with targeting the bottom of the page until we can gather enough click-through data and conversion data to identify patterns.

Once we have a sense of which keywords are going to be effective, we might decide to bid competitively one a handful of them to appear at the top of the page, since we'll have the data to make us confident that it will be worth the risk to purchase those expensive clicks.

Question 5

How do I advertise holidays and promotions?

Accepted Answer

Holidays & Promotions

Promotions

Temporarily change all ad copy to include mention of the promotion.
Simply swap out the landing page URL but keep the ad copy the same.
Run a promotions-focused campaign (which is described in the holiday campaigns section below).

Holiday Campaigns

Here is a recommended strategy example surrounding Valentines Day with a $15k spend on holiday-specific ads:

Spend $3k three weeks prior to V-Day & then spend the remaining $12k during the last two weeks.
Swap out the landing page used in the Branded Campaign to the holiday-specific page temporarily so that anyone familiar with the brand can learn about the limited-time products.
Set up a new Smart Shopping Campaign for the holiday-specific products. (If the products are new, then start with a regular Shopping Campaign in order to build conversion data first and then switch to Smart Shopping. See the Bidding Strategies FAQs for more on this.)
Set up a new Display Campaign for holiday-specific products.
Do not set up a new Search Campaign targeting V-Day Gift search terms (not product specific).

Question 6

How do I know the cost per aquisition of a client if Google Ads is only bringing in leads?

Accepted Answer

If your Google Ads account is gathering leads (as opposed to revenue), then it will be important to manually determine the cost per aquisition of a customer. Cost per aquisition, or CPA, is your bottom line, after all.

Getting to the bottom of this number is not always straightforward, but it is always worth the effort.

THe goal is to look through your recent sales and leads, and then to try to determine the average conversion rate of a lead that comes from Google Ads. That way we can apply the conversion rate to the performance reported by Google Ads in order to determine the CPA of a customer/client.

Here is an example of the math equation that needs to be done:

If your CRM/sales reps are able to find 19 leads that originally came from Google Ads in the past 4 months.

And 8 of those leads converted into a customer/client.

Then, 8 converted leads out of 19 total leads is a 42% conversion rate from Google Ads.

If Google Ads is reporting 63 leads in the past 4 months and spent $20,000 in ad spend to do that, let's apply the 42% conversion rate to those numbers:

42% of the 63 leads gathered by Google Ads is 26.46 leads that were converted into clients, theoretically.

$20,000 spent on ads divided by 26.46 clients means each client cost $756.

Now that you know each client cost $756, you can ask yourself: Is that a profitable amount to spend aquiring a client based on how much revenue clients bring in over their lifetime with the business, on average? If so, then it's probably time to start talking about increasing the monthly ad spend to begin scaling how many leads are coming in each month.

How to find the leads that came from Google Ads

Leads that submit a form will need to be tracked using UTM parameters. This will need to be done ahead of time, so that the contacts in your CRM can be identified as having Google Ads as their source.

Leads that call your business won't have any UTM parameters attached to their contact record (and, in many cases, won't have a contact record unless the person who answered the phone added them into the CRM). In this case, we can send you a list of names & phone numbers from our call tracking app, and then you can manually match up your recent sales/new customers/new clients to the list.

Question 7

How can we get the product rating stars to show up on the ads?

Accepted Answer

The product ratings will begin appearing on Shopping Campaign ads whenever your business and the product itself qualifies for the program. Google is a bit vague exactly how to qualify...The rule is to gather a minimum of 50 reviews across the store before submitting the form to apply to participate in the program, but that is where the hard & fast rules end. In this article they say, "Reviews and star ratings may not always show. We’ll show star ratings when our system determines that the information is accurate and relevant for shoppers’ needs." Which means they are leaving it up to an algorithm and the parameters are left a mystery.

The only way to get reviews that aren't made directly in Google to appear in the ads is with a reviews aggregator app. Here's an article explaining this and offering a few alternatives. And here's Google's comprehensive list of approved 3rd party aggregator apps.

There is a section of your Google Ads account where the seller rating stats will begin to populate once the ads are showing the stars. The only way to know whether the ratings are showing is to occasionally check recent dates in this section. Here is how to get to it: Click on "ads & extensions" and then "extensions" and then scroll to the bottom of the screen and choose "automated extensions." The "Seller Ratings" row will populate with data on days when the ratings appeared in the ads.

If you aren't receiving enough reviews to qualify for the program or to keep the stars actively appearing on your ads, here is a tip: Use your review app to create an automated email series that asks customers to review. Schedule a large amount of emails and be very direct about wanting a review. Make sure to set up a trigger inside his review platform to stop the emails as soon as the person leaves a review. The automated emails have to be sent out of his review platform to do this, of course. He said he sends emails that say things like: reviews are so important, we're a family owned business, your voice matters, if you can’t give us a 4 or 5 start review please let us know so we can make it better, and even "we’re not going to stop asking until you review." Sounds pushy, but effective!

Question 8

What do you recommend for a new product launch?

Accepted Answer

If you are launching a new product, there are a few things we can do to get it out into the ad ecosystem.

First of all, if you add the product to your eCommerce store, then it will automatically be added to the Smart Shopping campaign through the product feed after a few days. However, depending on how large your store is, it could take the algorithm quite some time to give the new product ad spend and gather conversion data on it. If you want to speed that process up, we can give the product it's own campaign(s) to force the account to devote ad spend to it more quickly.

We can give it it's own budget and run the following campaigns:

Shopping (eventually the product will be switched over to the main Smart Shopping campaign once we are done with the "push")
GSP and Display - These work especially well with remarketing audiences of recent website visitors
YouTube - Do you have a video to promote the product? If so, we can try YouTube shopping to get eyes on it.
Search - Temporarily running a search campaign on a new product can help the ad account gather conversion data more quickly because it allows the algorithm to see what the ideal, target customer looks like.

Question 9

How can I track chat leads? Which chat apps are compatible with Google Ads?

Accepted Answer

If you use a chat app on your website, and you want to see how many leads come through it after interacting with an ad, then we would recommend using a chat app that allows for lead tracking.

Lead tracking means we have the ability to verify the person chatting is an actual lead. Some chat apps simply mark every single chat message sent by a unique user as a lead, even if the person is trying asking a question that doesn't express intent to consider purchase. For example, if someone chats in to say "can I get a refund?" then we would not want to tell Google Ads that this person was a lead. There are two reasons why this is not ideal:

We would see an inflated number in the Google Ads performance reports/dashboard
We would be telling Google's algorithms to optimize it's targeting based on incorrectly marking that chat user as a piece of conversion data

If you are considering using a chat app that doesn’t allow lead tracking, then we would recommend not basing optimization decisions off of chat conversion rate. We can make this happen by setting up the conversion action & tracking, but not including those chat conversions in the "Conversions" column of the ad performance. This is because a chat conversion would be counted the moment the lead clicks to write their message, but this type of conversion isn’t a direct indication of success.

You have the option to swap out the chat app with one that does allow for conversion tracking with Google Ads.

Some chat apps have a team of customer support reps (like OctaChat or LiveChatInc. With these you don't pay unless it's a verified lead and the reps have gathered their contact information.)
Some allow you, the business owner/employee to man the chats yourself (like PureChat).
Some offer chatbots (like ManyChat)

Question 10

How can we target competitors even more? / What is a Competitive Proactive Campaign?

Accepted Answer

Pick a few competitors (suggesting 1-6) and create a display or video campaign. Setup one ad set for each competitor. Then, build these 4 audiences within each ad set:

Custom affinity targeting the competitor's website
Custom affinity targeting the competitor's brand name
Custom intent targeting the competitor's website
Custom intent targeting the competitor's brand name

This is a highly segmented way to have an outbound campaign going to specific competitor's users/customers/leads. Affinity means it will target people who are frequently visiting that brand's site or associating themselves with that brand regularly. Intent means it will target the people who are actively researching or planning a purchase of that business.

The caveat with this campaign is, if your competitor is a SAAS product, frequent visitors of the site might be going there to login. So this means the ads will appear for the competitor's existing users. Because of this, it's recommended to test this campaign to make sure you aren't spending a ton of budget targeting primarily existing users -- and, if you are, make sure the ads feature a competitive advantage in an effort to get those users to make the switch.