Question 1

How do we rank for organic Google searches?

Accepted Answer

Make sure your website can rank organically
Continual content creation (unique and about one topic. Doesn’t have to be long, 600 words is fine.)
Buy backlinks with a company like seo.co

Question 2

What is a Good Conversion Rate?

Accepted Answer

Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Ideally, you want to break into the top 10%.

Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/17/what-is-a-good-conversion-rate#:~:text=Conventional%20wisdom%20says%20that%20a,in%20the%20average%20performance%20bucket

Question 3

Is there any spillover from paid ads to organic search ranking?

Accepted Answer

On average, you will see about a 10 rank jump in organic search rank after you start running paid ads. Part of this is because Google counts all traffic to the website as “traffic.” Which means anyone who clicks on an ad gets points towards traffic. In Google Search Console (in the “Performance on Search Results” report) you can see organic search performance for the site. Compare the last 3 months with the previous 3 months to see the difference in average position, average CTR, total clicks, and total impressions.

Question 4

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 5

How do you track leads who call my business?

Accepted Answer

Most agencies will count a call that lasts 45 seconds or longer, for example, as a conversion. But we try to minimize false leads by hiring a designated team to listens to the calls that come in from an ad and give it a score. This also gives us the added bonus of helping us to uncover any issues that might be negatively affecting conversion rates during the calls (like an automatded answering machine that is confusing people, for example, or low quality leads who are asking for something different than what your business sells, etc.).

We use a platform called Call Tracking Metrics to help us record incoming calls and determine which were true leads.

What Is Call Tracking Metrics (CTM), and Why Do You Absolutely Need It?

Record, measure and listen to the calls your advertising efforts generate in real time! All phone call data is seamlessly linked to your Google Analytics, making it easy to define your exact ROI from your ad campaigns.

Here's how it works:

We generate a tracking number that will magically appear on your website instead of your real number only when someone has recently clicked on an ad. We generate another tracking number that will appear on the mobile ads as an ad extension, and ad leads will click on this number directly from the ad on their phone and their phone will dial the number, which will, of course, redirect them to your real number.
When either of these scenarios happen, someone from your business answers the phone and engages the prospect in conversation. The call will be recorded. We have a call rater who listens to every call, determines whether the person who made the call is an actual lead who is expressing interest in your product/service, and then rates it as a lead or not.
We are also able to see some very useful information about each call:

What page of your website the individual was on when they called
What keyword they used to land on your website
Which campaign generated that user
whether users were experiencing a challenge when attempting to place an order. So, that is a great QA check.

After that, we will import any of the leads who made the call from the website into Google Ads to attribute the conversion back to the day the person interacted with the ad(s).
If the call was made from the ad extension on the mobile ad, then it will be automatically counted as a lead only if the call lasted 30 seconds or longer. Google does this automatically because there is no functionality to import them (since they made a call directly, there is no tracking ID number, which is called a GCLID).

Here's the most important piece: After we listen to the conversation to access whether or not the lead was good or not, we go into your Google AdWords account and score the lead. This gives Google a lot of great data to work with.

If the lead was of poor quality, Google will limit the amount of times the ad gets shown to the same type of person.
If the lead was great, Google will show your ads to similar people who fit that leads profile.

End result? You get more conversions for a better cost.

***Please note that we pay for your Call Tracking Membership when we manage your advertising campaigns. The only cost to you is the monthly cost per number (In the US it is usually $1.50/number) and the cost per minute, which is usually less than $0.05 per minute.

Here is a screenshot of all the information you can receive about where exactly a call was coming from.

**Testing Your Magic Number*Once you or your vendor has setup the magic number on your website, you can test it to make sure it's working. Here's how: Open an incognito window and go to: [place URL here]/?gclid=test (i.e. yourwebsite.com/?gclid=test). You should see the magic number instead of the real number.

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

What's The Downside Of A Too-High ROAS Goal?

Accepted Answer

The higher the ROAS, the less of the market you can capture.

If you want to have a higher return, you need to spend less and make more.

Here’s why. In traditional sales funnels, we always have folks at the “bottom of the funnel” (people who are ready to buy) and folks at the “top of the funnel” (people who aren’t ready to buy yet).

Those who aren’t ready to buy are going to be more expensive. They’ll need to click on two or three ads before converting. Some of them won’t ever convert.

There's also people who will have a lower average cart value than others. So if you tell the algorithm, “I only want those who are cheap to acquire and who will spend a lot of money with me,” then you’re cutting out part of your market.

This is why a high ROAS goal will limit your ad spend and stop the account from growing.

The goal should be to choose the ROAS that’s just right (not too high and not too low) and try to maintain that ROAS while growing spend––gathering conversion patterns, optimizing the settings, keywords, product titles, etc.)

For further explanation, check out this video:

Question 8

How should we prepare for the holiday season?

Accepted Answer

It's best to get a head-start on any promotions you are planning for big holiday seasons (like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.).

For Black Friday & Cyber Monday, specifically, we recommend chooseing a site-wide discount. Your competition will be fierce, so it's a good idea to choose as steep of a discount as possible. If you need to temporarily hit a higher ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) in order to make this discount profitable, then we can easily do that.

Make sure any promotion you are offering in Google Ads is also offered in your other marketing channels. It's best to keep things synergistically across all platforms.

If your business is eCommerce, then you are probably running shopping campaigns. Shopping ads can promote discounts, special offers, free gifts, etc. right on the ad.

We can also promote the special deal directly in the text of any search ads that are running.

It can also be beneficial to create some images to support the promotion. We'll use these in the display campaigns to remarket to folks who visit the website during this time periot. A square version and a 19:1 ratio would work best, but Google has a long list aspect ratios they support, so more sizes means we are eligible to appear in more placements and therefore give the algorithm more opportunities to show the ad.

Google and all other ad platforms always experience a large increase in traffic during November and December. It can be a good idea to be flexible with the budget around this time -- meaning, if the audience size suddenly increases dramatically, then we will likely be able to spend more on the ads while continuing to meet a high return.

Question 9

How long will it take to build my campaigns?

Accepted Answer

10-12 business days.

Question 10

What is the difference between Google Smart Shopping and Google Shopping Ads?

Accepted Answer

Traditional Google Shopping campaigns are only directed at users searching Google for a product to buy. This user sees the ads on a search engine results page.

Google Smart Shopping, on the other hand, is a step up. This outbound-heavy campaign uses algorithmic targeting to show ads to a very specific user. This user has shown serious interest in a specific product through their past search activity.