Question 1

What time period should I use to judge ad performance?

Accepted Answer

It's tough to look at things on a week-to-week basis. Our team aims for hitting the ROAS goal on a month-to-month basis. Performance is intentionally bumpy throughout the month because we do things like using the Stair-Step Method to push the algorithm to grow, or testing small changes, etc.

Question 2

What are my resources as a Solutions 8 client?

Accepted Answer

When you become a Solutions 8 client, you are assigned an entire marketing department team for less than the cost of a part-time employee.

Your team is made up of:

A dedicated client manager
Specialist and backup specialist
Strategist

Question 3

Is it possible to run an e-commerce campaign but built as lead generation?

Accepted Answer

It doesn’t always make sense to setup e-commerce tracking in Google Ads.

Instead, we can just assign a static conversion value for the order form submission (average order price) and use that for tracking ROAS.

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

Why is my profit margin becoming thinner as we scale?

Accepted Answer

When you increase ad spend, it's common to see an increase in your CPL or a decrease in your ROAS. Here's why.

Increasing our ad spend means we are targeting a larger audience. These are people who aren’t ready to buy––and it takes more clicks and longer time to convert them.

Simultaneously, we are competing with big players who have enough money to over-bid on keywords. This brings our CPC up.

The more we expand the audience size, the less certain Google’s algorithm will be when they show an ad. That’s because we’re pushing the algorithm to go into uncharted territory––it doesn’t know who to target yet.

If our low-hanging-fruits are composed of only a small portion of our audience, it’s hard for Google’s algorithm to determine who will go for the click.

So we need to warm up our audience and add “brand awareness” strategies until the top-of-the-funnel audience gains familiarity with our brand.

For example, we can run a display ad that targets a proactive (not remarketed) audience. This might not get many clicks but we’ll get views that can increase our brand awareness.

How do we spend more without diminishing profit margin (i.e. lowering ROAS or increasing CPL)?

It is nearly impossible to increase your budget without thinning your profit margin, at least for a short time.

To balance it, we recommend temporarily “leaning out” your account when trying to scale. This helps you preserve your profit margin while waiting for the algorithm to adjust to a higher ad spend.

Here are a few of ways to do that:

Pause brand awareness campaigns like video shopping
Scale back brand campaigns by reducing budget and or changing bids
Find brand keywords that are taking money in the other search campaigns

When a campaign isn’t limited by budget, we can often increase the spend without lowering ROAS by much at all.

But what if your account has maxed out its spend and reached its entire market/audience?

Use lower-spend outbound campaigns. These are campaigns like YouTube or Display that help increase your brand awareness and introduce your offer to a new audience.

Start running these campaigns with a lower budget and analyze how they affect your overall campaign performance.

You will sacrifice your ROAS with these new outbound campaigns. So it’s best to keep the ad spend low in the beginning.

As a result, your main campaign conversion driver should become more active.

You’ll be able to increase your outbound campaigns’ budget incrementally.

Question 6

Here's What You Can Expect Now That You've Been Onboarded As A Client

Accepted Answer

Now that you have been onboarded as a client there are just a few technical things that we need to set up for your website, in order to properly track calls and conversions in order to better understand what optimizations need to be made.

This is a guide for you to know what these tools are, why they're important, and how they're paramount to the success of the campaign.

Don't worry. You don't need to do any of these things (that's what we're here for).

We might need to request access from you for some of these tools. If that's the case, we will reach out to you and make the process as easy as possible.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) Installation

Google Tag Manager is a tool that we use to track specific actions and events that happen on your website, such as conversions.

This tool integrates with Google Analytics, and allows us to see how your website visitors behave on your website.

By setting this up, we can track things like which forms a user has filled out, who has visited the website (important for remarketing), what links users are clicking on, etc.

Similar to how video cameras work to see what's going on in a physical store, Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics allows us to replicate that in a digital environment.

Call Tracking Metrics (CTM)

Call Tracking Metrics is important to set up, particularly if your goal is to have leads call your business.

This feature allows us to track conversations that leads have with your business. Our team will be listening in all of the phone calls to gauge the level of quality conversations that are being had. If lead quality is excellent, Call Tracking Metrics allows us to identify what campaign generated that phone calls so we can increase the frequency of calls from that campaign.

Conversion Tracking (Google Analytics)

Conversion Tracking helps us as advertisers to see when a user completes a desired action on your website, e.g. filling out a form, completing a purchase, etc.

Conversion Tracking utilizes Google Tag Manager in order to track actions and conversions.

Pixel Installation (Facebook)

Should your business goals require advertisements on Facebook, we will need to install what's known as Facebook's "Pixel".

The Pixel is Facebook's version of Google's "Tag", and it accomplishes many of the same functions that Google's Tag does.

Competitive Analysis

It's important to understand that other businesses in your space are likely advertising on Google as well.

Part of the process of creating a successful campaign is to see how your competitors are advertising. We uses a myriad of tools to identify what your competition is doing, if it's working, and how we can improve on it.

Ad Copy Creation

The Ad Copy is what a potential customer is going to see on Google when they type in their keyword to the search bar.

Every ad that we create will be relevant to the product/service that you sell and will be specific to the group of keywords that best describe your product.

Campaign Creation

Once we've received all the information relevant to your campaign, we can start the process of actually building out the PPC campaign. This is a complex process that involves taking the information that you filled out in the on-boarding process and translating that into keywords and advertisements.

Having the proper keywords, key phrases, ad budget, ad schedule, ad groups, landing page destination, etc. in place make sure that your ads are being shown to the right people, at the right time.

Also, depending on what your campaign goals are, it's at this stage that we configure the campaign to fit your desired customer actions, i.e. increase quality phone calls with potential customers, eCommerce transaction, contact form completions, acquiring customers for a particular cost, etc.

After The Campaign Has Been Created, But Before Launch

After the campaign has been created, we will schedule a time to review the campaign and discuss what has been created, why it's been created in that way, and the expected outcome.

Question 7

Can we spend more money on a specific product or in a specific location?

Accepted Answer

Begin with $50 per day (or an amount that makes sense to you). Try to split the Smart Shopping campaigns to two different geographical locations, then allocate the ad spend to each campaign based on performance.

So two identical smart shopping campaigns.

1: All of (ex: Country), excluding (ex: State)

Whatever ends up being limited by budget, or having the best ROAS, gets the most ad spend.

Since they both will have their own dedicated daily budget, you will want to balance that on how each of the campaigns performs.

Question 8

How important is it to have a fast website and does that affect ads?

Accepted Answer

Your ads are greatly affected by your website speed.

Google will throttle your ads if it decides your "landing page experience" is bad. And the largest indicator of landing page experience is speed.

If your competitors have a faster website than yours, it's likely they'll be able to get better placements at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than you can.

Slow website speed will also impact the bounce rate on your website (since cold leads are finnicky and just came from search results with a pile of options, so if they are struggling with your website then they might decide to go back and click on the next result from the search results). This lowers the conversion rate.

Here's how you can test your website speed in the eyes of Google's crawl bot:

Use this website speed analyzer tool.
Enter your website URL.
Click "Start Test"

Ideally your score should be in the green. If the load time is 3 seconds or less, you are in the clear.

Once you fix your website load speed, you will notice a drop in CPCs as well as a slight increase in CTR (due to better placements) and Conv. Rate (due to lower bounce rate, as well as higher-intent users who clicked at the top of the page where your better ad placement is).

Question 9

How do I set up UTM Tracking?

Accepted Answer

This means you want to manually store data in your CRM platform which tells you where the contact record originated from.

In order to do this, you will have to set up hidden fields on your landing page, and you will select which words (aka parameters) to store (i.e. “source=google” and “campaign=branded”).

Once you determine those parameters, you (or your vendor) will enter into the appropriate campaigns or ad groups.

You can double check that the UTM settings are set up correctly by clicking on "ADS & EXTENSIONS", then click and "EDIT" on an ad and then click “TEST.”

Intro to UTM parameters training here:

Keep in mind: These UTM parameters aren't quite as good as Google at tracking folks with accuracy. It's simply a piece of text that's temporarily stored in the person' browser cache when they visit the site. If they come back to the site again with new parameters sent, then the browser's cache will be overwritten with the new parameters. If they come back to the site on a different device to convert, then the browser won't push the parameters into Shopify. If they delete their cache & cookies between their first site visit and the site visit that they convert on, then Shopify also wouldn't be able to include the parameters with the sale.

Google, on the other hand, is much better at tracking folks across devices and through any accidental cache deletions or overwritings. Google has people logged in on their phones, etc. etc.

But the UTM parameters should be close enough to accurate to get a quick gauge on what percentage of traffic is coming from where! You can also compare this data with your Google Analytics account in the Source/Medium section.

Question 10

What is PPC?

Accepted Answer

That's a great question that deserves a great answer. Read more here.