Question 1

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 2

What if a campaign is not spending all of the budget?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes businesses would rather gain more impression share than hit a super high goal because the goal might be more profit than they really need and they want volume/scale.

For example, if you are targeting ROAS, then the campaign prioritizes that ROAS over spending all the budget, which means you’ve reached audience capacity and your options are either:

Find a new/wider audience with different keywords
Lower the bid strategy goal

Question 3

How often do we meet to review the campaigns?

Accepted Answer

This report is not proprietary and is easily reconcilable within your Google Ads account (which you retain full ownership of).

After you receive the report, we offer a meeting to review all activities in your campaigns, what happened over the last month, what is happening now, and what our plans are for future growth.

Question 4

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.

Question 5

When should I consider using Remarketing?

Accepted Answer

Hold off on remarketing in the beginning to test the quality of the traffic in the campaigns, and if a campaign isn’t performing well then you don’t want to limit the ad spend by pushing customers back.

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

How do you track phone calls (leads and sales)?

Accepted Answer

At Solutions 8 we use a tool called Call Tracking Metrics that records any calls that come in from your campaign. Then, we manually score every call as either a lead or not a lead. This score gets sent into the Google Ads campaign to ensure we're working with only the highest quality conversion data.

Tracking phone calls is incredibly important for accurate reporting. Any calls that come in from your campaign are recorded using a tool called Call Tracking Metrics.

Here’s how it works:

First, a lead calls from an ad extension or from your website.

When this happens, we can see some really useful data:

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

Then, a member of our team manually scores every call. After listening to the call recording, we manually import the quality conversations and the associated data into Google Ads.

Most agencies use a time threshold to determine lead quality (for example, any call over 45 seconds is automatically recorded as a conversion); however, we ensure lead quality manually, which makes for far superior data.

For more info, read our guest post "How to Track Your Phone Calls in Google Ads Using CallTrackingMetrics"

Question 8

Why shouldn't I show an email address on my site?

Accepted Answer

If Google Ads sends someone to the website and that website visitor copy & pastes the email address into their inbox, then we will never know we got a lead.

So, the algorithm won't have that conversion data point and neither will the ads management team.

Not only does it hurt the learning & optimization process, but it also makes it impossible to calculate the CPL.

Question 9

When is the best time to run Facebook Ads?

Accepted Answer

Start with a Remarketing campaign only for this first month until the pixel has picked up enough matched users and conversion data in the performance history. As a side note for e-commerce you can do Dynamic Product Remarketing which pulls products from the feed much like a Google Shopping campaign.

Keep in mind that Remarketing campaigns will not be able to spend much ad budget because the audience is made up of a percentage of people that visit your site (Facebook isn't able to match 100% of site visitors back to Facebook users). Start off with $5-$10/day for this campaign and adjust from there based on the frequency of the ads being displayed.

Once you have a good audience size and historical data then you can create a lookalike audience form your existing converters and show proactive ads to that cold list in order to build awareness.

People tend to view FB ads and then convert without clicking in FB. This can happen with Google to but it is more common with FB so it's hard to directly attribute sales and judge the performance of FB campiagns. Some of the people who convert on FB might be the sample people who are converting from an ad on another platofrm like Google. Without an attributuion tracking model it is impossible to know the exact path of conversion.

Question 10

How To Share The Facebook Pixel with A Business

Accepted Answer

In order to share your Facebook pixel with a business, you will need to already have a business manager. If you don't already have one, you can set one up here.

Once you've done that, go to Business Manager Settings.

Next, go to “Pixels” under Data Sources.

Select the pixel and click “Assign Partners.”

Enter the Solutions 8 Business ID: 915738658498354