Question 1

How to use Local Campaigns to drive traffic to your physical store

Accepted Answer

If you have a brick and mortar business and you’re running a special offer or a promotion, you can use Google Ads to drive traffic to your local store.

By using a “Local Campaign” in Google Ads, you can promote Google Maps listings and track conversions every time someone looks up the driving directions to your store or shares the location with a friend.

Here’s what you need to do:

Update

Update your Google My Business account first. This includes updating information like:

Your cover picture and mention the promotion so people can see the sponsored listing in Google Maps.
Your GMB listing. Add imagery, maps, hours, phone numbers, and relevant links.

Optimize

Talk about your promotion in your ad copy and extension.
Set your keyword targeting to anything around your main keyword (e.g. if you’re selling shoes, keyword target should be “shoes”)

A few things to remember

This campaign tracks conversions differently than the rest of the campaign, which means it will skew the average ROAS for the overall account.

Since the local campaign has its own separate budget, it will make the ROAS look lower than it really is.

But don’t be alarmed. This simply means that the campaign is spending the ad budget without bringing in conversion value that Google Ads knows about.

So our team has to calculate the ROAS manually. Here’s how we do it:

ROAS = conversion value / the total cost from all the other campaigns

For more information on how How To Use Local Campaigns in Google Ads, check out this video:

Question 2

How do I use landing pages?

Accepted Answer

It used to be standard practice to create a designated landing page that would “squeeze” people into a sale because it focuses on one product, there’s no menu, no distractions, no alternate buttons, etc.

This is not recommended because on average people view 2.8 pages before converting.

So, this means a new visitor who lands on the website’s product page, might also view other products or view the homepage or the contact us page before going back to their original landing page to purchase/convert.

Question 3

Why do I need a Branded Search Campaign/Why do I need to spend money when someone is searching for my brand name?

Accepted Answer

The common thought process is “why are we allocating budget in order for an ad to appear when someone is already searching for our brand? It seems like a waste of budget.”

Here’s why:

Don’t Leave the Hot Leads Exposed to Competitors:

You don’t want to leave the brand exposed to competitor campaigns. When a lead searches for the brand name, you don’t want a competitor ad to be the first thing they see (and you especially don’t want that lead to click on the competitor ad).

Gain Extra Data For Optimization Opportunities:

Statistically it takes 2.5 clicks on average before someone is able to convert. Most people come back later. Without a branded campaign, you can see which keywords developed a conversion, but you can’t see how long it took them to convert and what path they took to come back (meaning did they Google your brand name or simply go back to your website, did they sign up for an email marketing campaign and then click on a link in an email, did they find a social media ad instead and click from there to convert, etc.).
This is because Google isn’t able to re-tie all the session data from the first interaction to the subsequent interactions.
If you set up a branded campaign, then you’re able to optimize fully because you can see which keywords have a shorter time lag, which have a heightened time decay, what is their top conversion path, etc.
Branded campaigns usually see about a 50% click-through rate and a 30% conversion rate, so they manage to catch a good chunk of the hot leads to help you see this data.
So, if you’re wondering how well the other campaigns are at driving traffic to make a return visit, you will need to raise the bid on the branded campaign.

Question 4

Do you do Bing search campaigns?

Accepted Answer

Yes!

Typically, we wait until we have maxed out Google Ads. But in some cases, if your target audience is older, Bing can be a great channel to reach them.

Bing has about 10% of the traffic compared to Google, but it is very inexpensive and full of high-quality leads.

Question 5

How long will it take to build my campaigns?

Accepted Answer

10-12 business days.

Question 6

When do you update the ad copy?

Accepted Answer

Every month.

Here’s how it works:

After 100 clicks, we compare the performances of two ads.

We keep the ad copy with the highest click-through and conversion rate, pause the ad that didn’t perform as well, and build a new ad to compete against the winning one for another 100 clicks.

This cycle continues on a monthly basis.

Question 7

How do I decide whether a campaign can spend more even when it doesn’t say “limited by budget”?

Accepted Answer

If you have extra ad spend to work with (or if you pause another campaign and need to allocate its budget), check out the impression share (IS) lost to see if an existing campaign can take on the new spend. If (IS) is lost due to budget OR due to rank, then it most likely can. This is due to the cyclical nature of bids:

Rank determines your ad’s position in the results.
Rank is affected by bid.
Bid is set based on what the business can afford (for example, [Max CPC] = [Break Even CPL] * [Conversion Rate]).
Higher Bid = Higher Ad Position = Better Website Visitors = Higher Conversion Rate (clicks to leads) = A Higher Bid can be afforded. So, you can sometimes raise the bid in the anticipation that the conversion rate will increase by guesstimating what it will increase to and “putting the cart before the horse.”
If NOT Smart Shopping campaign - you might temporarily switch the campaign to a manual CPC (with enhanced CPC enabled) bidding strategy if it was using an automated bidding strategy before, because the algorithm most likely isn’t intelligent enough to push the max bid in this way.
If Smart Shopping - it’s not possible to switch to manual, so here are some other options:
- Give it more budget in order to get it to increase the bid
- Before increasing the budget, make sure the product feed is optimized by including a lot of optional information that helps with rank. Be sure to optimize your feed during the eCommerce setup process.

Question 8

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 9

Why is the conversion rate higher when leads come from paid ads vs. organic?

Accepted Answer

The paid campaigns are always going to bring in higher quality website traffic than organic search results because:

Ads have headlines and descriptions - vast amounts of them - that have been optimized for click-through-rate by us and by the algorithms.
Organic searchers aren't always going to be sent the correct page. When someone does a search on Google and finds your website in the results, they might not get to the landing page/homepage. They might end up on a blog post, etc. In fact, you can see what percentage of the website visitors enter your site from the landing page/homepage by going into analytics.google.com, clicking on Aquisition, then Search Console, then Landing Pages on the menu on the left.
You're also getting a higher percentage of people who are motivated to buy. Many people are looking for information and will end up on an article on your site. The people who do click on an ad are looking to explore your brand/product/service from the perspective of someone who is considering pulling out their wallet.

Conversion rates from paid ads tend to be 6 times higher than conversion rates from organic searches.

Question 10

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.