Question 1

Why isn’t the Facebook remarketing campaign running?

Accepted Answer

It's common for Facebook remarketing campaigns to struggle to acquire a large enough audience in order to run. Facebook says their minimum audience size for a pixel-generated audience is 1000.

This means the Facebook pixel on your site needs to be able to match at least 1000 website visitors to Facebook users.

What factors into this?

Match Rate - Facebook doesn't reveal their average match rate (the rate at which website visitors can typically be matched up with Facebook users), and this likely varies greatly depending on the type of user who visits the site (do they tend to have Facebook accounts? Do they tend to reset their cache & cookies often?) as well as a number of other factors.

Pixel Age - The pixel is only able to see website visitors in real time, which means it can't see people who visited before the pixel was added to the site. So, if you've had the pixel on the site for 6 months then it will have 6 months worth of website visitors to try to mach to Facebook users (as long as the settings inside the Facebook ad account are set to look back 6 months, which is the maximum amount of time Facebook allows a pixel to look back).

So, the best thing to do is get the Facebook pixel onto the site early, make sure the settings inside FB pixel area are set to look back 6 months, and consider sending more people to the website with proactive (aka not remarketing) ad campaigns in order to populate that Facebook remarketing pixel audience.

Question 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

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 6

Why Do We Exclude Certain People In Remarketing Campaigns?

Accepted Answer

Setting up a remarketing campaign in Google (or "retargeting" as it's known in Facebook) is a powerful and effective way to capture conversions from people who did not initially convert.

Cookies and Tags

Before we dive into what remarketing is, we first need to understand what a "tag" is. Whenever someone completes a desired action on your website, a cookie gets installed in their browser. A "tag" is recorded and this information is collected by Google Tag Manager and sent over to Google Analytics for us to track.

For instance, a cookie can be fired and recorded as a tag whenever someone simply visits any page on your website, if they fill out a particular form, if they click on a link, if they make a purchase, etc.

In order to configure tagging, you need to set up an account with Google Tag Manager then have the tag installed on your website or desired web pages. Don't worry though, if you're a client of Solutions 8 we do that all for you!

So now that you know what a tag is, let's talk about remarketing.

The Purpose of Remarketing

The overall goal of marketing and sales is to show the right offer, to the right person, at the right time.

If a person doesn't initially complete an action (i.e. fill out a form, make a purchase), they're not a lost cause. Why? Because they've been tagged.

We know that they didn't take the desired action, and now they are anonymously put into a list of people who also didn't take the desired action.

The goal then is to re-market to these people with different advertisements at different times, in an effort to get them to convert into the desired action. The more "touches" a prospective customer has with your business, the higher the likelihood of them converting into a customer.

Why Do We Exclude Some People In Remarketing Campaigns?

If someone has already completed the desired action, we don't want to keep making them that same offer.

For instance, if you own a shoe store and are promoting the new Brooks Adrenaline GTS for men, you don't want to keep showing this advertisement to the people who have already bought this item.

It's a waste of ad spend and can annoy your customers. It is much wiser to change the ads that are shown to these people.

"They're already customers. Aren't they prime prospects to advertise to?"

However, to reiterate our earlier point, advertising the same products that these people have already bought isn't an effective way to spend your advertising budget. They already know your product exists, what about showing them another product of yours that you think could help them too? Now you're thinking!

Question 7

Last Steps Before We Launch Your PPC Campaign

Accepted Answer

After a campaign has been built, but before it launches, we like to schedule a time with you to review the campaign before it goes live. This is to ensure that your initials goals are being strategically implemented, and allows everyone who's a part of the process to voice any concerns.

Below you'll find a list of topics and items that we will be reviewing during our discussion. Once we have reviewed the campaign with you, made any changes needed and have received your full approval, the campaign will go live!

Ad Budget

While we're confident in our abilities to successfully deliver and manage PPC campaigns, but it never hurts to double check things, especially the budget.

Campaign Schedule

The campaign schedule is the time of day and days of the week that the campaign will run its advertisements.

This is important because you may want to receive traffic to your website during the night, but also want to have traffic, plus phone calls during the day.

Geography

It's important to make sure that we have the proper geographical settings in place prior to launch.

If you are a business that is running advertisements to people who live within a 25-mile radius of your physical location, it would be inappropriate to have your ads set to run outside of your targeted market area.

Structure

The structure of your campaign is essentially another way to refer to the overarching goal of the campaign.

For instance, someone who is running a campaign to maximize conversions defined by email signups will have a different campaign structure than someone who just wants drive clicks and traffic to their website.

Ad Copy

This is a crucial step because the ad copy is going to be the first experience a potential customer has with your business.

It's important that we have proper ad copy in place that is relevant to what you are offering on the other end of your advertisement. We also want to make sure that the ads are relevant to the keywords that they are attached to.

Relevant ad copy is something that shouldn't be overlooked because the higher the relevancy is to people searching on Google, the higher your ad's quality score.

A higher quality score can help in the bidding process to lower your Cost Per Click, increase your ad rank, and increase overall campaign performance.

Negative Keyword List

There is nothing negative about negative keywords. In fact, compiling a list of negative keywords is a great thing!

Negative keywords increase campaign performance because they eliminate a lot of bad traffic and irrelevant clicks.

For instance, say that you run a business that sells luxury jewelry. The last thing you would want is for people clicking on your ads who search for "cheap jewelry".

The person who is searching for "cheap jewelry" isn't likely to buy luxury jewelry, and if they click on your advertisement you get charged for that irrelevant click.

The great thing about negative keywords is that if we add "cheap" as a negative keyword, your ad will never show for people who use the word "cheap" in their search.

This, in turn, saves you money on the campaign that can be used for more relevant clicks.

Ad Groups

Ad groups contain a collection of advertisements and keywords that are relevant to the overall goal of the campaign.

For instance, if your company offers a wide variety of services, each ad group should reflect that service. This offers much more in the way of scalability and control when wanting to expand your marketing around those specific services.

Keywords

A keyword is essentially a word or phrase that people search for in Google.

Keywords are the beating heart of each campaign. If the keywords don't match with the products/services you're advertising, it can cause problems.

We also focus on keywords and keyphrases that generate the type of conversion you want. By adding keywords and key phrases to your campaign such as “buy”, “for sale”, “near me”, etc., we can generate a conversion much more frequently.

Bidding Strategy

There are a few types of bidding strategies that you can use in an AdWords campaign. Depending on your business goals, some bidding strategies will be better suited for you than others.

For instance, if your business is trying to maximize the number of clicks to the website, a "Maximize Clicks" bidding strategy might be best. If your business is trying to capture conversions at a specific cost, then "Target CPA" bids might be best in that scenario.

It's also important to keep in mind that as your campaigns evolve, the bidding strategy used will likely evolve along with it.

In Summary...

If for any reason we have left one of your questions unanswered, you can always request another campaign walk through!

Question 8

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 9

Providing Solutions 8 with access to your Google My Business (GMB) account

Accepted Answer

Sign in here: https://www.google.com/business/
Choose the account you would like us to have access to
Choose "Users" on the left hand side
Select the "Invite new users" icon
Enter the email address you have been provided by your customer manager
Choose the role: "Manager"
Select "Invite"

Question 10

Is my website ready for PPC ads?

Accepted Answer

In order to satisfy Google, there are a few of their policies that we must abide by as advertisers in order to gain the full scope of the platform's capabilities.

Google's primary goal is to keep its users happy, and Google has a plethora of people wanting to advertise to Google's users. In other words, Google gets to pick and choose which ads they present to their audience.

The bad news is that we have to compete against those other ads. The good news is that Google doesn't discriminate as long as you follow their guidelines and rules.

Individual "Thank You" page For All Forms

Essentially, this means that after a user has completed a desired action on your website (e.g. a purchase has been completed, or someone filled out a form) a "Thank You" page needs to be displayed.

Mobile Responsive

This is a big one. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile phone? We're positive you have. Have you ever visited a site on your mobile phone, only to have the end result be some "zoomed-in" portion of the main website?

Pretty annoying, right?

Google actually pays attention to these kinds of things, and classifies these seemingly minor things as "user experience".

Basically, the better the user experience is on your website, the higher your quality score for your advertisements. This, in turn, leads to happier users and better ad ranking for your advertisements (which oftentimes means more sales).

Site Speed

This is another factor that Google looks at heavily. According to a study done by the website Hubspot, if your website makes you an average of $100,000 a day, a 1-second decrease in page load time can increase your sales by about $7,000.

It seems like such an insignificant detail, but in the hustle and bustle of today's environment, people want things and they want them now.

Moreover, if your site takes too long to load, you run the risk of people bouncing off of your site. That means that they click on your advertisement (you pay for that click) and then they leave the website before it fully loads, before you have a chance to sell them your offer, all because it took just a little too long for the site to load for them.

Again a minor detail, but it has huge consequences.

Privacy Policy

A privacy policy is a requirement that indicates to your website's visitors how their personal information will be stored in your system. Things like website cookies, email addresses, credit card information all fall under this category.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay a lawyer the big bucks to write you one of these. You just need to explain to the website visitor, in a transparent way, where their information is being stored (if at all) and what is being done with that information.

Have A Physical Address On Your Site

This is something that Google looks for to see that you are a legitimate business and not some scammer who's claiming they're in California but really on the other side of the planet.

The benefit of this is that it satisfies Google, but it also makes your website visitors feel more at ease when they are considering purchasing your products/services. It instills trust in your website visitors, and often times more trust equals higher conversions and more sales.

Your Phone Number On Your Site Should Be Coded Text

This is a bit of a more technical detail. Google is very smart, but sometimes it needs some help. Having a phone number on your website is another thing that you can do to instill more trust in your website visitors, and possibly boost conversions.

However, from a technical standpoint, Google can't recognize that phone number if it's in an image and not coded onto the page.

If you have a web developer, they should be very familiar with the difference.

Have An Email Address Listed On The Site

Just like having a phone number and physical location, Google wants you to have a way for website visitors to reach you by email.

Again, just like a phone number, this needs to be coded into the webpage and not an image so that Google can read it.

eCommerce Websites

These next two points are specifically for eCommerce websites that sell physical items.

Have A Published Return Policy

A return policy is standard practice for physical stores, and it should be no different for online stores.

Just like the privacy policy, you don't need a lawyer to create this for you (although, by all means, if you feel more comfortable having a lawyer write it for you, have a lawyer write one for you).

A return policy can be very simple. It just tells the user what to expect should they want to return their item or get a refund. Questions that could be answered include: How long do I have to return my item? What's your policy if my item arrives broken?

Have A Published Shipping Policy

People want to know how long it's going to take for their item to arrive from the moment that the order is placed.

It's always a good idea to set expectation ahead of time. So be sure to tell your website visitors in your Shipping Policy how long it takes to process an order, and what kind of shipping speeds your business offers.

That was a lot! Don't worry though...

These are all seemingly minor things, but the devil is in the details. Not only are you satisfying Google's guidelines by having these things in place, but you are also boosting trust with your website visitors.

Higher trust with your visitors means higher conversions, which means higher sales.