Google Ads is a valuable tool when trying to attract prospects to your website, but there are a couple of traps for the beginner.
Clicks are getting bloody expensive
I must admit the trend of steadily increasing clicks costs hasn’t changed since the Google Adwords now Google Ads campaigns I built in the early naughties. Click prices keep on climbing as the market competition heats up across sectors.
I find it interesting/challenging finding strategies of getting outcomes rather than simply asking for bigger media spends to fund outrageous bids and budgets.
Lead generation engine
Today, I’m revealing a ‘lead generation engine’ that I evolved and have used for a few years now. I’m revealing it here to illustrate how various Google Ads capabilities can be used in a collaborative fashion to provide a cost-effective lead generation model or ‘engine’.
Initial traffic source
We need some base traffic to get this engine started.
Depending on your website’s ability to attract Google searches, organic traffic might be all you need. If not then use a Search or Display campaign to attract punters.
The important thing about this starting traffic is that they need to be genuine prospects – ie they really do want to buy from this website.
Landing page
In an ideal world, there would be a purpose-built landing page inside your site. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of hype about landing pages, but here’s a simple breakdown of what I think should be in yours:
Sufficient information for an inbound prospect to make a purchase decision. This doesn’t have to be a long-winded sales pitch or product info, but concise and complete answers to the questions a prospect might have before committing to a purchase or contacting you.
With respect to our American friends who prefer long-form landing pages brimming with repetitive sales pitches and tiresome faked testimonials I just don’t think they work for an antipodean audience.
A Call to Action is absolutely essential but can be as simple as ‘Click here to register’ or similar.
Conversion tracking scripts are mandatory elements in the landing page. Google Analytics and/or Google Ads ReMarketing scripts in what ever form suits you.
I prefer Google Tag Manager to contain the scripts and drive Analytics. While this might seem initially like a lot more work, they present more opportunities to capture conversion data. Analytics cant capture click to calls, PDF downloads and form submits out of the box, (maybe GA4 does ?).
So that’s about all we need in the website to get this animal cranking, so lets examine the Google Ads campaigns.
Google Ads Campaigns
Now we need to create the campaigns so I’m not going to teach you how to suck eggs because I’m sure you already know how to build them:
Display
Targeting on-topic websites/industries/mobile apps (if you must)
Display Remarketing
After creating a remarketing audience use it to drive the targeting for this/these campaigns.
Display Similar audience
After the matching similar audiences have been spawned by Google Ads, then build this campaign targeting them.
An online marketer with deep experience in Sales & Marketing as well as technical skills accumulated over the many years of working in this industry. He has been knee-deep in websites and online marketing since the mid 80’s.
Peter is a lateral thinker who sees solutions where many don’t.
Website Concierge is a reincarnate of Succinct Ideas, providing quality website support and online marketing for small businesses.
If you found something in my site useful, I’d really appreciate if you could link to the page and maybe Google will help other people who need the same info find the page as well 😉
