Why The Heck Do I Need to Pay for Google Ads Management?
The fact that you can create a Google Ads account and have ads running in about a half hour makes this a very valid question, why you should consider paying for an Ads Management company to manage your ads?
The answer is simple:
A skilled and responsible company will add more value to your ads account than what it costs to engage them!
While the AI that Google uses in their ads platform is quite impressive, us humans can still add a ton of value and drive way better results than if you rely on the algorithm alone.
In short, skilled ads practitioners with experience within your industry have an established set of best practices that will support Google’s AI-driven efforts by:
- Saving you from spending money for low quality clicks (that can easily eat up half your budget or more).
- Winning you more customers per dollar spent.
Of course, not all ad managers are created equal, so you should definitely make sure you’re working with a company that’s great at what they do. Some ways to ensure this include:
- Asking about specific examples where they’ve succeeded in your industry.
- Asking to see a sample monthly report which should clearly identify how many new customers or leads you got from the ads, which campaigns and ad groups they came from, and the cost per new customer or lead. If their reports do not include this information then run away, fast!
- A note: cost per click is a near-meaningless metric – what you really need to focus on is cost per acquisition.
- Making sure you’re not getting locked into a long term contract. Google ads are great, but they don’t work for everyone and you don’t want to be locked in and paying for something that isn’t making you money.
For those of you that really want to dig into what an ads management company actually does, here’s a much more detailed version of how companies like ours earn their management fees…
Initial Setup
Here’s what we do before setting anything up:
- Identify what goals or actions a client wants to achieve with their ads
- Set up tracking on the client’s website so each time these goals happen we can track them back to the marketing source or ad that sent the visitor. This is so we can understand if the ads are working.
- Research to uncover the best keyword searches to bid on that are most likely to result in new clients and purchases. This is so we can make the most of the ads budget.
After that we:
- Review the client website to identify potential opportunities to make the site better at converting visitors to leads and customers. This is so we can fix anything and get the most out of the ads (and any other traffic)
- Strategize on ad group (or “topic) organization – this allow us to optimize and measure each different topic separately
- Override Google’s default keyword matching settings to achieve higher value visits.
- Turn off Google’s recommendation to extend your ads onto the Display network.
- Set up a custom bid strategy that will work the best for a new account.
- Write compelling ads to match each of the ad group topics, which helps boost clickthrough rates which in turn reduces the cost per click, saving clients money.
- Set up ads extensions strategically to flesh the ads out further and help make them more prominent.
- Carefully set the geographic target to make sure that the most valuable areas are fully covered with the clients budget rather. Usually this means prioritizing the market that’s closest to the business as that’s the area that usually converts best
Ongoing Monthly Work
Things that we do on a monthly basis to get even better performance include.
- Search Term Report – despite our best efforts, Google takes great liberty with putting your ads in front of inappropriate keywords that will never work for you – we have tools when those pop up to make sure you never pay for those words again. It’s not uncommon to see accounts spending half their budgets on these keywords.
- Search Impression Share monitoring and geographic targeting adjustment.
- Demographics monitoring and adjustment so you can get more traffic from your best potential clients.
- Bid strategy adjustment. At several intervals, as we get more data we can change your bid strategy in a manner that will drive better results and dramatically accelerate how long it will take Google’s AI to kick in.
- Tweaking of your Brand advertising strategy. This is basically how you handle things when your ads are showing up or searches that include your company name. In some cases it makes sense and in other cases it doesn’t and we manage it accordingly so you’re showing up when you need to and aren’t wasting money when it’s not needed.
- Testing of new ad copy.
- Adjustment of ad groups/topics in order to boost ad relevance and decrease your click costs.
- Addition of new campaigns as needed.
- Getting your feedback on things like the quality of your inquiries, sales, and leads so that we can adjust your ad topics and keywords accordingly.
- Monthly report highlighting what we focused on and sharing exactly how many leads, inquiries or sales were attributable to your ads.