Google Ads is the search platform powered by Google that allows businesses, like those in the shed industry, to advertise your products and services to people who are actively searching on Google and other Google properties for the products and services that you offer.
Google Ads has a “low barrier” to entry. You can get started with as little as $20 a day, for example. Also, it requires less time commitment.
“If you’re familiar with SEO (search engine optimization), that does take time,” points out Nicole McCullum, founder of CaptivateDesigns.com, an entrepreneur, speaker, and digital marketing strategist.
“With Google ads, especially now where a lot of it is automated, you don’t really need to spend a lot of time managing it as you would normally. You only pay when someone clicks on your ads. That means that you can show up in Google searches and get impressions and create brand awareness without someone even clicking on your ad.
“You also can make changes in real time. So, if your ad’s not working, you can pause it. You can make changes, and you can then relaunch it.”
Over 8.5 billion searches are conducted every day on Google, that includes customers looking for sheds and related services.
“Businesses earn an average of $3 in revenue for $1.60 spent on Google Ads,” McCullum shares. “This is just an average. If you have a high-ticket product or service, you’re typically going to see a higher return on this.”
Finally, around 65 percent of online purchasers click on Google Ads when they’re looking to buy something, meaning that the service is a viable option for companies in the shed industry to attract customers.
During the webinar “The Google Ads Playbook: How to Advertise Your Business On Google,” presented by SCORE, an organization that helps mentor and educate small businesses, McCullum discussed how to create an effective Google Ads search campaign.
Google Ads Search
McCullum says a Google Ads search campaign focuses on those people who go to google.com and Google search partners to conduct specific searches.
“Google is one of the largest online marketplaces, so it allows you to reach people who are actively searching for your products and services at a time when they need it,” McCullum points out. “You don’t have to convince these people that they need your products or services because they’re already searching for them.”
How does paid search work? A consumer goes to Google and types in a search query for known keywords, like “sheds for sale” or “shed delivery.”
“Then your ads are triggered, an auction goes on, and one to four ads are displayed at the top,” says McCullum. “Then the searcher is going to determine which ad is most appealing to them and then click on that ad.”
Once the ad is clicked, the consumer is taken to the website or landing page that you created when you set up your ad.
“You have to designate a specific page on your website that you want your ads to go to,” McCullum says. “I like to point this out because I like to think of Google as a relay. For example, if your ad is not showing up, it could be that you’re not bidding on the right keywords or you’re not bidding high enough, or maybe you’re using too, stringent of a match type.
“If your ads are showing up and you are getting traffic to your site but you’re not getting leads or sales, then it could be that you have a problem with the page that you’re sending people to, or your message is not really resonating with people. The great thing about this is that you can troubleshoot where you’re losing people and readjust your strategy.”
What’s the difference between SEO and pay-per-click? With SEO, you don’t pay when someone clicks on the SEO results. For a paid search, you do pay when someone clicks on your ad.
“SEO more of a long-term strategy,” points out McCullum. “It takes about three to six months for you to see results with SEO, whereas with Google Ads pay-per-click, you can see results right away. With SEO, the results are algorithm-based, so, you’re at the mercy of the algorithm. With pay-per-click on Google Ads, your ads are going to stop showing once you hit your daily budget.
“That’s why I typically recommend you start off with pay-per-click if you need to start seeing traffic right away, but then you also want to make SEO part of your strategy, because let’s say, for example, you have a keyword that gets a thousand searches a month, but that keyword, you’re paying $10 a click. That means that even if your budget is $100 a day, you’re only able to get 10 clicks. But if you’re ranking on the SEO side, you might be able to get more clicks because you’re not paying every time someone clicks on your search result. There are pros and cons to both of them.
“Usually when clients come to me and they really want to get their phone ringing, they want to get traffic to the website, creating leads and sales right away, Google Ads can be great for that because it produces results a lot faster than SEO.”
Successful Search Campaign Strategy
Before you get started with Google Ads, you need to research and understand your target audience, says McCullum.
“You need to understand their goals and desires,” she says, “what it is they’re trying to accomplish, and what they want from you. You need to understand their demographics like age, gender, location, interest, and online behavior. If you understand this information, it will help you to target your audience more effectively. It also helps you to tailor your ads for maximum relevance.
“You want to create a customer persona profile, which is a detailed profile of your ideal customer that you’re trying to reach, so when you’re creating ads, you will be able to reach them more effectively.”
You also want to establish clear goals. In Google Ads, you get to choose your objective, such as generate sales or leads or brand awareness.
“You don’t have to choose an objective,” shares McCullum. “If you’re not clear, you can just create the campaign without the goals guidance.”
It’s also important to set measurable KPIs (key performance indicators).
“They are the most important metrics that you’re going to use to measure the success of your ad campaigns,” says McCullum. “Think about what is the number one thing that you want to achieve with your ad.”
“Most campaigns will focus on leads or sales, so we might measure what percentage of users are actually seeing our ad and clicking on it because that’s going to get us more traffic. We also want to measure the conversion rate. What percentage of users come to our site and convert into a lead or sale? That will also let us know how well our ads, campaigns, and keywords are performing.
“You also want to pay attention to things like the cost per acquisition. How much is it costing you to acquire a lead or sale? Let’s say you sell a $100 product, and it’s costing you $40 to get that person to convert or to buy something, when you put in your overhead costs and your cost of goods sold, it may not be profitable.”
A key to making a Google Ads search campaign work is setting a bidding strategy.
“Your bidding strategy is basically how you’re going to pay in Google,” says McCullum. “With manual bidding, you set the bids for yourself, and you can choose a maximum bid. This is best. If you’re an experienced advertiser and you have the knowledge and expertise, you can choose manual bidding.
“You also have automated bidding, where Google sets the bid. There are several automated bidding strategies that you can choose from.”
The heart of a Google Ads search campaign is keywords, she points out.
“When it comes to building your keyword strategy, you can perform in-depth keyword research using the Google Keyword Planner tool,” shares McCullum. “This is a free tool within the Google Ads platform that allows you to be able to see what people are searching as it relates to your products or services.”
There are three tools within the Google Keyword Planner tool: discover new keywords, get search volume and forecasts, and organize keywords into ad groups.
“In ‘discover new keywords,’ you can enter up to 10 words that describe your business and then it’s going to give you ideas based upon those as to what people are searching for,” explains McCullum.
“The ‘get search volume and forecasts’ is if you already have a list of keywords and you want to see, on average, how many times people are searching for those keywords per month. Also, if you have conversion data in your account, you can forecast or predict, for example, if I spend XYZ based on my historical data, this is how many results I can see.
“Finally, with ‘organize keywords into groups,’ the idea is that it helps you to group related keywords together, which is really important.”
She says that one area where she sees many people make mistakes in Google Ads is keyword match types.
“Keyword match types are basically controls that Google utilizes to determine whether your ad should be shown or not,” says McCullum. “The first match type is broad match, which may show on searches that are related to your keyword but don’t contain the direct meaning of your keyword. This helps you to attract more visits to your website, but it can also cause you to spend a lot of money and pay for irrelevant clicks as well.
“Phrase match is going to give you tighter matches. Basically, your ads are going to show on keywords that include the meaning of your keyword and also the words within that keyword, but it might have some additional words.
“And then you have exact match, which is stricter. The problem with exact matches is you can pay a little bit more, but because it’s exact, you may not have as much search volume on it, but it’s going to give you the most relevant searches.”
Now, it’s time to set your Google Ads budget. There are several strategies when deciding how much money to spend on your search campaign.
“You could think of how much you can afford to spend a month and then you would divide that by 30.4 to set a daily budget,” offers McCullum. “You can also estimate the required number of clicks that you want. Let’s say you wanted to get 100 conversions, and you have a conversion rate of 2 percent. Then you’ll need about 5,000 clicks to get to 100 conversions. Or you can calculate this based on how much you’re willing to pay per click based on how much your monthly budget is.
“Typically, when you’re doing Google Ads, I wouldn’t recommend less than $600 a month to spend on it for you to really see results. $1000 a month is even better.”
Creating Ads That Get Clicks
Of course, all of this behind-the-scenes planning and strategizing in Google Ads won’t matter if shed customers aren’t clicking on your ads. This can be easier said than done, so McCullum offers several tips for creating clickable ads.
“One is that Google uses something called responsive search ads where you provide Google with 15 headlines, maximum, four descriptions and then Google creates over 43,680 variations of your ad. They do something called multivariate testing where they create multiple combinations to see what is going to get the highest click-through rate,” she shares.
“I strongly recommend you do all 15 headlines and four descriptions to create those combinations because that’s going to help you to get the highest click-through rate.”
When creating headlines, it’s important to include the keyword that you’re targeting in the ad.
“You want to make sure you include a strong call to action,” McCullum points out. “What do you want people to do? You also want to highlight the features and benefits of your products and services. What are some features or benefits that your audience is going to be appealing to your audience, which goes back to the importance of creating that customer persona profile.”
You also want to make sure that you match your ad copy to the landing page. Whatever you’re saying in your ad, you want to make sure that that is repeated on the page that you’re driving your traffic to.
“I can’t stress that enough,” says McCullum, “because that goes something called quality score that Google looks at in order to determine the quality of your ads.”
Another idea is to make an offer, such as a free 3D shed builder demo or consultation.
“Then, test your ad copy,” McCullum recommends. “You have the ability to create up to three ads. Make sure that you utilize those ads and test them out and see which ones are performing.”
Conversion tracking helps you to see which keywords are actually driving leads and sales for you. This helps you to focus on those keywords specifically.
“If you were targeting five different keywords, you might see that there might be one specific keyword that is actually driving leads and sales,” says McCullum. “Then you don’t need to waste money on the keywords that are not performing.
“Conversion tracking allows you to measure the success of your campaigns. It also allows you to unlock smart bidding where Google can optimize your account for conversions. It also allows you to calculate your return on investment or your return on ad spend as well.”
Finally, McCullum stresses the importance of testing, analyzing, and optimizing ad campaigns.
“This is where I see businesses make a mistake,” she says. “You run an ad campaign, and you think it’s not working for me. Then you stop. If you’re going to do Google Ads, you should set aside at least three months for you to give it time to work.
“When you’re actually running the ad campaigns, you’re going to get a lot of learnings like when you look at your data, you’ll see what’s working and what’s not working and then you can pivot and make changes—to tweak that to get it to the optimal working point.”
