Spent $50,000 on Google Ads - Here's What I learned
Hello Everyone, in today's video I'm going to talk about how I managed $50,000 in Google Ads for 1 client account and all the lessons I learned from this experience, keep in mind this particular example is for a service-based business but there are some good lessons that you can learn and apply in your own eCommerce business in the future or whatever type of business you have. If you are new to the channel please do hit the like button and subscribe, this will motivate me to make more content for you. So, let's get right into the video.
Lesson number 1 - You need a good-looking website: When customers are shopping around online, they will come across a few websites and your website will be one of them. First impressions do matter so you want to have a website that is going to visually stand out from your competitor's website. Ideally, you want your website to look much better than your competitor's website, think of it this way, if your customers are not regularly complimenting you on how nice your website looks, you may have a problem. Let's say your future customer is searching online for your service and they come across 3 websites, one of them just happens to look much better, in that specific scenario, you already sold that customer on learning more about your brand, your service and your offerings. A good looking website helps to sell the customer on spending more time on your website, after that, the job of your website is to persuade them to pick up the phone and call your business or to fill out the contact form so that they can become a lead for your business. So, with that in mind, make sure you have a good-looking website that you can be proud of so that you have the highest chance of converting website visitors into emails, leads and phone calls.
Lesson number 2 - Don't quit too early: Yes we all want to be successful fast and it can happen that’s for sure, but sometimes you might need a little bit more time. For this specific client, our Google Ads campaign didn't perform too well for the first few weeks, but we constantly monitored that data and made tweaks to the campaigns and landing pages and eventually, we were able to get a very high return on investment with Google Ads. If you are in a service-based business where you make thousands of dollars per client, Google Ads can work really well for you and it's definitely worth being patient with the process until you or your marketer find the right keywords and the right landing page style that's going to give you a very high conversion rate. Once you figure all these things out, you can essentially have a predictable system on how much revenue you can generate for your business and you will understand what you need to do to grow your business to the next level. So respect the process and be patient, don't give up to early.
Lesson Number 3 - Invest in good photography for your website: This one is incredibly important especially if you have a service-based business where your portfolio is a big selling tool for your business, this applies to businesses like photographers, makeup artists, wedding dress companies and the list goes on. Great photography can make your business stand out and help you get more out of your online marketing budget. Consider investing in a good camera and a great lighting kit and start taking your own photos, or simply hire a good photographer if you can. You can also check out websites like UNSPLASH.COM or various other stock photography websites for free images to use on your website. I will make a video in the future that shows you all the best stock photography websites.
Lesson Number 4 - Master the art of sales: This one is incredibly important because you can have the best website in the world, you can have the largest marketing budget out of all your competitors but if your sales team or you don't know how to properly interact with customers, you are going to waste a lot of money. Having a good sales team ensures that you get more value out of your marketing budget and also helps your marketer be more successful while working for your business. I've had clients in the past where I brought them tons of leads and they had horrible conversion rates simply because they didn't put in the required energy to close those deals or they simply didn't know how to properly sell their services or products. In your own organization, you wanna make sure that you put the right people in sales positions and you give them the right tools and resources to grow within their role, you don't want to put an introverted person and have them talk to clients all day, understand that people have different abilities and everyone has their own role inside your business, so plan accordingly. If you want to get better at sales or you want your salespeople to get better, you can look up Grant Cardone and buy his sales training program. I'm not affiliated with them, I just admire their work.
Lesson Number 5 - Follow up with clients: As a salesperson, regardless if you are a one-person operation or you have a team, you have to understand that a certain percentage of customers are ready to buy right now and a certain percentage are ready to buy in 1-2 months and a certain percentage are ready to buy in 1-2 years. You want to have a follow-up process for people in all of those categories. A good portion of your business deals will get closed within 1-2 weeks, however, you'll find that some of your clients might need 10-15 follow up emails, calls or text msgs before you get them on the phone and then you proceed to close them, this is normal, I've had so many examples where I politely followed up and ended up closing a deal with that client. Think of it this way, either you are going to close that customer or your competitor is, someone is gonna get their money, it might as well be you. Remember I said politely follow up, you don't want to be annoying, so be very careful on the language you use with your customers when you follow up, don't ever be aggressive or needy when you communicate with them, I might go in-depth on a future video on how to do this but for now, you just need to figure this one out on your own. Don't be shy to follow up, its normal and you just have to understand that your customers have very busy lives so just follow up, politely though. I highly recommend you to use some form of email follow-up sequences, text msg follow-ups and social media follow-ups just so you stay in your customer's mind until they are ready to have a conversation with you. I'll get into more details about this in a future video.
Lesson Number 6 - Invest effort into your social media: When it comes to social media, there are many uses for social media. For starters its another way to advertise to get clients, in my own personal experience I've found that Google Ads works really well for some businesses, while for some businesses, social media ads work much better, so you have to test and find out which platform is the right for your specific business. Regardless of how you advertise, you still need to use social media. If for whatever reason you or your marketer wasn't able to find a way to profitably advertise on social media sites to get customers, it does not mean you completely abandon social media altogether. It simply means you have to use it differently. So let's say you get all your clients from Google ads and SEO. You still want to use social media and post content regularly and interact with your audience in a creative manner because having a social media presence looks good in the eyes of a customer. Think of it this way, you come across two businesses selling the same exact service. Both of them have good-looking websites, great portfolio, but one of them doesn't have any posts or followers on social media while the other one has a decent amount of followers and lots of regular posts. Chances are you are going to feel more safe doing business with a company that has an active social media presence. It just helps them look like a safer option. Even though you don't directly make money from your social media efforts, it does have an indirect impact on your businesses revenue.
Lesson Number 7 - Get lots of reviews for your business: This is another small detail that was able to help my client increase their closing rates, having lots and lots of reviews helps customers know that their money is safe in your hands. Think of this situation from a customer's perspective, which business would you buy from, the one with 100 reviews or the one with 5 reviews. The one with 100 reviews will seem like a safer option. Having lots of reviews will help you close more deals but obviously if you are just getting started, work with what you got, everyone starts off from zero reviews, so don't be discouraged if you are not there just yet. But make it a goal to reach this level at some point in the future.
Lesson Number 8 - Have lots of content on your website: On our client website, we noticed that having lots of content actually helped minimize the time spent going back and forth during the sales process simply because the website did a good chunk of the selling for our client's business, so with that in mind, put in some effort to come up with useful and informative content on your website that will help your future customers get educated about your products and services.
Lesson Number 9 - Have pictures of you on your website or a video on your website: This minor detail is incredibly important especially for a service-based business that involves a lot of communication during the sales process. Initially, before you customer even reaches out to you and your business, you want them to get to know you a little bit. People like to know more about the people behind the business and they want to know who they are going to be doing business with. Consider having a video introduction on your website and having lots of informative videos about your product or service with you explaining it in detail. Having yourself in the video will help your business stand out from all the other companies because chances are your competitors are not going to be putting in this level of effort on their own website. You want to do everything possible in your business to stand out from your competitors. The more effort you put into your business, the more money you will make, just make sure it’s the right kind of effort. Visit my own personal website nordello.com and you'll see lots of examples of videos and this will give you a visual idea of how it helps bring your website to life.
Lesson Number 10 - Split test lots of Ad copy for your Google Search Ads: Now this topic is more specifically on the ad campaign side of your business and it’s a pretty important one. You or your marketer need to allocate a good amount of time to ad copywriting because having a high click percentage on your ads will help you get a higher quality score in your Google ad campaign. Having a higher quality score will help you pay less for your ads and will help your ads show more often than your competitor's ads. So make sure you take this advice very seriously because it can make a huge difference in the profitability of your ad campaigns.
Lesson Number 11 - Avoid broad-match keywords: You should never use broad-match keywords when you do Google ads because you will always get irrelevant traffic to your website and you will burn through your marketing budget faster than ever. The only time you should use broad match is for keyword research purposes only and make sure you set a very low daily budget for this. The right keyword match types to use are phrase match and exact match and broad match modifier if it still exists by the time you are watching this video.
Lesson Number 12 - Use a questionnaire style contact form to qualify leads: This is another great tip and my client actually gave me this idea, me personally I didn't think of it before, but it actually ended up working really well for their specific business. So the way it works is, let's say you have a service based business. On your contact page or landing page, wherever your customer goes to fill out the contact form, you want to extract as much info as possible so that when you receive their email, you have more details on what this client is looking for so that you can respond to their email better and it saves you from having to exchange multiple emails to get the same information. You want it right then and there. For example on my website if you go to my web design portfolio page, it asks customers how many pages they want on their website, how many products, their budget, their city, their industry, pretty much everything I need to be able to give them a quote when I see their email.
Lesson Number 13 - Invest time working on your blog: Now I know this one sounds super boring, but it has a lot of side benefits that you need to be aware of, first of all blogging helps your website rank higher on Google, which in return can help you get more customers online. Here is a great tip you can use when you blog on your website, after you write your blog post and upload it to your website, make a video about the blog post you just made, think of it as your video script, you can buy a teleprompter and use it to make your blog post content into video content, you just accomplished two tasks with a single effort. Having your content uploaded to YouTube can help you get additional organic traffic to your website and just by having lots of high quality educational videos about your products and service can help you increase the conversion rate on your website. This is another indirect benefit that will help you get more value out of your Google advertising efforts. In my own business I use this strategy as well, every blog post I turn them into video content for my YouTube channel.
Lesson Number 14 - Add strategic complimentary products or services: This is another great lesson I learned from one of my clients, as they started generating more revenue from Google ads, they started coming up with additional products and services to add and promote in their business so that they can sell more products and services to the same customer and make more money per transaction. Even though they are selling to the same number of customers, they are now in a position to increase their average order value simply because they sell more to the same customer. Think of how you can use this tactic in your own business, what additional products or services can you add to your business that will help you make more money per customer. This is something you will have to sit down and think about on your own but this one decision can help you make 10's of thousands per year in additional revenue.
Lesson Number 15 - Ask your customers for feedback on how to improve your website: Sometimes I will get permission from clients to reach out to their customers and ask them for feedback on what they think would be helpful on the website. Basically you want to take this opportunity to talk to your customers and ask them what could have helped them have a better experience on your website. Some clients might not have any feedback and that’s fine but you might come across some clients that might give you some tips that you may never have thought about, and simply implementing those tips could end-up making you more money in your business, so its well worth trying.
That's pretty much it for today - please do hit the like button and subscribe to our YouTube channel, this will motivate me to post more content to help you more with your business. If you have any suggestions on future video ideas please do mention it in the comment section below, depending on where you see this video from and I will add it to my list of videos to create. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.