Question 1

Should I Listen to Advice from the Google Ads Rep?

Accepted Answer

If you have been on the phone with anyone from Google, chances are they've got a lot of improvement recommendations for you. In this video, Kasim explains when you should (and when you shouldn't) listen to them.

Question 2

How Crucial Is Your Website To Your PPC Campaign?

Accepted Answer

Your website is your online hub. It houses your products, services, and brand on the internet. It is absolutely critical that your website is optimized for user experience when considering PPC, in order to get maximum results.

What kinds of things might you consider when optimizing your website?

Quick Article Summary:

Page Speed
Mobile Optimization
Webpage Layout
Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA's)
Cleary Displayed Contact Information
Separate "Thank You" Pages For Form Submissions
Have Google Analytics Installed
Quality Content

Page Speed

Page speed is the biggest factor when it comes to optimizing your website. If there was 1 thing that you focused on as far as website optimization, it's page speed.

Basically what page speed is just as it sounds. It's how long it takes for your website to load when users click onto any of its pages.

Here's a cool tool called PageSpeed Insights by Google that you can use to test how long it takes for your website to load. It will also give you insights into what you can do to reduce the time it takes for your website's pages to load.

Mobile Optimization

Does your website show up nicely formatted when someone searches for it on a mobile phone or tablet? Or does it look like someone zoomed in to the page, with text flowing off the screen and not wrapping lower to fit the size of the screen?

If you fall into the second category, you might want to take a closer look as to what might be causing this.

In the modern age of instant gratification, if your website is not perfect (or as close as possible) people will leave your website without given it a second chance or a second thought. It's a big issue if your website is not mobile optimized, because you're still paying for those ad clicks.

Imagine the difference in your bottom line in these 2 scenarios:

Scenario 1 - Your website is not mobile optimized. A user on their phone sees your ad on Google and clicks. The website takes too long to load, but they're patient. Finally the page loads, and it displays some obtuse, zoomed in portion of the page. As soon as they see this they get frustrated and move on to a different website, costing you the price of the click and the missed opportunity to sell them on your amazing offer.
Scenario 2 - Your website is lightening fast and mobile optimized. A user on their phone clicks on your ad, the page loads instantly, and it's a nicely formatted version of your normal website. The user is amazed at the visual quality of your site and spend a few minutes searching through what you have to offer. They're loving it.

In which scenario do you think a potential customer is going to make a purchase?

You're exactly right! The great thing too is that most website platforms (especially if you're on WordPress) have preloaded mobile optimized themes.

Webpage Layout

Webpage layout follows the same theme as mobile optimization. Having your webpages (i.e. homepage, blog, sales pages, etc.) formatted for "ease of access" is key.

In other words, you want to make it easy for users to navigate your site. A few benchmark questions you can ask yourself are:

Are my pages too "busy", or are they clear and clean?
Are my pages relevant to what people are looking for?

Clear Call-To-Actions (CTA's)

A call-to-action is essentially a button or a link that tells people what they should do on your website. Here's some examples of CTA's:

A button that says "Buy Now".
A callout in your blog text that asks a user to do something.
Hyperlinked text that prompts a user to click through.

It's important that these things are clearly displayed on your website. One of the worst things that could happen is to have a bunch of people on your website not knowing what to do next. The website should help guide them through their customer journey, and CTA's one of the biggest ways to do that.

It's also important to note that you shouldn't overdo it with CTA's on any single webpage. You do not want to ask your users to do 100 things on one page. In fact, the standard recommendation is that you have less than 3 CTA's, and ideally just 1.

Cleary Displayed Contact Information

Sometimes users want to reach out to your business via email or telephone. They might have a sales or technical question, and it's important that they have a way of contacting you.

Having your contact information clearly displayed at the top and/or bottom of the page is common practice, and what most users are used to.

Google will also disapprove any ads that are running to websites without contact information displayed.

Separate "Thank You" Pages For Form Submissions

The benefits of configuring might not be obvious at first, but setting up separate "thank you" pages for form submissions can add a new dimension of data. Here's the reasoning.

If you were to have all your forms direct to 1 "thank you" page, you'll be able to track your conversions. No problem there. The issue is that you won't know which page those conversions were made on.

By setting up an individual "thank you" page for every form, you can track which forms are getting conversions and which are not.

Have Google Analytics Installed

Google Analytics is a free tool by Google that allows you to track your users as they use your website. This is absolutely critical to the success of your campaign.

Just like brick & mortar stores have associates and clerks that can physically see what actions customers take in the store, Google Analytics allows you to do this digitally on your website.

We also set up certain goals in Google Analytics that are counted as conversions to be imported into AdWords.

Lastly, PPC Campaigns can NOT run remarketing campaigns, unless they are tied to an active Google Analytics account.

Quality Content

This is a no-brainer. Quality content is what attracts and keeps users engaged. Without quality content, users will get frustrated with your brand for its lack of helpfulness and flee to your competitors. It might sound like an exaggeration, but would you really want to chance that?

In Summary...

That wraps up this article. Hopefully, you have a better understanding of why your website is important to PPC campaigns. It really all comes down to user experience.

If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!

Question 3

What Is Call Tracking Metrics (CTM) and Why Do I Need It?

Accepted Answer

Record, measure, and listen to the calls your advertising efforts generate in real-time!

All phone call data is seamlessly linked to your Google Analytics, making it easy to define your exact ROI from your Search and AdWords campaigns. Plus, with Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI), you can switch phone numbers on your site based on each AdWords Campaign.

Here's how it works:

A lead sees your advertisement online.
They see the "call extension" and call in through the ad.
Someone from your business answers the phone and engages the prospect in conversation.
CTM records the call that happens.
We get to hear the recording of the conversation and score how good of a lead that was based on the quality of the conversation (i.e. was the lead a tire-kicker, or seriously interested in your offering?).

Here's the most important piece.

After we listen to the conversation to access whether or not the lead was good or not, we go into your Google AdWords account and score the lead. This gives Google a lot of great data to work with.

If the lead was of poor quality, Google will limit the amount of times the ad gets shown to the same type of person.

If the lead was great, Google will show your ads to similar people who fit that leads profile.

End result?

You get more conversions for a better cost.

***Please note that we pay for your Call Tracking Membership when we manage your advertising campaigns. The only cost to you is the monthly cost per number (In the US it is usually $1.50/number) and the cost per minute, which is usually less than $0.05 per minute.

Here's a quick bullet list of CTM's features, and why we think it's worth the cost:

Track all your online and offline advertising campaigns
Dynamic Number Insertion will show phone numbers on your website based on the advertising channel that they came from
Listen to your calls in real-time
Immediately see information about the call (Ad, Keyword, Page Views, History)
Route calls to one or more receiving phone numbers
Geo-route calls to the office closest to the caller
Setup call queues and instantly route calls to the next available agent

Here is a screenshot of all the information you can receive about where exactly a call was coming from.

Question 4

Why Does It Take 90 Days To Prove Concept?

Accepted Answer

You're probably already aware that we are very transparent on how long it takes to see results from your PPC campaign.

Our goal is to provide you with realistic expectations, rather than selling you the moon. This is for the benefit of both agency and client to ensure both a highly effective and professional working relationship.

The 90 Day "Rule of Thumb"

All PPC campaigns that we run start broad, on purpose. We start by identifying every possible keyword, ad copy and landing page destination that is relevant to your goals.

We gather this data from performing a competitive analysis, research and traffic amount estimates by keyword. While we may not know what is going to be the perfect ad copy, keyword, landing page, etc., it's our job to make sure that we include and test each asset and work to optimize the assets that are producing the most amount of conversions for the lowest cost per conversion.

During the first 90 days, we will be gathering data in the form of results. Some Ad Groups and Keywords are going to generate conversions and some are not, this is why campaign optimization is so important.

How do we "Optimize" the campaign?

When you hear the term "optimization" that means that we are going to work towards generating more conversions for less cost per conversion. These results will be more frequent the more data that we collect.

We work off of a base 100-point data set when performing optimizations. What this means, is that when there are 100 points of data for an action, whether that be impressions, clicks, conversions, or simply the most appropriate data point for a particular campaign, we make a decision on what to do with that asset.

For example, if we see a group of keywords in an Ad Group that all have 100 impressions, we are going to look to see what has the highest Click Through Rate (CTR) and place more spend towards those higher-relevant keywords. Then, once each keyword generates 100 clicks, we are going to look to see which keyword resulted in the most amount of conversions, and place more spend in the keywords that have generated the most amount of conversions.

There are many more data points that are taken into consideration when talking about optimizations, but this will help you understand how optimizations work in the most basic form.

We also listen to every phone call that is generated from the campaign to ensure that when the phone rings, its a relevant person ready to talk to you on the other end. The results of these phone calls, directly affect the optimizations of your campaign, since we manually count those as conversions so we can identify which campaign is generating the most amount of relevant phone calls.

What You Can Expect In The First 90 Days

Within the first few days of the campaign launch, you will experience real results, however, it will not be the most optimized results. The conversions may be a bit more expensive in the beginning, or they may not be as frequent as you may like them to be, but rest assured, with each passing day, the campaign is going through changes to see those results increase. The first second month will be better than the first and the third month will be better than the second.

We will be reaching out to you very frequently and checking in on the quality of the conversions, plus giving you insight as to what optimizations have been made and what future optimizations we are planning to make in the near future.

Each month, you will receive a detailed report, extracted directly out of your AdWords campaign that we will review together. We review all data together so that you can offer your feedback regarding our strategies. There may be times where we rely on you as a subject matter expert and we truly value your input.

In Summary...

While there are very few campaigns that launch perfectly optimized, we do need time to assess where the conversions are coming from and make changes to the campaign to spend more ad spend in the Campaigns and Ad Groups that are performing well.

Our goal is to deliver to you a very high performing campaign within the first 90 days.

If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!

Question 5

"Is my website PPC compliant?" - 10 Things That Might Delay Campaigns

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.

If you would like to check your current site speed and get suggestions on how to boost the speed, check out PageSpeed Insights by Google.

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.

Find out if your website is PPC compliant with a an Action Plan.

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?"

They are! In fact, studies have shown that once someone becomes a customer they are far more likely to buy again when compared to someone who has never bought before.

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!