How hard is Advertising with Google?
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Danial Ahchow, Co-Founder of Service Central, has directly overseen over $1,000,000 in advertising spend with Google. This large expenditure attracted Google’s attention, and they provided Service Central with access to Google employees to learn the inside information as to how to best set up, manage and optimise your Google advertising.
Here, Danial shares his learnings on what you have to do to get a good Return on Investment when advertising with Google.
Google makes it sound easy, but it really is hard
Google make is sound simple, spend just $50 per day (or even start with one of their free vouchers) and you’ll get potential customers clicking through to your website.
There are a lot of professionals who spend all day sitting on the computer optimising their Google Adwords advertising. When Service Central was spending over $100,000 per month on Google Advertising we had a whole team dedicated to setting up, monitoring, updating and optimising our campaigns. There would be at least three full time, highly skilled employees working to get the best bang for the buck.
Anyone who believes that you can simply spend $50 per day with Google and sit back and relax is either (a) kidding themselves, or (b) wasting their money. The reality is that to ensure that you don’t waste your money with Google you need to be very active every day in monitoring your results and continually trying to improve those results. Moreover, you need to maintain your website to a very high standard as well as promptly returning responses to queries if they do come through.
Tip number 1: Keep track of the true cost of your Google advertising.
Your Conversion Rate means a lot more than your Clicks
How can one person pay $10 per click, and get better bang for the buck than someone paying $2 per click? Easy!
Its all about your Conversion Rate. A Conversion rate is how many clicks it takes to "convert" a visitor to your website into a real Customer". If you convert 1 in 10 clicks into a Customer then you have a 10% Conversion Rate. If you convert 1 in 20 clicks into a Customer, then your Conversion Rate will only be 5%.
The better that people "convert" from a click on your Google Ad to a real Customer, the better your business will do. For example, if Company A was paying $10 per click and converting 50% of the visitors to its website into real Customers then it has effectively bought a new Customer for $20. Whereas, if Company B pays just $2 per click but only converts 5% of its visitors into real Customers, then it has effectively bought a new Customer for $40.
Isn’t that interesting how you can pay 5 times less per click, yet Google ends up making twice as much from you per Customer! So the key to the game is not how much you pay per click, but how well you convert each click into a customer. To that, you need to have all of the factors working in your favour, including appearance, language and speed to name but a few.
Tip number 2: Pay close attention to your Conversion Rates (and your cost per Customer).
You are competing against the Professionals
Google employ mathematical geniuses and it takes mathematical geniuses on your side to help your business win with Google. This is why when Service Central was spending $100,000 per month on Google Adwords, we had our team of experts working full time on these Campaigns.
The first member of the team was our Copywriter. She knew that picking the right keywords to buy on Google, and matching those with the right wording in each of our ads, would make a big difference in the end result. Over a period of 12 months we built up a list of 90,000 keywords that we would Bid on. After Google recognised how much we were spending, they provided us with a Google Insider to optimise our account and he culled us down to the 30,000 right keywords to bid on. This help from the Google Insider helped us get a significant increase in our Return on Investment, that we in turn passed on to the members of Service Central.
These keywords were also brought together into small keyword groups that were targeting similar types of Customers. It was a constant process of bundling together, and splitting out keywords to find the best Keyword Groups.
The other part of the Copywriter's job was to write ads that best matched each keyword, or groups of keywords. You could never predict which ads would get the most clicks, or how well each ad would convert into a real Customer. To overcome this, our Copywriter would have to write a minimum of three different ads for each keyword, or keyword group, and then monitor the results every day/week to optimise the account towards the ads that were working best. Her role didn’t stop there. Google actually charges you more if the webpage that your ad links to isn’t extremely relevant to each keyword. So our Copywriter had to spend months on end writing up relevant information on thousands of articles and landing pages.
The second member of the team was our Graphic Designer. You would not believe how great of a difference in Conversion Rate (i.e. the % of people who click on your Google Ad that go on to become your real Customer) you could get by simply changing a colour here, or a word there. If you can increase your Conversion Rate from 10% to 15% then you have just scored 50% more Customers for the exact same spend. Now that type of increase in the number of Customers is worth writing home about. That said, you could never predict what would work and what would fail. Like the Copywriters ads, the Graphic Designer had to constantly experiment with different approaches and then apply the one’s that worked across the whole site. Service Central has over 2 million pages on our website, so as you can imagine that is a lot of work!
The third member of the team was a full time Programmer. The Graphic Designer would be able to make the site look good but it was the Programmer that would make the website run fast and work for every single type of potential Customer. Did you know that Service Central has experimented with over 50 different Get Quotes Forms before we found the one that worked the best? Most businesses simply stick with the Get Quotes form that their website designer gave them in the first place, this is a surefire way of wasting money!
The Programmer also played an invaluable role in optimising our website to dramatically increase the Conversion Rate. Did you know that the faster your website the higher your Conversion Rate will be? Did you know that your website needs to work for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome and every single version of those? Did you know that your website needs to perfectly fit the screen of desktop computers, laptops, iPads, Tablets, iPhones and Android Phones, or you will be losing valuable Customers? These are the types of problems that our Programmer(s) are solving each and every single day.
Very few business owners have the time, or expertise to dedicate their days to making their Google advertising work.
Tip number 3: You must either (a) learn how to do Google Adwords properly, or (b) work with people who truly understand Google Adwords, or (c) find an alternative that works better.
Its expensive!
$50 per day might sound cheap, but it quickly ads up. If you spent $50 each day for every day of the year (365 days) means that you end up spending $18,250 with Google for the year. At Service Central we have been surprised about the number of businesses that are spending in excess of $100,000 per year with Google.
The $100,000 a year spend is just $274 per day, so you can see how easy it is for businesses to fall for this expensive trap.
Beware of the bidding wars! Google turns every single keyword that you wish to advertise for into a live auction. To get your ads closer to the top you're encouraged to pay more per click. Whoever Google makes the most of will be prioritized into the most profitable positions for each keyword. These keyword auctions are happening 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, so you need to be constantly updating how much you are bidding per keyword to keep your spot. There are tools that your competitors can use to see approximately how much you are bidding on for each keyword, and how much traffic you are getting from each keyword, so if a competitor sees that you have a particular keyword that is working well for your business they will increase their bids on that keyword to win those Customers from you. This quickly escalates into a bidding war that is great for Google, but not very good for your business.
To make things worse, in order to keep on top of your Google Adwords advertising you need someone to dedicate a lot of time and effort to setting up, monitoring, updating and optimising your Google Advertising. Someone that is capable of competing against Professional Teams like the Service Central one outlined above. If this is done by the boss then its valuable time and energy that could be put into other parts of the business. If this is done by an employee or a contractor then it is costing real money over and above the Google Adwords expenditure.
As a way of comparison, for the same $100,000 spend, Service Central could guarantee that your business would win $5,000,000 worth of work via one of our Income Guarantee packages. This locks in your Return on Investment, and ensures that you don’t have to pay anything more until you have won work to the value of $5,000,000.
Tip number 4: Don’t assume that Google is the best value for money. Double check the cost of Google against alternatives.
There can be better ways to get work
Service Central gets more visitors to our website now, than when we were spending a big part of our monthly marketing budget with Google. You don’t need to be spending the majority of your marketing budget with Google to win work, in fact there are many smart ways to get new Customers without paying Google at all.
On top of that our focus on Quality Jobs has lead us to identify where the best jobs come from, and work with those sources to get the best jobs to our members. See more about our Quality Jobs Program here: /articles/quality-jobs-program/
How does Service Central achieve this?
Firstly you can achieve some amazing things when you have a talented team of dedicated staff that are constantly looking at how to get more done for less. Our team had some of the brightest minds in the country, and they didn’t feel that it was right to spend all of our efforts finding ways to give Google more money.
The hard work that they had put into building a quality website with millions of unique pages and thousands of unique articles started to generate what is known as Organic Visitors from Google. This is when the website appears in Google’s search results for free. These Organic Visitors from Google built up year on year, until the website started to get more traffic for free than we had ever received when we were paying.
On top of this, the hard work that the team had put into increasing our Conversion Rate meant that we were now converting a higher % of visitors into real Customers. As a result, the businesses registered with Service Central started to see the number of new Customers rising, all without having to pay more than they were before.
But wait there’s more!
Over the last 8 years Service Central has developed a strong relationship with over 100,000 Customers who have in turn posted over 300,000 jobs with us. The total value of these jobs now exceeds $1 Billion worth of real work for our Members.
These strong Customer Relationships have been built up over a number of years of constantly referring them to Quality Businesses. Service Central sets the highest Quality Standards for the Businesses looking to join our Network. This focus on Quality has provided Customers with the confidence to keep coming back to us.
Commercial Clients have also come to Service Central looking for Quality Businesses to undertake work for industries such as Insurance, Real Estate, Property Management, Construction and Facility Management. These Commercial Clients are particularly attracted to the fact that Service Central can not only provide a national network of pre-qualified tradespeople but also that our inhouse IT Team have built commercial works management systems for the capture, distribution, management and reporting on that work. These commercial systems have been used by Government, Insurance, Construction and Facility Management Companies. These IT systems are http://www.supplierxchange.com.au/ and http://eaco.me/
If you are a Quality Business, and would like to speak to someone about how to get Customers in a way that isn’t as difficult or as expensive as Google, then call us today on 1800 SERVICE (1800 737 842) or Register Your Interest here: http://www.servicecentral.com.au/for-business/
No doubt every business that is serious about marketing should consider having Service Central in their marketing mix.
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