A little bit about Google Ads
As we all know by now, Google Ads campaigns are designed to drive traffic to your website and generate quality leads, and probably one of the greatest benefits is that majority of the time you only pay when someone clicks on your ad (for certain ad types you can pay per impression if the main goal is to get as many people to see your ad rather than click on it). Of course, this is why it’s called ‘PPC’, as you only have to ‘pay-per-click’.
Google Ads campaigns come in various forms - you can have Display, YouTube, App, Shopping campaigns, Search, Discovery and Performance Max campaigns. All of these different variations of Google Ads are extremely reliant on one particular thing - your website. PPC is a great way to get ahead of your competition fast and generate the much-needed leads/sales for your business - however, just an appealing advert won’t give you that.
Engaging your audience
By creating engaging advert copy and targeting relevant keywords for your business, you will get the clicks to your website. However, in this instance, it’s the website that will be your salesperson - your website will be responsible for getting that phone to ring and for that lead to generate or for someone to make a purchase.
Once your PPC campaigns are all set up and live, your Google Ads account will have a Quality Score. This is Google’s way of measuring the quality and relevance of your ads - this, again, is based on the relevancy of your landing pages, keywords and search query. The higher your Quality Score, the lower your cost-per-click will be.
Your landing pages
It is very important that your landing page is as relevant as possible to the service that you are looking to target. Let’s take a garage door company as an example:
You offer 10 different types of garage doors and want to incorporate all of them in a PPC campaign. However, you only have one generic page on your website for garage doors. Before considering going ahead with Google Ads, you need to think about updating your website and have 10 different sub-categories for each type of garage door - this will make the user experience much more relevant and, of course, you will have relevant landing pages for each search query.
What your audience is expecting
We live in an instantaneous world where we no longer have the patience to read through lots of different sources to find the information that we need. We want to type 2 or 3 words into Google and when we click on a website we want to see exactly what we are looking for, without having to scroll through all sorts of different paragraphs that are not relevant to what we need. As such, keep your information relevant to your target audience so it answers the questions they are asking.
You also want to give your audience the trust signals that we are all looking for when we want to consider making a purchase or an investment - reviews and testimonials. I would probably like to say this is a vital part of your website because regardless of how big or small the service or product you are offering might be, your audience wants to know how others feel about it. We don’t even buy toaster nowadays without reading the reviews.
What devices does your audience use?
Once you have updated your website and have relevant landing pages for each one of your services, you will need to ensure you are competitive and offer your potential clients unique selling points. This is because before having a conversation with you, they will have a conversation with your website and that will make for half of the sale. It is, of course, important to bear in mind that the majority of people will use a mobile phone to carry out a search query - 60% of online searches are made via a smartphone - so make sure your website is mobile friendly! (https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mobile-tablet)
Summary
A user-friendly and well-thought-out website will help boost your conversion rate. So, although Google Ads is considered the fast track option to generate leads, your website will always be your main gear changer.
