Stop Wasting Money On Google Ads | Podcast #148

Key Takeaways

while sup ninjas and in jets welcome to another episode of the exposure ninja digital marketing podcast my name's Tim Cameron Kitsch and I'm head ninja at exposure ninja which is an awesome digital marketing agency helping smaller medium-sized businesses get more leads and sales through your website and that is exactly what this podcast is about helping you to get more leads and sales through your website now we actually run a Google Ads help service if you're stuck with this you're running your own campaign or someone else who's running your ad campaign you just not sure if it's as profitable as it should be what you can do is you can reach out to us at exposure ninja just go through the free website and marketing review at exposure ninja calm and we'll take a free look at your pay-per-click ad account and we'll have a look and see what sort of improvements can be made we'll give you all these recommendations free of charge and then of course if you want us to implement them and run your campaign of course we'll be happy to discuss that but don't waste money on Google Ads Google has enough cash I hope you find this podcast episode useful and by the way just so you know you can watch all these podcast episodes on YouTube if you just go to youtube and search for exposure ninja see you soon [Music] alright alright so we all know that Google ads is expensive if you tried it you know it I know it everyone at exposure ninja knows it we do it for ourselves we do it for clients all the time but before we do that from what I've seen the majority of businesses that are advertising on Google ads are being nowhere near as effective with their budget as they could be and many of them are just opening the trunk and dumping the cash into the Google landfill and it's got to stop is absolutely got to stop so if you're running Google ads and the numbers just don't quite seem to be adding up and you're thinking we're just doing this wrong or is something seriously out there or if you're considering running Google ads and you're a bit cautious about getting involved let me give you some golden rules for when not to waste any budget at all inside Google Ads sign number one that you should spend no money on Google Ads is when the numbers just don't make sense now one quick caveat on when the numbers don't make sense if you're an e-commerce business you might be selling cheaper products using Google Shopping Ads rather than text search as usually makes much more financial sense because the clicks are lower priced and generally the traffic is much better quality because it can see the price it can see the product it can see the store before it clicks on you so that traffic is usually better quality usually has a higher conversion rate so it can make a lot more sense so let me show you on the old iPad just to further my case for making this thing tax-deductible okay so when don't the numbers make sense to run Google ads here's the calculation that you want to do you need to know a few things firstly you need to know your average cost per click the basic economics you just can't make sense of Google Ads no matter what way you slice it you're never gonna make it work it's never gonna make any money so here a couple of really important calculations that you need to do before you do any Google Ads to make sure that it's even financially possible for you to come out on top ok so we need to know a few numbers first thing that we're going to need to know is you cost-per-click or your CPC now you should get these fairly easy from google ads so we're gonna use some example numbers here so they kind of make a bit more sense so let's say that your average cost-per-click in your market is two pounds for some people that's going to be more for some people that's going to be less we're just gonna use an example number the next thing that we need to know is your website's conversion rate so this is the percentage of people that come to your website that turn into a lead or sale now what you've got a bear in mind is that traffic from Google Ads might be slightly higher quality than you're getting from other sources or it might be slightly lower quality it really depends so your conversion rate isn't always the same for each different traffic source but just to do some basic math we're going to assume that your conversion rate is the kind of industry standard slightly depressing one percent so what we can do from this is we can deduce how much it's going to cost you to get a lead or sale through your website so in this case it's going to be we need 100 visitors to get each lead or sale and we're going to be paying two pounds per click so we've got 100 times two pounds equals 200 pound CPA cost per acquisition or cost per lead whatever the thing is that you're having people do on your website so if that makes financial sense for you then good do Google Ads now obviously you can change these numbers if you make your conversion rate five percent instead that reduces your cost per lead or cost per cell to forty pounds which makes a massive difference but just using these numbers let's say that that makes sense for you thank great run Google Ads if it doesn't make sense for you then you've got a kind of reverse engineer what your conversion rate would need to be in order for it to make sense so let me give you another example this is the business they've got in contact with us asking for help with Google Ads so their product was 10 pounds and on that the profit was about 8 pounds so a pounds profit so when we looked at the cost of advertising in this space the cost per click was about one pound 15 so one pound 50 cost per click now the website at this point was converting very very low less than 2% in fact they weren't actually able to track the conversion rate but the clicks that they could see were less than 2% so that means they need 50 visitors per sale right so how much is it costing them to get each sale it's costing them 50 times 150 which is 75 pounds 75 pounds doesn't make sense does it 8 pound profit costing them 75 pounds to get it the only world where that makes sense is one where there's a back end they're buying the 10 pound thing because they're about to be sold a 500 pound course or something like that other than that it doesn't make sense so for a business like this Google Ads you've really got to play with your numbers in order for this to work so you'd have to have a conversion rate of like 50 percent for this to be worthwhile doing at all and for most businesses if it's an e-commerce purchase through the site you're not going to get a conversion rate at 50 percent so you've got to be conscious of your numbers and make sure that they actually make sense otherwise there's no point reason number two not to spend any money on Google Ads is when your website sucks okay I tried to find a nice way of saying it but honestly well if your website sucks compared to your competitors you know you go onto Google and you type in the thing that you sell and you see all of these other businesses advertising on Google and they've all got really nicely designed sites with really prominent calls to action they work great on mobile and you're like yeah I would kill for that but my thing just looks terrible it's pointless entering that race until your website is good enough to compete otherwise you're basically paying to enter a race where you know your car is much slower and much less economical than all of the other cars on the starting grid there's no point entering that race because you're gonna lose and you're gonna spend money losing you need to have a genuinely viable alternative to the other sites advertising for that term otherwise you're just a me-too but you're actually worse than the metis reason number three you should spend no money on Google ads is if you don't have a clear conversion goal on your website that you can track this blows my mind I remember talking to a business a fairly small business but they were spending ten thousand pounds a month on Google ads without tracking conversions so the first question we ask is how well is it working the only answer they can give is well business as a whole seems to be okay so it must be working all right trouble is you can't make any decisions if you're not tracking conversions you don't know if that business is coming through Google ads or organic you don't know if it is coming through Google ads which areas within Google ads you don't know which keywords are generating those sales which landing pages you've just got no information at all so the trouble with that approach is you might be wasting 95% of that 10k a month but you just don't know it's the whole thing about like 50% of my advertising is not working I don't know which 50 or whatever the phrase is but that's a stupid phrase that no one should ever say again because now we have all the data that we need to know exactly what's working for people so unless you're gonna track it in Google Ads pointless running it reason number four not to waste any money in Google Ads if people actually genuinely aren't searching for what it is that you do I was talking to someone yesterday who runs a state agency consultancy firm she said should I be running Google ads and you know I gave her a really simple answer which is are people searching for what you do if they are yes if they're not no right if people aren't searching for what you do is absolutely pointless appearing for those searches so it's really important to understand whether you are an impulse purchase so people see it and go oh that looks pretty cool or if you're something that people are actually searching for if you're something that people are actually searching for usually organic and Google's ads will be a priority for you if you're selling something that's impulse purchase you might be much more towards social media on social ads because those are things where people are just scrolling it oh you know I can see that face mask great that looks good I'm gonna buy that whereas doing that type of thing on Google Ads might be much more tricky reason number five not to touch Google eyes with your credit card is if you're not committed to optimizing and tracking things over time here's the most dangerous attitude that you can have for Google Ads it's all about setting up a great campaign once I've set up the great campaign it's just gonna run itself it's so dangerous I haven't ever seen an ad platform which gets better left alone they all get worse your Google ad campaign that kills it in Week one by week five um done anything with it it's probably in the floor the same with Facebook ads right sometimes these things get a bit better if the algorithm figure some stuff out but rarely you get kind of trying formation or growth with Google Ads it's all about optimizing and refining over time we might be taking 90% off the average cost per acquisition over the first six to twelve months of a campaign but we can only do that by collecting the data from Google and seeing what's really working what's not working and making sure all of the budget is in the stuff that is working you need to be tracking and you need to be monitoring it if you don't have the time or you don't have the inclination because you're a bit like me you're like hey great let's set this thing up all at spread loads of time working and setting up great now it's done let's move on to the next thing if that's your kind of personality and you know that that's your personality don't even bother running any kind of ad platform yourself because you're not gonna give it the time it needs you need someone who's really hot on it who likes tweaking and optimizing to take care of those things so if that's you don't do it yourself either get someone else to do it or just simply stay in there okay so that's where not to run Google ads how you know if you should because the reality is that for many businesses Google ads is a fantastic source of traffic even if you've got a great organic visibility sometimes running Google ads can make a lot of sense because it means that you've got that backup should anything happen with your organic visibility you're not completely tied to that one source of traffic one is such a dangerous number in marketing because it can so easily turn into a zero so we like to always have a backup source of paid ads that you can run that you can start to scale up if the organic starts to fall so when the numbers make sense if you project your numbers you work out your average cost-per-click your conversion rate and then your cost per acquisition and you can see that you can make money from that equation then fantastic Google Ads should be a priority to get right you know if your site is converting twice as well as your closest competitor for example you can afford to outspend them quite significantly because you know that that website is going to be so much better at generating leads or sales for you than those competitors if you're tracking your data and you're committed to optimizing the campaign again Google Ads can work really well don't be disheartened if you don't get the results that you need in month one or month two usually with a pay-per-click campaign we're expecting to see that cost per acquisition come down and down and down and down over time as we were able to refine the campaign and fine-tune it so if people are searching for what you're doing and all of those above criteria apply then I would definitely suggest testing Google Ads if you want some help running your eye campaign then of course you can request a free marketing review from exposure ninja just click on the link somewhere and it'll magically happen but I hope you found this useful and I hope see you can run your Google ad campaign profitably without wasting any of that ad budget because the world really does not need a Google self-driving can opener stay safe ninjas and jets CeCe