If Google Ads don’t add up, stop doing them, is the advice I have given to several people recently. Why would I say this, when, I am usually a huge advocate for Google Ads?
I adore Google Ads because they are a fantastic form of attraction marketing – meaning that it gets your services placed in front of your ideal clients at the precise moment in time that they are ready to buy your services. What is not to love about that?
I manage an annualised spend for my Google Ads clients of anywhere between £1.5 million to £2million. This huge spend with Google produces amazing returns on investment for my clients, meaning that it puts much more money back into their bank accounts in terms of billing for their services than it takes out.
So why on earth do I tell people not to do Google Ads when it works so well and I am usually an evangelist for them?
Quite simply, sometimes the numbers just do not stack up.
The people I have spoken with recently could never make Google Ads work financially for them.
Being someone that only advises my clients to spend money when doing so provides a return on investment of at least 3 to 1, if the numbers don’t add up, I simply do not want people to waste their money, their time or their energy.
What do I mean by this?
Let me give you an example.
If it costs you an average of £2 per click for your Google Ads traffic, it means that you are going to spend £200 for each one hundred visitors.
Let’s imagine that your monthly budget with Google is £1,000. You have £1,000 a month to spend with Google Ads to produce new clients for you.
At £2 per click, this spend is going to generate 500 clicks through to your website. That sounds good, doesn’t it? 500 new people find your website who otherwise would not have done had you not been using Google Ads when looking for your services. What is not to like about that?
Well, to see why I would advise you to stop doing this, we have to dive deeper into these numbers.
For 500 people, if your website converts at an average number (conversion meaning turning the visitors into new enquiries for your services) then only 1% of those visitors will get in touch with you.
This means that on an average month you will generate 5 new client enquiries for your £1,000 Google Ads spend.
5 new enquiries for your services; it still sounds good, doesn’t it?
However, we need to get down to the nitty gritty now.
If you convert new enquiries into new clients at a rate of just under 50% (which is quite common) that means you will receive two new clients each month.
If you only charge £100 for the services that you are selling using Google ads, it means you will generate an income of only £200 per month from your £1,000 Google Ads spend.
If you KNOW that these new customers will go on to buy from you again, because the majority of your customers do, then if each client is £100 in fees every month, then by month five you will get into profit. If you can afford to bank roll these ads for a few months, it could still work.
However, if the £100 sale is all that you will get from these clients, a spend of £1,000 on marketing for £200 simply cannot be justified.
This is why I have been telling people to stop doing Google Ads recently. I tell them to stop wasting their money.
However, if the numbers do stack up nicely, for example the £1,000 spend produces two new clients at £1,500 each, then I move on to finding opportunities to make their Google Ads spend go even further.
I will show them how to improve their advertisement copy to get even more people clicking through to their website, how to find more quality search terms for them to target and equally as important, how to stop showing up for search terms that simply will not generate new clients.
I them move on to the most important area: showing them how to improve the page on their website where the visitors are sent to when they click on one of their advertisements, usually called ‘the landing page’.
At this point, if the person on my Google Ads Optimisation Call is already using a Google Ads agency, I start to get a bit (lot) cross.
Why?
I know from running Google Ads campaigns since 2004 that the single biggest area for dramatic improvement (more enquiries from Google Ads spend) is to improve this landing page. So, when I see the page being targeted has no telephone number, no enquiry form, no email address, no client reviews and is missing various elements which are essential to make it produce a good volume of enquiries, two things happen:
- I wonder how on earth the person being paid to run these Google Ads sleeps at night when they are not doing a core part of their job well or at all;
- I get excited at the opportunity that exists for the person on the call with me to dramatically improve their return on investment (if the numbers stack up of course).
When the numbers already stack up for Google Ads, I can show someone how to make them work even better for them. However, when they do not stack up, and due to the fees that will be generated can never stack up, I am the first person to tell someone to stop spending money on Google Ads.
I am a return on investment marketing advisor. The money you spend on marketing must put more back into your bank account than it takes out, otherwise you have to improve it quickly or stop it.
That is proper, grown up marketing.
Is your marketing spend putting more into your bank account than it takes out? If not, improve it or stop it, whatever that marketing is. If it isn’t proper, grown up marketing, stop spending money on it, full stop!
If you are currently running Google Ads, click the button below to download my Google Ads Whitepaper now and let me show you how to generate more clients and how to schedule a Google Ads Optimisation Review Call with me if you would like to:
