Category: Google Ads
Google Ads, AdWords, paid search, pay-per-click (PPC). Whatever you’ve heard it called, it all comes down to the same thing: paying Google to show your business at the top of the search results when people look for what you sell.
“How hard can it be?” is a fair question, especially as Google makes it very easy to get started. It will help you set up your account, suggest which searches to appear for, recommend a budget and, these days, offer to manage much of it for you automatically.
There’s one thing worth keeping in mind through all of that, and when you think about it, it’s obvious. Every time someone clicks your advert, you get a new visitor to your website, which is great. But you also pay for that click, and the money goes to Google. The more Google can encourage you to spend, the more it earns.
That doesn’t make Google’s advice wrong. Much of it is genuinely useful. But it does mean it isn’t neutral, and that’s worth remembering every time Google suggests a change.
The hotel that paid for the wrong visitors
We first wrote about this back in 2016, using an example that still makes the point well.
A boutique hotel in the centre of a historic city in the UK, charging around £150 a night, was advised to appear for searches that would bring in lots of visitors. That included searches such as “cheap hotel” and “budget hotel”. The traffic certainly arrived. But how many people looking for a cheap or budget hotel were likely to book a room at £150 a night?
The hotel was buying a lot of clicks, but its bookings weren’t going up. Being seen on Google simply isn’t enough. You have to be seen for the right searches.
How things have changed since then
When we first wrote this post, running Google Ads mostly meant choosing your keywords carefully and setting how much you were willing to pay for each click. That’s still part of it, but Google has added a lot of automation since, and it has made the same principle even more important.
Automated bidding now decides how much to bid for each search, based on how likely Google thinks it is to lead to a sale or enquiry. Done well, it can work very effectively. But it’s only as good as the information it’s given. If your account is counting the wrong things as successes, or not counting enquiries at all, automated bidding will happily spend your budget chasing the wrong results.
Broad match keywords, which Google increasingly recommends, let your adverts show for a much wider range of searches than the words you chose. For a business with lots of data and a big budget, that can find new customers. For a small local business, it can just as easily find the modern equivalent of “cheap hotel” searches, and charge you for them.
Then there’s the recommendations page, and the optimisation score that goes up when you accept Google’s suggestions. Some recommendations are helpful. Others mainly increase your spend, such as raising budgets or broadening your keywords. Google also offers to apply some recommendations automatically, which means changes can be made to your account without anyone asking you first.
What to check before you trust Google’s suggestions
None of this means you should ignore Google. It means you should check before you agree.
Before switching to automated bidding, make sure your conversion tracking is set up properly and counts real enquiries, such as calls and contact forms, rather than things that don’t matter.
Before adding broad match keywords, look at your search terms report, which shows what people actually searched before clicking. If it’s already full of irrelevant searches, broad match will usually make that worse, not better.
Before accepting a recommendation, ask whether it will bring in more of the right customers or simply cost more. If you can’t tell, don’t apply it yet.
And check whether automatically applied recommendations are switched on in your account. If they are, make sure you know which ones and why.
What this means for a local business
For a business in Salisbury or one of the towns around it, the same principle applies to where your adverts appear as well as what they appear for.
Google’s default location settings can show your adverts to people outside the area you serve, including people who have simply shown an interest in Salisbury from somewhere else entirely. For a hotel or an attraction, that can be useful. For a plumber, an electrician or a hairdresser, it often means paying for clicks from people who will never become customers.
So alongside your search terms, check where your clicks are really coming from. If a noticeable share are from towns you don’t cover, your location settings need tightening. It’s another example of something Google won’t necessarily point out, because those clicks still earn it money.
Why it’s worth having someone manage it
It’s natural to feel that paying an agency to manage your advertising is an extra cost you could do without. But wasted clicks on the wrong searches, settings left on their defaults and recommendations accepted without question can end up costing far more than the management itself.
A good account manager understands that being seen in Google isn’t the goal. The goal is calls, enquiries and customers, at a cost that makes sense for your business. That means checking the searches you’re paying for, keeping your adverts and landing pages relevant, and treating Google’s suggestions as suggestions.
To find out how Spire Digital can help you get the most out of your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, give us a call on 01722 320 500 or fill in our contact form and a member of the team will be in touch.