Google Ads and Analytics Q&A

One of the most common problems people face with Google Ads is getting plenty of results they must pay for (clicks or calls), but the callers are not really customers. This most often happens when the campaign is using broad string keywords that describe their service in the broad spectrum of services.

For instance, an AC Repair company may be advised by Google to choose "AC Repair near me" which WILL result in plenty of clicks. But what kind of AC Repair are we talking about? Car AC? Window units? Trucks? Commercial coolers? Home Central Air units?

To get better results, the keywords must match the exact service offered otherwise, plenty of useless (and costly) clicks will occur.

There are two common reasons those who visit your website from Google Ads do not become buyers. These are:

1. The keywords chosen were too broad (see the previous Question/Answer).
2. The site does not have a proper landing page.

If the landing page does not tell people exactly what to do or attempts to gather too much information, prospective buyers will leave and never return. Of course, if you are getting at least 2% of those who reach your site to convert to buyers, you are doing well.

The Google Quality score is based on how relevant the keywords chosen are to your landing page/business and how well your ad is written. It matters because a higher quality score results in lower costs-per-click or whatever goal you have chosen to pursue. It also matters because a higher score means you are working to provide a better marketing experience. This will also result in higher click-through-rates and higher conversions (aka more customers).

Keywords enter a virtual auction in the sense that when two or more keywords are competing for the same space, the one which has bid highest will earn the higher position. This is important when there are plenty of businesses vying for top position in the results, but if competion is scarce, the auction is less relevant.

Whether the "auction" matters or not depends on the market and the compeiton within the market for ad positions. Careful keyword research can reveal this information.

Impressions are the number of times someone was exposed to your ad, whether they clicked on it or not. Impressions are important for branding campaigns. These are campaigns where the goal is not so much to get people to visit the website, but rather to simply see your ad and become more aware of your company, products, or services.

The click-through-rate is a percentage metric which helps you know how often people click on your ads compared to the number of times they saw the ad (impressions). To calculate the CTR, Google simply divides the number of clicks by the impressions.

Keywords are the terms which people are using to search for a certain product or service. If your ad is set to show for certain keywords, every time someone uses them in a search, your ad will appear. Naturally, you want to show up for as many keywords as possible, but you also want those keywords to accurately describe what you offer. Vague keywords will result in many useless clicks to your site and increase your costs.

Text Ads are just that: Ads the appear as text-only. Display ads include images and text. There is no difference in the cost of the ads and both may run to obtain impressions, clicks, or calls.

Generally two to three weeks worth of data is required before being able to make a clear analysis of performance. At this time, an ad campaign can be adjusted to perform better.

Assuming you are getting traffic to your website, Google Analytics can let you know more about your demographics, their interests, where they live, what time they surf the internet, how they found your website and more. This is all valuable information, but to get it, you must first have the traffic.

Without traffic to your website, Google Analytics is useless.

To obtain analytics information from Google, a website must be linked. To do this, Google provides a snippet of code which is inserted in the header section of the website on every page. If using a WordPress website, a plugin can be used to automatically insert the code making this a one-time task.

Goals are a tool Google has provided to allow testing of certain website objectives and measuring conversions on pages. For instance, if you want to know how many people are signing up for your newsletter compared to how many see the signup form, you can set this up on goals and track results. This way, you can test various ways to improve your website over time.

Google Analytics allows us to see where traffic is coming from. Are we getting more people through social media? Facebook in particular? Which pages are producing the best results from that source?

Knowing this information can help us better tailor content to our audience by both knowing where they are coming from and what they like.

Also, if we are spending money on a non-digital campaign, we can generally gauge the results of that advertising. While we cannot know for certain how well a TV ad is performing, if we stress visiting our Instagram page or looking us up using a certain term or expression, we can use this feature of Google Analytics to determine how well the outside advertising is doing.

Bounce rate refers to how many people leave a website without visiting a second page. It is one of the quality parameters Google uses to determine whether a website is healthy and worthy of recommendation in search. If a site maintains a high bounce rate for some time, Google will slowly push its pages down in the search results.

Too, if a certain page has a low bounce rate, a site owner can seek to understand why people are inclined to keep using their site by looking at that page as an example. In this way, they can improve their website and grow both their traffic and their business.

By knowing when certain markets/people use your website, you can better target others in the same market in your Google Ads campaigns. If you are targeting a certain demographic in your ads, rather than having those ads run all day, you can know that most people in that demographic are online at certain times. This way, you can minimize your ad costs while maximizing results. This lowers your ROI.

ROI is Return on Investment. It is an important metric in digital marketing because it can be accurately measured. In fact, only digitial marketing allows people to know exactly how much of what they spend is being effective. By measuring the ROI, advertisers can, over time, lower their customer acquistion costs. Lower costs are always better right?

If you want to lower your costs in acquiring new customers, get in touch with Oakes Writing today at 337-660-4774.