Google Ads
Advertising buys time. It puts your offer in front of someone searching for exactly that, today, and it stops the day you cut the budget. That is its weakness, and it is also what makes it useful when you need enquiries now.
A badly built campaign does not only cost its budget. It teaches Google to send you the wrong people, and that lesson keeps being paid for weeks afterwards. The cause is almost always the same: keywords that are too broad, a single ad for ten different intentions, and a landing page that is the site’s home page rather than the answer to the ad.
What an enquiry is worth to you
So we start at the end. What does an enquiry worth having look like for you, how much does a customer bring in, and therefore how much can you pay to win one. Without that figure nobody can say whether a campaign is good, and the conversation slides towards the cost per click, which means nothing.
Only then come the campaigns. One intention per group, an ad that echoes the words of the search, and a landing page that keeps the ad’s promise. That page often makes more difference than everything else combined: sending an advertising budget to a slow or rambling page amounts to paying to drive people away.
What a campaign covers
- The groundwork figures: value of a customer, acceptable cost of an enquiry.
- The campaign structure, one search intention per group.
- The keywords to exclude, which are often half the work.
- The ads, and the landing page that matches them.
- Conversion tracking: calls, forms, quote requests.
- A monthly report that starts with enquiries received, not with impressions.
When we advise against launching
Three situations where we advise against running a campaign at all, and they are worth writing down. When the margin on a customer does not cover the market’s cost of acquisition, advertising only accelerates the losses. When the site has no page able to receive the traffic, the money is gone before there was ever a chance. And when the demand does not yet exist, when nobody searches for what you sell because they do not know it exists, paid search has nothing to intercept.
Counting enquiries, not clicks
Conversion tracking is not optional, it is what separates a campaign being steered from a budget being spent. It goes in before the first impression, and it counts enquiries received, not clicks. The measuring results page explains how.
Advertising and organic search complement each other better than they replace each other. Campaigns reveal within weeks which wordings bring in real customers. Those wordings are precisely the ones to build pages on, and those pages will still be there when the budget stops.