How To Advertise On Google & Get Results (PPC Framework Explained)

You know that Google Ads (AdWords) can generate lots of high-quality leads for your business. However, you still aren’t sure how to advertise on Google without burning through a lot of ad spend. And I’m not talking about the technical stuff. I’m talking about the framework you use for running paid ads.

Having the proper framework (i.e., high-level strategy) is?the #1 factor in your advertising success.

In our agency, we spend over 50% of our time?creating the advertising strategy, then executing it. The reason for that is simple:

The cost of a flawed strategy trumps all the input for fulfilling this strategy. You have to get things right from the get-go.

Let’s walk through the main things you need to know to create a successful Google Ads lead generation funnel without hurting your profits.

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How Advertising On Google Works

Google Ads works like an auction. The advertiser with the highest Ad Rank gets placed at the top. There are many articles on the internet on how Google determines its ad rank. If you want to learn more about this, I’d recommend starting with?Google’s documentation?on using Ads for online marketing.

This article aims to address what most people don’t talk about – how you can control the customer journey. I want to show you how you can start getting the right people to click your ad, convert those clicks into leads & turn those leads into customers. All while maximizing your profit, of course.

Let’s start by covering the #1 factor that impacts your success.

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The #1 Factor For Profitable Ad Campaigns

You don’t need to be a technical expert in Google Ads to be successful. Instead, the main thing you need to know is your high-level framework for running paid ads: the general stages you need to go through to convert paid traffic into leads & sales. Your framework is the difference between a profitable business & the one that throws money at different ad platforms & hopes for the best.

Here is the framework we use at?Ads Lancelot:

Each variable represents a stage in your prospects’ buying journey. Each step has its problems & focus areas. However, all of them need to be maintained, optimized & work together cohesively to generate the ultimate result: consistently bring more customers to your business at the same (or lower) cost-per-acquisition.

Let’s go over each stage, so you understand what to pay attention to in each step of your customer journey.

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Traffic: How To Target The Right People In The Right Place

Everything starts with traffic. Depending on the people you target, and where they see your ad, your message and CTA (call-to-action) would be different. As one old-school copywriter famously put it:

Your customer is the starting point. Your message needs to meet them where they are & show them how using your product/service can transform their lives.

The best traffic source to generate leads & sales for your business is to go after people who are actively looking for a solution your product/service provides. Those people would be the easiest to convert to paying clients because they are actively expressing interest in buying a solution (i.e., they’re warmer on the buying scale).

To reach your “wallet out” prospects through the Google Ads platform, the first campaign you need to create is a Search Network campaign.

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Why Start With A Search Campaign

The person who actively searches for your service on Google would typically have a much higher conversion intent than a person who sees a banner ad while reading the news. They want a solution & they want it now.

Showing a relevant ad on the first page of Google SERP when your ideal buyer is searching for a solution will give you the highest chance of converting that click into a lead and later on into a customer.

But there is a caveat to this.

You need to be laser-focused on matching your keywords to your ideal prospect’s search queries, so you only pay for relevant clicks that actually impact your bottom line.

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How To Pick The Right Keywords

Before I get into our strategy for picking the right keywords, let me first show you how most people do it:

1. Brainstorm all the possible keywords related to their services (or pay a freelancer to do it for them).
2. Review the long list of keywords, and since it all sounds relevant, they drop them into Google Ads.
3. Launch their new campaign, but soon see that nothing works, and they understand why.

Sound familiar?

What I described above is a common mistake new advertisers make. They forget that they?pay-per-click?and that?each keyword performs differently?(and needs its click-data to be optimized).

You’ll be far better off starting with 5-10 main target keywords and optimizing them, than starting with 100’s of keywords & optimizing none at all.

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How To Structure Your Campaign

For you to get the most of your campaign we recommend structuring your campaign in the following manner:

How To Examine Your Traffic Relevancy

At any point in time, you should check how relevant your traffic is by looking at your Search Terms report. Pay attention to which search terms does your keyword trigger.

If you see that the search terms you’re getting are highly relevant (i.e., it’s what your ideal prospects would ask for in real life before they buy your product/service), then you’re good with this part. You can now focus on improving your conversion rates.

If your search terms report is full of trash queries, then go back & restructure your campaign. You need to get relevant traffic before you even think of conversion rate optimization.

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Conversion: How To Make An Offer They Can’t Resist

Now that you’re getting relevant traffic, the next step is to convert it into leads. To get started, we’ll first create the landing page and write our ads after. We do this because:

Conversion doesn’t usually happen from the ad, it happens on the landing page.

We want to prepare our landing page first and then structure the ad to match the keyword to the landing page offer.

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Why Most Advertisers Get A Poor Conversion Rate

Before we get into the structure of a well-converting page, you must understand why most advertisers fail at making their landing pages convert.

For the sake of keeping this entertaining, let’s do it in a story format:

• Meet Bob. He’s a small business owner that recently decided to generate more leads online.
• Bob has a website, and although he heard about landing pages, he decides to start simple & uses his website page for Google Ads traffic.
• Bob was rushing to start, so he didn’t install any tracking or plan his conversion strategy. He thought he’d “feel” if this works.
• The business started getting some traction, but Bob finds it hard to understand what is working & what is not.
• Bob wants to improve things, and starts reading about conversion rate optimization, landing page tools, etc., and thinks to sign up.

Should Bob sign up for a new landing page tool? Will it help him at this point?

Hate to disappoint, but no. No landing page tool will help Bob until he first understands what his landing page needs to accomplish.

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The Goal Of Your Landing Page

The main goal your landing page needs to accomplish is to convert a?visitor into a lead. That’s it.

And to accomplish these things, you need a visitor to:

• Understand in 3 seconds or less that your page can help them achieve their goal.
• Get excited about your offer, and leave their contact information in exchange for it.
• Take action then and there, without getting distracted by different links, excessive copy, or other CTAs.

If you keep these objectives in mind, you will be able to structure your landing page in a way that consistently brings in conversions (even on your current website).

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The Landing Page Structure

As said previously, the structure of your page will depend on the traffic, you are getting. Since we recommend using a search campaign to start with, it makes sense to show you the essential landing page elements you need to convert that PPC traffic:

P.S. this article would be twice as long if I would tell you about every feature. In the future, I’ll create a separate article about landing page structure and the importance of each element.

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The Ad Structure

Now that we know our keywords & we have our landing page structured, it’s time to talk about writing ad copy.

The first thing you need to do when writing click-worthy ads is to select a Google Ad type. This article will show you how to structure the classic Expanded Text Ad since it’s the easiest.

Most advertisers don’t think this granular when creating their ads. They don’t even use all the free ad real-estate available to them. So do this, and you’ll be ahead of most advertisers on Google SERP.

P.S. after creating your ads, don’t forget to write your ad extensions & re-check that they look relevant in-between the keyword & your landing page.

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Sale: How To Streamline Your Lead Conversion Process

Now that you’re generating a good flow of leads from Google Ads, it’s time to talk about how you can streamline your lead-to-sale conversions & maximize the efficiency of your whole Google Ads funnel.

What I’m going to share in this chapter is not meant to alter your entire sales process. Instead, these are simple tips you can implement in the next few days to shorten your sales cycle, spend less time on talking to prospects & more time on closing profitable deals. Here they are:

• Contact the new inbound lead as soon as it comes. You will seriously improve your chances of getting a conversation started & leave a great first impression.
• Add hidden fields to your online form. This would help your sales reps know what the lead is interested in most.
• Use a CRM & integrate your lead notifications into it. This will help you streamline your sales process and understand which keywords have the highest sales rate. You can later optimize your ad campaigns for quality of leads, not just quantity.
• Follow up like a madman until you get them on the phone. Strike the iron while it’s hot, and don’t give up until you can speak with them over the phone.
• Set up an auto-responder, so new leads get an automatic email after inquiry, which would position your company as an authority in the field & set the expectation for what they should do next.

Not too complex, eh??

Our?most successful clients?do these things consistently when working with Google Ads leads. So apply these battle-tested strategies yourself & let us know how it worked out for you.

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(Bonus) How To Troubleshoot Your Google Ads Funnel

With this framework in mind, you should quickly identify what is working/not working & optimize your results.

However, I thought I’d make it easier for you and make a simple little graphic you can refer to at all times when reviewing your PPC results & planning your next actions.

Traffic: If you’re not generating the right kind of traffic, it doesn’t matter how good your ad or landing page is – you’d have a poor conversion rate in any case. And even if you’re converting ok, your sales success rate would go down because you’re not generating the right kind of leads.

• Traffic needs to be fixed first. You need to get the right eyeballs for your product/service offer. Only then it’s time to look into further stages.

Conversion: If you’re getting the right kind of traffic, but your conversion rate isn’t exciting, then you have a conversion problem.

• We recommend testing different variations of your landing page and splitting half of the traffic to each version. We, marketers, have proven that combining the correct targeting with CRO tests can?increase your conversions by 300% or more.

Sale: If you’re generating a good volume of leads each month but cannot close them consistently, you need to look into your sales process.

• Identify the common questions/concerns your leads have when they contact you the first time. Find a way to answer those effectively during your sales process, and then add the question/answer to your landing page – see if this would resolve the prospect’s concern before they even contact you (i.e., streamline your sales process).

Remember, your results are as good as the weakest link in the funnel. So fix the weakest link, and your overall results will improve.

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Conclusion

By now, you should have a pretty good understanding of the 3-part PPC success framework and what it takes to get started on Google Ads profitably.

You think that putting all this to action would take a long time. It shouldn’t; otherwise, you’re doing it wrong.

You see, the best way you can get started is to take one thing (the weakest link in your marketing funnel) and optimize it. Then take the second most crucial thing & optimize that. This way, you’ll keep things actionable & build the?most?critical asset for your business:?a way to consistently turn advertising into profit.

I hope you found this post valuable. If you want me to clarify smth or you want to add to the conversation, feel free to comment below. I be paying close attention to your feedback & answer back as soon as I can.

– Daniel