The single most important reason your Google Ads are NOT performing
Google Ads are a very powerful marketing channel, if done right. Today, we will discuss what I consider one of the biggest reasons why your Ads might not be performing as expected.
To keep it short, I could summarize this one reason into just one principle, CONSISTENCY. To understand this in more detail, let’s see what could go wrong.
Why consistency is important?
Consistency is a very important part of our everyday life. It is even more important in marketing as we try to inspire a customer to take specific action. A consistent experience builds trust and loyalty.
To understand how this works in Google Ads, let’s dig deeper, but keep in mind the below examples are intentionally significantly simplified to explain the concepts.
Potential client does search
The search process on Google goes through a few phases, all of them happen at the speed of thought.
- Type a “Keyword or Phrase” you believe it is the best to help you find what you are looking for.
- Scan the results and read the titles and descriptions looking for the best match to what you are looking for.
- Click on one result to go to the page, Landing Page and take action like filling a form.
- The final step is the sale which happens offline, where you call the business or get a call to book an appointment, etc.
To summarize, Keyword, Title and Landing, all of them you control as an advertizer.
How does Consistency work?
Let’s look at the experience between the Keyword and the Ad Title.
Imagine you search for “BMW garage”, then the first search result you get as an Ad reads “Mercedes Repair in Dubai”? How does that sound? One word, INCONSISTENT.
Now let’s say you get this instead, “German Car Repair in Dubai”. Sounds better? One word, More CONSISTENT.
How about “BMW Repair in Dubai”? Much better. Again, one word, CONSISTENT.
To make it more clear, imagine you got all the above 3 Ads on the same page, which one are you more likely to click on? The last one of course. It matches my search keyword the most.
Those more consistent Ads might be your competitors.
Tip 1: What does this teach us? You might need to have different Ads (Title and Description) for different Keyword groups.
Let’s move on to the experience between the Ad and the Landing Page.
You click on the Ad that reads “BMW Repair in Dubai” to open the landing page. Once the page opens, you see a big title that reads “We fix all kinds of cars” followed by a big image of many cars none of them is BWM!
Ouch, that’s really bad, INCONSISTENT. Let’s see how we can improve this campaign.
How about changing the big page title to read “Professional BMW Garage?”. Then let’s change the image to an image of different BMW models. This provides more consistent experience across the purchase jurney that doesn’t make a potential client think twice whether he clicked the wrong link.
Tips 2: Once more, this teaches us that we need different landing pages to match different Ads.
We can further improve the page by making sure all the content in the landing page talks to the BMW owner only. For example, we can have few photos of our engineers working on BMW cars and maybe few testimonials from BMW clients, etc.
This is usually ignored due to the work involved to run a consistent campaign. This required multiple landing pages corresponding to different Ads, which in turn corresponds to multiple keyword groups.
Most advertisers simply create one Ad, one landing page and call it a day.
To add salt to injury, testing different variations and optimizing the landing page is mostly ignored in these cases, leading to lower conversion rates and wasted money on Ads.
Doing the business
The final step of any advertising campaign is the goal of any business, the sale. The sale mostly happens offline, in our example the garage, unless you have an online store.
Although this is out of the scope of advertising, it is very important to keep in mind. Does your business experience offline match its online image?
One of the common things that put me off quickly when I decide to call a business is to be met with someone who is hardly qualified to answer a client call. Someone who is not trained to say “How can I help you?”.
Many clients won’t feel confidence the moment they have this call and they keep shopping around. What’s more important is that those are the clients who are usually NOT shopping for the price. They are ready to pay a premium to get better service.
This is a very common experience with small businesses if you pay attention. If you own a small business, it is a huge opportunity to stand out.
How long does it take you to call a lead once the form is submitted? You better do it no more than 30 minutes later. The sooner the better. So 5 minutes is the perfect experience.
You are paying lots of money for advertising, so make sure you do your best to convert every single lead that comes out of it.
Have a separate phone number for your paid campaigns and make sure a trained employee answers in a professional manner. Call leads back as soon as possible.
It is important to understand the feelings triggered by INCONSISTENT campaigns mostly happen in the subconscious. The client feels there is something off with it and simply leave to the next Ad.
Conclusion
In reality, some BMW owners don’t mind fixing their cars at any garage and it happens all the time, but MOSTLY, they won’t be searching for “BMW garage”. They might search for “Best garage in Dubai” for example, etc.
Why did I capitalize “MOSTLY”? Because I mean it. It is true that some BMW owners will still go to the garage who made that INCONSISTENT Ad. What’s equally true is that these ads will have low conversion rates and very high CPCs (Cost per Click and Cost per Conversion).
Simply, there is NO black and white here. It is more like a spectrum where campaign “A” is better than campaign “B” but campaign “C” is better than both of them.
The next time you create a Google Ads campaign, think about your audience journey from the moment the search is done till they become a client. Make sure it is as smooth as you can and follows an integrated approach toward marketing.