You Ask, I Answer: Impact of Google Ads?

In today's episode, Alessandra asks, I am running a Google Ads campaign for a customer, but results are not showing yet. The conversions are few, though click-through rate is over seven percent. Besides analyzing ads, keywords, and landing pages, what business considerations can I make to the client to convince him it's worthwhile to continue to invest in ads? What can he learn for his business from the results of the campaign? Well, the big question here is how far down the marketing operations funnel can you see?

If all you have access to is ads data, then you could basically show him that you've got you know the probably the right audience, uh a good offer, a good creative. Well, that's uh Bob Stone's uh 1968 direct marketing framework. But one of the challenges with ads is that there's a potential disconnect once somebody arrives on site. Right? Imagine um you have this really compelling ad for a coffee shop, right?

And uh you do a great job of getting people interested in the coffee shop, and you do a great job of uh getting people excited and they they fire up Google Maps and they get directions, they go there, and when they get there, the sole barista that's working there is asleep on the floor. All right. Now, did the ads fail? No. The ads did their job.

They got people to the front door, they got people even through the front door, and then the customer experience went off the rails. That's not advertising's fault. That is a product marketing uh problem. Well, I mean, it's technically just a flat out business problem. So the question is is the lack of results because of the conversions because of something that you did wrong in the direct marketing framework?

Or is it because there's a disconnect between the two, uh, between the ad and the experience? The way to figure this out is again look at that uh old framework. List offer creative. List these days means audience. Do you uh target the right audience with the ads?

Is it the people who are have a high propensity of buying or uh retargeted based on existing conversions or look like audience? If so, your list is probably in pretty good shape. Is the offer in the advertisement uh likely to entice somebody? And this is where what is in the ad, is it synchronous with what you happens when you get on the site? Is it uh is it an offer that makes sense?

Is it an offer that it does not feel like a bait and switch? Um there's this whole bunch of these ads on Facebook that uh are like advertising. Oh, you can, you know, go get a free product and then you click through, and it's like you you pay money and you leave review and then they refund your money. Well, that's not free. Right?

Though by the way, you should immediately report those ads as scams. Um, but that's not free. It's a complete disconnect between what was promised in the advertising and what was actually delivered. So you want to make sure that that's not the problem. And of course, there's a creative.

In this case, because you're getting high conversion rates, higher high click-through rates, it's probably not a creative issue. So either the advertising uh offer is out of sync with what the offer actually is, or you've got a bad experience on site. The way to remedy that is ideally have access to Google Analytics, ideally have access to uh the data that's happening on site. What happens when somebody gets to the landing page? Do they immediately bounce away?

If so, you've got a landing page problem, and that's something you should again be looking at that the uh the offer, the creative, the layout, uh, whether it renders properly on mobile devices, the usual things you do to diagnose a landing page. If you don't see a super high bounce rate, then you have to wonder is there in fact a problem with the audience? Is this product that you made some assumptions on who you're going to advertise to, uh, are they in fact not the right audience, right? Um again, if if you advertise, say uh uh espresso drinks, right? And people click through and they get to the homepage and it's it's a coffee shop, but you are are just totally going all out on your frozen summertime uh beverages, people may look at that and go, well, that's not really what I came here for, right?

I'm not a a cold coffee drinker, I'm a I'm a hot coffee drinker, and they may they may choose to go away because you again you're you're presenting something that they didn't ask for. Uh they thought they were getting one thing and they're not getting it. In terms of other things that other business considerations, um area that you can explore, and it is fraught with danger if you don't do it properly, is you can look at branded organic search. So the premise is that if you are running any kind of promotion, advertising, uh public relations, uh influencer marketing, and it's doing its job, one of the things you should see happen is synchronous with the advertising and commensurate with the spend on the advertising, you should see an increase in branded organic search of some kind. And by that we mean looking for the company's products or services or name.

If I take out a whole bunch of ads for uh my company, Trust Insights, and I just go all out, and you know, I'm paying CPMs, I don't care about uh click throughs, I just want to I just want people to know the name of the company. If the ads are effective, I should see a commensurate uptick in the number of searches for trust insights uh in organic search because again, people are aware of this company. Hopefully it has piqued their interest. Hopefully they have gone to click through and and uh gone a search for us. Now I say that's fraught with difficulty because it requires statistical analysis.

It requires you to be able to do cross-correlation functions uh to see not only is there a relationship, but what is the time lag on the relationship? And is the time lag on the relationship synchronous with uh what happens for unpaid efforts? Those are challenging questions to ask for folks who don't have a statistical background. So that's something you have to keep in mind. But that is a an additional business consideration you can look at.

Do you see uh branded organic search marching in lockstep with the paid advertising you're doing? At the end of the day, though, it all comes down to conversion. Uh if the conversions are not happening, that's the number one priority. Figure out why the conversions are not happening. Make sure that uh if you don't have one in place already and and you know you're you're spending a decent amount of money, you may want to consider a website satisfaction survey, one of those four Q ones that asks simple questions like Did you accomplish the task that you set out to when you came to this site today?

Right? And you run it and target it only on people, uh only on the landing page for the ads, so that you can ascertain is there something on the experience side of the site that is preventing you from being able to prevent the customer from being able to do what they wanted. If so, that then tells you it's a customer experience problem and not an advertising problem. You can also ask, you know, you can't you came to this page from an advertisement. Did this page fulfill the ad the ads promise?

Again, if you get feedback saying nope, it didn't, then you know you've got a a disconnect between those two. So I would say focus on the diagnostic side to figure out why your click-through rate is high, but your conversion rate is is non-existent. That's going to be able to help you understand what's going on with the advertising. Um if the customer is not interested in running additional ads, at least you can take those best practices and put them towards the next uh customer and maybe make it a part of the campaign that's integrated so that you're running those diagnostics from the very beginning and you're aver you're understanding how it is that uh people are finding the experience between the ad and the action that you want them to take. If you have follow up questions, leave them in the comments box below.

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