Google Ads paid search is often one of the best channels for generating leads.
When done right, it can easily become one of your most consistent inbound lead channels.
However, navigating paid search on Google Ads can be tricky. There are numerous pitfalls and nuances that can make or break your campaign. To add to the confusion, a lot has changed in recent years.
To help you master Google Ads for lead generation in 2024, we turned to Google Ads expert Andy Black. He’s here to answer your questions and share his top tips.
Note: All questions are sourced directly from the LeadCapture.io community and presented in a digestible Q&A format.
How to actually get qualified calls using call ads?
By “qualified” I presume you mean they match certain criteria? You could get whoever answers the call to ask get certain questions to qualify them, or maybe use an automated phone tree.
To increase the quality of calls in the first place then bid on keywords that indicate the searcher has a problem and is actively searching for a service or product.
We might use the ad scheduler to run campaigns only during hours where people answer the phone. If we find there’s certain days when conversion rates are lower then we might manually drop bids those days, or let automated bidding figure it out.
How critical is using Ad Scheduler vs Smart bidding?
You might be surprised to learn that we often use manual bidding and have the exact same “blanket” bid price across all keywords in each campaign, and often the whole account. We’ll increase or decrease this blanket bid price and see what effect it has on daily and weekly performance. This is often because our account is very long-tail and granular. We consider keywords such as “plumber dublin” and “plumbers cork” as having equal intent and effectively the same keyword.. If we’ve 100 locations in the “Plumbers <LOCATION>” campaign (set up as 100 ad groups, keywords, and ads) then they’re effectively all the same searches – someone looking for a plumber in their city. We’ll bid equally for each until we manually see if some locations do better than others. We’ll analyse why that might be, and only after that will we let Google try to optimise bidding.
In your experience, what are some things you’ve done to improve conversion metrics in an account?
It starts by ensuring ads show for the right search terms in the first place. Simple things like tightening up match types from broad to phrase can improve conversion rates (since visitors are more likely searching for what we’re selling).
Then we want to ensure the right ad shows to the right searcher, and we send them to the right page.
Conversions happen when we get the right ads in front of people looking to buy, and send them to the page showing what was promised in the ad. Once that’s done we then work on ad copy, landing page copy, removing bottlenecks in the visitor journey, testing theories about why people click where they click, etc.
Have Google’s conversion metrics improved over time within Google Ads and Google Analytics?
I didn’t think we’ve enough data to say, and it’s not something we worry about. We deal with the data we get in the interface, and from client feedback.
What are your thoughts on using Ad Scheduling and the pros/cons of it?
I think ad scheduling is one of the last things to optimise, and we’d likely let Google optimise via maximise clicks or conversions.
The first step is to bid on the right keywords, in the right match type. Monitor search terms and add negatives as they come up. Create new campaigns/ ad groups based on longer tail search terms that might show up (often called “peel and stick”).
Optimise account structure so the most relevant ad shows to the searcher. For instance, we might have an ad for “Dublin Oven Repairs” with keyword “oven repairs dublin”, and an ad for “Dublin Cooker Repairs” with keyword “cooker repairs dublin”. If we see search term “cooker repairs dublin” showing for the “oven repairs dublin” keyword then we’ll add a negative of “cooker” to that ad group,and vice versa. That’s a true example and it doubled CTR since we forced Google to show the most relevant ad.
How do you target high-net-worth individuals internationally through paid search?
You could try to use the demographics data (household income, age), but I wouldn’t start there.
I’d start by showing ads for all demographics and ideally bid on keywords so ads show for search terms high-net-worth individuals would search for. Observe if more conversions come from higher household incomes.
I’d also load up individual locations into the campaign rather than one large location. If you load all the zipcodes in a county into the campaign then you can see the data by zipcode. We do that a lot with campaigns targeting the whole of the US – instead of targeting the whole country we target all the individual states in the campaign. This is extra data we can show the client early on, and could give them new insights.
If you start seeing a pattern then that would be a good learning for the business. Having the data means they could act on it (create campaigns just targeting specific locations they deem to have good potential and that justify creating new campaigns and potentially new landing pages).
I’d also consider running a test and letting Google try to maximise conversions. This could start showing where conversions come from (by demographic, location, day of the month and week, time of day, etc).
What is your favorite tool for keyword analytics? Notably, for long-tail keywords.
We just use the Google Keyword Planner. It’s Google’s database after all.
We’ll set the location to target the whole country so we’re getting as many keywords as possible.
We’ll download the data and analyse it in Excel, looking for the short-head terms and possible long-tail variants. We don’t really care at this stage if Google doesn’t show every long-tail variation. We want to get lists of all permutations, create large “data gathering” campaigns, and launch and learn.
We’re typically trying to create lists we create permutations from (a cartesian join in database speak).
For local service businesses we use what I call the “near me” trick. We set the location to the whole country, add up to 10 keywords (search terms!) we think people use and set a filter so we only see ones that contain “near me”.
We download them all into Excel/Google Sheets and grab the ones that end with “near me”. Then we strip out the “near me” and get all the permutations for all the locations.
I wrote more details on LinkedIn here.
What’s your typical trigger volume for selecting a keyword? What’s the assessment process you use to determine the likelihood of click-through success?
We don’t pay much attention to what the Google Keyword Planner says search volume is. We load all keyword combinations into test campaigns and find out actual search volumes.
We start with the same blanket bid prices and find out the CTR, Impression Share, Impressions, Estimated Search Volume (Impressions / Impression Share) and CPCs – for that given bid prices. We’ll often then increase or decrease the blanket bid price to get a bit more data.
Then we let the client know our findings and they can determine where to focus resources (unless search volumes are so low or CPCs so high they decide to try another lead generation strategy – which is still good to learn early rather than letting Google spend a lot of money trying to find conversions).
Can you please describe your business model and pricing structure when you offer a Google Adwords service to a client?
For example, agree on a daily campaign budget, and duration of the campaign, use their credit card and change a flat day rate.
For consulting clients we charge a flat monthly fee. The client owns the account and uses their own credit card.
The first month’s engagement is to do keyword research with the client, build test campaigns (possibly to a simple dynamic landing page we setup for them), and to run the campaigns to determine if Google Ads has legs or needs a swift bullet. The goal is to determine actual search volumes (on a low ad spend) so the business can decide where to focus.
If we continue into months 2+ it’s typically for a flat-monthly rate while we try to get them profitable. Ideally it gets to the point where it runs like clockwork and we’re in maintenance mode with small tweaks or occasional new campaigns. Our goal is that the client doesn’t pay us out of their budget anymore, but we’re paid out of the new business we bring them.
Our goal is to be a long-term partner managing the Google Ads channel for them.
What’s your approach to writing Adword copy?
Our primary approach to writing ad copy is to have the search term in the ad headline 1 and on the landing page. We focus on getting that right first, often pinning the search term into headline 1 (not using dynamic keyword insertion I might add, but by creating lots of relevant ads in the one-keyword-per-adgroup style).
We might load lots of different ad headlines to show in position 2 and 3, and we might load 4 descriptions. We’ll often let Google rotate the descriptions and look later to see which combinations showed the most. This might inform some ad tests, and it might inform the business (e.g. did you know dear client that more people searching for “wedding rings” are interested in custom wedding rings than celtic wedding rings? Maybe you could test a page pushing the custom angle?”).
Please provide several examples of ad copy that have strong pulling power! While a unique landing page with a CTA is the standard modus operandi, what other components are you also using as part of the customer sales funnel?
The trick to optimising ads and landing pages is to never try and judge them in isolation. Ads and landing pages do not have conversion rates, they’re simply part of the funnel that helps convert visitors into inquirers into customers.
Your emergency plumber landing page doesn’t have a 10% conversion rate. Visitors to your emergency plumber landing page convert into inquirers at 10%. If I sent people looking for car insurance or a Caribbean cruise to your landing page then I’ll bet less than 10% will inquire about your emergency plumbing service.
Think about the search term someone used, and put that into the left of ad headline 1.
If they search for “hotels london” and don’t like the results and then add “kings cross” to the end of their search term so it becomes “hotels london kings cross” then what ad headline would most appeal to them?
Would it be “Hotels London”, or “London Hotels”?
Or would it be “Kings Cross Hotels”?
Maybe what they’re searching for and where doesn’t fit into headline 1? In that case we’ll often put WHAT into one headline, WHERE into another, and all other headlines will be pinned to position 3. This means WHAT and WHERE can rotate between position 1 and 2.
So ads could show as:
Water Damage Restoration | Charlotte NC | Call Now
or
Charlotte NC | Water Damage Restoration | Call Now
We make headlines that don’t contain WHAT or WHERE be short and to the point. Headline 3 might not show on desktop and is unlikely to show on mobile. Headline 2 might even be cut off.
Examples headline 3’s for the above Water Damage Restoration ads might be “24/7 Helpline”, “40 Min Onsite Response”, “Emergency Callouts”.
Numbers and symbols catch the eye.
Test “100% Free” vs just “Free”.
Test “Save 20% – Book Online” vs “20% Off – Book Online”.
For the “Charlotte NC” ad above I might want to test “Charlotte (NC)”. If I do that I’d pin the WHAT to maybe position 1, and both WHERE combinations to position 2. We don’t want to allow Google to show an ad that says “Charlotte NC | Charlotte (NC) | Call Now”. Google shouldn’t show that, but I want to force it so they can’t.
For ad descriptions I assume people are skimming and not reading. I don’t put them in “Proper Case” but use “Sentence case” and typically have all 4 variations unpinned, different lengths, and different from each other. I’m interested in which combinations show the most often (meaning get the best CTR since Google will show the combination that makes them the most money).
How successful has your use of geolocation targeting (city/region presence) been with Google Adwords?
This is our bread-and-butter.
If someone in the city of Cork searches for “physios near me” they want to see an ad saying “Cork Physio” or “Cork Physios”.
A big national franchise might not create a campaign per county, but create one large campaign with one ad trying to appeal to everyone.
I’m going to beat their ads by doing what they don’t think to do, don’t want to do, or can’t be bothered doing.
What niches have you found that this targeting works best for?
Niches where the person searching has a bit of an emergency and just wants to find someone or something local.
Think about services/products where people search with “near me”. Create campaigns targeting each city where searches contain “near me”, and campaigns targeting the country where people search “<service> <city>”.
Have a look at the yellow pages for types of businesses people use locally.
Think about other things people want locally. “houses for sale <location>”, “jobs <location>”, “courses <location>”, etc.
How do you determine a daily budget for a campaign? Start small, do A/B testing then scale the most successful offers.
Yes, we start small with low bids and observe impressions, clicks, search impression share, search impression share lost due to budget, and search impression share lost due to rank.
We’ll maybe have to increase bids to get impressions.
Or maybe we’ll have to decrease bids if we’re losing too much impression share due to budget.
With initial data we might turn off some keywords and focus on a few.
Once we’ve dialled in bids so we’re getting the most visitors with the search intent we want for the given test budget, we then try to improve ad CTR, and the landing page. Once everyone is focused on one or a handful of keywords it suddenly becomes obvious how we can improve the ad and landing page.
There have been a lot of changes to match types over the years. How are you currently handling match types like exact, phrase, and broad? Are single keyword ad groups and exact match still a big part of your strategy?
Yes, we still use single-keyword-ad-groups. We start with phrase match and monitor search terms coming through. Sometimes Google shows search terms that are too broad for our phrase match keywords (such as competitor brandnames when the keyword is “carpet cleaners <lcoation>”, in which case we’ll switch to exact match).
Funnily enough this is different from niche to niche. I suspect it’s down to search volumes. It seems that if it’s a high search volume niche then Google takes less liberties and shows for more relevant search terms.
Have you adopted AI? If so, how?
I’ve used ChatGPT to help me write Google Ads Scripts that we’ve rolled out to our Google Manager Accounts and run against client accounts.
I’ve also pointed ChatGPT at client websites and asked it to summarise all pages and give likely search terms for each page. You can also point it at a few competitor sites and get it to do the same and summarise all findings in one table. This can be useful for clients to see, and can help us jumpstart our keyword research.
When I’ve asked ChatGPT to come up with ad copy it often is a bit too salesy and exuberant. It can give me a few soundbites or angles though. I’ll maybe create a custom GPT to get it to be less cringy.
I’m currently learning how to implement AI in Make.com workflows as this seems the most practical way of using AI at the moment.
To wrap things up, what are your top three tips?
1) Use Google Ads for marketing, not just advertising
Don’t just send visitors to your offer (aka run ads), but find out what people are looking to buy, and use that steady stream of same intent visitors to iterate your offer and landing page until they resonate.
You can learn more by reading how I got started in Google Ads and how I discovered what I think is the greatest benefit of Google Ads here.
And you can read a short case study of how we used Google Ads to quickly and cheaply test a business idea here.
2) Understand the difference between search terms and keywords
One of the biggest Google Ads mistakes is calling what people type into Google “keywords”.
𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝘀 are what people type into Google.
𝗞𝗲𝘆𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀 are what we bid on in our campaigns.
Each keyword matches a SET of search terms, often broader than intended which can lead to ads showing for irrelevant queries.
You can read more about this insight here.
3) Put the search term in the ad, and in the landing page
Dynamic landing pages can help match the landing page with the ad.
You can see an example here.
Where can people go to learn more about you?
They can find me at andyblack.net and my LinkedIn account where I’m quite active.
