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You can post like a man (or woman) possessed in social media. You can network like crazy, you can post videos on Tik Toc till you’re blue in the face.
You can run yourself ragged using all these ‘free’ platforms in an effort to generate leads and sales for your business. But if you’re really serious about marketing your business, then sooner or later you’re going to have to use PAID advertising.
And if you’re trying to attract new customers, there are really only TWO digital platforms worth spending a lot of energy on; Google, and Facebook/Instagram.
You can post like a man (or woman) possessed in social media. You can network like crazy, you can post videos on Tik Toc till you’re blue in the face.
You can run yourself ragged using all these ‘free’ platforms in an effort to generate leads and sales for your business. But if you’re really serious about marketing your business, then sooner or later you’re going to have to use PAID advertising.
And if you’re trying to attract new customers, there are really only TWO digital platforms worth spending a lot of energy on; Google, and Facebook/Instagram.
For the purposes of this exercise, I’m going to concentrate on Google.
Because Google is the default go-to platform when people are searching for a product or service in their area.
Unless you really know what you’re doing in the back end of the Google ads dashboard, you can waste a lot of money and time. Yes, it’s complicated, it’s easy to make mistakes, and mistakes can cost money.
But if you get it right, you can really knock it out of the park.
The first metric you want to pay attention to is something called the Click Through Rate, or CTR.
That’s the number of clicks the ad gets as a percentage of the number of times the ad is shown when people search.
Now, according to Google’s vast knowledge-base, the average CTR for all the billions of ads shown every day is somewhere between 4% and 6%.
So how would you like to get a CTR of twice or even three times that?
Here’s an ad my team devised for a new gutter-cleaning business:
In a little over 3 weeks since the ads started running, they’ve been shown just under 300 times, and 52 people have clicked on them and gone through to the business’s website.
That’s a click through rate of nearly 18%, three times the Google average. Each click has cost the business $7.68, which is fine, because each sale made is worth many hundreds of dollars.
Here’s another example. This is a liquid waste management company. One of their main revenue sources is pumping out septic tank systems.
Their average CTR for the past month is 10.66% – pretty good. But some of their keywords are producing huge CTRs, up to 44%:
Of course, there’s a LOT more to it that just click through rates. What you’ll pay for each click depends on many variables, for example how much compeititon you face in your target market.
Another crucial thing:
Simply setting up a series of Google ads and sending clicks to the home page of your website and hoping for the best isn’t really going to cut it.
It’s usually best to have a dedicated landing page designed specifically to take traffic from the Google ads.
For example, the ads for the liquid waste management company above send people to a specific page on their website that ONLY talks about septic tanks. You can check it out here: https://shepvts.com/septic-tank-pump-out/