For many years, people were able to easily and cheaply drive traffic with Google Adwords. Others made a lot of money by having Adsense on their websites.

Then, Adsense stopped paying well while Adwords became extremely expensive and didn’t seem as effective.

So, is Google learning its lesson? Are Google ads useful again?

The answer is that it depends upon your type of business.

Google Ads Are Useful for Local Businesses

How to Be More Effective?

Make certain that you claim and maintain your business page on Google. It’s free, and gives you the boost you need when people are searching for your business.

I also mentioned “maintaining” your business. Make regular updates if you can so Google knows that you’re still in business.

One other quick tip is to make sure your location targeting is appropriate. Often, people make the area too big or too little. Spend some time finding out where your customers live so you can make adjustments.

Get That Phone Ringing

Did you know Google has “Call-Only Campaigns?”  It rolled out in 2015, and is often underutilized. It’s a great way to get people to call you to make reservations or check to see if you have an item in stock.

According to Google, 70% of mobile searches end up calling a business directly from the search results.

If you’re worried about the cost, rest assured that the ads only show up on mobile devices.

Use Custom Intent Audiences

This was rolled out last year, and is still being improved. Custom Intent Audiences which allows you to provide keywords and URLs and create your own custom In-Market audience.

This is similar to Facebook custom audiences, and it’s also way more powerful. You can advertise to people specifically rather than the old In Market categories. It’s only available on the Google Display Network (GDN) which can sometimes be a bit more expensive for advertising.

But you can set up daily and campaign limits as well as limiting geography.

The key is to test and monitor the campaigns. You may find that you’re spending $500 a month and receiving $2500 in revenue. But if you increase to $1000/month, you get $7500 in revenue.  But, if you increase to $2000, maybe you only get $8000.

That’s why it’s essential to scale slowly, and monitor your numbers carefully. You want to be able to find the sweet spot that works best for your business.

What About Other Business Types?

Right now, the jury is still out for most types of businesses. The competition is fierce and the cost is quite high.

You need to know your numbers. For example, if you’re spending $500 on ads and your revenue is only $501, is it worth it?

It may be if that’s just your front end. If you’re building up a relationship, and your customer lifetime value is a lot more than $1, then it’s worth it.

I’ll keep researching and write an update as I find more.

Using Conversions Instead of Clicks

Finally, make certain you hook up Google Analytics.  It’s free. And when you have analytics connected to adwords, Google will be better able to help you get better conversions based upon how you have it set up.

Looking for more information on conversions?  Check out this article from Google Support.

Because it’s the holiday season, you probably think you should be spending your ad budget right now driving people to your website. And that would be a mistake if you’re still new to the game.

Everyone’s Doing It

Yes, everyone is spending their ad budget hoping to drive people to their website to get more sales by the year’s end. That means that it’s a lot more expensive now than it will be in January. Remember, all advertising platforms utilize auctions. If you’re following my Focused FB Ads method, then you’re using automatic bidding on your Facebook ads.

So the cost per click will go up, and you’ll get fewer views for your set daily amount. One other thing to remember is that your daily budget isn’t precise. Google will let it go over by as much as 20%. (Some people report that it can be twice your daily budget. I personally have not seen that).

The other reason why you don’t want to be spending a lot on ads right now is that people are becoming blind to ads. Their screens are full of this widget and that gadget, and they’re just exhausted. You really have to do something to stick up out of the crowd and off the page.

 

So What Should I Be Spending My Ad Budget

Spend your Facebook ad budget to get more people to like your page. Then you can create a lookalike audience and capture new customers in the New Year.  Ease back on your Bing and Google ads.

If you’re Business to Business (B2B), most companies are fairly dead at this time of year. People are having office parties or are on vacation. So your target audience isn’t paying attention. If you have your Google and Bing ads set up for click conversions, you can let them run. It won’t cost you anything to have impressions show up. But if you’re paying for impressions, you may want to try testing some pay per conversion ads right now to save money.

If you’re Business to Customer (B2C), identify the one or two products that usually sell well and focus on them. Remember, video ads are still performing better than carousel which performs better than a single image. And spend some of your budget testing out Instagram ads. They’re still quite cheap for the result.

What you need to be doing now is planning your next quarter and year. I’ll go more into that in the next post.

Digital advertising is a great way to drive people into your marketing funnel. You may be concerned with the initial  up front costs, but I’ll explain why it will save you money in the long run.

Test Your Funnel

You have no idea if you have the right deal set up unless people go through the funnel.  You’re testing the message, the offer, and the audience.

There’s something called “critical mass” which is essential when you are evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign.

Test the Audience

Using very targeted customer audiences on Facebook at $3-5/day will allow you to test how engaged your target market will be with your offer and landing page. You should let the ad run about 3-5 days to evaluate its effectiveness.

You can pull audiences from people who have already visited your website. Or you can start to test with demographics.

If you set up a fan page, and go into Insights, you will see the demographics of the people who like your page. This could be a good starting point.

You’ll need to ask yourself if they’re buyers or just people who “like” what you’re doing.

Then you can expand by using Look-alike audiences.

Test the Landing Page

There are programs out there called “heat maps” that will show you how people are interacting with your web page. This can be useful if people are expecting something to be a link and it’s not, or they’re not engaging with the Buy Now button. You may want to test adding in more buttons or moving the button around.

Then set up two landing pages to test the text. You may always be running some form of test to see what converts. This is called Split A/B testing.  What you should know is to only test one thing at a time. If you try to test more, then you won’t know what ended up converting better.

This is the scientific part of marketing which I always find fun.

Test the Offer

When you have the correct audience and the correct landing page, then you need to test the offer. You can use Google Analytics to help you with the flow.

If people are leaving your website or not picking up your upsell, it’s time to test if it’s resonating with your target audience. If not, maybe you need a different upsell.

Or perhaps people aren’t taking your second one but are taking your third. In which case, you may want to swap the second and third.

Why? Psychology. When people keep saying “Yes,” then they keep wanting to say “Yes.” Test it and see.

Organic Ranking Is Slow

It could be months before you have enough traffic, and by then, you won’t have been able to optimize your sales funnel.  Think of all the money you left on the table by not optimizing your funnel faster.

Advertising Increases Awareness

I’m sure you’ve heard that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Now you know that’s only true if they know you have the mousetrap.

You can get your product or service in front of more people who have pain but don’t know what to do.

Learn more about Facebook Ads in my Simply Effective Facebook Ads course on Udemy. Use this link and pick it up for $10.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I found this interesting video on Bing native ads. It explains how they are placed within an article. There are additional types of native ads that I’ll discuss below.

Native ads can be used in newspaper or magazine type sites where you have a lot of article titles. You probably saw it on Yahoo where it says that it’s Sponsored Content. I’ve also seen it on my local news site.

How to Set Up A Native Ad

The best native ads don’t look like ads. They look like an interesting story that someone would want to click on.

The best places to start with native ads are revcontent and spoutable. You can get started for $100. Many of the other places have a $1000 minimum.

Outbrain (I’m not sure what their minimum is…they’re a highly recommended company from everyone I’ve talked to) has a great resource page. Read this article and see examples of the best native ads.

Managing Your Native Ad

When you start with $100 you need to “mine” for good widgets first and target only the good ones. There are a lot of bad sites out there that are nothing but ads and it’s hard to get noticed. You can do this easily by going to these sites and examine the code and find the widget or site id’s. You can also that in conjunction with a spy tool like adplexity.

Make sure you’re tracking conversions and how much money you make on the back end. If you’re not making money, change up your ad. Remember that people get ad blindness after seeing it a few times.

If you don’t want to just throw away your money, then you have to learn how to craft good ad copy that produces results.
Everyone knows that, right? But what they don’t tell you is that you have to write a lot of copy to get good copy. And you need to always be testing.
A successful ad produces the right message to the right people at the right time.

There are some simple things that aren’t easy to do. But they will ensure you get a better ad.

Write a Clear and Concise Message

• What is your ad about
• Who is it talking to
• What does the ad want these people to do?

If your purpose is just brand awareness, you want it to be clear who you are and what you offer but no action is necessary on the target audience.
However, if you want them to like your page or sign up for your newsletter, you need to be clear in your copy.

Create a Strong Call to Action

Make sure you have a simple next step for them to follow. Keep the copy simple and consistent with the action.

1. Click Here.
2. Call This Number
3. Sign Up Here (this one I tend to avoid. Very few people like to think they’re signing up for something)
4. Like This Page
5. Watch This Video
6. Get This Free Book

Bounce the Copy Off Someone

Find a trusted person and have them review your copy. You may be missing something. Feel free to use the Facebook Page for this site. Or if you’re in my Mastermind, we can review it there.

Watch The Language

I was talking to a friend in support the other day. She was saying they’re trying to set up “easy to search” support documents for customers. The problem is the customers are using different terms then they would use.

The lesson to be learned? Use the language of your client.

Use forums or question sites to see how people describe something. For example, if you have a high priced item, you may assume that people like it for the snob factor. But what if they like that high priced item because of its safety? You’ll get more conversions if you tell people how safe they’ll be using your product instead of telling them they’ll be the envy of all their friends. (Ok, I confess, I was thinking about my Audi A6. I get teased that I like expensive cars. I do. But after being in a few accidents, the Audi keeps me feeling safer.)

Benefits Not Specifications

A huge and common mistake is to discuss the specifications instead of the benefits. If the person reading the ad goes “So what?” then you missed an opportunity.

You’re going to help this person with a problem. Let’s pretend you’re a small caterer and trying to figure out what stand mixer you should get. In your sales page, if you just said that they have a 59-point planetary mixing motion, the caterer would move on.

But if you said it would allow them to mix larger batches more thoroughly and faster than regular stand mixers, you’d get their attention. Then point out it would allow them to produce their food faster, well, that’s the pain that needs fixing.

Your goal is to have the person reading your copy go “YES! You understand me.”  You want them feeling like you’re talking directly to them. That builds know/like/trust factor, and they’re more inclined to buy.

What do you think?

Is blogging a good idea? In a word, YES!

Ok, Why Is Blogging So Great

Blogging is a way of building up your authority, your authenticity, and your audience. It allows people to get to know you and see how you can help them before they commit money.

There are a number of different reasons to start and maintain a blog including revenue generation, promoting a product and providing useful training information.  The key is consistency. I’m guilty of that myself.  One smart way of getting consistent blogs once you’ve gotten over 30 posts is to go back and update some of your first ones.  That way you continue to provide new information for the search engines, and you’re able to update what you’ve already created.

But I’m jumping way ahead of myself.

How to Start

First, choose your platform. Are you going to use an existing one or will you be setting up a blog on your web pages?

Free options can be great when starting out because, well, they’re free. You don’t have to set up a domain or manage the back end. All you have to do is log in and write. You also get visibility on the web without having to be technical or a web designer. Some free sites have options for downloading your content as a backup.

The downside is that your content is not yours. The provider could disappear and take your hard work with them. You will be limited by their resources, so if your blog gets big, some people may not be able to access it and those that do will have a very slow experience. And sadly, Google tends to look down on free sites.

• Blogger
• WordPress.com (not .org)
• LiveJournal
• Wix
• IMCreator
• Jimdo
• Websitebuilder
• Yola

Typepad is still available but it’s a paid site.  You’ll get better SEO because you’re paying for the service.

You can set up your own domain with a major hosting site like HostGator. They have a one click install of WordPress. They will also try to upsell you on templates and having someone set up the site for you.

Google Rewards Fresh Content

A good blog will also help you with SEO and showing up in organic search results. And as I mentioned, you can update old blog posts and post them on a current day and Google thinks it’s new. Blogging allows you to target keywords. You’ll hear about that frequently when discussing search engine optimization and search engine marketing.  (SEO is optimizing your site for certain keyword phrases so Google knows to recommend your site when someone does a search on that phrase and SEM is finding the right keywords for paid traffic).

Blogging allows you to expand your keywords.  For example, if your main website is targeting people who want to buy digital cameras, your keyword is probably going to be “digital camera.”  You can write a blog post focusing on models and include the keyword “review” as well as “for sale” and make money on affiliate commissions (that’s when you get paid for helping someone else sell a product. Amazon has a good affiliate program for beginners).  And don’t think that’s just for small time. I used to work at large companies that had affiliate links.

Next week, I’ll talk about video blogging. Leave a question in the comments and I’ll address it.

I’ve published a new Udemy course with my friend Boomy. You can sign up for 50% off here. There are 250 coupons available and this expires on 12/31/16, so go sign up for Blogging for Noobees at half price.