When & How To Focus On Google Ads?

Today, I’m going to be answering a question emailed in by Andrea:

“Hi Kyle, I am a small business and absolutely need to be super careful with my advertising budget. I’ve run Google Ads in the past but never did much more than break even. Someone from Google redid all of my ads to help them perform better and they did worse. I was looking for resources to learn how to create Google Ads and came across your Facebook group. Are there any resources you’re aware of for someone new to Google Ads and someone for whom advertising is only one of the many things I have to focus on each day. This is hugely important and I need to learn this.”

By the way, you can also ask your question over voicemail at 701-409-4138.

Great Question! Let me answer this as best as I can because there are a lot of ways I can go with this.

First off, no surprise that when someone from Google redid your ads, they performed worse. That is never an approach I’d recommend.

Now, if you were already breaking even on your ads, that is a great starting point. With just a little more effort, you can start to do more than break even.

Step #1 – Start With Website Messaging

Breakeven is a great place to start. So what should you focus on to make sure your ads are performing better than breakeven? I’d actually start by looking at your website and your offer. If you focus on what you’re selling and what your message on your website is, it is not only going to help your Google Ads – it’ll help everything else you’re doing.

It sounds like you have a lot of things going on. I assume you’re getting traffic from other places than Google Ads, so improving your website and conversion rate is going to be huge. If you do that and change nothing else about Google Ads, the campaign you set up (not the campaign Google set up) sounds like it will be profitable.

Step #2

You might see that if your website starts converting a lot better, you’ll be bringing in more customers and now you don’t have time to focus on Google Ads anymore. Hopefully, you can hire more people to help with that and then focus on Google Ads. If you decide that you are just too busy running your company, you can always hire someone to run your Google Ads.

When it comes to actually focusing on your Google Ads, if you’re at breakeven, that’s great. My first question is, “How do you know that? Are you tracking your conversions already? Or are you just going based on generalizations of how much you’re spending and how much more business you get while running ads?” You need to be tracking your conversions, leads, or sales.

If you have an entire campaign that is breakeven, that means parts of the campaign are losing money and parts are making money. You need to know which is which and the only way to do that is by tracking your conversions. If your conversion tracking is in place and working, now you can focus on what is not working. You figure out either how to make it work or cut it out completely. Maybe there are certain products you’re advertising that are not profitable and it is just not worth the time to try to make it profitable, you can cut those out completely. Maybe there are certain locations or keywords you’re targeting that aren’t working – cut that stuff out.

Then, take a look at what is working and focus on that. If there are certain types of keywords that are bringing you sales, find more keywords like that. Maybe bid more aggressively on the keywords that are bringing sales so you get more traffic. Of course, that all depends on your profitability. You don’t want to increase your bids so much that it’s no longer profitable. There’s always a happy medium there, so you may need to play around with it.

There are a couple of resources I can direct you to:

I have a 14-part series on my YouTube channel to help you audit your Google Ads campaign. This will help you find those areas of your campaign that can be improved and areas that you can fix to see better results.

If you want even more extensive training and if you are running a local business, I have a Google Ads course specifically for local businesses called Elite Local Ads. Don’t buy this training if you don’t want to put in the time because it is a very intensive program. It is meant for marketers who are running campaigns for lots of local businesses or it’s meant for local business owners or employees who really have the time to dedicate to running their own Google Ads campaigns.

It sounds like you are already getting okay results by doing this yourself and breaking even. If you want to get great results, you need to put in the time. If you’re not able or willing to put in the time, then Elite Local Ads is not going to help you.

Thank you for emailing that question in! If anyone else has a question, you can go to googleadsstrategy.com and ask it or call the voicemail line at 701-409-4138. Leave your question there and I might just answer it in an episode.