Google Ads For Accountants: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

In today’s competitive market, accountants need to have an effective marketing strategy to reach local clients. Running a Google Ads account for accountants is what you need to reach your target market.

Google Ads is a pay per click(PPC) advertising platform that allows you to target people that are actively looking for your accountancy services. This is known as an inbound system and you only pay for performance like impressions, clicks and calls to your business.

To get started with Google Ads for your accountancy practice, visit Google Ads to create your account and then follow the tips below to create your first campaign

Campaign goal

If the goal for your Google Ads account is to drive leads and enquiries, then you should select the “Leads” goal. This determines the features you get to promote your accountancy business.

This also determines the campaign type that is available to you. Because you want to target people looking for an accountant in your location, you should choose the Search campaign.

So, anyone searching for an accountant in your location on Google or its Search partner websites, either on a desktop, mobile or tablet will see your ad and can click through to your website.

Later you can setup other campaign types like Display, Discover and Remarketing to retarget your past visitors or reach them in their Gmail accounts.

 

Campaign type

A Search campaign type allows you to target people actively searching for an accountant in your location. For a “Lead” goal this means you are looking to drive calls and enquiries to your accountancy firm.

After selecting “Search” as the campaign type, you are presented with five options that help you reach your goal.

Because you want to drive leads, the Website visits, phone calls and Lead form submissions from the above would have to be the most ideal. You can select all three and then provide the required info like the website address and phone number and add the lead form.

 

Budgets

To run an effective Google Ads campaign as an accountant you should have the right budget amount. Initially, you will have a small budget to test your ads and keywords and then you can increase it as performance improves.

Many accountants and accountancy practices start with £300 or $300 in their Search campaign and then increase it as search relevance improves and enquiries increase.

 

Bidding

For your Search campaign you have access to both automated and manual bidding strategies. An automated strategy like Maximise Clicks is one of the best bid strategies to start with. It helps you get as many clicks as possible for your budget.

The automated bid strategy sets the bid automatically at auction time and will be determined by many factors like the search term, device used, location, browser and much more.

 

Keywords

When choosing keywords to target, think of the actual searches that people will conduct on Google. They will be many of course, because people search in all kinds of ways when looking for accountancy services, so you won’t be able to add them all as keywords.

However, you can still target them with the keyword match types that you use.

For example, a phrase match keyword like “local accountant” will reach a wide range of searches that include synonyms, misspellings, plurals, singulars, close variants and so on. This will include:

Local accountants – plural
Accountant near me – close variant
Local accounting firm – close variant

You can of course block any that you don’t like as negative keywords, and that will block them from triggering the searches.

 

Text ads

There are a few ad types available for your Search campaign. If you’ve selected ‘phone calls’ above as one way to reach your prospects, then you can add some call-only ads. With this ad type you only pay when someone calls your accountancy practice looking for your solutions.

This can be cost-effective and will save you a lot of money from wasted clicks. However, running call-only ads will limit your reach and lead to less potential traffic.

A responsive search ad gives you wider reach and more text space to promote your accountancy services. Your ads appear on all devices and the Google machine learning algorithm picks the best headline and description combinations to maximise your reach at auction time.

 

Locations

As an accountant targeting local clients, you have the option to target a town, city, postcodes, county or territory. Or you can use radius targeting to target people within distance of a location like a town or postcode. You can also add multiple locations in one campaign like cities that are related to your customer base.

 

Ad schedule

When your ads are active is important because that determines who sees them and what enquiries and leads you get. As an accountancy practice, running ads during working hours only is a standard option because you will reach businesses and people that are ready to make contact and sign up for your services.

However, running ads 24/7 is also beneficial as people now do a lot of research outside working hours – in the evenings and weekends. This prevents any missed opportunities and you can increase clicks and enquiries through reaching all searches in your location.

In Ad Schedule, you can set the days and hours when you want your ads to be active. And then change it as you assess performance of the best performing times.

 

Where your ads appear

Your ads will appear on Google alongside other accountancy firms in your targeted locations – whether that be city, postcodes, towns, countries, counties, radius targeting and so on.

If you include the Search partners in your targeting, your ads also appear on other Google properties like YouTube and Google Video when people are searching – and also third party search platforms that have partnered with Google to provide results.

 

Case Study

MBS Accountants has many years’ experience providing accountancy solutions to service-based businesses. They contacted me to help them improve their Search campaigns in Google Ads. After an initial review, I recommended they setup a new Search campaign and a Remarketing campaign to retarget past visitors. This helped to reduce their Cost Per Click (CPC) Rate To £3 per click on average and to increase conversion rates up to 12%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in touch

Want to know how a Google Ads campaign for Accountants can help your accountancy practice? Fill out the form below and I’ll get back to you with more info.