Google Ads for Agencies: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads advertising for agencies is the solution for digital businesses that want to advertise effectively online and gain more customers. It provides you with tools to target people that are actively searching online, while also raising awareness for your business and services.

Whether you are a pay per click (PPC) agency, search engine optimisation (SEO) agency, web development agency or a digital marketing agency, a Google Ads campaign is a great way to connect with prospects and get more clients for your business.

Follow these tips to setup your campaign and start advertising on Google and its partner networks.

 

Campaign objective

There are at least six objectives to choose from for a Google Ads campaign for digital agencies. You can test different objectives and even run a campaign without an objective, and then make campaign feature choices based on your own requirements.

However, a Leads objective is likely to be the most ideal because of the range of possibilities you have with this objective.

It helps you drive leads directly from your ads through a lead form or calls directly from the ads. Or you can drive traffic to your website and people can call from there or use a contact form, which happens to be the primary conversion type for this objective.

 

Campaign type

The lead objective then provides you with specific campaign types that you can use.

A Search campaign is the best option for digital agencies because it uses keywords to target people that are actively searching for your digital solutions. This helps you to achieve a high conversion rate because you only target people that are in-market for your services.

You also spend less in the long run compared to other campaign types that focus more on brand awareness. However, the average cost for each keyword is relatively higher for digital agencies than other industries because of greater competition.

 

Budgets

Google Ads advertising for agencies can be competitive and average bids are higher than many similar industries. So you should have a good launch budget to test your keywords and get a good return on ad spend (ROAS).

A minimum budget to start with would be $1500 or £1000 per month. And then work on increasing it as performance improves and ROAS increases.

Bidding

A good bidding strategy to start with for a Google Ads campaign for agencies is Maximise Clicks. This is an automated strategy that gets you as many clicks as possible for your budget. The actual bid is set at auction time, by the machine learning system that factors in many signals to get the best performance.

With more performance data, you can switch to another automated bid strategy that focuses on conversions, such as Maximise Conversions with a target cost per acquisition.

This helps to increase conversions while maintaining a good return on ad spend for your campaign.

 

Keywords

Google Ads is a competitive platform for agencies. There are many digital agencies bidding on the same keywords and this drives the cost per click (CPC) higher. So, it’s important to carry out some thorough keyword research to find long tail keywords that are less competitive.

Some of these will have low search volumes and may not come up when you carry out your initial research. However, adding phrase match keywords will help you to target them.

Don’t start your campaign with any broad match keywords because that is likely to drive many searches that are not relevant. First, build a negative keyword list and when your searches are more targeted, you can increase click volumes with broad match.

Use the Keyword Planner tool in your account to carry out the research. You will find it in the Tools & Settings section.

 

Text ads

The two main text ad formats you can use in your Google Ads campaign are Responsive search ads and call-only ads. With Responsive search ads, the Google Ads system combines the headlines and descriptions based on the search query to make it as relevant as possible to the searcher. So it’s important to provide as many headlines and descriptions as possible.

And with call-only ads, searchers can call directly from your ads and not have to click through to your website first.

A combination of the two is ideal and helps you get as many leads as possible for your agency.

 

Ad schedule

If you have a low budget, like the minimum budget suggested above, then you should focus on the best days and times. Google Ads for agencies can be very expensive and your budget can quickly run out if you run your ads all the time.

Also, you want to appear when you can quickly respond to enquiries and that would be whenever you are working and available or during normal working day hours.

But, it’s important to be aware that people now search at all times and sometimes on the go, on mobile devices. So, running your ads 24/7 could help you capture some targeted searches and contact them when you are available.

The ad schedule tool helps you to set the days and times when you are available as below

 

Where your ads appear

There are a number of places your ads will appear depending on the ‘Networks’ that you’ve chosen. As a digital agency you will need to keep track of the networks, to see how they are performing for your business.

Firstly, your ads will appear on Google at the top or bottom of the search results pages based on your bidding options. Your ads will also appear on Search partner websites if you’ve selected that option. Some clicks on the Search partner websites may cost more or less than your Google Search maximum CPC bid.

A third place your ads can appear is the Display Network if you’ve selected that too. This is a way to get additional conversions at similar or lower costs than Search, with your unused Search budget. This can be quite effective for digital agencies and it is worth testing to see what results you get.

 

Case study

Now Listen PR is a digital marketing agency for musicians and independent artists. They approached me to setup campaigns to target European countries and the US and Canada. This drove a lot of traffic to the website and higher than their previous search campaigns and helped to increase their return on investment (ROI) by over 300%. Check out the case study.

 

Get in Touch

Find out how a well constructed Google Ads campaign for digital agencies can help you increase leads and enquiries for your business. Use the contact form below to get in touch.