Google Ads for Consultants: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads advertising for consultants continues to grow and many firms are seeing the benefits of launching a keyword marketing strategy to reach their goals. Using the latest tools provided by Google, you’re able to see what businesses are searching for and the size of that market and implement that in your campaigns.

Whether you’re an IT consultant, management consultant , marketing consultant, financial advisor or other, a pay per click (PPC) campaign is the solution to targeting people searching for your services.

To get started, first create an account at ads.google.com if you don’t have one yet and then create your first campaign. I’ve included instructions below on how to setup your Google Ads campaign.

 

Campaign objective

Choosing a marketing objective, you will receive campaign suggestions that will help you achieve your goals. A Google Ads campaign for consultants should focus on getting enquiries and leads, and so the best objective is ‘Leads’.

This objective helps you to get leads and other conversions by encouraging customers to take action from your ads and your website.

Your visitors are able to call you directly from your ads or use the lead form on your ads to contact you. And they can visit your website too and call you from there or use your contact form.

 

Campaign type

Next, you can choose the campaign type that will help you achieve your objectives. The most effective Google Ads campaign for consultants is the Search campaign which allows you to target businesses and individuals searching for your services on Google.

Search is the most popular campaign type in Google Ads. It’s an inbound campaign which focuses on targeting people that are actively searching, and so is the best for consultants looking to advertise online.

 

Budget

One of the challenging areas of setting up a new campaign is deciding on what budget to set. This is a challenge especially for new advertisers with little or no experience setting up and running PPC campaigns.

One of the best ways to solve this is to do some keyword research which I describe below. This will help you find the keywords that you want to bid on and you will be able to see what the average cost per click is. And that will help you decide on your budget.

For consultants, it’s a good idea to start with a test budget to test the ads and keywords and see what returns you will get. A good budget for the first month is $700 or £500 and then you can increase it as performance improves.

 

Bidding

Your bid strategy is how you optimise your bids to meet your advertising objectives. In your Search campaign, there are automated and manual bid strategies. And you can use each of them at different stages of your advertising.

With automated bidding, the system sets bids automatically based on your goals. And with manual bidding you set your bids on your own and that can be for ad groups or keywords.

 

Keywords

In Google Ads, consultants can use the Keyword Planner tool to carry out research and find targeted keywords to bid on. This is a free tool and it includes forecasting tools to see what you are likely to spend each month for your keywords.

Also, focus on using phrase and exact match keywords to control the searches that you get. Later, you can add broad match type keywords to target additional search terms, as you increase your budget.

This is an example of a keyword in phrase and exact match formats and you can do the same for all the keywords that you find.

“IT consultant” – phrase match keyword
[IT consultant] – exact match keyword

 

Text ads

A Google Ads Search campaign for consultants uses Responsive search ads to target people that are searching on Google. The ads include up to 15 headlines and four description lines and you should include the main benefits and features of your services and a call to action.

Later you can add Dynamic search ads to target searches that your keyword-based ad groups are not targeting. Regularly check your Recommendations page to see if there are any recommendations to create a Dynamic search ad.

 

Ad schedule

The Ad schedule feature helps you choose the days and hours when you want to run your ads. This helps you target the best times when your audience is searching and looking for a consultant in your industry.

The campaign is set to run ads on all days and hours by default but you can change this to the times you want. For many consultants, running ads during working hours turns out to be a good option. However, people now search at all times including weekends and evenings. And usually these people are decision makers and you may want to reach them at those times too.

 

Where your ads appear

Running a Search campaign in Google Ads for consultants means targeting people that are searching on Google and its partner sites. Your ads will be eligible to appear on Google when people search with the keywords that you’ve included in your campaign.

Your ads can also appear on the Search Network and Display Network if you’ve opted into these.

The Search Network includes hundreds of platforms that partner with Google to show ads on their search results. And some of these are Google-owned properties like YouTube, Google Images, Maps and Google Play.

With the Display Network your ads will be eligible to appear on some of the many Display sites and apps available when you’re not using all of your budget on Search.

 

Case Study

CNS IT is an IT Consulting business that offers a broad spectrum of services to businesses that have a host of computing related issues. They are in a very competitive sector and they needed help to setup a new Search campaign to target businesses within a certain radius of their location. I created a new campaign which helped achieve a 9% conversion rate, which is difficult to achieve in this industry. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

Need help setting up your Google Ads campaign? I help many consultants setup and manage effective pay per click campaigns in Google Ads. Contact me to find out how I can help.