Google AdWords Lead Generation – 5 Tips to Increase Leads for Your Business

For service industries including local services such as tradesmen, electricians, plumbers, accountants, solicitors etc, having an effective Adwords lead generation strategy is essential.

 

However, the level of competition has shot through the roof and it’s more important than ever to take a unique approach to Adwords advertising.

 

Here are 5 proven tips to help you boost your Adwords lead generation efforts:

 

Increase Ad positions

Your position in the auction results on Google will be an important factor to the performance of your ads and lead gen goals. Top results in the ads means being one of the 1-4 Ads above the organic search results and the actual number of listings there will depend on a number of factors.

 

If you are not in one of these positions then you are likely to appear below the organic search results or on page 2 or 3 of the results. This of course has a number of implications including paying much less Cost Per Click (CPC) bids and you are also most likely to have lower Click Through Rates (CTRs) and therefore much less clicks and leads.

 

There are a number of ways to get to the top listings and boost your Adwords lead generation efforts in the process:

 

⁃ Use a competitor bid strategy like target outranking share to outrank one of your competitors. Pick one of your highest ranked competitors and add their domain in the bid strategy

 

 

 

⁃ If you are using manual bidding, consider increasing your bids significantly but be aware that they are likely to do the same and you may have to continue making manual bid changes, which can be time consuming

 

⁃ Use a top of the first results page strategy. I’ve seen mixed results with this strategy and if you are in a very competitive sector, I would recommend using one of the other options listed above because it is often not so effective.

 

Update Text Ads

It still amazes me this day (March 2018) to find campaigns that are still running the old standard ad formats that were phased out over a year ago. So this tells me that they have not updated their ads in over a year – which is a losing strategy.

 

This is shocking, and one of the reasons why many ads underperform. And it’s no wonder that such advertisers find they have low Click Through Rates (CTRs), low ad rank, low conversions, poor quality scores and an overall poor Adwords advertising experience which leads to disappointing lead generation efforts.

 

Of course this is not limited to standard text ad formats alone. Ads should be regularly updated in line with new features, benefits, offers, trends, knowledge, competitor action and a lot more.

 

Use Bid Modifiers

Bid modifiers are an easier way to maximise anything that is working well for your campaigns, and to minimise any failings that are affecting their performance.

 

So if you have devices, demographics or locations that are working well for you, you should consider increasing bids to maximise performance. If you find, for example, that mobile users have a good conversion rate and your average position is a bit low, you can increase bids by 25% to gain more exposure. And if you find that mobile is underperforming and you want to completely stop appearing for this device type, you can reduce bids by 100%.

 

 

This is true for locations and demographics too, especially if you find some opportunities or threats to maximise or minimise respectively.

 

Use The Right Keyword Match Types

Many advertisers start with phrase match and exact match keywords and this is fine considering that you are likely to have a limited negative keyword list at the beginning to block irrelevant searches. These two match types will help to control the flow of traffic and the type of search terms that you get.

 

You see, it’s important to note that there is a difference between a keyword and a search term. A keyword is what you put in your Adwords campaign and ad group and is related to the ads in the ad group. A search term on the other hand is what your prospects uses to search for your ad.

 

So, if the keyword matches close with the users search term, then your ad will appear in the auction results. This is the part that match types play: to match keywords and search terms and therefore trigger the ads.

 

There are 4 match types: broad, phrase, exact and modified broad match types.

 

This is an example of what they each look like for the keyword – AdWords Expert:

 

“AdWords Expert” – Phrase
[AdWords Expert] – Exact
+AdWords +Expert – Modified Broad
AdWords Expert – Broad

 

You can find out more about each keyword match type option here

 

So, my advice to increase leads is after you’ve run some phrase and exact match types for a while and built your negative keyword list, you should then include modified broad match type keywords to increase volumes and then add broad match ones to really increase traffic a lot more and target synonyms and long tail keywords.

 

Launch Display Campaign

Display ads on the Google Display Network (GDN) are one of the trickiest Ad formats to run. Many advertisers find this channel difficult to master and that’s because of their approach to it. They approach it as they would the Search network, which is a completely different platform altogether.

 

In fact, many advertisers make the mistake of using only keyword targeting for GDN and totally ignore all the other targeting options available to them like demographics, placements, topics, affinity audiences and others.

 

The GDN has many opportunities that go well beyond search advertising for those who approach it the right way and are serious about using it as a top of funnel strategy which can lead to a lot of business down the line.

 

The first thing to think about is who your audience is and where they hang out. Because with GDN, you are not necessarily targeting people that are looking for your services, you should choose your targeting options carefully.

 

For example, a business that provides first aid training courses could look for placements related to first aid courses, however, that is likely to return a low number of websites. The next stage would then be to find related placements that are frequented by their target audience to place their banners on.

 

This will yield a good stream of traffic that will be engaged on the website and will help to increase the lead count.

 

Need help with your Google AdWords Lead Generation strategy? Contact me to find out more about how I’ve helped a wide range of businesses and how yours can benefit too.