Running a small business comes with its own set of challenges, let alone trying to get the most from PPC on small budgets and restrictions. Many businesses I speak to at my consultancy thebigmarketer.com say PPC doesn’t work. They are wrong of course, it’s all about leveraging all features of Google Ads. Here are some top tips to get the most from your small business PPC campaigns.
1 Utilize Location Extensions
If the business you are promoting provides location based services then make sure you are utilizing location extensions. To use location extensions you need to register your business with the service Google My Business and then link your business account to Google Ads. The location extension means that a your ads will appear with your business address and will have a link to the location of your business within Google maps. Your ad is eligible to show within the Google maps search results too.
2 Get Reviews
Are you taking advantage of your reviews. Review platforms like Trustpilot allow you to add a snippet of code to your web page that allows your star rating to show in search engines. This is great for PPC because it shows the star ratings within your text ad, which can give your CTR a boost. Your CTR is the biggest factor that determines your keyword quality score, so it’s definitely worth doing.
3 RLSA Can Pay
With small business there are far less fish in the sea when it comes to searches for your services and inquiries when compared to national bigger businesses. Which is why it is important to keep your brand in the mind of a potential customer after they visit your site and don’t convert.
Remarketing List for Search Ads mean you can build an audience of people who have already visited your site, and when they return to Google to search for your services again you can serve ads, increase bids and select keywords based on the fact they have already visited your site. So you can tailor your message specifically to get them to convert this time around, and also bid more aggressively as they would already be aware of your brand will be more inclined to click through and convert.
You can read more about RLSA here: https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2701222?hl=en-GB
4 Maximize Traffic Volumes
If you are a car mechanic in Newcastle and somebody performs the search “mechanic in Newcastle” from London would you want to appear in the search results? Of course you would, even if they are based in London they are showing intent to get the service in your area. Maybe a friend or relative lives in Newcastle and the inquiry is coming from London but on behalf of someone in Newcastle.
To ensure that you appear for these searches, separate your Google Ads account into Local and National campaigns. The nationally targeted campaigns should only contain keywords containing a geographical location. These keywords in the nationally targeted campaign should only use phrase match, exact match or modified broad match on the location term. This is to give the keyword no chance of broad matching to non-location based searches outside of your target serviceable area.
By doing this you are maximizing your traffic volumes and picking up on traffic you wouldn’t ordinarily get. The local campaign keywords shouldn’t contain a location and terms like “local mechanic” would be fine as the ads will only serve within your defined target location.
5 Make Sure Inquiries Are In Serviceable Areas
If you are running a location based small business campaigns there is nothing worse than wasting clicks on people who are outside of your serviceable area. With the above campaign structure in place, ensuring keywords containing geographical areas are separated into a different campaign to the non-geographical keywords, you can will be able to measure the results of non-geographical keywords separately in the dimensions tab.
The reason for analyzing non geographical keywords within the dimensions tab is to ensure that your traffic is coming from within your target area.
You can find out how to optimize campaigns by location in more detail here
Log into Google Ads, type “predefined reports” into the search box and head to “Locations” then “User Locations”. Using the user locations report you can easily see how much traffic you are getting from outside of your target area.
If you are consistently receiving out of area traffic, add the offending areas as exclusions within the targeted locations in the settings tab.
If you still get out of area inquiries and you are on a budget, you can change one of the advanced targeting settings within the “Location Options (Advanced)” option in the settings tab.
If you change the target from the default which is “People in, searching for or who show interest in my targeted location” to the more targeted option of “People in my targeted location” You can ensure that your budget is only spent within your target area for particular campaigns.
