A BIG problem for small business owners is working out if their Google ADWS account is being managed and developed according to ‘best practice’. The same problem exists for Facebook Advertising.
The word ‘Developed’ is a keyword in the previous sentence. A Google Ads and Facebook Advert Account should be worked on constantly in an effort to improve performance – that is, your Account Manager should be constantly ‘optimising’ your account and looking for opportunities to make you more money!
The goalposts are continually changing and if you don’t change as well, you’ll stop kicking goals.
However, it’s difficult for a small business owner to determine if this is being done to ‘best practice’. There are many moving parts and it can get confusing.
To help you solve this problem we have compiled a short list of 4 ‘Must Haves’ that should be apart of every Google ADWORDS and Facebook Advertising account.
If you’re Adwords Manager is NOT doing any of these 4 things then consider changing to a marketing agency that will:
MUST HAVE 1 – Thank-You Pages & Phone Call Monitoring
We’re consistently shocked to discover that many ADWORDS & Facebook accounts are not monitoring when a ‘lead’ fills out a website form. To track such a lead, it is necessary to send the lead to a ‘Thank-You’ page after they submit the form.
Therefore, an easy way to test if your leads are being tracked is to fill out a form on your website and see if you end up on a Thank You page. Although this test is not 100% conclusive, likely, you are not tracking leads if there are no Thank-You pages.
Similarly, you HAVE to track your phone calls. Google Adwords has FREE phone call tracking and there are amazingly valuable and affordable 3rd party services that not only track phone calls but also record them.
The reason why it’s sooooooo important to track these two types of leads is that you need to know which advertising campaign delivered the lead to you.
It is critical that you are aware of the advertising campaigns that are successful and those that aren’t. Then you’re able to ‘double up’ on the campaign winners and close down the campaign losers.
MUST HAVE 2 – Not Just Lead Conversion, You Want Customer Conversion
There are too many marketing agencies who think their job finishes once a Lead is generated. Even worse, some agencies only care about (and report on) advert ‘Click Through Rates’. They don’t take any responsibility for Landing Page development, or what happens to a potential customer after they click on the advert.
Let’s be clear about this. A lead is worth nothing to you. You want customers – not just leads.
A good agency will recognise this distinction and do everything possible to track and influence website visitors as they turn into leads, as well as track and influence leads, as they turn into customers. This will often require development in:
- a CRM system &
- a marketing automation system (sales funnel).
The best marketing systems will report on your Return On Investment (ROI) by tracking customers all the way back to the Facebook or ADWORDS Campaign they were sourced from.
You’ll always get better results if you’re optimising your campaigns based on customer information rather than lead information.
MUST HAVE 3 – Optimise Advert Images, Headlines & Copy Using A/B Testing
A/B testing, or split testing, different adverts is a crucial part of improving the performance of a Google and Facebook Advertising campaign.
It is utterly amazing to watch the difference from one advert to the next as you make small changes to an advert Headline or an Image.
A/B testing is very powerful because the decision making is left to the punter. You don’t need to decide if a picture of a dog or a cat should be used in the advert – produce 2 adverts with an animal in each advert and A/B test to see which is more successful.
If you continually do this, you’ll end up with a set of adverts that are optimised to perform in your particular market.
MUST HAVE 4 – Keep Looking For More Audiences
It’s clear that Google and Facebook know a lot about a lot of people. And all this information is made available to advertisers.
What isn’t immediately clear is the sheer number of ways you’re able to slice and dice this information to target different audiences that could be perfect for your particular market. There’s always a better audience out there and you need to make sure you’re doing everything you can to find them.
An experienced account manager should be continuously testing new audiences and attempting to find one that will make you additional revenue.
In order to do this properly, they need to work efficiently. This is a numbers game and they’ll be crunching through many permutations and combinations in order to identify the wheat from the chaff.
Marketing Implementation Clinic will perform a comprehensive Audit of your Google ADWORDS or Facebook advertising account. You’ll then have the opportunity of choosing one of our advertising packages which are designed for small business.
