Google Ads Strategies: Driving Quality Leads in a Hurry

Hello, everyone. I’m Tiger Rensch from Vertical Measures. Today, I want to talk about how to generate quality leads fast.

A lot of times, if you’ve been working with a digital marketing agency, you’re employing a full funnel approach. And, that’s great, but in real life, we need to stop the bleeding (so to speak). So, how can we do that with Google AdWords call-only ads? Let’s jump right in.

STEP 1

The first step is to open your Google AdWords account. You should see a screen similar to this one:

Go to Campaigns and click the blue +Button and select New Campaign. From this window, we want to create a search campaign. We also want to optimize the campaign for lead generation. From here, you can tell Google that any conversion action should be Phone Call. Type in your phone number and click Continue.

STEP 2

The Campaign Naming Convention is determined by whether or not you’re targeting branded terms, as well as your geographical location. So, for this example, I’ll type in Arizona // NonBrand.

Deselect the Include Google Search Partners. Call-only ads just show the phone number and only work on mobile devices, so you don’t want them running on other websites that don’t support click to call.

As I scroll down, you’ll see Arizona’s already selected as my Geographical Region. But you could type in any other locations here, and as many as you want. If you have Predefined Audiences, this would also be the time to add those.

For Budget, I typically recommend doubling your target cost per conversion (CPC). So, if it typically costs your organization $50 to obtain a lead, I suggest starting out with $100.

When setting your Bidding Type, you want to bid for Conversions. If you’re worried that Google’s algorithm doesn’t have enough information to optimize for conversions yet, I suggest just bidding for Clicks, with a maximum CPC. Select Save and Continue.

STEP 3

Building the Ad Group is the fun part. Name your ad group based on the terms you’re going to target. In this case, I’ll target digital marketing terms. Keep in mind, if you have a landing page, you could enter that information here and Google will find keyword suggestions for you.

Because this example focuses on call-only, we won’t have a landing page. Instead, we’ll just give Google our own keyword ideas.

Now, we have this whole list of suggestions we could add to our Ad Group Target. Keyword targeting can get pretty advanced and if you don’t know the proper match types and how to set those up, you might want to hire a professional to help you with this part. Start here!

STEP 4

I always recommend setting up at least three separate ads per ad group. The difference with a call-only ad as opposed to a standard-text ad is that the phone number acts as the headline. So, it’s important to include your main value proposition to be in the description.

When creating the ad, enter the name of your business. In Description Line 1, enter your greatest value proposition. This might be something like “First Month Free”. In Description Line 2, enter you call-to-action. For Display URL, put the URL of your website as well as any Verification URL you’d like to use. This could be your website homepage; a different landing page; anything you want.

The most important part of this step is to select Call Reporting ON. This will track and monitor phone calls that are made from your ads, so Google can tell you:

• Whether or not a phone call lasted long enough to consider it a conversion
• Exactly how long it lasted
• Where the phone call came from

Always select Call from Ads as the Conversion action. And that’s it, you’ve set up your first call-only campaign!