Google Ads are awesome: they allow your company to appear at the top of page one for all of your desired searches. The issue is, over the years the cost of Google Ads has increased while their effectiveness has diminished. But don't worry, they still work great but you must evolve your marketing strategy to get the most out of them. And that's what we address with this video! We actually share our secret sauce on how we routinely create some of the top-performing Google Ad campaigns in the nation.
Video Transcription
Dave Martin (00:00):
Hey everybody. What do you do when your Google Ads don't work? Well, that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to give you the problem of why Google Ads ROI is on the decline and also our solution. Here's a hint. Thunder and lighting. Need I say more?So what do I mean when I say that Google Ads don't work as well as they used to? Well, let's think back and reminisce to a much simpler time. 2013. Now think back to 2013. This right here, we'll call this a sales funnel and this is when somebody becomes a client. Now, right here, these are Google Ads and up here, this is things like TV and billboards. With TV and billboards, you can't target people very well. It's very much a shotgun approach to advertising. The opposite though is Google. If let's say you're selling RayBan sunglasses and somebody Googles RayBan sunglasses, your Google ad appears to that person. So it's real time advertising as it never has been before, which is why Google Ads are very expensive. But back in 2013, they worked really well. Somebody clicks on the ad and largely they become a client. Well, what's happened since then? Well, in 2019, this same sales funnel exists. But here's the problem. When somebody clicks on a Google ad, unlike in 2013 when they largely become clients, the bottom of the funnel has gotten much longer in 2019. So what does that mean?
(01:55):
Well, if back in 2013, a person clicked on a Google ad and became a client right away, well, now in 2019, when somebody clicks on a Google ad, they don't become a client. So how do you get them back in your funnel? Well, if you're using Google Ads again to get them back and what happens? They still don't become a client and then even again, they still don't become a client until finally, they click on the fourth Google Ad and become a client. Well, in some industries, if a click is say, 20, 30, $50 a click, this could get incredibly expensive and in some cases it becomes cost prohibitive to do advertising on Google and that's the difference between 2013 and 2019. The funnel has gotten much longer or in other words, the cost to acquire a client on Google has gotten much more expensive. Now, for some of you, this might already confirm what you were thinking, like, "Gosh, my Google Ads, they're just not working as well as they used to," And for others, this might be a light bulb moment, like, "Of course, that is the reason why."
(03:13):
No matter what, here's our solution. We like to call it our thunder and lightning [inaudible 00:03:21] All right, and so it utilizes both Facebook and Instagram as well as Google. But what the point is is that it gets somebody down this funnel a lot more cost effectively. So what does it look like? Well, when you talk about thunder, you can hear thunder. But you can't see it and with lightning you can see it. But of course you can't hear it. So what is thunder? In this case, thunder's going to be Facebook and Instagram. You can target your potential clients on Facebook. Now, let me grab my pen here. Where's Facebook in the sales funnel? Well, Facebook's about in the middle, okay? With Facebook, I can target you on all the things that you love putting in Facebook and updating to your friends and family and coworkers. Me as a marketer, I could target you based on all that data. Now, Facebook is great because I know the kind of things that you like to do, the restaurants you go to, the clothes you like to wear.
(04:29):
But it doesn't mean that you're in market to buy that, to where Google, well shoot, that ad pops up when you're searching for it. So because it's not quite as low in the funnel, Facebook ads are a lot cheaper. In other words, most clicks on Facebook are around a dollar to where the average click on Google is well over $10 and in many cases, they could be over $100 a click. So the question is, if this is as long as the sales funnel has gotten in 2019, does it have to be this expensive to create a client and the answer is no. So back to the thunder and lightning funnel. So thunder is Facebook and Instagram. Utilizing Facebook and Instagram, you can target your potential clients with image-based ads, even video ads because you could target them based on where they work, based on their title, if you're a B2B customer. There's a variety of ways to target your potential clients. Now, once they click on your ad and they go to your website, the chances are they're not going to become a client. But here's the good news.
(05:40):
You've only paid a dollar for that click, not like with Google where you've paid 10, 20, 50, or $100 for that click. You've only paid a dollar. Well, once they go to your website, you're going to drop a pixel on their site, which will allow you to re-target them with Google Ads. Now, that's the lightning. Thunder is Instagram and Facebook where you can only hear it. You can't see it. The lightning, that's something that can kill you. Well, that's Google. Now what a Google ad, a Google retargeting ad is, it's the same thing as this kind of Google ad here, except that Google retargeting ad only appears to people that have been on your website before. So if somebody clicks on the thunder part of this, the Facebook, Instagram, if somebody clicks on that affidavit, goes to your site, they know what your company's about. Now, they may not become a client yet. But they know what you're about. You've built some trust and you've established yourself in their eyes. But then when they go and Google to actually search for that service, that's when your ad will hit them.
(06:50):
Now, that's a Google click worth paying for. This company knows who you are because they've clicked on a Facebook ad for a dollar. But now when they see your Google ad and they click on that, when they land on your website, they're going to be much more familiar with who you are as a company and the value that you represent. That right there is the thunder and lightning funnel and we have seen numerous clients of ours get amazing results with this. So let me go ahead and give you some examples of some of the clients that we've used with this and the results they've gotten. We have a solar subcontractor client. So their clients or customers are actually not people like you and me wanting solar for their roof.
(07:37):
Their ideal target audience are solar contractors that when they get too busy and they don't want to overstaff, they'll use a solar subcontractor to fulfill their projects and the problem is, if you do simply Google Ads for solar, you're going to get a ton of people that are looking to get solar on their own house and if you just do solar subcontractor searches, even within California, not just one city in California, you don't have a lot of searches.
(08:10):
So it made us have to rethink our positioning and our strategy and so what we decided to do is use the thunder and lightning approach and so that would mean utilizing Facebook and utilizing Instagram by targeting in the project managers of gigantic solar contractors, many of them based on the east coast and in the Midwest that were doing projects in California and so we started to hit them with these ads that over a series of time in clicks would build trust and familiarity with our client and then of course, putting the pixel on these potential clients' browsers so that when they actually use Google to search for a solar subcontractor in California, that our client's ad would be at the top of Google every single time and this strategy has yielded millions of dollars for this client of ours. Another example of our thunder and lightning funnel is our commercial trucking client. Now, initially we were just doing Google Ads for them. But we found over time many of the clicks came from people looking for larger trucks to pull their fifth wheels and their trailers and things like that.
(09:32):
So we used the thunder and lightning funnel to first target people on Facebook and Instagram based on where they worked, the areas they worked, the kinds of websites that they go to. These are all targeting parameters within Facebook and once they clicked on those ads, they were pushed to our client's website, creating trust, creating awareness and then once they go back to Google and search for a commercial truck, then our client's ad appears at that point. They click on it. They're much more familiar. They know what our client's about and that's what's actually made a huge difference for our commercial trucking client. Now, the last one is we have a commercial roofer that we've used the same strategy for and it started really kind of the same. We were just doing Google Ads and we found that many people that were searching for roofing did not want to put or for whatever reason, didn't put industrial or commercial as a qualifier and we knew, well, we're going to lose a lot of people that may need a commercial roof. But when they go on Google, they just look up roofers.
(10:44):
The problem is when you do that, you're going to get a lot of clicks from people looking for residential roofers. You're going to pay a lot of money for clicks that you really don't want clicking on your ads. So we also use the thunder and lightning funnel strategy again and by doing ads on Facebook and doing ads on Instagram, we're able to educate people through a series of visuals, whether through video and images, to show what our client was all about, their value they conveyed and then we dropped the pixel on their browser and later hit those same people with Google Ad retargeting ads. This strategy has yielded a gigantic ROI for all three of these clients and it could do the same for you. So why does the thunder and lightning funnel work? How come this can't work anymore? This is so much easier. Well, here's the thing.
(11:43):
What the thunder and lightning funnel does is it builds trust in your community and if you don't believe this is an effective way to build new clients, then go ahead and Google personal injury attorney Los Angeles and you're going to see the Google Ads that appear at the top of that search. If you click on any of those ads, it's going to cost them between 150 and $225 a click. But that's not the point. The point is, look at the landing pages. None of them are going to win some amazing design award and yet these attorneys are willingly paying tens of thousands of dollars a month for these clicks to push traffic to these really basic landing pages. So why do these landing pages work? Well, it's because these attorneys have invested the time and effort to build trust in their community so that when somebody clicks on their ad and they go to their website, they go, "Oh yeah, I've seen these guys before," versus you click on an ad, you go to a site you've never seen. "Yeah, let me keep looking." The way people make decisions, they're emotional.
(12:57):
Everybody makes decisions usually based on emotion and then later they justify it rationally that that emotional decision was the right decision and that's just how people are. So the reason that this thunder and lightning phased funnel works is that it acknowledges the fact that you have to build trust first before you just go straight to Google Ads. Otherwise, you're wasting money on getting a lot of clicks and just not creating that sense of, "I got to call this person or this company right now." That's really why this works so well. Okay, bonus tip time. Now, I might do a separate video just on this. But I'm going to go ahead and throw it out there because this tactic is making a huge difference for some of our clients and I'm just going to go ahead and share it with you right now. When you utilize Facebook or Google, somebody clicks on your ad and goes to your site and as I said, you drop a pixel on their site.
(13:59):
It allows you to target them no matter where they go within reason throughout the internet just like if you were shopping for a pair of shoes and now that same pair of shoes is following you everywhere across Facebook and the internet, wherever you go. Well, that is retargeting like we talked about here. But here's the issue is that you're retargeting based on an IP address. An IP address is anything that searches the internet, whether it's a smartphone or it's a laptop computer or a desktop computer. They all have IP addresses that are a unique identifier to each device. Well, what Google is doing when you do retargeting is you're able to track that person across a lot of different devices with your ads. But here's the hard part is that that IP address that you paid that click for, well, that still is Google's and after a certain period of time, Google will delete those IP addresses that you've paid clicks for and you're retargeting actively. But at a certain time, Google will delete them and the same thing with Facebook.
(15:06):
When people click on a Facebook ad, then you can re-target them with the Google ad, that whole thing, Facebook will delete those IP addresses as well. But here is the bonus tip. You should use a third party analytics software like Mixpanel because what Mixpanel allows you to do is drop the same cookie or script when somebody clicks on the affidavit. But then Mixpanel will record that IP address as well as Google as well as Facebook. But with Mixpanel, you don't have to delete those IP addresses and you could segment them from these IPs came from Google. These IPs came from Facebook or these IPs went to this product page. These IPs went to that product page. So it allows you to send segmented advertising to each one of those buckets of people, very similar to email marketing. When you get an email from somebody, you could put it in a bucket of, if I'm shopping for cars, this person's interested in a truck. These people are interested in a car.
(16:13):
These people are interested in minivans and then when you have some sale on trucks, well then you just send that to the people that you have email addresses for that were interested in trucks. Well, that's email marketing. But this is IP address marketing. So instead of sending an email, you could send a targeted piece of digital advertising to just people that were interested in a specific product. So imagine not only can you segment IP addresses, but now using something like Mixpanel, you can hold on to these IP addresses for much longer than Google or Facebook allows you to hold onto them. So you're building a list of targeted people that you've spent a ton of money to click on your ads, whether through Google or Facebook. You should hold onto those IP addresses, not just Google and not just Facebook. Okay, so I hope you enjoyed what to do when Google Ads don't work and I hope I gave you some ideas. So just to give you some takeaways, the first is Google has gotten incredibly expensive as we talked about, comparing 2013 to 2019.
(17:24):
It's gotten very expensive because the bottom of the funnel, which is where Google Ads exists is incredibly long now. So it costs a lot more to create a client. Therefore, the cost to acquire a client has skyrocketed. Now, of course, Facebook Ads is a great way to send people down this funnel. Instead of spending 30, 40, $50 a click all the way down, you could spend a dollar a click, which obviously means you're going to make a lot more money per client that you acquire and another thing that Facebook allows you to do is build trust and that's why the thunder and lightning funnel works so well because you're able to build trust with your potential clients and it should come as no surprise. Just think about how you shop. Do you ever just click on an ad and buy? Of course you don't. You click on a lot of ads or maybe you don't even click on ads. You click on blog posts of comparing one product to another and when you're close to buying, you might click on an ad.
(18:28):
The point is, most people don't just click on an ad and buy. They're trying to gather information. So this strategy does that for you by building trust, utilizing Facebook targeting your potential audience very inexpensively and the last, of course, but not least, is the bonus tip. Those IP addresses that Google and Facebook uses to re-target all that money you spend on those clicks, well, they're going to dump that data at a certain point. So instead of that use Mixpanel, a third party analytics software and there's other softwares out there, not just Mixpanel. But we like Mixpanel. But they grab your IP addresses. You could segment them, put them in different buckets, allowing you to target them with targeted advertising. Whenever you have a new product launch, whenever you have a new service, it's just a great way to digitally wrap your arms around your potential clients. Thanks.
