Justin Croxton (00:01):

Hey, how’s it going, everyone? Justin Croxton here at Propellant Media. Wanted to talk about a… I don’t know if I call this an esoteric topic, but it’s certainly a topic that is pretty important when it comes to Google ads.

Justin Croxton (00:15):

A lot of times, if you have a client that is running a campaign in Google ads, through the search campaign that is, and you’re just doing everything in your power to improve the click-through rates and they just look sucky. They’re 1%, 2%, you’re trying to get them up to 5, 6, 7, 10% in many cases; there’s a number of things that you can do and a lot of stuff that we do here to help in that process. Now, this list isn’t fully expansive, but I think in is a pretty good one, actually, that we go by, that’s helped us in many of the more difficult campaigns that just weren’t doing well.

Justin Croxton (00:52):

And so, from a best practice standpoint, I just wanted to give everybody some context into what surefire, if you do these things, you are absolutely going to at least double your click-through rates within your campaigns. Particularly if their campaigns are really, really bad. You just don’t have a good copy or things of that nature. So, hear me out for a second.

Justin Croxton (01:14):

So, I want to talk a little bit about when you’re building out your infrastructure within your campaigns. This part is super important. So, the first thing that we always say is you want to separate your campaigns by product and service. You really need to plan that out well. And part of the reason is that if you create a campaign around a product or a service, so, let’s say I’m a home care services, and I don’t know, say I’m a roofing company. And for roofing, I can actually do a repair for a roof or someone can buy a roof, and someone in their mind knows that those are their two options.

Justin Croxton (01:54):

You don’t want to really talk about or have copy talking about repairs for the purchase of a roof. And then the other way around, you don’t want to about, let’s call it, repairing a roof that gets put in the campaign for buying a roof. You want those to be separated out so that when you’re building your ads, your ads are very specific to the product or the service.

Justin Croxton (02:19):

And I can’t tell you how many people that we come across, how many campaigns that we run here at our firm; they deal with that same thing, or they just say, “I’m just going to lump them all into one campaign and leave it at that.” If you start here, this is going to give you certainly a leg up as you’re building out more campaigns.

Justin Croxton (02:37):

So, another great example is a personal injury attorney. If you’re a PI attorney, you want to have a campaign that’s for car accidents, you want to have a campaign that’s for trucking accidents, you want to have one that’s for motorcycle accidents; so that your ad copy can be very singular, very micro-targeted to the keyword relative to the product or service that you’re promoting. So if you do that, you’re going to be off to the race. So, that’s the first thing for everyone that’s out there in terms of campaign infrastructure.

Justin Croxton (03:08):

Next, you want to ensure that your ad copy on responsive ads is closely related to the product of the service. So, it’s similar to what I was saying before, but you just want to take the next step in building out that ad copy. So, we were talking about the PI attorney. If it’s a motorcycle accident, your headline might be, “John Wall and Associates: Motorcycle accident attorneys, motorcycle accident lawyers, motorcycle accident… We protect motorcycle accident victims. Call us today.” Just things that are in the motorcycle realm is going to be that individual ad that’s relative to that particular product or service. If you do that, you’re going to be in a good shape. So, I want you to just look at it from that perspective.

Justin Croxton (04:01):

Always have call to actions in the headlines and descriptions, always, and I do mean always. We’ve seen just with a lot of the testing that we do, this really does make a difference when it comes to building out those ads. And just real quick, I just want to make certain, I want to pull something in here so everybody can see it. Just bear with me a second. Okay. So, we’re going to build out some ads. All right. So, I want to pull this down. I just want to show everybody a couple things.

Justin Croxton (04:34):

But a lot of times, if you are building out an ad; if you just say who are or what you’re about, there’s something about having the call to action peppered in many different places. You don’t have to get crazy with it, but, “Call today, contact us today, learn more.” Having that in the headline has a tendency to cause someone to actually click on your ad. You don’t know what it is. I mean, it could be a certain level of psychology that’s there.

Justin Croxton (05:03):

But if you go here, I’m just going to pull my screen down a little bit so you can see this. You’ll notice that this is a local brand, Louisville Spray Foam Insulation, “Get a free quote today.” You can see that we try our best to ensure that we’re getting the individual call to action in the headline, as well as in the description. Do that every time, you’re definitely going to see your ads improve from a click-through rate perspective. Perfect.

Justin Croxton (05:39):

Pepper your copy with numbers. When I say pepper your copy with numbers, what I mean by that is, if you’re able to offer a discount, like a 20% discount or maybe you have some hours that you already automatically put in there. “Open till 7:00 PM, seven days a week,” or something like that. It’s something about having the numbers in the ad copy that draws the eyes to your ad when someone does a search. So if you’re a personal injury attorney, maybe you put in there, “Open 24/7. We take calls 24/7.” Something in along those lines really does make a difference. We’ve seen that, we’ve tested that all the time. Most cases, having those numbers performs better than just having straight copy in your ads.

Justin Croxton (06:30):

And then the other thing that I didn’t mention and is sometimes I will also have special characters, but you can’t go crazy with the special characters. You can’t put a ton of exclamation points. You can’t put a bunch of bars in your ad copy. I think the most that you can do is you might be able to do quotation marks from time to time. But aside from that, play around with it. But something that breaks up the text and makes sense is going to make a big difference for you long term.

Justin Croxton (07:02):

We also do title case. So, for those who don’t know what title case means, is that the first letter of each word is capitalized. So, Low Cost Spray Foam Insulation. Every single letter of the first word of each word is capitalized. We’ve tested this. It just performs better. That’s all you got to worry about from that perspective.

Justin Croxton (07:31):

Conduct proper competitor research. So a lot of times, if we’re trying to build out copy for many of our clients, we will do a crap load of searches across many different keywords that’s relevant to our brand and relevant to our client’s brand. And so when we do that research, it just helps generate new ideas. You may think that you have all the ideas and all the answers for the ad copy, you may have gone through a brand strategy. Do the competitor research because you’ll be surprised how some of the competitors are doing, and also what tactics they’re leveraging in terms of their own ad copy. And you don’t have to take everything that they’re doing, it just helps generate new ideas that you might want to provide some variations on. We do that all the time, you should do it as well, without a doubt.

Justin Croxton (08:23):

SKAGs. SKAGs stands for single keyword ad groups. Here’s the reason why I’m a big proponent of SKAGs, single keyword ad groups. Part of the reason is that I think over a past year, Google has made it much more difficult for brands to see which keywords are performing well. And so, let’s say, you take motorcycle accidents is a great example. Let’s say you lump every single motorcycle accident keyword in that campaign for motorcycle accidents; motorcycle accident attorney, motorcycle accident lawyer, et cetera, et cetera. You may not have the opportunity to make changes to those ads that’s within that ad group, unless you have them all separated out as single keyword ad group.

Justin Croxton (09:13):

So what I mean by that is as you’re looking at the data, you’re seeing all these keywords for personal injury attorneys, personal injury lawyers, all these different keywords. But if you lump all of those into one ad group, and also all of the ads into one ad group, it doesn’t give you more control. You’re not able to make the proper changes to individual ads that could help improve performance across each individual ad group, if that makes sense.

Justin Croxton (09:46):

And so in many cases, and it’s really not difficult, gang, to create a single keyword ad group. Many times when we’re, we’re running campaigns, we’ll have of 40, 50, 60 key single keyword ad groups, and there’s different tools that allows you to do that. And then you can monitor the performance of each one, and if you want to improve, you can change the copy up for the keyword that’s within that particular ad group, relative to that particular ad. We do that all the time. It also helps improve overall your ad rank as well. And so, a lot of times we do like to do single keyword ad groups. Every once in a while we might put more keywords than just one into a theme and then just put one or two ads into that particular ad group, but many times we like to do single keyword ad groups.

Justin Croxton (10:38):

Let’s see here. Next. Use 80% of ad extensions. So, let’s make sure we’re clear on that. So, that includes the call outs, site links, call extensions, your pricing, structured snippets. Make certain I’ve spelled that correctly, structured snippets. Your location extensions, and there’s also a lead gen form.

Justin Croxton (11:01):

If you can imagine when your ads are showing up at the top of Google, and let’s say we come in here and we did a quick Google search, you go and can see I got a ton of stuff on my screen. Personal injury attorney Atlanta.

Justin Croxton (11:21):

Well, first of all, these guys are currently utilizing not structured snippets, but these are local service ads. So, we definitely recommend those for sure. But then for the people, you see they have a phone number extension, they have a location extension, they have their hours of operation as well, they have site links rocking there too. They have a lot of stuff going, and so they’re utilizing… You can see, the more you utilize, the higher position you’ll have in certain cases, but the more real estate you get, and that’s the key. We’re just trying to get as much real estate for when that person does that search, we’re showing up at the top effectively. And so, I want you all to think about that as you’re building out your ads and building out your campaigns.

Justin Croxton (12:04):

Now, there are certain cases where I won’t recommend certain ad extensions, one of them being in site links. If my focus is a pure lead gen campaign, and I only have one landing page that helps accomplish that; I don’t want people getting distracted with other site links, unless I have lead on those landing pages as well on those site links. Otherwise, I wouldn’t use site links. I’d use probably call outs, probably use call extension, structured snippets location, and possibly lead gen forms as well. But that’s usually the case. You’ve got to try to use as many of your ad extensions as possible. That is incredibly important to improve your click-through rates.

Justin Croxton (12:48):

One other thing, you want to watch for your search terms report. Because a lot of times, if you look at your terms report, it’s going to tell you not just the keywords that are producing high click-through rates, but also the ones that are producing lower click-through rates, let alone lower conversions for you. And so, if you’re going through that list on a regular basis, like let’s say every day for the first two weeks, and then every other day after that, you’re usually in a good place and you will see your click-through rates go up drastically.

Justin Croxton (13:20):

Next, be mindful of your location targeting settings. So, this one is really, really, really, really important, and I can’t believe there’s so many folks that miss this one. But if you come over here, and we’re just going to go to this one for spray foam services. Let’s see if it… How long it takes. Perfect. So, we’ll go over here to settings. Let’s see here. It’s taking a little bit of time to load. Just give it a little bit more to time.

Justin Croxton (13:56):

Well, one thing that I was just going to say is that a lot of times, if you are targeting, like let’s say here in this campaign, you come over here to location options. There’s a lot of people that will pick this recommended, which is recommended by Google, but we don’t recommend this. People here that show a presence or interest in your location. If you are a local service business, unless you’re national, and even in those national campaigns we don’t pick this recommended portion because you don’t want to target… If you’re an Atlanta plumber, you really don’t want someone that’s located in, I don’t know, let’s call it Charlotte. Maybe they did do a Google search for ATL plumbers, I still don’t want to show up for that person. I want to show up for just those people that are in Atlanta, Georgia.

Justin Croxton (14:44):

And so, when you click this button; that not only ensures that you’re going to show up to the right people, it also has a tendency to improve your click-through rates as well. Particularly from a location service standpoint, we’ve seen that those that are local to a local campaign produces higher click-through rates. And so, that’s typically our recommendation. We recommend that for many, many campaigns that we run.

Justin Croxton (15:09):

And then last but not least, there’s one thing. I mean, I think we’ve talked about this in one of our other videos for best practices when you’re setting up a campaign. We’ll have some folks that will click not just the search network, but also the display network as well. Don’t do the display network when you’re first doing a campaign. Do not do it.

Justin Croxton (15:28):

You’re going to have super, super low click-through rates initially. Instead, start with just the search network. Start with just the search network, and then eventually you can go ahead and include the search partners network, and then after that you can include the display network after that. But, I say a big but, only that when you are tracking conversions. If you’re not tracking conversions, I really don’t suggest the display network, unless it’s really a brand play, otherwise stick with search then expand to search partners and then possibly expand over into the Google display network. And after that, I think you’re usually cooking with gas. You’re in a good place from that perspective.

Justin Croxton (16:13):

And so, gang, that’s it. I mean, hopefully this wasn’t too complicated. Just real quick to revisit the conversation around SKAGs. As you can see that we have different keywords relative to each individual service, so foam insulation, foam insulation cost, open cell foam insulation, open cell insulation. You can see that we have an individual ad group, and within each of those ad groups, our ads that we can tailor to that conversation. So, close cell foam insulation, I’d just talk about close cell phone insulation. Both in the description, also in the ad copy of the headline. That ultimately improves your ad rank, that improves your scores within Google. That’s why we really go with the single keyword ad group approach, instead of just creating three ad groups and putting all of your keywords into each individual one. You’re going to see your ads really skyrocket. And more importantly, you’re going to see your click-through rates go up quite a bit when you take that approach.

Justin Croxton (17:22):

If you take on these as options for your campaigns, I’m telling you’re going to be in a good shape. I feel like I spelled that extensions wrong. If you take these approaches, I promise you want to see your click-through rates grow up quite a bit for all of your campaigns, specifically in Google search, and we even touch on Google display, which is a different animal. But for search, for sure, you’re going to see your thing skyrocket. I’m sure there’s probably a couple that I’m just not thinking of, but these are some of the big picture ones that we leverage ourselves for our team as well.

Justin Croxton (17:53):

So, let me know if you have any questions, definitely appreciate you all taking the time, and hope to talk to you soon.