Building long-tail Google Ads campaigns for fun and profit

[Andy Black]

TL;DR:

• A decade ago I helped a startup acquire 15k signups a day using Google Ads.
• Since then we generate leads for clients, but don't store the lead data.
• We've not done email marketing to date but did a quick test to grow an email list with Google Ads HERE.
• We're going to start storing the lead data and making use of it.
• We'll own the whole system end to end: the Google Ads accounts, domains, websites, and emails. Oh, and the consumer facing brands.

More Details:

• We generate leads for clients using Google Ads.
• Someone searches on Google, clicks our ad, hits our page and fills in the form. An email is sent to the client.
• We don't capture the prospect's info. If we did we'd be able to nurture the lead and maybe get them to buy again in the future.
• We'll also add a little check box and allow people to opt into a list we'll own.
• Obviously, we'll have to comply with GDPR and good practice.

A Ficticious Example:

Someone searches for "business grants ireland".

They see our ad for "Business Grants Ireland - Speak To An Expert".

They click and hit our achingly simple landing page:

Looking for a Business Grant in Ireland?

• Check if you're eligible.
• Get help applying.
• Contact us now.

< Contact Us Now >

When they hit the button it asks for their contact details and message.

The contact details and message get sent to the client (like we currently do).

This time we'll put a checkbox on the form and get permission to send more info to the visitor.



We'll also test it the other way round where we get people to opt into the email list and on the Thank-You page we'll present the option to speak to an expert. This might work even better, but we'll start where we are.



We've kicked off two simple projects where each client will likely give us €200 to run some Google Ads tests. The landing pages are being developed and I bought a couple of domains to slap them on.


EDIT: Moved to the outside since it might help people see how they can progress beyond freelancing once they have a skill...

 

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[Andy Black]

Thanks @Subsonic @4gus

You guys have just made me *properly* realise that, although I've been repeating myself daily in the forum for years, there's new people joining daily who've never read any of it.

I've been too wary of boring people who've already read a few of my posts. That's not the right mindset.

I'll bear that in mind going forward.

In the meantime, check out the second and third row of links in my signature. (Turn your phone sideways if you can't see my signature.)

 

[GoodluckChuck]

Can do it with Facebook Ads too. Getting leads for a Fastlaner right now for $2 a piece. Get an email address, a Youtube subscription, and a possible low level offer sold to some of them to at least break even and it's a limitless list building machine.

 

[Andy Black]

Last week stats for one of the €5/day campaigns:

12 of those reported conversions were clicks on the form-button (we've changed that so they won't show up as primary conversions going forward). The other 9 conversions were form-submissions.

The client also said they have a similar number of phone calls.

Let's say 9 form-fills and 9 phone-calls = 18 conversions.

That's a 17.5% conversion rate. Not bad for this early in the project.




The client gave us a good idea what type of calls were coming through.

We've turned off a lot of the ad groups and will focus the €5/day budget on two types.

If we had 103 visitors for just those two then we can start dialling in the landing page a bit more.



Oh, and here's the landing page for all you feckers who keep overcomplicating this:

 

[Andy Black]

Here's what I've setup so far and why.

1) Someone Googles on their mobile for "xyz carlisle" (Carlisle being a location in the UK).

2) They click this ad:




3) They visit this dynamic landing page:




4) They click the "Get Notified" button and get sent to this Google Form:

I'd like to send parameters to the form to pre-populate some answers if possible. This article might help:

• Let’s auto fill Google Forms with URL parameters…

I'd like to send people to a specific Thank-You page so we can better track conversions and have more flexibility. We can probably get conversion tracking work.



5) Their data is automatically added to a Google Sheet:

• I've tested it a couple of times, hence the two entries.
• It's amazing seeing the headings change in the Google Sheet as you change the questions in the Google Form.

6) We'll setup an automation to add their details into ConvertKit, SendGrid, or MailerLite so they get an automated email sequence, and so we can send regular notifications as promised.

Why this way?​

Google Ad
-> Simple Landing Page
-> Google Form
-> Google Sheet
-> Email Service Provider (ESP)

1) Google Ads are simple to setup (when you know how of course) and low maintenance when dialed in.

2) The Google Form is simple to create and amend. We don't need to wait for a developer to do this.

3) The data is sent into a Google Sheet so we can view the data more easily than if it was in an ESP like ConvertKit.

4) We can switch which ESP we're using. Our data is stored in a Google Sheet in the first instance. This serves as a backup of our data too (although we'll not know when someone's unsubscribed).



Off we go again!

• I cloned the campaigns that contained the 36k ad groups. I wanted to change the ad copy but keep the original campaigns untouched (so I can compare previous stats, and also in case I wanted to "fall-back" to the old campaigns).
• I've just set the new campaigns running again with a €5/day budget.
• Hopefully everything will be in order and Google doesn't see the landing page as a "bridge page" to the Google Form, and that we're also not "information harvesting".

 

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[Andy Black]

Lower bids got us more clicks for the same daily budget

We were losing impression share due to our €200/day budget so started lowering bids.
(Note that conversions will trickle in over the coming days so the conversion rate for the last few days will increase.)

 

[Raedrum]

I was planning to learn google ads in the near future and all the datas you're sharing are of an incredible value

Thank you Andy ! This is first hand, applicatives infos to improve our learning curves

 

[Andy Black]

I love these high-volume low-tail clients. Even better if CPCs are low!


We uploaded 5,184 long-tail keyword-ad combinations yesterday:



Preliminary results look good:

• CTR went up (as expected since we've more specific keyword-ad combinations).
• Google overspent our €210/day budget. Hopefully it will dial in today. If we lose Impression Share due to Budget then we can drop bids.
• I suspect conversions will continue to come in for the next few days and our CPA will drop for yesterday.
• I've made another change this morning that should help CTR.

 

[Dami-B]

This is an incredible strategy, I've been thinking towards the same line and maybe I'll start a thread once I get things going.

For me, I've been thinking about creating something similar for company formation LLCs for clients in developing nations who need to connect with lawyers and firms who provide such services.

I already have the skillset to build a proper dashboard, automate the lead gen, onboarding docs and appointment setting for booking a call with a lawyer.

Lawyers can pay me $200 per client or maybe a few per appointment.

But this is an idea I can replicate for legal, insurance, medical even the agric industry, it's basically PHASE 2 of my consulting journey, PHASE 1 being building applications for clients and providing marketing services.

I'd like to be more involved sna shave more control over the process, especially lead gen and your post has given more some ideas.

Thanks and God bless!

 

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[Andy Black]

"Contact Us" button last week:
> 78 visitors
> 9 button-clicks (11% of visitors)
> 1 submission (11% of button-clicks, 1% of visitors)

"Get Notified" button last two hours:
> 11 visitors
> 2 button-clicks (18% of visitors)
> 1 submission (50% of button-clicks, 9% of visitors)

Low numbers, but seems to confirm our suspicions that they would prefer notifications instead of contacting someone.

(There's still room to improve the 9% visitor-to-submission-rate.)

The next step is to get their name, email, and other info added to ConvertKit or similar.

 

[Andy Black]

Trying to figure out the simplest way to get Convertkit signups break-even via Google Ads by referring signups to other newsletters using Upscribe from Sparkloop.

Rightmessage might even be in the mix to recommend newsletters based on subscriber responses.

Here's my vision:

1) Someone searches on Google

2) Clicks relevant ad

3) Hits relevant landing page

4) Answers survey questions

5) Signs up

6) Gets recommended relevant newsletters who pay if they signup

Dial this in so initial revenue covers cost and you're building an email list for free.

 

[Andy Black]

For the project where we're going to try and get email signups "breakeven":

W/C 13-Mar-23

11 visitors for €5 last week.

• We only ran the campaigns for an hour last week.
• We'd changed the button from "Contact Us" to "Get Notified".
• We had 11 visitors for €5 and 1 person filled in the form. Granted it's only 1 person, but that was a big jump in conversion rate to 9% from 1% the week before.
• We currently have campaigns paused while we hook up the form to add emails to ConvertKit.
• We also wanted to signup to a newsletter partnership program (which we got accepted to today).
• Working on the form -> ConvertKit integration.

 

[ZackerySprague]

For the third project that's currently a lead-gen in Ireland:

W/C 13-Mar-23

55 visitors for €38 last week.

• No enquiries unfortunately, which is slightly surprising. Maybe the page isn't trustworthy enough, or maybe they want to read information rather than speak to someone. We'll devise a test this week.
• On a positive note, CPCs are very low, we've a great CTR, and there's a LOT of volume. I've just dropped bids from €0.50 to 0.25 to see if we go from 10 visitors a day to 20 visitors a day. That would be quite amazing given the searches being performed.

View attachment 47604

That's a really nice low CPC and a really nice CTR.

 

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[cornishpasty]

great content Andy, new member here & currently diving into your posts, thank you for your wisdom! Much appreciated

 

[srodrigo]

Hey @Andy Black , what's your opinion about Convertkit?

Looks like it gets quite expensive quickly? Even 10k subscribers is $100/month.

Maybe it's enough for a landing page with an "email me when the app is ready" form though. And it includes a landing page builder, which is great.

 

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[Andy Black]

Hey @Andy Black , what's your opinion about Convertkit?

Looks like it gets quite expensive quickly? Even 10k subscribers is $100/month.

Maybe it's enough for a landing page with an "email me when the app is ready" form though. And it includes a landing page builder, which is great.

I've not really used it yet. It might be overkill for what I'm doing.

I don't like its landing page builder, but can use Carrd.co or (more likely) get my developer to create a page.

I like that it's not the cheapest. Whoever uses it isn't choosing tools for their business because they're the cheapest.

I also like that the founder is super active on social media and has a podcast.

IF I wanted to sell "growing ConvertKit newsletters with Google Ads as a service" then I know who's radar to get on. It's not part of the plan but it's a consideration.

 

[Andy Black]

Interesting stats for yesterday for one of the projects:

• We're mistakenly recording a "Form Button Click" as a primary conversion. We'll fix that so it's only a secondary conversion.
• 2 forms submitted out of 13 clicks would be a 15% conversion rate.
• The CPA would then be €2.58.
• The high "Search lost Impression Share due to budget" of 87.80% indicates we can maybe drop the bids from the current €0.40.

 

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[Andy Black]

I thought I'd check in on the campaigns sending visitors to the page and Google Form in the previous post.


Daily Google Ads stats:

• Bids are €0.25 and that's what we're paying per click.
• Budget is €5/day and we're spending less than that. We've not lost any Impression Share due to budget (except a tiny bit on Saturday).
• We could increase bids a bit to get more volume, but I'm happy with this daily trickle of visitors at the moment.
• We've not got conversion tracking setup, but that's OK as I can see entries getting added to the Google Sheet (see below).
• For Saturday, the lost Impression Shares add up to 92.01%, meaning we showed 7.99% of the time. If 142 impressions is 7.99% then we can estimate there were 1,777 searches.

Form Fills:

• There was only 1 over the weekend and I was tempted to turn this off and have a rethink. But I never got round to it and I'm glad because there's been 5 form fills out of 18 visitors this week so far.
• Interestingly, only half the people signing up want regular tips and advice. We may change that offer to be some free course and see if that gets more people to say "Yes please". We could also add that to the ad and landing page and see if it increases the CTR and visitor-to-signup conversion rate.

 

[Andy Black]

This is for a local lead gen project.

There's not enough volume so the client wanted to double bids from $10 to $20 to see what happened.

Today is Friday and we doubled bids on Wednesday.

Thursday is the first full day running at $20 bids.

Note how I'm comparing Thursday to previous Thursdays.

We can see Impression Share is up, BUT our budget is $25/day and Google took twice that much yesterday.
I think we'll find the Search lost IS (budget) will start increasing.

We'll leave it for the weekend and maybe switch from manual bids to maximise clicks with a max CPC of $20.

 

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[Andy Black]

This morning I wanted to find all the locations in a couple of counties I wasn't already bidding on.

ChatGPT to the rescue.

"List in a table the city, county, state, and statecode for all cities, towns, and villages in Napa County and Sonoma County that are NOT in the following list:
Sonoma
Napa
Yountville
Penngrove
Glen Ellen
Kenwood
Rohnert Park
Healdsburg
Cotati
Petaluma
St. Helena
Calistoga
Eldridge"

Here's some of the result (I'm on my phone so can't screenshot much).

 

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[Andy Black]

I've found from running Google Ads campaigns that less is more. You won't believe how simple our landing pages are.

Why does it work when they're simple?

Because landing pages don't convert. People do. From a searcher, to a visitor, to an enquirer, to a client.

Sales happen when you get the right person to the right offer at the right time.

"Feed the starving crowd."
(Gary Halbert)

An agency client said their water damage restoration client got a call and are on the way to a guy's house who's got a burst pipe with water flooding his hardwood floors.

The landing page?

<LOCATION> Water Cleanup Specialists
# Bullet 1
# Bullet 2
# Bullet 3
[ Tap to Call ]
[ Request a Callback ]

 

[Andy Black]

Oh. I forgot (or didn't realise?) this was in the Speedway. Moved outside in case it helps people.

 

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[Andy Black]

Can do it with Facebook Ads too. Getting leads for a Fastlaner right now for $2 a piece. Get an email address, a Youtube subscription, and a possible low level offer sold to some of them to at least break even and it's a limitless list building machine.

Exactly! Add a low cost offer and break even. In this case the client will pay for the ad spend and leads and we get the emails (as well as building a limitless list building machine that we own). We'll play with the order and also test having a low cost offer.

 

[Andy Black]

We started our first campaign yesterday.

• This doesn't get people onto an email list yet, it just has a "Contact Us" button.
• We'll amend this shortly, but for now we just want to know if there's potential volume with low bids.

Promising stats from yesterday:

• And that's with me forgetting to create sitelinks which should give a boost to CTR.
• We've just dropped bids for today from €1.00 to €0.50, and turned off desktop and tablet which have barely any volume anyway.

 

[Andy Black]

Some of the search terms today were for pretty small locations in the UK so we're loading 36k UK locations.

 

[Andy Black]

W/C 27-Feb-23

19 visitors last week for €11

• 1 form fill.

Ads stopped showing on Thursday last week when we loaded 36k locations.

• They've just started showing this morning.
• I guess the campaigns ended up flagged for manual review and have been approved now.

We got another form-fill just now:

• This is promising. He submitted his name, phone number, and email address. We'll follow up and help him out. All these moments engaging with the market help us figure out who they are, what they're stuck on, why, and how best to help them.

The form-fill is a conversion from today and here's the stats so far by the hour:

• Ads have probably stopped showing as we're over the €5/day budget.
• We're mostly losing Impression Share due to budget, implying we can drop the bids from €0.50 and still get volume. I'll do that now so we run at €0.25 bids tomorrow.

​

Daily Stats to date:

• We only just installed conversion tracking so the conversions today are for that form-fill and the click on the button to start the form-fill.

Actions taken today:

• Dropped bids from €0.50 to €0.25.

​

Weekly Trading:​

 

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[Andy Black]

I logged in first thing as I wanted to see the Impression Share data for yesterday.

Why doesn't Google just tell us the Search impr. share is 3.15% instead of us having to work it out (100 - 83.30 - 13.55 = 3.15) ???

Working backwards, if we had 236 impressions with a 3.15% impression share then there were about 7,500 searches yesterday that we could have showed for (236 / 0.0315).

Other notes:

• We actually had two conversions yesteday but one hasn't registered (or maybe it was organic or word-of-mouth - which I doubt).
• We've a budget of €5/day and Google took €9.95. Not a big deal in this case, but just be aware that Google can take up to twice as much as you specify.
• Bids are €0.25 today. I'm curious if that's enough to get impressions.
• We're just using paid search ads on the Google search engine, and just on mobile. I want the learnings so we can adjust the offer and landing page to match what people want, rather than run Performance Max campaigns that will try to find conversions based on our simple test landing page.

 

[Andy Black]

Day 1 for a local lead gen project.

2 leads already? Is this sustainable?!?

 

[Subsonic]

TL;DR:

• A decade ago I helped a startup acquire 15k signups a day using Google Ads.
• Since then we generate leads for clients, but don't store the lead data.
• We've not done email marketing to date but did a quick test to grow an email list with Google Ads HERE.
• We're going to start storing the lead data and making use of it.
• We'll own the whole system end to end: the Google Ads accounts, domains, websites, and emails. Oh, and the consumer facing brands.

More Details:

• We generate leads for clients using Google Ads.
• Someone searches on Google, clicks our ad, hits our page and fills in the form. An email is sent to the client.
• We don't capture the prospect's info. If we did we'd be able to nurture the lead and maybe get them to buy again in the future.
• We'll also add a little check box and allow people to opt into a list that we'll own.
• Obviously, we'll have to comply with GDPR and good practice.

A Ficticious Example:

Someone searches for "business grants ireland".

They see our ad for "Business Grants Ireland - Speak To An Expert".

They click and hit our achingly simple landing page:

Looking for a Business Grant in Ireland?

• Check if you're eligible.
• Get help applying.
• Contact us now.

< Contact Us Now >

When they hit the button it asks for their contact details and message.

The contact details and message get sent to the client (like we currently do).

This time we'll put a checkbox on the form and get permission to send more info to the visitor.



We'll also test it the other way round where we get people to opt into the email list and on the Thank-You page we'll present the option to speak to an expert. This might work even better, but we'll start where we are.



We've kicked off two simple projects where each client will likely give us €200 to run some Google Ads tests. The landing pages are being developed and I bought a couple of domains to slap them on.


EDIT: Moved to the outside since it might help people see how they can progress beyond freelancing...

Thank you so much for sharing this.
Other people would use this to become gurus and charge $4997 for the ability to see this.
You posts are going to be the basis for my Google ads once (or if haha) my account gets approved.

 

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[4gus]

Thanks for this Andy! Like Subsonic said, it's super helpful for us who've just started to see how you work!