HOT TOPIC Lead Gen for Local Service Businesses

[GoodluckChuck]

If there’s enough volume I run geo-modified keywords (keywords with locations in them), and if there’s not then we have to go for campaigns IP-Targeted to the city and add more negatives.

This is exactly what we do. Maybe because I learned from Andy.. haha

 

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[Andy Black]

This is exactly what we do. Maybe because I learned from Andy.. haha

Hopefully it's because it makes sense.

Oh, add +near-me to modified broad keywords to get them closer to a geo-mod search.

 

[Blackman]

@Andy Black a quick question about daily budgets, which is lately getting a bit annoying, as Google likes to overspend, and there's not much we can do about it...

I know they say that eventhough they can sometimes spend DOUBLE your daily budget on certain days of the month, when the search volumes are higher, but they promise not to exceed your average daily budget at the end of the month.

This is all well and good, if you're advertising 7 days a week, but I was wondering what happens when you launch campaigns in the middle of the month and you advertise during weekdays only, for example?

I'm running some trial campaigns for a few clients and I've got a feeling that Google is going to overspend my budget, and the ad payments I've received from clients won't be enough to cover the expenses.

I'm still a few weeks away from reaching a point where it will become clear whether their stupid budgeting system works or not, but things are not looking too pretty at the moment.

Just for the sake of an example, if you were to advertise (Monday to Friday) for a client for the next 4 weeks starting from Monday next week (17/08/2020) and stop on 11/09/20, with a budget of £20/day, what would the final ad spend look like?

I would usually take an advanced payment of £400 to cover the ad spend for the whole period, but looking at how Google exceeds my daily budget quite often, I'm not too confident the numbers will work out well in the end...

Let me know what you think and your experience with Google's budgeting system.

 

[Parks]

Thank you for the share Andy, I've read a lot of your content here. It's awesome.

Do you see the value for offline marketing as much as you do for online? Bandit signs, fliers, etc (funny enough I'm working on building a machine which can shoot folded fliers with a clip on them, so you can get a few thousand out in a day driving by people's houses. While LQ, it works.) I've kind of always been obsessed with stuff like this but I know there is a lot of cons. What's your opinion?

 

[Andy Black]

@Andy Black a quick question about daily budgets, which is lately getting a bit annoying, as Google likes to overspend, and there's not much we can do about it...

I know they say that eventhough they can sometimes spend DOUBLE your daily budget on certain days of the month, when the search volumes are higher, but they promise not to exceed your average daily budget at the end of the month.

This is all well and good, if you're advertising 7 days a week, but I was wondering what happens when you launch campaigns in the middle of the month and you advertise during weekdays only, for example?

I'm running some trial campaigns for a few clients and I've got a feeling that Google is going to overspend my budget, and the ad payments I've received from clients won't be enough to cover the expenses.

I'm still a few weeks away from reaching a point where it will become clear whether their stupid budgeting system works or not, but things are not looking too pretty at the moment.

Just for the sake of an example, if you were to advertise (Monday to Friday) for a client for the next 4 weeks starting from Monday next week (17/08/2020) and stop on 11/09/20, with a budget of £20/day, what would the final ad spend look like?

I would usually take an advanced payment of £400 to cover the ad spend for the whole period, but looking at how Google exceeds my daily budget quite often, I'm not too confident the numbers will work out well in the end...

Let me know what you think and your experience with Google's budgeting system.

I can't stand their budgeting system. I might want to run a test for a week at $10/day, but I've got to start at $5/day because Google will likely take 2x the initial daily budget. And I've seen it going over the 2x too.

It's something we have to work around. I set budgets lower than what I want to spend so that I don't overspend. So that's the result of Google trying to be "helpful" with budgets ... I now underspend to make sure we don't overspend.

 

[Andy Black]

Thank you for the share Andy, I've read a lot of your content here. It's awesome.

Do you see the value for offline marketing as much as you do for online? Bandit signs, fliers, etc (funny enough I'm working on building a machine which can shoot folded fliers with a clip on them, so you can get a few thousand out in a day driving by people's houses. While LQ, it works.) I've kind of always been obsessed with stuff like this but I know there is a lot of cons. What's your opinion?

I'm sure anything can work, especially if the herd is going the other way.

I provide online marketing as a service to businesses, but I don't run ads for myself. I get my business by good old fashioned relationship building.

@Kak chatted with me about relationship building here:

• Kak & Andy discuss the importance of building relationships in business

Funny how Kyle wanted to talk about relationship building rather than "Google Ads" right?

 

[Blackman]

@Andy Black is going to like these latest news from Google....

"Starting September 2020, the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click. You may now see fewer terms in your report."

Absolutely ridiculous....so now I won't be able to see what term exactly triggered my ad, but I'll still have to pay for it? Google thinks their advertisers are complete idiots.

 

[Andy Black]

@Andy Black is going to like these latest news from Google....

"Starting September 2020, the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click. You may now see fewer terms in your report."

Absolutely ridiculous....so now I won't be able to see what term exactly triggered my ad, but I'll still have to pay for it? Google thinks their advertisers are complete idiots.

Good grief. They’re eroding our control constantly. There’s no way that helps advertisers.

 

[Blackman]

Good grief. They’re eroding our control constantly. There’s no way that helps advertisers.

Some stats from a new campaign I launched a few days ago - 28 clicks in total and only 13 search terms are being shown. They are hiding more than 50% of the terms, which is ridiculous...

I think this new change is clearly worse for campaigns with limited search volume, whereas it probably won't affect much campaigns with keywords that get hundreds/thousands of impressions per day.

In any case, there's nothing good about this, but unfortunately Google can do what they want and I doubt they are going to reverse this decision.

There's a petition going on at the moment, not sure if it's going to make any difference to Google's decision >> Sign the Petition

 

[Andy Black]

Some stats from a new campaign I launched a few days ago - 28 clicks in total and only 13 search terms are being shown. They are hiding more than 50% of the terms, which is ridiculous...

I think this new change is clearly worse for campaigns with limited search volume, whereas it probably won't affect much campaigns with keywords that get hundreds/thousands of impressions per day.

In any case, there's nothing good about this, but unfortunately Google can do what they want and I doubt they are going to reverse this decision.

There's a petition going on at the moment, not sure if it's going to make any difference to Google's decision >> Sign the Petition

I just posted this in another thread.

I think this is why they're hiding search terms. So we can't see how poor their matching is.

 

[Blackman]

I kept looking into ways of how to see the hidden search terms in Google Ads and came across a blog post, where someone recommended to use Google Analytics to identify those terms. Can't seem to find the link now, but it's pretty simple.

Basically, you connect Google Analytics from your site that's being advertised with Google Ads, then use the "Acquisition" tab in Google Analytics and go into "Google Ads", then "Search Queries" to see all the terms.

I'm not sure if it's 100% accurate, but you definitely get more data there, compared to Google Ads, so you could use it to neg irrelevant terms that would otherwise cost you money without you being aware of them.

 

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[Blackman]

Looks like it didn't take Google too long to close the loophole of finding Google Ads search terms in Google Analytics, unless I haven't managed to figure out how to use Google Analytics 4?

As far as I understand, they got rid of the older Universal Analytics setup, which had the option to go into Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries, and there you would see all the search terms triggered, even those hidden in Google Ads.

Now with Google Analytics 4, you go into Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition and there's nothing there, apart from the source of traffic? It's a total joke. The Analytics and Google Ads are both linked, so that's not the issue.

@Andy Black , anyone? Am I doing it right?

 

[Andy Black]

Looks like it didn't take Google too long to close the loophole of finding Google Ads search terms in Google Analytics, unless I haven't managed to figure out how to use Google Analytics 4?

As far as I understand, they got rid of the older Universal Analytics setup, which had the option to go into Acquisition > Google Ads > Search Queries, and there you would see all the search terms triggered, even those hidden in Google Ads.

Now with Google Analytics 4, you go into Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition and there's nothing there, apart from the source of traffic? It's a total joke. The Analytics and Google Ads are both linked, so that's not the issue.

@Andy Black , anyone? Am I doing it right?

I’ve not really looked tbh. We normally have very targeted keywords to start with. We’re still seeing enough data in the search terms to determine what new campaigns to build rather than what negatives to add. Our strategies are normally more about creating lots of targeted keywords than using lots of negatives.

 

[Blackman]

I’ve not really looked tbh. We normally have very targeted keywords to start with. We’re still seeing enough data in the search terms to determine what new campaigns to build rather than what negatives to add. Our strategies are normally more about creating lots of targeted keywords than using lots of negatives.

With local lead gen campaigns, I usually use broad-match modified keywords, and despite including a location in the keyword, you can still catch some silly stuff, which is not relevant and needs to be negg'ed to avoid wasting the budget.

We're not talking about thousands here, but I hate the fact that I can't see what I'm paying for, and knowing Google, they make every effort to trigger your ad for "closely related terms", when oftentimes it's useless crap.

 

[Andy Black]

With local lead gen campaigns, I usually use broad-match modified keywords, and despite including a location in the keyword, you can still catch some silly stuff, which is not relevant and needs to be negg'ed to avoid wasting the budget.

We're not talking about thousands here, but I hate the fact that I can't see what I'm paying for, and knowing Google, they make every effort to trigger your ad for "closely related terms", when oftentimes it's useless crap.

Yeah. Agreed. Their matching gets fuzzier as they hide the search terms.

 

[Dustinaitis]

How important is it to set up google my business? Do you even use it for local lead gen? I just set up google my business for a client and I start to collect the first reviews on it. Furthermore there are these little ads you can place between this listing. Are they worth it? Or should I stay just to the "old" search ads?

Thank you in advance!

 

[Andy Black]

How important is it to set up google my business? Do you even use it for local lead gen? I just set up google my business for a client and I start to collect the first reviews on it. Furthermore there are these little ads you can place between this listing. Are they worth it? Or should I stay just to the "old" search ads?

Thank you in advance!

Do it!

 

[Kal-El1998]

Do you still do lead generation Andy?

 

[Andy Black]

Do you still do lead generation Andy?

Yep. Some clients want leads/enquiries. Others are doing eCommerce and are going for online transactions.

 

[Andy Black]

Local lead gen campaign structure for Google/Bing.

———————————

1) Campaign targets the whole of the US.

Keywords:
+service +location +statecode
e.g.
+assisted-living +charlotte +nc

For large cities or unique location names you can do just:
+service +location
e.g.
+assisted-living +chicago
+home-care +texas

———————————

2) Campaign targets the state (assumes unique location names in the state).

Keywords:
+service +location
e.g.
+home-care +charlotte

———————————

3) Campaign targets your catchment area.

Keywords:
+service
+service +near-me
Etc.

———————————

Your ads should match your keywords.

Get ninja points if your landing page(s) match your ads.

 

[Blackman]

Looks like I've got excited a bit too early about finding Google Ads search terms in your analytics account, because I can't seem to find them any no longer in Google Analytics 4?

Am I doing something wrong? Is there an option in Google Analytics to look up search queries at all, whether it's organic or through Google Ads?

I would assume that it's under "Acquisition" and then "Traffic Acquisition", but you can only see the source of the traffic there and nothing else?

Anyone using Google Analytics 4 and has figured out how to see search terms?

 

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