Paid ads for micro businesses - is it worth the time and money?

Right. For the people in the room that don’t know me, I mean, I’ve pretty much seen all of your faces before, apart from a couple of people. I’m Sylvia. I’m a Paid Advertising Specialist. I work full time in an agency doing PPC, but I also do my freelance work in PPC as well. In management.

All other stuff, that book, whatever. Doesn’t really matter. If you want to connect with me, this is the QR code. But it doesn’t really matter because, you know, we’re in the same room. So if we want to connect with me, we’re going to do it in person. Today we’re going to be talking about Google Ads in particular, but Google Ads specifically for Micro-businesses.

I wanted to just be all on the same page, because I’m guessing that the majority of you, if not all of you know what Google Ads are? But, you might not know exactly how it works or the definition of the intricacies of it. So, just top level what I’m going to be talking about is Google Ads.

This is the correct definition. So you pay Google. Google puts your ad either on the search results, on the search partners network, which is basically 99% of the internet’s websites. You’re going to see them in forms of small videos or in banners, those annoying things that pop up or crop up when you’re trying to read something, a blog, etc., and you don’t want them to be there.

In particular, for women, those are the shoes pictures that follow you around whenever you’re seeing some shoes online, and then you cannot unsee them. So those are display ads. And when I talk about the way the Google Ads work, really, I could be exchanging it with with Bing. So now Microsoft ads or Facebook or LinkedIn.

So the, the mechanics of how they work is slightly different. However, you pay these companies to put ads on their websites. And this is a logic that applies to everything. Just in case nobody has seen an ad before, I mean, unlikely, but you know, sometimes I had people that asked me, you told me what it is, but I don’t know what it looks like.

It shouldn’t be the case for this audience, but this is an example of a search ad, it’s literally just bid on a keyword. People search for that particular keyword, you show up. So this is text. Now we’ve got the addition of an image that can or cannot show up. Google decides whether using a picture and adding a picture will increase the likelihood of a person clicking on the ad.

We don’t decide. Google does, unfortunately. This is what it looks like in the context of mobile. And this is what display ads look like. As you can see, they’ve got different sizes, different formats. They look different depending on the device. But also, they depend, like they look different depending on the placement.

So if on a website, it’s going to be different on YouTube in, in-stream ads. So in the middle of the videos are going to be different. YouTube on the right hand side. Again it’s another format. So you provide an asset and Google usually changes it to fit where it’s going to appear. So back in the day, we used to have to create every single size and every single format, everywhere,

and it was a pain in the ass. Now, well, you can still do that if you want to, but Google has made it a little bit easier to do this for us. Now, one important thing that I have to talk about is, the context of Google Ads. Paid advertising, it’s very tempting to think that paid advertising is a sure fire way to get some sales, because if you’ve paid Google to get traffic on your website, surely a sale is going to come off the back of that.

Well, the answer is unfortunately, no, but you might have already guessed that, Google ads, you’ve seen it highlighted there, it’s just part of the marketing ecosystem. If the website is not set up properly, if the content on the website is not correct, if the tracking is not there, if, and in case of B2B, if after an inquiry, the sales process is not made so that the inquiry turns into a sale,

Google ads can do very little. In particular another way to visualise this is looking around the entire customer journey. Now, these are not all the touchpoints in the customer journey. Just a few. But as you can see. And now I would really like you see that the I’ve got a pointer there, but when I point it at the screen, nothing happens.

Magic. So anyway.

Ad’s.

Here. So this is where the ads are in the journey. They’re not here. They’re not here. So. Here. So, that shows you already that the role of advertising is very much to match people who are looking for something that you offer with your website. And once you match that, and you know that the search that you paid money for is relevant to what you offer, then it’s the role of the website and whatever is on the website to convert.

I know that, majority of people would like this to be the customer journey we all want that, it’s a straight line, the customer needs something, they see our ads, they go on our website, they buy straight away and you get rich, and unfortunately, this is, I know, I would like this to happen, but this does not happen.

And the reason it does not happen is because, latest data, according to Google, a buyer journey usually varies from 20 to 500 touchpoints depending on complexity. Now, obviously, if you have to go to the shop and buy a loaf of bread, it’s not a difficult decision. But very complex decisions, especially in business, decisions where you, maybe you sign up a contract for years, very expensive decisions.

It can easily get into the hundreds. Now, personally, I’ve never seen a 500 touchpoint journey, but I’m sure that some complex purchases on Google did get to that. Now, this is the summary of what I wanted to talk about. And now, now I’m getting into the micro business part of this. Now, theory out of the way.

Now what, what can you do? Should you do Google Ads as a micro business? What are the conditions, for you to do it? How do you know it’s the right time? And this is more of a conversation piece. I don’t have many slides. I just have a couple later. For the mathematically challenged, among us, myself included.

But, I call it napkin math because it’s really easy and everybody can do it. And you do it with big round numbers so that you don’t have to think about it. But it’s going to be applicable to all of you, just you swap the numbers that are example numbers that I’ve given, with the examples that, the numbers that are relevant to your business and you are going to find whether you should be advertising or not.

But anyway, point number one, what do you need to run ads? Well, obviously first you need a website. Duh. But, you would not believe how many people use third party websites to advertise. So, for example, if somebody is trying to get bookings or phone calls and use a third party booking system directly to get those leads or those bookings.

Now, the theory is okay in the sense that it makes sense why you would do that. And if you have no other option, fine. But a third party system, even though you add analytics to it and you can technically see what’s happening, it’s still a third party website. So you are sending traffic to somebody else’s site. It’s not yours.

You’re just loaning it because it’s owned by the company. So ideally you have your own website. Ideally you have a website that says who you are, what you do, and who you do it for. Ideally a starting price. It has to be clear why you and and not the competition. Because especially for high commodity services

it can really, if the differentiation is not clear, it can easily come down to price. And obviously I hope that we don’t want to be the cheapest because it’s a race to the bottom. So there’s always going to be somebody cheaper than you. So the differentiation needs to be something that is not price. And if you don’t tell them what the differentiation is, they’re not going to be able to know.

So, first of all, your own website, then clear content on the website, ideally a PPC landing page specifically because, I usually, when I advertise, I find that, the business wants to advertise something that doesn’t have a specific page as such so the content might be spread in, in a lot of different places. So if you then put something like a landing page together that takes the best parts of different parts of your website, where you might have obviously the service, but then you’re going to have the pricing comparison tables, then you’re going to have the reviews, then you’re going to have the logos of other companies that you worked with,

maybe you’ve got some video testimonials, maybe you’ve got the FAQ somewhere else. All of these things already exist on the website. They might not just not be on one page, and that is what you need to give paid advertising the highest chance of converting. Last thing, tracking. I know when I talk about tracking, everybody starts to squirm a little bit because, oh my God, tracking is difficult.

It’s boring. I don’t get it. Okay. In the simplest possible way, you need, well, analytics GA 4 on the website. But I think every website right now has got analytics. But you also need another bit on top of it for more complex tracking requirements, so that is called Tag Manager. So basically this Tag Manager what it does is that allows you to see meaningful actions that people take on the website, for example,

Calendly bookings when are embedded on the website or any other third party that you have forms everything that’s happening on the website. Buttons, any buttons that highlights parts of the journey and can create the context for you of what people do on your website. You can have some simple tracking in GA 4, but it’s mainly, it mainly works on page views.

So if, for example, you have a form submission on your website and you send people to a thank you page, GA 4 can track page view/thank you or whatever that is, and that is a form submission. But when you have complex stuff on your website, you need Tag Manager to fill the gaps. Basically something happens on the website,

Tag Manager is the man in the middle, Tag Manager then sends a notification to GA 4 and says something happened on the website. So instead of, they can’t communicate directly, they need a middleman. These are the things that you need at the very minimum to advertise as a micro business. But then the next thing as I was talking about, napkin maths, would ads make sense financially for you?

Now, as I said, very simple. Let’s say, for example, you’ve got 10 enquiries from your website. Or not on your website, they might be a referral. But anyway, 10 enquiries overall. Say, out of them you have got conversion rate of 10%, hopefully more because of the job that we’re all doing. But anyway, let’s say 10% conversion rate. Say that the average or the value of a sale is two grand.

That means that in theory, when you advertise, you should be getting a cost per enquiry of £200, because obviously, £200 x ten, you get one sale and buy £2000. So this is the theoretical scenario where you break even. Now, exchange this for your own numbers in your business. And this is roughly how it works. I say roughly because it’s not like if you get a cost per enquiry of 201, it’s a disaster and you turn off everything.

No, no, no, I mean, this is a guidance that you have now, that you didn’t have before that guides you in the decision of whether, saying, oh, the campaign is working as expected and therefore let’s carry on. The campaign is not working as expected, and therefore we need to do some optimisation or if you do the optimisation and then it still doesn’t work, then something else is off,

and therefore you might be better turning off the advertising and stop spending money because somewhere else in the journey, something is not working correctly, because you might see that the traffic that you get from Google Ads is actually the type of traffic that you want. But if it doesn’t convert on site, bearing in mind the 90% of 98% of visitors are not ready to convert right now, maybe at some point in the future, but still, that 2% should be converting.

So if it doesn’t, something is up with the website. Now, best way to get started. So, the best way to get started if you are looking to run ads as a micro business is think simplicity. I cannot stress enough how many people try to build the most complex account with the most complex campaign, with dozens and dozens and dozens of keywords and ads all over the place, 58 different variations, breaking down campaigns with small budgets.

So the best way to get started is think about one service, just one service that you want to push, out of that service there is a way on Google Ads it’s called the Keyword Planner to do some keyword research. So you put in the keyword that you’re thinking about advertising on, and Google is going to tell you if in your, either nationally, internationally or just in your area, in your county, etc, if you have enough people searching for that. If you have enough people searching for that, just start with that one campaign.

You’re going to have probably five, six, seven keywords that are all pretty similar. Those are the keywords that you start with. Start with one ad. The ad will have 15 different headlines and four different descriptions that you can fill out. Once you make sure that most of the relevant content is on there on a relatively small budget, and I mean, depending on the industry, you can start with

20 to 25 pounds a day, and every 2 or 3 days go and check what kind of traffic are you getting from Google Ads? Are the searches in Google Ads relevant to you? If they are, carry on, if they’re not, stop and reevaluate. What is it that’s wrong with it? Because obviously if the searches are not right, they’re going to get to your website,

they’re not going to find what they’re looking for, you have wasted your money anyway. If you then realise, okay, nothing I see here is relevant to me, then that is the point where you either call for help, or you have a look at how you can change things up. Usually the Keyword Planner, like the keyword research that you do, is going to tell you straight away if you’re going in the right direction or not.

But if not, if in doubt, always, if in doubt, just pause the campaigns, because I’d rather you stop for 2, 3 days a week, two weeks to reevaluate, then then keep spending for that period of time, especially if every penny is important. Because obviously for Microbusinesses, we’re all in that situation where we may be just one person and we’re doing everything and you know, we’re not super rich.

And therefore all the budget, specifically marketing budget needs to be accounted for. So 25 pounds a day for a month is going to make a difference to your marketing budget. It’s not it’s not the time of keep spending. This is a prerogative of bigger businesses. Let’s just stop and reevaluate. Any questions?