Leads are essential many businesses; getting more leads is paramount to your survival. Yet the advertising budget is limited, finances are stretched, you aren’t getting as many leads as you need, and you have a sneaking suspicion that you might be able to get more leads for your budget if you just knew how.
If this describes you, let’s talk. We have 6 tried and true methods for boosting your leads on Google Ads without raising the budget a single penny.
1. Expand your location and schedule.
The first way to get more leads without raising your budget is to expand your location targeting and to open up your schedule. If your Google Ads campaigns are only targeting a 5 mile radius around your office, then you may be missing more leads that are just outside your target location. Expanding your locations may help you pick up that traffic, getting you more clicks overall.
The same is true of your schedule. Opening up the schedule on which your ads show will also help your ads show to more people. And with more impressions, you’ll get more clicks and increase the likelihood of more conversions.
The secret sauce here is that more impressions give you the chance go a little bit less aggressive with your bids and get a slightly lower clickthrough rate, but since you’re getting more impressions you can still try and get clicked on enough to spend your full budget, but with a lower cost per click and a lower cost per lead. And that means more leads for the same budget you were spending before. We call this the Go Wider, Pay Less Google Ads strategy.
2. Focus on phone calls.
For businesses that are looking for phone calls as their leads, focusing on phone calls in your ads is a great way to boost leads. Add the call extension on your regular search campaigns and boost your bids on mobile devices to show your ads higher in the search results on mobile. With your number prominently displayed via your call extension, you will get more calls without having to grow your budget.
Additionally, a call only campaign with call only ads can bring in more leads from phone calls, as the ads can only show up on mobile and instead of written headlines, there is instead simply your phone number. By running call only ads, you cut out the middle step of getting the customer to your website and then getting them to pick up the phone. Cutting to the chase will allow you to focus directly on getting those leads. The caveat is that these call only clicks sometimes seem to be a bit more expensive, but the upside and the reason for that is that call only ads can also lead to a higher rate of clicks that turn into leads.
3. Go for positions 2 and 3.
You might be doing a great job of showing up in the number 1 position with your ads, but what some people don’t understand is that positions 2 and 3 also get a lot clicks and leads. Often advertisers can lower their bids and get more clicks for their budget by showing up in positions 2 and3, thereby getting more quality leads overall. If you drop your bids too low, your click and lead volume will drop as well, so you can’t go too low, but it is worth trying to find that sweet spot where you are getting the most leads possible for your budget.
4. Add negative keywords to eliminate waste.
A lot of businesses advertising on Google Ads waste a lot of their budget on bad searches, and this wasted budget could be going towards getting them more leads.
How do you block these junk searches from showing up? You can add them into Google Ads as “negative keywords”, or words and phrases that you never want to show up on.
However, the key to a successful negative keyword strategy is NOT to add every possible phrase that you don’t want to show up on as a negative. For instance, if you advertise for a moving company, you don’t want to add “free moving services”, “moving services for free”, and “i need free movers” as negative keywords.
Instead, you just want to add the core negative keyword that is causing all the trouble. In this case, that core troublemaker is the word “free”. Instead of iterating every possible way for the word “free” to show up in your search terms and blocking all of those terms, just block that one word to block every possible term that includes that word.
How do negative keywords get you more leads? Negatives preserve your budget and help ensure that you are paying only for high-quality clicks. And with more high-quality clicks, more clicks become the leads your business so desperately needs.
For more information on negative keywords and avoiding wasting your budget on bad searches, make sure you understand the difference between keywords and search terms.
5. Focus on high-performing ads.
When you have ads in your account that are performing poorly, you may be wasting a lot of clicks. To solve this issue, go to the ads section in your campaign, look at the last 30-60 days, and sort by clicks. Ads that are getting lots of impressions with a high clickthrough rate (which means lots of clicks) and no conversions are possibly wasting budget, so pause those ads and funnel your budget towards the ads that produce lots of conversions.
6. Get rid of problem keywords.
Be sure to nix the keywords on your campaign that are gobbling up your budget but never produce a conversion. And you don’t just want conversions, but rather conversions at a profitable rate.
For example, if your average cost per conversion over the last two months is $40, but you have a keyword that has produced just 1 conversion over the last two months for a cost of $300, then that would be a problem keyword. Pause or lower bids on that keyword, and then that keyword’s budget can be directed towards cheaper, more profitable keywords. Especially if you are on a small advertising budget, those higher-expense keywords are not worth it. For an in-depth tutorial on finding and nixing your problem keywords, read this article.
