Many new clients reach out to me, and one of their first questions is “can you improve my Google Ads account?” Usually the answer is yes. But how do I know that? How can I know that there’s room for improvement without even looking at their account and having just talked to them for the first time?
It comes down to three very important questions.
1. How much are you spending on Google Ads?
2. How many leads are you getting from Google Ads?
3. What’s your cost per lead.
If a business owner can’t answer all three questions with confidence, then 100% there is room for improvement.
These three questions explain everything. The whole point of advertising on Google Ads for a service business is to get leads profitably. These three questions answer if you are doing that.
How much are you spending on Google Ads?
Simple question. Should be a simple answer.
How many leads are you getting from Google Ads?
Some leads will always fall through the tracking. Like if someone sees your ad, clicks, and then goes over to your Facebook page and calls the number the see on Facebook, but in general, mostly everything is trackable.
With conversion tracking you can know how many calls from ads you got, how many calls from the website you got, and how many lead form submissions you got. You can also usually track when someone opens a chat conversion on the chat box, when they click an email address, and when they click a button to a third-party booking website. You want to be able to track all these kinds of things.
This conversion tracking will answer how many leads you’re getting. If you can’t answer how many leads you’re getting, the reason why is because you don’t have great conversion tracking in place, and these days, great conversion tracking needs to be the standard because so many of the best parts of Google Ads, the most effective parts of Google Ads, like max conversion bidding and Performance Max, rely on conversion tracking.
What’s your cost per lead?
This becomes an easy question to answer after you have answered the first two questions. Take what you’re spending, divide it by conversions, and that’s your cost per conversion, or for service companies, the cost per lead.
There’s nuances past this, like lead quality, maximizing lead volume, maximizing cost per lead, etc. But if you don’t even know what your cost per lead is, then yea, there’s tons of room for improvement in your Google Ads account.
I love these three questions on day one, but I also love them years into an account. It’s good to reflect on these questions over time because they are so central to everything you should be doing with your Google Ads account. The whole point is the get leads profitably.
And these questions then lead to more great questions because if you know what your cost per lead is, then you can reflect on if you should be spending more, if your lead quality is good, if you need to bring the cost per lead down, or if you have room to be more aggressive and go for a higher cost per lead and more leads overall.
If you’re a business owner out there and your hunch is that Google Ads is working okay but you think it could be better, the first thing to do is ask those three questions above. What am I spending, how many leads and I getting, and what’s my cost per lead. If you can’t answer all three, then there’s room for improvement.
