When I walk down the street, people routinely push me into walls and start yelling at me, desperate for my secret to business success. Although quite rude, these people mean well and I can’t blame them for their passion, since they know who I am and what I do. I used to get nervous when faced with this aggression, but now I know exactly what to expect after the initial physical altercation.
They first apologize for getting in my face, and then they get down to business. They plead with me, “Jason tell me! How do you get elite Google Ads success for your clients? I know about search terms, I know about cost per lead, I know about persuasive ad copy, and Google Ads is going good for me – but I know it could be better! What’s your secret to elite Google Ads performance and success? Tell me right now!”
Let’s stop with the one-offs, the pushing, and the yelling. Right here, right now, I’ll go ahead and spill the beans. I hope you like my answer. Some people will get it, some people won’t. But let me preface with this, as it’s been said before:
The highest level of genius is simplicity.
Simplicity is the secret to life. It’s the modus operandi of everything I do. “Doing things simply” has given me everything I’ve ever achieved. Let me tell you the easy, simple secret to getting elite Google Ads success.
Here’s the secret to elite Google Ads success:
Answer your phone and follow up on lead forms quickly.
Got it? I told you it was simple.
Why does it work? The point of Google Ads for service companies is to get leads and turn those leads into new business for your company. Google Ads allows you to get in front of those leads and capture many of them through phone calls and lead form completions. But that’s where the Google Ads gift ends and your responsibility begins. Once someone calls you or fills out a form on your website, it’s on you, and only you, to turn that lead into a revenue-producing entity, commonly referred to as a customer. Elite Google Ads performance is only possible with top-notch sales.
Successful advertisers take this handoff of responsibility seriously. They understand that even if they get the absolute best Google Ads performance possible, they still have to do their job after they get the lead in order to make the overall Google Ads strategy work. That job is to follow up quickly with those leads and turn them into customers.
Believe it or not, you can give yourself a serious edge in Google Ads if you answer your phone and follow up with lead form completions quickly. Why? Simply put, the more quickly you follow up, the more leads you will close. The more leads you close, the more revenue you generate. The more revenue you generate, the more leads you can pay for. The more leads you can pay for, the more you can bid in Google Ads. The more you bid, the more you can dominate your market and crush your competitors.
Let’s dig a little deeper. Since Google Ads is an auction system, quality scores play a big role in the auction placement, but so do bids. If two advertisers both have good quality scores that are similar, then the advertiser who bids more will show up higher and get more clicks and leads from Google Ads. If you can turn leads into customers at a higher rate than your competitors, then you are able to bid more than your competitors and still be profitable.
This is why answering the phone and quickly following up with lead form completions is a secret to elite Google Ads success. Answering phone calls immediately, with a human being, will help you increase your close rate and turn more of your leads into customers. And quickly following up with people who completed lead forms on your website also helps you increase your close rate. With an increased close rate, these leads you get from Google Ads become more valuable (because more of the leads turn into paying customers). This allows you to bid more than your competitors and pay more for leads from Google Ads – the leads are not as valuable to them, because they don’t close as well as you do. Your ability to pay more for leads from Google Ads allows you to dominate search results and take a larger share of the market than your competitors.
It’s a simple concept, but it works. If you make leads from Google Ads more valuable for you than your competitors (because you close leads at a higher rate by actually answering the phone and quickly following up on lead forms), then you can bid more than them and get more business from Google Ads.
That’s not to say you can’t have really good success from Google Ads if you aren’t a hawk on the phone and lead form completions. If you do just okay at this aspect of business, you can still get really good Google Ads performance. Google Ads and search engine marketing is such an effective form of advertising that it allows for a lot of slack in a company’s overall sales system. If you get your search terms right, control your bidding, and generally do things correctly in Google Ads, then you’re going to have success from your PPC campaign; but not as much success as you would have with outstanding follow-up / sales. It all comes down to the degree of success you want to achieve.
There’s good performance, there’s great performance, and then beyond that, there’s elite performance. Elite Google Ads success comes from marrying effective Google Ads strategies (marketing) with effective phone, follow up, and communication strategies (sales). Focus on not just marketing, but also sales, and you’ll be able to achieve elite Google Ads performance.
