How Long Does It Take To Succeed With Google Ads? (Episode 527)

0:19Chris Schaeffer: Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaeffer and today I'm going to answer a question I get all the time. How long does it take to be successful in Google Ads? I'm going to answer that right away. I have a straightforward answer. Then I'm going to give you the longer answer about where the truth actually lies, because it's not the same for everyone, of course. But I think you'll be very grateful for this answer once I lay it out for you. So before I get started in the podcast, I wanted to tell you how this podcast is possible. I am a busy guy. I've been to Google Ads for a long time, and I have a lot of information to share.

0:58Chris Schaeffer: But nowadays, there's more tools out there than what can really be done with just one guy, with one set of hands. Everybody needs more in Google Ads because the data is growing. Things are getting more complicated, and that's why my sponsor Optio is here to help. It can help take the complicated actions of Google Ads, the complicated aspects of Google Ads, and give you a power tool to manage all the strategies, all of the possibilities that you can create and adjust in this amazing software. So if you need help understanding your data, if you need help diagnosing what the problem is, this amazing tool can help you do more than you've ever done before.

1:52Chris Schaeffer: It helps get things done faster. What do I mean? Well, it can help you to analyze your clicks, your conversions, your bidding strategies, help generate ads from specific landing pages that you've created. It has a keyword finder tool. It has an analyze with AI button. So if you're looking at something, you don't really know how to read this information. Why have clicks gone down? Well, this tool can help you to diagnose that problem. Why is your cost per click increasing? This can help you find that problem. So you can try this tool for free for 28 days at optio.com slash PSP. That's O-P-T-E-O dot com slash PSP.

2:34Chris Schaeffer: get the 28 day free trial when you go to that URL optio.com slash PSP. Okay, so we're going to move on and I'm going to save you some time. And I'm going to give you the answer to today's podcast discussion right up top. I don't want to waste your time. I respect your time. I'm talking to a lot of business owners, business people, professionals out there. So here's the answer. The answer, how long Google Ads takes for success is three months. I'm going to give that generic answer because most of the time that's true. The first month is a time of testing and probably a lot of failure, a lot of immediate discoveries about what you do and don't want, month two immediately starts to take those learnings and to improve upon what is working, and by month three, hopefully to improve upon that and optimize for the successes that you are experiencing.

3:39Chris Schaeffer: So I would say most of the time, three months. Now, I'm also speaking to those of you that have success in your future. I would also say it takes three months to figure out the Google ads is probably not for you. So I'd say three months for success or failure in Google ads. I don't think the year is necessary. I think a month is too short. And I think three months is about right. So now pick, pick those three months appropriately. You may not want to do it at the very beginning of the year, maybe the very end of the year, you know, maybe the summertime's a bad time for your industry. Pick a good time for you to try those three months.

4:25Chris Schaeffer: But I think three months is a pretty good answer. So if that's all you needed to hear, you can stop now. Thanks for listening to the podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and have a great day. But I imagine most of you probably want more than that. You want to find out the real complexity to that question because because the real answer is success in Google ads can be sped up and can be slowed down. And I don't think you fully understand what I mean by that. So I'm actually going to go through that and explain how you can speed up success and why that may not be what you want and how you can slow down success.

5:09Chris Schaeffer: And that may not be what you want either. This is going to be an answer that's different for everyone. So let's go through it here. Um, number one, success can be sped up in Google ads, uh, by using a specific tactic tactic of lowering the specifics of the lead that you're looking for. Okay. So, um, let's, um, you know, let's go with something, maybe a home service. Let's try something like a, you know, a pest control, right? Someone who sprays for bugs and things like that. Let's say that you're starting a Google ads campaign for pest control and you want to speed up your success in Google ads.

5:58Chris Schaeffer: So what you would do is you might use the most generic, common, most commonly searched terms in your industry and just have the word pest control near me, pest control services, pest control company, pest control plus a city name. I mean, these are extremely common, absolutely no creativity involved here. No real strategy other than just go brute force straight into the thick of things. Okay. So this can actually speed up your success, but stay with me because you might realize that this is not what you want. Another form of speeding up your campaign is take these generic keywords. I'm going to call them generic because, you know, pest control near me is, you know, very, very generic.

6:52Chris Schaeffer: It's not really creative. It's just the thing. It's just the keyword that you want to show up on. Okay. So what you could do to pair that and speed up things even faster is have a very low bar, very low hurdle for a conversion. So just having a phone number in the ad or having a website that is very simple. It's one page and it just has a phone number or it has, you know, you can text. It doesn't even have a form. It's just the fastest communication possible, the least requirement of any kind of verification of who they are, what they're looking for. Everyone just dial this number and call me now.

7:41Chris Schaeffer: Dial this number and call me now. Right? So there's very little qualification. They don't even have to type their name into a form. They don't have to put an email address in. There's no quote. They that requires any kind of grittiness or slowdown of them going straight from click to conversion. Okay, so take these two things together. And what do we have? We now have a campaign that is speeding towards success. I'm going to put that in quotes, speeding towards success because it's using very broad targets and very low hurdles. Okay, so I cannot tell you how many times I see this happening in accounts.

8:37It's very common.

8:42Chris Schaeffer: I was working with an AC repair company. They do home services. They do plumbing, AC repair, electrical. They do a lot of different services. So a couple of years ago, I was working with them. And the goal was to get a certain number of conversions per month. That's the goal that they provided me with. You know, a certain cost per conversion. They're going to spend, you know, several tens of thousands of dollars a month. And their goal was to get this many conversions. So I very much built them what I described to you. a low hurdle, broad approach that can generate a lot of clicks, but have absolutely minimal quality control.

9:29They're going to get searches for competitors. They're going to get searches for all kinds of stuff that kind of surrounds the AC, plumbing, electrical industry in their area. so we went through this for a year i think it was over a year maybe a year and a half and after this time uh you know they analyzed where they were at they were looking at their numbers and they called me up and said you know this something's got to change something has to because our cost per job is extremely low. We get a lot of phone calls, but very often they're price shoppers or they're calling about a competitor or they have something else in mind that's not really qualified to our funnel.

10:23And while I was hitting their cost per acquisition, I was hitting their number of leads that they were looking to get, they were unhappy because they had sped towards success. They had gone for very broad approaches and very low hurdles. Okay. So that's an example of fast success in Google ads. But you understand And now this success was, for their bottom line, very much not successful.

10:59Chris Schaeffer: So before you think, well, okay, I know what Chris is going to say. He's going to say, you know, do the opposite. Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what the opposite looks like and how I also think that this success is also not true success. And at the end of the episode, I'm going to tie all this together. I'm going to tell you where I think the secret of success actually lies in Google ads and, and why it's not necessarily fast and why it's not always super slow. Um, and, and how I think the best way to approach it is. So instead of broad, wide reaching, low hurdle, no quality control.

11:39Chris Schaeffer: Let's completely go 180. Let's change it. And now let's talk about entirely focusing on value, the value of the lead, controlling traffic, making sure we get exactly what we're looking for, making sure that, you know, not a single click is wasted, making sure that every single click and is as precise and narrowly targeted as we can possibly make it. Also adding in high barriers to entry. Okay, so what does this success look like? Well, this is a campaign that uses all exact match keywords. This approach is going to be immediately taking the opposite of the broad. it's going to be very narrow. So immediately there's less volume, less clicks available.

12:37Chris Schaeffer: So however many impressions there might've been with these broad, wide reaching keywords, now we are down to a fraction of that by using exact match keywords. So the availability of impressions has immediately shrunk, but that's good because now we've immediately filtered out all the stuff we don't want, which is great. But what comes as a byproduct of that is an extremely high cost per click. If you decide the exact traffic that you want, and you control it by means of precise targeting in Google ads, you often are presented with an extremely high cost per click. And a high cost per click means that your spend is now going to spend at a faster pace.

13:26Chris Schaeffer: So now$100 a day doesn't go as far as it did before. You might have gotten in a broad approach, maybe a$20 cost per click. And when you go for a very narrow approach, it might be$60 cost per click. So now you went from getting five clicks a day to, you know, getting one and a half clicks a day. I mean, this is significantly going to slow down the acquisition of clicks and clicks lead to sales conversions. So this is going to be a problem. Now, what have we done? We've taken the goal line of achieving success and rather than narrowing it and making it so precise that we can hit it every single time.

14:18Now we've elongated the process of achieving success. Now it might take us a long time to achieve success because now we only get a fraction of the clicks per day. And let's take it a step further. You know, you're going after these really, really specific clicks and you're pointing them to highly specific landing pages. And these landing pages are specifically for people who want, you know, a specific type of service or a very specific kind of product. And that's what the lead acquisition is focused on. If someone wants anything outside of that, they're not going to be happy with that landing page.

14:58Chris Schaeffer: They're not going to be happy with that page they're landing on because it's not speaking to anything else other than that one narrow channel of need that you're targeting. So when someone does fall into that and it works exactly as it should, you can get some great leads exactly like you're looking for. But what keeps us from being successful is that the campaign is now going at a snail's pace. you may suffer with volume. In fact, you will suffer with volume. You'll say, yeah, I mean, we've gotten lead, but we've only gotten like two in the past three months. And, you know, the quality of traffic, the quality of people that you're bringing to the site might be phenomenal.

15:51And this, just as the other type of strategy, can lead to absolute, you know, you ever run really fast, and you're sprinting so hard, you know, you see it on videos, people start sprinting, and they immediately topple over, right?

16:08Chris Schaeffer: They start just falling over because their legs got ahead of their body, or their body got ahead of their legs, right? That's the other speed strategy. This precision strategy is as though someone's running and they have something tied around their legs, so they fall over in the same way. the restriction however it's done either generously or restrictively can bring a campaign to a halt very quickly for for different reasons they achieve the goals of success they both achieve that goal of success in that they got high volume of conversions but they weren't qualified and the other one got highly qualified traffic but it wasn't enough conversions Neither one of those is success.

16:56Those don't work. They don't work. I'm going to tell you here at the end of the episode where I think success actually lies. And before I do, remind you about my sponsor Optio. Please check out their website, optio.com slash PSP to learn about their AI integration power tools. It's no longer just recommendations anymore. It is a multi-channel tool for LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, Google, TikTok. It can help do many things. And I highly recommend it, optio.com slash PSP.

17:33So here we go. Here's what I think success looks like in Google Ads. I think the real solution is to do both of those things. and I'm going to prescribe to you exactly how that looks. Say, you know, how could you do both, Chris? They're both very different. Well, compartmentalization, or if you want to call it a modular approach, is the proper way to do it. This might mean that you have one campaign that is designed to be precision targeted at specific things. So we were using pest control before, and maybe it's a specific type of pest based on the season. In the summertime or the wintertime, maybe there's some pests that are much more prevalent during the time of year.

18:31So a very precise campaign targeting that, with landing pages going after that. And that's given a percentage of the budget. okay and then the other side of it the the broader approach you have another campaign that has maybe a different bidding strategy that has different keywords that uses broad phrase probably really not any exact match um but maybe it might in different situations but the point is is it's not duplicating what the other campaign's doing it's it's doing the opposite it's going after greater volume, reach, for lack of a better term, it's really not precise. It's imprecise in what it's doing.

19:16And that's what gives it kind of the power to move quickly. You're not real specific about what kind of stuff you're going to be getting, but you'll be able to block it once you see what you're getting and you don't like. You'll be able to use negative keywords. And one campaign goes after really specific targets. another campaign goes after broader wider scope and maybe they point to the same page of your website they don't have to go to different pages you know maybe this isn't the time for that maybe you go to one page and that's that's what brings me to my my final point here is that my suggestion for lead acquisition beyond just the keywords when you get it to your website I think everyone, no matter what strategy they're doing, whether they're leaning more on precise or they're leaning more on broad, I think having a diverse selection of conversion actions is critical to success.

20:20I think requiring someone to call in order to contact you, and that's the only method of success or only method of conversion that you have, is a bad thing. I think only having a purchase now or, you know, a cart on your site and that's it, I think that's a bad thing. I think no matter what percentage of precision and broad you do this with, you should allow people to have both high barrier to entry for lead generation or for e-commerce, or you have very low hurdle conversion tracking or e-commerce purchases. so for example for e-commerce you might have a contact us form on there so people can just ask a question about the product and you also have a purchase now button for lead generation you have a you might have a book an appointment or book a meeting you might have a contact form and you might have a get a quote form and maybe a phone number two typically lead generation you're going to have a lot more opportunities to have different types of conversion tracking available to you.

21:47But I hope you understand what I'm getting here is that I think success in Google ads should not be extremely fast and nobody wants it to be extremely slow. Instead, taking those strategies of speed and precision and putting them together and controlling it. That's what success looks like. And if you do that properly, I do think that you can achieve, you can achieve success in about three months. I think success in Google ads requires a diverse collection of strategies, not just one, not just all broad match with automated bidding, and not just all exact match with manual bidding. Those two could pair quite nicely.

22:40and that's that's true in reality that's true in life what you know whether you want to success in google ads or you want to lose weight you know doing anything to an extreme is usually a bad idea so if you're having trouble stumbling through and you don't really know you hear all these different strategies that people talk about the truth is the truth is it lies in between all of those all these different things that people say about do this don't do that and And then somebody else comes forward and says, no, no, don't do that. Do this. The truth is somewhere in between. And the great thing about Google ads is you can create those strategies separately.

23:22You can control them.

23:24Chris Schaeffer: You can create broad. You can create precision and control each of those areas.

23:36So that's where I'll leave it today. If you'd like help generating these ideas, these strategies for your Google ads campaigns, I'm available to help either with full, absolute full Google ads management for you, or you can book a call with me. I can go through your campaign with you line by line and get it worked out and make sure it works to your liking. You can find my options for help at chrisshafer.com. Otherwise you'll hear me next week right here on the paid search podcast. I'll see you then.