We spent $1 million in a month on Google ads. Here’s what we learned.
February was a great month for us. We signed quite a few new clients and we drove some amazing results in Google Ads.
In this article we’ll talk about what we learned and how you can apply that to your ad campaigns.
First, let’s break down the numbers. You can see the screenshot below showing key metrics across accounts.
Here’s how the numbers broke down:
- Almost 7 million impressions (purple)
- Just about 500,000 clicks for a click through rate of 7.36% (purple)
- Total ad spend was just over $1 million (green)
- That resulted in about 165,000 leads, which shook out to about a 34% conversion rate (red)
Key Takeaways
I like to do these kinds of assessments each month internally, but I thought I’d share this one so you can. not only see what we learned but also understand how we evaluate ourselves internally.
Overall, performance was really strong. A 165,000 leads at a 34.44% conversion rate is one of our best months yet.
I realized I didn’t include cost per conversion in the screenshot above. That came to about $6 per auto glass lead. Not bad.
What did we learn
Importance of account structure
One of the most important things we’ve learned over the years, and that played out this month, is that account structure is crucial.
We’ve taken over campaigns from other agencies with literally thousands of ad groups. The problem is you can’t possibly keep track of that many ad groups, which means things get missed, forgotten about, and if you want to be thorough and avoid mistakes, every change takes an eternity.
This is one of those recurring tests we run. Every year or so we test account structure ideas to see if our approach is still working best. We usually eek out improvements, sometimes big ones, but we always find that a simpler account structure is better.
Spend time perfecting the user experience on your landing pages
One of the most common landing page mistakes is creating robotic, unfriendly landing pages designed for robots instead of humans.
Check out this headline I found on a local law firm’s website:
Now compare that to this headline from Apple’s new Macbook Pro landing page:
One tells you what the company does. In the most boring way possible. The other creates a sense of excitement and makes you want to read the rest of the page.
There’s a reason Apple’s brand is worth $320 billion.
Understanding this is one of the key reasons we’re able to drive 30-50% conversion rates when the industry average is around 2%.
Understand the industry
We’ve been in the auto glass industry for about 8 years now. But we’ve all done marketing for other industries, and the thing any well-rounded marketer learns pretty quickly is that what works in one industry won’t necessarily work in another.
You have to understand the industry, and, most importantly, the customer shopping in that industry.
What do they care about? How are they shopping? How long is the buying cycle? How price-sensitive are they?
The answers to these questions will vary by industry, but they’ll also vary by customer segment within an industry. If your service area is mostly upper middle class suburbs, that’s a very different customer than if you’re serving customers downtown.
Summary
To tie all this together, Google advertising is often thought of as some kind of technical process of flipping the right switches at the right time. But it’s not that at all.
The switch flipping is important, but at the end of the day this is marketing. And marketing is about people.
Understand the person, and you unlock incredible results and rapid growth.
We help auto glass companies get the phone ringing off the hook. Contact us today to see if you qualify for our program.