Tips for generating profitable leads from Google Ads

Google Ads are a direct and actionable way to drive a relevant audience (lead) to your business. The platform allows you to target an audience interested in your products and services through the Google Search Network and its partner base.

The key to understanding whether you’re running a profitable Google Ads campaign is to have the ability to track and attribute whether these leads are turning into sales and thus delivering a direct return on investment.

Once you know which campaigns are driving the most profit, it’s easier for you to stop wasting your budget on campaigns that bring in tyre kickers instead. 

How does Google Ads help you generate immediate leads?

When it comes to ads in Google search, leads come in many forms, including phone calls, emails, form fills, a lead form extension and sales. 

One of the greatest strengths of Google search ads is that your lead generation strategy can go from zero to generating a healthy return within a short time frame, depending on your customer buying cycle. 

By tailoring your ad campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords to reach your target audience, you can maximise your opportunity to drive lead generation successfully and profitably. 

But, the trick to ensuring your ad budget consistently generates profitable leads is to gather insights on which of your campaigns bring in the most profitable leads. As any business owner knows, not all leads come equal. A phone call from a tyre kicker or a bargain hunter is a waste of your time and budget. But a steady stream of phone calls from your ideal clients can be an absolute game changer.

At EngineRoom, we help our clients take things a step further than simply tracking their return on ad spend. First, we use data to help attract more of your ideal clients through your ads. And then, we help you attribute profitable leads to specific ad campaigns and even to specific keyword searches, so your ad budget goes further. 

In fact, we’ve developed a custom dashboard that can give all stakeholders in your business more insights than you would be able to gather from your Google Ads account. Including spend per campaign, right through to the sales made from those campaigns.

So we know a thing or two about what drives profitable leads through Google Ads and we’re about to share it all, so listen up!

Google Ads lead generation for B2B companies

B2B lead generation typically involves a highly qualified audience and many touch points over the customer journey. It can also be frustrating to track properly, with ad attribution windows being fairly short compared to the average B2B sales cycle length. 

This is why it is important to have highly relevant long-tail keywords and ads to reach this audience lower in the funnel.

Let’s pretend you offer business consultancy services for a moment. 

If your ads target high-level top-of-funnel keywords, like “what is business consultancy” it is unlikely you’ll generate many leads. And the leads you do generate will have to go through so many more phases in their buying journey before they’re ready to purchase your services.

However, by targeting keyword opportunities at the bottom of the funnel, you’ll reach people who are 100% ready to buy at the time they are making a search. 

The question isn’t if they’ll buy. It’s who they’ll make their purchase from.

The thing is, these keywords are harder to spot and don’t always seem lucrative at face value. They often have much lower search volume and can also seem oddly specific.

For instance, let’s look at these keywords for a B2B software company:

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At first glance, you might think it’s best to target the one with the most searches. And sure, there are ad strategies that support this logic if you’re playing a numbers game. The more exposure you get, the more conversions you’ll get too.

However, the amount of budget you need to spend to get a handful of clicks from a keyword with thousands of searches a month is significantly more than if you ran a long-tail strategy that targeted more specific audience segments.

Even if a keyword only had 10 searches a month, but you were the only brand bidding on that keyword, you have a larger slice of the click pie than if you were bidding and competing on the keyword with thousands of searches a month. 

And for B2B businesses, that could be the difference between the clicks on a long-tail keyword leading to more phone calls with your ideal client instead of tyre kickers and bargain hunters.

So, essentially, targeting long-tail keywords helps with generating leads that reach a sales decision faster and are more likely to be profitable for your business. Over time, you can refine and optimise these keywords to reach an audience with higher intent, increasing your lead generation conversion rate.

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Google Ads lead generation for eCommerce

A couple of key features of the Google Ads platform that are well suited to eCommerce businesses, include:

• Google shopping
• Google display network.

Your ads on Google shopping allow your eCommerce business to sell its inventory directly in Google search results. 

The ads feature pictures, prices, descriptions, and reviews. In addition, Google also places them quite prominently in the search results (often right up the top). Featuring so prominently in the search feed is a great way to reach your target audience and create sales.

Then, your ads can also feature on other people’s websites through Google’s display network. Essentially, they follow your target audience around the web so your brand gets more exposure.

At EngineRoom, we help our eCommerce clients track their sales from all marketing channels and better attribute the lifetime value of their customers. We can help you see more than just traditional metrics like transactions, revenue and return on ad spend. You can see exactly which keywords and ad groups generated the most profitable leads, including repeat transactions and the lifetime spend of a customer.

That’s right, we can help you see which campaigns are more likely to bring in repeat customers. That means you pay for the click on an ad once and continue to generate sales over the long term, for free. It’s the smart way to generate profitable eCommerce leads using Google Ads!

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Ready to start a Google Ads program?

Book a strategy session with one of our senior digital advisors and they’ll take a look at:

• Your current website
• Your competitors website and traffic
• Your business objectives and campaign goals

Following this analysis, they’ll sit down with you to begin strategising a conversion focused Google Ads program.

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Google Ads lead generation for service based businesses

If you run a service based business, Google Ads can be one of the most effective and quickest ways to reach customers currently interested in finding local services.

For example, if a customer was looking for your service, they could search on their phone and see your ad. Then, they could click on the call extension (or one of the Google lead form extensions you enable on your ad), and make a booking without even having to click through to your website.

We track these bookings and more through our EngineRoom dashboard. Our platform can give you and other key stakeholders in your business complete transparency on the quality and quantity of leads your digital marketing efforts generate.

A unique feature of our platform, however, is that we can help you see the entire journey your customers went on before they call you so you can track the effectiveness of your ads alongside other digital marketing channels.

Having transparency over how a lead first found you online is more difficult to achieve than it sounds, especially for service businesses. 

But if you truly want to track which of your marketing channels are the most profitable, you need to know all the touch points a lead made with your brand along the way.

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3 tips for consistently generating profitable leads from Google Ads

When building a Google Ads strategy, the first step is defining your target audience. Then, you need to tailor your ads and keywords with messages that reach your target audience. 

Everything from the keywords, ad copy, and the landing pages you add must be relevant to the person reading your ad. Relevance is a simple concept in theory, but it’s also one of the biggest reasons ads don’t perform very well!

So if you’re looking to generate more profitable leads from Google Ads consistently, here are a few other tips we can share to help you get there.

Tip #1: Campaign structure for lead generation

There are various different campaign structures that you can use when building an account in Google Ads. They can be built by:

• Product or Service
• Geographic location 
• Keyword match type

At EngineRoom, our preferred strategy is to build campaigns by product or service so that they match the structure of our client’s website. 

When campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ad copy, and the landing page are all aligned, this helps us achieve the highest possible quality score. We can more easily reach our specific target market, leading to profitable lead generation.

However, if your website is structured differently, you’ll need to customise your ad set-up to match. For instance, some of our franchise clients prefer to track everything according to their store locations. Either way, it pays dividends to create relevance in your campaigns by matching to your website structure.

Tip #2: Conversion tracking

Tracking conversions in the Google Ads dashboard is the foundation for measuring the success of any campaign. It also helps you optimise towards the best return on investment.

For our clients, once an ad is clicked, we use the EngineRoom platform to attribute the action they take. Such as if they make a phone call, complete a form fill or email, download a document, or complete a sale. 

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Tip #3 Tracking sales from Google Ad campaigns

Tracking sales can also be done on a more granular level. We believe hidden gold can be found when you overlay your ads data with first-party data from within your organisation.

The EngineRoom platform can track:

1. Sales
2. Revenue
3. Transactions
4. Return on ad spend for any eCommerce business

We can also overlay these metrics with the data from your CRM or accounting platform and you can see exactly how effective ads can be for different segments of your business, even if you don’t run an eCommerce store!

Detailed tracking helps us determine which campaigns or products have the best return on investment and ensures that we can maximise the investment in these areas.

EngineRoom even gives non-eCommerce customers the ability to see ROI, average transaction yield and total marketing investment.

Best practices for attracting your ideal customers through Google Ads

Best practice for any Google Ads campaign involves defining your target audience, products and services. 

Once this is established, you can select the most relevant keywords to best target this audience.

From here, it’s a matter of crafting and publishing the right message to your audience through relevant ad copy.

This strategy will help you achieve the highest possible quality score, ultimately seeing you maximise your ROI by reducing your ad spend and achieving higher ad ranking positions.