Why You Should Be Using Google Adwords Featuring Mitch Gallant || Eps 36 #InTheDealership

This week’s #InTheLab I get to interview Mitch Gallant, Marketing Manager for the Capital Auto Group. I’ve worked on and off with him and his team for around 4 years now. Mitch is brilliant when it comes to online marketing let alone Google Adwords. This talk is mostly focused on Google Adwords.

“Buying a car is a hassle! That’s probably why buying a car is one of the most researched industries on the internet.”

Mobile traffic is more valuable than desktop traffic

“People looking on their phone aren’t just window shopping, they’re looking with intent.” Mobile customers are much more valuable to businesses selling a product, in the vehicle industry anyway, people don’t pull out their smartphone to “browse” for cars, no, they’re there for a reason. Mobile will be a big deal for your company, if you aren’t looking at your analytics, it could be already!

3 Reasons Why You Should Be On Google

1. You can test and measure everything

From Title, to body text (content), to your website URL, you can test every part of your
Google ads. This is the basic methodology you need to adopt, create variations to better understand what people are interested in. Not only are you testing each ad, you’re testing each title, each body and each URL you use. That makes a lot of different variations that are possible and Google makes it very simple to create more ads.

When you’re in Adwords creating your campaign, you can copy a previously made ad and then change out one of the three variables you’re testing. That’s why in the video Mitch says that the Capital Auto Group uses approximately 2,500 ads. It sounds like a LOT, but that’s not 2,500 unique ads, no, that 2,500 different ad variations all trying to help Mitch figure out what types of ads work the best at attracting click-thru’s to his website. With those kind of numbers at any given time he has a great idea on what Titles, body content and URL work the best.

Lets stop creating just one advertisement or just a couple ads for your next campaign. Why not create 50-100 ads so you can compare after and make your decisions easier next time?

2. You will better understand what your audience is looking for

Adwords isn’t amazing just for testing ads, you will also be testing the keywords people search in Google and then trigger your ad to be shown. In the olden Google days you could see all search traffic coming to your website AND what people were searching when they found your website. Today, the default setting of most browsers is “Cookies off” so Google nor your website team can get that data anymore.

So how do you find out what people are looking for in your industry? Google Adwords to the rescue.

When someone clicks on one of your ads you’ll know precisely what keywords they were searching for. After a few months of running Adwords campaigns you’ll have a great idea of what people like to click on and what they don’t like to click on. Stop arguing with your staff about to name things and start naming things based on Google’s Keyword Research Tool( you’ll need an Adwords account to use it). The Adwords Keyword planner helps by telling you the estimated search volume of any keyword combination. Unless there is too little search volume, then it’ll just tell you that.  

We regularly get in arguments in the office as to what keywords we should be optimizing for. The most recent was we all thought “child dentist” or “children’s dentist” or what would be the most popular search for a dentist for a kid? Turns out “Pediatric dentist” is search much, MUCH more than any of the variations we thought of first.

If you’re doing a lot on your website and no ones coming, maybe you’re offering something nobody wants. Google does an amazing job of helping better understand what people are searching for and expanding the keywords you’re using. So experiment, come up with 200 different keyword searches for your industry and run a campaign for a couple months. Spend $500-$1,000 and watch the data come in. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll uncover.

3. You only pay when someone clicks

“Why wouldn’t you spend money to make money?!? Google allows you to do this!” -Mitch Gallant

Finally the best part of Google Adwords is you only pay when someone clicks. Yes clicks can become expensive, we’ve spent up to $20 a click, depending on what you’re selling it can still be profitable. You see above in the “dental” searches how expensive the cost per click estimates are, anywhere from $9 to $12 per click. I’m guessing that when someone is searching “pediactric dentist” it’s for an important reason, not just browsing dentists, resulting in an extremely qualified lead.

People don’t search for what they aren’t interested in(ugh, double negative I know!!). Search is one of the most important functions the internet enables, if not the most important. If you want to learn more about how Adwords work check out this page from Google: Want to learn more about Adwords? Check out some great resources here.

If you want to learn more about Adwords take Mitch out for a coffee, he knows his stuff and I’m sure would love to chat about it.