The Top 3 Google Ads Myths For Local Businesses

Here’s the most common misconceptions about Google Ads marketing for local businesses.

1. By paying an agency you end up paying more

One of the most common myths is that you pay more by using an agency rather than if you were to run your Adwords campaigns yourself.

One of the first things you will learn as a small business owner is that you can’t do everything yourself.

When you start out in business, you typically get your first customer by sales or word of mouth. Then you have to make sure your legal documents are okay to protect yourself if the worst happens. Then you have to service the customer. Then you have to make sure the customer is satisfied with their product or service. Then you have to bill the customer. Then make sure they pay etc etc.

Then, if you are an ambitious business owner, you will soon get more customers as people hear about your great work, and this is when you hit the realisation, you CAN’T do everything yourself.

Nearly every local business starts this way, and once you grow to this stage you realise this is where the complexity rises. To accommodate growth over and above the level of customers you personally can serve, you will need to build:

• Project management systems
• Customer service systems
• Billing systems
• Sales systems.
• Marketing systems
• Hiring Systems
• Firing Systems
• Quality Control Systems
• And more….

This is why running your own Google Adwords is not the smartest idea you’ve ever thought of. You’ve got too many other priorities, rather than deal with the “intricacies of Adwords execution”.

You literally don’t have enough hours in the day to even contemplate learning about it. Unless you want to REMAIN a small business forever, that is.

Smart local business owners know that they cannot take the time to learn/execute the marketing themselves as in the case of Google Adwords. The reality is, Adwords is a tough skill and could take years of daily study to become an expert… and you will be competing with experts.

For example, do you know the difference between broad match, exact match and phrase match? How many Ad groups or advertisements should you write for your industry? How are you going to build a strategy to beat your competition?

What words should you “neg”? What’s a negative keyword? How much should you be bidding on a particular keyword for optimal return on investment?

The primary price per click you pay is determined by your clickthrough rate (how many times your ads appear vs how many times they are clicked on. As an amateur who does Adwords, you might generate a clickthrough rate (CTR) of between 0–3%, whereas our campaigns at Kala Digital generate, on average, a CTR of above 4%. This reduces your cost per click and increases your return on investment over time.

So you can waste a HUGE amount of time and money learning Adwords to save yourself approximately 30% management fees (which is a typical management fee), and in the long run, this just isn’t worth it.

If your budget is $1000 or $2000 a month, an expert provider will generate far more profit for you than the measly 30% in fees.

2. You pay more to get to the top

Some business owners believe you’ve just got “to spend more” to get to the top.

Whilst this may be partly true, it is not the whole story. The best way to illustrate how Google determines your position is the following chart:

You will notice three elements on this chart:

• Clickthrough rate
• Landing page
• Text ad

A combination of these three elements determines your position on the page. Further to this, these three factors also determine how much you pay for every click. It is quite possible someone paying less than you can end up on top of you on Google if their advertisements are more relevant and they have a relevant landing page to the search query.

The above three elements are what’s referred to as “Quality Score”. I prefer to refer to it as “Relevancy Score” which is a little simpler to understand.

The major factor being Clickthrough rate. Google figures if lots of people are clicking on your ads, then your ad must be relevant to what the searcher is typing in and what you’re offering must be attractive to the user. Writing great text ads, and setting up campaigns to increase clickthrough rates is beyond the scope of this article, however, it is imperative that these are done correctly to increase the return on investment from your online marketing campaigns.

3. Nobody clicks on the ads.

Of all the myths of Google Adwords, this is probably one of the most amusing… because it is so simply answered.

I cannot count the amount of times I have heard. “I never click on the sponsored links, I just don’t trust them” or something similar.

The reality is the following… who cares if no one clicks on an ad that you are serving… you don’t pay for it!? So essentially you have a FREE advert.

I hope this clears up the common misconceptions about Google Adwords for Local Businesses.

To Better Return On Investment,

"Trust me this book is full of great advice, but you need to take the steps to make
it happen!"