AdWords for Your Business

As your company grows and you start to develop a sense of what works and what does not when it comes to driving revenue, you will eventually be confronted with the chance to join the Google AdWords game. You will then have the choice to produce a more robust advertising focus on the job, or outsource the job to someone with technical expertise. But to find the correct partner, you will need to know the appropriate questions to ask.

Choosing the right service for you

When outsourcing your AdWords campaign management, always try to find an AdWords agency with some practical experience working with customers in your trade. Coca Cola would not work with an agency that has never done beverage advertisements before, so don’t you make that mistake, either. Perhaps the perfect agency has worked with a competitor of yours in the past.

Locally-focused companies (i.e., businesses that service a particular geographic area) should attempt to find a local service with demonstrated experience targeting customers locally (every area has its own quirks). Bigger agencies are normally less locally-focused, can be cost-prohibitive for smaller home service companies, and are more likely to be diverted by higher-paying accounts. When outsourcing, consider everything that goes into an ad campaign, such as:

• Keyword investigation and installation
• Ad copy (i.e., content) and graphic design
• Reporting
• Campaign updates and adjustments

In a perfect world, your agency partner can handle the heavy lifting in all those realms (otherwise, you will need a strategy to do this work yourself). Even minor, continuing changes to ad copy can be time consuming but create a huge gap on the overall performance of your ad campaigns.

Another important consideration is finding a service which will be 100% clear with you and discuss specific, detailed reports and raw data. A partner who attempts to hide the performance information that you have access to probably does not have your best interests in mind.

For a home service company, learning the ins and outs of AdWords campaigns is vital. Even if you never take AdWords on in house, you still need the knowledge necessary to evaluate your agency’s performance and understand where your money is going.

Best practices for successful advertising campaigns

If you know early July is an important time for generating business, you need to have your AdWords campaign entirely planned and ready prior to this time.

Another key to success with AdWords is to define what success is beforehand by identifying what ‘conversions’ you want to see. If your advertisement causes someone to go to your web site, and do nothing else, is that a conversion? Does the visitor need to complete a form, call your office, book a job, or something else to call it a triumph? There are many different measures on the customer traffic. If you do not agree with your service provider beforehand–in concrete terms–about what success is, you are setting both companies up for irritating failure.

Investing in the help of a digital agency to help grow your business is a big step. Be blunt in communicating your needs and expectations and do not be afraid to ask pointed questions, or walk away if you don’t feel like you’re getting everything you require.

Always start off with month-to-month deals initially and remain on top of your agency to provide the reports you require, on-time, every time. Demand focus on what they’re working on a continuous basis to enhance your advertising campaign results and make them show you their work logs and correlate efforts to improved outcomes.