Effective strategies and tips for evaluating if a customer would benefit from an AdWords campaign and, if so, presenting your case to the customer.
- Upselling – how to explain, how to identify if it’s a good idea for a customer
- Counts toward your revenue managed
- Helps customer generate more money by being more competitive
- How AdWords can help SEO (on-site behavior)
- Brings increased traffic to your website and if you are doing it right, brings quality traffic to your website
- Side benefit of Adwords: Since on-site behavior is a variable in determining rankings, that improvement in behavior can help your organic rankings
- Next Step: Identify one customer who could benefit from AdWords, identify what campaigns would be good (branded, non-branded, specific parts of business), competitive landscape, and then talk to that customer with goal of upselling.
Reviewing an Account for AdWords Potential
Existing AdWords Account that We Do Not Manage
- Do they have existing AdWords account running that we could take over? If so, get info on ad spend, look at ROI in Analytics. Could we manage it better?
- >> ROI Formula: (Total AdWords-Generated Revenue – All AdWords-Related Expenses)/All AdWords-Related Expenses
- Detailed breakdown: ((AdWords Ecommerce Revenue+Any Verified Phone Bookings from AdWords) – (Ad Spend+Management fees))/(Ad Spend+Management fees)
- Phone bookings will be tough to get but good to have that data if possible in your ROI calculations
- Test keywords in an incognito mode to see how they are ranking and if they are showing up
Existing AdWords Account that We Manage
- Is there opportunity/evidence to justify raising the budget or creating additional campaigns?
- If ROI is good, it may be worth increasing their budget.
- Do they have additional business components (e.g. Weddings, Restaurant) that would benefit from their own campaigns?
- Limited radius for restaurant campaigns since you would want to target local traffic
- Tough to calculate ROI for restaurants and weddings because it won’t track eCommerce data for these. Base on it calls that they receive and also the amount of traffic to those pages.
- Maybe a Phone Call campaign? Make sure to use precise targeting and negative keywords, as with any campaign.
No Existing AdWords Account
Branded Search
- Do an Incognito search for their brand name – are other businesses (e.g. Expedia, VRBO, etc.) bidding on their name? If so, this is a huge opportunity to take back that traffic.
- This is a good way to lower dependency on OTAs if that is a goal for your customer.
- What if they’re increasing their rates on OTA listings to make up the expense? Is the cost of AdWords still justified?
- 1) Their guests spend less in fees, which leaves more money to be spent at their property or on add-ons and packages.
- 2) OTAs don’t have upsell options at the end of the booking process like the booking engine does.
Non-Branded
- Do an Incognito search for some of their primary keywords, e.g. “Bed and breakfast Cape Cod” or “Fort Lauderdale Vacation Rental” and see where they rank organically and how many ads display.
- If it is a more competitive area where the competitors are bidding on AdWords then you would need to add it in or to compete with the other local businesses.
- See where they are organically too and where their competitors are showing up on the ads (top of the first page, bottom or later)
What to look for in Analytics
- Look at traffic sources, where is it coming from? How does Google organic traffic perform?
- PPC has a higher conversion rate typically than organic because it is more targeted.
- Did they lose traffic from a big referral source? AdWords can help make up difference.
- A lot of customers saw this with BedandBreakfast.com recently. Creates an opportunity to bring in converting traffic
- Can help reduce dependence on OTAs.
- How well is your traffic converting? If low, make sure you also focus on CRO.
- If your site isn’t converting then you are going to likely have the same problems with PPC.
- If you have this problem, push more phone bookings because that is more likely to convert than that particular website. Make sure you have the right keywords and very targeted keywords (ex: Palmetto Sands)- Make sure it is scheduled to only show during business hours otherwise those calls won’t convert.
- If your site isn’t converting then you are going to likely have the same problems with PPC.
- Demographics – Age? If mostly older, maybe start with Bing.
- If they get a lot of Bing organic traffic, then consider doing Bing Ads. Older people will use defaulted web browser which is edge.
What about Bing Ads?
- The demographic who uses Bing search (I.e. slightly older people, on average), while much smaller, is more likely than Google users to convert to a booking for most of our customers. Look at Bing Organic vs Google Organic conversion rates in Analytics. If the conversion rate for Bing is significantly higher, Bing Ads could be a worthwhile investment as well.
- If Google AdWords is working well AND they have high-converting Bing traffic, it may be worth duplicating the AdWords campaign as a Bing campaign.
- This is easy to export and just import into Bing ads.
- Separate management fees for AdWords and Bing unless the total budget is over the $500 mark.
- One of the easiest upsell opportunities.
- If they have a limited budget and their Bing traffic is doing really well. You could just do Bing Ads instead of AdWords.
CEM Post-Meeting Task
AdWords Upselling Goal: Identify 2 customers who could benefit from AdWords, put together info supporting your claim, and have a call with them explaining why/how it would benefit them. Main goal is to help your customer and work towards achieving their goals.
Upselling Tracking Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B4I7Pzf9CLhsxpRbkDPdPxCLQ5Wr9yob3T_rD1jc4vE/edit?usp=sharing
Deadline for calls with customers is June 29.
- Could start small with a $200 a month and grow it if they are interested in it.
- Customers get the most value if they spend $500 per month because the mgmt fee is the same up to $500 ad spend.
IF we already manage their AdWords, is there a case for raising the budget?
Check Bing Listings: Make sure that everything is correct and your customers have a listing.