Andy Black
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The Biggest Benefit of Google Ads
One of my friends is an electrician, and his work dried up when the economy tanked in 2009.
If got so bad he had to hand his van back, and he had a wife, two kids and another baby on the way.
He would have known this was the beginning of the end for him.
I wanted to learn how to build websites and asked if he’d be my guinea pig. He bit my hand off down to my ankle.
We built a simple site and got him ranked top for “kildare electrician” (Kildare being the county we live in here in Ireland).
Nothing happened.
Then one day a €50 Google Ads voucher fell out of a book. I setup an account, and got a few ads running.
Within a few days he rang saying “Andy, I’ve had a call!” I remember standing up and wandering around the office in a daze thinking “Wow, this actually works.”
We were really excited, and sat in his kitchen working out a bigger list of things to bid on. We had new keywords such as “dublin electrician”, “wiring and rewiring”, and “fuse board replacement”.
He was really excited about “smoke detector installation” because of all the landlords in Dublin that would need smoke detectors installed in their properties.
We setup a “Services” page on his site and listed each of the services as bullet points. We bid on each keyword and sent visitors to the page.
He started getting calls and I remember him getting home late one Friday evening because he had been fixing a washing machine in a town nearby.
He asked me to add “washing machine repairs” to the services page, saying that a lot of the people looked for an electrician because they wanted appliances repaired. We added that to his “Services” page, and created ads too.
After a month of the campaign running, we looked at his stats and and found that his ads had shown 10,000 times.
He’d had 300 clicks, and spent €75.
He was more than happy spending that €75, because he’d had enough work to cover the costs and get some money in.
Most people would use Google Analytics to find out what those 300 visitors did when they landed on the page, but I was more interested in the 9,700 people who had seen our ad and sailed past.
When I analysed the 10,000 times his ad had shown, I found that 2,000 were to do with people searching for electricians, especially in Dublin (the biggest city in Ireland).
We didn’t get many visitors though from these “electrician” searches, because every other electrician was also bidding on them and we were in a really low ad position.
We had hardly any clicks for wiring and rewiring, and no calls at all. I guessed our site wasn’t professional enough for people who were about to spend quite a bit of money and probably price shopping.
Our ads had shown only 12 times for “smoke detector installation”, so I told him that wasn’t going to work.
What I did find out though, was that half of all his impressions (that’s 5,000 impressions!) were down to either washing machine repairs, cooker repairs, or oven repairs.
He said he was absolutely swamped with all these appliance repairs calls.
Not only were there loads of people searching for appliance repairs, but there was much less competition in AdWords, so we were in a really high ad position and getting a lot of clicks.
Also, people looking to repair their washing machine or cooker are pretty desperate, and less likely to be price shopping because it’s a cheap job anyway.
So we threw away the DublinElectrical site we were building and built DublinWashingMachineRepairs.com, DublinCookerRepairs.com, and DublinOvenRepairs.com
And then built KildareWashingMachineRepairscom, KildareCookerRepairs.com and KildareOvenRepairs.com
We turned off all other ads, and just sent visitors to the correct website depending on what people were searching for.
His click-through-rate went from 4% to 8% overnight because someone searching for “dublin washing machine repairs” saw an ad from DublinWashingMachineRepairs.com instead of a Dublin Electrical site.
When they landed on the site and it said “Dublin Washing Machine Repairs”, they didn’t wonder whether he fixed washing machines, or if he covered Dublin. They just wanted to find his number and ask him when he could come round.
So his conversion rate also went up.
Which meant we could afford to pay more per click.
And get into top ad position.
Which brought in even more visitors.
The happy ending to the story is that my friend ended up getting a new van and building a workshop in his back garden to fix all the washing machines.
I’d never heard his dad speak, but he quietly bought me a drink at a family gathering.
To me, the biggest benefit of AdWords is not that you can buy visitors, but that you can find out what people are searching for, so that you can sell it to them.
You can quickly test whether “cheap”, “reliable”, or “qualified” works better in an ad when someone is looking for an electrician.
You can add the winner into the copy on your landing page.
Google Ads is the purest form of cold "traffic" - there's an intent behind every search.
If you’re not using it to buy real time market intelligence, then you’re just buying traffic.
The biggest benefit of AdWords is that it can help you to build products your market actually wants, rather than what you think it wants.
(Video version of the story added later in this thread, plus a link to a radio interview expanding upon it.)
One of my friends is an electrician, and his work dried up when the economy tanked in 2009.
If got so bad he had to hand his van back, and he had a wife, two kids and another baby on the way.
He would have known this was the beginning of the end for him.
I wanted to learn how to build websites and asked if he’d be my guinea pig. He bit my hand off down to my ankle.
We built a simple site and got him ranked top for “kildare electrician” (Kildare being the county we live in here in Ireland).
Nothing happened.
Then one day a €50 Google Ads voucher fell out of a book. I setup an account, and got a few ads running.
Within a few days he rang saying “Andy, I’ve had a call!” I remember standing up and wandering around the office in a daze thinking “Wow, this actually works.”
We were really excited, and sat in his kitchen working out a bigger list of things to bid on. We had new keywords such as “dublin electrician”, “wiring and rewiring”, and “fuse board replacement”.
He was really excited about “smoke detector installation” because of all the landlords in Dublin that would need smoke detectors installed in their properties.
We setup a “Services” page on his site and listed each of the services as bullet points. We bid on each keyword and sent visitors to the page.
He started getting calls and I remember him getting home late one Friday evening because he had been fixing a washing machine in a town nearby.
He asked me to add “washing machine repairs” to the services page, saying that a lot of the people looked for an electrician because they wanted appliances repaired. We added that to his “Services” page, and created ads too.
After a month of the campaign running, we looked at his stats and and found that his ads had shown 10,000 times.
He’d had 300 clicks, and spent €75.
He was more than happy spending that €75, because he’d had enough work to cover the costs and get some money in.
Most people would use Google Analytics to find out what those 300 visitors did when they landed on the page, but I was more interested in the 9,700 people who had seen our ad and sailed past.
When I analysed the 10,000 times his ad had shown, I found that 2,000 were to do with people searching for electricians, especially in Dublin (the biggest city in Ireland).
We didn’t get many visitors though from these “electrician” searches, because every other electrician was also bidding on them and we were in a really low ad position.
We had hardly any clicks for wiring and rewiring, and no calls at all. I guessed our site wasn’t professional enough for people who were about to spend quite a bit of money and probably price shopping.
Our ads had shown only 12 times for “smoke detector installation”, so I told him that wasn’t going to work.
What I did find out though, was that half of all his impressions (that’s 5,000 impressions!) were down to either washing machine repairs, cooker repairs, or oven repairs.
He said he was absolutely swamped with all these appliance repairs calls.
Not only were there loads of people searching for appliance repairs, but there was much less competition in AdWords, so we were in a really high ad position and getting a lot of clicks.
Also, people looking to repair their washing machine or cooker are pretty desperate, and less likely to be price shopping because it’s a cheap job anyway.
So we threw away the DublinElectrical site we were building and built DublinWashingMachineRepairs.com, DublinCookerRepairs.com, and DublinOvenRepairs.com
And then built KildareWashingMachineRepairscom, KildareCookerRepairs.com and KildareOvenRepairs.com
We turned off all other ads, and just sent visitors to the correct website depending on what people were searching for.
His click-through-rate went from 4% to 8% overnight because someone searching for “dublin washing machine repairs” saw an ad from DublinWashingMachineRepairs.com instead of a Dublin Electrical site.
When they landed on the site and it said “Dublin Washing Machine Repairs”, they didn’t wonder whether he fixed washing machines, or if he covered Dublin. They just wanted to find his number and ask him when he could come round.
So his conversion rate also went up.
Which meant we could afford to pay more per click.
And get into top ad position.
Which brought in even more visitors.
The happy ending to the story is that my friend ended up getting a new van and building a workshop in his back garden to fix all the washing machines.
I’d never heard his dad speak, but he quietly bought me a drink at a family gathering.
To me, the biggest benefit of AdWords is not that you can buy visitors, but that you can find out what people are searching for, so that you can sell it to them.
You can quickly test whether “cheap”, “reliable”, or “qualified” works better in an ad when someone is looking for an electrician.
You can add the winner into the copy on your landing page.
Google Ads is the purest form of cold "traffic" - there's an intent behind every search.
If you’re not using it to buy real time market intelligence, then you’re just buying traffic.
The biggest benefit of AdWords is that it can help you to build products your market actually wants, rather than what you think it wants.
(Video version of the story added later in this thread, plus a link to a radio interview expanding upon it.)
Dislike ads? Become a Fastlane member:
Subscribe today and surround yourself with winners and millionaire mentors, not those broke friends who only want to drink beer and play video games. :-)
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