Don’t Just View Google Ads Spend As Money Spent, It’s Money Invested

We look after the Google Ads budgets for quite a few clients. Some of the clients run very large budgets, and others run budgets of just a few hundred pounds a month. Whatever the budget you choose for your Google Ads activity, the most important thing is to design a campaign that works at driving conversions on your website. If you can get a solid return on investment for every pound you spend on this platform, then your budget can scale without it costing you a penny.

The trickiest conversations around Google Ads comes when whoever is paying the Google Ads bill starts to observe money taken by Google purely as money spent…

Crucially when these conversations crop up, it’s because they believe the bills are too high and that they would like to question the value of that spend.  Quite often this is somebody in the accounts or finance department who are looking at the P&L and where they can make cuts to costs to increase profitability.  In these cases that person is just looking at what they are paying out to Google and not what they are getting back in return. We would urge anyone in this position to look at the whole activity and what the return looks like rather than viewing the spend as a hefty cost that needs to be chopped.

Calculating a good return on investment

At Destination Digital we are very careful to calculate a good return on investment with all the Google Ads campaigns we run and are always mindful of driving value for money with the spend we manage for our clients. We push what works and we chop what doesn’t, but the net outcome is that we aim for the client to never be paying out a penny!

Well…when we say you won’t be ‘paying out a penny’, we mean that the return on investment brings back many times the revenue for each pound of Google ad spend, so that the net outcome is that our clients accounts always produce a very healthy and profitable return and you always get your initial stake back.

If you spend £1,000 on Google Ads, and you get back £2,500 of revenue on your website, then you have made £1,500. Yes, you spent £1,000, but you got that back. It’s the initial investment of £1,000 that brought this extra revenue of £1,500 that wouldn’t necessarily have come to you in any other way. So for every £1 spent you got £2.50 of revenue back.

Once you have secured assured performance on your account’s campaigns mix, you can see how this can then easily scale and be a very worthwhile endeavour. On this same ROI calculation, you can see how £10,000 spent would give you a return of £25,000, and no one in their right mind would say this isn’t a good deal.

Using Google Ads to help your website’s SEO strategy

Google Ads has other uses too. It can be used to help you to score on Google search phrases in ways that your search engine optimisation campaigns can’t deliver in the immediate term.

If there are search phrases that you simply can’t get onto page 1 in the organic Google search results, which often happens with very competitive phrases, then setting up Google Ads campaigns to service these phrases is a smart thing to do to give your brand presence.

SEO is a long slow burn and can take some months for your website to get enough content and SEO strength behind it in order to score for some search results. Sometimes you’ll find that you’ll never hit page one for some particular terms. In these cases Google Ads is your answer.

Don’t waste Google Ads money through neglect

As a final parting shot, a note on what *is* a waste of time and money on Google Ads.

We often take over and then are asked to turn around existing ads campaigns for clients. When we first take a look at accounts, what we often find is that they have been set up and then just left to run. Even worse, at times they’ve been set up with poorly chosen keyword phrases that the account is bidding on day by day that is a clear waste of money.  So neglecting the account once set up is the perfect way to throw money down the drain.

This is why a management fee comes with Google Ads management; it’s to pay for time spent by a human being (we don’t rely on bots and automated scripts) looking at the account and digging around uncovering problems and fixing them.

If you have an ads account that you know you have the password for somewhere and you know that Google takes money from your credit card every month so it must be live, then get in touch with us and we can cast our eye over it.

Contact us

We’re Google Partners, so if you’d like help with Google Analytics, Google Ads, marketing data analysis or digital marketing strategy, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.