We Halved Their Google Ads Spend. Revenue Went Up

When it comes to lead generation and Google Ads at scale, the data you see inside of your Google Ads dashboard becomes less and less important the more that you spend. And yes, I said that the right way. The more money that you spend inside of Google Ads, and as you start to scale your spend inside of Google Ads, especially when the goal is to generate more high-quality leads for your business with Google Ads, the more you spend, the less you need to actually worry about the conversion data that you're seeing inside of your Google Ads account. And let me explain, it's very, very easy for people to think that when you talk about Google Ads, you're just talking about whether you're doing e-commerce or whether you're talking about doing lead generation. But there's so many different levels to both of those disciplines. And today we're going to focus on lead generation. And now this is dependent on your niche, depending on your product, dependent on your value of this product or service, and also the geographical area that you're targeting. So This is gonna be different if you're targeting a country like America versus a smaller European country or a smaller Asian or Pacific country. So there is some context here. But if I was just to put a broad brush rule across all the different campaigns in the world, which I know we really can't do that. Now there are levels to this game when it comes to lead generation and Google Ads. And when you're just starting, so you're just starting to put your budgets together for Google Ads and up to at a max $20,000 for some niches, it sits at about $5,000. Others at $10,000, others at $20,000. You may be lucky, maybe able to push that up to $50,000 or more a month in ad spend. But at some point, you're going to have to change the way you approach your Google Ads strategy when it comes to lead generation. Now, when you're just starting out with lead generation and Google Ads, you do need to really focus on those core basics of Google Ads. Make sure you're targeting the most relevant traffic. So that's where you're building out your correct ad group themes, using things like single-themed ad groups, where you need to make sure you've got your negative keywords dialed in. So you're limiting that spend. You need to really hone in on your ad copy and your landing pages and your offer. And now while those things are still important when it comes to scaling your business with Google Ads to get more high-quality leads, those things do not become as important because when you want to achieve success with Google Ads at scale, it's more about the structure that you've got inside of your Google Ads account and the key point of the data that you are looking at not only inside of Google Ads, but also the data inside of your real business, because that's really the big unlock that I wanna take you through in this video. Now, if you haven't made it clear by the intro of this video is that if you are just starting out inside of Google Ads and you do wanna generate some high-quality leads for your business, this is probably not gonna be the video for you. But never fear, because I do have a video that would be great for you to go through and watch. And if you go through and watch this video right here, this is gonna take you through that process of just starting out in Google Ads and then starting to build up, getting the basics right so that you can start to see more success with your Google Ads campaigns in Google Ads. So if that's you, you're just starting out and spending under that $5,000 in Google Ads, go through and watch this video right here. However, if you are spending some serious money inside of Google Ads and you want to start to know how you can really profitably scale Google Ads, this is the video that you need to watch. In case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron Young. Obviously I'm from Define Digital Academy and I've been running Google Ads since 2010. We first started my Google Ads journey running Google Ads for our very own business. So we come at it from a very, very different angle. And what that angle is, is that yes, while we do look at what's happening inside of the Google Ads dashboard, what's more important for us is what's happening in the profit and loss and in the bank balance accounts of the individual business. And if you are a business owner and that is a problem that you're currently struggling with, that you need to see better results for your business with Google Ads, obviously we're going to be taking you through this free teaching here. But if you would like some extra expert help and guidance, we have a program which is specifically tailored for you. It's called On Demand. The difference with it is that you stay in control. We just offer you the expert advice that you need in order to scale your business. If you'd like to find more out about that, just follow that link in the description below. And if you are just starting and you're still with us, there are some free resources and tools that we give away for free just for watching this. All of that is in the description. But what we're going to do in this video is I want to make this as practical as possible for you. So we're going to be running through a real-life case study of an actual business who faced this same I'm going to be— I'm going to firstly take you through the actual results so you can see what we achieved. But then I'm going to take you through the actual changes that we made. But even before we get to the actual changes that we made inside of the account, we're also going to go through the data that we reviewed in order to be able to make those right changes. And then I will also take you through some of the, some of the lessons learned, and some of the challenges that we are trying to overcome as we scale this business to the next level. And to make this as practical as possible, let's jump into a screen share so I can walk you through. Now, obviously, as you would understand, because this is a real-life client and a real-life life business that we're looking at, I have had to fade out or blur out or block out a lot of the keyword data, campaign names, and I obviously can't show the website. But I will definitely be able to take you through the process and the thought process. And any data that you are seeing on— and some of the graphs that I'm about to take you through is the real-life data that they saw in this business. So with all that said, let's jump into the screen share. Alright, before I take you into the actual Google Ads account and really start walking you through the data that we requested and the changes we made and how we went about this. I firstly want you to go through and look at the results that we saw from this business. Now, a couple things for context. This was a law firm. They did specialize in a certain type of law, which we'll have to keep secret. They were advertising into 46 states inside of the US, and their whole goal was they were only running at this time, they're only running Google Ads as their main driver. There was a little bit of Meta spend, but it was very, very minute. We're talking, you know, under, I think about $2,000 a month. So very much the driver of their business was Google Ads. So I want to just walk you through, I guess, probably some of the key elements that we saw from here. We went through and made a lot of these changes through June. What happened from here? They actually engaged us in April, at the end of April. So it took us that first month to really go through and take a big deep dive inside of the business. So we did do some testing in May. We really came back and made those changes in June. What I want to show you here, and this is the really, really important metric: half the spend, more client value signed. So they were scaling really quickly, and they— that's why they reached out to us, because as they were scaling, it started falling apart. The Google Ads spend was $105,000, and they got a total value— or total for them, it was all about client value— of $1.3 million, with an average value of $33,000 per client. And that was coming in at $24 from lead to actually client. So you can see here they had a lot of leads. You can see here 944 coming through. They had— the drop-off was 211 down to qualified leads, and then obviously they had their converted leads from there. I want you to fast forward to August, remembering we made the bulk of the changes which I'm going to be taking you through in June. So they saw the results immediately, but fast forward to August. Right now we're midway through September. I'm recording on the 14th of September. So this— the initial data is looking better, but they do have a acquisition window of about 3 to 4 weeks. So it's going to be better than August. I just can't report on that right now. So, but with a spend of $52,000, they actually saw not only a higher total value in new business, so by an extra $400,000, so from $1.3 through to $1.4, but the average value per client actually went up to $34,000. And here it came down at $14.8 million. So the other thing I want to show you in through here is that in February, they were getting $12 back into this column, the total value for every dollar spent. In August, that went up to $32. The big thing I really, really want to show you here, and the real big highlight number, is that we scaled the performance of the business while pretty much halving their spend. In fact, we did actually halve their spend. My maths might be out a little bit, but from $105 down to 52. And I'm going to walk you through how we firstly discovered this and what changes we made. So the first thing that I really want to point out here is that before we even went in and had a look inside of the Google Ads account— because this is where if you were to engage an agency or a lot of freelancers coming in, or even in-house team, they run their audits firstly just by looking at the Google Ads account. Now I don't judge them for that, it makes sense, but What it misses is it misses the most important metric. And what the most important metric is, is as a business owner, and the way that I frame this to business owners, if you're listening right now, if I was to show you a Google Ads account which had a cost per conversion of more than double than what you're paying now, but your business was getting more than double the revenue for less than half the spend, would you take that deal? The answer is always yes. Ultimately, the Google Ads dashboard data is important, and we do use that for optimizing your Google Ads accounts. But if you use that as your proof of source, or what you're really looking at, that's the most important data, you're never going to be able to unlock the code for lead generation at scale with Google Ads. So the first step was that we asked this business the number of leads, the number of qualified leads, then the total client value, and the average client value to get this data. And then we also— there was also some extra data, which I'm not showing here, we got it segmented by states. By the actual individual states inside of the US, the area that they're marketing. Now, for that segment by states, if you're running in a smaller population, for example, we're helping some clients in Singapore at the moment, we don't worry about that because Singapore is a, is a country, a city, and a state all in one, and the population base and the geographical area just isn't large enough to do that analysis. What we're looking at in through here is we wanted to do 2 things. We firstly wanted to have a look at because we knew that, or Our suspicion here was that there was a lot of poor quality, there was a lot of wasted spend in the account, which was generating lower quality leads. And then from there as well is that we also wanted to double check, and that's why we asked it to be segmented, is we want to do some analysis of where is Google spending the money, where is versus where are they actually getting the highest value clients. And we identified 2 states. We then, I'll bring this out further, we then started to do some top-of-funnel marketing to those 2 states because they were the real drivers of that business. And that part of the strategy hasn't come to the full effect. But now let me just take you through. So the first thing we wanted to get is that before we even go inside of the Google Ads account, we really want to find out what is their lead volume. Also too, what is their client value and what was their average client value? And the good thing was, is because this business already had offline conversions happening and they had UTM tracking, They were using HubSpot, which also allowed us to put things back to certain campaigns. So really start breaking down these campaigns were giving us these results. And what we found was that they were, they were spending basically based off conversions. So they were pushing all the data and spending more inside of Google Ads as to what was generating conversions inside of Google Ads, not with the campaigns or the search themes that were generating clients for their business. So the first thing we did is that they had, when we when we came in with them, they had one search campaign and a Performance Max campaign. They also had a Demand Gen campaign, which we killed off pretty quickly, then re-engaged it. So it was a pretty simple setup, which is not a problem because at scale you actually want a condensed structure. But what we noticed was, is that the Performance Max campaign was generating a lot of conversions, but it wasn't generating the actual conversions they needed. But then we found out inside of Performance Max that there was this certain keyword theme, which was generating some good conversions. So we broke that keyword theme out into its own search campaign. So the first thing we did— I'm going to jump into the account here— is when we looked at their conversion actions, they had a submit the lead form. I've had to blur out these conversion names because it, it contains the business name. So they had calls from ads, they had a submit lead form, they then— they also did have some Zapier interactive conversions feeding back into their account, which was converted lead and a qualified lead. But they had these all active in their account. Now what this was meaning is that this meant that they were really focusing on the calls from ads and the submit lead forms. But these calls from ads and also the submit lead forms were eventually becoming qualified leads. Now in this process, they had a live sales team that would ring them and qualify these leads. So what the first move that we ended up doing was we actually removed the submit lead form and calls from ads. We moved them to secondary. So we didn't remove them from the account. We just moved to change it back to secondary goals. Now, one thing I do want to point out there, and you do need to make sure that you do do this correctly, that we— with their qualified leads, they were still getting— they're actually getting about 50 qualified leads a week. So as you can see from here, even at their low point with these qualified leads, they were getting, you know, at that point in May when we had a look, it was just under that 50 amount. But generally what they were getting a lot of qualified qualified leads per week, which meant that we could actually remove these weaker conversions— course from ads, submit lead form— and just purely work off the qualified leads. The second thing that we did— so the first thing was is that we went, did a deep dive of their data, looked at what were the conversions that were actually leading to qualified leads. The way that we frame this to the business is, what are the type of people that you want your sales team talking to every single day of the week? Mark them as qualified leads. And then we, once we've got enough data inside of the Google Ads account, we switched off or moved to a secondary goal, calls from ads and submit lead forms. And then what we did from there, let me just close this down, is that they had a Performance Max campaign which we defunded. And what I mean by defunded is that we essentially dropped. So at the peak they were spending $18,000 a month. This is in monthly data. We then moved it down to $14,000. We then moved it down to $10,000. We then moved it down to $1,500. Now I'm going to come back to the Performance Max campaign because there is a key learning there that I do want to point out because we have actually re-engaged this Performance Max campaign. We reworked it and relaunched it. And then in the search campaign, they had— they only had one search campaign. So for their first search campaign, which was performing okay, but it wasn't giving them the most amount of data in there, we actually dropped the spend from there as well. And let me give you the figures. In the search campaign, we moved it from 43,000 down to 29,000. So if it was 43,000 in May, down to 29,000 in June, 18,000 in July, and 17,000 in August. Then what we did do— remember how I said previously is that we saw that they had another search thing that they weren't currently targeting, which was giving them some conversions inside of their Performance Max campaign. This was better aligned to what they offered as a business. And what we did through here is you can see we We scaled that really, really rapidly. 14,000, 20,000, and then we scaled it up to 32,000 in a month. And this was the main driver. So when we see from here, we started really ramping up the spend in June, then in July, and then up to August. And this, as you can see from here, we took that 60 to 90 days to really move their budgets around, pulling down the spend in Performance Max, pulling down the spend in their initial and their existing search campaign, then we increased the spend on their new search campaign. Now, many people ask, why didn't we do that all at once? And the reality is, is that this was a business that could not just turn off the tap overnight. Yes, they saw and they knew that we were spending in the wrong way, but it was still generating some conversions for their business. So what we did is that once we got more confidence in this new structure running on a, running on a 7 to 14 day cadence, where we would check this data in the backend, making sure that all their leads were qualified, the numbers were going up. And every time it went up, we then defunded the search and the existing search and Performance Max campaigns and added extra budget into that core search campaign. The other thing that we did do is I just want to read out a quick list. Sorry if I'm looking at my screen from here, because there was quite a lot of things that we did do inside of their Performance Max campaign to try and clean that up. Firstly, what we did do apart from removing the budget, we added in some age bracket exclusions. So we took out the 18 to 24 age bracket, and we also excluded the 65+ age bracket. That came back, and the reason why we did that is the initial data showed us that those people didn't convert for this business. We then added a brand exclusion. Now the reason why we added that brand exclusion is because we didn't want to spend money inside of Performance Max when we would have got those conversions anyway. We then added exclusions for people who are on their qualified list, converted list, even people who had submitted a lead form or who had also done a phone call with Google. Now, the reason why we did that is that we wanted to move Performance Max to essentially a new customer acquisition campaign. So if they had already completed even a soft conversion signal, we didn't want to spend any more money or target them inside of a Performance Max campaign. The other thing we did do is we also removed that target CPA, which was an essential step that we had to do Because we completely moved all of the conversion actions. So now I just want to go through because there is one last thing. Now I know here, and I am trying to be as practical as possible, but I really hope you can see my hands are a little bit tied with what I can share and what I can't share. But before I show you this interesting part that we did learn about Performance Max and the role that it plays, I do really just want to stop and really, really just remind you of the core things that we did there. The most important step that you can take if you want to see success with Google Ads for lead generation is that when you're reviewing or auditing your Google Ads account, before you do a Google Ads audit, you firstly want to get that offline data. What you want to be getting is you want to break down whether it's leads or conversions, you want to break down your different locations, you want to break down your, your service values or your services that you're offering, where the lead flow is going. Perfect example, let's just say you get a much better close rate when you get the person's phone number. Versus when someone fills out a form, you then want to focus your Google Ads campaign to get more phone calls. For this business, it was the opposite. They got a much higher engagement when their clients first filled out a form or applied online, and then their sales team called them manually. And what— so what you really want to focus on is what works in the sales process for your business. Then you want to go through and have a look at really looking at where is Google spending the money. Not only around the keyword themes, but also around locations if you target multiple locations. And this is where you can use a tool like Claude to run that analysis and really do like a business SWOT analysis of aligning your business results with your Google Ads spending and your results, and then layering that together inside of a tool like Claude to give you some data insights. Then from there, you can make your strategic decisions. And now the other thing that I would really, really suggest is that when you are looking at changing the direction trajectory of an account, don't change everything all at once. Have a game plan. We wrote out this game plan with our member. We agreed on what the metrics were that we would be looking for. And then we said, look, let's roll this new strategy out over a 3-month period. And you can see the results that we were able to achieve. But one thing that I do want to finish on, and this is an important note, remember how I said before that Performance Max was giving this business lower quality leads and they actually stopped the Performance Max campaign We ran this. This is their Performance Max campaign that they stopped, and as you can see, they completely stopped the spend in it. I've actually show you the last 30 days. They're no longer running that that Performance Max campaign. We've just recently in the last two weeks relaunched a new Performance Max campaign, and the reason for that is for this exact reason. Now let me walk you through these results. It's important to note that this is the search campaign. So this is that new search campaign that we. Launched that has really become the core driver of their business, spending about 80% of their total budget that they're spending in Google Ads right now. You can see from here is that we were able to very, very quickly— this is the one that we started in June, the red line— we're able to scale up the spend and it was working really, really well. And it was about here where the client or the member started to ask the question, hey, why should we still spend on Performance Max? Because It's just not giving us at the campaign level when we're tracking the UTMs back into our sales data inside of our business, we're just not seeing the real data there. So we're not seeing the results there. So we ran it as a test to pause it. We were happy to pause that because sometimes I do like running these hard tests. And what I want to see is obviously we expected the conversions to drop down. This is actually the same date range, as you can see, 1st of June, 17th of August. Now they do run on a longer acquisition window, as we said. So this conversion have tailed out a little bit. But what I was really concerned about is the jump in CPCs. Now this data actually went up from CPCs of $8 up to about $11, actually going on $12. So it was a really, really significant jump. What you can see through here is that as we were scaling this account while also running Performance Max, we're actually able to see a really significant drop in their CPCs, which were continuing to go down Until we stop that Performance Max campaign. So the key learning here that I really, really want you to get, and I am going to release some further teaching on this topic. So once you really start thinking about at scale, Google Ads is a team sport. You don't only need to judge the success of the account on one campaign because we can see a perfect example here. What was actually missed was the role that Performance Max was playing in that it was helping the search campaign to be able to scale more efficiency. While actually having lower CPCs. Now, as I said, I am going to release a further video on that because I'm still collecting more data about this, but it is just something that I do want you to watch out for as you are starting to scale your, your lead generation accounts inside of Google Ads. You can't just operate on search alone. You can, this, you know, up to a certain level. In some niches, you may be able to scrape it up to $50,000, but at some stage you are going to have to start reaching out some colder traffic or some top-of-funnel audiences. Otherwise, the CPC game just doesn't work for you, and you cannot— you can't pay your way out of it. So I really do hope that you took a lot out of this video, remembering that, as I said, the whole thing that I wanted to show you with this video was to really, really start to get you to think about while we are really looking at Google Ads, and that's where we make our optimizations, the Google Ads dashboard doesn't always tell the truth. What you want to be looking at is always coming back and look at the business. Firstly, look at your business, business results. Find the core metrics that work for your business so that you can see better results with Google Ads. Hey, thank you for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure having you here. And remember, if you would like some extra support with your Google Ads accounts, you would like me and my team to come alongside and partner with you to help you get better results for your business, why don't you follow that link in the description below and apply for our on-demand program? But as I said, thank you so much for joining me, and I look forward to seeing you on our next video. See ya.