When is too much of a good thing... not a good thing? I have a new Google Ads coaching client, Kasim, an agency owner who booked a call with me after feeling "torn in the middle" on advice he received from various Google Ads specialists and Google reps. He was looking for some firm answers to issues they hadn't been able to solve.
Kasim's agency specializes in Google Ads for local service businesses like plumbers, electricians, and roofers. They've achieved excellent results for their clients over the last 5+ years, but found that they weren't able to scale anymore as much as they'd like.
For example, one client on a $100/day budget wanted to double it to $200/day, but ended up getting the same number of conversions with double the CPC. And then when Kasim tried to limit the CPC, the budget simply wouldn't spend.
This signaled to me that we have an impression share challenge. To find out just how much of the opportunity Kasim's client was capturing, we looked at search impression share and saw one of the highest numbers I've ever seen: 91%! Keep in mind, this is for non-brand search in a highly competitive industry, and they were showing ads on practically every single available search.
Kasim was surprised by my surprise, noting that many of their clients' accounts have non-brand search impression shares of 70% or more. I told Kasim that this high impression share is directly linked to why their CPCs are so high - much higher than what I typically see for this country, in these industries.
However, and this is the REALLY IMPRESSIVE part, Kasim built excellent landing pages for his clients and even offered them sales training, so they were able to get 20% conversion rates on those expensive clicks. That's also a much higher conversion rate than what I typically see for this country in these industries, and that's how they were able to make the high CPCs profitable: high conversion rate.
But we still had the scalability problem. Here's what I told Kasim, which I also want to tell you: remember that behind every search query is a real person. These real people only search for a plumber, an electrician, or an air conditioning repair service so many times. If you're already reaching them every time they search for exactly what you offer, you've "maxed out" that audience on search.
So, how do you grow when you're already dominating your core search terms? You have to expand your reach. This means either:
1. Reaching people searching for related but less direct terms: This involves broadening your keyword strategy, perhaps incorporating broad match with conversion-based bidding instead of phrase or exact match with click-based bidding. Or experimenting with new keywordless features in AI Max. While this will bring in traffic that is less likely to convert, the CPCs should also be much cheaper, netting out to more leads at a similar CPA. At least in theory - you never know until you test it!
2. Reaching people when they aren't actively searching: This is where campaign types like Demand Gen come into play. Demand Gen campaigns use image and/or video ads, targeted by audience (like "Homeowners" or "In-Market for Roofing Services"), that run on Google-owned properties like Gmail, YouTube, and Discover. As with expanding your keywords, launching Demand Gen will bring you a lot of relevant (or semi-relevant) traffic at lower CPCs than Search, so it won't convert as well, but can bring you incremental business you wouldn't have got otherwise.
The key takeaway is that once you've achieved a high impression share on your most valuable search terms (which I usually consider around 40-50% search impression share), continuing to push more budget into those areas will likely only inflate your costs. To truly grow, you need to think about new ways to connect with those real people you're trying to reach, whether through expanding the scope of your search targeting or by reaching them through different channels entirely.
Want to optimize your Google Ads campaigns together? Book a call with me and we'll get your Google Ads working the way you want.
