The Secret Weapon for Measuring Google Ads Results

If people are searching for your products or services online, running Google Ads campaigns is a no-brainer. But there’s a little-known secret to getting better measurement of Google Ads results that few businesses are using. 

Google processes approximately 75,000 search queries every second! That equates to 6.5 billion searches every day, or 2.5 trillion searches each year 

As you’ll already know, nearly every time one of these searches happens on Google, Google shows “Google Ads” at the top and bottom of the search results.  Generally, the first four results on the search results page are ads.  The ads look almost identical to the organic search results, except for the bold text saying “Ad” just beside the URL 

If you’re not familiar with Google Ads, they are incredibly powerful, because as an advertiser you (or your digital marketing agency) can choose what words you want your ads to show for. What’s more, you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. This provides highly targeted ad campaigns that enable you to show your offering to customers right when they’re searching for your products or services.   

Sometimes people ask me, “Does anybody actually click on the ads?”  The short answer is, yes, they absolutely do. In the campaigns we ran for our Duoplus clients last month we had over 63,000 clicks on ads.  In total, just over 70% of Google’s annual revenue is from clicks on ads. So yes, Google Ads certainly work.  

There is one secret weapon we recommend for our all clients that helps improve our Google Ads results. The power of Google Ads comes not just from measuring clicks on ads, but from measuring how many leads you get from the ads.  We called these “conversions”.   

If someone clicks on an add and then contacts you, that’s a conversion. So, if someone fills in the contact form after clicking on an ad, Google Ads can tell us exactly which ad was clicked and which keyword they searched for before converting as a lead.  

But most businesses we work with get a lot more phone calls that website form fills. This means that if you’re only tracking form fills as conversions you’re missing out on measuring where most of your results are actually coming from.  

That’s why our secret weapon for measuring results in Google Ads is “call tracking”.  We use special call tracking technology you can measure exactly how many people clicked on an ad and then phoned your business.  Even if they search on a desktop computer, click on your ad, and then call on their mobile, advanced call tracking technology can tell you that the phone call came from someone who clicked on Google Ads. Not only that, but we can also tell exactly which ad they clicked on and which keyword they searched for before making the phone call!  

By using call tracking technology like this you get highly accurate measurement of how many leads you are really getting from Google Ads.  

A few years ago, we had client who didn’t think they needed call tracking.  They felt 90% of their leads were coming from form fills on their website, so they didn’t think call tracking would add much benefit.  They finally agreed to give call tracking a go and were astounded with the results.  In the first month that call tracking was turned on they had 73 phone calls from ads and 75 form fills. It was almost a 50/50 split.  This meant that up until that point they were only tracking half of all of their leads from Google Ads. Many of our other clients will have up to 80% of their leads come through phone calls.  

The big danger of missing this out of your conversion data is that you can think that your cost per lead is far higher than it actually is.  This can lead to bad decisions that negatively impact your business growth, such as investing less in your best performing marketing because it’s not clear how well it is working 

In addition to that, to optimise Google Ads you want to spend more money on the keywords and ads that are producing the best results and turn off the ones that aren’t performing.  If you remove the majority of your conversion data from your results, you might end up turning off ads that are actually performing really well  

So, in your business, if your aim from Google Ads campaigns is for people to contact you by form fill or phoning, then definitely use an agency that provides advanced call tracking technology.  This will give you accurate tracking for the number of phone calls your ads are generating, which ads are generating them, and a true measure of your cost per lead, giving you the best data to make good business decisions.

Josh Moore

Josh Moore leads the team at Duoplus – a Hamilton-based digital marketing agency that helps businesses generate more leads & sales through highly measurable online marketing.

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