All right, I think we are live. Please give me a moment, I'll make sure everything is working fine and we'll get started. Okay, that's good. Brilliant, everything seems to be working fine.
Hello and a warm welcome to today's YouTube live stream. My name is Uzair, and in today's live stream I'll be going through the Google Ads lead forms. But before I get started, just to tell a little bit about these sessions for those who are new here: I'll go through the workflow and today's topic, and towards the end I'll try my best to answer any questions you may have. If you would like me to answer any questions, please put them in the comment box. I'll try to answer them towards the end of the session.
So a warm welcome to all of you. Hello Sandeep, Nikhil. Okay, everything seems to be working fine, and for those of you who are watching live on Instagram, it is also working today and seems to be behaving. If you would like to watch the full workflow and my screen, then what you need to do is to hop over to our YouTube channel and you'll be able to see my screen, and obviously see me as well. On Instagram we can only show the setup and behind the scenes, as we've only got one camera. I tried to set it up with two cameras or two phones, but it just doesn't work and we get a lot of interference and echo. So hello Mike, good to see you guys here, and we'll get started.
So let's move on to Google's bible, which is the support centre. I've said this quite often: whenever you want to do something, head over to Google and you will get the most accurate information. And when I came back here, something new has popped up. I'm just highlighting that lead forms no longer support custom call to action text. Instead, you can now choose from a list of predefined call to action options when you create a new lead form. So it's going to change by the 3rd of November 2020. Make sure to edit your existing lead forms to use a predefined call to action. After this date, all existing lead forms will switch to the "Learn more" call to action.
So if you are using lead forms, you might as well just go in there in a day or two and change the call to action, otherwise they will all turn to "Learn more". If your call to action is "Buy now", then you just need to select one of the calls to action from the predefined list.
Benefits. It's got tremendous potential and huge benefits, because you have got someone clicking on your ad, the form pops up, and most of the time it will be pre-populated with the name, email and everything, all the details which Google has about us on our Google account. So they don't even need to type. It's a huge benefit, especially on the mobile phone, where it can be a bit fiddly to type in if it's a long form.
So the benefits we've got over here: generate leads to drive sales for your product or service, drive leads into your marketing funnel to help get more conversions, and find and engage users interested in your product or service.
Okay, how it works. It will collect leads directly from your ad, from people interested in your business or service, by filling in the form. You'll need to add a URL to your privacy policy. That is a must, and it's always best to have a privacy policy and terms of use to abide by all legal situations. You don't want to break any law anywhere, in any country. So the potential customers can read it before they provide the information. But when was the last time you read anyone's privacy policy? I haven't. Nobody does. But you've got to have that on your website.
For search campaigns, add it as an extension. For video campaigns, lead forms can be added during the campaign creation in your campaign settings. So I'll go through the ad extension setup today.
For video campaigns, you can choose the type of leads that you want to gather. You can choose to reach people more likely to be interested in your product, which is the higher intent, or reach a higher number of people, more volume, with your lead form. I would not go after the volume, because that is kind of like the broad match. The targeting is too broad. I'd rather have fewer people or visitors to my ads or to my website who have a higher intent.
You can then download and manage your collected leads in a CSV file, and then import them in whichever CRM you are using. But you must do that within 30 days, otherwise you will lose the data. For search, the CSV file is downloadable immediately. For video campaigns, the CSV file is available after the first lead is submitted. You can also create a webhook, which you can then link to any of your CRMs.
If you want to change the information that you request, for example a name or a phone number in a lead form, you'll need to remove the existing lead form and then create a new one. So you can't amend an existing one. And that's pretty much it, really. It's fairly straightforward.
And yeah, this is important. They are not available in all the countries right now, but they are in loads of them. Devices: iOS and Android, which is fine. So on the Apple ones you only have search campaigns running at the moment and not the video one. And although it is in beta mode, it works pretty well.
Okay, let's go ahead into our Google Ads account, and this account is not whitelisted. Where is my... oh no, I'm in the wrong place. That's why I was wondering where it has disappeared. Okay, so you need to be not on the ads, you need to be in the extensions. Go down, lead form extension, select which campaign you want to run with. Now you can have it at campaign level, because I've selected the campaign. Create new or use an existing one. I'm going to create a new one.
So this is what they were talking about, the call to action. They are going to change this after the 20th of November, so you want to set this up straight away. So "Learn more" is fine for me right now. And now you can see on here, on the right-hand side where the preview is, this is the extension, this is the lead form, how the form is going to look, and this is the thank you message when it has been sent.
We're going to start off at the top. So we can write "Google Ads management" or "agency". I'm just making one for myself. "Want more leads or sales?" Put in the business name, and then the description, which is quite big, 200 characters, so you can have a couple of paragraphs, actually. "We can help you get more leads or sales with a positive ROI or ROAS. Get in touch for a free audit and consultation." And I can write a few more things like "Read our reviews: over 130 five-star reviews on our Google My Business", or something like that. You want to put in the social proof as much as possible.
Right, so I'm happy with that. I can also put in "Get in touch now", or in fact I can say "Fill in the form below". That's a good call to action, because it's right below that text.
Then you have up to 10 questions. I would highly recommend that you keep this form as short as possible, because short forms convert higher than longer forms. And again, as I said, to fill in a form on a mobile is quite fiddly if you've got big fingers and thumbs. So I've got my full name and email. I would have that: name, email and phone number. I could have that as a first name and last name, but it just makes it a bit longer and you need to click one more time to go to the next field. So full name is fine.
Then you may use the work email or a work phone number if it's a B2B lead form. It depends on who you are targeting. If I'm targeting B2B leads, then I would want that work email and that phone number. You could have more questions over here, and in here they've got a fair few categories where you can say what is the size of your business, annual sales and so on.
I personally am not a big fan of these, because if I ask you what is your annual sales volume, you don't know me and I'm asking you all these questions. It's going to put people off. So just keep to the basics and the most important ones. But if you want to try it and split test a longer form versus a short form, be my guest. Absolutely do test. As I always say, don't take my word for it.
Privacy policy: take it from your website and paste the URL over here. So it could be anything like sfdigital.co.uk/privacy-policy. You can put in the background image as well and upload it. Let me try this one, this might look pretty cool. Oh yeah, this is today's one, and it is going to show up like this. There you go. If you are your business or your brand, I would again highly recommend you put your headshot over here. See, it makes a huge difference. The trust factor increases 10 times.
Right, so I could have my company logo there, but this fits in really nicely. This was just a 16:9 image which we use for our custom image on the front of the videos every time we upload, so 1920 by 1080 pixels, and that fits in nicely over here. And all you would need to do is to just rearrange the text and the logos, and the headshot looks pretty good.
So I have done my lead form, and now we move on to the submission message, which is obviously this section, because now we can see this blue line is highlighted. When I click on that, that means I am in this section. When I click on there, it goes to the top. So it's quite easy to navigate where you are.
Headline: always start with a thank you. Description: "We will be in touch during office hours." Now, you probably have noticed again, over here we've got 200 characters, so utilise this as much as you possibly can and try to give them another call to action. Because they have now submitted the details, they're excited to be talking to someone at your company. I want them to be more excited, and I can do that by sending them to one of our blog posts or to a video or to a customer testimonial page and so on.
Right: "We'll be in touch during office hours. In the meantime, please feel free to visit our Happy Clients page, where you will see lots of customer success stories. Please click the link below." And then you have the call to action, "Visit website". Or if you have got the customer success stories as a PDF, you can ask them to download them as well. But what I want to do is to get them to my website to pixel them. So wherever you are advertising, whether it's Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, wherever, always try to get them to your website. That's what you want to do.
So my call to action is that, and then I can just put in my URL in there, and when they click on that it's going to take them straight to my website. Then you have the delivery option for your leads, so you can put up a webhook and test the data into your CRM. And that is it. You save it and job done. That's how easy it is to generate a lead form.
So now is the time to go to comments. Please put in any questions you may have and I'll try to answer them for you. And if you're new here and you haven't subscribed, please do so and hit the bell button, because every time we go live or upload a new video you will be the first one to be notified.
Okay, Sandeep: "After watching our ads there will be a CTA button. It will take them to an opt-in page. The form will appear for our customers to fill their details. Should we do free content or a front-end product?" It really depends on how your funnel is set up. So you could have a free downloadable product or a free plus shipping product and then get somebody into your funnel, or you can send them to a page where you're just selling them up front. I really can't recommend which one you should go with, because I really don't know what your back end is and what the numbers stack up as.
Because some companies want to make a profit at the front end, whereas the clever companies, or the most profitable and the biggest companies, will make the most money or the profits at the back end. Google is a perfect example. 98% of their products are all for free: Gmail, Calendar, Maps, Chrome. They've sucked us into the ecosystem completely, and the whole world cannot live without Google any more. The cash cow is Google Ads. They make all the money at the back end.
So what they are doing is, they're giving away tons and tons of value up front, and they know that we cannot escape their clutches. We will come to Google. The Google page is where they make the most money, and that is the simplest page in the world, where there is no content, only a little search box. And that search box is one of the most powerful search boxes in the world. So it's a very clever way of how they have set up the funnel, and they keep on adding more value and more value. So I can't say to you which ones you should be running. You need to do your numbers and your maths, and then you will know whether you need to make a profit at the front end or at the back end.
Okay: "My question is, with this lead form, can we track leads within the last 30 days' data without Analytics?" Yeah, absolutely, because this is Google Ads and it's an extension. 100% you can track which campaign, which ad, which keywords are converting or not converting.
"Is lead form a tool?" Yeah, it's an extension. Just like you would set up a call extension, this is a lead extension.
"Can we do a product survey using Google Ads, like YouTube?" You can. There is a survey which you can set up on YouTube, but you will need to be whitelisted, I believe, for those, and you need to have a big budget for them, for sure.
Pratik, hi: "Is 1600 hours in the UK 9:30 in India from now on?" Yes, I believe so, because we have switched over to the winter time, so the clocks have gone back one hour. So in the summer it's four and a half hours, in the winter it's five and a half hours. Oh, Emily has replied, thanks. You lost two classes? You need to set up a reminder in your phone and then you won't miss it. Or you should subscribe and hit the bell button. You will not miss a single class after that.
Hi Adam: "What is the advantage of keyword sculpting ad groups, and do you only do BMM and exact match?" Great question. Yes, we only do BMM and exact match, because the BMM will cover the phrase match, so I don't need to make more work for myself. It's going to hunt and fish for any new keywords. With phrase match you get a bit more control. So if you find that there are far too many irrelevant search terms showing our ads, then we start putting them as negative keywords and block that search query. So it's a game of whack-a-mole. You keep adding the negatives in.
And we sculpt. So the exact match keywords, all of the exact match ad groups, are placed as an exact match negative in the BMM ad group. If one of those search terms is searched and it's an exact match to the exact match keyword, it won't be triggered. We don't want the BMM to trigger, because we will have the most relevant keyword in the exact match ad group, and that's where I want that ad to be triggered from.
"How do you deal with clients where you are able to provide the conversions but they may have challenges closing the deal?" Yeah, I have this challenge, and I think every agency and Google Ads professional has the same challenge. You send them good quality leads or calls, and they don't answer the call, or they answer the call after 60 seconds or 50 seconds, by which time that caller has gone away. The website has problems, it's a bit of a mess.
So we tend not to take those accounts, because we know that that landing page is not going to convert. And we tell those clients up front: we will need to create or redesign a landing page where we can drive traffic to. Because there's no point me doing all the hard work over here and then they're losing and leaking. It's a leaking sales funnel, to be honest with you. I'm not here to help other businesses manage their business and how to close deals. I'm here to give them leads or sales. It's up to them how they close or don't close.
So the way you want to do this, for lead generation especially, and it's really important, is to ask them: "Okay, if I send you 10 good quality leads, what is your conversion rate from the past history?" They might say three out of 10, or four out of 10, or whatever. Then you will do the sums at this conversion rate. The customer lifetime value is also extremely important. Don't just go on that first transaction. Go on a customer lifetime value of at least one to two years, and then work out how much you can afford to pay for an acquisition of a lead, or pay for a click.
Oh yeah, okay. Thank you, Emily. So someone from Instagram, at least it worked, has asked a question over there. Automated bidding, smart bidding campaigns: they do work, as long as you have set up the conversions properly and you have run the campaigns in manual mode, so that Google knows what data we are looking for and what conversions we need. And then switch over slowly to Target ROAS or Target CPA or any other kind of smart campaigns. And it does work very well.
And the good thing is, the algorithm, the machine learning, is getting better and better. It's going to be like the Terminator. There's no way the humans will be able to beat it, and it already is showing in a lot of our accounts. So I would say yeah, use it with caution, but certainly the future is smart campaigns.
Alamgir... oh my God, there's loads of questions here. "Which campaign objective do you choose for this lead form?" It's an extension, it really doesn't matter. So the campaign objective or the goals don't come into play.
"What is programmatic marketing?" That's completely different. I would need a lot more time to talk about programmatic, so I'm afraid we'll just stick to Google Ads on this one.
"On my website, traffic is coming from Google Ads but they are not putting in any enquiry. I started on the first of October and it's now 98,000 impressions." Okay, so how many clicks have you got? That's the thing. If you're not getting the clicks, then that means you are targeting the wrong keywords, or people don't like what they see on your ads. So I would recommend you don't go on the impressions. You go on the three most important metrics: conversions, conversion rate and cost per conversion. The rest of them are irrelevant. Even if it's 980 impressions and you've got leads coming through, it's fine, instead of spending so much time and money on so much traffic.
Pratik: "I'm a subscriber." Okay, just hit the bell button again, Pratik. I think it'll be fine. You're most welcome, Adam.
Hello Fuzail: "Should we use a landing page or a whole website? We are a two-way radio hire and sales company, so what would you prefer?" It's not about what my preference is. It's about what converts the most. In some industries and niches, people just want to see that offer and a straightforward call to action which you want them to take. In some industries, people want to browse around your website, the about page, the testimonial page, services, and then decide whether you are the company to go with or not.
So what I would do in this respect is, I would set up two campaigns. One goes to the landing page, one goes to the website, and see how the conversion rate is. You will be pleasantly surprised at the results, and I would say the landing pages will work a bit better. It does for us. Some agencies say they don't use landing pages any more, but it's a proven fact that when the focus on a landing page is just one call to action, and not lots of different links and all that, you will find that the landing pages will work better.
"People are asking on Quora who is the best digital marketer in India." Just give them my name, Sandeep. You don't need to ask me this question. You should know this by now. I'm disappointed you're asking me that. Okay, joking aside. "Some people are replying to that. So if I'm a fresher, a new marketer, what exact message should I send?" Well, if you're not the best digital marketer, you can say you are the best upcoming digital marketer and go with that. You've got to have proven results behind you, and let others decide who is the best marketer. I can sing my own praises and so can you, but that doesn't make any bit of difference to the end user.
Okay, Fuzail, now you have a big, big problem. Out of 98,000 impressions, your clicks are only 290. Yeah, you're getting junk traffic, my friend. The click-through rate is very low. So you need to look at the whole lot: the keywords, the ads, or whatever you're targeting, the audiences, etc. I'm not sure whether you are using search or display or video campaigns, so I'd really need to have a look at it. It could be you're using a display campaign, so that would be a different matter, but I'm just thinking that you used a search campaign.
Adam: "Have you seen CPC eventually go down once you switch to smart bidding, based on what the CPC was during..." No, because I don't care about CPC, Adam. Because if the conversion rate has gone up as well as the CPC, my cost per conversion can go down, and will go down. So I want Google to be as aggressive as possible in front of those people who it thinks are likely to convert.
So don't worry about the CPC. The CPC is not in our hands anyway. It's in the hands of the Google gods, and let them do what they like. As long as I've given Google a Target ROAS or Target CPA and it's giving me those results, I don't care really how much it costs, because I'm being profitable.
Okay, I think that's enough rambling for today. What has he got? Yeah, I just answered that. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, Fuzail, last one, just squeeze the last one in: "We are using call extensions and display ads." Yeah, that's what I thought. "What is the solution to rectify the problem?" If you're going after conversions, then you need to look at search campaigns first and then go on to display.
Display does work, but it also enhances your brand and your online presence. It works hand in hand with search. So for direct calls to action on display, there's no intent. People stumble upon your ads. Whereas on search, people have a pain point. They are looking for a solution to their problem. If you've got the solution to someone's problem, they're going to click on your ad and come to your website. If the offer is good, they're going to become a lead.
I would say go with the search campaigns first, to start with, and then venture into display. Get one thing right first, and walk before you can run.
So thank you all for joining in today. I appreciate your time with me, and I'll be back again tomorrow, same place, same time. So till then, stay safe and goodbye for now.
