How to scale up sales with Google Ads?

She wasn’t happy with the number of people visiting her website and enrolling in her courses from the existing traffic sources.

She didn’t have a problem with how much we’d spend on Google Ads as long as we provided results and high-quality leads.

And this is how we became friends with Debbie. She was open to new ideas, experiments and solution, just under one condition – our actions had to attract new business.

Let’s pause for a minute. Imagine that you are a manager or an aspiring manager and that you’d like to gain new skills, improve your knowledge and learn how to lead people. Do you click on the first ad you see, glance at what the website says and buy the course? Of course not. It takes time. You have to consider what kind of course is best for you. You need to think whether the company offering such course knows its business and has any credibility. And you determine whether you can afford to spend some hard-earned money on an online course.

We didn’t revolutionize digital marketing. We just used our expertise in sales funnels to apply what everyone knows (or at least should know).

It all takes time. In that particular case, we needed to set up a sales funnel and create a user journey to educate people why they need our courses if they want to achieve professional success.

Step 1: Awareness & Discovery. To make sure that our courses are in high demand, we needed to work on increasing the reach of our content and display it to the right people. Thanks to the current targeting options of Google Ads, we could design a Display Network campaign with targeting selected with Affinity and custom affinity and In-market, life events and custom intent options to reach the right people.

Step 2: Researching solutions. So we showed our ads to people who should at least be interested in what we have to sell. Based on the content our visitors consumed, we launched a remarketing campaign with personalized ads to increase the chance of yet another interaction with the website.

Step 3: Making a purchase decision. It was the time to close the deal. We reached the right people, made sure they found out what we offered, intensified our efforts with the help of GDN campaigns (including Gmail advertising), supported ourselves with Search and RLSA ads – but, at the end of the day, it is people themselves who need to decide whether they’re in or not. With yet another remarketing ad set, we targeted people who triggered events on the website and invited them to enroll immediately so that they could receive a free mini-course.

At that point, all we wanted to do was to test whether our idea actually worked. So at the end of September, we started our campaigns.

The test phase lasted two weeks. We were able to generate 25 conversions for less than $17 each – for a virtual product that costs $199 on average. It would be satisfactory even for a traditional e-commerce business, and for a company that provides online courses that, once published, can be sold forever? That was a huge success. For Debbie and for us.

One could say, “What’s the big deal, it’s just 43 conversions for 755 CAD.” But those conversions meant $8557 for our client. For a product that can be sold in unlimited quantities. It was Debbie’s profit. And what’s more important, the strategy didn’t require a lot of testing, and it certainly wasn’t rocket science. We simply followed some basic rules of creating a proper sales funnel for potential customers.

And if you didn’t design one for yourself… well, you should get to work before you think of increasing conversion rate from paid traffic.

Create a journey. Think of what your customers need to see, watch or read before they decide to buy from you. Then provide it to them.
Keep them involved. Including more stages in your sales funnel doesn’t have to mean higher conversion cost. In fact, it may decrease your conversion cost and improve your conversion rate.
Drive valuable traffic. Sure, setting up a single campaign will attract visitors and result in more conversions, but traffic with the right purchase intent will provide even better outcomes. If possible, keep your ads simple, but make your targeting and traffic flow as complex as you can.

AFTER A MONTH, WE RESUMED THE CAMPAIGN AND IN THE NEXT 2 WEEKS WE SOLD ANOTHER 18 COURSES.