4 reasons why you should try Google Ads this spring too!

Spring has started and due to the current circumstances it remains important to be active and visible online. Google Ads is the most established way to make this happen. At Garden Connect, we help garden centres by creating successful Google Advertising campaigns so you can sell more product locally or even nationally.

The reason why we’re a fan of Google Ads, compared to social media, e-mail marketing or flyers, is that with Google you can always reach new people who are looking for your products.

With social media and e-mail marketing, you can mainly reach people you already know. Flyers and display marketing are suitable for branding, but you’re most often reaching out to the customer who are not directly looking for that product type. If someone is searching via Google, the intention to buy something or to visit the garden centre is already there.

Do you want to know how Google Ads can help you to sell more this spring? And did you know that you can also use Google Ads to reach more customers from your area?

In this blog, we will give you 4 reasons why we think that you should try Google Ads this spring!

 

1. Everyone clicks on Google Ads, your customers too

Let’s start with a common misconception. We often hear that people don’t click on ads (“I never do that!”). The trick is that people often don’t see that people actually click on advertisements. Google Ads are the paid search results on top and on the right of the organic (free) search results.

Below you will find the search results if you search for “Buy interior plant”

 

The red part contains the advertisements. On this screen, 90% of what you see is an ad! Because the search results on the right (Google Shopping ads) contain nice pictures, the visitor will be more likely to click.

The result is that everyone clicks on ads. And so do I!
Why do you often hear that “nobody” clicks on ads? That’s mainly because people often don’t notice that they click on an advertisement. In 2020 the revenue for clicking on Google Ads has been more than $134 billion dollars.

That’s a lot of clicks for something that no one usually clicks!

 

2. You can have fast results

Search engine optimization can be a long trajectory before you reach any results, Google Ads is something you start up quickly. There’s also a downside to that but we’ll get to that point later.

The only thing you have to do to get started with Google Ads, is creating an account, submit your payment details and create a campaign. Once you’ve done this, the ads are live and you can welcome your first visitors.

That’s the ideal situation, because that means that you can get started immediately to increase the amount of traffic and revenue.

But, as mentioned before, there’s a danger in it: The fact that it’s online that quickly doesn’t mean that it’s going well and that you’ll make money immediately.

Many garden centres that we know, have once tried to figure out Google Ads, saw the costs of that and only little revenue and then concluded that it’s not working.

When you get started without a strategy, it doesn’t work. That’s why we take the time to create a strategy.

• What do you want to reach?
• What are you going to offer?
• Why should people buy from you or visit your garden centre?

It’s not a strategy to sell everything to everyone, so you need to make some decisions in this process. We can help you with that of course!

A good strategy is essential to create profitable campaigns.

 

3. Everything is measurable

When you publish new ads, it remains to be seen whether it yields results. You never know exactly how much revenue a Facebook post will generate either. But you can see exactly how many orders a Google Ads advertisement yields.

We often see that measuring returns is forgotten, or is not set up properly. If you don’t measure what’s happening on your webshop, you don’t know if whether your marketing budget is spent effectively either.

When we set up campaigns, we always monitor if everything is measured correctly, so we can quickly see how much your Google Ads campaigns yield.

For one of our customers, we created a campaign this spring to promote barbecues. As you can see this customer spent €1.801,19  for 7.630 visitors. They spent €26.464,75 on his webshop and completed 190 purchases.

This is not the complete overview, but only the actions and sales that we registered. There are a few things that we can’t measure, but they do count and might even make the results higher:

• Some visitors block their cookies, so not all revenue can be measured. This will most probably be higher than measured.
• The visitors that view online, but buy offline, are not measured in the results. We don’t know what people buy in your store after all.
• A part of the 190 customers will probably return. The Customer Lifetime Value is higher than this single purchase.

These are side effects of Google Ads campaigns that aren’t measurable but do take place. We only measure and optimise the campaigns based on the statistics that we have. The famous author and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahnemann calls this “What You See Is All There Is”.

By setting up your Google Ads campaigns correctly, and by connecting this to Analytics and your website, you can get a great overview of the results. You can prevent spending too much budget on a campaign that doesn’t work.

4. Google Ads works locally and nationally

We have a few garden centres who advertise and sell nationally, which goes very well as you could see in the previous example.

For webshops that want to grow nationally, Google Ads can be a great way to attract new customers. By targeting keywords and articles, the branding is less important than with flyers or display marketing. It’s a way to reach people beyond your own (social media) bubble.

Would Google Ads work if you only want to deliver regionally?

From the most Northern part of the UK to the most Southern part of the UK, people use Google, and they click on advertisements, so why would that not be effective locally?

The great thing about Google Ads is that you can target a specific area. By doing so, you can make sure that your advertisements will only be shown to Google users in your area, for example 20 miles around your garden centre.

Besides that, we can also help you to attract more visitors to your garden centre by using Local Inventory Ads. Google users immediately see where your garden centre is and what the opening hours are:

Of course the one doesn’t exclude the other. You can advertise nationally with your webshop, and create an extra campaign for your own region. But if you only want to be visible regionally, it’s possible as well.

Did you know that 46% of the search prompts in Google are focused on seeing, doing, buying, or visiting something in the area? There is a great potential!

You know why you should try Google Ads this spring: but are you ready for it? We are here to help you and we can advise you about the possibilities with Google Ads for your garden centre. Call or email your account manager, or email info@gardenconnect.com and we’ll get back to you soon.