ROAS: Google Ads Best Practices for Telecom

Deciding to spend money on PPC (Google Ads) is an exciting time for any small business. It’s important to start with a clear set of rules to maximize your ROI (Or ROAS – Return on Ad Spend). For Small Businesses with limited budgets, adherence to a set of clear, granular best practices will ensure that you’re maximizing every penny you’re spending on your Google Ads. We’ve created this collection of just a few Google Ads best practices for telecoms (or any business, really) – so that you can hit the ground running, not spending.

Understanding PPC Campaigns and Google Ads

PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is a model of internet marketing in which advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. Essentially, it’s a way of buying visits to your site (very fast), rather than attempting to “earn” those visits organically (very slow). Google Ads is one of the most popular PPC advertising systems in the world. The platform enables businesses to create ads that appear on Google’s search engine and other Google properties.

Creating Your First Google Ads Campaign

1. Your ad is a billboard, telling people to come to your site. When they get there, they’ll want to see relevant information about their search. You’ll need to have a landing page specific to your ad (or ad group).
2. Your program has to convert. If you’re not focused on converting leads, don’t run your ads. You’ll need a way to capture contact information from every “clicker” on your ads. To do this, create a contact form on your landing page. Clicks are vanity, Conversions are value.

Designing Effective Ad Copy and Landing Pages

Creating compelling ad copy and designing effective landing pages are crucial for converting visitors into leads. Here’s how you can make sure your efforts are as effective as possible:

1. Ensure that your ad copy is directly relevant to the keywords you are bidding on and the landing pages you are directing traffic to.
2. Use strong calls to action and clear, concise language.

For more detailed best practices on landing page designs, review our guide to crafting landing pages that convert.

Utilizing Lead Magnets Effectively

A lead magnet can be an invaluable tool for collecting contact information from potential customers. Ensure that your lead magnet is highly relevant to the advertised products or services and compelling enough to entice users to exchange their contact details for access. For strategies on building effective lead magnets, check out our best practice guide.

Narrowing Down Your Target Audience

Keep your target market precise. You don’t want everyone landing on your page—clicks cost money, so make sure you’re getting the clicks (visitors) that want to pay you for your service. If your target market is too vague or too large, you’ll end up paying for visitors that have no intention of buying your product/service. That’s just wasted money.

Narrow your keyphrases and audiences

Google wants you to spend money. So they want you to get as many clicks as you possibly can on your ads. The trouble is, and we hope this has been loud and clear throughout this article: You don’t want everyone on your site. By ensuring you’re only optimizing your ad(s) for the specific keyword your prospects are searching, you can limit reckless spend, and maximize your conversions. It’s better to start with one high-converting keyphrase than 100 low-converting keyphrase.

For smaller service providers (most of our clients are TPIAs), you can’t (and don’t want to) compete on just “broadband” or some other generic term. You’ll be competing against everyone on the same generic term – and the incumbents generally have MUCH deeper pockets than you do – they’ll outspend you on virtually every keyword.

Think of products/services/areas/audiences that you can target effectively. “The Riches are in the Niches.” Think strategically about the kind of traffic you want to create.

Focus on Conversions, not Click-Through-Rates

This is another important point for Telecom Marketers looking to achieve the Zen of a positive return-on-ad-spend. A visitor that does what YOU want them to do is valuable to you, so focus on how your ads are helping your business, not just how your ads are generating clicks. This Google Ads Best Practice is designed to help your business, not just to make marketing “look good.” Click and Conversions are two different metrics and you, as a digital marketer, need to focus, especially at the onset of your PPC marketing journey, on the former.

Integrate Other Marketing Channels

And finally, (sure, this is an article on Google Ads Best Practices) don’t just rely on PPC. PPC is just one of many inbound marketing channel. There are many more (social media and email marketing, for example) that you should also leverage to drive traffic to the landing page. This integrated approach ensures that you are not overly dependent on any single source of traffic.

Google Ads Best Practices for Small Businesses

Following our Google Ads Best Practices will help you maximize your ROI and achieve better results. From crafting targeted ad copy to designing conversion-focused landing pages, each element plays a crucial role in the success of your campaigns.

But let’s get started. We’re now on to part 2 of our Google Ads Best Practice for telecom.

Creating your PPC Ads

Okay, so you’ve got your target market and your lead magnet that you think they’ll be interested in, and your landing page chock full of keywords your audience will be looking for. You’re ready to start writing your ads.

PPC Ad Components

Most PPC Ads are made up of a number of components, but really, there are three that really matter. The Headline, the Description, and the Link URL. Google has many more that you should be taking advantage of, but we’ll leave it at these three for now.

Google Ads Best Practice: The Catchy Ad Headline

Google Ads best practice is to create many headlines and use as many of them as makes sense. ChatGPT or any other generative AI tool will be very useful for you in this regard. We use six different categories to help us craft our headlines: keyword-focused, features-focused, user benefit-focused, brand messaging-focused, social proof-focused, call-to-action-focused.

Here’s how you could bucket Google Ads for an ISP using our six categories:

In the table above, we’ve quickly created some mock headlines. They’re not very exciting, and you’ve probably seen them a thousand times. You’ll want to use this same approach, however – but align the headlines more to your brand, products, users, etc.

Google Ads Best Practice: Compelling Ad Descriptions

When writing ad descriptions, our goal is to blend the right mix of keyword optimization, highlighting features, and focusing on user benefits to target B2B customers.

The descriptions we would use would focus on key factors such as reliability, scalability, customer trust, security, and a strong call to action. We aim for short, direct statements that showcase how the service will solve a business’s problem, emphasizing efficiency and professionalism.

The important part, though, is to be strategic about how you mix your keyword, feature, and user-benefits together. Here are some examples of how we use categories to create our Google Ad descriptions for telecom service providers:

1. Keywords + Features + Call to Action: These will focus on the core service, highlighting key features and a call to action.
2. User Benefits + Keywords + Social Proof: Descriptions will focus on the user benefits, build trust with social proof, and incorporate relevant keywords.
3. User Benefits + Features + Call to Action: Here, I’ll emphasize the benefits of the features, closing with a clear call to action.

If used properly, then your descriptions will have enough variety to satisfy a wider swath of prospects. The variety can also be used to help you hone in on your messaging and optimize your ads.

Here are some examples of descriptions, following the categories above.

Okay, now that we’ve got that done, we can go ahead and create the links.

Google Ads Best Practice: The Ad Link

We use just two rules to help us craft useful and manageable ad links. Here they are:

1. Direct Links to a Relevant Landing Page
   We’ve already discussed this, but don’t.. don’t.. don’t ever publish an ad that links prospects to an irrelevant landing page like your homepage. Ensure that each ad directs users to a page that closely matches the ad copy’s promise. This helps improve the user experience and reduces bounce rates. If your ad is about “Scalable Business Internet Plans,” the link should go directly to a page discussing internet plan options, not a general homepage. Oh, and make sure there’s a CLEAR Call-to-Action on that page.
   
2. Use Custom UTM Parameters for Tracking
   Links are made to be tracked. UTM parameters are your friends. As marketers, they’re your most valuable friends. Apply UTM parameters (tags added to your URL) to track the performance of each ad. This helps measure the effectiveness of different campaigns. (Pro Tip about UTM Parameters: You can use them pretty much any time you run a campaign that has an online element. Get comfortable with them. If you want to, check out this 9 minute video on UTMs to start on your UTM journey.) Here’s a good example of a UTM-enriched URL: A UTM-tagged link might look like: https://example.com/internet-plans?utm_source=google&utm_campaign=b2b_internet&utm_content=scalable_plans

When we have a campaign, we use a 1:1:1:1:1:1:10 rule for our content.

As we mentioned earlier, your Google Ads campaign shouldn’t be your only inbound activity. We suggest, at a bare minimum, writing Ten blog articles to help you move TOFU (Top of Funnel) visitors. Doing so will help you identify the value propositions that convert and help you figure out where you’ll want to focus for your landing page content.

We can help

We hope this quick guide helps you become a better PPC marketer. If you want/need help crafting your ads, ad copy, or coming up with a strategy, we can help. Are you ready to boost your Google Ads campaigns – or at the very least, ready to stop wasting money on ineffective ad clicks? Contact us today for personalized assistance or to start optimizing your PPC strategies with our expert help.