Does PPC work for accountants?
"I spent a good amount on PPC /Google Ads and LinkedIn several months ago and I only got calls from sales people trying to sell me products I don't need. They have just googled the services I provide, clicked on all the ads and called me. As a result I was spending money just to get the calls I would normally avoid."
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AdWords is a poor fit for the market.
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Mistakes building and managing the AdWords campaign.
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The process between a prospective customer clicking on your advert and buying from you is broken.
- Enough people must use Google to search for what you sell. A very good AdWords campaign would need 100 searches for every sales enquiry you got via your website. A typical DIY AdWords campaign would need about 10 000 searches for every sales lead. If you only work in a small local area you won’t get enough people searching to make it worth doing.
- The competition can’t be too fierce. Google sells their advertising space by auction.If you’ve got lots of advertisers the costs go up, if you’ve got big players with deep pockets competing it’s very difficult for a smaller player. Anything to do with hotels, flights, insurance etc is like this.
- The product or service you sell must have a high enough value to cover the costs of getting the sale. That value can come from the first sale, or it can come from ongoing sales - monthly fees in your case. This is much easier when you’re selling high value products or services. It’s incredibly difficult if your business model is high volume at low margins.
- The web page loads slowly so they hit the back button.
- They’re on their phone and the web page doesn’t look good on a small screen.
- The page doesn’t appear to be what they were looking for.
- They can’t easily find out how to contact you.
- Your contact form is long and asks too many questions.
- Your contact form is hidden behind a link or in a sidebar or at the bottom of a long page.
- Your contact form has CAPTCHA anti-spam which looks like it might be too difficult to figure out.
- Your contact form doesn’t work well on a mobile phone.
- Your email system decides that email from your website is spam and so you never see it.
- You get the email from your contact form and reply to it. Your future client’s email system decides it’s spam and doesn’t deliver it.
- You respond quickly by email but your future client only looks at their email the next morning. Your email is at the bottom of their inbox because you responded quickly. Your competition also responded by email but they were slower so their email is near the top of the inbox and they get the business.
- Your future client is in the early researching stage, they're not ready to buy today. You’ve got no process to keep in touch with them so they remember you when they’re ready to commit. They enquire of you and forget about you.
- etc etc...
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