Hey everyone's Regina at starter PPC. We often work with new businesses, businesses that are just starting out, or maybe they've been around for a few years, but they haven't really pushed for growth yet. They haven't really done the Google ads thing or done any ads really. we often get asked the question, is my business now ready for Google ads? What do I need to do? To make sure that I'm not doing Google ads too soon. So I wanted to run through a couple of the main items that I run through. When I'm trying to answer that question for them to decide like, is Google ads right for you at this time? So the first thing that I look at is their website. Of course, if your website doesn't convert. No amount of Google ads expertise is going to be able to get it to work, right? So it has to be an up to date design, right? It has to look like someone cares about it and someone has been keeping the design up to date. More importantly, it has to have, a call to action above the fold. It has to have some clearly laid out sections that show what you do and why they should care. And why you're better than the competitor. That's a good rule of thumb. Sometimes if I'm not sure about the site, I'll just do a Google search as though I'm looking for that product or service. And I'll look at the other competitors websites. And if your website doesn't look as good or better than the competitors that are also running ads, You're not ready. Okay. So do a couple of Google searches. And you'll know. The other thing to think about too is if your website is converting good enough it's going to convert less good with cold leads from Google ads. When you run ads, these people who are seeing your ad. They want to buy now, right? Because they have search intent that proves that they are ready. They have wallet in hand. And not only that, but they just came from a search results page where there are plenty of other competitors willing to sell them the same thing. your website has to hold up to the competition. It has to have a high conversion rate. People that come direct to your site, people that come from referrals, even people that come organically are going to convert at a much higher rate than a cold lead will. So just keep that in mind. Your website has to be extra good. Along those same lines, make sure that your sales funnel is good too. Right? Like I said, cold leads, they're going to be ready to buy. Now, if you're lead generation business and you have a phone number on your site and you're not answering the phones they're going to leave and call the next guy on the list who answers his phones. just make sure that, if you thought it was okay to call people back after 24 hours with the referral leads, unfortunately, that's not going to hold up with cold leads. You also want to make sure you have the email follow up sequences in place, right? If you're lead gen, you might need to make sure that you know, your sales funnel is buttoned up. If you're e commerce, you want to make sure that you have a system going for people who have bought from you to buy again people that you guys know the basic sales funnel stuff, right? You need to make sure to kind of pull out all the stops. Get your ducks in a row with your sales funnel. Because if you don't, your competitors will, and what happens is you end up having to pay the same for a lead or or a sale as your competitors do. So if they're making more on repeat sales, if they're making a higher average order value than you are, if their conversion rate is higher than you, you're still paying that same cost per click. you kind of have to pull out all the stops before you run Google ads. lots to think about. The other thing is cost. Unfortunately, there is a little bit of a barrier to entry with Google ads, right? You can't just kind of dip your toes in with 500 and see what you're going to be paying for a click or see what your return is going to be. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that because in our experience, it takes about 90 days. And a minimum of at least 1, 000 a month. Although, if you have Certain industries, I would say it's higher than a thousand. So a thousand is a minimum, right? So if you have like a B2C product, maybe a thousand is enough to start out with. If you go to our help center, actually go to the help center at Solutions8. It's help. sol8, S O L 8. com and search for budget. You'll see an article that talks about, what is the minimum budget that you guys recommend. you don't want to set aside like a minimum of 3, 000 cause you want to also run it for about 90 days. Don't give up after 30 days. If you don't have the budget to run it for 90 days, you're not ready to start. Save up until you have 90 days worth of budget. The reason why is because the first month or month and a half, it's just data collection, right? The algorithm has no idea when to show what, to who, where, how, why, right? We don't either. So we're collecting all that data. Then the next 45 days is where we start to optimize. The algorithm optimizes, right? Cause it, catches some patterns of conversions. We start to optimize. We might change some settings here or there. Try a different campaign, one that's not working. Try a new one. And so that all takes time. So you can't just dip your toes in for 30 days. At the end of 90 days, I would look back at the most recent 30 days and try to see whether things are still getting better or whether they've plateaued. If they're still getting better, hopefully you have the budget to continue for a fourth month, right? If they have plateaued. Then you have to decide whether to continue, which brings me to my next point goals. You need to have clearly defined your goals. If on day 90, you don't know whether or not you're close to hitting your goal or you're hitting your goal to be profitable. you're not going to know whether to continue or to hit pause. And if you hit pause, Everything, all that data starts to get old, right? Everything kind of starts to die. So all the investment that you've put in, right? So you need to be ready with clearly defined goals. The biggest mistake I see people making is they don't know their goals. And so they just choose an exorbitant goal. Like we'll ask them, what kind of a return do you need? And they're like, I would like a 10 X. No, you don't want a 10 X. And so I have to explain to them why it's actually bad to have a goal that's too high. It's better to have a competitive goal, one that's not too high and not too low. If you have a goal that's too high, it's going to make you quit on day 90, or it's going to make you not increase your budget and scale your business when that's really the best thing for your business. It basically holds your business back from growth if you have a goal that's unrealistically high. I have an article all about this and I will include it in the description. Of this video. it's another article on help. sole8. com. And if you want to go there and search for it, just search for the word mer, M E R. And it's probably the first one that shows up. It's what should my mer goal be and why? couple of other things, just things to think about website speed. I can't tell you like 90, 95 percent of the new clients that we work with, we find that their website speed is. Not ideal. And unfortunately, Google will favor your competitors who have a fast website speed because Google is rating, grading your landing page user experience. And so website speed is a huge part of that. If your website speed is slower than your competitors, you're going to ultimately have worse placements, worse rank, or you're going to have to pay slightly more for a click just to get as good of a rank as as good of a placement at the top of the page as them. These are the type of little sneaky behind the scenes things that will destroy your campaign. So website speed is very important. Also inventory. If you sell well. Inventory and also bandwidth, right? So oftentimes we get, for example, an e commerce client. And we say to them, well, what are your best sellers? What are your high margin products? And they tell us their best sellers. They tell us their high margin products. We start running ads and their best selling and high margin products go out of stock right away. Similarly, Well, let me pause there and just say, this is bad because the algorithm is learning, right? It's learning about every SKU, every product individually. So if it sells five of them and then it goes out of stock, it's like you're starting at square one with that budget that was being spent and learned about that product. Now the algorithm has to go, Oh God, let me start from square one and see what to do with this SKU. So the products that you know are going to sell well, or that you want to lean into and invest in. Get plenty of inventory on those before you get started because those are going to start selling you. You don't want to pull the rug out from the algorithm right away. The other thing to for lead generation businesses is oftentimes we. Start sending them phone calls and they can't answer the phones, or they say to us, Oh, you know, our contractors are booked up. Okay, well just be prepared. If you're going to run Google ads, you're going to start growing. So you want to also have the budget to invest in having a little bit of buffer in your bandwidth, right? Make sure that those people are ready to go to take those additional leads. Otherwise you're wasting money wasting money, investing in the ads. You don't want that to be a waste. So I think those are the main things. So give it, give it a thought. If you have questions for us, you can head on over to starter ppc. com and there's a little chat bubble. You can ask us questions about all of this. We work with. Businesses that have budgets of 5, 000 or less, and we've designed a service that is affordable for businesses that are just starting out. So check us out. The main way that we make it affordable is we don't offer any meetings. seems to work out really well. We just have a support ticketing system. you do get a point of contact. One person who's with you consistently, who works on your account. So you can ask them questions, send them as many questions as you want. You can send them videos, you can request videos from them. But we've made it extremely, we've made the service extremely affordable by cutting out meetings. And that's how we've been able to help small businesses get from 1, 000 to 5, 000 a month.