Are you seeing a drop off in customers?
Your Google Ads might hold the answer.
All businesses and sectors go through slow periods. It might be a seasonal thing, it might be your sector or the wider economy, or it might just be you.
If you get a lot of customers from digital marketing channels – your website, and Google Ads – then you have got all the data at your fingertips to figure out what’s happening and pinpoint where you are losing customers. Let’s break it down.
Your Website
With your website, short of it not working properly, there isn’t much that can cause you to lose customers rapidly. SEO (how well your website shows up in online searches) takes time to build up, and likewise only tends to drop slowly.
It’s worth checking in Google Search Console, but your website isn’t likely to be the cause of a major loss of customers.
Google Ads
Unlike your website SEO, traffic from Google Ads can vary a lot from day to day and week to week. The cost per click of keywords on Ads is based on how many businesses are competing for that keyword.
If business is tough for whatever reason, and competitors are throwing extra money at Ads to try and keep customers rolling in, then your Google Ads aren’t going to be working as well as they used to.
Let’s look at a couple of real examples
Client A runs a business that is highly seasonal.
Summer is great, but the whole sector pretty much grinds to a halt for a good few months over winter. This client is fairly small, and while they have carved out a nice niche for themselves, they are surrounded by bigger players.
When last winter hit, we had a look to see how their Google Ads were performing. Keywords looked good and geographic targeting was spot on. What had changed was cost per click.
It was clear that their competitors with bigger fixed costs to cover were fighting over the reduced number of customers still looking to buy.
Our client had two options.
- Up their budget and try and compete, or
- Hunker down, scale back their Ads spend and wait for spring.
They went for the second option which has worked well for them. They bumped their budget back up just before temperatures started climbing and things got back to normal.
Semi-retired and with minimal overheads, Client B doesn’t need (or want) to be run off their feet.
They contacted us after a couple of weeks of lower than usual customer enquiries. At the same time, they commented that some of the bigger companies in the sector were also slow (suggesting an economic rather than a seasonal slowdown).
A quick check in Search Console and Analytics showed that their website was working well, but most of their online customers came from Google Ads.
Digging into their Ads, cost per click was up due to increased competition, but their Ads needed some fine tuning too. We decided to leave their Ads spend where it was, but better target the keywords they were paying for, and tighten up the areas their Ads focussed on to align with where their customers came from and the areas they wanted to service.
The end result was a slight reduction in traffic from Google Ads, but the traffic that was coming through was of a much higher quality, more likely to result in business.
Our advice? Reduce your dependency on Ads
The volume of customers that you get from Ads can change quickly. In the face of increased competition, the effectiveness of your Ads spend can drop, and if you stop paying for Ads, the customers from them stop too.
We always suggest that as well as running Ads, you work on your website, and the other channels that point to it.
OUR TWO TOP TIPS:
1. Grow organic traffic
If you can slowly grow the SEO of your website, then that will slowly increase the number of customers who find you from searching on Google. That’s something that is unlikely to fall away quickly, and it’s also something you don’t have to pay for on an ongoing basis.
Done right, growing organic traffic (from searches) to your website can even let you slowly back off your Ads spend.
2. Foster other channels
Likewise, it’s worth building on the other ways that people find your business. Two good examples are social media and online reviews. Upping your game in these areas is often relatively quick and easy to do and can significantly increase the number and quality of leads you get.
Are you in a business that sometimes sees noticeable drops in customer numbers?
Contact us and have a chat. We can help you work out what is causing the change and come up with the best responses to get business humming again.
