I've been on a few discovery calls lately where someone mentioned they didn't find value in advertising with Google. They tried it and it didn't work. 🤷‍♀️

My next question is always:

Did you work with an agency or DIY your paid ads?

Often followed by this answer:

I did it myself - or - I have a friend who did it for me

​

I am all for the DIY approach when possible. The problem with the DIY approach to digital marketing is that it looks pretty easy and straightforward.

However. It takes skill and experience to do it well.

Skill and experience is the difference between seeing results and spinning your wheels.

And, sadly, Google will bill your credit card whether the campaigns are well configured or not. So I often see DIYers wasting a lot of money and feeling frustrated.

​

A Woods MarCom Paid Campaign

Our paid campaigns are researched, built, and optimized by our in-house Digital Marketing Strategist, a Google Ads Certified partner.

With years of experience building paid campaigns in a variety of paid platforms (Google, Meta, etc.) her approach is highly strategic, tactical, and focused on your specific campaign goals.

Digital Marketing is not a "set it and forget it" tactic. We monitor all campaigns and make regular adjustments to optimize performance.

We use additional layers and paid tools to ensure the entire customer journey is seamless and each conversion is counted.

We also meet with each client monthly to review the data and assess performance against our key performance metrics (KPMs).

​

Digital Marketing Case Study

The client is a small women's health clinic offering a variety of services, including medical-grade aesthetic treatments such as body contouring and laser services.

These MedSpa services are the focus of their paid digital campaign, including Google paid search and paid Meta advertising.

Building this campaign, we leveraged the following tools:

• Trackable phone number - Allowing us to link customers who viewed our paid ads and then dialed a phone, rather than clicking through. Without these tools and proper configuration, these connected conversions are lost.
• Strategic Landing Page - The client offers several robust women's health services. We built their landing page to provide high-level information focused on this service line and encourage visitors to complete a lead form for more information.
• Digital Ad Project Management Tool - This allows our team to organize all elements of the Google campaign into one dashboard. Building the campaign outside of Google first helps us be more strategic and collaborative in-house, and also gives our clients visibility they may not typically have with a traditional agency campaign process.

Strategically, we built multiple ad groups within Google and Meta to refine the campaign elements and target audience within each group, and to see how they performed against one another.

As we moved through the first three months, we monitored performance on both platforms and made adjustments regularly.

Campaign Results

For this client, patient acquisition for these MedSpa services was their top priority. We are always excited to see high numbers of ad impressions and engagement (demonstrating success with brand awareness). However, our primary key performance metric here is cost per acquisition (CPA).

When looking at conversions, we need to ensure that the investment made to bring in each lead consistently lands below the revenue generated by the first customer interaction.

There are some cases where you might adjust the benchmark CPA based on business goals, but this is the KPM in this case.

• In the first month, the cost per acquisition came in at $400, which was within our target range.
• In the second month, we saw the CPA drop to $93 per lead.

Now it our third month, we are preparing to refresh the images across the Meta campaigns (a good idea to do this every 2-3 months) and continue to make tweaks to the campaign configurations in both platforms to maximize performance and adjust to changes in our data.

​

Can You DIY Your Paid Digital?

It is absolutely possible to open a Google Ads account and fire up a DIY campaign. And Google makes it look really easy to do so (because they will charge you either way!)

But I am frequently reminded that we get what we pay for.

If you want paid digital ads that perform well and convert, I recommend you hire a professional.

And, of course, I happen to know a gal! 😉