Surfside PPC Podcast

welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast Go to surfsidepppc.com to join Surfside PPC premium and ask your questions Thanks for listening and please subscribe What's up everyone welcome to episode 7 of the Surfside PPC podcast Today I'm just going to be answering one question So quick update If you are looking for my course I do have my first nine modules released for my 2026 Google Ads course So basically if you go now you'll at least have a good background and good highle overview of Google Ads if you're just getting started with it Going to keep adding modules there So $34.99 a year and you'll basically have access to my Google Ads education for as long as you as long as you want the uh yearly subscription So we're going to get right into it today And the main thing I want to focus on is is really I got a question that's like how do you go about setting up brand new accounts so new Google Ads account tutorial new Google Ads account strategy So basically that's what I'm going to be going over today It was it was a really long detailed question So I will put the question in now and then we will actually answer that question and and kind of go through everything So let's put in our question for the episode I am launching a new Google Ads account for a dermatologist I am not sure the best steps to get started and I have a limited budget that I do not want to waste What is the best way to launch a new account and a new campaign on Google Ads to avoid wasting my budget okay so question number one brand new Google Ads account So in this case this was for a medical office So I I try not to disclose too much information about who reached out to me This is specifically for a dermatologist So dermatologist reached out to me and asked "Hey we're launching Google Ads brand new What are the things that you would do if you were launching a brand new account?" And there's a lot of steps to take And it's one of those where launching a brand new account is very difficult If you're launching a brand new Google Ads account my recommendation is generally talk to a professional who does it all the time if you don't do it all the time Now to to use a dermatologist it'd be like me trying to self diagnose something on my skin using Google And a dermatologist would laugh at me and say "Well this is why I do this all day and this is why I went to school for this." And basically people who run Google ads and and use these platforms on a daily basis just have a background that you're not going to have where you understand how it actually works So that'd be my first recommendation is not spending tons and tons of money on Google ads to realize that it's a really difficult thing to do especially when you're first launching So here would be my recommendation when you're launching if you're brand new and you know you could contact me I do provide consulting I do provide ongoing management and it will save you money in the long run So I would recommend reaching out to a professional If you don't want to do that and you're like "Hey I want to do this myself." This these are the steps that I would take If you're an agency if you're a marketer you're launching brand new you need to launch a new Google Ads account for your business You know hiring somebody is just out of the cards right now I I get it So basically what I would do is start create your Google Ads account The very first step for me is always conversion tracking So the most important conversion you can actually send to Google Ads is actual customer data So if you could actually say here is my CRM here are all the customers that come in it every single month and tie it back to Google Ads that's the number one thing that you can do to start your Google Ads account So if you're a dermatologist if you have a CRM that integrates directly with Google Ads and there are some you know some things healthwise where you have to use certain CRM where it does actually protect patient data So there are some limitations to this on the health side but you should still be able to track these successfully It's Google's not going to not track your offline conversions So these are called offline conversions Basically people are calling you people are filling out your form Those are important things to actually track as well But the most important thing to track is actual customers What is driving you actual customers for an e-commerce website for example you're tracking purchase conversions tied back to the source In this case you're doing the same thing but you just connect your CRM so it actually works So that is going to be step number one is uploading offline conversions And that could also be importing data from uh so call rail actually has built-in ways to do this as well You just have to go back in and import that data later So call rail what converts If you have a here are the 30 leads that we got this month you could basically figure out okay this this is how much those leads actually paid with us I do have clients that track this really well and the the main thing that we always kind of focus on is lowering how much we're spending per lead per job and it's not an easy thing to do It's one of those but that's the best way to actually track that and do that The next things you want to do are track phone calls and lead forms So I do all of this with Google Tag Manager If you're looking for a tutorial for how to do this I do have them on my goo on my YouTube channel and in within my course as well So all of this is within my course if you're looking for the the step by step and also on my YouTube channel So what you want to do is set up conversion tracking From there my very first step is creating a search campaign that works So search campaign organize ad groups send people to the right pages So if you're tracking conversions your next step is we need to to set up really strong targeting You set up really strong targeting then you're most likely going to drive conversions And then you have to focus on your bidding So when you're first launching a new account the biggest challenge is your bidding Bidding used to be easier at first and now it's easier long but you have to get to a place where your Google ads actually work in order to bid successfully So you need to get conversion data in so you could actually bid for more conversions So that's kind of the ultimate goal of Google Ads And when you really think about it Google Ads isn't going to work quickly or overnight Like when you think about how it works the goal is to get data into your account If you're launching brand new your account is brand new If you've been running ads for the last 10 years really none of that matters but the last like 30 to 60 days it seems So really the most the thing that matters is most recent data Now there's a step I really didn't talk about that it really does come first but it's one of those that as you're building your campaign you might find you know what we need a lot more pages on this website But building out good landing pages first and foremost and when I say landing pages I just mean pages on your website So landing pages are pages you send traffic to It doesn't have to be something on a separate website It doesn't have to a completely separate page where you're driving traffic to with the intention of driving leads Your website should be set up with the intention of driving leads And you don't need a separate standalone page where people can't click to because ultimately you're trying to just get people to your website So landing pages building out your website What I always say that the number one thing you can do is every service every service area having a page for it That might be 300 pages in some case if you have a lot of services have a lot of service areas But that's going to set you apart in Google ads So you don't have one page that's basically like hey we provide you know tree services in Texas It's it's kind of like okay that's pretty open-ended That's not really going to tell you a whole lot and not going to be really helpful if we're being honest So basically what you're trying to do first and foremost is set up a really nice website set up really good conversion tracking and then ultimately you really want to focus on how you can drive really good targeting so you can bid for more and more conversions Your goal is telling Google about your business in Google Ads so that you can drive more conversions and more revenue get revenue data into Google Ads and you could actually bid for revenue So that's kind of my my main focus right now is getting as much much conversion data as I can in every single account I work in So the next thing is going to be well basically creating additional campaigns and using all the features that Google ads has So I am performance max is a campaign that I run There are some limitations on the health side but just because of personalized advertising I still think on the keyword side and you know what people are searching there's still plenty of value for for running performance max even for health you're going to get some you're going to get a sign that says it's limited by health in personalized advertising which is perfectly fine It still performs really well It still uses your conversion data and the targeting that you're using to effectively target the right people and make sure that you're driving additional conversions Performance Max has sort of replaced like the old display campaign for me where I use it for it's it's way different but I use it for retargeting I use it to run video ads You upload images You get a ton of ad copy in there So I go in and just tons of ad copy tons of asset groups get as many assets as we can created image video because ultimately what you're trying to do is test all these things so you can figure out what works drive additional conversions For a dermatologist I would set up separate asset groups for some of the different practices that you're you know some of the different things that you might be focused on If it's acne for example then have a specific asset group for acne care and you know visit us for acne relief you know how however you want to use that So I would say the biggest mistake I see most people making is they don't know how to target So within a search campaign not targeting the right keywords not targeting the right keyword match types There's there's a pretty simple formula that I use and it works So phrase match keywords make sure every single keyword contains service and a location and that's generally going to work and a service plus near me So the the main thing is just separating out your keywords into separate ad groups giving people the right ads giving people the right landing pages creating really effective pages on your website so that you can take advantage of performance max features and what will eventually be AI max features And ultimately long term you know I think with Google ads it's it's I think we're going to see a lot of clicks and we're going to see a lower cost per click long term which is kind of odd to say but we're going to see lower conversion rates and we just kind of have to live with the fact that there's not going to be this straight one to one hey we're targeting the keyword dermatologist near me which you still should do but it's almost like do we just target 10 keywords the main 10 keywords that we have as broad match keywords and just live with it and and add negative keywords and optimize for those 10 keywords and then build a performance max campaign Do we create large keyword lists do we create multiple search campaigns with different goals so there's going to be a lot of strategy going on in Google Ads This is why I think sometimes when people start like saying "I could do this myself." In certain instances in certain businesses if somebody's created everything for you and it's working yes you can run it for a little while but you're going to fall behind unless you hire somebody who is sitting in the account and doing this stuff every day So it's just that that's kind of the main difference that I generally see in accounts that I'm managing for especially a brand new account And a lot of brand new accounts what happens is people launch them they think it's going to work they run the ads for a month or two and they say "Yeah I've been running ads for a month or two." They come to me and I look and there's been several thousand sometimes a lot more in spend And it's like "You guys should just hire me to manage this because I can see how much you're wasting You could pay that to me and I will get your stuff on track." So obviously I don't mean to sit here and sell all my services You could hire anybody like hire a professional If you don't know what you're doing with a brand new account if you're a marketer that's trying to learn then really the the process for me is I mean the first step would be building out landing pages building out a really professional beautiful website that goes over all the services the service areas sells the business why people should hire them That's really important Your goal is to build trust as quickly as possible with your end landing page with your Google business profile So that's kind of number one Number two is going to be setting up conversion tracking so Google Ads actually knows what works Number three is creating the right targeting within your search campaigns So setting up really organized ad groups sending people to good landing pages creating really effective advertisements using assets call assets location assets and then it's going to be running the campaign collecting data Once you have data then it's about bidding for more conversions So switching to a target CPA target return on ad spend just really depends on how you're tracking your conversions There's a lot of details in here but that's ultimately the highle overview of launching a brand new account Conversion tracking get the right targeting get conversion data and then bid for conversions So that will wrap up episode number seven Thank you for listening You can join Surfside PVC premium for $5 a month Otherwise I will see you on episode number eight Thanks for listening to the Surfside PPC podcast Please go to surfsideepc.com for management or consulting options or to get my course or just Surfside PPC premium through my YouTube channel my school page or my Patreon Please subscribe