Google Ads for Storefronts: What You Actually Need to Know

What are you trying to accomplish with this advertising? For most local retailers, it's going to be about getting people in the door. So ultimately, what you're going to be looking at is, am I seeing more people come in the door? Am I seeing more, you know, in store transactions taking place, and trying to correlate that with this investment into advertising.

This is the entrepreneur school podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you, the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair, and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under three. I'm a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out. On this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey, and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to entrepreneur School.

Kelly. Thank you so much for having me.

Let's dive in. Let's dive into the fact that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially you know storefronts, think Google ads are really important and or maybe a quick fix, or like the thing they want to do to try and drive extra traffic into the doors. So tell us a little bit about your approach when it comes to Google ads and sort of the stub group difference there.

Yeah, so Google ads, like you said, can be very important for local businesses, and it can also be very tricky. And I'll kind of talk through why a lot of that. Well, there's a couple of variables that go into it. Part of why it's so tricky is because there's this disconnect between offline and online. So it can be very difficult for storefront owners, for retailers, to know what the real impact is of the ads that they're running, because obviously someone's on their phone, someone's on their computer to see the ad, and then they physically walk in the door, and it's hard to connect those things. And there are some things we can do to try and close gaps there that we can talk about, but that's usually one of the, one of the biggest pain points that I see. You know, local retailers communicate is, let's say they are running Google ads like, I don't know if it's working. I don't know, like, which parts of it's working. I don't know, you know, if I'm wasting some money, if any of it's working. You know, what's driving people to actually, physically come in? But the when we kind of look at things big picture and think through, well, why is Google and why is Google Ads even something that local retailers should think about, it's because of the reality, which is that most people are using the internet to find even the physical places they're going to go to. Now that's not always true. So definitely, when we're talking with clients, we want to take a look at how do people find that local storefront? So there are some businesses that is just all about, you know, walk past traffic, they're in a strip mall, and their traffic just comes from people who drive by and see it, or people who are, you know, going to an anchor store in the mall, and then they come over to their store. And for some of those businesses, you know, Google ads might not be the best fit, because people aren't actively searching for it on their phone. They're just seeing it and saying, Oh yeah, let's go check it out. But if it is the type of thing where people are actively using the internet to see, hey, what's near me? You know, what toy store is near me, what coffee shop is near me, things like that, then coming up on Google when people do those searches and making it super easy for them to see where you are, how to how to get to you, you know what your hours are, things like that can be super important and have a big impact on that walk in traffic.

Yeah, I feel like it's the truth with everything related to marketing that we wish we could just track it all the way through, like, like, as if a cookie could just land on a person and then when they walk through the door, you know exactly how they get there. So I'm sure there's a lot of things that you know on the other end that the business owner really needs to do to understand what parts of their marketing. Are the most effective, and particularly when they're investing money into ADS, because that can sometimes feel like you're just pouring cash into something and you're not necessarily knowing whether it's coming back. So on that note, I want to jump right to your hot take, which you told me before we started recording and and that was the minimum amount of budget that you recommend to a business in order to be able to actually assess. Because when you're doing ads, you've got to be testing, you've got to be, you know, trying different things. So talk to me about what that is,

yeah for. So the way that we think about budget is really we thinking about data, which is, how much data can we collect from a budget that will let us understand whether or not the budget is working or not? So, for example, let's say you had a $10 budget, like, hey, this month, wanna spend $10 Google ads? Well, we could spend that, and I had to have no idea whether or not that was a good or bad thing for you, because you're gonna get a couple of clicks, probably for $10 maybe $10 maybe, if you're lucky, you know, 10 clicks, 20 clicks, 30 clicks, depending on on where you're spending that money. And I have no way of saying, yes, those clicks did or didn't drive good results for you. It's not moving the needle in any, you know, trackable way. And let's just say, you know, let's say you magically did get a couple of phone calls out of that that track from people who were going to then come in and physically purchase something from your store. That's awesome, but I don't know if that's just a fluke. If that means that we're going to keep seeing that if we spend more money, there's just not enough data for us to know whether or not this is actually working for you. And so when we think about budget, we think about how much data that allows us to collect so that we can see whether or not this is working for you, and how to improve the parts that are working and cut the wasted parts that aren't working. And so for most businesses, the number that I come up with is about $2,000 per month for the monthly budget that you're spending with Google, that you're paying to Google. And that number, again, is roughly related to how much data for most businesses is going to allow them to collect to actually prove if this is a good place for them to allocate their funds. Now, of course, there's always going to be exceptions. We do have clients who spend less money than that. It also depends, to some extent, upon just how large an area of service, how many people are searching for what you sell in that given area, things like that. So I'm not going to say that. You know, no company can get in under 2k per month in ad spend, but that's a good rule of thumb or benchmark. I think for the majority of businesses who are are looking to invest into a platform like Google,

and I found that so eye opening, because that's significant for a lot of businesses, as far as percentage of revenue goes into invest into a marketing strategy. And on top of that, what's your recommended length of time for an ad campaign to run in order to get good data?

Yeah, generally speaking, you want to give things at least three months. And now that doesn't mean that you're not seeing things you know, in month number one that you're improving building upon. Because that's one of the beauties of the paid side of things at Google, is you can get quick, quick feedback. It's not like the organic side of things, where you, you know, try to rank for a keyword organically, and maybe it takes six months, nine months, to even know if they're going to show up with Google. You know very quickly if people are clicking your ads, you know if they're searching for what you're targeting, et cetera. So you can make early decisions, but it takes time for then those early decisions that you make in response to the data to take effect, to iterate, to split test, to see what ad copy people are engaging with, what categories of searches are working or aren't working. And so that's why we usually recommend, hey, if you're gonna get into this plan for this to at least be a three month thing, to really give it a shot and understand whether or not this is the right platform for you.

And what are some of the key goals some A business might have that would maybe be more successful, or what are some of you can you just break down that little detail a little bit behind the scenes and how the ads work. So if somebody is thinking, okay, so wait till I have 6k cash ready to go, and then what am I actually advertising about?

Yes, so you want to think through, you know, as a business, what are you trying to accomplish with this advertising. For most, you know, local retailers, it's going to be about getting people in the door. So ultimately, what you're going to be looking at is, am I seeing more people come in the door? Am I seeing more, you know, in store transactions taking place, and trying to correlate that with this investment into advertising. And when I say correlate, and say that intentionally, because it's a very difficult, like we talked about the beginning of conversation here, to say exactly, okay, this person who just bought from yesterday, physically in store, you know, saw an ad now there are, there are a number of things you can do to try and close some of those tracking gaps. One thing you can do, of course, is just ask people how they found you, which can be. Helpful, and I recommend it, but you always also have to take the answers with a grain of salt, because, first of all, a lot of people see have multiple touch points before they get to you. So they might say, Oh, I Googled you, but maybe they've been seeing your Facebook posts, or, you know, they saw your sign, and then they saw Google, you know, when they came up, and things like that. So they might say one thing, when there was a really a journey. And then secondly, people often don't understand the difference between, like, paid and organic results, so they might say, Oh, I saw you on Google. But that doesn't tell you necessarily, was it a Google ad? Was it just your Google business profile that came up on a map? Things like that? So you ask the question, but take the results with a grain of salt. Other things you can do, though, are kind of signals of interest. So most people, when they're clicking on your ads, they're going to be reaching your website. Your website or potentially your Google business profile listing, which we can talk about a little bit as well. And so first of all, you're gaging, Hey. Are people actually doing that? Are they clicking the ads and getting to our list and getting to our website? So that's the first signal of, hopefully some interest. And the second thing would be things like, Hey, if you have a phone number on your website, and people can call you with questions, what are your hours? Or do you sell this? Or whatever the case may be, that is something you can track. And can track pretty well back to the campaigns you're running. And we use call tracking software to accomplish this, so that's really important. And one of the one of the highest signals you can track is if you've got people clicking your ads, and then a lot of them are calling, asking relevant questions. That's a good sign you're getting in front of the right people, and they're engaging with you. Same thing, if you have any other actions people can take on your website, like filling out a form. Sometimes, too, you can kind of create a situation where you're getting them to fill out a form. So for example, we have a jewelry store client who has this situation they're trying as much as possible to connect this gap between the money they're spending online and people coming physically to the jewelry store. And so they have a coupon on their landing page that you can enter your email address in and phone number in to download you can come and redeem that in the physical location. And what that does, hey, it's an incentive for people to actually come into the physical location, because it's a it's a sizable coupon, it's a real, legit offer. And then B, it allows us to to connect some of those dots. How many people are requesting that coupon? Okay, that's a great signal of if the ads are working or not. And then how many of those people actually, you know, come in and and redeem that coupon, because then you can track that back as well those so those are some of the ways you can kind of close those gaps. Yeah,

this is really interesting, actually, as of what I'm hearing you say about just customer behavior, consumer behavior and the whole journey, because we're talking about online searching, also making phone calls, which so many people don't even think about doing in the world anymore, and physically walking into a store. So in your experience in building out successful ad campaigns, can you speak a little bit to that, like consumer journey, like touch points and and how that fits in?

The consumer journey is long and varied, and I think this is one of the myth is maybe too strong a word, but one of the challenges that a lot of you know, digital marketers, agencies, etc, have kind of created in the marketplace is this idea of attribution, of like, okay, track everything back. You know exactly where things came from. And often you lose a lot because you might, okay, maybe, maybe they called after they clicked Google ad. But again, Was it really the Google ad that was the first thing they saw that made them aware? Or had they been walking past your business for the last week and then they did a search and like, oh yeah, I recognize that name, click on the ad, et cetera. And so it's very difficult to really track the entirety of that customer journey and all the different touch points people see, and so that's why, ideally, your A being in as many places as possible on that journey. So, you know, great physical signage online, making sure you're in all the directories possible. So if people's looking for you on Google or Apple Maps or, you know, Bing Maps, or whatever it might be, you're showing up you have relevant information, you know, trying to make sure that your pages are SEO optimized, so that you're going to show up in the regular search results, making sure that your Google business profile is optimized people see that as much as possible. You know, just kind of putting in the foundational work to be in as many places as possible when people are in that customer journey, and then trying to correlate things. So if you're going to, for example, get into Google ads and spend some money there saying, Okay, well, let's look and see what impact in terms of in store traffic and revenue, can we correlate with the timing of this? So let's say we do this in April. Okay, April, May, June. Great. Well, let's look at this April, May June compared to last April, May June compared to the previous months. Try and understand, are there any other variables, you know, things that we've changed in our marketing or whatever. And try to see, okay, hey, yeah, we spent, you know, 6k over three months, and we sold no more sales, no more no more revenue. It's probably not a good sign. Or hey, yeah, we saw a bump in people coming in, a bump in sales, that kind of. Relates to when we did this cool that's a good sign that maybe we should continue investing into

it. Yeah. I mean, I feel like, as a marketing strategist too, you would never just say, just do one thing and only this one thing, and go all in on this one thing. It's really always about the combination of strategies that you're implementing in your business. And you know, as much as we would love to be able to track, like you said, the attribution of every action that we take in the end, more is more, right? And you don't necessarily, like you said, know which of the actions was the final trigger? Like which was the first one and which one was the final one? It almost doesn't matter, as long as they end up coming through the door and buying something in the end. And I know it takes me forever, like there's some new shops around, probably been around for a year that I've driven by multiple I literally know because it's on the route that I take my kids to hockey practice, which is multiple times a week, and I never went in. I just couldn't get myself there, because I didn't know why I should go in, but I wanted to, but it just takes a long time. So that's just human nature, right? Absolutely,

a somewhat little more sophisticated strategy. One thing that I see some local, local businesses advertisers do is, if you are collecting what they call personally identifiable information, so email address and phone number, primarily from the people who are coming into your store, whether it be capturing at a point of sale or you've got a giveaway or loyalty program, things like that, if you're able to capture that information, You can then send that data back to Google and also meta, for example, you know, for Facebook, Instagram, and to some extent, those platforms can cat can match up and see if someone with that profile viewed your ads. So, for example, a lot of people you know, they have a Gmail address or YouTube account or whatever that's tied to your email address, and then, if you say, Hey, someone with this email address came into my store, you send that data to Google. Google knows if that person was logged into their Google profile when they saw your ad. Google knows that. And so you can, to some extent, feedback to Google and track, you know, what we call conversions, and track and see, okay, yeah, there are or are not people who were collecting information from actually seeing our ads prior to coming into the store.

Are you talking about that on the back end, like, if you've already run a Google campaign and you collect an email address from a sale, then you can do a verification versus, I know in I've played a little bit of meta ads before that you can, like, create audiences based on your lists or based on like, if you uploaded your consumer list into one of these platforms, you can target that way, or

is it both of those things? Yeah, no, it's great points, very much both of those. So from the targeting standpoint, like you said, you can upload information, create an audience to teach the system. This is the type of person who's purchasing from us, and then you can target local likes of that. Now it's harder to do that on the Google side of things, just because they have criteria you have to meet before you become eligible for that. And the hardest one to hit usually is like, you spend $50,000 in that ad account before they let you do that. So for a lot of small businesses, that's kind of out of their reach, meta doesn't have that type of threshold, so meta is much more doable on that targeting side of things, but yeah, on the conversion side of things, then or then the reporting side of things, absolutely you can upload. They call it offline conversion. So you can upload that data to Google if you are running campaigns, and basically you're telling Google, hey, these people converted, and then Google was able to show you, you know, they don't show you specific, like first identifiable information. You're not seeing the names of people or things like that within the Google ads platform. But you can see, okay, yes, I got five conversions out of this campaign based upon this, this data that I uploaded to Google, that type of thing. Okay,

well, I think we've got, like, a lot of good details and ideas around how the strategy works, if, if somebody was to go for it. But I think there's another really simple tactic that a lot of businesses forget to optimize, and that is the Google My Business Profile. So tell us, like, how you do that the right way.

Yes, I love talking about these because, like you said, it's free, and it's something that every business should be doing, and a lot of businesses just don't understand how it works, and so don't have a good listing. So first of all, Google loves changing the names of things, so for many years, it was Google My Business. That's still how I talk about it often. But then Google had to go and change it to the Google Business Listing. So it's still the same exact thing, whether you call it GMB, Google, my business, or Google Business Listing, it's still the idea of, if you're a store, so you have a physical location, you can go and claim your listing about your store with Google. And there's a couple of different. Ways You actually claim it initially, sometimes they'll send you a postcard to the physical location with like, a verification code so you can prove you actually are there. Sometimes they'll do a phone call. It kind of depends on just how Google's feeling and what they make you go through at a given time, but the first step is claiming that listing. So you just go to Google, and literally, you can type in Google, Google Business Listing. Go claim your listing, and you tell Google information about yourself. So your physical address of the store, the name of the store, the phone number of the store, the hours, things like that, things that are relevant to people who are going to see that locally and who need information about you. And so the first mistake a lot of businesses do is just not taking advantage of all of the fields information that Google allows you to enter, because there's a lot of optional fields, like there's some things you have to have a business name that kind of require. You can't get away without that. But there's things like categorizing what type of business you are, adding additional categories that are relevant to your business, adding a description, a really well written description about your business, adding good, high quality photos of the business, things like that. A lot of people just do the bare minimum to create that listing, but that listing, especially for local retail, is often as important or more important than your website, because that's what a lot of people who are going to see and a lot of people are just going to engage with that listing. They're not even going to get to your website. They're going to make a decision about, you know, whether to reach out to you, where you're located, etc, just from that listing. So first thing to do is fill out as much information as possible. Take advantage of all of the fields Google gives you, then the second thing is, reviews have a tremendous impact on the ranking of your listing, because there's probably going to be multiple different similar companies in your area that are going to come up. You want to come up as often as high as possible, so you get most traffic. But Google wants to see what are people actually engaging with which businesses are they finding the most helpful? And so the number and quality of the reviews that businesses collect is one of the biggest signals that Google, you know, has for determining that. And so you want to have a strategy in place to request reviews from your customers. Because, you know, some people are reviewers. They'll, they'll give you reviews here and there. But most of us don't have this top of mind. We're not going to do it unless you really make it easy for us, kind of put it in front of us. And there's all kinds of strategies for this. Could be, you know, little postcards with barcodes on your tables. It could be, you know, a giveaway. Hey, you know, leave us a review you're interested to a giveaway. There's all sorts of creative strategies, but if you can really get your review count up, that has a massive impact on your ranking. And then by the last thing I would say on that too, is that Google gives you the ability to post content to your Google business profile. Think of it almost like your Facebook page. You know, you have a sale, you have a hey, it's National Donut Day, stuff like that. You can post those things to your Google business profile as well. And this is a good signal to Google that you're active and on top of things, because they like recent data. They like people who actually leverage their tools and so that can give you a ranking boost as well. If you're consistently, ideally, you know, maybe a couple times a week, at least once a week, just posting some information to that listing. I've

always wondered about that. I'm like, What is this thing that you can post stuff about? And just to also clarify the Google My Business or what did you say? It's actually called Google Business Listing, yeah, now they call it that, right? It's the thing that it kind of like pulls a summary about your business right into the Google feed. So while in some cases you see just a link and a little paragraph about something, this will actually give you the store hours, the phone number the website like, hot linked, and it has a picture and like and it takes up more digital real estate too, so you're automatically standing out in that search. And I noticed sometimes too, it doesn't always pull the Google listing to the top of the search. It's sometimes three or four down sponsored posts go on top that kind of thing. Like, can you speak to the structure of the Google search there.

Yeah, the structure, like you said, it can vary, and it really depends on what Google thinks you're looking for, that the individual user what they're looking for when they look and so Google's trying to customize that experience. Then it's also going to depend upon what device you're using, where you're located. Google has a lot of information about you. So sometimes the first thing that comes up when you search for something might be just text ads, and then after that, you've got maybe the the Google Maps do a Google search while we're talking. Yes, awesome. Let's do it live, like men's clothing store, right? Like we want to see what? Let's see what comes up when you haven't, kind of talk, talk through what you see. Yeah. Yeah,

the men's clothing store. Okay, so first a bunch of Chinese online sites across the top. Temu, Xian hilara, those

are probably shopping ads. Probably like pictures of specific products with prices, yeah, the ones that go like. So those are shopping ads coming from,

and I'm doing this on my phone for those who aren't looking. And then places, okay, cool. So places, oh my gosh, this is like, explain it. Then you get, like, the places with a map and like the listing

map with kind of the dots on it, and then a couple of featured, couple of featured places underneath, which sometimes those featured places. They can be served by an ad. You'll see like little sponsored or something tag on there. Sometimes it's just what we call organic, which is the free listing coming up. And there's limited spots there, obviously. So again, the more that you're doing to make Google like your profile, the more likely it is you get one of those limited and therefore very valuable spot.

Yeah, I can see that the one that ranks above the other one has more reviews. You can see it has 31 versus 25

Yeah, and that's often, that's often the case. Yeah, there are a number of factors that go into it. So it's not purely a reviews game, it's not purely the one with the most wins, but it's a strong, strong ranking factor, as well as of recency too. You know, if somebody's got 100 degrees, they're all two years old, Google's going to care a lot less about that than if you had 30 reviews in the last month, because Google knows right now you're relevant. So it's not just about, you know, collecting a big number. It's again, about recency and making sure new reviews continue to come in over time.

So okay, just to kind of like, tie the two parts of this conversation together, the ads that you pay for and then the organic things that you do to like, make Google like you better when you're building out a campaign and strategies for your clients. How are you putting those two pieces together? You always saying, like, even if we're doing the $2,000 in ads, we're also making sure we're regularly posting there. We've optimized the profile all of those things.

Yeah. So the way we would approach that is you should, just by default, you should have that Google Business Listing as good as possible any regular posting to it, because it doesn't cost you money from Google. You know, if you want someone to do the work for you, you can pay them to do the work for you, but Google's not charging you anything there, so you might as well. You might as well do it, and it's very powerful. And then it can also work in tandem with your advertising, because on the local side of things, you can connect that Google Business Listing to your ad account, and that is a couple of things. One, it gives Google information that, oh, you have a physical location that is near people, and so it's going to give you a leg up. Let's say someone's near you and is searching, and Google's deciding whether to show your ad or someone else's ad. Well, Google is going to say, Oh, hey, you're, you know, you're you know, you're 500 feet from this person, and they're, you know, two blocks over. You probably are going to have a, you know, you're going to be more relevant to their search, and so you're going to be more likely to actually get your ad to show to begin with. So there's that benefit, and then there's also the benefit that Google integrates information from that Google Business Listing into your ad. And they can do this in a variety of ways. You know, if you search for Home Depot right now, you'll probably probably see, like a text ad, and then a couple of listings below it of actual store locations in your area. And you could tap on those locations, and it would probably take you directly to the Google Business Listing, so you could skip the directions, see the hours, that type of thing. And so having that Google Business Listing well optimized and linked to your ad account allows for that type of experience as well, which also makes your ad bigger, which means it pushes other people away, makes you stand out more, and makes you just look more relevant and helpful to people, and therefore increases the likelihood that they're going to pick you and engage with you.

Okay, so what are some examples as takeaways for people just to like prompts, maybe, of what could you be posting regularly in your Google My Business, so that you're staying active there?

Yeah, a couple of categories. So first, any sales and promotions that you're running. Go ahead and just let people know they're often you know, a lot of businesses are already posting stuff on Facebook, and so you can literally put the same information on Google. There's, there's no downside of same information, just make sure it's in both places. So that's, that's an easy one. So repurpose your social media posts. Exactly. Yes, repurposing

video or images or text can

do. Let's see here. I believe you can do YouTube videos. Think you can link to YouTube videos because Google obviously owns YouTube, so they like YouTube. I believe it's going to kind of play in in YouTube itself, so it's not going to be like the Facebook side of things, where it's necessarily playing like in the feed on. The Google says, Be more okay, I'll link to a YouTube video. But if you are putting content on YouTube, that's that's definitely not a bad thing to do. And Google does like video content, so that can be great. You know, celebrations of national days, national Dawn day, whatever. Just, you know, fun stuff like that. Could even feature review. This could be like, hey, screenshot of a great review. Just got Hey, thank you so much Sandy for giving us this review. This was awesome. We love serving people like you. It doesn't have to be anything super fancy or super hard to create, just stuff that makes your brand look good, that people would find interesting, and doing it consistently is the most important part. Okay.

Okay. I think that was really great information, and like the whole tying the strategy together, is this just not a set it and forget it thing. It's just regularly integrating using that as a platform. And I'm a big fan of making sure that everything that we do is getting cross promoted into multiple places, because we're so limited as business owners on energy and resources and time. So if you're going to make something you might as well get the most out of it. And I've just been reminded during this conversation that Google is a very important place to be active and show up so that you're like ranking in that search. Because the reality is, especially in the case of a local business with a storefront, that that's probably one of the top ways people are going to find you, versus directly through social media,

absolutely. Okay, well, John,

thank you so much. Is there any last pieces of wisdom that I forgot to extract out of you, or any resources that you want to share with the audience?

One thing, we have a couple of free resources on our website, including we just very recently put out a guide to what types of content to post on your Google business profile. So very, very relevant to what we just talked about. So you can grab all that stuff, group.com/free, it's all on there, and yeah, hopefully that that'll give you some some good give those listening or watching here some good insights and kind of checklists and whatnot to use

Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time today. Thank

you so much for having me. Really, really enjoy it. Okay, I'll talk to you later.