FOR GOOGLE ADS, BIGGER REALLY IS BETTER

So you're looking to generate more revenue for your local cremation services business. Where do you start?

Your website will rank better in local organic search results if you work to improve its search engine optimization (SEO), but while that's a valid strategy, it takes a while to kick in. It could be six, nine, or even twelve months before you see significant ranking improvement vs. your local competitors.

I recommend improving your SEO, but that's more of a long-term (or at least medium-term) strategy. In the short term, it's all about pay-per-click advertising, aka PPC. When it comes to bang for your buck, this tool is awfully hard to beat.

You get the benefit of immediately appearing atop search engine results pages (SERPs) on searches for cremation providers in your area. You can customize your ad on the fly to better attract clientele. And because you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, there's no wasted money on old-school "impressions" or unqualified leads.

And the top priority for employing PPC, of course, is to do so on Google Ads. Sure, there are other PPC platforms — including Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Amazon — but you must always start with Google.

Google currently owns about 90 percent of search engine market share, so there's literally no point to starting anywhere else. Once you're up and running with Google, you can branch out further if you have plenty of marketing budget left over for PPC.

what's new

To that point, you need to be aware of recent upgrades to Google Ads (previously "Google AdWords"), specifically its Expanded Text Ads. Thanks to these changes, you really are getting far more bang for your buck.

The short version is that you now can include more text, and thus more information, in your cremation services ads. Prior to the change, you were limited to two headlines and one description line: a total of 140 characters (including spaces) to get your message across.
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By comparison, Google displays (at minimum) about 150–156 characters of text in meta descriptions, the summary you provide of your webpage content, which are designed to convince people to click on organic links to your site. You can see the challenge in having only 140 characters to persuade people to click on an ad.

But now you get an extra headline ("Headline 3") and description line ("Description 2"). Each headline allows for 30 characters. Descriptions used to be limited to 80 characters, but Google has since bumped that to 90 characters each.
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That's a total increase from 140 characters max to 270 characters in each ad (not including the "path fields" portion of the display URL, which indicates where the searcher ends up after clicking the link). When you put that extra text space to use, you virtually double the amount of info you convey without increasing per-ad spend.

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how it works

Google reports that larger PPC ads tend to see click-through rates 15 percent higher than smaller ads. When Google last made a move to include more real estate in each ad, advertisers reported click-through increases of 20 percent. That means more people reading about what your company offers and landing on your website.

With that said, understand that the extra space won't always appear to searchers. Google's big on responsive design (web pages that display in a friendly fashion on any type of device or screen), and it practices what it preaches. That means ads display differently when they're viewed on mobile devices vs. desktop computer screens.

One way to accommodate disparate displays is to show a smaller version of an ad, which means truncating Header 3 and Description 2. So make sure you use those spaces for extra information that potentially drives more conversions and not for information that's absolutely critical to the meaning of your message.

making the most of 130 characters

With that in mind, how do you put the extra space to work advertising your business? First, consider how you can expand previous messaging to be more effective or clear.

Did you take out words (or use acronyms instead) in previous text ads? If so, you could put that text back in to ensure meaning is more readily apparent to those outside the industry.

For example, if you previously abbreviated "celebration of life service" to "COL service" or "alternative container" to "alt container," you might be able to spell out those terms for greater clarity.

Also, you could add another feature or benefit message in your ad. Your secondary messaging might include the availability of a large urn selection or assistance in arranging unique final dispositions.

Expanded ads make it possible to share more about your business with searchers at the first touchpoint. Leverage them wisely to increase traffic to your pages and generate more cremation revenue.

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Welton Hong, is the founder of Ring Ring Marketing® and a leading expert in creating case generation from online to the phone line. He is the author of Making Your Phone Ring for Funeral Homes, 2019 Edition.