Google Ads and Google Shopping solutions for small business

Our Google Ads management services help your business get seen by the right people, at the right price

Ocean Bear Digital focuses on one thing and one thing only; getting small businesses to dominate their industry on Google.

Our focus is on maximizing your ad spend and delivering you real results with no wastage. We have experience in managing Google Ads accounts spending over $500,000 through to small businesses targeting niche areas with as little as $1,500 a month.

We focus on advertising to consumers who display ‘commercial intent’, ensuring maximum efficiency in your ad spend.

What’s commercial intent you may ask? Put simply, it’s users who exhibit an intent to purchase your product or service. Say you’re a car mechanic, and a user searches “car mechanics near me” on Google; that user has strong commercial intent.

It’s all too easy to spend a lot of money on Google for not much return. As an agency focused on growing and scaling small businesses, our Google Ads management ensures your spend is channeled into the area’s most likely to deliver you leads, purchases and ultimately, revenue.

Our Google Ads solution incorporates three distinct advertising channels.

This is what we recommend for nearly all our clients, often as their sole digital advertising channel. These are the text ads you see on Google.ca when you search for a product or service (or just about anything else under the sun). We relentlessly optimize Google Ads accounts to ensure delivery of the right ads, to the right users, at the right price.

If you sell products online, Google Shopping can be a highly effective channel. In our experience managing millions of dollars of advertising spend, Google Shopping consistently proves an effective channel in driving enquiries and purchases, cost-effectively. With Google Shopping, we managed a $40 cost per lead on an ecommerce store that averages $3,658 per transaction.

When you have an ecommerce platform, it can be hard to decide where to invest your precious advertising dollars to promote your products. Our job is to drive the most amount of conversions from your ad spend, and that’s why we turn to Google Shopping time and time again.

Remarketing is an important component of any Google Ads strategy. Remarketing enables you to advertise to users who visited your website but didn’t submit an enquiry or complete a purchase.

Imagine you own a gym and a user spends five minutes on your website, views your pricing page, then leaves without signing up. Then imagine two days later that same user searches “best gyms near me” on Google. If you run a remarketing campaign, you can advertise to that user with a personalized ad. For example, you might include a 10% discount in the ad text, as price may have been the reason the user didn’t sign up the first time they visited your website.

And most important of all…

Rich reporting is provided across all three channels. We’re skilled in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Search Console and Google Data Studio, ensuring your account is fully optimized based on hard data.

We’ll also provide you with a beautifully polished, real time report that allows you to view advertising performance through an interactive dashboard that you can manipulate based on your preferred date range. With the click of a mouse you can switch from seeing the performance of your advertising from yesterday, to last year. And if that sounds like too much, don’t worry, we can just as easily provide you with a monthly report on performance.

Why you can put your faith in us

Proven performance

2,500% return on ad spend and over 170 leads per month for a company we work with

Google Ads Expertise

Google Search and Shopping certified. 15 years’ experience working with companies spending up to $50,000 per month

Best-in-class set-up

Your Google Ads account will be crafted to perfection, ensuring you’re targeting the right keywords, with the right ads, at the right price

Beautiful ads

We apply psychological buyer behavior principles to ensure your ads stand out from the crowd and attract clicks

Revenue-focused approach

Our Google Ads accounts are optimized towards conversions and revenue, ensuring every dollar you spend works hard to deliver you profit

Remarketing included

We’ll create segmented pools of users based on how they interact with your website, and tailor messaging to them accordingly

Transparency

Detailed, real-time reporting available, using the most advanced analytics tools in the market

Website expertise

Advanced technical and on-page optimization, ensuring your website is performing at its peak to deliver you the best return on your ad spend

View our super transparent, super competitive Google Ads management plans

Google Ads Pricing Plans

A sneak peek into our Google Ads process for small business

We leave no stone unturned in building a best-in-class Google Ads account. This starts with an immersion session, where we’ll seek to understand your various services and products. We’ll also review your website hierarchy, with the final goal of building thematic groups of ads. For example, if you’re a cosmetic dentist and offer teeth whitening and teeth straightening, we would build a campaign for both of these services, each with their own ad creative, bidding strategy and conversion tracking.

From there, we’ll undertake exhaustive keyword research to make sure we’re targeting the right search terms with our ads. This means targeting keywords with commercial intent, whilst ensuring we’re not limiting reach. We generally run a mix of exact match and broad match campaigns. Exact match is when we only deliver an ad if a user searches the exact keyword we bid on, where as broad match can include any search term variation, so long as the keyword is present somewhere. We’ll also set-up negative keywords to exclude search terms we want to avoid.

We’ll also add lots (and we mean lots!) of other refinements to the account that will optimize performance, including setting up an ad schedule to ensure we deliver ads at the best time of the day and week; and applying bid modifiers so we can bid more or less aggressively on various attributes. For example, if your website isn’t optimized for mobile we would bid less on users searching Google on their mobile devices.

Lastly, we’ll perform an on-site audit. This is for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the performance of your website, such as page speed, will impact on the amount you pay per click of an ad as well as how high your ad appears on Google. Secondly, if you’re paying for ads, you best make sure it’s worthwhile. That means optimizing your website for conversions.

This is a crucial step in the advertising process as if you aren’t making profit, all of the clicks, enquiries and purchases in the world aren’t going to help you. We do a considerable amount of work upfront to calculate what a profitable bidding strategy for your business looks like.

It’s no use Google Ads driving $100,000 worth of revenue on your ecommerce platform if the cost of advertising exceeds that. Even if that $100,000 worth of revenue stems from $50,000 worth of advertising, if the overall cost to manufacture or import your products exceeds $50,000 (in order words, if your margin is less than 50%), you would also be failing to make a positive return on your investment.

These are questions you often don’t get asked by agencies willing to invest your money in an attempt to drive enquiries and revenue, without an overall idea as to whether that investment is making you a profit. We have a range of calculations we perform upfront and ongoing (when we have sufficient data in our account) which dictates how much we’re prepared to bid per to ensure your account stays in the black.

Lastly, if phone calls are important to your business, we can set-up call tracking for your website so you can monitor the volume of calls from Google Ads. We can even set a criteria whereby a phone call is only counted as a conversion if it’s over a certain length of time.

Remarketing is a tactic of delivering ads to users who have visited your website, but not completed a purchase or submitted an enquiry. It should be a part of just about every Google Ads account, as 99% of users who visit your website won’t purchase or submit an enquiry on the first visit.

Remarketing allows us to set unique bids for these users. For example, we may choose to bid more aggressively to users who spent more time on your website as they likely came closer to taking a desired action. A perfect example of this is a user who adds a product to their shopping cart but doesn’t complete the check out process.

Messaging and copy is another feature that is slightly different for remarketing than traditional campaigns. As users have already been on your website, they likely know about the products and services you offer and hence we don’t need to go into as much detail on these. This means we can deliver harder sell ads to get the users back on your website to submit an enquiry or complete a purchase.

Imagine you own a gym and a user spends five minutes on your website, views your pricing page, then leaves without signing up. Then imagine two days later that same user searches “best gyms near me” on Google. If you run a remarketing campaign, you can advertise to that user with a personalized ad. For example, you might include a 10% discount in the ad as price may have been the reason the user didn’t sign up the first time they visited your website.

If you run an ecommerce website selling products, Google Shopping can be an extremely effective sales channel. Available on our Google Ads Grizzly pricing plan, we can set-up of your Google Shopping campaign and have your products displaying on Google quicker than you can say, “free shipping”. Don’t worry, free shipping isn’t a requirement for Google Shopping.

Google Shopping ads appear on Google when users search for relevant products, and they also appear in the Shopping tab of Google. Like anything on Google Ads, there’s a methodology to appearing in the most prized position for a search term. You need a well optimized website and feed, strong imagery, and the right bidding strategy.

We generally start our clients on a Standard Shopping campaign, which gives us more control over products, ads and bidding. When a client has a sufficient amount of conversions (enquiries or purchases) built up, it’s usually time to transition them to Smart Shopping. Smart Shopping is powered by Google AI, which optimizes product ads towards conversions. Across all of the accounts we manage, we’ve found Smart Shopping to be a more effective advertising channel than Standard Shopping.

Ocean Bear Digital are experts in Google Shopping and product ads, and it’s generally the first place we recommend for ecommerce businesses.

Crafting compelling ads is a key component of any Google Ads account. It’s about going beyond a simple description of a product or service, and focusing on the emotional, psychological pay-offs. As an example, when we write Google Ads for Ocean Bear Digital, we don’t necessarily focus on our years of experience, Google certifications, or even the results we’ve achieved; but rather how we help businesses grow.

A way we do this is through the Fogg Behavior Model (B=MAP), which dictates that for an action to occur, there must be a motivation, an ability, and a prompt. The motivation exists by way of a user searching for a product or service. The aim of our ads is to enhance this motivation with a compelling overview of your products or services; make it easy (or affordable) for the user to access your products or services (ability); and provide a strong call to action (prompt). You can see all of these in action through one of our Google Ads for Ocean Bear Digital.

We’ll also ensure your ads have all the right ad extensions. Ad extensions are additional pieces of information you can append to your Google Ads, at no cost. They won’t all show at one time, however ad extensions can include the following:

Call extensions – If a user clicks the phone number in your ad, it will directly call your business from Google
Callout extension – Include the key features, or “callouts” of your business, such as warranty, free shipping, free consultation or otherwise
Price extensions – If you have an ecommerce store, or you’re able to be transparent with your service prices, such as $200 for a teeth clean, a price extension is a must

Lastly, it’s important that keywords match-up throughout the journey of a user seeing your ad and engaging with your website, as Google interprets that as a sign of relevance. The keywords in your ad should match both the term the user searched on Google; and the keywords seeded into your website.

The most important element of a profitable Google Ads account is the optimization. That’s when the real fun begins, as we can collect rich performance data at a keyword, ads and website conversion level.

We optimize accounts across over 50 data points, with some of the more important as follows:

Removing keywords not performing by adding them to negative keyword lists
Reviewing ad click through rate. We run several variations of ads for each product or service you offer. When it’s clear one ad isn’t performing as well as another, we pause it and launch a new ad. The idea is to always have ads competing against each other so we’re continually improving our ad performance
Bid adjustments are where we choose to show ads more or less frequently depending upon performance. For example, if a particular keyword, such as “mobile mechanic Vancouver” is driving a lot of enquiries on your website at a profitable cost per lead, we would look to bid more aggressively on that keyword so our ad shows more. Conversely, if our advertising doesn’t perform well amongst users on tablet devices, we can choose to bid less on users searching Google on tablets.

With Ocean Bear Digital, you’ll also receive a real-time dashboard, which allows you to track the performance of your ads. We won’t hold it against you if that’s all a bit much. We can also provide monthly reports alongside commentary and proposed optimizations.

Google Ads management that moves the needle

Years’ experience in Google Ads management

100%

Return on ad spend

Leads per month

$100

Cost per lead

Companies we’ve worked with

Ocean Bear Digital has worked alongside us to build our short and long term digital strategy. They successfully combine the science of SEO and analytics to deliver commercial results and major ROI. It’s big brand thinking and strategy without the pretense and budget. They took the time to understand our business model, brand, market and competitors, educated us and worked with us to define our goals and used this to create a way forward. After a few short weeks, it is already delivering tangible outcomes and building our business online. We are so incredibly grateful to have Ocean Bear Digital as a partner in our business.

Peta Karunaratne

The Karuna Collective

Jamie is a talented digital consultant and has been a great asset to Hastings Deering and the Caterpillar brand. Jamie has helped us develop and execute comprehensive and robust integrated digital marketing strategies that have had a significant impact on the mining arm of the Hastings Deering business. His technical ability and knowledge in digital has helped us drive significant digital innovation and disruption at the company. He is a subject matter expert in marketing automation – particularly business to business – and of course, all things Google. Highly recommended!

Katie O’Malley

Hastings Deering

We were in a tricky spot and didn’t know where to turn. We didn’t rank on anything except our own brand name on Google (and even then we weren’t in first position). Working with Ocean Bear Digital, we now rank strongly across most industry search terms. Our traffic has gone up and we get a steady stream of enquiries. We’ve found Jamie super pleasant to work with. Importantly, he took the time to learn about our industry and business to deliver the best outcomes. He explained his process in a way we could understand and is very responsive.

Dan Downs

Better Credit Management

Say hello

Dominate the competition on Google and make the most of every dollar with a perfectly optimized, best-in-class Google Ads solution.

You don’t get this far without a few questions

With Google Ads, you only pay when a user clicks on your ad. You can also ensure your ads only appear in front of users who display commercial intent. For example, if you’re a cosmetic dentist in Vancouver and a user searches “teeth straightening Vancouver”; you can confidently display an ad knowing it’s reaching exactly the right audience at exactly the right time. This is an advantage Google Ads has over other types of advertising, such as social and programmatic, which relies on delivering ads to users based on their interests, not necessarily a direct intent to purchase. If you run an ecommerce store, Google Shopping allows you to display your products at the top of Google when users search for a product, again enabling you to capitalize on commercial intent. For these reasons, Google Ads is a highly effective solution for small businesses.

Google Ads are generally always worth it for small businesses. They provide a cost-effective way to put your products or services in front of the people who are actively seeking those products or services out. Furthermore, Google Ads provides tremendous reporting capability, allowing you to see exactly how much you pay per conversion, down to an individual keyword. This means you can quickly and easily deduce how profitable your Google Ads campaigns are, then make adjustments as necessary.

Google charge you every time a user clicks on your ad. The price you pay for a click depends on a range of factors including your maximum cost per click (how much you’re willing to pay for a click) and your quality score. Quality score is based on a range of factors, but boils down to how relevant, and how optimal of a user experience you provide to users who see and interact with your ads on Google. It’s hugely important as a higher quality score means you’ll likely pay less per click, have your ads show higher up on Google (by way of a better Ad Rank) and it can actually make your competitors pay more per click. Hence, there’s no fixed cost per se with Google Ads and it really depends on your budget. If you want more clicks and you’re achieving profitable outcomes, you can keep increasing your budget. Eventually you’ll reach saturation based on search volume on Google, but for most industries this would require a significant monthly budget.

On top of the cost per click, you will need to pay an agency for Google Ads management. Google Ads is a complex landscape that requires significant skill and experience to deliver profitable outcomes. Management costs depend on the size and complexity of the account and can range from $1,000, up to $10,000 per month. Ocean Bear Digital have one of the most competitive Google Ads management costs in the country.