So we just talked a little bit about Facebook advertising. It can be really laser-focused - and it can be really powerful, and you can actually move people from awareness to consideration to conversion very effectively with a Google ad campaign when you structure that properly.

But when you're talking about the world of searches, people are going to go to Google or Bing, and they're going to type in a search for a painting company in a city. Google ads are king.

66% of all searches are done on Google, but Bing delivers search results for both Bing and Yahoo search engines. So it's going to have a solid 15 to 20% of searches. So don't necessarily ignore that, but again, manage your time and your effort wisely.

And if you can only pick one, unless there's a really strong reason why you would go with Bing ads over Google, I would almost always look at Google first.

Instagram. Actually that platform, from an advertising perspective, is managed through the Facebook advertising facility - because Facebook owns Instagram.

YouTube ads can be fantastic. YouTube ads are owned by Google. Google owns YouTube. And so that could be a fantastic strategy to get in front of people. Again, on the paid social advertising, it's typically a lot cheaper than a pay-per-click type model.

And then the paid lead services. This could be using a third party service, could be using the Google local display or local services ads. And then there are these ads that you can run on certain websites that are banner ads that that will display and so Google has a very robust display network.

And again, because it's awareness and less about people taking action, it's to help you stay top of mind. The Google display ads are usually a lot less costly.

Why people fail with their pay-per-click campaigns.

So why people fail with their pay-per-click campaigns is usually because they set up only one ad group and they tried to drive everything about their business from that one ad to the homepage on their website.

Google wants you to be really specific, and it wants the ad, the ad copy, the headline and the place that you're driving people to on your website to all be about that one specific thing that you're advertising.

So if you're advertising interior painting services, don't drive them to a homepage and make them work to find what page they need to go to, to read about how you do interior painting. Take them right to the interior painting page. That's a huge mistake.

Having negative keywords set up. So with painting jobs, most of you probably don't want to pay Google money when people are clicking on those ads if they're looking for employment. You might, but make sure that that's why you're running the ad and be prepared to pay for it for the right reason and not accidentally.

Not having a strong call to action. When you get people onto a page on your website, you don't ask them to take that next step, schedule a free estimate or download a guide to help them make a decision about why they should hire a painting company. And like I said, don't just drive them to the homepage or a general contact page, contact page.

Google ads can be fairly complex and Google tries their best to make it really easy for you to set up and launch an ad and they give you these coupons for $100 off or $125 off, but they don't set your expectations about what you need to have in terms of budget.

And if you accept Google's recommendations on how you set up your ads, you're going to waste a lot of money on your ads.

So I would really recommend that you work with somebody who understands the way Google ads are set up to take advantage of the power of Google ads because they are very, very powerful. And also not waste a ton of money on ads that are not relevant for your business.

Google operates on this thing called a quality score, which is based on the click through rates of your ads. So your ads are going to be displayed on a regular basis if you're paying enough. When people see the ad as it's displayed, but they're not clicking on it, Google factors that in. It factors that in, in terms of whether or not they think the ad is relevant to the search that somebody did to actually pull up the search results and the ads on that page.

They want to see what happens when people go from clicking on the ad to your website. What do they do? Do they stick around? Do they stay on the site? Do they take a call to action by clicking or making a phone call or requesting a consultation or a free estimate?

All of those things factor in. I'm not going to get a whole lot into this because we're already running a little bit over time, but if you have a higher quality score than a competitor, you can actually have your ad display in a more prominent position in the ad display - and cost you less money because you have a higher quality score and the quality score ranges from 1 to 10 with 10 being the optimum.

You can actually have your ad displayed if you have a really high-quality score; if you're paying the same price as a competitor and their quality score is four, and your quality score is eight.

Basically, the goal is to get these higher quality scores, which comes down to relevance, continuing to manage and optimize and tweak the performance of your campaigns on an ongoing basis. It's not just like you can set it and forget it and hope that everything's going to be good for the long haul. It may be good enough for a period of time, but you really need to be actively managing Google ad campaigns.