Okay. I believe we are live. Hello everyone and welcome to today's Q&A session where I will be answering any of your questions you may have. So quite a few of you have sent me some questions so I have made a note of them and I will be starting to answer them very shortly, but if you have any questions, then please ping it in the question box on the right hand side of the screen and I'll try my best to answer them for you.
These sessions are for you guys. So if there is any way I can help you, any of you, wherever you may be, it'll be my pleasure first of all and even if I make a difference to one person and help you to get started with whatever you are looking to do, I will consider this as a great success.
So, please don't hesitate to send in any questions you may have. Hello, Emmanuel. Hi, Harshal. Okay, so I will start with the questions. I'll copy it from my other screen. Let me make this a bit bigger... Okay. So hopefully you'll be able to see my screen now. Okay. So I was sent this question a couple of days ago.
What is GCID? So this is the Google Click ID. So it's a tracking parameter where the data flows from AdWords to analytics and vice versa. If you're just a beginner and you're starting with Google Ads and Google Analytics, don't worry too much about it for the time being. It will not interfere with any of your marketing activities and just make sure that you've got all your goals and conversion tracking set up the right way. okay So are there any good alternatives to Google AdWords editor?
Not in my humble opinion, no, not at all. There isn't any tool out there quite like the editor. It's an amazing tool. If you haven't started using it, I would highly recommend that you search for Google AdWords Editor or Google Ads Editor. Download it for free. It works on both the Mac and a PC. It streamlines your workflow and allows you to make changes in bulk.
Now, I had quite a few people send me questions as to how we use this. They just couldn't understand how we can use this in a way where you can upload literally hundreds or thousands of keywords, ads, ad groups, etc. I will do a little session on this as to how we use a Google sheet or an Excel spreadsheet where we build up our campaign in there, copy it from there, paste it in AdWords editor, and then upload it to the interface.
So it's a tool which I use pretty much on a daily basis. And without it, I'd be pretty lost and it'd be impossible, the way I run my campaigns. okay Why is Facebook ads better than Google Ads? I'm not sure how you've come to this opinion that Facebook is better than Google or Google is better than Facebook.
I have answered this before quite a few times. Both of them are pretty good. It really depends on what kind of product or service you are offering. For me, I find that Facebook really adds value to my online marketing strategy or the overall marketing strategy because when someone has a problem, the first place they go is at Google, not on Facebook.
You will not on Facebook and start searching for a solution to your problem. You're going to go to Google or YouTube. So these are the two biggest search engines in the world where you will go and try and find your solution to the problem where Facebook and Instagram come into play in the remarketing. Because if your audience has come to your website or landing page and have not converted, and then they're going over on Facebook and Instagram and spending time over there, you want to hit them with your ads over there to bring them back and remind them that you are still here and to build up that brand awareness and the branding.
So I use Facebook and Instagram a lot in this way where we remarket to warm audiences as well as cold audiences or the top of the funnel where you want to raise awareness of your business. So it's a great way to work all of these ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, YouTube. Now, LinkedIn as well is doing pretty well.
So create an ad and run it on all these channels. You don't need to have a mega big budget. You can run a few dollars a day on all of these platforms and you'll start to get some really good results. Okay, the next question is, What is the best way to reduce your cost per click on Google Ads?
The reason why some keywords are expensive and some keywords are cheap is because the expensive ones convert well, that's why they are expensive! So try not to just go after the cheapest click because it may not be your best strategy. You may get the cheap click, but then you will not get the conversions whereas an expensive click with a higher conversion rate will give you better results, a lower cost per acquisition or a better ROAS.
So I never recommend reducing the cost per click. Yes, by all means, if there are any savings to be made, by all means try and save some money, but the strategy needs to be to increase profitability rather than reducing cost, because there is a certain point if you keep on reducing the cost, your competitors may be bidding aggressively and they are going to outrank you and outbid you in the auction and you'll start to lose your search impression share and that's what you don't want to do.
So once you’ve got a handful of keywords, all you do is bid aggressively as the 80:20, 20% of the keywords probably give you 80% of the results. So be very aggressive on those 20 keywords, you don't want to lose out on your search impression share and on the rest of the 80% either reduce or you pause them if they are wasting your budget.
Okay Hello Raymond. I've got your comment as well. So I will come on to all the questions in the chat box in a little while once I've gone through this list. So at least everybody's questions will be answered today. Is it better to invest in SEO or running ads on Google? Again, I answered this before many times.
In fact, a lot of the time, business owners, professionals and even bigger companies sometimes don't know in which one to invest. SEO is a long term strategy. It's like going to the gym. You cannot just run, do some optimization for a couple of months and then expect to stay at Google page one for the foreseeable future. The way I run this is I set up a Google Ads campaign, run it and see which keywords are the profitable keywords and then optimize my website and start a search engine optimization campaign on those keywords, which are converting, because if you pick up the wrong keyword and you are doing your SEO and they don't convert then it's a complete waste of time.
And quite often I found a lot of these companies, they will get you ranked very quickly and show you the results. Here, there you go, you're on page one...but there is no traffic! There are no clicks and there are no conversions. So what's the point of being number one for a keyword or a term which nobody's searching for?
So you need to have a balance between the volume and also the strength of the competition because if the keyword is very competitive and there is no way in the world that you will get ranked, then you'd rather go after some other keywords or a variation of that keyword which will help you to get the top three at least in Google.
Okay. What's my top five tips on Google Ads, Oh God, there's so many! The first obviously is you do your keyword research very well, set up your negative keywords, so you don't lose your budget or waste your budget. Keywords are extremely important. I tend not, in fact I never use broad match keywords unless it is for a big brand and they just want impressions and eyeballs and clicks on their brand.
So use exact match, phrase and broad modified along with obviously the negative keywords. The ads are also extremely important. Again, it depends on which network you're going for because there will be different tips for different campaign types. Search campaigns will be different to your display campaigns and will be different to your video campaigns because the metrics are different and right now I'm just talking about the search campaign if that's what your question is.
So ads have multiple ads in each ad group and make sure that the seed keyword is at least in one of the headings. I try to keep that keyword in headline one, so as soon as somebody sees your ad, it is relevant to that person because they see that keyword in the headline and always have your benefits, your features, a strong call to action in your ad as well as the price point.
A lot of people shy away from not putting the price in because they don't want to for some reason. A lot of people think that it cheapens the ad and the brand, but if somebody cannot afford you, then you are pre-qualifying that click. You are not wasting that budget, because if someone, if you are selling a product for $100 and that person cannot afford $100, then there's no point in getting that person to click on your ad.
So if it says on here on the ad, you know, a prices start from $100 and I see it and I say, well, it's too expensive for me, I'm not going to bother clicking on it, so I don't waste my click. I would perhaps get that click from somebody who said, yeah, a hundred seems to be reasonable.
I can afford that. I'm going to go and have a look at it on their landing page. So on the ads, yeah, always have the pricing as well because you will qualify your audience or that click. Okay. The next one is, which link should I click when I make a Google search? The AdWord link or the normal link?
I know both links will lead to the same result destination, but who actually benefits when I click the AdWord link? Google or the advertiser. Okay. So there's two questions in there. Which link should I click, the ads or the organic rankings? The ads will definitely give you the best results. Here's the reason why, because the advertiser is making an effort.
They're investing in Google Ads to put their product out to the relevant person. Now, I may have the best product in the world, but my organic rankings are pretty much zero. So I will not show up and in the search rankings or on the Google page one or page two or wherever, but if I'm running a Google Ads campaign, I know within the top four, if I'm bidding properly and I've set up my campaigns the right way, I know for sure that my ads are going to be shown.
So it will be seen by the person. So in that case, obviously the person who's clicking does not get charged. Obviously the advertiser gets charged by Google. So unless the advertiser has a top four ad ranking as well as an organic ranking, then yes they may have multiple links, but you will find that extremely rare that a company has got a very good online strategy where they are running paid ads as well as search engine optimization.
So you'll probably get one or the other. Now, who benefits? Well actually it's a win, win, win situation because when somebody like me and you are searching for a solution to our problem and we click on that on a link, be it organic or ads, I go to the landing page and that company gets that visitor. But if I click on an ad, then that ad has been shown to me, for which I'm searching for, Google gets the money for that click and the advertiser pays for that click, but then the advertiser has got a very targeted audience on their landing page.
So it's a win, win, win situation as far as I can see! Everybody wins! And that's why Google Ads is such a powerful way to drive traffic to your business or to sell your products or service. Okay. The next one is, ‘do responsive display ads really perform better on the display campaigns on GDN than typical banner ads?’ Okay, that's a really good question.
I would like to say from what I see in my campaigns and accounts I would say yes a lot of the time because of the flexibility you get from the responsive display ads, first of all, they're extremely easy to set up. You don't need to be a graphic designer, you don't need to hire one. All you do is add a handful of headlines of about 10 or so headlines, four description lines throw in some images and your logo and that's it.
Google is going to mix and match and run with different variations to test out which is working the best and which is giving you the best performance and that way in the split testing, you don't need to create multiple image ads or banner ads to test out which one is going to work and which one isn't going to work.
The other thing which I love about the responsive display ads is that you can also add a video in it. So a video can be embedded on a display ad as well as an image ad. So it works really well, that's the best thing which I love about the RD ads. Okay, what is the best PPC reporting tool for Google Ads and Facebook for under a hundred dollars a month?
We personally don't use any. The one which I would highly recommend is by Google and of course it is for free. That's the Google data studio. It's amazing. So that's the one Google data studio. You Google it, you go there, they have templates as well. To link Facebook to Google data studio. You would need a third party connector between the two, but AdWords data analytics, search console all of this data can go straight into Google data studio.
And they have got some amazing free templates which you can use. And the beauty with this is it is dynamic so you can change the date range and the data will update. So we don't need to send out reports to our clients. All we do is we build it once and then the client can change the date range and see the data update as and when.
So yes, the Google data studio is the one which I would recommend highly. Okay. If I use Google keyword planner, do I need to use any other keyword tools? You don't need to, there are quite a few third party keyword tools out there. I only use the Google keyword planner because all these other third party apps, they take the data from Google.
Obviously the one if I were to recommend would be SEM Rush. That's a really good tool. SEM Rush. And the other one is also Uber Suggest, by Neil Patel. So that's also a good one. But I believe this is a paid one. This certainly is paid, but you can sign up for a free trial and see how it is.
So SEM Rush is a really good one. Thanks for the questions in the chat. Let them come through and I will answer them at the end. I've got a handful of questions which I had put in my list before. Okay ‘From your own experience, do you think comments now are still an important factor for video ranking and YouTube's algorithms?’ Yes, because this is a ranking factor for engagement and interaction.
When you get likes, comments, shares, all of this interaction from the audience, YouTube knows that you are getting a reaction out of your audience and it will, it is important, and one of the ranking factors for sure, to get your videos ranked in YouTube and in Google. Okay, ‘What do you think is more important, clickthrough rate or retention rate for YouTube videos?’ Yeah, the retention rate or the view rate is extremely important because all these platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, they want to keep that person on their own platform for as long as possible.
So if your content or video is helping them keep someone on their platform for a longer time, that means they are viewing more ads and YouTube and Facebook are making more money because of your engaging content. So retention rate and view rates are extremely important. And obviously the click through rate is important for you because you may be taking them off YouTube and onto your landing page.
So both of them are important. So one is important for YouTube, and the other one is obviously important for your business. Even though you may not get the clicks, as long as they are watching your video, they are consuming your content, you are pushing them further down the funnel. So just like you are watching me right now, you're listening to me, watching me.
I'm building up my brand awareness, the trust building, and the more you watch my videos, the more you're going to trust me. And once you start to trust me, eventually you are going to hopefully come to me for help and do spend some money with me! But these are live sessions, not for selling anything. It is purely to help you guys out as much as I possibly can.
So I absolutely recommend that you spend a bit of time with me either live or afterwards and watch these videos, because I'm going to do a mixture of these. Some will be Q&As where I'll answer these questions, and some will be walk-through tutorials, how to set up a campaign, how to build up a keyword list or write an ad.
So lots and lots of different things have been planned up for the next few months because we're all in the same boat right now. We're all stuck and we can't go out! So the best way to reach out to your audience is through video marketing. You can build up your channel, you can build up your expertise, you can build up your brand extremely quickly and give yourself 90 days and see what happens.
Try it and I can promise you you're going to get some really good results. Okay. So the next question is, ‘What ways do Google Ads experts make money online without creating blogs or a YouTube channel?’ Well, agencies like myself, we make money in a variety of ways. First of all, we manage other companies or other people's campaigns so they don't need to manage the campaigns themselves.
We manage it and we charge a fee, a monthly fee for the campaigns themselves. We manage it and we charge a fee, a monthly fee for through the accounts or edit their accounts, the ads or whatever they need, the landing page, building up their funnel and so on. Email marketing and so on. And then they go and do it either themselves or get it done by a third person.
Another way, a screen sharing session and I teach you how to manage your accounts, how to run your campaigns. So there are lots of ways you can make money. But the thing is you need to be good at one thing and just focus on whether it is Google Ads or video ads or Facebook or whatever it may be, and then go out and start earning.
There's lots of money to be made! And the thing is you don't need to be the best, you need to be good enough against your competitors! What are the best video marketing tips for business? Okay. Just get started! Only 9% of businesses, be it small or big, are using YouTube right now and video marketing is going to absolutely explode.
It was going to become even more... And video is where most people are. I was looking at my LinkedIn feed today and I couldn't believe how many videos I'm now getting on LinkedIn. Every other post is with a video and now everybody is hopping on this bandwagon for video marketing. So you need to get started. Absolutely. You don't need to have a complicated strategy or a setup.
Keep it very simple and get started and perfect as you go along. That's what I would say. Don't try to be a perfectionist. Just keep it simple and improve your videos and your campaigns as you go along. But you need to get started! First of all, we've got quite a few video questions today. So I guess people are now looking very closely to market themselves via video.
Okay. ‘What are the top video marketing companies that could help me in my business?’ So what I found is a lot of companies preach video marketing, but they don't market themselves! When you go to their website, they don't have a single video. They will just have the client videos. They will not have their own videos. They will not have a YouTube channel.
They may not have a Facebook page with video content on it. So you need to make sure that when you do hire someone, they are good at video marketing, but the best person to market yourself is yourself. You’ve got to just keep putting out content, don't need fancy and expensive videos, or videos which have Hollywood production style or quality.
Just keep it simple and get started. what are the top video marketing companies that could help me oh that's the same one cancel that This is a really interesting question. ‘How can I be successful in the video marketing business?’ Now I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you running a video marketing business? Did you mean to say that you want to be successful in marketing your business through video marketing?
You've got to be consistent. Just keep going. You will not get the results within a handful of videos. You need to try it for at least six months, a year, and then you'll start to build up your following and your tribe, then you'll start to get your results. And the same with this one.... ‘What's your number one tip to help businesses get started with video marketing?’ My biggest tip is this, your smart phone.
Just get started with this. You don't need expensive equipment. You don't need lots of gizmos and gadgets. Just a little microphone, which clips into your smartphone, and you can get these for about 10 pounds or $10 from Amazon when they open up that is! If you don't have, it doesn't matter, just use your builtin mic for now, but just get started and start uploading to your channel but not only upload to YouTube but then you upload to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, all of these channels.
So then you are putting out your messages in multiple channels and places. Okay, I'm going to go to the chat now. If you do have any further questions or you need any help with something, please put this in now. So just give me a moment while I go through this... Harshal is asking, ‘Can we promote affiliate products on Google Ads?’ You'll get suspended.
So the best way to do that is you set up a blog post and then you feature that product or service. Give value to your audience so that they can see you are trying to help them. And then you can give an affiliate link, but be upfront that this is an affiliate link because some people think it's very sneaky when they click on it and then it goes to an affiliate page.
So be upfront and promote it and build up that trust that if you are giving them great value. So let's say you're promoting SEM Rush, it's a software so you can show them how to use SEM Rush, help someone use that product. And I'm sure they will return the favour by using your affiliate link, but don't put your affiliate link as a URL in Google Ads.
You will definitely get suspended. Okay, hi Raymond. Okay, so you're asking..thank you for doing this. You're most welcome. Thanks for being here. I'm glad you enjoy the sessions. ‘What is the name of the software that you usually use for recording your desktop?’ Okay, so I use ScreenFlow, which is for Mac and PC or you can use Camtasia.
This is PC or Mac. And that one is only it's the other way around. So I use ScreenFlow because I've got an iMac, but if you go on a PC, you can use Camtasia. So the way I shoot my videos as you will see me on the bottom right hand corner of that video, so I've got a green screen behind me so I cut myself out, so I video myself using my webcam and the screen is recorded simultaneously by ScreenFlow and then in ScreenFlow it puts it together and makes out one video.
It's fairly straightforward once you start using it. In fact, I might do one session on how to use ScreenFlow! That would be quite interesting for a lot of people. Okay. Emmanuel. Hello there. Okay, you're asking, ‘Can you put the three match types on the same ad groups SKAGs?’ Yes you can. I don't see any problems with that.
When I'm using SKAGs, I have it as three ad groups, so I will have one ad group as exact, with one keyword as ‘exact match’. Phrase, with ‘phrase match’ and broad modified with ‘broad modified’. So I can have three separate ad groups or I can put the same ad group in three different match types and in the same ad group.
Alright Raymond, I'll certainly do that. I will do a session on how to use ScreenFlow and how to create these little videos. So that's it for today. I think I've answered everybody and there aren't anymore questions so thank you for being with me. I hope you enjoyed the session. If you have any questions, please bring it across.
Now is the opportunity to get your marketing on top. What you want to do is to do something which differentiates yourself from your competitors. I'm spending time with you and you are spending time with me and I am really grateful for that,that you guys log online and some of you watch the videos afterwards as well. Do something different.
I know it's very difficult but you've just got to be positive. Things will improve and it will not stay the same. And when they do improve in two or three months time or God knows when, you have built up that momentum, which your competitors will find it very difficult to keep pace with you, you will be ahead of the rest of the pack.
Every one of you has got some expertise, know-how knowledge, create simple videos like these, help your audiences and trust me, ey are going to come to you when they need somebody like yourself. So thanks for being with me, that's it for today. Alright one more question from Emmanueljust pinged in, ‘Can you use analytics to know the specific locations which clients are coming from?’ Yeah, you can see it through the countries, which countries are giving you the most clicks or visitors to your website.
For sure. I will be doing some lives on analytics as well because that's very important as to how to keep track of everything so that you get the best bang out of your budget and your marketing. So that's it for today. Thanks for being with me and I'll see you tomorrow at five o'clock UK time. Bye for now.
LIVE