Okay. I believe we are live. Please give me a moment. I'll make sure everything is working fine and we'll get started. We had a bit of a problem with the audio yesterday and I believe it is working fine. Those of you who are listening in live, please put in a little yes in the comment box so that I'll know that it is all working fine and it's good to go.
I believe everything is working fine. Okay. Let's get the show on the road. Hello. My name is Uzair and it is five o'clock in the UK. Every weekday I come online for these YouTube live streams and cover topics on digital marketing, Google Ads or anything to do with promoting and advertising a business, especially on Google... Oh, brilliant!
Thanks Adam and hello back. Hopefully- I've tested the microphone. I don't know what happened yesterday, but it seems to be behaving perfectly well. Today I will be covering your question and answers. There's been a few questions which were sent across to me. Now is the time for you to put in any questions you may have in the comment box on the right-hand side and I'll do our best to answer them for you.
Let's go on to my Google slides and get started. Okay. The first question is about Google Ads Smart Bidding. It is, "I'm very confused about Smart Bidding. When, why, and how to use. Please can you explain this for me? Thank you for your videos. They are great help to me." Thank you for logging in watching the videos and also sending me this question.
Smart Bidding can be a very powerful tool if you use it the right way. Unfortunately, a lot of people use it the wrong way, thinking that it's going to work straight off the bat which quite often it doesn't. What needs to be done before you go onto Smart Bidding is to run your campaigns manually, give your account or your Google the data so it knows exactly what you're looking for and then switch over to Smart Bidding.
We need to get some conversions in to begin with, and I would say depending on how big or small that account is, you need to have at least 25 to 30, and you'll find that once you switch over to the smart bidding from the manual one, it will start to work pretty well and get you the results which you are looking for.
So let's cover the four main Smart Bidding types. They are not in any particular order. I'll start off with the TCPA. T stands for Target Cost Per Acquisition, cost per action. This helps to increase your conversions while targeting a specific cost per action. What you want to do is to give the campaign or Google a target cost per acquisition, that I want to get leads for $50, a hundred dollars and so on, but the TCPA, bidding is mostly for lead generation.
What you want to do is any kind of e-commerce campaigns you may be running. You don't want to be running on that. You want to go onto a target ROAS, which I'll cover in a minute. With the TCPA, once Google has got enough data, and it knows that you are looking to get a lead for $50, it's going to go out and put your ads in front of those people who are most likely to sign up or become a lead and bid less aggressively who are not likely to convert.
What this does is it gives you a hands-free, pretty much a hands-free campaign management. It's kind of like, you know, the manual gear shift cars and automatic cars. You put the car in auto and drive but nowadays there's now the self-driving cars as well. We're just taking the driving experience to the next level and it is improving day on day.
Within the next couple of years or so, pretty much most of the cars will be self-driving and Google as is in my humble opinion, absolutely heading it that way as well. We don't know where we will end up, but the algorithm and the machine learning is getting powerful day by day. You feed the right data in and you're going to get some pretty good results.
I've got one of my campaigns right now. I've set the bid at about 45 pounds and Google, a machine learning or the algorithms or the target CPA bidding is getting me conversions at about 47, 46, and 47. It's very close to my target CPA, but it does work and it works wonderfully well because the heavy lifting is done by Google then.
You don't need to worry about keywords, bidding, bid adjustments, pretty much everything. You set it and you let it run. What you want to do is to give it some time. Don't expect instant results the next day because the machine does take a bit of time. It needs to shift gears from the first, second, third, and so on and then once it's on the motorway or the freeway and going at, you know, a hundred miles an hour, it is pretty much unstoppable.
The next one is tROAS - Target Return on Ad Spend. This is where Google will optimize your campaigns for the conversion value and not the conversion. ROAS bidding is mainly for e-commerce. If you are selling something online, a product, not for lead generation, the difference between these two is a lead will be a lead because the value of that lead will be the same, whereas a value of a conversion when somebody makes a purchase through your shopping cart will never be the same.
One person or a customer can make a purchase for a hundred dollars. Another one could be $10 or another one could be 500. What you want to do is to work out how much return on ad spend you need. Most companies are happy with the minimum of 300% return on ad spend. What that means is you give $1 to Google and you getting back a three in retail.
So as long as you are profitable, or some companies may be running at breakeven because they want to talk about the lifetime value, which I'll cover in a bit, it's not costing them money to run these campaigns so they can scale up very quickly and aggressively. The lower the tROAS, the more leeway you are giving to Google and for these smart campaigns, what you want to be doing is to give enough budget to all these campaigns to run on.
If your target, let's say target CPA is $50 and you are bidding 50, or you're budgeting, I should say, 50 a day, you will find your campaigns will hardly get any impressions you need to give at least four to five times. Some of the Smart Bidding strategies need a bit more, 10x. You need to be prepared to spend a bit upfront because once that target CPA or the ROAS is what you want, then the budget should not come into play.
Unless you cannot cope up with the number of leads you are getting, or you can't cope up with the number of orders you are getting from Google. You give a good enough budget so that you can give Google that leeway to keep going out aggressively in front of your target audience and getting you those conversions. The next, strategy is ‘Maximize Conversions.’ This obviously as the name suggests.
It maximizes for the conversions. For this bidding strategy, you don't need to have 4X or 5X budget. Whatever budget you are comfortable with, you put it out and then Google will try and get you those conversions with the budget you have. Most likely you will find that all your budget is being spent with this Smart Bidding. conversion it will try and get you value where instead of the maximize conversion value it will try and get you higher conversion value for your business.
If you want to maximize the ROAS, then you need to switch over to maximize conversion value and set up or target a specific ROAS number, which you want to bid for. These are the four main bidding strategies which you can start with and there are a couple others as well, where we go into the display network and the videos, which I will cover in a separate video.
There's one more, I beg your pardon, the fourth one, which was the enhanced, cost per click or the CPC. This is when you run a manual campaign but there's a little checkbox where you check it off and tell Google to bid more aggressively, and it can double up your CPC because you are enhancing your CPC. You try to get into that auction even if it is costing you a higher cost per click, but you can limit your highest maximum CPC so you can say, I don't want to pay more than $30 or $50 and so on.
It will automatically adjust the bids accordingly. What Google is going to do is going to, again, bid more in front of those audiences, who it thinks are likely to convert and bid less, who are things is not going to likely to convert. Okay, keep pinging in your questions in the chat box. I'll come to that in a bit.
This is a good question because I'm glad that you are thinking about the customer lifetime value. The question is, "What is a period of time to set that lifetime value? A year, 5 years?" This is where most or many advertisers go wrong because they don't take into account the customer lifetime value and they think that they are not making a profit, or they are not getting, a positive return on investment or ad spend.
What you don't want to be doing is working just on that first time order or that first conversion, because if a customer buys from you... let's put this into an example of our business. Someone signs up with me for let's say, Google Ads management. The lifetime value is not just month one, unless they cancel after month one, it will be multiple months and quite a few of them are quite a few years because they are getting the results which they want.
What we do is we take into account the customer lifetime value. I'm just throwing these numbers as an example, and these are not hard numbers, which we work to. Let's say a customer lifetime value is 3000 for us to a business. Every time a customer comes to us, it is worth 3000 pounds. The first transaction could be 400 or 300 or a smaller amount, but as each month goes, we start earning more money.
From month 2 onwards, there is no acquisition cost obviously. We've got that, we've acquired the customer, we paid for that through our ads or online advertising or whatever. If I was just working on the first order value or the month 1 and let's say in month 1, they spent 300 pounds then I won't be able to afford to pay more than 50 or a hundred pounds to acquire that customer or thinking that, “okay, I'll make so much profit.” But what I could do is say, “okay, if I don't make money on month 1, I can afford to get a customer up to 300 pounds and then from month 2 onwards, we will start making a profit.” Having said that, if I know that my customer lifetime value is 3000, I can afford to pay 500 and now the whole campaign changes because I can bid very aggressively compared to my competitors.
If they are not prepared to pay up to 500 and they are working along these same numbers and they are also working at a 300 pound first time, order the value and the acquisition cost is 500, they're making a 200 pound instant loss. Some companies will work on 'Loss leaders', as we say, but many smaller companies cannot afford to do that and they're soon going to run out of cash.
It's critical that you work out your customer lifetime value and returning to this question about how long should be a customer lifetime value? I personally work towards a two year lifetime value. How much are they worth to us over a 24-month period and how many transactions we do. After that it's all bonus and icing on the cake, but a minimum of two years.
Insurance companies for example, I mean, I've been with my insurance companies for years. I've been with my mobile phone provider for years, maybe 10 years or more. I'm happy with them with the service they provide. So in that instance, their customer lifetime value is over 10 years. So it really depends from business to business as to what you are looking for and what sort of business you're in and how often these do customers come to you.
For example, let's take McDonald's. Customer lifetime value literally is a lifetime until the customer dies. In that instance, yeah, absolutely, it's a lifetime value in the true sense because we start going to McDonald's pretty much from year one and we keep going there until we pretty much die. There is no hard and fast rule or a number as to what should be the number of years.
It really depends from business to business. Okay. So this question is about YouTube. "How do you get likes and comments on a video when running an ad?" Okay. So that is what you're referring to as an in-stream ad, which pops up as a skip ad and you can skip after five seconds. If somebody continues to watch or view the video for more than five seconds, they are not on your channel or your watch page, you are on somebody else's watch page.
You can't comment over there or like on there so what you can do is you build up your remarketing list and then you will have a call to action on your videos, which clicking on it can either take them to your website or to your channel page or your landing video watch page. Over there, you can do that.
When I'm running these ads, I'm not too concerned about likes and comments. I'm more worried about getting the view rate as high as possible, because I want the majority of the people who see my ad not to skip and continue seeing it and also the view retention. How long are they viewing that video for 10%, 20, 30, 50% and so on, because the longer they view, the more interested and engaged they are.
Then what I also do is run other ads on the Google display network and YouTube, and follow them up with remarketing. You're pushing them further down the funnel. You can't expect someone to like you or comment on the first video, unless, you know, the video is really amazing and you've done a great job. You build up that trust, that authority and somehow somewhere down the line, they are going to make a comment like share and interact with your videos and the same thing over here.
You start to go to these events like these livestreams and follow that person on Facebook and Instagram and all over the internet. Okay. I'm going to go onto the comments now and any questions you have and try to answer them for you. So please enter them now while we're online. Hi, Wesley. "On YouTube discovery campaign, would you combine keyword and in-market to narrow it down or would you just do one for each ad group?" Both.
I would do a keyword plus topic because we... keyword + topic used to work quite well and just make different combinations. You are not restricted. You are restricted by your imagination and creativity. How much you want to target if you're targeting the whole world, and it's a huge population, you can layer three different audiences type and then narrow it really down.
So you know that you are going after a very select audience, but if you are running this campaign in a local area of, let's say a city or a five mile radius, then you will hardly get any views when you narrow it down too much. So it really depends on first of all, how big your location is, how much budget you've got and then test it and see what's happening and what's not happening.
Your follow-up question is, "Would you do the same for in-stream video?" Yeah. Or any kind of a display ad, even on campaigns on the Google display network. I hope that clarifies, Wesley. Okay. Hi Rahil. "If my average order value is rupees 1000, for example, how much should be the max CPC that I can go for? How do I calculate that?" It's not about your average order value.
It's about your profit margins as well and we've done some videos on how to calculate that as well as to what the most is you can pay for a CPC and I'll cover that again in the forthcoming videos as well, where we can work out and reverse engineer. It also depends on your conversion rate also. You know, you can get a cheap click, but if your conversion rate is very low as well, then you won't be able to afford to pay more.
The other factor you need to take into account is your cost of goods. How much is your product, which costs you out of a thousand rupees and what is your profit margin? So you work on the... first take away, the cost of your product or cost of goods, and then whatever the profit is you work. Let's say a thousand is your average order value.
You have got 300 rupees as your cost of goods. So you got 700 to play with. We're not talking about all the other expenses, like rent rates, phone, electricity and all that. We just work. I'm talking about the direct cost of goods. You've got 700 rupees to play with, and then you can say, "Okay, I can afford to pay this much to acquire a customer," and again, what about the lifetime value?
Are you following them up with an email offer? If they buy again, then you are saving that money on the acquisition cost and this is exactly what I said earlier on a little while as to what is your customer lifetime value, its very important, especially for e-commerce websites where your average order values are relatively small amounts. Wesley.
"Would I combine audience and topic?" Yeah. Combine whatever you like, you know, throw everything in and see what is working and what's not working. Hello, Mark. "After running ECPC I want to switch to a more automated strategy like TROAS. Google suggest a ROAS of 186, but my profitability is at 350 ROAS. Can I use 350 instead of 186 and get a positive return?" If you want to use 350, you are going to restrict your campaign right now.
What I would do is let it run for a little while. Sorry. I think I misread your question. Google suggest a ROAS of 186. Okay. So you need a minimum ROAS of 350. You let it run at 186 right now don't try and do something different because then it will struggle. Set to 186 and see what happens and don't touch it for a couple of weeks.
It may go up, it may go down, it will settle down and then you might start to find that you are getting the returns, because if your profitability is at 350 ROAS and Google is suggesting 186 so you will be profitable. I don't see any problem why you shouldn't set your ROAS at 186. Samuel "If our AdWords account got blocked for the site, can we use the same website to create new Google Ads?" I believe we are talking about account being suspended.
You'll find it hard to get your account back because Google will know a lot more about you and your IP, your billing and all that and you're more likely to get suspended again. Hi Sandy, "Please make a video on placements. Is there any automation marketing in Google Ads?" Automation can be done through scripts and you can also set up rules as well and Google Ads, but the scripts is the best way to automate a lot of your marketing or your Google Ads account and we use a lot of scripts in our company to do all the heavy lifting.
So let's say if there was a drop in impressions the day before we can get notified or the CPC went very high or the client's credit card failed, and we had zero impression. These sort of things can help us with with scripts and automation. Okay. With regards to placements, Sandy, I'm not sure what can be made of a video on placement because placement is that, when you start to get the placements where you ads have been placed, and you look in on the data.
If a placement is bleeding cash and not converting, or the cost per acquisition is very high, then you stop. Start cutting them out and put them as a negative placements. That's all you need to do to run those placements. Adam, "I'm running a responsive display campaign for a client and notice they burn through their budget almost immediately each day.
Is there a way to space out the ad or does it not matter?" If you are getting good results, then ask your client to increase the budget? Or what you can do is you can set up your ad schedule, but let's say if it's eating up all the budget in the morning, then you bid negatively between 9 and 12 so you're bidding less, or literally bid minus 50% or 80% or something like that but it may not even get any traffic and then between one and three, you can fit normally and so on.
What I would do is I would look at the data and see where the peak hours are when you are getting great results, whatever those results could be. It may not be just the conversions. It could be, you know, your site engagement or the micro goals. At that time you are getting the best audiences, then you need to bid high and the time, when you are getting the worst results you bid less, and that will help you to spread your budget a bit more.
Rahil, "Is it possible for you to do a live analysis of any conversion campaign that you have run? Since I'm not accustomed to the post analysis part of a campaign." I will but I can't do this in a live stream because I would need to hide the client details and I don't share any of my client account data anywhere publicly.
I can't do that, unfortunately. "Is it necessary to follow the AIDA concept when running campaigns, I'm selling smart watches and I have a very small budget. I want people to go for a purchase." Yeah. You can start with a small budget. I don't see any problems why. Most accounts we get are small budgets of less than thousand dollars.
I wouldn't say most, but many of the accounts we get and then we slowly, slowly grow it up. If you are getting a positive return on investment then you are going to scale up. Why would you not scale your campaigns? It's not about big or small budgets. It's about having a good website. Have you got fast and free shipping?
What is your refund policy? Returns policy, and there are lots of factors which you need to put into place so that when someone does land on your landing page, they are completely blown away by... First, the product needs to be really good. The price also needs to be good because you will be pretty much competing against Amazon.
Amazon is next day delivery. Can you offer that? And if not, why should they buy from you? So that trust building needs to be there and if you've got a product which is not available on Amazon, or they may be selling at a higher price over there, which I doubt very much. This is what you need to do is to build that trust.
Set up remarketing campaigns as well, because not everybody comes to a website and makes the purchase in the first place. Sandy, "We are a small e-commerce. How can we compete with Amazon or eBay?" I think the whole world is asking that question, not only yourself but every shop keeper or a person who have got a bricks and mortar store is how do they compete with Amazon?
The question is that you have to build up your brand, build up that trust. The reason why I'm doing YouTube video livestreams is I'm building up my brand, building up trust and we're investing quite a lot in this, because two, three years down the line, I would like to think that we have a great following on the internet and YouTube and we are the first company, or I'm the first person which comes to someone's mind when they think about Google Ads.
That's what you want to do. Adam. "What does SF stand for?" It's not San Francisco and a lot of Americans think they call us. "You're in San Francisco," and we said, no, it's not. The initials of our two children. Now, its a very interesting story, which I'll share with you since you asked. Sehar and Farhan... they are our two children.
When we started the company, we had two kids. Then a third one popped along after almost 10 year gap. We have two choices. Either change the name of the company and rebrand everything, which would be quite a bit and cost us a lot of money or we call her Digital because if Madonna and David Beckham can keep wonderful and weird names for their children, I can call my daughter Digital!
No, it's a joke, we did not, we're not that cruel to call our daughter Digital but yeah, we kept the SF as it is. We'll think of something for our third child when she grows up. Okay. Last question, Wesley, "Would it be possible to learn on the data analysis on what data is important to pay attention and what vanity metrics is?" Yeah.
Vanity metrics, impression, CTR. CPC. Yeah. You can keep a track of it, but the focus should be on three numbers. That's it. Conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion. That's it and the rest, as you said, very rightly - vanity metrics. That's it, boys and girls enough for today I think. It's boiling in here right now. It's I think one of the hottest days in the UK today.
So I'm gonna have some, a little bit of a drink. Thank you for being here today and we'll be back again on Monday at five o'clock same place, same time. If you haven't subscribed please hit whatever buttons you want except the thumbs down! Share, comment, like, and yeah, bring in your questions and we'll take it forward. So stay safe, have a great weekend and I shall hopefully see you back here on Monday.
Goodbye for now.
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