Hello. I believe we are live. Let me make sure everything is working fine and then we shall get started. Okay. Yep. Everything looks good. And the internet is behaving itself. Hello, my name is Uzair and a very warm welcome to you whether you're watching live or as a recording. Today is- what's the date today? 22nd of July, five o'clock in the afternoon and the UK.
Wherever you are joining in from the world, hope you had a productive day and you're looking- hopefully looking forward to the session. Today I'm going to be talking about optimization tips for search campaigns as to how you can make your campaigns increase the ROI, reduce cost possibly, and keep on optimizing... and how to improve your campaigns on an on-going basis.
But before I get started, I just want to talk a little bit about this. Today's motto over here, which is “never give up” is quite relevant to today's session because a lot of people give up far too quickly and far too soon in life and business, and also in Google Ads! Everyone wants instant results. They want to switch on a campaign and start getting the results from day one and so on sometimes, and in a few hours, because I do get calls in the office.
Oh we've run the ads for a few hours now, but we haven't got any calls or any leads. It doesn't work like this anymore. It used to a few years back when Google Ads was very new, there weren't that many competitors, but now there's a lot of competition. And this, the path to conversion has changed quite a lot.
It's not a case of just your potential customer coming to your website and either buying something or signing up with your offer, they're going to go to you then to your competitors down on social media, then on forums, then come back to you again and so on and then they are going to make up their mind as to who to buy from.
This is what “I'm giving up” is all about. I'm giving up far too quickly because if you don't have any data you are technically speaking, not wasting money, but you may feel like wasting money that, “Oh, I'm spending all this budget, not getting anything in return.” Eventually your cost per acquisition is going to go up and then slowly you need to optimize and bring this down.
These optimization tips are going to help you achieve those results, but you need to give a bit of time and you need to give a little bit of data for the machine to run with and then you'll see that it works pretty well. The best analogy I can give to you is going to the gym. You sign up today you're not going to get instant results from tomorrow or in one week or in one month, unless you are doing something dodgy or something, you're taking some steroids or whatever, but that's beside the point!
I mean, if you do something silly on Google Ads, then you're going to get suspended as simple as that. You've got to play by Google's rules and with the gym analogy, you will start...If you haven't been exercising, you need to lose weight and you need to get fit and stronger. You need to start slowly. You can't go in the gym on day one and start exercising for two hours because your body is going to ache like hell the next day!
That's what you need to do is to build up your stamina, your muscles, your strength, over a period of time. First you may probably start off with half an hour light exercises, then you go a bit higher and a bit more and so on. And the same thing with Google Ads, you can't just jump in and go all gung-ho and expect results straight away.
You need to let the algorithm learn what you're trying to achieve, and then you start to get some results. The other problem I also see is far too many changes. Being made every few hours or on a daily basis. If the account is very small, it just messes up the learning of the machine and the algorithms, and you're doing more harm than good.
You've got to have a bit of patience, and this is what I will always tell my clients and if you are an agency or a freelancer, you got to handle your client's expectations and let them know straight up. This is what we are going to do. When I get a new client and they've got zero data in the account, what I tell them is, look, we need to get this data from Google.
We are buying all this intelligence from Google. You may feel that we are wasting money, but we not. Once we have got data for 10, 15 days, then we can start to optimize, see what’s working, what's not working. And then we take it forward. Then we keep on optimizing and then the scaling comes in, so this is how I have this game is played!
Let's hop onto our Google slides and I'll go through the top tips today. Hello, Entertainment media... Thank you for being here. Yeah, and your comments help! You learn a few things and those of you who are new over here, I'm going to go through my slide deck now, and towards the end of the session, I'm going to answer any questions you may have put up.
Please put them up on the comment box on the right-hand side as we go along and I'll work back to them towards the end. Let's start with the first steps. What you want to do is to test the branded and the competitors' keywords... I won't say we are testing the branded keywords because I would always recommend that you do run with branded terms.
What you're doing is stopping your competitors hogging up the top spot of Google. This is another, you can say argument/ discussion or a debate with the clients, why should I pay for my branded terms? I already ranked number one for my company name in Google. Well, if you look at a Google page, the top four ads now are quite big.
Then you've got Google maps and then this organic rankings come along at the bottom. Try looking that up on your mobile phone, your link will not be seen until somebody scrolls down quite a bit. You've got to invest in protecting your brand and by what I mean by protecting the brand is you are taking up the top spot because if your competitors are bidding for you on your brand terms, you are going to lose out because they will be right at the top.
Now, even if you are trademarked and you've got the trademark, you can bid on a branded terms, on trademark terms, but you cannot put the name of the trademark in your ads, that's what you can't do. The keywords, I would also recommend that you test them out because it will either be good or bad, but until you don't know what's happening, you won't know the results.
You might find that you may get calls from people who are looking for your competitors on a support center or technical help or whatever. In those cases, then you need to start putting in those search terms as negative keywords, you know technical support or login, help, and online access and things like that, but just the brand term, you ought to definitely test them and you will find that you are starting to get conversions and technically we are stealing your competitors traffic ethically or legally, and the competitors will be doing the same to you!
If you go to Google now and search for a brand term, and if somebody else's ads are popping up, that means they are bidding on your brand. You need to absolutely return the favour!!! Okay? So that was the same one I'm giving you the pro tip is to bid on your competitors keywords, even if trademarked. Can't use them in the ads.
The next step is reviewing your campaign and ad group structure. The first thing is your budgets. You don't want to be limited by budget. If your campaign is performing and is profitable, because why would you limit? Because you're hitting your CPA targets and you are being limited by budget. That means you are losing out on traffic and possibly, and potentially more conversions.
Whenever you start a campaign or run a campaign, you've got clients, you ask them...look, and the name of the game is to grow that business. The more they spend, the more they are going to grow. Full stop, it's the same thing, like the more tax you pay, the more profit you're going to be making. If you're not paying taxes that means you are not making any profit, or if you're taking little tax, that means you are not making a lot of profit.
It’s exactly the same thing. This is something which a lot of business owners don't understand, Oh, why should I spend so much money? Well, you are losing out. You're keeping cash on the table for your competitors to take right under your nose. When you know that at such a target CPA, you are profitable and you also know that you are now limited by budget, unless you cannot, you do not have capacity or you can handle more enquiries or leads.
That's a different matter, but then it's a good problem to have, because now you want to scale your business and you need to grow your business. Potentially hiring more people. And most often, this is how you're going to do that. What you want to do is to take an account from thousand dollars a month, let's say to 5,000 or 10,000 a month.
Then this is what growth means, and this is what you want to be doing, to get that target cost per acquisition, straight up or the lowest number, and then keep on growing. You don't want to be limited by budget. Then when it comes to sorting out your campaign, names and structure, what you want to do is..., this is what I do from pretty much all of our accounts and all of our clients.
We have three types of campaigns. They may not run all at the same time, but this is how we structure them. So we call the main campaign as the main campaign with all the services in there. I'm talking about lead generation. I'm not talking about e-commerce. Each service will have its own ad group or multiple ad groups.
Let’s say for instance, for our business, we have Google Ads or pay-per-click service, web design, photography video, what else? SEO and so on. So we will never have all these keywords in the same ad groups. We have specific keyword group of ad groups for Google Ads, but then a separate ad group for pay-per-click because there are two different search terms and the same thing for websites and photography.
And so on. Even in photography, we will have a different ad groups with different keywords, for a headshots business, headshots or product pack shots, completely two different products or service, but it is at the end of the day, photography. So you've got to make sure that your ad groups have got very relevant words in them. When you write the ads, they are absolutely relevant to each other.
You've got to make sure to do that and not put all of them in one ad group or a handful of ad groups, because laziness creeps in, and people don't want to do a lot of work by creating more and more ad groups. The more work you put in upfront, the better results you're going to get at the back end, then obviously you have a brand campaign...
Try not to limit this by budget. People are actually searching for your brand. That's what you are hoping to achieve, that people go to Google and put in your brand term and if they can't see your ad, then potentially your competitor’s ads are going to pop up above you. Then what you can also do is to take the winners from the main campaign away from there.
You can bid the most and be extremely aggressive in that, you don't lose out on the search impression share, and you will have a handful of winners, not a lot, but you want to protect those keywords. Again, don't be limited by budget. Locations - although Google recommends people in or who show interest in your targeted locations, use this one.
I just want to show my ads to people in or regularly in your targeted location, because if I searched outside the area for a product or a service, I can potentially see that ad because I'm interested in that keyword. I just want my ads to show within that target location so use the second one and not the recommended one.
Another tip for locations is to include or exclude. If you let say are targeting a country - USA, then what you can do is instead of just targeting the whole country, you add all the states to begin with. So I believe it is 51 or 50 if I've got that number wrong apologies to my friends in the US!
I think its 51! Add all of these separately and as the data starts to come in, then I can adjust my bids accordingly, but if I have California as a state and I can see that California is giving me great results, I can increase my bids on the profitable locations, or if it's too expensive, then I can decrease the bids on my expensive locations.
This way I can optimize it by location as well. Instead of just putting in the whole country, try to segment it out or in the UK, you can have all the different counties and as you start to get more granular, you find that, okay, New York is good. You know San Diego is really good. Chicago is working really well but New Orleans is not working...Then you can adjust your bids accordingly to optimize your campaigns.
These are the few tips for today to keep you guys and girls going. I'm gonna look at the comment box now and see if you've got any questions - now's your chance to ask me any questions, or if you are watching this as a recording, then put them in the comment box underneath the video, and I regularly check them and reply to each and every one of them.
Okay. Hello, Mike. Hi back. Mike, 'if you don't have access to Google analytics for our website, can you still get good results with ad campaigns targeting a page from that website?' Well, you're trying to fight a war or a battle with one hand behind your back! Analytics and Google Ads work hand in hand, and I would highly recommend that you have access to both of them.
Now, I know a lot of the time you will have problems trying to get access because the client doesn't have access to that account because the previous agency set it up for them and they're not giving access, or they can't get hold of the logins, whatever the problems is. The simple problem is you can set up a new account, a Google analytics, put it up on the website and then give access to the client as well to do that Google GA account.
And I know it's going to start all the data from zero, but you're none the wiser, because you never had that data in the first place. That means you're starting afresh and you're getting the data in... I highly recommend that you have both and then you can see a lot of interesting metrics and data in there which will help you optimize your campaigns.
Hi Adam. "Is best practice to optimize campaigns once a week?" Not really. No the best practice is it really depends on how much are you spending or how much data is happening, or how many changes are happening every day. If you're running $10 or £10 a day compared to a £1000 a day, then it's a completely different workflow for each of these campaigns, but you've got to have a fine balance for a small account, yes, you go in there every day, have a look and if you want to add any negative search terms, which are popping up for your keywords, by all means, you can add those as many times as you like, because obviously in the long run, you're going to save money if you do that, but if you are trying to make changes to the bids, especially when you have got a small budget, then you need to let the algorithms or the machine run and get some meaningful data before you can see whether it is helping or hindering.
I'm afraid there is not a magic number, which I could give you as to how many times you should be optimizing, but it needs to be, you know, you can't do too much on a small account and you can't do too little on a big account. Okay, Adam. You're asking “Would Gmail ads be a good fit for driving localized traffic to a chain of stores for a specific product?” I guess it's for a local business where the traffic is already limited.
How do you scale these campaigns? Because let's say you are running a campaign in a five mile radius. This is where you can really stand out from your competitors or other agencies, because all of them are going to tell their clients or search term - go on the search network and there will only be a very limited amount of searches for a local service-based business.
They can't offer their services to someone 20 miles away. It's pointless to advertise there, then scaling the business, right? So what you do is build up the brand in the local community in such a way that wherever the audience go, your customers name pops up - Gmail, YouTube, discovery ads, which I've shown you before. What else...Video ads, we've got Gmail, you've got search, remarketing.
Then you do remarketing on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You got about at least six or seven different channels where you can hit your audience and you can keep growing the account. Over a period of time, how you measure, whether it's working or not is by looking in Google analytics for the brand traffic, the direct traffic, and where else they're coming from, whether they're coming from Facebook or Twitter, all these places, and then you can show them...it's not all about conversions.
Yes, we all need conversions, but to reach that point, you need to do all of these things to reach them. You've got to be like an octopus, whenever your customer or potential client turns, to grab them! That's how I would recommend that you go and try it. You know, and the thing to do is, this is not a quick fix either.
You've got to run these, and on and on with not a lot of budget, but for a fair amount of time, don't expect results. In two weeks, the brand building process doesn't happen overnight. Just like going to the gym, you will not going to build up your muscles in two weeks! It’s going to take you a few months.
And then whenever your client is going to go in the local areas, people are going to tell them, “Oh, whenever I go to YouTube or Facebook, I see your ads.” And in the next week, or the week after I'm going to do the various types of ads, which we run for our business on all these channels, you know, 5 second ads, 15 second ads, infographics, then we're doing these YouTube lives and then we download this 30 minutes live stream and chop them into three minutes or two minutes videos that we are creating constantly.
We are creating content and putting it out there so that somebody somewhere is going to see us and find us. Hope that answered your question. You're most welcome, Adam. And yeah, a very interesting question, guys. Thank you for being here. Can't see any more popping up on my screen so we'll call it a day and I'll see you guys tomorrow.
Same time, same place. 'Til then stay safe and thanks very much for being here. Goodbye.
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