Google Adwords, Effective Online Marketing

Want to expand your reach globally an increase sales? Then Google adwords might just be what you’re looking for. In this episode, Matt and Brandon explain how to use adwords with devestating effect. From REALLY targeting your keywords, to keeping your click through costs low, you can start driving more targeted traffic to your site and increase your sales all on a shoestring budget. So whether you’re familiar with adwords or not, this episode of the Automate My Small Business Podcast will help you understand adwords and improve your chances of generating even more income.

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Links from the show:

• Google Adwords
• Pay Per Click
• Speed PPC
• Google Keyword Tool
• Google Trends
• Compete.com
• Alexa.com
• SpyFu
• Adsense
• CPC
• Omniture Search Center
• Bid Simulator

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #20 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we’re going to talk to you about advertising for your small business using Google Adwords. But before we get into that, Brandon, what have you been up to?

BRANDON: Ah, let’s see. I’ve been waiting for this baby to pop out and I haven’t gotten…

MATT: That was like two episodes ago, man.

BRANDON: I thought for sure that we were going to be parents of a second child but this has not been happening but I don’t want to dread upon that but yeah, any day now we’ve been waiting for this baby. So yeah, I’m excited about it but it’s still on kind of pins and needles a little bit so. You know, nothing really exciting has been going on. How about you? What have you been up to?

MATT: I’ve been helping out my wife with some of her things she’s been working on. I’ve been playing with Google Adwords a little bit again recently which kind of brought this topic up and near to mind so I thought maybe we’d do a show on this.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think it’s a good topic. You either know a lot about it or you don’t and it’s something that I think everybody should know a little bit about if they’re doing any sort of online business. So it’s a good topic.

MATT: Yeah and I think we’re going to focus on Google Adwords for this particular show but it applies equally well to Yahoo search marketing for the next couple of months while they’re still around and then Microsoft Ad center.

BRANDON: Yeah, there’s a lot of platforms you can use out there but Google definitely has the lion share.

MATT: Yeah, I think they have what, like 70 percent of the search market right now.

BRANDON: Yeah. Maybe a little more than that. Yeah.

MATT: And then Microsoft and Yahoo, Bing Who, I think is what they’re calling it now.

BRANDON: Binghoo?

MATT: Binghoo.

BRANDON: Why are they calling it that?

MATT: No. Not the Microsoft is not calling it that but the other people.

BRANDON: Got it.

MATT: I think that has well 25 percent and then you have to strugglers like Ask and the other random search engines the last 5 percent.

BRANDON: Right. Well, you know, Pay Per Click is not necessarily new but it definitely is becoming more and more powerful of a way to advertise and it’s definitely the future of advertising and it’s taking the whole industry by storm to be honest. I mean there are still some traditional advertisers out there but I think they’re going to dwindle away after a while. You know, I’ve actually walked into a lot of PR firms and gotten the whole you know high level presentation of “this is how we advertise you in the magazines and this is how we get you into newspapers and stuff.” And I’m thinking, “Are you guys crazy or just missing the whole boat?” I mean, yeah there is all that offline stuff to consider but when you compare it to online advertising list and specifically Pay Per Click, it’s apples and oranges. I mean you’re getting such a better value for your dollar.

MATT: And not just value I mean I like that you can see where your money is going like you can see the return on investment you’re getting directly from within the tools was the magazine stuff and all those other things. It’s kind of like, well, we got a few more orders this month. Is it due to the magazine? Or we don’t know. We’re not sure.

BRANDON: Right. There’s no way to track it. It’s just absolutely just a lined feedback loop. There’s nothing there to really analyze. Yeah.

MATT: I mean they tried but I mean it’s like go to our URL/some special code and no one types in the special code.

BRANDON: Right. I do have coupons that I used for offline promotions but I only default to it because it’s the only way to do it but when you’re online, everything’s trackable. Because this is kind of a topic that either you know a lot about or you don’t know anything about, we’re kind of try to thread the needle right through the middle and see if we can bring anybody who hasn’t worked with Adwords in the past to kind of bring them up to speed as well as kind of tell you guys some advanced tools that we know of in case you already are running Adwords and would be interested in kind of knowing more of how to get more out of your Adwords campaign. So first of all, let’s just talk about why it works. I mean there’s a couple of touching points that your customers will be going through as they search and find your ad. First of all, they’re searching for your product, right? If they entered certain keywords that you’ve specified that are relevant to your product, the mere fact that they’re searching for your product is already putting them into I’m interested or I’m a buyer and these are the exact terms I’m thinking is what I’m looking for so that immediately puts them into that category.

MATT: Yeah. Later on the buying cycle, right, I mean I’m not on the part where I don’t know anything about what I’m going to buy. You know I have some idea what I want. Now, I’m looking for someone that provides that.

BRANDON: Again, I think the billboard example is a good one where you know by putting an ad up on the billboard, you’re kind of hoping that somebody sees the ad and you’re teaching them or you’re trying to educate them as to that your product exists which you’ll get very low conversion rate.

MATT: Right. So like a month later when they’re you know in front of a bar, they remember to order a course like it, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. So we’re looking at it in a different way here. We’re picking them off the tree here right when they’re ripe and ready to buy and you know the second touch point that they have is they’re reading your ad. Well, that in itself is good because you’re in a way having the billboard effect where your impressioning them and that’s why they’re calling them impressions. And so you’re giving your impressions to them, you know, and thirdly they choose your ad as the most relevant on the page. So you’re automatically getting that filter of customers that tells you, “Hey, this is the ad they like because they feel it’s relevant. Now, let’s take it to the site.” So now they’re at the site, they’re one click away from buying. You get that impulse buy feature going for you and again you’re late in the buying cycle so you’re going to have a higher conversation rate. So compare that to magazines where you’re just kind of throwing it out there in the wind and hoping something sticks and if you get maybe a .25 percent conversion rate, any traditional marketer would say, that’s actually good conversation rate. So we have apples and oranges here in terms of traditional versus online Pay Per Click.

MATT: Okay. So let’s go into a little bit about the organization of Adwords accounts. So you’re first going to go to Adwords. You’re going to sign up for an account and you’re going to get this thing that’s going to have a campaign ad groups, keywords ads, landing page. How does these all stuff put together?

BRANDON: Yeah. I mean first of all, know that Adwords account is free which is a good thing. This is powerful platform but it’s all for free. I mean the Ads aren’t free but…

MATT: And if you have web hosting or anything like that you’re probably going to be able to get like $25 to $100 coupon so check with your hosting companies because a lot of times you can get a lot of free money to try out.

BRANDON: That’s right. Any time you open up a new Adwords account there’s I think a 100 bucks you can get off if you look around online. You know once you have your account set up that you go to work at setting up your campaigns and the way it works is you set up a campaign, you set your budget for that campaign and then you go to work at setting up an ad group and the ad groups has keywords in it.

MATT: Yeah. So I mean when you go to Google, you put a couple of terms into the search bar and that’s really what the keywords are. People are trying to match what they sell via those keywords to what you’re searching for.And Google is going to have an algorhythm that match those up.

BRANDON: Exactly. So you got your group of keywords and then you have your ads and then you can match the ads with the keywords so you’re specifying basically whose searching for certain keywords and then showing this ad because I know what type of customer they are. So now you’re being able to really focus on and target who you’re showing ads to and what ads are seen.

MATT: Yes. So if I search for Les Paul guitars, there’s going to be an ad. You know buy Les Paul guitar for $50 off at whatever guitar store, right? So they’re going to match that up and they’re not going to show me the buy s stratacaster at …

BRANDON: Exactly. So you really get fine toothed comb to be able to filter out which keywords they’re being search for and which ads they’re being shown. So there’s a couple of different types of ads you could show but most common is the text ad and that consist of a title, two lines of text each having 35 characters including spaces and then of course the URL that you take them to which from here on out we’ll call a landing page. And we’ll talk a little bit more about using that to specify you know even more so where they go and what type of customer you’re wanting to drop them onto, what page of your website.

MATT: Yeah, one thing to know is that the URL that you display along with that text ad doesn’t have to be the full URL that you are actually sending them to. They can be just your domain name. You can do things like drop the www off of it so it’s a little bit easier to read, especially if your domain name is keyword rich. You wanted to make it as easy to read for people. Maybe capitalize the first letter of each word, things like that to make it kind of easier to get more keywords into that ad.

BRANDON: Right. So that’s the text ad. The second type of ad you can do is the display ad or image and you can you know use your logo, you can use maybe a product image you have.

MATT: Most of those are going to show up on the content, right?

BRANDON: Right. Well, all of them actually, yes. And so you’re basically putting a little banner ad together and Google makes it pretty easy. They got some templates you can use. So if you’re not real good at design, you could pretty much put a banner ad together on the Google platform for you know less than a couple of minutes. You know, so it’s pretty simple.

MATT: And if I remember it correctly, the flash based ad like the Adobe Flash ads are the same price as the images so …

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: You might as well get your bank for the buck and get something that moves around and flashes or something to get some attention.

BRANDON: You know it’s pretty simple. You’re going to be spending a lot of money on it to have the volume that you need to get that you know, when we go on to the content network, we’ll talk about this more but when you go on the content network, you’re going to have a much higher volume and lower click throughs so there’s a balancing act there on the display ads. But then you got video ads you could work with and those basically work on YouTube.

MATT: Yeah. I do not know anywhere it else it shows. I think those are mostly in YouTube.

BRANDON: And then you’ve got your click to call ads which Matt, tell us about how to use that.

MATT: One other thing with the video, I think those go on TV as well. You can target those ads to real TV broadcasting.

BRANDON: That’s right. I’ve never used that before but it seems like a great idea.

MATT: I remember you investigated a while ago. So yeah and then the click to call stuff is new so it’s really targeted at mobile phone so your iPhones, android phones. When they search from mobile device like that, instead of taking them to a URL, Google sort of have this thing called click to call for local businesses. When they click on it, it uses the phone to call you or your business number and that’s the click through. So that’s really cool if you’re a local business and you rely a lot on phone leads.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s a good idea especially if you’re …

MATT: A restaurant or anything, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, local business of some sort. So you know it sounds complicated. It really gets simple once you get into it and you start playing around with it so I would say my biggest recommendation is just to go and get started with it. It’s free. Start playing around with it and you know put your budget pretty low. You can do it for under 5 bucks a day if you want or even less.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: And just test it out and you’ll quickly see where your money is wasted and where your money is used wisely and so you’ll start to slough off the bad keywords and hone the ads that work best.

MATT: Yeah. So the way I usually set mine out just to kind of give you an idea of where to put things as you’re going is you know obviously I have my campaign around some sort of product that I have. If I have multiple products, I have different campaigns for each product. I’ll set up ad groups which are targeted at very specific keyword and variants of that keyword. So if I’m trying to advertise a camcorder, I might have different variants of the name with the dash, without the dash, a space, with the manufacturer’s name, without, but all targeted very much the same idea, the same concept and have a couple ads that are targeting that so I can figure out which of my ads are doing the best for that and then different set of keywords get to different ad group.

BRANDON: Yeah and there are some third party applications that you can use to do this because it could take a long time to do it correctly especially if you know let’s say you had 20 or 30 different ads and each have to be copied across each ad group that you might put in there. You know so it could be repetitive and kind of lengthy if you didn’t have special tools so there are tools out there. Speed PPC is one of them. Un fortunately it’s about $300 or $400 so it’s an expensive option but there are other less expensive ones that you could use.

MATT: Yeah and I think even within Adwords, you can now edit in like a spreadsheet mode, directly the spreadsheet of keywords. So that might make it a little bit faster but since we’re talking about keywords, let’s go into little bit more about finding keywords. So I mean if you’re really going to target customers on a couple of different ways, the major way is keywords. Another way is the scheduling of when they search or their geographical region or what site they’re searching on, be it you know Google.com or some other search partner or the content network at YouTube. So let’s start out with targeting your customers with keywords.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean if you have a handful of keywords that you can just think of off the top of your head, you can start with that and using a few simple tools, you can get new keyword ideas. You can find out what they’re commercial intention is. There’s a website that we’ll put in our show notes that’s a Microsoft website that you could put in a handful of keywords or even a website that you want to know how much commercial intent those keywords have which basically means what is the likeliness that somebody searching for those keywords is interested in purchasing something versus are they just out there searching for those keywords because they’re looking for information and so the commercial intent gives you a good idea as to, hey these are good keywords to use because they’re kind of triggers or has a high likeliness of those who are wanting to purchase a product are going to be using these keywords. Really good stuff.

MATT: Yeah. So to give you example, I just put in Britney Spears into the tool and it said none commercial intent, 1 percent probability that I’m going to buy something.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: And I put in, let’s see, if I put in a camcorder that is a 99 percent probability that I’m trying to buy something.

BRANDON: Exactly. I think that’s fantastic information to have. I mean those are real obvious but the ones that are not so obvious is also good throw in there, see what sticks. So then we have the search funnel. Matt, tell us about the search funnel.

MATT: So I mean we all use Google and you know Bing a lot so we know that when we’re searching for something, very rarely do we find it on the first try that we search. So when we search, we usually search for something general and we don’t necessarily find what we want or we decide we want to refine our search and we search again with a few more words and so the search funnel is trying to represent how the users move through these searches and so that you can target at a later search that you cannot advertise on the more general search but advertise on the more specific search where they’re going to find exactly what they’re looking for and hopefully buy from you.

BRANDON: Yeah. So you’re basically identifying what level of detail or how broad the term is along the path of when they’re out there searching around for products or if they’re out there search around for information, at what point are they searching for it that keyword.

MATT: Yeah, I mean so if you’re like looking to buy a TV and my search for like HD TV, you might search for you know plasma screen TVs. You might look for best plasma screen and then you know cheap plasma screen or best deal for budget screen.

BRANDON: And then you find one specific that you like and you start searching after that keyword.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: You know Sony plasma screen XX356 then you search for Sony X536 reviews because you want to hear about reviews.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So clearly there’s like this path that people take when they’re searching around the internet for it. So that’s the search funnel tool and again we have that in our show notes.

MATT: Yeah. So we’re trying to establish commercial intent that’s right with both of those tools. We’re trying to see how likely is the person that’s searching for these phrase right now to buy something and the more likely they are to buy, the more we want to advertise to them.

BRANDON: And the next area that you could start looking around refining your keywords is to find out how much volume you’re going to get. Is this a keyword that a lot of people are searching for? I mean if you have a business especially if you’re thinking about starting a new business, one of the first things I do is I go straight to the Google Keyword Tool and see how many people are actually searching for this. Because there is actually a book written on demonstrating that we are what we search for, right? Because nobody is watching us when we search so we have no influence from anybody else. Whatever we are searching is what we’re thinking about.

MATT: So you mean Google knows about my innermost thoughts.

BRANDON: That’s right. And I mean it’s kind of scary because there’s a lot of pattern. There’s dozens of analysts out there watching what we are searching for because never in history have we had such a fantastic way of knowing what we desire until Google came around and showed us how accurate our searches are relative to what we’re thinking. So you know if you use the Google keyword tool, you can quickly identify how large a market is not necessarily based on purchases or you know traditionally you’d say, oh this is a $3 billion market because there’s this many people buying those products. Well, if that’s true, you’re kind of late to the game, right? You’re using numbers that are already established markets and if you want to get into a market early, you want to know how many people are searching for it and if they search for it but don’t find a product, maybe that’s a good market to be in because now you can fill that gap. You can fill that void.

MATT: A search is basically demand, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. So this is a good tool to use, Google keyword tool.

MATT: Another thing I’d like to use is Google trends which is going to show you historical trends of those searches. So maybe that when you’re trying to evaluate these keywords, certain keywords and certain products are going to be very seasonal and it may not always be apparent that they are seasonal. So I was very surprised with all the camcorder stuff to realize that you know camcorders are very seasonal. People buy them at Christmas and people buy them before they go on vacation in the summer. I would have figured Christmas but the other I wouldn’t have thought of.

BRANDON: You know the other thing Google Trends does not only show seasonality but it also shows an increase or decrease in volume.

MATT: Overall trending, right, so is it going up in history or is it kind of tapering off the last couple of years? And is it a market that you might want to get into because of that?

BRANDON: Exactly. So you know you’re always going to want to get on that upswing from you know a trend that’s kind of coming into popularity.

MATT: Yeah, so you know you’re going to see things that are high volume but when there are high volume you’ll also probably going to see high competition. So a lot of people bidding on those keywords which means they’re going to be expensive keywords and it’s going to cost you more. It’s going to be harder to make it profitable. So within those tools, you can also look for keywords that are not being bid on very high, low competition. It’s like a little bar, right. It shows high, low, not the exact number for that.

BRANDON: Yeah. Speaking of competition, I mean there’s some great sites to go and analyze what your competitors are doing and what keywords they’re using, what ads they’re running and just getting an overall demographic snap shot if you want.

MATT: That’s a great way to get some good ideas for keywords, right? Just go to the people that are already advertising on those things.

BRANDON: Exactly. You know if they got a certain share of the market then you know you could start taking a little bit of it and it’s all a matter if you want to set up your budget in Adwords to you know whatever that might be but you know Compete.com is one of my favorite sites to go check out how you’re doing with your competitors and it’d actually will show you a graph for free. They do have a paid version but you know for free you can see how much traffic you’re getting compared to how much traffic your competitors are getting or any other sites that you want to start looking at. On top of some demographic information, Alexa.com does a great job. You can put in a website into the box and it tells you you know 30 percent of the visitors are male and the rest are female or you know what age groups are going to these sites. And this is information that’s free. There’s some paid information you can get that’s more expensive.

MATT: Yeah, I think both Compete and Alexa are really focused on kind of overall site and overall search and aren’t specifically focused on necessarily PPC although they kind of encompass that but there’s a tool called SpyFu. I know they do some free stuff. I don’t know if they have a paid site of it but you can get some really good information specifically about their PPC advertising, how much they’re spending and stuff like that. It’s not perfectly accurate but you know we compared it against our Adwords budgets and they’re reasonable within 25 percent margin there probably, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. About that, yeah. I mean they’ll give you an estimate. It’s not real accurate but it will give you an idea of how much…

MATT: If they’re spending a million dollars a day or $10 a day.

BRANDON: Yeah, I mean that in itself is good information and why? Because if you can tell how much people are spending on their Adwords campaigns, you can pretty much guarantee that they’re profitable if it’s a high number. So if you’re wondering if they’re making money, just go see how much they’re spending on their Adwords. They’ll tell you real quick if they’re profitable or not, what their margins are and stuff. And then in order to find your relevance, you can get other ideas for keywords, we like the search based keyword tool. There’s actually a Google keyword tool and a search based keyword tool.

MATT: Which is also from Google but like even with the regular keyword tool, it’s going to say you put in shoes, you know, people also search for sneakers. So it’s going to give you some hints and some ideas. The search based keyword tool you can actually point your existing website and it’ll crawl your entire website and say hey, you should consider these extra keywords based on what we see at your website. So that’s another great way to get some more ideas.

BRANDON: Right. So you’re going to get a bunch of different synonyms pretty much of keywords that you may have started off with and then new ones that you may have never thought of.

MATT: Even maybe a more specific phrase or something like that and there’s another tool called Word tracker which is I think by a company in England. I use that a while ago when I was trying to set up my first average campaign and it came up with a bunch of different keywords. There’s some pretty good ones that the Google tools didn’t come up with. But that one was paid so if you’re looking just for free keyword tools, the Google tools is the way to go and some of those Microsoft tools but if you’re spending thousands of dollars a month on your Adwords budget then you know 100 bucks for the keyword tool might be easily justifiable.

BRANDON: Yeah. So once you find your keywords and you do a little bit of researching you know which ones are your competitors are using, what kind of volume you’re going to be getting from some of them, if they have commercial intent or not, how competitive they are, those keyword tools will even tell you how much you’re going to have to pay per click and in what position you’ll end up in. So you’ll get a lot of information from all those tools but then you’re going to start entering those keywords in, and you’re going to have to decide you know are these keywords going to be broad match, should they be phrase match, exact match or negative match and the difference between all those …

MATT: So let’s walk through one at a time. So broad match, give me an example of broad match.

BRANDON: Well, in a broad match, you don’t put any quotations or brackets or negative signs on the front of it.

MATT: And this is an easy way to make a mistake because I think most people would just put keywords as they see them and they’re going to be broad match, right?

BRANDON: Right. So by default they’re broad match which basically means that this keyword can be used anywhere within their search. It could be in reverse order. It could be sometimes even the synonym.

MATT: Yeah. Even if you had two words, if either one of them shows up, it’s going to …

BRANDON: It’s going to trigger the ad to run.

MATT: Yeah. So you could be paying for your ad to run a lot more than you really want to.

BRANDON: Right. You think, “Oh that’s great, right? The more people that come to my site, the better.” Well, that’s not necessarily true because if your keywords are so broad that it’s causing a lot of traffic to come, you’re paying for every click that comes through to your website but it’s probably a lot of poor quality traffic instead of a high quality traffic. So the way to minimize that is to use a phrase match or an exact match. Matt, you want to explain the difference?

MATT: Yes so a phrase match is kind of saying match these two words red shoes anywhere in the search terms. The person who gets search for large red shoes and your keywords are going to match that. There’s also a little—it’s not exactly always going to preserve exactly those two words and may add an “S” to the end of your words on that, has a little bit of flexibility but it’s pretty close to match these two words in order anywhere in the search query. And the next step up from that is an exact match which has two square brackets. So in opening square bracket, your keywords and then a closing square bracket, that means match these terms exactly.

BRANDON: Right. And exclusively. It has to be only those words in the search and no other words. So it’s really, really tightly defined.

MATT: Yeah and so the last one is the negative match and this is really useful tool when you’re doing things like the broad match and the phrase match. So you know I was working on my wife’s campaign and we’re putting in speech pathology and one of the really searched for keyword terms in speech pathology is speech pathology jobs. Well, she’s not looking to hire anyone for this. She’s trying to get customers so we want to put a negative match on toward jobs with our phrase matches so that her ads wouldn’t show up for people searching for a job.

BRANDON: Right. So you’re pretty much filtering out keywords that you know don’t apply to the type of customer you’re trying to attract.

MATT: Exactly.

BRANDON: So the other way you could target your marketing or your ads to certain customers is by the time of day. You can actually set it up to schedule to run all the ads evenly throughout the day, alternately four hours a day. You could say only during the work hours.

MATT: You can say only certain day so if you have a bar that you want to advertise and your big days are Friday and Saturday, well, you probably want to put most of your budget into Friday and Saturday when people are trying to figure out what to do as opposed to Tuesday 8am.

BRANDON: Right. That’s a great example.

MATT: Although maybe there’s some people on Tuesday 8am that want to go to the bar.

BRANDON: Oh come one. We’ve all done that. We’ve been on the bars on Tuesday every once in a while.

MATT: Yeah. So if what you’re trying to advertise is time sensitive or even if you don’t think it’s time sensitive but you see in your reports and your conversion statistics that people are converting better on certain days. At Google you can’t see certain times a day but Microsoft advertising will certainly tell you what time of day some people are clicking through. There’s some reports that will show you that. So with Google for time a day you kind of gotta guess. Hopefully they’ll come up with a report for that. But definitely you know by actual day you can say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or whatever.

BRANDON: Right. The third way you can target your keywords in your ads are geographically. You can specify what city, what state, what country. You can do a radius, certain miles around zip code, a lot of ways you can do it.

MATT: This is especially powerful if you’re a local business and you have a very specific geographic region that you’re trying to garget. Also even if you’re a larger company that has many locations, you may want to target different types of ads with different geographical regions. So it gives you some flexibility there as well. So another way that you can target different users is by what channel they’re searching on or they’re acting on. So I think we’re all familiar with going to Google, typing in some search terms and getting some results back and seeing you know those paid ads on the right, on the top. Those are what you’re getting back on the search network. There’s also a couple other search engines that are out there that use Google as their engine behind it. AltaVista and things like that, some of those older search engines that don’t really do very much anymore, I think they contract with Google and they get you know search ads and some results back in Google but another channel is the content network. You want to talk about the content network?

BRANDON: Yeah. The content network basically is a way to post your ads on to other websites that have similar content to what you’re trying to advertise on or to and you may be familiar with Adsense which is kind of the reverse of Adwords which are websites owners or bloggers or any site owner that has a lot of traffic can monetize that by running Google ads on their website and getting paid a small fraction of the amount that you’re paying Google. So what it’s doing is Google is pairing up their website with your ad based on keywords that you’ve chosen and they’re basically trying to get as many people to click on your ad as possible. So it’s a win-win, I mean they’re trying to get the right fit for your ad on a website that will drive them the most traffic and the most clicks. So it works well.

MATT: Yeah and there’s millions and millions of sites that are in the content network. I mean if you have like some major web sites that are in your industry, go on them and see if you see ads by Google like you know three little text links down the side or on the top and see if you can advertise there I mean the content network is a mix bag. There’s a lot of really bad traffic that comes out of it but there’s also a lot of really good opportunities if you can get advertising on those high conversion sites. You know there’s opportunity there because a lot of people just right the content network off and don’t do anything with it.

BRANDON: But if you spend a little time specifying the site that you want to be on, it really does pay off.

MATT: Yeah, you can pick specific sites. You can say I just want be on you know CNET. I don’t know if CNET is on but you know whatever specific site that’s relevant to your industry and no other ones, you know, not Joe Schmo’s blog. I want to be on these specific sites.

BRANDON: Right. You know it’s a great idea that I just thought of is as you were talking about that, what if you found a competitor of yours and you notice that they’re running Google Adsense and you specified you wanted to be on their website as an advertiser, I mean I know they have the ability to block any other competitors so it will only go so far but you could do that. Alright so once you get your keywords kind of in place and you kind of have an idea what your keywords are going to be, you kind of dive in with the how much you want to pay for it, what your budget is going to be and before we kind of get into that, we kind of want to go over some terms that we’re going to be using so that we don’t leave you too much in the dark. In order to calculate the cost per click which is commonly termed CPC, Click Through Rate which is commonly shortened by CTR. There’s a lot of it that goes into it but Matt, tell us how the CPC or the Cost Per Click is calculated.

MATT: So we have a bunch of advertisers bidding for a certain keyword. Google has got to figure out a way to rank these advertisers and show you know one ad in position one and another one in position two, position three and so on. So it does this in a couple of ways. One is that it runs a live auction so basically you set up how much you’re willing to pay per click so you have a max CPC which is the maximum you pay then it runs in auction and figures out you know whoever is going to pay more, gets a little bit higher and you know traditionally we might think that’s the way the auction works and that will be it. Whoever pays more gets to the top but Google has some other interest other than just making all the money in the world. They want to make all the money in the world you know for a long time and to do that they have to make their searches happy. So they wanted to deliver ads that are very relevant to what the searches are searching for so that you know when you use Google as a user, you have a really good experience. So in addition to just how much you’re willing to pay, they’re going to measure something they call the quality score. And the quality score is really an aggregation of a bunch of different metrics that you use to try to figure out if your ad is relevant and your site is relevant to what the person is searching for. So let’s go through some of the things that Google uses to calculate that quality score.

BRANDON: So there’s a few things that a quality score is comprised of. One being the Click Through Rate or how much your ad or your keyword is driving traffic through it and it basically counts how well your ad is performing so in the eyes of Google, you’re basically getting the score by letting the market place show how well your ad performs by how often they choose to click through it. Another way that they dictate how well your quality score goes up or down is the quality of the landing page. Is the landing page that the customer gets to when after they click the ad, is it relevant? Are the keywords that are on that landing page similar to the keyword that they chose when they searched and the keywords that they used to get to your ad? And you know, is that a consistent experience from the very first point of searching on all the way through to the point where you’re on your website?

MATT: Yes, so Google really looks at the relevancy of a lot of things. So not just if your ad is relevant to your website, it also looks if your ad is relevant to the keywords that you bid on. So if you bid on our red shoes example again and your ad is about teddy bears, it’s going to know that hey, those don’t go together, even the you know keywords that you bid on, even though that’s what you chose is not relevant to what your ad is and it’s going to have a lower quality score for that.

BRANDON: Right. So Click Through Rate is big. Historical Click Through Rate is big and even your account history, how well your account is with Google. You know if you had a couple of months of just really poor performance or you try to do a few hokey things where you know you thought it would be a great idea to try to get all the traffic from Coca cola and Pepsi to get to your website and here you are selling credit card applications. You know that doesn’t look real good in the eyes of Google. So you know they’re going to keep track of that.

MATT: And even if it’s not that neferious, even though it’s just like you’re trying to bid on a couple of keywords and it just wasn’t working for you and you know you’re getting really poor click through rate and now you have some things that are pulling down the overall quality score for everything in your account, right, even if you have another campaign in Ad group that’s doing very well, you have this potential effect from these other campaigns that aren’t doing well so you really wanted to trim the things out that have low quality scores and aren’t performing well.

BRANDON: Right. You know I guess Google does docu on certain things if you’re using brand names. Matt, you have that experience, right, where you were using brand names in your ads and they didn’t like that. They dropped your score because of it.

MATT: Yeah. So I had you know a phenomenal Adwords campaign going where I had a 10 quality score which is I think the highest you can get.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: I was paying you know very, very cheap like maybe 20 cents a click for things that other people are paying 75 cents to a dollar per click and I was up near like number one, number two position every time. It was just a phenomenal campaign but I was using some negative keywords and I was using specific brand names and I got penalized because of that and it affected everything in the whole account. Not just the things that were in that campaign you know just before I knew to separate different sites out and so it affected several sites that I had because they were just different campaigns in the same account. But I really learned my lesson about that and it definitely one even Ad group that gets docked get really low quality scores can affect a lot of things because they take in the account that whole account history of you know the overall quality score.

BRANDON: Right. I thought it was kind of a good idea at the time and I think it still is but you have to be careful with that. You know if say Ford Motors decides to run an ad saying don’t buy a Chevy or don’t buy a Toyota because of its breaks or something. It may catch a lot of eyeballs and in fact it probably has a great click through rate.

MATT: Yeah. I was getting like 25 percent click through rate, just ridiculous numbers because you know if you think about all those ads saying do this, do this, do this, do this. You almost never see an ad that says don’t do something and so if you get an ad that does that…

BRANDON: It stands out.

MATT: It really stands out.

BRANDON: Yeah. So you know there’s the competition how much everybody is willing to bid for that keyword or set of keyword phrases, then you have your quality store that gets put into the mix to calculate the final cost, and then finally it kind of stack up the positions of where your ad is going to be placed and of course the top position is the most expensive and then you know down the line they’ll get cheaper and cheaper. The top three positions above the organic results are highest paid.

MATT: Yeah, those are positions one through three, right.

BRANDON: One, two three, and then along the right hand side you have positions four, five, six and on down. And you know you might think to yourself well, I’d want to be on the top position because that gets the most click through rate and you’d be right except for the fact that you’re going to be paying a lot more for that position.

MATT: Unless you have a great quality score, right?

BRANDON: Right. Unless you have a great quality score and you’ve gotten your price down a lot by getting a high quality score. You know you kind of have to ask yourself, is being at the top position worth the money for every click that it’s been charged me? And you know I like to think that the position three to five is kind of the sweet spot.

MATT: I particularly like position three because you know it’s right next to that top organic result so you know all the people that have been trained who just skipped past the paid searches and just look for the organic results, you know they still get a glimpse of your ad right there and sometimes they’ll click on it.

BRANDON: Yeah. So you know there is a sweet spot there to figure out and to me a click is a click, right? I mean why pay more for a click when it kind of results in the same customer because they’re using the same keywords in there, you know. You’re showing them the same ad. The entire experience is the same. So if the ad is positioned in a different location, I don’t see the difference. So I’d rather pay the cheaper price.

MATT: And you can actually specifically tell Google that you know I only want to be in positions three to seven or you know one through three or whatever. There’s some advance features in Adwords that you can specifically say that my ad should only appear in these positions. And really you shouldn’t do that just on the whim. If you’re going to do something like that, there’s a bunch of reports in Adwords that will help you out and say these are the positions that you’re going to get conversions in, a good click through in and use the data to make those decisions. So just out of the blue say, hey I only want to be on one through three if you haven’t tested and seen four through nine is really not doing good for you.

BRANDON: Right. So there’s other ways that you can set it up the price that you’re willing to pay instead of setting the cost per click, you could say I just want to budget that you know is $10 a day.

MATT: Yeah. So when you first start out, right, so you just say hey, with your $10 a day example you just gave, Google say, oh great I’ll manage all the bidding for you. I’ll figure out that you know this keyword I want to bid $2 on, this keyword you should bid 15 cents on and I’m going to try to maximize the amount of clicks you’re going to get and if you just don’t do anything, that’s why Google starts out, right?

BRANDON: Right. It’s kind of the default entry level account and that’s probably something worth noting right now is that when you first get started there is kind of an entry level version of Google Adwords which is probably good to get started with. You’re going to want to get out of that probably after a few weeks of just playing around with it.

MATT: I find it really confusing. I didn’t get the beginner one. But once I switched over to the real one, I was much more comfortable with that.

BRANDON: Yeah, it kind of has limited features so you’re kind of wondering where are all these controls that we’re talking about. So if you want to jump right into the more advanced account you’re more than welcome to do so. I think it’s probably a good idea eventually anyways.

MATT: And I think it will make more sense because when people talk about certain features that may not be there in the entry level version, it only confuses you more.

BRANDON: You know and it’s true because there really is no way to understand this. It is a very complex system and Google was kind of genius to figure this out without having it existing prior to them figuring it out. So it is definitely a foreign idea until once you get in it and you kind of start playing around with it, you kind of figure it out and there’s really no way to do it other than doing it just with your own time figuring it out on your own. Yeah, you can get people. You can hire people to do it for you…

MATT: And you might should but you want to know what they’re doing. You want to understand. You know they’re going to tell you, hey, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this. You want to know if that’s a good idea and exactly kind of …

BRANDON: Exactly. Yeah, there’s really no substitute to just kind of getting your hands dirty and getting in there.

MATT: That’s kind of our philosophy in everything though, righ? You know have enough knowledge to know what you’re paying for and be able to you know delegate to someone else and have confidence that they’re going to do it correctly.

BRANDON: I personally use a Pay Per Click manager. In fact, I’m just trying to get him to do an interview with this for this one but he was busy but we’ll probably have it on the future episode. He has really taken my campaigns to a whole new level than I haven’t been able to on my own and he’s in Egypt and has been using some really highly advanced tools that I don’t have access to that are you know thousands of, well probably hundreds of thousands of dollars just to own and he’s done a good job of you know really fine tuning some of my Adwords campaign.

MATT: So you bring up a good point is that you know why you can have it automatic bidding when you start out you know very quickly a lot of professionals will move over to manual but even beyond manual they have you know bid management systems that use the Google Adword’s API and just manage things external of Google, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. There’s one called Omniture Search Center that is a third party bid management application.

MATT: The Omniture is a big search center you know. They have a lot of products around that so …

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: I’ve heard about them. I’ve never actually used their search center.

BRANDON: I mentioned Speed PPC is a good one. There’s actually hundreds of them out there but there’s only a handful good ones but you know you can set your cost per click manually, a good way to find out what the cost are. You could go to Traffic Estimator which is a Google tool that will basically tell you how many visits or how many clicks you’re going to get after setting your budget and how much your maximum cost per click is that you’re willing to spend. So you’ll get a pretty good estimate of how much traffic you’ll get by using that.

MATT: And then kind of the flip side of that tool is you know that kind of looks out in the future saying what if you bid this, how many clicks will you get? There’s another tool called the Bid Simulator which will sometimes show up in your Adwords account. I think it’s, you click in front of the headings or something. You can look that up in the Google out. So basically that looks backwards and says you know based on your account history, had you bid this more you would have gotten this many more clicks or had you bid less you would have gotten or made this less clicks and so you can kind of play with your account history and tweak it and get on optimal level.

BRANDON: Right. So you know once you get these going, you’ll get some history behind you. You’ll have a lot of data to start analyzing and it is worth analyzing. It’s going to be, I don’t know, I like it. I think it’s kind of you’re playing forensic. You’re trying to figure out what combination of keywords and ads and you know what your bid amount is and what your daily budget will be and you know should I turn on certain features? What’s my quality score?

MATT: It’s kind of addictive at the beginning because you’re getting so much feedback about what you’re doing.

BRANDON: It is addictive and there’s so much to look at and you know so many ways to flip the data around and once you get into it, you’ll realize real quickly that there are certain keywords that really perform well and there’s others that perform very poorly or maybe I had this experience when I first got started was I started looking at these keywords going oh, wow, these are great keywords because look at all the traffic I’m getting with these special keywords that are you know driving hundreds of clicks through my website. And then I realized, wait a minute, they’re not ending up in any sales. They’re conversion rate is down.

MATT: You don’t sell clicks, right?

BRANDON: Yeah. I don’t sell clicks and unfortunately I have to pay for those clicks on Adwords so what I really want is a different combination. I want low click prices but I want high conversion. Basically a sale is a conversion.

MATT: It’s really easy to get fixated on this click through rates because that’s all Google really shows you as you’re starting out before you kind of set up conversion tracking.

BRANDON: Exactly. So what you want to do is you want to take the conversion tracking snippet of code from your Google Adwords account and you place it in your website specifically on the thank you page to note that a conversion has occurred or sale has occurred or you know a conversion could even be a sign up on a news letter if you’re wanting to track that.

MATT: It’s anything that’s of monetary value to you, right.

BRANDON: Exactly. Anything that you’re trying to track and you consider it a sale or something that’s good. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to have this data starting to accumulate of how much your keywords are costing you and how well they’re converting and you’re going to get a cost per conversion.

MATT: All sort of purchase is cost per acquisition, right?

BRANDON: Or cost per acquisition, right. So you’re going to have, they call that a CPA and you’re going to want to have that as low as possible and you’re going to think to yourself, wouldn’t it be nice if it could just automatically know which keywords were doing well and which ones weren’t and then bid higher on the keywords that are doing well and bid lower on the ones that are doing poorly. Well, it turns out Google has figured this out and they call this conversion optimizer. It’s a fantastic way of once you can get some data in your campaign, it’s a fantastic way of kind of setting it and forgetting it. Once you have some traffic and some data to deal with, it’ll basically increase your bid on the higher performing keywords.

MATT: It’s cool because it gives you such predictability, right? If you say you know I’m willing to pay $25 per conversion and you say that knowing that you make a $100 on every sale or $150 on every sale, well it doesn’t matter if you’re spending $500 or $5.000 a month on this Adwords campaign because you’d know everything above that is just going to be pure profit, right?

BRANDON: Exactly. It’s almost too easy because you’re pretty much guaranteed you know plus or minus couple of cents that you’re going to be paying a certain amount for your ads or less and by having that amount set, you can pretty much know what your profit margin is on each sale. It’s fantastic. It’s brilliant. I wish came up with it but Google is doing well and they’re doing exactly what I needed them to do so I’m happy with it. But yeah, you can optimize it by a lot of ways. Matt, what have they got? Day and location?

MATT: Yeah. So Google is going to take into effect all these data that’s gathering about when your conversion happen, what type of customers, what type of ads, what type of keywords, the content that’s on the landing pages that they’re landing on. Even down to like what operating system or any kind of random amount of data that Google has about your ads, your site, your conversions, and your customers to figure out when the most conversion happen and what is the most optimal way to spend that money. And even though you’re bidding at that cost per acquisition really on the coverage, it’s still doing PPC. It’s still paying per click. It’s still bidding on a max CPC but it just kind of visualizing and managing that budget in response to your profitability and how much you’re actually willing to pay per sale basically.

BRANDON: Exactly. So the only unfortunate part about the conversion optimizer is you do need to have at least 30 conversions in the last month for it to really be relevant. And Google knows that and so they make that limitation. It may not be something you can take advantage of right away if you have less than 30 conversions but eventually once you get enough data in there, it’s great tool to have. So that kind of takes care of what you’re doing in terms of bidding and what your cost is. Now, we’re going to kind of refocus on what happens after the click. Where does the customer go? What you want to look at and it all starts with the landing page? You know I go to these Google Adwords seminars where I hear a lot of PPC managers or pay per click managers talk about what they’re learning and what they’re realizing is the effective way of changing their campaigns and it’s constantly coming up as the landing page, landing page, landing page is really the area you want to focus on. I mean once you get the campaigns up and running, they kind of run on their own and the landing page is so critical. There’s a whole science behind getting your landing page search engine optimized and search engine friendly. and even more so with the Adwords.

MATT: And you can find specialist that just do landing page optimization. It’s you know how important it is that there’s a whole discipline around this.

BRANDON: Yeah. The basics are you know you want it to be keyword rich. You want the call to action. You want a higher conversion rate off of that landing page which then in turn gives you a better quality score and it all works together, right, with your Adwords, your ads, your keywords, your landing page. You have a good landing page, it’s all going to benefit so really focus on that and we’re going to talk more about that in the future. So it’s due…

MATT: Yeah. You haven’t heard us mention call to action before, that’s really just when the user gets to your landing page make it easy for them to figure out what you want them to do. Tell them in very big text or a nice bright orange button exactly what they’re supposed to do once they get there so they don’t go to your page and get confused and then leave and go back and search again.

BRANDON: Exactly. So you’re really going to start to want to analyze a lot of these data and it’s going to take some tools and reports to start to realize where the patterns are. One of the most widely used tool is Google Analytics and it will basically tell you not only how your Adwords are performing but also where the demographics of your visitors are coming from, how long they’re staying on your site…

MATT: Where they’re leaving your site from.

BRANDON: Yeah. Exactly. You know they have a few metrics that are easy to learn and use effectively. It’s probably the best analytics platform out there for the price, free, which we all like of course. So there are other analytics platforms that you could use that are sometimes paid. Sometimes there are a few free ones out there but by far the most used one is Google Analytics.

MATT: And we’re going to do a whole show on metrics and things like that. So we’ll get into all of those other analytic tools and stuff but Google Analytics I think is our favorite.

BRANDON: Exactly. So you’re going to start looking at this data and you’re going to really start thinking the details of the data is kind of like the doubles in the details. It really is in this case because if you think about something like where the customer entered the system and then got to your site or whether they left the system and then came back and decided to purchase later.

MATT: Now, you’re getting controversial, right? So I mean there’s a huge dispute over you know if the customer came and they saw the word dog and they click through to your site, then they saw your product and then they thought about and two days later they came back and searched for your product name, which keyword sold them? Is it the first one when they first came into your site? Is that where you give credit to the conversion? Or is it the one right before they came and purchased?

BRANDON: I would assume that it was the first one because I’m looking for what caused them to find me. That’s more important to me than what was the keyword that they used to find me again.

MATT: The flipside of looking at that is well, the first word didn’t convince them to buy but the second one convinced them. That’s what sold them.

BRANDON: Yeah. I guess you could argue that.

MATT: I don’t know which one it is. I’d like to give credit to both of them. Unfortunately you can’t do that in Google but if you do so by default Google is last click wins which means the last keyword they clicked through on is the one that gets credit for the conversion. You can override that. They have some campaign query string variables you can add. There’s a UTM underscore no override equals one and if you do that and you add that to the landing page URL of your ad, that will make it a first click wins system.

BRANDON: Exactly. So there is now other reports that you could look at to see that and also a number of other performance indicators. There’s some sites that are doing it the best. Matt, you have some that you recommend?

MATT: Yeah. I mean within Google Adwords, there’s going to be a whole reporting section and if you’ve linked Google Analytics into you know you can link up your Google Analytics account with your Adwords account so they kind of act as one and they share all these information. So depending if you’ve done that or not, there’ll be a report section and one of the most important reports that you can have is the search query performance report and that’s going to basically tell you the real search terms that people searched on and which ads has got served and which ones got better click through rates based on that and I think the best thing you can find out about from this report is the search terms that your ads are being displayed for that you don’t want them to be displayed for. It’s a great report to find out what should be your negative keywords and we talked about those in the beginning. But you’ll see a search phrases as you know I used that speech pathology job earlier as an example, well, maybe I didn’t think about jobs before I did this and I just saw like I was getting hundreds and hundreds of searches with real phrases with the term jobs then, this is the report I would use to figure out that that’s what my ads were getting served for.

BRANDON: Right. Another great way to use it again this is the search query performance report, another great way to use it is to maybe learn that your keywords are doing well but you didn’t realized that they tacked on another word at the end of it that you just have never been running ads for. You know if you’re using red shoes as your keywords and red shoe high top was the most commonly searched for term that ended up getting to your site, maybe you want to start using high top in your campaign. So it can start giving you some ideas of different variations for your keyword.

MATT: Yeah. And if you’re on the content network kind of the equivalent really Kick Butt report I think is the placement performance report which is going to show you what sites your ads are doing well on or doing poorly on so you can actually say for you know XYZ.com, my ads aren’t doing very well on that site. I’m getting little click through, little conversion rate. But on you know on some othersite.com, I’m getting really good click through and I want you know really push more budget into that site and push more ads onto it.

BRANDON: So you’re going to get all these data. You’re going to be going through all these reports and eventually it comes time to refining your campaigns. I mean this is where it really gets down the rubber meets the road. You’re going to start wanting to use some negative keywords to shed out the irrelevant searches that you’re getting people on your website that you never really intended to have and then you’re going to want to start doing some split test ads to find out which ones are performing better and which ones aren’t. If you have some really low performing ads, drop them.

MATT: Yeah. I mean as you have all these ads, you put them in an ad group, you just never just have one ad in the ad group. You always have a couple in there. Maybe you vary them, you know one has an exclamation point, one doesn’t. Just very slight things and do this little test and you’ll eventually see that you know one’s getting a 4 percent click through rate and the other one is getting a 4.5 percent click through rate. Well, take the 4.5 and do another little variant on that and you get better and better by doing these subtle little improvements.

BRANDON: Yeah and another way that you’re going to really lower your cost is when you start finding those expensive keywords. Those keywords that are bringing you a lot of traffic but it’s not quality traffic. So you’ll start to shed some of those expensive keywords.

MATT: And those are my least favorite.

BRANDON: Yeah. And they can be expensive because you know you’re racking up all these traffic and you’re going, well, where’s the sales, right? It’s because you have low quality and you have to sometimes force yourself to weed out a lot of the broad terms, a lot of the broad keyword because the broad keywords are the ones that are going to bring you a lot of people but you know all over the world different people have these broad terms that are you know driving them to your site but they’re just not converting. So weed those out, after you get those out, and you kind of get an idea which ads run well you really start to hone your campaigns and it’s going to work for you so I think that’s kind of where you want to end up.

MATT: Yeah and so I mean looking out into the future but right now Google has a ton of great features. You know they’re introducing new stuff all the time. We’ve talked about like the mobile click to call. I think you’re going to see a lot more mobile focus from Google as they start to get more and more iPhones and android phones and Windows mobile 7 and whatever else you know devices that are going to come out. Another thing that they’re running betas on right now that I think is really cool is comparison ads where they’re starting to pull the transaction you know off your website and onto Google and they’re searching where they’re having comparison searches for things like credit card or mortgage rates where you know you can actually pretty much buy right on Google site or fill out contact information right on Google site and it gets forwarded onto you so they never even leave Google. So there’s all kinds of interesting things coming down the pipe.

BRANDON: Yeah. So if you haven’t gotten into an Adwords account and you have a website that you think you’d like to get more traffic to this is got to be one of the top recommended ways of driving more traffic. Although it’s not free, it’s pretty darn effective and it’s close to free if you think of it as a way of trading dollars for profit and I think it’s a well worth it if you do it right. It might take you little time to get used to but it’s worth it.

MATT: And I think it’s a great way to kind of figure out which keywords and which areas I should focus my SEO on because you can turn this on like within an hour and all of a sudden you’re getting all these traffic and you’re getting all these data, what’s converting, what’s not converting. I think it’s a great research tool to figure out hey I need to spend a month or two months of my people’s time focusing on getting SEO traffic for this because it’s a great converting keyword versus you know just trying to pick that out of the blue or use some of the keyword tools to do that. I can really prove it with Adwords and then go and deliver all that free traffic later on.

BRANDON: Exactly. So it’s a good testing bed for sure and there’s a lot of videos on YouTube that Google has posted on different areas of Adwords if you want to get more information about specific tool that you want to use. I would definitely recommend just jumping in and not being afraid to just put a few dollars on your budget and see what happens. Make sure you track it all. You know it will be smart to get that tracking code for your conversion tracking into your website as soon as you can, probably as soon as you set it up so that you can start tracking your conversions.

MATT: Yeah. Do that right away. Don’t delay on that.

BRANDON: Yeah. Don’t delay on that. I made that mistake. I started running my Adwords for a few weeks before I decided to put my conversion tracking code in there on my website and I really wish I had that data to work from but unfortunately I didn’t so it’s good to get that all set right from the beginning. So I think there’s a lot of information we shared today and for those who’ve already been running Adwords probably you know old hat but this is so important for anybody running an online business to be able to advertise through Google and all the other search engines.

MATT: Yeah. I think there’s a great place to really outsource this and hire someone to do it once you kind of get your feet wet and you understand how it works and you have the vocabulary to talk to them about what they’re doing and understand where you want to take the ad campaigns. So this is really you know a great place to bring in a specialist.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think you nailed it on the head right there is that the vocabulary is critical because this is such a new concept. I mean it really is. I mean yeah, Google has been around for 10 years now or so but it’s still such a new concept for businesses and it changes the way advertising has worked. So learn the vocabulary, become familiar with it and then start outsourcing it once you’ve kind of gotten to the edge of your knowledge base you know, and figured out you know you’ve done all you can. So I think it’s going to be helpful for all of you. I hope it is and if you have an opportunity to get on our iTunes account and give us a little rating and some feedback, we’d appreciate it.

MATT: Yeah. And go to AutomateMySmallBusiness.com to get any of the links and tools that we’ve talked about today. And also go on there and visit our community site and you know ask a question or answer a question that you want to answer in the community.

BRANDON: Thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you next week.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to AutomateMySmallBusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.

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