AdWords dude saying hello

[Andy Black]

I found this forum today when another member (tengen) linked to my blog and I spotted someone coming through from here in my Google Analytics account.

Wow, what a find. Not only is it a subject I love (growing your business - ethically), but it's a paid forum run in Xenforo.

I've just started a Xenforo paid forum about a month ago and have 4 signups so far. So this is like killing two birds with one stone!

I specialise in AdWords paid search, which I've been doing since 2009 ish. I was in a team of 35 AdWords specialists buying 1m clicks a day for €120k a day. I was their geek in the corner for a while, and then I managed the team for a bit. I then worked for a startup and built 120m keywords and ads to help them acquire 15k new signups a day.

I love demystifying AdWords paid search for people, and believe the biggest benefit of AdWords is not the traffic you can buy, but that you get to find out what your market actually wants, so you can sell it to them.

I'll order the book and read that, and probably pay into the INSIDERS as it seems amazing value.

I'm busy enough in my own forum, and in IMGrind and a few others but am very interested in learning from you all, as well as seeing how an Xenforo forum works.

Looking forward to learning and contributing.

Andy

 

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[Andy Black]

I'll trade ya adwords knowledge for seo knowledge

Lol... no thanks.

Paid search first, SEO a distant distant second. When you've worked out what search terms are bringing in the money, and how much each click costs, and how much a place on the organic results is worth for you, then you might want to bring in the SEO guns. I'd rather invest my time and money into increasing the conversion rates and average life-time-value (LTV) so that I can bid more.


Most people are attracted to the free clicks from SEO

... because they don't put a value on their time!


It's also much harder to work out the ROI for SEO because you don't see the cost-per-click. So you're tempted to keep doing something that isn't working and should have been shot a long while ago.

And if you think about the data that you can buy with AdWords, and so fast, that you can buy impressions using a crappy landing page and decide that the idea isn't worth persuing, then you'll realise that the biggest benefit of paid search is the market intelligence you gather, not the traffic you're buying. (Go read this post: Are You Only Buying Traffic?)

SEO takes so bleeding long.

Sooo, with all due respect, bollix to SEO.

 

[Andy Black]

Welcome to the forums

Just curious, how do you go about using adwords to find out what your market actually wants...by looking at the keywords that driving clicks (the ones that don't relate to what you're already selling)? Also what's your blog that tengen linked to?

Thanks for the welcome Yury.

It's not just the keywords driving clicks. That's looking at the small % of visitors that you got when people clicked on your ad.

If you're ad CTR was 3%, and you had 10,000 impressions in the month, then you'd have 300 clicks.

Most people will just analyse the 300 clicks and use Google Analytics to work out what they were doing on their site.

But what about the 9,700 that saw your ad and sailed on by? Which of your products or services received the most impressions?

And if your impression share was only 25% (meaning your ads showed 25% of the time that they could have shown), then you can actually work backwards and know that there were 40,000 eligible searches that your ads could have shown for. And you can determine the impression share and impressions for each of your products...


An example I did in the past was to load up "solicitors" and 40,000 locations in the UK.

I set a budget of £10 to run the next day from 8am. The budget was used up by 9am. We couldn't tell how long it took to use up the budget since the lowest reporting granularity for AdWords is an hour.

In under an hour we bought 13 clicks, and 700 impressions. Working backwards, we knew there were 4,000 searches.

With a blanket bid price for all 40,000 ad groups we could tell which locations had more competition (we were in a lower ad position).

We could have predicted that the most popular location was London, and this would be extremely competitive.

And that Birmingham would be next.

But what locations do you think appeared in the top for volumes?

And what locations had decent volumes and a decent ad position so that we'd be able to get clicks for this cheap bid price?

We bought a lot of data for £10



My blog, if I'm allowed to link to it, is www.andyblack.net

Moderators... delete away if I'm not allowed to link to anything yet.

 

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[Andy Black]

For people wondering how I get local businesses as clients (which I don't have many of by the way):

I don't consider myself an expert at face to face sales by any means, but off the top of my head...

Search Engine Marketing is all about being found by the people already looking for you. They are the easiest to sell to.

Once I started taking my own medicine and only taking inbound leads (word of mouth referrals, people finding me on LinkedIn), then everything fell into place.

Forget "selling"... it's all about helping them. If you focus on what they want, and not on what you want, then they see that and you're pushing against an open door.

Oh, and I know my website looks crap, but that's not the point. I only want to deal with people who are interested in the content, not the prettiness of the site. I will eventually beautify it, but it's not a high enough priority for me at the moment.

I am always open to meet businesses for a coffee. They buy me lunch, I waffle. It helps me to hone my stories.

I like telling stories. People remember stories, and I always tell the story about my brother-in-law.

I'm crap at closing, but I think that's mostly because I'm not really chasing the sale. If they're interested, they will circle back. If they aren't interested, I don't want to waste my time.

You *really* need to make sure you're not wasting your time on the wrong prospects.

Find out as quickly as you can whether they see the value in what you do, or the cost.

If the conversation is all about costs, then run. They will NEVER change, and they will always be squeezing you.

If their eyes light up because you provide exactly what they have been looking for, then you're in business (if you want it).

It's just then a case of working out HOW to align both your interests.

I've ended up going down the flat monthly rate route because that's how they mostly want to pay, and it's easiest for both parties.

Most small businesses have zero tracking, and most have a "budget" mentality rather than an "ROI" mentality.

"Let your customer pay you however they want to" was a line I read somewhere.

At the end of the day, a flat rate, % of PPC costs, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, % of profits, etc are all just different ways HOW to do the same thing.

Also, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with them, so trust your gut, and only work with people you enjoy the company of.

(The reality is that I like producing content, and coaching and training. So rather than run campaigns for small businesses, I'd rather create some sort of info product and/or subscription based coaching site that helps them to get better themselves. If I can get to 50% creating content/coaching and 50% managing campaigns, then I'll be happy.)

 

[Andy Black]

Wow. I've just realised I've crept over 3,000 posts on TFLF since joining on 20-May-14 (a day after my 43rd birthday!)

Looking forward to learning and contributing.

Yep... I've learned a shed-load in the past two years - mostly mindset stuff about how our biggest obstacle is ourselves.

Once you've immersed yourself in this forum for a little while you start to absorb the thought patterns and ways of thinking from other members.

When you read a new post and can predict what the responses will be from other members, then you'll realise you've just experienced the most incredible mentoring.

When you can predict the mindset of a poster purely from the subject line of their post, then you know you've made incredible progress yourself.



This thread you're reading here is the first one I created. I started how I meant to continue - which is adding value first with no expectation of anything in return.

In return, I've received back way more than I could ever have expected. Not monetary gains, but mindset shifts and a realisation that "I am enough". I don't "need" anything. I can just be and do. I can just "Go".

I'm much less in my own way than I was 2 years ago.

And the journey is more fun and less stressful.



Thank you @MJ DeMarco for creating this amazing place. Every business is a reflection of their owner. This forum is a reflection of the values and work ethic of the owner. It's what attracts and keeps so many other amazing forum members.

Thank you everyone in this forum for making this my home online.

 

[Andy Black]

Andy could you please start an AMA (Ask Me Anything) for adwords?

Hi tafy, Thanks for the compliment there.

I'm not quite ready yet to do an AMA, for a few reasons:

1) I'm chipping away at my own forum and blog

2) I've a Q&A area for my paid forum members, so don't want to devalue that

3) A lot of questions might be saved if I posted a lot of my free content in here anyway


What I'll do instead of an AMA is start posting the best stuff from my blog in here, and answer queries relating to each post. That would be better than linking out to my blog all the time which isn't best manners in someone else's forum.

If people read it all and still have questions, I might do an AMA. I find that I create my best content answering questions anyway. I just don't want to answer the same questions all the time.

I have a question about local search with adwords in crazy hard category where there's massive budgets

Let's have a guess...

When you say "massive budgets", I presume you mean that you believe your competitors are spending without getting a positive ROI.

Obviously it happens... CEOs of big Law Firms might like to see themselves in position 1 above their competitors, even if it means they are paying an insane CPC. It's often an ego thing, but it also helps the Marketing Manager look good.

Also, a lot of businesses do that "branding" exercise where they just want to be seen. Direct response is alien to them, and yes, they have a "budget" that they need to spend to get a bigger budget next year.

(As an aside: I have a big enough client that keeps talking about "budgets" all the time. The closest I came to converting them into the direct response mindset was a presentation I did for them recently. I recorded a video version here.)

Another issue is that most bricks and mortars businesses don't have any tracking in place to work out their ROI on AdWords spend anyway, and they've outsourced their campaign management to agencies who gets a % of the AdWords spend as their revenue. Not really conducive to running profitably is it?

Right so. How would you compete against these massive, slow moving, "what's a landing page?", budget mentality giants?

... when you're an agile, aggressive, ROI driven, direct response attack dog?

(Is that a leading question?)

Find the weak underbelly in the market, and focus all your resources there.

So no more wide funnels. Go very very narrow. Make sure your ad CTR is better than theirs, and keep improving it. Use all the available weapons you can... sitelinks, call extensions, extended headlines, social extensions, reviews, etc.

Then, to afford to bid more, you're going to have to increase your EPC. (Cos if your CPC is higher than your EPC, then you're going to be negative ROI right?)

How do you increase your EPC? (Note that I called it RPC in the video linked to above because a bricks and mortars business calls it "Revenue", and not "Earnings".)

Increase your conversion rates for starters. If you get more conversions for the same spend, then your profits and margins are higher. Your CPA has also fallen, so you can push bids to get back up to your previous CPA.

And build a deeper funnel.

Turn buyers into repeat buyers (aka customers).

Make 'em happy so that they bring their friends and become referrers for you.

INCREASE AVERAGE VISITOR LIFE-TIME-VALUE.

BY ADDING VALUE.

Keep fixing leaks, and increasing LTV, and ratcheting open the traffic at the top of the funnel (pushing bids).


So in summary, forget wide and shallow funnels, and build narrow and deep ones instead.

Get profitable somewhere, then rinse and repeat.

And make sure you read the awesome thread by @limitup here.

 

[Andy Black]

Great intro and welcome to the forums @Andy Black!

Do you have much experience with search and mobile?

I specialize in mobile display advertising (my day job) but haven't tried hitting search yet. It's been about 4 years since I bought traffic on search and we have some big clients that are interested in that traffic.

If you have experience there, how is mobile search different than web? Are there any different restrictions? Can we direct link straight to our advertisers' app store page/lead form/whatever?

Appreciate any input you have and if you have any questions on mobile display, feel free to ask or PM me.

Thanks for the welcome frieden70

I just do search, and across all the devices. I haven't done any mobile display advertising, and only limited web/desktop display advertising.

I prefer search as I get to see where my ads are placed, what they look like compared to the competitors', and my simple brain understands search intent - when someone looks for "plumber jobs dublin", then I have a good idea what they're looking for! I need it plain and simple like that... I'm just a dumb bloke who can't work out what his wife means when she says "yes, that's nice".

I also prefer search as I think this is the best form of (cold) traffic. If you can't sell to someone who's actively looking for your solution, then how can you sell to tire-kickers? Search traffic is also incredibly consistent (if you get your match types right), so I think it's the best traffic to use to find and fix the leaks in your funnel, before you send other traffic down it. I actually think this is a bigger benefit than getting traffic - use it to hone your funnels, and then you can almost turn off AdWords and get traffic in via other channels.


"Direct link"... I'm not even sure what that means to tell you the truth. You can point to where-ever you want. How does Google know whether you own the domain or not? There are of course problems linking to a domain you don't own:

1) If there are lots of other advertisers (affiliates) linking to the same domain, then you're all competing with each other for the impressions (since Google won't show more than one ad per domain).

2) You're screwed if the landing page is non-compliant, since you can't change it to make it compliant.



I'd love to learn a bit more about mobile display. Maybe we can do a Skype session with screenshare and swap notes?

 

[Andy Black]

I've just reread my intro from back in May-2014.

It's interesting to see how things have progressed.


# The value bombing commences

Within two weeks of joining I was dropping content from my blog into the forum and eventually created a master index thread here:

• Andy's AdWords Posts

# My goal

I've just written up how I was USING the forum for my own gains in this post:

• Fastlane Paradox

# Why I wasn't using TFLF as "lead gen"

Here's why I wasn't building a funnel to siphon people from TFLF to my own blog and list:

1) It's just damn rude.

2) It's just damn stupid.

Read this fella:

• Clarity of purpose

# Good things happen when your goal is to help more people

Wow... this thread choked me up.

It was totally unexpected, and I had no idea how far giving a little bit of attention goes.

What surprised me was how little my AdWords knowledge had to do with it - at a guess, probably 0% ?

• Congrats Andy Black

• The gift of attention

# What's YOUR takeaways?

What will you do differently now?

What will you do more of now?​

 

[Andy Black]

Went on IMGrind recently for the first time, information overload. I'll revisit it once I need help on a specific need I help with...otherwise it's impossible to keep up with all the great content that's produced every day.

IMGrind is a gold mine, but be careful - gold has a habit of distracting you from what you planned to do.

The most dangerous distraction is opportunity, because it comes disguised...

EDIT: But seriously, it's an absolute gold mine!

 

[Andy Black]

Man this is great, I am really trying to get educated on this stuff right now as it is the next natural step for my business - and also totally new for me.

Thanks for bringing the value right up front. I looked at your blog for a few and it looks like it is also totally based on value to the reader.

Thanks again

You're welcome man.

The secret to paid search? Give people what they are looking for.

So I have to take my own medicine and do the same.

 

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[Tengen]

Great to see you here Andy!

 

[Andy Black]

Welcome! There is plenty to learn here. I hope you enjoy your stay here

@JasonR maybe he knows how to increase your 5k budget

Thanks for the welcome also kaloenneli.

Hmmm... is someone trying to spend more? I hate calling it a "budget" btw... it's "spend" or "cost", hopefully "investment". It's a running battle I have with clients' accounts departments - "So you want us to stop the campaigns now that we've hit *budget* for the month? Even though we're positive ROI?"

The short answer is to increase CTR so you get more clicks (unless you've increased it by reducing impressions of course).

The best answer is to increase EPCs, so you can bid more.


EDIT: Holy cr@p, but this forum is busy! I'm off to bed, great to be in such a busy forum.

 

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[Y.B.]

Went on IMGrind recently for the first time, information overload. I'll revisit it once I need help on a specific need I help with...otherwise it's impossible to keep up with all the great content that's produced every day.

 

[Andy Black]

Ok specifically I mean local search in regards to hotels

The big OTA pay big fat CPC rates to guarantee the top2 spots, any local hotel finds it seriously hard to beat that, also the conversions are terrible as they still book on the OTA.

OTAs are easy to beat. Their ads are bland and formulaic. Write a better ad, use better sitelinks. Put the words from the search term into the ad headline. Use extended headlines.

Craft your ad with more love and attention.

 

[Y.B.]

Welcome to the forums

Just curious, how do you go about using adwords to find out what your market actually wants...by looking at the keywords that driving clicks (the ones that don't relate to what you're already selling)? Also what's your blog that tengen linked to?

 

[adoredunchin]

I didn't see anything in the thread about a $5k budget. What am I missing?

maybe I'm not up-to-date but last time I checked your thread you said you have a 5k limit in your adsense account?
Andy says he had 120k budget per day. So I thought he might give you some tipps. But perhaps I have a bad memory

 

[frieden70]

Great intro and welcome to the forums @Andy Black!

Do you have much experience with search and mobile?

I specialize in mobile display advertising (my day job) but haven't tried hitting search yet. It's been about 4 years since I bought traffic on search and we have some big clients that are interested in that traffic.

If you have experience there, how is mobile search different than web? Are there any different restrictions? Can we direct link straight to our advertisers' app store page/lead form/whatever?

Appreciate any input you have and if you have any questions on mobile display, feel free to ask or PM me.

 

[Andy Black]

How do you up this? Adwords takes $350 out of my account every couple of days. Not that it makes my life harder, but I would prefer an end-of-month withdrawal instead.

Not sure you can change this. It will depend on your history of spend.

I know that for a company I worked for, they were able to pay their Google bill after their Yahoo revenue came in. Nice for cashflow...

 

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[pickeringmt]

Man this is great, I am really trying to get educated on this stuff right now as it is the next natural step for my business - and also totally new for me.

Thanks for bringing the value right up front. I looked at your blog for a few and it looks like it is also totally based on value to the reader.

Thanks again

 

[frieden70]

I'll PM you so we can chat a bit more to see if we can provide eachother value but some of the points you bring up could be of value to other peeps here

Thanks for the welcome frieden70

"Direct link"... I'm not even sure what that means to tell you the truth. You can point to where-ever you want. How does Google know whether you own the domain or not? There are of course problems linking to a domain you don't own:

"Direct Link" refers to linking directly to the advertiser's web page/offer/etc. So no landing page or splash page. I know google banned a lot of that practice (or at least made it much more difficult) than it used to be. This of course, makes sense since they don't want a shit ton of the same advertisers showing up for the same search terms. You pointed that out in 1) below

2) You're screwed if the landing page is non-compliant, since you can't change it to make it compliant.

Absolutely. I'm curious to see what is and isn't compliant as far as mobile is concerned.

BTW, is your search experience solely adwords or do you work with other search partners?

Thanks and take care!

 

[Andy Black]

is your search experience solely adwords or do you work with other search partners?

I just use AdWords, and paid search. I prefer to get really really good at one thing.

 

[Andy Black]

Welcome to the Fastlane, Andy!

I have actually been reading your blog, which I found through IMGrind (which, in turn, I found on here), so it's a big circle!

Glad you have you here, hope you enjoy the boards (I see you're an INSIDERS already, yay!) and if you have any questions or anything, feel free to PM me and I'll see what I can do for you.

Thanks Fiona. Yes, I recognise your avatar from IMGrind.

Funny how you found my blog before I signed up in here. Big circles like you say.

I'm not used to thinking in circles... everything for me is a straight line and direct response. I shall have to mull this over and see what I can learn from it.

 

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[tafy]

Andy could you please start an AMA (Ask Me Anything) for adwords?
I have a question about local search with adwords in crazy hard category where there's massive budgets

 

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[Raedrum]

Lol... no thanks.

Paid search first, SEO a distant distant second. When you've worked out what search terms are bringing in the money, and how much each click costs, and how much a place on the organic results is worth for you, then you might want to bring in the SEO guns. I'd rather invest my time and money into increasing the conversion rates and average life-time-value (LTV) so that I can bid more.


Most people are attracted to the free clicks from SEO

... because they don't put a value on their time!


It's also much harder to work out the ROI for SEO because you don't see the cost-per-click. So you're tempted to keep doing something that isn't working and should have been shot a long while ago.

And if you think about the data that you can buy with AdWords, and so fast, that you can buy impressions using a crappy landing page and decide that the idea isn't worth persuing, then you'll realise that the biggest benefit of paid search is the market intelligence you gather, not the traffic you're buying. (Go read this post: Are You Only Buying Traffic?)

SEO takes so bleeding long.

Sooo, with all due respect, bollix to SEO.

I think this is the reason why I began to do websites a year ago and never really bother about SEO. Not knowing exactly why but I had the feeling that this will be a waste of time. Now I know why thank to you ^^ I'll do a little SEO and a lot of SEA. This way I have control and can see where I go from the data I will collect.

For people wondering how I get local businesses as clients (which I don't have many of by the way):

I don't consider myself an expert at face to face sales by any means, but off the top of my head...

Search Engine Marketing is all about being found by the people already looking for you. They are the easiest to sell to.

Once I started taking my own medicine and only taking inbound leads (word of mouth referrals, people finding me on LinkedIn), then everything fell into place.

Forget "selling"... it's all about helping them. If you focus on what they want, and not on what you want, then they see that and you're pushing against an open door.

Oh, and I know my website looks crap, but that's not the point. I only want to deal with people who are interested in the content, not the prettiness of the site. I will eventually beautify it, but it's not a high enough priority for me at the moment.

I am always open to meet businesses for a coffee. They buy me lunch, I waffle. It helps me to hone my stories.

I like telling stories. People remember stories, and I always tell the story about my brother-in-law.

I'm crap at closing, but I think that's mostly because I'm not really chasing the sale. If they're interested, they will circle back. If they aren't interested, I don't want to waste my time.

You *really* need to make sure you're not wasting your time on the wrong prospects.

Find out as quickly as you can whether they see the value in what you do, or the cost.

If the conversation is all about costs, then run. They will NEVER change, and they will always be squeezing you.

If their eyes light up because you provide exactly what they have been looking for, then you're in business (if you want it).

It's just then a case of working out HOW to align both your interests.

I've ended up going down the flat monthly rate route because that's how they mostly want to pay, and it's easiest for both parties.

Most small businesses have zero tracking, and most have a "budget" mentality rather than an "ROI" mentality.

"Let your customer pay you however they want to" was a line I read somewhere.

At the end of the day, a flat rate, % of PPC costs, pay-per-lead, pay-per-sale, % of profits, etc are all just different ways HOW to do the same thing.

Also, you're going to spend a lot of time dealing with them, so trust your gut, and only work with people you enjoy the company of.

(The reality is that I like producing content, and coaching and training. So rather than run campaigns for small businesses, I'd rather create some sort of info product and/or subscription based coaching site that helps them to get better themselves. If I can get to 50% creating content/coaching and 50% managing campaigns, then I'll be happy.)

I sure waste a sh*** load of time trying to convince people to buy me things instead of placing myself in front of people who want something I can offer. Worst is that I had hints but didn't see it, too me-focused. Listening to your interviews make me do progress about that and my results have already augmented.

Wow. I've just realised I've crept over 3,000 posts on TFLF since joining on 20-May-14 (a day after my 43rd birthday!)




Yep... I've learned a shed-load in the past two years - mostly mindset stuff about how our biggest obstacle is ourselves.

Once you've immersed yourself in this forum for a little while you start to absorb the thought patterns and ways of thinking from other members.

When you read a new post and can predict what the responses will be from other members, then you'll realise you've just experienced the most incredible mentoring.

When you can predict the mindset of a poster purely from the subject line of their post, then you know you've made incredible progress yourself.



This thread you're reading here is the first one I created. I started how I meant to continue - which is adding value first with no expectation of anything in return.

In return, I've received back way more than I could ever have expected. Not monetary gains, but mindset shifts and a realisation that "I am enough". I don't "need" anything. I can just be and do. I can just "Go".

I'm much less in my own way than I was 2 years ago.

And the journey is more fun and less stressful.



Thank you @MJ DeMarco for creating this amazing place. Every business is a reflection of their owner. This forum is a reflection of the values and work ethic of the owner. It's what attracts and keeps so many other amazing forum members.

Thank you everyone in this forum for making this my home online.

I'm experiencing that too, this is nice and comfort me in the idea that I'm in the right path.

EDIT: yes I'm digging up all your past posts hehehe

 

[adoredunchin]

Welcome! There is plenty to learn here. I hope you enjoy your stay here

@JasonR maybe he knows how to increase your 5k budget

 

[JasonR]

maybe he knows how to increase your 5k budget

I didn't see anything in the thread about a $5k budget. What am I missing?

 

[DeletedUser2]

coolio!

and good intro!!
Z

 

[JasonR]

Ah - I misunderstood.

My budget is $15k right now. Thanks man.

 

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[randomnumber314]

Ah - I misunderstood.
My budget is $15k right now. Thanks man.

How do you up this? Adwords takes $350 out of my account every couple of days. Not that it makes my life harder, but I would prefer an end-of-month withdrawal instead.

 

[Eskil]

From one Adwords dude to another - welcome aboard

(Did you ever hang out on Wickedfire too?)