The Growth Booth

Google Ads: Lessons & Mistakes From Our Google Guru | The Growth Booth #48

December 06, 2022 Aidan Booth Season 1 Episode 48
The Growth Booth
Google Ads: Lessons & Mistakes From Our Google Guru | The Growth Booth #48
Show Notes Transcript

95% of Google’s revenue comes from Google Ads… how can you use that to your advantage?

Welcome to the 48th episode of The Growth Booth Podcast, a show focused on supporting budding entrepreneurs and established business owners alike, towards achieving lifestyle freedom through building successful online businesses.

This week, Aidan talks about Google Ads with Larry O’Conners, our in-house Google Ads guru with a decade of experience running Google Ads campaigns. Discover the 101 of Google Ads: from how much it costs for a single click, how to start an ad campaign, to how to identify negative keywords.

Whether you're looking for step-by-step strategies to start building an online business, simple game plans to grow your business, or proven lifestyle freedom frameworks, you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned and be sure to join the thousands of listeners already in growth mode!


Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:31 Google Ads Experience

04:09 Ads You Can Run

05:23 How Much Is One Ad?

10:01 Should My Business Be Doing Ads?

13:22 From The Start, Please

21:47 Budgeting with Google

25:10 Where Do Keywords Go?

27:37 Google Ads Policies

31:18 Negative Keywords

35:29 Outro


Links and Resources Mentioned:


About Our Host:

Aidan Booth is passionate about lifestyle freedom and has focused on building online businesses to achieve this since 2005. From affiliate marketing to eCommerce, small business marketing to SAAS (software as a service), online education to speaking at seminars, the journey has been a rollercoaster ride with plenty of thrills along the way. Aidan is proud to have helped thousands of entrepreneurs earn their first dollar online, and coached many people to build million-dollar businesses. Aidan and his business partner (Steven Clayton) are the #1 ranked vendors on Clickbank.com, and sell their products in over 100 countries globally, as well as in 20,000+ stores across the USA, to generate 8-figures annually.

Away from the online world, Aidan is a proud Dad of two young kids, an avid investor, a swimming enthusiast, and a nomadic traveler.

 

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Hey, everyone. Aidan Booth here. Welcome to episode number 48 of The Growth Booth, where today we're going to be talking about the ‘what’, the ‘when’, the ‘why’, and the ‘how’ of AdWords, Google Ads as it's known these days, and how you can use Google Advertising, some things you might not know about it. I've got someone who is an absolute expert, through and through expert with about a decade of Google Ads experience on the call. This is someone who is our in-house Google Advertising Manager and is a specialist in everything related to Google Ads now. His name is Larry O'Conners.

 

Aidan

Larry, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day to be with us.

 

Larry

No problem, Aidan. Glad to be here.

 

Aidan

And you probably can tell from Larry's accent that he's up in Ireland. I'm just hoping that you're not going to start talking too fast or you're going to lose all of us, I included.

 

Larry

I remember that.

 

Aidan

Yeah, make sure you remember that. So, I did tell Larry that I wanted the theme of the show today to sort of be to imagine that we were talking about Google Ads and diving into it as if we were sitting down at the pub and he was talking to one of his good mates who didn't really know all that much about Google Ads. So, we are going to be talking from a very sort of beginner's standpoint, and hopefully, we'll be filling in some gaps that you may have and also sharing a lot of experience about things that have worked for us in running ads to software businesses, to physical product businesses, to info product businesses and everything in between.

 

The thing about Google is - whether you love Google, whether you hate Google - it's a massive opportunity. I remember when I got started with Google Ads, it was about 2007, and it was completely different from what it was today. I mean, that was in the infancy, I guess, of Google Advertising. And it's a very mature, serious platform nowadays. In fact, I was actually booted off and banned from Google Ads in about 2008. Is that something that's ever happened to you? Larry, have you ever been banned from Google Ads?

 

Larry

Oh, yes. I think if you haven't Aidan - being on the platform this long - then you haven't really experienced it. But yes, I have. Yeah.

 

Aidan

It seems part of the course. It seems like it's something that happens. But the good news is that over time, Google has matured. And in my case, for example, I was banned originally back in about 2008, and I could easily get my account back and I go on to do lots and lots of ads on Google. Something interesting that I found when doing some research for this episode here today was Google generates something like 95% of its revenue from Google Ads. Now, obviously, Google has got a whole range of different parts to their business, but over 95% of their revenue comes from ads. So clearly it is by far and away the most important part of the Google business. And that's, I guess, why they look after it and they're always trying to make it better. So, Larry, let's dive into this. When people talk about Google Ads, what exactly are they talking about? Maybe you could give a bit of an overview of the different types of ads and exactly what it is.

 

Larry

Yeah. So Google Ads is actually Google's online advertising program. Through Google Ads, you can create online ads with it to reach people exactly when they're interested in the products and services that you offer. No doubt you've seen that when you type in a keyword phrase, you see there are some ads at the top and maybe some ads at the bottom. And then you might see some image ads and stuff like that. That's when you know that Google is making all their money, so people pay to be in those places as such. Okay, one of the things - Google Accounts is actually from the Google Ads platform. It's free to set up. All you need is a Google account. So if you have a Gmail account, some people might have a GSuite account, as long as you have a Google Account, you can actually set up Google Ads and it's actually free to use.

 

Aidan

And how much does it cost to run an ad and to get a click, let's say? And obviously, this is like asking how long is a piece of string. But could you give people some parameters around what might be the low end of a keyword cost and the high end?

 

Larry

Well, realistically, you could potentially run a $5 ad, I'm not saying that the cost per click is going to be that, but realistically, you can run budgets as low as $5 and you can go up to thousands per day. Now, depending obviously, on the niche that you're in, we can vary. Clicks can cost anywhere from a couple of cents up to, I think, our most expensive one that we’re running from our software product, that was $67 per click. Yes, and if you're in the insurance space, it could even be above that. I hear that there are cases where it could be even like $98 to $100 per click. It really does depend on what industry you're in. But like for small businesses, for example, you could be paying probably anything from maybe one dollar to maybe two to $3 Realistically.

 

Aidan

Is there a way that you can find this out? Is there a way you can find that out before you start running the campaign?

 

Larry

Yes, there is. Actually, Google has its own keyword tool now. It's called a keyword planner. If you just type into Google's Keyword Planner, you will get their keyword tool. There's a link there. It's usually at the top of the search results. And what's great about this keyword tool is it shows you search volume. You simply type in a keyword phrase and it will give you search volume and it'll also give you the average cost per click. Now, what I will say is I always treat those figures as relative. I would never treat them as absolutes. So, for example, if you typed in a keyword phrase if you were selling bikes, for example, and you wanted to advertise online and you typed in like ‘mountain bikes’, let's say, for example, a keyword phrase for mountain bikes was 1000 searches a month. It will give you search volume and it also gives you an average cost per click. So that average cost per click, maybe they might say $0.90 or $1.0. But I just think it's important to note to never treat that as an absolute figure. Treat it more as a relative figure. It engages with what you might be paying and the average search volume then.

 

Aidan

Yeah, right. It's a gauge and it's something that you could compare to other keywords. You might be in the biking niche, and considering running ads on ‘mountain bike’, you might also be in the weight loss niche. If you're in the weight loss niche, the word ‘weight loss’ might have a search volume of 100,000 a month or something. ‘Mountain bike’ might have 10,000 a month. And what you can take away from that is in orders of magnitude, you're going to be getting a lot more traffic for returns like ‘weight loss’. And the same with the cost per click. Mountain Bike might have a cost per click of, let's say, $2. Weight loss might have a cost per click of $10. These are estimates. And what you take away from that is it's going to be more expensive running a keyword like weight loss?

 

Larry

Yes, absolutely. Because there's probably a lot more competition. It's related to competition there as well. Google knows, for example, if you're a local business, you're a dentist, for example, or if you're a solicitor, they will charge a lot more cost per click because they know that people are in that market, they know that they can actually charge a lot more. It comes down to what they know that they can charge, and actually, competition.

 

Aidan

It really comes down to supply and demand. If you've got a lot of people who are willing to spend money and there's a limited amount of traffic, then you know, it's like a free market essentially. And in fact, do you see that with the different campaigns that you're running at different times of the year, the prices fluctuate, and the amount that you pay per click fluctuates?

 

Larry

Absolutely. Yeah. Definitely Q4 is always more expensive and actually oftentimes can be up to 30% more expensive. It's like big businesses are coming in and maybe they have budget spend towards the end of the year. And yet at a cost per click, we find August, kind of November, December all goes up about between 10% and 25%. So yeah, Q4 is always a bit of a nightmare for that.

 

Aidan

And also, depending on what you're doing, sometimes we might even pause some of our ad campaigns, not just necessarily because of the price going up, but also in physical products. Shipping can become an issue. If there are delays around logistics and so forth, or someone wants to get something delivered to them before Christmas, then we don't want to be running ads driving sales if we're not going to be able to deliver by Christmas. So sometimes we actually pause ad campaigns for multiple reasons. I do see that online traffic, not only do costs increase for getting clicks in the fourth quarter, but the amount of traffic increases as well. So this must be a time of year that Google probably loves because they're making a lot of money.

 

I think also to your point, you mentioned a lot of corporations and big businesses have got marketing budgets and they need to spend their marketing budget. If they get towards the end of the year and they've got all this money left, then they just go out there and have a field day and spend it sometimes.

 

There are lots of reasons why costs tend to go up in the fourth quarter, but most of it comes down to higher demand and more people wanting to run ads. Now, on that note, what type of businesses could Google Ads work for? Is it something that is only going to be working for physical products? Or can you give us an example of some of the different industries that would use Google Ads?

 

Larry

Yeah, I would say actually, Aidan, that Google Ads could be a strong platform for most businesses that offer any type of product or service. The Google Ads platform has many different offerings, and product offerings, right? At a high level, say you've got your standard search ad type. You type in the keyword trades and you see the ads coming up. You also have what is called shopping ads. If you're an e-commerce store, they are a great way to get traction. Also within the Google Ads platform, they have video ads so you can advertise on YouTube. And a new ad product they have now is also called local store visits. So, for example, if you own a physical store, maybe like a restaurant or a dealership, now you do need what is called a business profile for that to link in with Google Ads. But that can be a great way for the likes of a restaurant or a dealership to actually advertise on Google Ads.

 

And also one that's been there for a good while, it's called Display Ads. So that's basically the Google content network. Like they've got millions of sites on the Internet and you could actually advertise on there. And one thing that the Display Ads products can be good for is actually something we refer to as retargeting or remarketing. If somebody visits your website and doesn't take an action, which oftentimes can be up to 60% or 70% or even above, you can actually target these guys and kind of follow up using the Google Content Network. It can be a great way of getting an ROI on that as well.

 

Aidan

Right, okay. So that gives us a good bit of an overview of the types of businesses and how they can sort of run ads. But if you are starting out a new campaign, so you're starting with a new business, a new campaign, could you share a little bit about your mindset and the process you go through? Let's say you've just started working on a new project, it could be related to anything. You can decide that. How do you go about getting started with a campaign? When you begin, do you do some research? Where do you start?

 

Larry

Yeah, so I suppose the first thing I would do and I would recommend is rather than diving straight into the actual platform itself, as I said, I would do some research. What I would do is, for example, actually just create a simple Google Document and I would start my keyword research and I would use the Google Keyword Planner tool for that. Whatever product our business I was offering, continuing our example of a bike shop, it was a local bike shop, and I want to start advertising online. I would type in maybe one or two bike types that I might be looking at advertising. For example, the mountain bike. I type that into my primary keyword phrase into the keyword tool, and I would look to get a good gauge of what the search volume and price per click was from the Google Keyword Tool.

 

Starting out, I would probably list out maybe 20 to 30 keywords that I felt were good search volume. And what I would do then is I would theme those keywords, and this is a very important thing actually to highlight, I would theme those keywords. So rather than actually using 20 keywords in one single campaign or an ad group in a single campaign, and we can talk about that a little bit further on, I would look at theming those ad groups into maybe a single group.

 

Aidan

When you say theming them, you're talking about putting them into groups that are related to one another?

 

Larry

Yes, like focus, if I would call it. I'll give you an example here to probably explain a little bit further. So, for example, after my research, if I found that there was some search volume, I give you three or four keywords, for example, and I found a search volume on the likes of the keyword phrase called ‘Discount Mountain Bikes’. Maybe there was a second keyword phrase there called ‘Best Mountain Bikes’. And maybe there were two or three other keyword phrases there that were actually brand-driven, so maybe ‘Polygon Mountain bike for sale’. That could be a keyword phrase. Or ‘Discount Polygon Mountain Bike’. I give you an example where there are four keyword phrases, and even though there are only four keyword phrases, I wouldn't actually just put those four keyword phrases in a single ad group. What I would do, and I give you my reason behind it as well, what I would do is I would put the ‘Discount Mountain Bikes’ and the ‘Best Mountain Bikes’ into one ad group, and then I would put the ‘Polygon Mountain Bikes for Sale’ and the ‘Discount Polygon Mountain Bikes for Sale’ into another ad group.

 

And my reasoning for that is the person that types in the likes of ‘Best Mountain Bike’, they're earlier on in their research, so they're not 100% on what type of bike they will get. What you're better off doing is when you're creating your ad with your keyword, you're better off sending them to a page, say a category page on your e-commerce store, that's all to do with mountain bikes. Whereas the ‘Polygon Mountain Bike For Sale’ keyword phrase, you're much better off creating a separate ad for that, a separate ad group, and then sending them to the Polygon as in a brand page about if you had your Polygon brand page on your website.

 

It all comes down to relevancy in relation to what Google is looking for. When they want users, they're in to have a good user experience. It's very important to create campaigns and ad groups that have buckets so that it's easy for people and when they type in a keyword phrase, your ad is very related to that keyword phrase and you're also taking them to a landing page that is related to that keyword phrase. By doing something like that, you're more likely to get a conversion rather than creating just one single campaign and one ad and maybe having 20 to 30 keyword phrases inside. And that and it's probably the biggest mistake that newbies to Google Ads actually make. They do their research and they might use the Google Keyword tool, but they probably might only end up creating a single ad with maybe 20 or 30 keywords inside of that ad. It's very hard to create a relevant ad when you've got that amount of keywords, so the tighter your keyword ad group is to your ad and also to your landing page, the more likely you are to get that conversion.

 

Aidan

Right, just going back a little bit. When you go about starting initially, do you write out a list? You do go to Google Planner. Do you start writing out a big list or noting down a big list of all the different potential keywords, and then you sort them? One related to this example here, is the ‘best Mountain Bike’, ‘discount Mountain bike’. They write at the start of their sort of research process, and then further down the line, they might be looking for brand-specific. You come up with a big list of keywords, and then you sort them out into different groups, which you refer to as themes. And then at that point, what do you do? Once you've got all of these keywords mapped out, what's the next step? Do you sort of load them up into Google?

 

Larry

Yeah, you have all your information inside in your document, so then you would just go to the Google Ads platform, so that's ads.google.com, okay? And once you have that, you have a Google account, you can just go in and there's a button in there. Then it's just straight into actually creating a campaign.

 

You've got three different levels. When you're creating a campaign, you've got a campaign level where you put in your budgets and your location is in the area you want to target. Then underneath that you've got ad groups, and that's where you put in your keyword phrases, okay? And then you have below that, then you would actually create your ad. That's where you put in your headline, your description, and the actual landing page that you want the traffic to go to.

 

Aidan

Okay, so let's say that you've done your research. You've come up with, just for arguments, 30 different keywords, and there are three different themes there. Would each one of those themes be a different ad group? Is that what you say?

 

Larry

Yes. Each one of those themes would be a different ad group. And more often than not, they may actually then go to separate landing pages on your site as well. So, again, if we use the analogy of the bikes, if we had like three different types of ad campaign one for ‘mountain bikes’, and maybe we had one for ‘electric bikes’, we did a campaign for mountain bikes, we have a campaign for electric bikes, we have a campaign for road bikes, for example, and then within that, you have your silo of ad groups, as in your tightly teamed keyword groups. And then you would send those separate landing pages rather than sending them to the home page. Again, this is a problem that a lot of newbies make, that they will send those teamed ad groups. They will send them all, for example, to the home page. You are probably better off if you have a silo ad group about a specific part that you would create separate landing pages on your website for that.

 

Aidan

Yup. Okay, so you upload these keywords, and you've got them all organized. You've gone out and you've made custom pages to make the landing pages very specific and related to the keywords. How do you know what to spend at this point? You've got 30 different keywords there. Obviously, you could say, “Well, my available budget is $50 a day.” What do you do? Do you just put $50 a day in Google and let Google do the rest?

 

Larry

Yes, as such. You decide on what you're prepared to spend on a daily basis. And more often than not, Google will stick to that. Now, there are times that they may end up spending $60 or $70, and then other days they might just spend $30, but over the norm of the course of a month. In general, if you say $50 a day, Google is good, and around that $50 mark is what they will spend the day. Now, you would also base that on your keyword research. You probably would have found out what the average cost per click was from the Google Keyword Planner tool. And then based on that, you might decide what your daily budget is. So rather than just picking a figure out of the year, you base it on, maybe some research that you did. You got the average cost per click, and then you decided, “Okay, if the average cost per click on these keywords is, let's say it's $2,” then you might decide, “Okay, look, listen, I can afford to spend 50 or I can afford to spend $100 a day or whatever.”

 

It's up to you how much you actually spend. There's no prerequisite that you have to be spending X amount a day.  As I said earlier on, you can probably go as low as $5 if you wanted to just test the waters. But ideally, if your individual cost per click on each keyword is $2, you might only get three clicks or whatever. But I just wanted to give you an example there. There's no prerequisite that you have to spend the next amount. You can decide what your budget is, which is good.

 

Aidan

You can always sort of dip your toes in the water there and start with a teeny tiny budget just to kind of understand how it works and to start seeing some activity. And you can do that without much fear, really, because what's the worst that could happen? You could make a mistake on the keywords you're selecting or the landing page, and you might be $5 out of pocket. Obviously, if you're spending $500 or $5,000 a day, then you want to make sure things are really dialed in. But you only ever get to those numbers when you're sort of gradually scaling anyway. It's not like you just start off there on day one.

 

Larry

Correct? Yeah, I'm just wanting to add as well, just as part of the setup at the campaign level, there is an option to have a start and an end date. So, for example, if you weren't comfortable about, as you said, you were just testing the waters, it may not be a bad thing to actually maybe put an end date on that campaign rather than just leaving it there. Because we have heard horror stories of somebody starting a Google Ads campaign.

 

Aidan

Forgetting to turn it off?

 

Larry

So going back to Google and telling them, “Look, you're after charging me X amount off my credit card, you shouldn't have.” They've heard all of this before. They would just take that money from the credit card. So, if you're testing the waters and have never worked with Google Ads before, just a recommendation there, put in a start and an end date.

 

Aidan

You've mentioned a couple of things already that people who are getting started, or even not people are getting started, but people tend to mess up. One of them was about landing pages, not being specific and targeted to the keywords. If someone is searching for a mountain bike to buy and you start showing them e-bikes, then obviously that's not really applicable. Or if someone is looking for a road bike and you start showing them mountain bikes, then there's incongruity. That's one mistake that people make with their landing pages. Are there other things that people seem to mess up as well or common sort of pitfalls that people fall into that you can think of?

 

Larry

Yeah, I guess it would be kind of a lazy setup if I would call it - and I referenced it earlier. It's maybe like they do their research and they spend the time doing their research, but they just decide to throw all the keywords into a single ad group and actually send us to either the home page or a single page. Now that's a recipe for disaster because what actually happens there is Google sees that you didn't take the time and effort to structure your campaign properly, and as a result is likely to consider that a bad user experience for people that are typing in a keyword phrase. Number one, you might not get a good click-through rate on your ad, and secondly, Google might charge you more for that because they just see that you didn't structure the campaign correctly.

 

So that's probably one of the biggest things that I see happening with people who start off with Google Ads for the first time. Yes, they will do their keyword research, but they kind of just throw all the keywords in, do a single ad and expect it to work. And when it doesn't, they blame the Google Ads platform when it's such that they didn't actually set it up correctly.

 

Aidan

One of the things I've always loved about running Google Ads is you can get very granular with the data and you can see what's working and you can see what's not working. And it's fairly easy to pinpoint where a problem is because either maybe the keyword that you've chosen is maybe it's too expensive or maybe it doesn't have enough search volume, or maybe it does have enough search volume and it does tick the box regarding price, but then your landing page doesn't convert. And I think if you are willing to dive into some of the data, you can really pinpoint where potential problems are and where potential opportunities are. Another thing that I think people sometimes mess up is, and I certainly messed up with this, is on running traffic to a keyword that might not be compliant with what Google accepts. For example, you might not be able to run traffic to things like guns, weapons, and so forth. Have you hit any red flags with anything like this?

 

Larry

Yes, and you bring up a great point, and it's constantly changing. If you were starting at Google or if you were working with the Google Ads platform for the first time, I cannot over-recommend enough actually going through their terms of service and their policy on that. Like if you just type in ‘Google Ads policy’, you will get a link to their latest policies about what you can and cannot do. And yes, you're correct, you cannot advertise anything alcohol, the likes of guns, or even the weight loss industry actually is a tough one to be in. There are specific cases that you can and cannot run with that you can say things like, you can’t make extravagant claims in your ads. And so it is actually very important to continuously review those because as I said, they may actually change on a weekly or monthly basis. Checking at one time and then not checking it again for a year, you could come back and suddenly find that your Google account is suspended because of some new policy that they had that you didn't comply with.

 

Aidan

Yeah, and I don't want to strike fear into people that are listening to this. Reading the Google advertising policy is not difficult. It's not going to take you very long, and it's going to give you an overview of what Google is really searching for. And once you understand that, I think you are pretty much good to go.

 

The reason that I got my ad account banned way back in, I think it was like 2008, was in one of my ads, I had the keyword ‘miracle’. I had the word ‘miracle’ in my ad, but I wasn't actually saying something was a miracle. The name of the product that I was selling had the word miracle in it. So I was saying “Find out about,”  I think it was called Tinnitus Miracle or something. “Find out about the ‘Tinnitus Miracle’, go here.” And the ad was banned. The account got banned and they said, “You're banned because you're saying something is a miracle.” And I was like, “Hang on a minute. I'm not saying it was a miracle. I'm referencing the name of the product.” So it's even things like that in context, I think it was fine what I was doing. But if there's a robot that is constantly analyzing the words that you're using in your ads and you trigger something, then that's the kind of thing that could happen. I was able to get the ad account back eventually, but yeah, it's just something else to be aware of.

 

And you know what I didn't do? I didn't read the Google advertising policy. Otherwise, I would have known that. But I was sort of jumping deep and I'm going to learn as I go. And, you know, without advertising, with something like Google, it doesn't always pan out the best when you do that.

 

Larry

You're not alone in that. I think many people have probably started just jumping in and just try it out. So, yeah, no, it's definitely worth reading their policy and their ads policy. It's super important. And the reason being is, as I say, they are constantly updating it. It's not something that they do kind of once a year. I would say they probably update that probably once a month.

 

Aidan

Right. Now, we've spoken a little bit about keywords. Now, I should have clarified that a keyword is just a search phrase. It's a term in which a keyword could be ‘a mountain bike’. It's not necessarily one word. It could be a string of words. Something that people sometimes ask about are negative keywords. Can you explain what a negative keyword is?

 

Larry

Yes. So, if you are running a campaign and you decide that you don't want your ad to appear for a certain keyword phrase, you can tell Google on the platform that you do not want your ad to actually appear for this specific keyword phrase.

 

Aidan

When would be an opportunity that you might want to do that? Why would you set the negative keyword?

 

Larry

Now, without getting too detailed, there is a search term report that is available once you're running ads. And you might find in that search term report that you are getting a lot of queries and you are getting a lot of keyword phrases. People are typing in keyword phrases that Google is showing your ads for that you didn't expect that they would be showing your ad for. What you can do is you can take that keyword phrase and say, “Okay, I do not want my ad to be showing that keyword phrase,” and then you would just type that keyword phrase as a negative keyword phrase.

 

Aidan

So, as an example, we've been using ‘mountain bikes’. Let's say you've got a shop that's selling mountain bikes, and you've got this keyword set up as ‘mountain bikes’, and Google starts sending all kinds of traffic related to mountain bikes, and you start noticing that you get people visiting your website when they type in ‘mountain bike repair’. But you might not be a repair shop, so you know that traffic is completely wasted. Is that a case where you would make mountain bike repair a negative keyword?

 

Larry

Correct. Yes.

 

Aidan

Once you've got a campaign set up and running, how do you know which keywords are the ones that are performing and which aren't performing?

 

Larry

Okay, good question Aidan. Yes. So, one of the things that Google Ads offer within the platform is this thing called conversion tracking. It was referred to as a pixel code that you would put on your website, on the thank you page of your website. Okay. What it does is a person, if you're looking for a sale, so, for example, to continue with our ‘mountain bike’, if somebody purchased the mountain bike, you'd want to know which keyword phrase that came from. So that is done through conversion tracking. You put the pixel code on the thank-you page of the website, and then that gets tracked back inside the Google Ads platform to the keyword. Also, you can tell which ad actually made a conversion as well. That ensures that you're only paying for keywords that you know are converting.

 

Aidan

Right, and that's really, really important because if you're just running traffic for the sake of it and operating sort of on gut feelings, then you're always going to end up out of pocket.

 

One of the most important things that I've learned over the years about paid advertising, and it's not limited just to Google, it's understanding how to interpret the results that you're getting and understanding how to know when you're winning and when you're making money or something. Thankfully though, advertising platforms like Google are very user-friendly these days. I remember back 15 years ago when I was getting started with running a lot of ads on Google. It was pretty complicated and it wasn't really set up for the average Joe just to be able to go in there and start running an ad. But nowadays it's pretty intuitive and there's lots of good information out there on the web as well. I mean, if you're a member of one of our programs, then we've got quite a bit of training around Google Ads - not just Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, and so on and so forth, but beyond that, Google Search and YouTube are great places to go to get more information as well.

 

Larry, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day there and just giving people the 101 lessons of Google Ads. I think it's a massive opportunity, so hopefully, this will help people fill in a few gaps and be able to get started. Thanks for being with us here today, Larry.

 

Larry

Okay, thank you very much, Aidan. I'm happy to help and hope people find it useful.

 

Aidan

We're definitely going to get you back on to go into level two, I think, and dive into some of these more advanced topics like the conversion report and so on and so forth. I look forward to doing that. In the meantime, though, you can find in the show notes we'll have links to, for example, the Google Planner and other important links like where you can go to start opening a Google account and the Google Advertising Policy. We'll have all of that listed over at TheGrowthBooth.com on show number 48. That's TheGrowthBooth.com, show number 48. That's a wrap for today. Thanks for listening. We will see you again next week on The Growth Booth!