Google Adwords tips and tricks for 2013/14. AKA the advertising money tree episode!

Tim: Episode 150 of Australia’s number 1 marketing show. Imagine if every dollar you spent advertising your business returned multiples. That could never happen, could it?
Welcome to the small business big marketing show where successful business owners share their secrets to take your marketing to the next level. Now here’s your host, Tim Reid
Tim: Good day everyone and welcome back to episode 150 of the small business big marketing show. I am your host, Timbo Reid but you; you so much more importantly are a motivated small business owner, ready to crank out some very, very smart marketing to build your business and that’s what we do here. That’s how we roll. We are brought to you by the very good folk at Net Registry who help get your online marketing sorted. You need Net Registry if you want to get an ad words campaign, very relevant to today’s episode. If you want to get a website designed or developed, you want to get some search engine optimization action happening. You want to register a domain name. You want to get some hosting, all that stuff. Net Registry will sort you out and they are wonderful friends of this show and they are wonderful friends of small business so I encourage you to go over to netregistry.com.au to get your online marketing sorted! Now, we are here today with a very interesting show, following up from last week’s episode with Andrew Mattner, the accountant Andrew Mattner who talked all about old school marketing methods, everything was offline. Hey, wasn’t that refreshing? It wasn’t a hash tag or retweet or a pin or a like in sight. It was old school big time and had some great feedback on that episode thanks to all the listeners who did send me feedback. It is refreshing every now and then to hear what’s happening above the line as opposed to on the line so absolutely, if you haven’t listened to episode 149, head back and do so because it is a great reminder that the entire marketing world doesn’t live online. We can sometimes be fallen to the fact, that’s the case but it isn’t.
We’re going back online today though. We’re going back to some modern marketing methods. I’ve got Mike Rhodes from WebSavvy and he is talking about basically has this, are you ready? Mike reckons if there really is any such thing as a money tree, then this Google Adwords is it and he’s going to explain how that can be the case and how we can use it to our advantage. Stay tune for that. I have got a bit of a winch, a bit of a winch about some big brands that let me down online of recent times. I’ve got a question from a listener on how to market a business naming business and then we’ve got Mike so we’ve got a fair bit to cover and I also want to welcome everyone from the Flying Solo Community. That group of solopreneurs, doing it by themselves and are loving it.
Alright, let’s start with a bit of a winch. We don’t do a lot of winching on this show but I just think it’s really interesting sometimes you look to the big brands to see how they’re doing things and what as small business owners we can learn from them. Sometimes it’s positive, sometimes it’s negative. Interestingly enough, in this case my bank, Westpac Banking Corporation decided well they didn’t decide, their internet banking has had a few hiccups over the past week. It just hasn’t been accessible so I thought I’d get on Twitter and ask what’s going on. You know, come on, Westpac any response? What are you doing? How long? All that type of stuff and did not get a response and I find that amazing. Confirmed that I had the right Twitter ID and all that type of stuff so I wasn’t tweeting someone that wasn’t actually Westpac. I’ve done that before actually. I remember doing that with Jetstar. Jetstar being a domestic airline in Australia, I remember being in the airport one day and sending a tweet to @jetstar thinking “well that will be the airline” and I said “what are you doing Jetstar? You’re stuffing me around?!” and it came back saying “I’m sitting on the couch, watching TV” and it turns out Jetstar is a private individual in the UK who happens to be a pilot. That was kind of funny. Always check if you’ve got the right ID before you tweet someone but anyway back to Westpac, yeah let me down just no response and I find that just really, really unusual, you know? I don’t think they can afford that kind of communications channel slip through the gaps. I would have thought, I would have expected that they’d have a large team, a large social media team, sitting there, waiting to respond instantly to anything that came through the pipes and I know Virgin Australia are bringing this. I know Zappo are bringing this in the states but Westpac, you let me down. I don’t think there’s really any excuse in today’s day and age; yeah, no excuse at all. I had another interesting one, Telstra, good old Telstra. Actually they’ve been pretty good from a company’s point of view, they’ve been pretty good but I had a long conversation with someone at one of their call centers the other day and then I get this email from them saying “thanks for your call, here’s what we covered” and it was a blank email. Again, systems up, working in the big brands and I often see this as small business owners, I think part of it is we have skin in the game and we care more. I just sometimes think that’s the case and there’s little things like Westpac not tracking their tweets, Telstra having empty emails going out. I don’t know, there seem to be a lot of care. Sometimes we can learn from the big brands, sometimes we can’t.
Alrighty, I have got a listener question here from V. V is in the UK and I don’t know whether V is a boy or a girl. So anyway they say “Hi Tim, I really hope it’s okay to email you. I have been reading your website, listening to your podcast, all great stuff. Thanks! I know you must be super busy but I wonder if I could run something by you really quickly.” Okay, go for it. “I’m looking to start a very small business, home-based in the UK. I don’t have any marketing experience. In fact I previously worked in recruitment but I would love to do something creative and thought of possibly starting a small naming agency business geared around small businesses sole traders.” Nice idea. “Trouble is I have no idea if there is a market for this sort of thing for very small businesses or whether it is only large companies who would use this sort of service. I was thinking of charging something modest like 150 – 250 squid to come up with a list of names, do some basic research. My favorite thing to do is come up with ideas which is how I initially came across your site. Without any creative agency marketing experience, I’ve been trying to figure out how to build a little business around this. Again, I really hope I haven’t bothered you.” No you haven’t V; this is why I’m here “and I know you must be incredibly busy” yeah well, you know we all are “and I totally understand if you are unable to reply” I’m replying. “Thanks very much, V.” Okay, good question. How do you start and how do you market a naming business? A business naming business, well here’s some things I’d do V, I’d start blogging straight away about business names. Things like ways to do it, funny business names that you’ve come across and provide a commentary on that. Find names that didn’t work, provide a commentary on that. Find names that have worked and put across your opinions on why they did work. Number 1, get blogging straight away. Register a domain name, get a website up or a blog and get going. You want to start to get some content out there around business naming. Have a look at what’s ranking on Google in terms of business naming keywords and identify those and make sure you include blog posts that include those keywords. Get clear on your editorial mission, V. We talked a lot about that on this show and I think your editorial mission should be something like “naming inspirations for small businesses and not for profits to help them come up with a name they love for their business, product or service” everything you do, from a content creation point of view, from a blogging point of view should rely and fall back on that editorial mission.
The next thing I would do V would be to create the ultimate slide deck that you would use if you were asked to speak on the topic of naming a business. Create it with the expectation that you aren’t going to present it. It’s just your ultimate slide deck. That might be 10, 20 slides where you create your story and provide your IP, your information about how to go about naming businesses including great case studies, funny examples, series examples, results, all that research, whatever you’ve got around naming a business. That’s your ultimate slide deck. A great way to articulate what it is you’ve got to sell.
Then what I would do is look for opportunities to present that slide deck. The first one would be go and present it to yourself. Record it using Screenflow or even record it into your iPhone as if an actual video and upload it to YouTube so therefore you got one presentation and a very rich piece of content to start with.
I would also look for other opportunities to present it, local chambers of commerce, anyone who want to listen. Not for profit associations, they’re always looking for free speakers. Tap them on the door and just ask “can I come in and present my thoughts on naming.” They might have a product to name, a service to name, a business to name, a promotion to name so it’s not all about naming business either V. You kind of broaden your outlook in regards to that.
Finally, you might want to create a little eBook called Don’t Name Anything until You’ve Read This and you might give that eBook away for free on your blog in exchange for an email address and you can start to build a list that way and then finally, I just go out and find a client. Just ask around. Put it out there on social media. Search Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn for people who are looking for business names. There’ll be people posting that type of question on social media all the time. V, I think it’s a great idea. All idea starts without a customer. Go and find your first one and build it from there. You’ll soon get a sense of who will pay the money for naming and you probably will find that obviously the bigger the company, the bigger the budget and that’s where you may have to focus your attentions and maybe you even do a few freebies to start with. I know I’ve done that previously. You do a few freebies to start with; find people online, on social media looking to name their business and just get kind of, get some case studies under your belt. Hey V thanks so much for your question. Good luck with that, let us know when you do launch your blog. I’d love to see it.
Alrighty, it is time for today’s guest and today’s guest is an old mate of mine, Mike Rhodes. If you’re a long time listener of small business big marketing, you’ll know that Mike appeared on episode 44 where he shared his knowledge and a very deep knowledge of Adwords. Mike’s been a Google Adword specialist for many, many years and Mike also ran a full session, it was about an 80 minutes session on my online marketing communications master class about 18 months ago now and that session is actually available in the small business big marketing forum inside the classroom there, along with a whole lot of other training. Mike is a wonderful presenter and a wonderful educator around Adwords. He’s got a company called WebSavvy…WebSavvy I should say, double V, Y, is absolutely fanatical about results and that’s why he loves Adwords so much. In fact, one of the first questions I asked Mike is what does he love about Adwords and he’s not shy in actually suggesting that it’s about as close to a money tree as you’re going to get from an advertising perspective and he goes into quite some detail about that and how we, as small business owners can really, really use it to our advantage so the title of this kind of interview I guess – New Ways To Get Results From Adwords in the Coming 12 Months. There’s been a number of changes that Google have made of recent times, some of which are pretty good, some of which can be a little bit confusing and Mike really does provide great clarity. Without further ado, here is Mike Rhodes from WebSavvy.
Mike Rhodes from WebSavvy, welcome back to small business big marketingMike: Good day Tim, it’s lovely to be here. Thank you for having me backTim: Well it’s an absolute pleasure, Mike, because you are the leader. I’m going to put right out there as the leader in Google Adwords in Australia. There you go, right thereMike: I will comment you on that laterTim: Yeah you can do that. Imagine it will appear in some brochure somewhere. When I say welcome back, you appeared on the show. When was it, 3 years ago?Mike: At least 2, yeahTim: Yeah at least 2 and you were also part of an online master class that I ran about 2 years ago which is still in the forum and still gets downloaded and listened to. In fact, some of the forum members have listened to that and asked questions as a result of it for you later on. Mike, let’s talk. We’re here to talk Google Adwords. In fact, we’ve given this session a title of New Ways to Get Results from Google Adwords in 2013-2014 going forward. I’m interested to know what you love so much about Google Adwords that you build an entire business around it.Mike: If I had to put it in a single word, it would be results but if I were a bit deeper than that, it’s measurable results consistently and repeatable so that you can do your testing and yes there’s an ongoing element to Adwords. We’re always tweaking, always improving the results that we get from clients with their Adwords campaign but once you’ve got the basics down, you can repeat and scale those results. You get the same results over and over and over again and it’s kind of a weird thing when you think about it. At its basic, Adwords is showing ads to people that are searching for certain phrases and even though last month was a completely different thousand people compared to the thousand people that search this month compared to the thousand people that will search next month, for any one particular phrase within there, those people tend to act very, very similarly over time. You can start to make predictions that for this keyword, with this ad, if I send them to this page on my website, I make X dollars and there’s no other form of marketing that I know that’s so measurable like that to the cent and then repeatable over and over again so it really is a little magic money machine sitting on your desk and you bring the dollar in and you go “oh I’m going to press that $5 button” and $5 comes out. Then you go “I’m going to keep two of those, I’m going to put $3 back in and press the $5 button again and $15 comes out”

Tim: Mike, that’s massive. As you say, there’s almost no other advertising medium out there where you could even say anything like that and even as you say it, it makes me nervous. It gives me butterflies because that sounds like a money tree.

Mike: Marketing done well should be a vending machine, not a slot machine. That’s a line from the lovely guys that I love marketing and Adwords really fits that model very well. It is a vending machine. Yes there’s a lot of work to build that $5 button on your money machine if you like because it probably started off as a 70 cent button. Every dollar you tip in, you get 70 cents back and you got to do the work to improve the return, to improve your ROI but once you’ve tested or once you’ve got it to that point or it’s positive ROI, now every dollar you tip in gets you more than a dollar back and then you just keep improving, keep improving. Obviously you’ll reach a point where okay I’m getting $10 back for every dollar I tip in, do I really want to spend more time improving my $10 button on my vending machine or do I now go off and build another machine somewhere else? Do I go and work on a different constraint in my business? Are my systems sucky in the business or the customer service or something else in the business that’s causing problems because this is now good enough? Good enough is good enough, positive ROI and I know that ten grand I tipped in there every month brings a hundred grand worth of sales, great talent, go fix something else in the business. You can come back and improve it a bit more later.

Tim: I certainly have, there’s a guy in the small business big marketing forum. He’s in the UK, he has a driveway veranda cleaning with high pressure water torches and he often talks in the forum about he spends 50 squid. Those in the UK, spend 50 squid on his Adwords and his next demand of business for the month or two and then he turns it off, he turns the Adwords tap on and he turns the reel tap on for the high pressure water hose, boom-boom.

Mike: Boom-boom.

Tim: Boom-boom eh

Mike: I love it

Tim: We are working beautifully Mr. Rhodes but you know I’ve seen that but let me tell you because the listeners are now learning into the speaker’s mic. You have seriously wetted their appetite. Let me tell you what I see with most small businesses who dabble in Adwords. They get in there; they’ve heard someone say “Adwords is amazing. You can get on page 1 of Google. You can appear when someone does a search about something related to your business so you can have an ad appear only when they’re searching for something related to your business. It’s amazing” so they go “right on, I’m going to do it” and by the way, it’s free until they click on your ad. At that point they’re going “Adwords is amazing” so what they do is they go and they open up an Adwords account and they write an ad, they write the headline and they write a copy and then they send a link off to their home page and then they sit back and they wait and either they do 1 of 2 things. They just leave it running, they spend 5, 10, 50 bucks a week or four weeks later they go “this Adwords is crap. It doesn’t work”

Mike: Yeah

Tim: Is that, do you see that?

Mike: Oh yeah and firmly enough, the people spending many, many multiples of those amounts are often the worst offenders. You’ll be amazed at the number of 20, 30 grand a month accounts that we see that are making cardinal sins in their Adwords account. They’re doing a lot of the basics wrong. It’s not a question of the size of business at all.

Tim: Interesting, that’s reassuring. In fact I say that generally speaking, I mean if we were talking above the line advertising, if we were talking website design, I mean we see this big mistakes made by the big guys. I mean small businesses can often be. I mean when you got skin on the game and it’s your own business, you can actually be a little bit more attentive. Tell me, you keep mentioning this word “basics” so let’s start there and I want to spend the next however long it takes dissecting what it takes to get that money machine happening. You talked about getting the basics right, what are they?
Mike: One thing that I want to address, just on that last little thing, your last little rant about Adwords there. It was right at the beginning.

Tim: You know me too well

Mike: You used the word dabble and that’s the problem. You wouldn’t dabble with becoming an airline pilot. You either become an airline pilot and you know how to fly 747 or you don’t. I think let’s continue that analogy. Back in the day, Adwords was like flying a small plane. Everyone can drive and fly a small plane. It’s just a small card, just goes up and down as well. It’s pretty easy, you can figure it out. There’s only 6 knobs and dials in front of you in the cockpit. A lot of people could do that given the chance. Adwords these days is like flying a jumbo jet. There are that many knobs and buttons and levers to pull and things to press. It is overly confusing for most people. Now Google are trying to dumb it down, essentially. Trying to make it easier for people to get started and we’ll talk about Adwords express a little later which is one of their options that they put in as a ready cut-down version of Adwords to make it easier for small businesses to get started. They’re obviously tweaking things all the time. There’s a new announcement almost daily these days but certainly something new comes out every week where they’re trying to a make it improve it but it is hard to master. It’s very easy to get started with Adwords. It’s very easy to open an Adwords account and do all those things that you said. Pick a few keywords, write an ad, set your bid, off you go but it really is that last 20%, almost really that last 5% that makes all the difference and why, probably I don’t know the exact stat but something like 2% or 3% of Adwords advertisers globally make the vast majority of the profit because it’s that last little bit but yes let’s cover some basics.

Tim: It sounds like they need Sir Jonathan Ive to design the interface and then Google just get on providing the algorithm.

Mike: That would be an interesting thing. I mean one of the ex apple guys did the interface for Google plus and it’s lovely. It’s one of their best products. Maybe they should put that guy on outputs.
Tim: Absolutely

Mike: You’re a clever; you should be doing strategy and stuff.

Tim: Stop it, stop it. Well my view is pretty simple. I’ll buy an Apple car; yes I’ve moved over to an HTC, I’m ready to move back to an iPhone. I’ll buy an Apple car, an Apple fridge, an Apple anything, you know, it’s simple. What are the basics of Adwords?

Mike: The basics are only pretty much that you choose some keywords that you think your target audience are likely to sit down in front of Google and use to find you. You write an ad or two, you choose how much you want to spend when somebody clicks that ad and you wait and see what happens. Then the important bit comes which is the ongoing management of that account because you’re not going to pick the right keywords first time. You’re not going write the best ad first time but it’s one of those cases were 80% is good enough. Good enough is good enough. Just get started, don’t try and be a perfectionist. I’ve been listening a lot to a bloke called Dan Sullivan. I’ve been listening to him for many, many years and he has this one thing called the 80% approach and that’s perfect for Adwords. Just do enough to get started but then you have to keep on looking at it, improving it. You got to have a love of numbers. You got to be able to look at a spreadsheet and not look like a bus time table from 1927 and you just go “aaahhh, stop!”

Tim: you just brought out 50% of my audience.

Mike: In that case, then that’s great. It’s good to know that, doesn’t it? You don’t want to bang your head against the wall forever trying to do something that you just not inherently going to be good at. You know you got to outsource that whether that brings someone into your business half a day a week. Straight out of union and knows the digital world, dangers with that obviously or you decide “no this is something I need to master for the business. I need to learn” Perry Marshall, the godfather of Google adverts often talks about “you need to know one traffic strategy and one conversion strategy to get your website working” You don’t need to be a jack of all trades. You got to master one. For some businesses Adwords will be that one. For others, Facebook will be that one. For a few maybe SEO, maybe it will be referrals system, it will be joint ventures but for our clients, it’s Adwords. Although I need to say that I would never ever recommend that anybody rely on one single source of traffic and be completely reliant on Google Adwords and not have anything else. No other feathers to their bow but once you master one, that takes the pressure off.

Tim: they often say one is a dangerous number in business

Mike: Indeed, but it does take a pressure off if you know that you’ve built a money machine that’s going to generate leads. Now you can go build some other sources of leads with the pressure taken off that you know that the bills are getting paid and payrolls sorted.

Tim: Let’s talk about the 80%, the keywords, the ad and the spend. I mean you rattled them off as if they were, you know, have them knocked out in a couple of minutes. We’ll do a keywords section in another time but just to give people a heads up as to how to identify keywords, I mean number 1 ask your clients and prospects what are they keying into Google when looking for someone like you.

Mike: Exactly

Tim: Number 1

Mike: Look at the content on your website. Look at the content on your competitors’ websites. Ask friends and families “okay you’re searching for me, what would you sit down at Google and type it?” you also got a tool, a free tool within Google that you can only now use if you have an Adwords account called the keyword planner. It’s no longer the keyword tool, which is not again massively intuitive. Again they tried to changed the interface there, they tried to make it more accessible but still it’s not massively intuitive if you’ve never done Adwords before and this really is the cracks of making Adwords work well. Picture an archery target. You’ve got all of those concentric circles on that archery target. In the middle of that archery target you’ve got a bull’s eye. If you can start your Adwords account with bull’s eye keywords, in other words just those few phrases that are bang on, exactly what you do but they’re not so broad, so generic which are the keywords around the outside of that archery target but they could mean lots of different things to different people. Let’s take two important examples – someone searching for “in-ground swimming pool Melbourne” they’ve got a pretty fair idea of what they’re looking for. For the person who searches for “swimming pools” it could be someone looking for the opening times of their local pool. It could be someone searching for lessons for their 2 year old. It could be someone searching for an inflatable 6-foot paddling pool to blow up and put some water in for the kids in the garden or it could be someone searching for an in-ground concrete lap pool to put in the back of their mansion but you don’t really know when they just type in “swimming pool” so if you choose a fairly broad, generic term like that, you’re going to attract a few people, but a lot of the people that are click your ad that you’re still going to pay for are not people that are interested in your products and services. Generally speaking, start with 3, 4, maybe even 5 word phrases because generally speaking the more words that someone types in the more specific their search.

Tim: And the closer they are to buying?

Mike: Yes, generally speaking. We say the further down the funnel they are. They start at the top of the funnel searching for something broad like pools or swimming pools, they do a bit of research, they come back to Google and they search for in-ground pool. “Done my research, this is the sort of thing I’m after” then they go away and now they come back and search for “in-ground pool prices” or “in-ground pools in Eastern Melbourne.” Once they’re typing in those longer phrases, they’re generally as you say, closer to getting out their wallet and spending their money. If you start with those, it’s more likely to be profitable.

Tim: I love it, so identify those keywords. Keep playing with them but this is not tricky. Identifying keywords isn’t meant to be tricky. They’re natural words people keying into Google when they’re looking for business like yours and that’s exactly what it is.

Mike: Yeah, there is a level of experience really there. It’s the only way to put it but we look at a keyword and we just sort of know, “is this going to be a good keyword or a bad keyword? Should this be a part of the test or not?” it’s just that gut feel of what’s the intent behind that phrase and it’s a game of majorities. If you think the majority of people typing in that phrase are your target market then great but if it’s one of those “this could mean lots of different things to different people” if I think about it and that’s hard for people because it’s hard to be really objective about your business because you look at a keyword and go “yeah obviously, people typing in that, they’re looking for me” but it’s hard to see what all of the other meanings of that phrase could be. That’s the tricky bit with keywords.

Tim: Gotcha, alright now. The next basic is the ad; now I don’t call writing ads basic and in fact I would argue that writing an Adwords ad is potentially one of the hardest ads to write because you are absolutely limited by the amount of characters you can use.

Mike: Absolutely

Tim: and it’s much easier to be the boss than it is to be to sink

Mike: Yes

Tim: We are dealing with a headline and copy and a link. How many characters do Google give us for the headline of the copy?

Mike: You’ve got 25 characters for the headline, 35 characters for each of the next two lines. You’ve got 95 characters to play with

Tim: Wow

Mike: And as Mark Twain said “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter”

Tim: You got to love that quote, I love it.

Mike: It takes time to get that concise, benefit-driven little ad

Tim: Well so concise is, you are forced to be concise. Benefit-driven is a choice and any great copy should be benefit-driven. So, are you suggesting that both the headline and the two lines of copy should be all about benefit?

Mike: When you’re starting out, there are no golden rules but when you’re starting out, get the basics right. You can always improve and hit your rate and change that ad and test different ideas later. A good rule of thumb when you’re starting, the headline it can be as simple as reusing the keywords. If someone is searching for “in-ground swimming pool” a headline that says “in-ground swimming pool” is not the worst headline in the world. There’s all sort of training that you can find online, going to all sorts of tricks that you can do with your ad, generally speaking that’s a good place to ad. Then you’ve got 2 lines, they are called description line 1 and description line 2. We call them D1 and D2. Typically speaking, you want to get a benefit or a feature in there. That’s a very broad role. I’m going back probably 5 or 6 years in terms of old school training but that’s a good place to start. Get benefits into that as much as possible and you don’t need to be tricky. You don’t need to be an incredible wordsmith and use puns and be very eloquent. Younger room, it’s just telling them what you got and tell why it’s good for them. Point of difference benefits, if you can identify how you are different to your competitors which is obviously a stronger benefit than just a point of entry benefit, that’s what I’m looking for, everybody in the market has great quality. Everybody says that, that’s not a benefit but a point of difference benefit, that’s typically tough…

Tim: It is, you know.

Mike: for many small businesses to articulate how they’re different from their competitors because so many businesses are commoditized.

Tim: Well we lived in a world, as I said before; we lived in a word of sameness so we need to hang our hair on something. It may well be your brand; it may be the personality, the way you talk. It may be the tone of your ad versus what you’re saying.

Mike: Yes, yes and hopefully for a good price.

Tim: Exactly right. Mike, is it a smart idea to put your phone number in D1 or D2?

Mike: You can’t do that anymore. As of April this year, we’re recording this on August 2013, you can no longer put your phone number in your ad, you got to use something called a call extension. I’m happy to dig in to that in more detail if you want but you can’t actually put your phone number in the ad, copy itself anymore.

Tim: Well what is a call extension? It’s a box you tick that then allows you to have the phone number for an additional cost or something?

Mike: basically yeah. If someone is searching for you from their mobile phone, which is obviously a quarter of the population at this point and growing then you can set that up in a number of different ways but essentially there’ll be a call button as part of your ad on their smart phone and they’re just going to tap that and directly through to your sales guys, your 1-300 number or whatever.

Tim: There is conversion right there, right there.

Mike: Conversion…

Tim: Yeah, yeah correct. I want to talk about link but let’s touch on that while we’re hot. That whole putting your phone number, the whole mobile version of the ad is almost a mandatory. This mobile ad that Google Adwords have, is that a separate campaign that you have to create or a box that you tick?

Mike: So we always use to set this up as separate campaigns and the reason being that it gave us much more control, you might want to pay different prices for clicks on mobile. You probably want to tweak your ad copy a little bit and you might want to have “call us now” in that ad copy for instance rather than “check out our website” because you actually want people to call because you want them to go to your website, particularly if your website looks crap on their Smartphone, they’re pinch zooming in trying to find your contact page and then they find your number which is in 6 point font at the bottom of that page and then “honey you know the first 4 digit, I remember the next 4 digits” and then you go back out of the phone and try “what the hell was it? 54 or 45? Oh bloody.” Now this makes it so much easier for them just to tap that number, come straight through to your sales team and off you go. You’re going to pay the same amount for that click on that phone number as you would for that click if they came through to your website. If you’re in the $5 a click market, it’s going to cost you 5 bucks. If you’re in a 50 cent a click market, you’re going to pay 50 cent for that phone call; money for jam. These days, Google just, well they’re actually in the process of doing it, just in the last couple of weeks rolled out probably the single biggest change to Adwords that has happened in 8 years.

Tim: Drum roll

Mike: And it’s called enhanced campaigns and this is really, mobile is a huge, huge part of this. This is, we’re going to the why. The why, just between you and I Tim

Tim: Ok don’t tell anyone

Mike: Don’t tell anyone, a lot of people in the industry think this is about making a little bit cash for Google machine. Now, of course I never say that out loud.

Tim: Hello to Larry and Sergei, who listen to a lot of the show often

Mike: Good day boys, how are you? They’re trying to, basically what happened in the last year for the first time in ever, October last year the average cost-per-click that Google make went down. It went down 15% and about a day after they said that, their share price dropped 8% and they went “hang on a minute” and then the following quarter it went down again. They stopped the bleeding at this point it went down 6% the next quarter. They had to do something about it. Investors and shareholders were not happy so part of enhanced campaigns, I suspect, just my opinion don’t sue me, allegedly is that it’s about forcing more people so show ads on more devices which create more competition which ultimately is going to push prices up and we are already seeing that across few campaigns although we are seeing some campaigns where prices are going down. It’s not a set thing. What Google us trying to do with enhanced campaigns is to simplify how you go about building out your campaigns so you can now have one campaign that targets all devices, computers and tablets and mobiles. The problem is, we don’t have as much control as we used to. We’re control freaks that’s why we do Adwords. We can’t now turn tablets off. We can’t treat computers and tablets differently even though we know people use them differently.

Tim: Absolutely

Mike: We can’t show ads only on a mobile and never on computers and tablets so we’ve lost a lot of control so a lot more people will be, possibly accidentally showing ads on mobiles from this point forwards. It is easier to setup but it does mean you got to watch your numbers closely and make sure you’re not wasting money on stuffs that doesn’t convert.

Tim: Ouch, yeah okay, well it’s a pity; driven by the almighty dollar.

Mike: I think so

Tim: Mike, tell us, what we’ve got here so far is we’ve got the headline, we got the copy D1 and D2, 35 characters each. Need to include a benefit in there. The last two parts of the basic Adword setup is where you direct people, what link do you put there and how much do you decide to spend. Let’s talk link. My observation is too many small businesses direct everyone to their homepage. Clearly, I’m guessing you’re going to have a much greater conversion if you direct people to a page that the ad is specifically speaking about. If I was to bold as to continue the pool example, if you’ve got an ad that is all about “Melbourne in-ground tile pools” then I’d love to then be bounced to a page that talks about a pool builder that builds tiled pools and grand pools in Melbourne.

Mike: And we are lazy and apathetic. You know exactly what I was searching because that the keywords that you picked and that technically speaking the search that someone has made on Google has been matched to one of those keywords and Google goes “yep you’re close enough, I’m going to show your ad” you know exactly what they’ve just seen in the ad and the reason that ad is so important is it’s the only visible part of any Adwords account to your end users. That’s the only bit they ever get to see. They don’t get to see your keywords and your bids and all these settings, they only ever see the ads that’s why it’s so important. And then if you drop them off at the front door of your website and say “yep it’s in there somewhere. Off you go, you’ll figure it out” a bunch of them is going to go “eh” hit the back button, back to Google, click on someone else. I want a better user experience than that.

Tim: So the laziness comes in the fact that you are really being forced. The smart ones, well everyone were being forced to then create dedicated pages per Google Adwords ad, right? Which is a smart thing to do.

Mike: You don’t have to go to that level of granularity straight away. You don’t have to think “oh God I’ve got 50 ads in my campaign, I need to go build 50 new pages” you don’t need to start there but you can certainly look your reports and say “wow 50% of the people coming to my website are clicking on the in-ground pool ad. I should probably build an in-ground pool page.” Two big reasons there, one you mentioned already, is conversion. If I send the people to the page that’s all about the stuff they’re looking for, you’re much more likely to get a positive response but also, Adwords is telling you which phrases the market uses because people are weird. We all use different ways to describe the same thing. If lots and lots of people, your target market, are using phrase like “in-ground pool Melbourne” creating that new page that’s specifically about that, that’s going to help you in a bunch of other ways. It’s going to help your SEO, your search engine optimization because now you’ve got a page that’s really optimized for a phrase that lots and lots of people use. Use Adwords as a testing tool as much as anything. I actually think it’s more about testing than getting traffic to your website quite frankly.

Tim: Yeah well it certainly can help shape your website

Mike: Oh absolutely and it should be before you start doing SEO because if you do SEO, generally most businesses do that, pick a few phrases at random, give them to their SEO guys and say “optimize my website for that” but you haven’t actually known if that is a good phrase. Let’s take the swimming pool analogy a step further. They might say to their SEO guys “yeah, yeah swimming pools. That’s what I’m all about. Get me to the top of swimming pools” only to find a year later when they do make it to the first page that actually “swimming pools” means lots of different things to lots of different people and only a fraction of those people come to your website and fill in the form for an inquiry on those in-ground pools that you sell because actually lots of those people searching for “swimming pools” don’t want what you sell and that would be a really quick and easy test you’d find out within a week with Adwords. “You know what; this isn’t a good keyword for us. We shouldn’t be using that. Here’s some other keywords that lots of people use” because there’s no point having a keyword that only gets used once a year and certainly no point building a page on your website for something that only gets used once a year. You’re balancing that, “are enough people searching for it and does it convert?” at the end of the day, this is not about traffic. It’s not about clicks. It’s not even about leads. It’s about profit and that’s why we’re all in business, to make a profit, to make and keep our customers and delight them preferably along the way. Are they getting in touch with you? Are they converting? Are they leading to sales? That’s the stuff that matters.

Tim: I love it. On the matter of money, we’ve now got our headline. We’ve got our copy. We’ve got our link. Spend Mike, the almighty question, how on earth…well clearly once you get clever at it and you got to the point of the money tree that you mentioned at the start of the show, you find as many dollars as you can because you know they were turning multiple but to start with, you know the first few weeks and months of getting an Adwords campaign up and running, how do you decide what you’re going to spend?

Mike: Two things I think. One is set your expectations low to begin with. Don’t expect this to be profitable week one or probably even month one, particularly if you’re doing it yourself and you’re educating yourself. Good on you if you are but you’re learning, you’re going to have some money to the market and the school of hard Knox to learn how to do this properly. The second thing is this is the only medium in the world that I know of where the better you get, the cheaper it gets. The more people that click on your ad compared to your competitors ad, Google’s looking at it and going “you’re good for my customers. You’re making the whole experience of using Google better” if you’ve got an ad that loads of people click on because it’s such a well written ad, it’s delivering the benefits that they were looking for, it’s showing specifically just to those people looking for the stuff you sell. You’re not showing that really broad, generic term that means lots of different things to different people, obviously not many of those people are going to click on your ad even if you’re paying the bid. If you do all of that and you do it well, Google needs to reward you in some way because you’re doing good things for Google and it’s this funky thing called quality score. Essentially, Google care more about the user experience than they do about revenue because they know and I know a few people are laughing now but they know that if they deliver a fantastic experience and you get what you came from. We all do it, we all treat Google like a mind reader. We expect it to know what we’re looking for and we know that we’re going to click around a couple of places, we’re going to find what we’re looking for and so we all go back to Google. We don’t go and use Yahoo and Bing and AOL and Ask. We use Google because we get what we came for and Google knows if they do a really good job of that, then they’re going to maintain maybe even grow that massive market share that they have.

Tim: Well I think this is a really interesting equation generally for whether you’re running an Adwords campaign, creating an engaging website; the Google algorithm is incredibly complicated. In fact I heard the other day they make 1 ½ changes per day to it so God knows how any of this can keep up but the simple equation as far as I’m concern is deliver a wonderful online – and this is if you want to rank well in Google or you want your Adwords campaigns to perform well at a relatively inexpensive cost – is to provide an amazing experience to the people visiting your website. Get more people to your website, hold them for longer, therefore it gives Google the opportunity to sell more advertising and make more money. If you do that and pat the monster on the head, then Google will reward you with better rankings. Is that free?

Mike: Yup! They will move your ad higher up the page and they will charge you less for that click and from the free side of Google, yes they will improve your rankings and show you higher up the listing because you’re improving the experience of using Google and so that’s if your ad gets clicked on 10 times more than one of your competitor ads because your competitor doesn’t know how to make a good ad and they’re showing the ads to the wrong person. It’s not as simple anymore as Google with charge you a tenth of what they’re being charged. That was kind of the mass 8, 9 years ago when I started doing this. It’s far more complicated than that now but you will pay significantly less than that other person. All of that is back story to say how much do you offer Google. The price for the exact same keyword on the exact same day in the same city is going to be different on everybody that’s on the page and you’ll find advertisers beneath you that are paying more than you because most people think “I’ve got to pay more to get up to the top of the page” not true. You’ll find people below you that are paying more than you because they’re not doing as well. Really the trick is to start with what you can afford and to see where Google shows your ads because if you show in those premium spots, typically yellow box above the organic results, your ads are going to show there or down the right hand side of Google. If you show in that yellow box at the top, you’re going to get about 10 maybe 15 times the clicks that you’re going to get if you show over the right hand side. If it’s volume you want, you really want to be in those top 3 positions. Sometimes, it’s more profitable to be a little bit less, particularly at the beginning when you’re learning, to show your ad over on the right hand side. If you can make it profitable over there on the right hand side, then you can say to Google now the quick fix to show my ad high is to bid a bit more but once you do that, then you keep improving things then Google is going to go “I don’t need to charge you as much anymore. Let me charge you a bit less, let me charge you a bit less” and that price goes down over time as you keep improving things which is why guess adverts, let’s not forget, the more you keep improving things, the cheaper it’s going to get.

Tim: Yeah! I can’t think of another advertising medium that does that.

Mike: No, don’t think the tv company has ever called you back and said “you know what, we measured this and we found out that of those people that watched your ad last night, so many of them called you and therefore we need to charge you less!”

Tim: Well A – they’re not measuring it, and B – they wouldn’t know what to measure and C – they couldn’t afford to do that. Fascinating mate, we’ve now constructed the campaign. We’ve got to go back in there; we’ve got to measure, measure, measure. Keep changing, keep beating what’s working. Replace it with something even better. I just want to get in to some of the changes that Google have made. You’ve touched on mobile, massive growth continues and you’ve touched on the importance of that. What are the kind of major changes have happened to Google Adwords recently?

Mike: Mobile and tablet, huge. Just one thing to finish off that bid is please make sure your website works beautifully on smartphones and on tablets. That means not using flash element. I still see, I saw a site yesterday which had a flash intro at the beginning of it and these guys are spending. I know they’re spending 20 grand a month on radio and they still have a site that does not work for probably 40% of their users because mobile and tablet combined will probably be for most website… for most website will be between 30% – 50% at this point. Please make sure your site works on mobiles. Two other big, big changes that have happened; we’ve talked briefly in the past about the other side of Google. There’s a whole other place where Google can show you around and that’s called the Google Display Network or GDN for short and that’s a collection of over 2 million sites, probably approaching 3 million by now, that are basically done a deal with Google. They’ve said to themselves “we need to make some money out of our website. We need to show some ad on our website. It’s way too hard to go and do deals with each individual advertiser so we’re going to do a deal with Google. We’re going to do a deal with Google. Google are going to put some ads on our site and we’ll split the revenue.” Your ads can show on massive sites like Oprah and CNN and ESPN or tiny, tiny little blogs and forums about the specific thing that you do, in-ground tile pools maybe. And even though your ads might show on an American site like New York Times, you can set it so they’re only seen by people 10K around your business. They might happen to be reading the New York Times but your ad only shows if they are within 10K of where you do business, on a Tuesday, in the afternoon if you like. You have incredible control over that. I love display advertising because it’s so easy to target it really, really well now and the reason for telling you all about display is the best bit of display is called remarketing. And I know we’re going to talk about this a little bit, the forum question. Remarketing is re-marketing, so marketing again so essentially when people come to your website, they’re tag. The techie term is cookie. They’re cookie when they come to your site and then once they leave your site, as they’re wondering around other websites that are part of this display network of Google, they get to see your ads.
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Tim: This is so powerful!

Mike: It’s such a good way to look bigger than you are.

Tim: Massive, I mean I’ve seen it before where I’ve seen little sites that I’ve been to, I then go to a big site, whether it be Oprah or News Limited or the Age or whatever it might be and there is their ad and it’s like “wow!”

Mike: “These guys are…they must have a bit of marketing. They must be good!”

Tim: In fact A – they’re good, B – they don’t necessarily have to have a big budget.

Mike: Not at all because you’re not showing ads to everybody on the Age, you’re not even showing ads to everybody on the Age on Melbourne. You’re just showing ads to the 5,000 that have been to your website in the past 2 weeks. Incredibly powerful and of course you can show text ads, you can show image ads to those people. You can change the ads based on times so if they came to your website within the last 7 days show them this ad, if it was a month ago show them this ad, if it was a year ago show them this ad. We’ve got an insurance company, for instance I’ll give you an example one way you might use that. They know everybody coming in to their website is looking at getting a car insurance in probably the next month. That’s the typical buying timeframe but they also know that 80% of those visitors don’t buy from them that a year from now they’ll be looking again for car insurance. So by cookie all these people, we can start showing ads 11 months from now which starts saying “car insurance due?” and it’s not showing to everybody in the room. It’s just showing ads to those people that we know are probably just about to be in the market for car insurance again even if they didn’t buy from these guys the first time around.

Tim: So can you tell Google “hey listen, we know that those people are going to come back. They’re going to be shopping again in 11 months time” can you start running our ads then or is that something that you need to make like a manual diary note?

Mike: No, you can set it all up and say to Google “just show ads to people that came to my website between 11 and 13 months ago. If they came to my website in that little window, then show them these ads in this location and pay this much if they click my ad and don’t show ads in the weekend because my call center isn’t open and stop showing ads at 10 in the night because we know that doesn’t work too often.” Total control over all of this
Tim: Mike is that Adwords stage kind of 2 or 3 for the small business guy who’s looking at this because all of the sudden they need to create various sized ads; we’re talking banner ads, postage size ads, actual visual ads with photography, with headlines, with calls to action. We need to setup a remarketing code and drop it on the website. We need to do so many. We started to get technical, correct?
Mike: We have started to get a bit technical, however a lot of that, for some people creating that remarketing ad is actually easier than the search ad because then they don’t have to think about the copy so much and there are so many services where you can go, sites like $20 banners and minibannerzen.com where you can go and get a banner, I’ve created 99 designs I believe through them now and go and get that created for far less than $100. Have someone else who specializes in that create an ad for you and start running that ad. Yes you got to put a bit of code in your site, it’s relatively easy and yes we can go to the nth degree with strategy around remarketing but if all you did was to tag everybody that came to your website and then show them an ad for 30 days after they leave your site to entice some of them back to look at bit bigger than you are, to stay top of mind and remind them of who you are so they see your logo. Not everywhere they go, you don’t want to do it badly that you swamp them. Ads and resources are examples of that where all you see for the next three days is a particular person’s ad, that’s remarketing done badly but it is one of the most powerful ways for a small business and you don’t need a massive budget to do it. It does tend to work better if you’ve got more traffic coming through your website but I should point to, we’re not just talking about tagging those people that come to your site from Adwords, we’re tagging everybody that comes to your site. So if you get lots and lots of Facebook traffic, this is a great way to tag them, cookie them when they come in and then after they’ve left your site and let’s face it, if you’re an e-commerce store then 98% of your visitors leave without buying something. If you’re a lead agent site, maybe it’s 80%-90% of people leave your site without filling in that form. You can follow those people around, stalk them if you will, follow them around. Present them with an offer they might be interested in. It’s a wonderful, wonderful tool.

Tim: The other thing too with this remarketing is the branding, the free branding that you get because you got to remember, your ad, your banner is appearing God knows how many times – hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times depending on how you set the campaign up. There is a percentage of people that are physically clicking on it and that is the outcome you want but there’s also the other majority at just seeing your brand often and they’re not even paying for that.

Mike: They’re not paying a thing they click it and click through rates are pretty tiny for display ads. It’s going to be less than 1%

Tim: Yeah right

Mike: It’s probably less than 0.5% but that means you’re only paying for 1 in 200, maybe 1 in 500 views of that ad. It’s all free branding. You can even, this is a setting in Google where you can choose to only show that ad if your ad is above the vault, in other words if that ad is at the top of that website that they would see it without scrolling down the page so you’re not wasting impressions that people may not even have seen that ad. You’re only showing the ad on top of that because people don’t scroll, they’re lazy. They look at that site for a few seconds, they move on but there you are, there you are again, there you are again although it’s a different ad.

Tim: yeah, yeah. Listeners I’m talking to Mike Rhodes, he owns WebSavvy. He’s Australia’s leading expert on Google Adwords. I hope you’re getting benefits from this as we go through the additions and enhancements Google have made over the last 12 months and going forward with Adwords. I have got a series of questions that my four members have provided, Mike. We’re going to cover them off after this interview and that’s going to live exclusively in the forum but we haven’t finished yet, Mr. Rhodes, we haven’t finished yet because we have still got this concept of Google Shopping Ads.

Mike: Yes

Tim: I understand is another addition that has just recently come online.

Mike: Again incredibly powerful and again a little more complicated so this is now more intermediate Adwords advertising because there is a bit of work to be done here. Shopping ads have changed. It used to be all free within Google. Everything now is a paid model and you would have seen that sometimes you search for something, it might be laptop bag, typically a physical product and you will see those little square picture ads. Sometimes there’s a little row of 5 of them underneath those ads in the yellow box and sometimes you’ll see them over the top right. There may be 6 or 8, little square picture ads.

Tim: Looks a little bit eBay-ish?

Mike: Looks a bit eBay-ish. Often got a price underneath, often got the first 20 characters or so of a description then the … because the description wouldn’t fit and you tend to, we love clicking on pictures, the best looking picture. The picture that looks like the product that you’re searching for gets more clicks than a lot of the ads, certainly the ads down the right hand side but we’re seeing a lot of research from the states in particular and our friends at Ad Guru which is saying that a lot of people are clicking on those, they’re called PLA – product listing ads, PLA ads. To set this up, it’s going to all depend on; this is for e-commerce. This is for people that sell stuff. You’ll build your e-commerce store on a platform. So it might be Magento, it might be BigCommerce, it might be something horrible like Volusion, just kidding at Volusion, we love you really.

Tim: There was such a geeky little site because I have no idea what you’re talking about and nor do my listeners. They don’t know yet, you need to explain that.

Mike: Okay, everyone’s heard of WordPress right? Building sites on WordPress, it’s platforms, WordPress is just platforms in which you build.

Tim: I knew the first two and maybe my listeners don’t but you thought you were being funny with the Volusion joke. Mike, Mike…

Mike: Okay, geeky

Tim: Geeky sheik by the way, geeky sheik

Mike: Alright, okay, the geeks have heard it, okay.

Tim: So PLAs…

Mike: You’ve got a platform on which your website is built. All of your products are held within that platform. The tricky bit is getting a list called a feed, getting a feed of all of those products and you got to push that feed out from the back end of your site into something called the Google Merchant Centre. Now there’s a whole bunch of ways to do this. Hopefully if you’re on a good sensible platform *geek humor insert here* then that all happens relatively automatically. There’s loads of work around if you don’t. Go Google it and say “I haven’t got this thing and I wonder Google Merchant Centre how on earth do I do it?” Contact whoever sold you the platform that you’re running your site on and they should be able to help with that. Once you’ve got a Google merchant centre setup, that’s essentially now Google knows about all of your products and then the last little bit of that is you link that to your Adwords account and you say “if someone is searching for one of those products, here’s all the information about my product. Here’s the picture of it and here’s the prize and here’s the title. Show that as an ad please to the person searching for that product” it’s that simple once you’ve done the hard work to link all these things together, Google pretty much takes care of all of it for you. You don’t have to write ads, you basically just set one bit for the whole lot, you can get more granule than that but you can set one bid for the whole lot and say “Google, if someone searches for one of my product, show them one of these ads” and from an ROI point of view, they kill it. They absolutely kill it. They are so profitable for e-commerce client, it’s not funny.

Tim: Mike, it is being an amazing update on what is obviously a very powerful advertising medium. At this point, there’s a couple things listeners. One is Mike’s business, WebSavvy is for high end, big budget and tell me if I’m over selling and stopping you from getting business here, Mike but you’re not for the small business owner who’s just wanting to embark on an Adwords campaign, that’s fair?

Mike: Correct. We’ve got a couple training products if you want to learn how to do this yourself. I’m going to run, we have this site, hopefully it’s okay to plug it here but we’re going to run my Adwords boot camp again later this year and teach people how to do this themselves. I’ve just run a big training product all about display and remarketing for Perry’s group over in the states. That was a big success so I know that’s a very, very solid product. I put a lot of time and effort into creating that. If you want to learn about display and remarketing then jump on websavvy.com.au, come and check us out but yes, predominantly we run Adwords accounts for people with a budget of at least 5 grand a month and up.

Tim: Listeners, by the way, you want to stay in touch with what Mike’s doing with his Adwords boot camp or anything else, I will include links in the show notes. If you sign up at smallbusinessbigmarketing.com, Mike will let me know when he’s got stuff coming up. I’ll include it in my weekly mail at.

Mike: Lovely

Tim: You can also visit websavvy.com

Mike: .au

Tim: .au, yeah absolutely because the .com is a bit of a dodgy one, I must say. That’s nothing to do with you.

Mike: websavvy.com.au

Tim: Good idea. Why don’t we just finish this episode Mike just with some… where else can they go? Google’s got a whole lot of resources it terms of how to run, is that the best place? Sounds like an obvious question but is that the best place to go, to Google Adwords page?

Mike: Google’s help centre is an interesting place

Tim: Right, it’s no good, clearly.

Mike: There are lots of broken links in there. They are working hard to improve it but it’s…

Tim: They’re probably understaffed; they find it hard to attract people.

Mike: They only got 37,000 staff so it’s difficult for the poor things.

Tim: Ah funny

Mike: Bear in mind though too, this is a tricky one for me to bounce. Their goal is to increase revenue, our goal is to increase profit so there is a slight mismatch there in terms of how Google will tell you how to setup campaigns because they’re not necessarily looking at it in your best interest in terms of maximizing profit. Ultimately for them, they want to maximize revenue. Great places to start, Perry Marshall’s book which is available on Amazon, The Ultimate Guide to Adwords. That’s a fantastic place to start. For 20 bucks you’re going to get huge education. Of all the books on Google Adwords, that’s probably the best. Howie Jacobson’s Google Adwords for Dummies is also very good. There are a bunch of YouTube videos but that’s more than enough I would say to get started.

Tim: Yeah, Perry’s book clearly, right there. When are you putting a book out?

Mike: I don’t know

Tim: Come on

Mike: One day maybe

Tim: Mike, that’s been absolute joy mate. We’ve got a little bit more to cover. One of the things that I love about the small business big marketing forum members is they’re dedicated. They’re motivated small business owners and we’ve got some very specific questions that you’re going to about to answer, we’ll answer them now. Again, from all the listeners, thanks so much for being a part of small business marketing again.

Mike: Thank you for having me, pleasure.

Tim: Alrighty dudely, I hope you enjoyed that very, very educational fire side chat with Mike Rhodes and that you are a little bit clearer on whether Google Adwords is for you and if it is, how you can best use it. Whilst Mike doesn’t service the small, end of town from a Google Adwords point of view, Net Registry absolutely do. If you do want to go down that Adwords path, give Net Registry a call. Tell them Timbo sent you because they can help you with a whole lot of Adwords love. So, one of the things or there’s actually three things that I got from there, in fact there’s actually probably about 20 but the top three learning’s from that chat with Mike – I love that phrase, one traffic and one conversion strategy. Have one of each. Bit bigger than an Adwords kind of learning but having a focus on one traffic and one conversion strategy I think it’s really interesting and really important. It doesn’t mean you don’t have other balls in the air as well but focusing on one of each and trying to master them I think is a smart idea and Mike’s given us some tips on how to do that if we choose Adwords as being our traffic strategy.
Number 2, if you start Adwords, don’t give up. I say it all the time and I kind of reiterated that in the interview with Mike. Get your keywords, your headline, your copy, your link right and then continue with that ongoing improvement. I can’t’ emphasize that enough. That’s a learning across all modalities of small business marketing, you know, particularly content marketing which is a marathon and not a sprint. You’ve just got to get in there and do it for months, not weeks. It’s not going to give you that instant result. Adwords might but some of the other content marketing strategies that we talked about, you really got to rather sleaze up and be in there for the medium to long term to see results but don’t give up on Adwords either. I see too many businesses give up within a couple of weeks.
Mobile ads, hey how interesting is that? Having an ad appear, having your ad appear on someone’s mobile phone with a button that has your phone number. They just have to hit and call you like that. That’s going to have a high conversion.
As I mentioned in that interview with Mike, he then went on after I hit stop. We then recorded a session for our forum, small business big marketing forum members who had the opportunity to list their questions exclusively. They were very specific questions and we went into greater depth about how Adwords can help their businesses and that is in the forum. You can go to smallbusinessbigmarketing.com and click on the forum button or the products button and you can join the forum. 49 bucks a month. I’m going to be doing a lot more exclusive interviews for forum members over the coming weeks, months, years so get in there. There’s so much more besides that as well that is going to help grow your small business. Hey team, that brings us to the end of episode 150 of the small business big marketing show, Australia’s number 1 marketing show. By the way, btw, and I love bringing every second of it to you. Have a great week. Thank you Net Registry for your love and support and may your marketing guys be the best marketing. See you next week.