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Tech’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising with Rachel Logan
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Tech’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising with Rachel Logan
In this episode of the Technibble Computer Business Podcast (with transcript below) I have Rachel Logan who is a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) expert who is currently doing work for the remote support software Instant Housecall.
We talked about how to be successful with Pay-Per-Click advertising, how to choose good keywords and refine them so that they cost you less, how to create a good landing page that abides with Google’s and Bing’s terms but also converts well. How to write a good ad, how to improve Google Adwords quality score (which I know so many technicians get stuck on) and outsourcing versus doing Pay-Per-Click yourself.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:23 — 46.3MB)
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Discussion Highlights:
00:55 – Pay-Per-Click and the Organic Searches
04:35 – Tips on creating a Landing Page
06:50 – How to know what keywords you need to target
10:19 – Maximize the amount of people looking for you
13:03 – Don’t target your own name
13:54 – Increasing your Quality Score
17:13 – Tracking a conversion
19:18 – Minimum money to spend in PPC and increase ROI
24:22 – Other search networks you can enroll aside from Adwords and Bing
25:09 – Third party tools for research
26:13 – Using negative keywords
27:25 – Starting Keywords to use in your first campaign
29:08 – Campaign, adgroup and ad levels
31:05 – How many ads you need to run and how to test them
32:47 – Outsourcing your PPC Campaign
37:27 – Remote support and its difficulties in Google and Bing
41:51 – Don’t solely rely your business on PPC
48:55 – What successful people do.
Tweetables:
“Tech’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising with Rachel Logan” [Click To Tweet]
“Increase your ROI as a Computer Technician with Pay-Per-Click advertising” [Click To Tweet]
“Pay-per-click tips for Computer Technicians” [Click To Tweet]
Transcription:
Bryce: Hello and welcome to another Technibble computer business podcast. I am Bryce Whitty and today I have Rachel Logan who is a pay-per-click expert, who is currently doing work for the Remote Support software, instant HouseCall. In this podcast, we talk about how to be successful with pay-per-click advertising, how to choose good keywords and refine them so that they cost you less, how to create a good landing page that abides by Google and Bing’s terms, but also converts well, how to write a good ad, how to improve your Google AdWords quality score, which I know so many technicians get stuck on and they just can’t run their ads and also outsourcing versus doing pay-per-click yourself. Please welcome Rachel Logan.
Rachel: Hello.
Bryce: Would you be able to just really briefly explain what the difference is between pay-per-click and say organic search engine marketing just for the people who are very new to this.
Rachel: Sure. Your organic search is when someone goes to Google or Bing and types in keywords, it’ll pull up the responses that Google has deemed are an appropriate answer to whatever your question is. PPC is slightly different in that you actually run an ad and Google will match their search to your ad copy and your keywords and then put ads on their search that they can click on and you pay every time they click.
Bryce: Do you have any tips for any techs on how to do a really good ad, say for example on Google AdWords?
Rachel: On AdWords and actually on Bing as well, your quality score is really important and that is the score that Google gives you that says that your keywords match your search queries and your ads and that it’s all relevant to your website. Your ad copy is going to need to match your keywords closely, as well as match your landing page closely and be relevant to whoever is searching for you. For example if someone searches for purple elephants in your ad, maybe your keyword is purple elephants, but your ad talks about blue whales, you’re going to get a horrible quality score and your ad will never show up.
It’s important that everything is relevant to each other and then as far as ad copy itself goes, people expect to see ad language, so you can be a little pitchy in your ad. You don’t get very many characters that you can use, so you’ve got to be very clear and concise, but you also need to avoid words like free. Google doesn’t like that. You want to be very clear and very specific to your audience. Tell them exactly what you have for them and then you should be in.
Bryce: Yeah. I think that the keyword free would be dangerous, not just from Lord Google not liking it, but I think it would attract the wrong clients.
Rachel: Yeah, it’s very true and of course it depends on what you’re advertising, what service that you’re advertising. As a technician, you may be advertising virus removal. You may be advertising other tech services or even building computers and you’re going to need to have everything drilled down and very specific and that’s where landing pages and things come in, because when someone types in, I’m looking for malware removal and your ad pops up and your ad is compelling.
It talks about removing malware and they click on it and let’s say they go to your homepage and on your homepage it says, we build computers they’re going to click right off. They’re going to bounce immediately. You have to be very specific and landing pages come in handy in order to make sure that you maintain the attention of your customer.
Bryce: Yeah, I think that’s probably the biggest mistake I see other techs do with PPC, is as you mentioned, keywords, virus removal and going to the homepage. I think they need to super optimize the page that it’s pointing to. As you mentioned, if it’s virus removal, then we are the best at virus removal. We can come to your location. I think I also see that some of them will put their phone number on the homepage, but not on the subpage, like the virus removal page, so it’s like, okay, you’ve interested them, but there’s no phone number.
Rachel: Yes, definitely. They need a way to contact you and you can actually through AdWords put your phone number directly on the ad, as an extension, which if they choose to see your ad and call you straight from the ads without clicking, then you’ve saved yourself some money, not very much, but it doesn’t necessarily require them going to your page. You can advertise directly to their first opportunity to see the ad.
Bryce: Do you have any tips for writing a good landing page? What sort of things they should have on the landing page?
Rachel: I have been informed on a number of occasions from Google reps that they’re crawlers prefer everything to be above the line. You need to have as much information as you can text wise that the crawlers can read above the fold. When you first go to the website, of course above the fold is anything that you see immediately that you don’t have to scroll down for. You don’t necessarily have to have your exact keywords on that landing page, but it helps if they’re least relevant because their entire automated system looks for specificity.
Bryce: An example of something I do with my own stuff is basically I write everything I want to say and then I figure out how to say that with less word. Compress it or make it much tighter and as you mentioned keep it above the fold.
Rachel: Yeah exactly. They’re not generally looking for a lot of information and again, you really need to know your market and understand what your what your customers are looking for, but most customers if they’re coming to you, if they’re coming to you through PPC, they’re not necessarily looking for you. They’re looking for a solution to a problem. Your landing page shouldn’t be pitching you, it should be telling them what the solution is to their problem and showing them that it’s you.
Bryce: All right, so do you think that having a picture of you, does that add credibility or should we have that in the sign bit above the fold, or is it specifically just exactly what you do? We can solve your virus removal problems and …
Rachel: I think it is definitely important to have your picture there and to let people know, especially in this world. I ran a company for a while where we got all of our traffic from PPC and it was amazing. Google and Bing eventually shut us down because other people in the industry were running frauds, which was unfortunate for us, but I’m glad that they’re protecting consumers that way.
The people are aware and they’re not going to just call anybody, but if you’ve a picture and a little bit about you, that’s a great thing to have on your website, on your landing page and it’s just important to try to match your landing page to your keywords. That’s why they break it down into ad groups and to specific landing pages, so that you have just a few keywords that apply to that landing page and you build a new one for your next set of keywords.
Bryce: With choosing good keyword, I know you said it’s very specific on what you do, but like just to use an example of everyday tech, he goes, he does a bit of break fix, he goes to the suburbs that are the next town over and the next town over in the other direction. Let’s say he does basic virus removal and hardware upgrades, it’s difficult to do this without punching into the Keyword Tool, but what would be some typical keywords that he want for something like that.
Rachel: First of all, he’s going to want to make sure that he’s targeting geographically, so that he’s not advertising to the entire country, because that won’t do him any good, or the world for that matter. He needs to be very specific on his geography and both Google and Bing will allow you to do that, but beyond that as far as choosing keywords, it’s important to remember what your customer is looking for. Again, they’re not searching for you. They are trying to find a solution to their problem and most of your customers are not going to, typically, are not going to say, how do I remove this virus? They’re going to talk about a problem.
They’re going to say, I can’t get into my email. Or I have too many toolbars, or something like that and then you present the solution as being, if you have too many toolbars, you might have malware. A little bit of education because they don’t know that. When we would call our customers we did a lot of Remote Support, break fix and nobody, nobody knew what malware was, so advertising for malware did us no good, because anybody who was actually searching for that already knew what it was and most likely wasn’t going to hire me to help them.
They were going to download some program or something, which whether or not they should, I don’t have to talk about, but you have to find out what your audience is actually searching for and so you use these long tail keywords that are longer. I can’t get into my email. Honestly, most of the time when people can’t get into their email, it’s simple they just don’t know how to click on the right things in order to get their passwords back, but a lot of times too they’re having malware that’s preventing things. Or they have too many toolbars, or maybe, my search bar isn’t working, or my search results aren’t what I want them to be.
That’s all indicative of malware toolbars that are on their system that they may need help and be willing to pay you to help them take care of. You need to be thinking about what their actual problems are and how they talk about their problems, not how you would describe their problems.
Bryce: How would you find out what they’re searching for? Is there a tool or is it really, you just need to think about what your own clients are asking?
Rachel: You would just need to pay attention to what they’re asking. If you had a shop, pay attention to what people come in and say. When they come in and they set their computer down in front of you, what are they saying? What are the words that they’re saying? Those are keywords.
Bryce: Yeah, I guess us technicians need to realize that a lot of people think that the box that sits under their desk is called the CPU, or the screen is called the CPU. They all are not using the terms that we know. We’ve managed services, I often tell techs, don’t use the keyword, managed services, because a lot of people don’t search for managed services, they search for outsourced IT or something like that.
Rachel: Exactly and not only that but the word managed service, is high competition. If you’re a small guy there’s no way you’re going to be able to afford to keep up with that.
Bryce: You also mentioned a lot of people do have technical problems when they’re searching and calling a tech, often they have trouble even getting to Google or even Google isn’t their default search engine. What would you recommend as a way for the techs to maximize the amount of people that are looking for them?
Rachel: Okay, so two things here. Average obviously is everybody’s preference and Bing usually gets swept under the rug, but Bing is actually cheaper and I’m not really … I don’t know if it’s because their market share is technically smaller, but I found in the past that you’re getting for this particular market, you’re getting just as good a result if not better results from using Bing as you do from Google, because a lot of these people, their computer comes as Bing as their default search and that’s what they search through.
Now if they get some malware or something on their computer, whether they’re using Google or they’re using Bing, really they run through affiliates of Bing or of Google. Now the downside to that is that, if you’re going to try to pitch somebody on a remote support clean out, or help them that way, they tend to be a little bit sketchy because they’re not quite sure where you came from, because their search engine wasn’t clean.
If they’re coming into your store or you’re going to their location, then all you have to do is make sure that your Google or your Bing is set to advertise through the search partners and those extra toolbars on those extra searches that get hijacked will lead to you as well.