Tech’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising with Rachel Logan

09/02/2015

Bryce: You mentioned searched partners, could you explain a little bit how that differs from what’s on the side of Google or Bing results?

Rachel: Yeah. The results themselves don’t usually change, but what happens especially specifically talking about malware, or even if it’s not malware, maybe it’s just a toolbar you don’t want, it will search through for example Ask. Ask is as far as the last time I checked is a Google search partner and so if someone searches through Ask, Ask is actually kind of rebranding the Google search, so it goes out through Ask, Ask is actually rebranding the Good search, so it goes out through Google and finds your results and it labels everything like you found it from Ask, but it’s actually going to the Google service.

When you advertise through Google and someone searches through Ask, it will pull up your results because Ask is pulling from Google.

Bryce: Okay. Would you suggest that technicians also use say something like negative terms, as in certain words to avoid in keyword search?

Rachel: Yeah, absolutely.

Bryce: Or even misspellings. They got a weird name like … I don’t know. Like ABC Tech, should they do something like EBC Tech or something like that?

Rachel: Honestly, I don’t recommend … As long as your website is built properly and has its own as SEO, you don’t have to hire someone, but the crawlers will find your website. I do not recommend running PPC on your name, because you’re just going to pay for people that would have clicked on you otherwise. If someone is searching for your specific name, now if you’re if you’re ABC Tech, there could be 100 ABC Techs out there, so maybe in your geographic area you don’t want to target your own name because someone will see your ad.

They’re going to see both your website come up in the organic search, hopefully if your website is optimized properly and then they’ll also see it as an ad and they’re more likely to click on the ad, because it’s going to be higher. You end up paying for somebody that would have come to your website anyway. I don’t usually recommend. You’re going to see really high click through rates with your own name, but that’s because they would have clicked on you anyway.

Bryce: Something I say, that’s a little bit cheeky as well is, bid on their competitors brand name, so if you search for Google it might be a Bing ad or something like that. Would you recommend people to bid on their competitor’s brand name?

Rachel: You are not allowed to use your competitor’s brand name because it’s trademarked. You might be able to run it for a few days, but as soon as Google picks up on it, they’ll disapprove your ad.

Bryce: Based on my own PPC that I’ve done, getting the quality score is a problem and I see that on the forums, people do their keywords, they do their ads, but they can never get their quality score up to a point where Google will actually run it for any significant amount of time. Do you have any recommendations on that?

Rachel: Yeah, the biggest one is to stay away from the common keywords. Get yourself into a market or in Google’s eyes into a market that’s different than the big guys, because a lot of it is just your market share. Your qualities score goes pretty far, but as long as you’re willing to pay a ton of money and you don’t have the history on your account to compete with the big guys, you’re just not going to get the market share in the space on the page the way that they are.

The best thing to do is just stay away from all those keywords and run technically and with the same audience, but under different keywords and even though your quality score may not improve, you’ll get more run time and ultimately at the end of the day, you can spend so much time and energy trying to get your quality score up and the most important thing is whether or not you’re getting ROI. Your quality score could be really low, but if your return on investment of using AdWords is high, or even breaking even so that you’re branding and you’re getting your name out there without technically spending any money, because you’re getting enough people coming in on it, then it’s worth it.

You don’t need to really worry about the quality score. There’s only so much you can do and you can’t fight against their systems. I can’t tell you how many times I have … They have people in this back room that they don’t even let you talk to. If you have a problem, you have to go through somebody else. You cannot get a straight answer from them as to what exactly you need to do. You follow their best practices and then you just watch your ROI.

Bryce: You mentioned common keywords, so I assume that would be like virus removal Los Angeles, are you saying avoid a keyword like that?

Rachel: Yeah, for two reasons. Number one, all the big guys that can afford to outbid you on these keywords are going to be using those keywords and number two, your customer most likely is not going to say virus removal. Now, if you’re dealing with say a company or some larger organization and that maybe has a tech that works for them that is searching for something, you just got to figure out exactly what service they are looking for and just drill it down. It’s just not specific enough.

Bryce: I guess so, it might be ask toolbar remove or something is that what you’re saying?

Rachel: Yeah, or even and they may not even know that removing the toolbar is what they need to do. Maybe they just feel like their search results aren’t what they used to be, or their search results appear fraudulent, because a lot of times some of ones that are actually malware will pull back search results that don’t look right and it makes them nervous, they don’t know to do and so they search for that and then now your ad pops up and hopefully they click on it.

Bryce: You could have a keyword like a scam search and the ad would be, is your search not what it used to be or not what it’s supposed to look like? Then give us a call.

Rachel: Exactly. You’ve got to get in their heads and think what question, or what problem are they dealing with, what question are they asking and how am I going to answer that question?

Bryce: You mentioned tracking the ROI, Google and Bing will track the amount of clicks that come through the ad, once the client is on the technician site, how does the technician track whether that converted into a call or whether it converted into actual work? Is there a good way to track that?

Rachel: There’s two ways you can do it. You can use trackers to where when someone comes to your website from the ad, it’s showing up on your system as a particular tracker, so you know what campaign it came from, what ROI group it came from. You can specify it that way on your end, but there’s also codes that you can put into Google the same way that you can … I guess tracks it on its own.

You have what they pull up as a click equals they go to your website and that’s automatic, but there’s code on the Google site that you can put into your website that will tell Google when someone’s performed a certain action, or gone to a certain page. Let’s say that a conversion is setting up a schedule with you on the website and part of the scheduling process, there’s a page that comes up that says, thank you for scheduling with us.
You can put a snippet of code on that page, that when someone reaches that page, which means they’ve obviously scheduled with you, it will signal to Google that someone’s reached that page and it will show up that conversion as well. You can see and it’ll show up exactly for which keyword brought them there, so track the entire progress to that converting moment and it’ll report it to Google.

Bryce: That’s using Google Analytics code, is that correct?

Rachel: Yes it’s in the same category, yeah.

Bryce: Is that using goals in Google Analytics or is it something completely different?

Rachel: I believe it’s in the end of the conversions tab.

Bryce: Okay, but the code must be on the, thank you for scheduling with us because that only appears after they’ve actually entered their details or something like that, is that correct?

Rachel: Yeah it has to be on the part of your website that is for sure they did whatever desired action you required of them to do. If you do it just on the part where they schedule, you don’t know whether they scheduled or not. All you know is that they got to that page.

Bryce: Okay, I understand. What sort of minimum spend should a lot of techs use? I know some people go into this fairly sheepishly and say, “I’ll only do $50 or maybe $100.” Is there any recommended minimum spend for them to … I know with most things, there needs to be a certain point before you start really getting the results. Is there a minimum point for spending on Google ads or Bing ads?

Rachel: It really depends on how much time you have. If you have a month to figure out what your numbers are, then you can start off really slow and you can let the numbers trickle in and at the end of that month, you can look at your numbers and figure out if it’s working for you or what to change. The difficulty is that now you’ve ran the campaign for an entire month and you only now know if maybe some ad copy wasn’t working or maybe one particular keyword wasn’t working. You don’t have a lot of information, but you do have that information for the same amount of money that you would have spent if you just spend that entire month’s budget over the course of two days.

You’re just making changes quicker, so it really just depends on how much time you have to spend. Spend a little bit of money if you have a lot of time and you just want to slowly figure out whether this is going to work and spend a lot of money if you want to find out right away, but the amount of money as far as your daily budget does not have any effect over how much your ad is going to be displayed.

I need to clarify that a little bit because it does to some degree if your daily spend … If you cap out on your daily spend, your ad will show only as many times as you can afford for that days, but what I’m saying is that the results that you get back, the responses that you get back are not going to be any different whether you’re spending $25 or $100 or even $1,000. It will just depend on how quickly you get enough information to make decisions and to make changes and to maximize your ROI.

Once you have a positive ROI at that point, it’s easy. You basically built this system now where you put $1 in and the machine gives you $10 back. There’s no mountain of saying, “Why wouldn’t I give that dollar? Why would I give that machine all of my dollars if it’s going to give me $10 back?” Once you get something working, put as much money as you can or wanting to.

Bryce: Once you determine that you have a certain ROI, let’s just say as you said $1 spent results in $10 made. How would a technician refine that like I want to … Beyond just increasing the spent, how would I turn that $10 into $20?

Rachel: If you look through your keywords and you look through your ad groups and your ads, you’ll find the ones that aren’t performing as well as others. Now, if they have a positive ROI, then they’re worth running, but maybe they are not worth running as much as the other ones are. You can change the way your ad groups run and put them in separate campaigns.

Once you figure out because your maximum, your daily budget is based on your campaign or is at the campaign level. Once you figure out there’s some meat maybe that aren’t performing as well, you can move them to a new campaign and not spend as much of your budget on those and spend all of your budget on the ones that do give you a greater return. Or you can just pause those ones all together and only focus on the ones that give you the greatest return.

It’s really just your own preference or what you see the best and maybe they convert, but maybe they convert differently. Maybe you’re getting schedules from all of them and maybe the ones that deal with malware removal are getting better results than the ones that deal with building a computer, but the ones that are for building a computer making you more money or maybe even just the ones that you like to do more.
Maybe you like to build computers and you don’t really like to remove malware. As an individual business owner, you get to make those decisions of where your priorities are.

Bryce: It makes sense. What’s working, keep doing it and what isn’t, kill it and what you don’t enjoy, don’t do it.

Rachel: Right.

Bryce: I see a bit of a nuclear arms race happen with keywords sometimes. If I bid $2 on let’s say, something like virus removal, then my nearby competitor would bid a little bit more and I think you can set up option where you keep bidding higher than the last person. How do you stop the nuclear arms race that happens with that sort of thing and where your keywords can just become super expensive really quickly?

Rachel: The first way is to stay away from the volatile keywords, so ones that everybody is going to think of when they come into the market. You have companies who come in to AdWords and don’t find a positive ROI and they leave, but in the meantime they’ve totally messed up your numbers because they’re betting on things that they weren’t betting on before. A lot of it, you just have to write it out and determine exactly what you’re willing to pay for something or avoid those keywords that you know that the new guys are going to think of first.

Like I said those long tail keywords that are really answering your customers’ questions and otherwise is really nothing you can do. There are a lot of limits to the system and if you have someone that’s bigger than you, that wants their name on top no matter what the cost, there’s nothing you can do about that.