Live Stream: How to Build, Grow & Measure an Effective AdWords Campaign

John Rowa: How’s it sounding, Greg? How we doing?
Greg: It’s good.
John Rowa: We’re good? You’re just going to work the whole time, huh? No?
Greg: I just want to [inaudible 00:00:12].
John Rowa: Oh.
Greg: I want to make sure it started.
John Rowa: Good. We’re live. You’re zoomed in a bit though.
Greg: Say what?
John Rowa: On this screen.
Greg: Say what? This …
John Rowa: Zoom out a little bit. [crosstalk 00:00:29] Is it all zoomed out on your guys’, too?
Speaker 3: Yes.
John Rowa: Yes, you might have to zoom out a little bit.
Greg: It going to be backwards now.
Greg: It’s zoomed out as far as it can go, bro.
John Rowa: Interesting. Well, you might have to pull it back a little bit. Is it all close on your guys’ screens, too?
Speaker 3: Yes. [crosstalk 00:00:52]
John Rowa: Is that Arnold Schwarzenegger? That should be fine.
Greg: Is that good?
John Rowa: I think so. They’re probably just going to have to get a little close.
Greg: There you go.
John Rowa: That’s close. We’ll just get in- [inaudible 00:01:13] Now we can see it. It’s just a little …
Greg: I can just sit like this.
John Rowa: Yes.
Greg: And then I’ll leave.
John Rowa: You can tell this is our first one.
Greg: Yes, people are watching like, “These idiots …”
John Rowa: They’re right.
Speaker 3: [inaudible 00:01:30]
John Rowa: Cool. Well, I’m all ready.
Greg: Lunch and Learn’s over.
John Rowa: Lunch and Learn’s over. Here, I’ll … I’d scoot over more, but I’m going to take up more of the screen, because, obviously, I’m fat. Anyways …
Well, thanks for coming, everybody, to our first livestream Lunch and Learn. My name is John Rowa, for everybody who’s watching live, president here at Lemonade Stand. We’re an internet marketing agency. Everybody here in the room knows this, but just for everybody out there watching online: we’re an internet marketing agency …
So, Greg, how’s it going today?
Greg: Pretty good, pretty good.
John Rowa: You look so much taller than me.
Greg: I am.
John Rowa: Yes. I’m still better-looking. So …
Greg: [inaudible 00:02:20] these guys with their shirts.
John Rowa: Yes. So, Lunch and Learn …
Greg: [crosstalk 00:02:26] I don’t want to say something stupid online.
John Rowa: Yes, I know. Our Lunch and Learns, what i- [inaudible 00:02:30]
Greg: Okay, so we do Lunch and Learns here, so actually, for our own training, and so we … For people, but for interns, people that are barely just started, or for cross-training, so that we can … Since we’re small, we want everybody to know a little about everything, and we work with each other on almost every project. It’s for our own training, but why we decided to start streaming it is so that other agencies can benefit from the training that we’re putting together for our own team, so they can benefit from it as well, really. And not just agencies, but other business, entrepreneurs, people that are working in other industries that can bene- everything’s the internet nowadays. All marketing has sort of shifted to the internet in some way, shape, or form. We’re going to put together some good trainings for both our team and give that out to the world as well.
John Rowa: There’s [crosstalk 00:03:48] streaming it live …
Greg: Awesome.
John Rowa: From their phones as well. You guys can just look up, you know? It’s all right.
Greg: Is that all you need from me?
John Rowa: That’s all we need.
Greg: Okay.
John Rowa: So Greg, thanks. Thanks, Greg. Thank you for coming …
Speaker 3: Thanks, Greg.
John Rowa: To your own office.
We didn’t have this one on.
Greg: Huh?
John Rowa: We didn’t have that one on. Oh well. It’s fine. So … Yes, there we go. This is our first one, folks. So today, and actually for the next three weeks, we’re going to do something pretty cool. We’re going to be covering a pretty fun topic called, “How to Build, Grow, and Measure an Effective Google AdWords Campaign.” There’s a lot of points within that, but first, if you guys haven’t yet …
If you’re watching online, if you haven’t yet gone to our website, lemonadestand.org/university, we’ve got a lot of cool stuff on there. There’s actually a lot of people in the room here that have written some really cool stuff that they’ve shared out recently, and we’re going to be posting a lot more stuff here. I’m actually going to be sharing some tools from this livestream on University a little later. The whole point of that site is purely just to give away cool stuff that we’ve learned, and ultimately how we’ve built our seven-figure agency in three years by just using internet marketing, and all the tools and all the lessons we’ve learned.
So it’s been pretty cool to do it, and we want to share it, give it away, help others reach that step, and hopefully help others not only in our office, but beyond. So, go to that: lemonadestand.org/university.
But today, “How to Build, Grow, Measure an Effective Google AdWords Campaign.” So, the first of a three-part series. The schedule is: today, we’re going to be learning how to sell the client, discovering strategy. Next week, next Friday at the same time, we’ll be doing part two, which is landing page creation, creating a paperclip campaign. We’ll cover a little bit of the parts within that today, and then next week, we’ll dive into some details and really practical applications. It’s going to be really fun. And then part three: Google Shopping, display network, and conversion rate optimization. That is getting into how to do some more advanced AdWords stuff.
So our goal, at the end of these three weeks, is that you’ve just enhanced your knowledge in Google AdWords and your experience [inaudible 00:06:17] as well.
Cool. So part one, today.
Greg: Can you apologize to all the live people that we blew out their eardrums?
John Rowa: We blew out their eardrums? Was that just [crosstalk 00:06:32]
Greg: For like a couple seconds.
John Rowa: Wow. Sorry. Sorry about that. I think they heard you. Sorry.
Part one. Today- I’m blocking the screen, but- sorry. Part one is Intro. We’re going to go over a quick intro. We’re going to talk about selling the client, discovery, and strategy.
So the intro. What is Google AdWords? Everybody here, fairly familiar with Google AdWords, but if you’re unsure, just in case you are: Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system. Advertisers bid on keywords so their ads will show up in Google Search results, hoping that the people clicking on the ads will ultimately use their service, visit their store, or make a purchase, do something, right? We call this type of advertising “paid search marketing.”
The reason we titled this campaign “How to Build, Grow, and Measure an Effective Google AdWords Campaign” is because that’s more of a keyword that we were targeting, actually, in our work, just to be fully transparent on it. Really, the full phrase that we use in all of our AdWords and paid search marketing is that, is “paid search marketing.” It goes beyond just AdWords; there’s also Bing, there’s Yahoo!, there’s a lot of different ways to do paid search marketing. This full thing is … Paid search marketing encompasses all that.
So, if you haven’t yet seen what a Google AdWord [inaudible 00:07:55] make a search, like I made this search for “internet marketing agency”. The first few ads you’ll see, with the little green box that will say “Ad”, those are ads created in Google AdWords. So, we put an ad out for anybody who’s searching for “internet marketing agency” within a specific area that we’re trying to target. Make sense? You good?
So who should use Google AdWords? And that’s an important question. If you are looking for clients, or if you are somebody who might be wondering if it would fit for your business, here’s how you know if Google AdWords is right for you. If you want more traffic, leads, or sales. So basically, if you want people to do something that enhances your sales process, your business, drive new traffic, leads, calls, form fills, or ultimately purchases for your site, that’s who’s going to use Google AdWords. Who doesn’t use Google AdWords? People who have enough traffic, leads, or sales. So in other words, just about any business who has the need and want to grow can take advantage of Google AdWords, take advantage of paid search marketing and how it can drive new leads to their business.
Also, I forgot to mention by the way: throughout this process, if you’re watching on Facebook, if you want to post comments, feel free to do so. Post your comments. At the end, we’ll have a quick Q&A. Greg will come back up, ask a few of the questions, so some of the better ones. So if your questions are horrible, don’t worry, we’ll respond to them later, but we’ll cover some of the best ones that we see now, during this session, and as many as possible. There really is no dumb question, but just the better ones will only be read live. Is that okay?
Cool. Selling the client. So, the few points we’re going to touch within this: why paid search marketing, why us, and how to price and send a proposal. So why paid search marketing? Everybody here … And if you’re online you can answer, but just go with me on this. If you’re familiar with the sales funnel, the sales funnel looks a little like this. There’s awareness. Can hear you.
Feedback: [inaudible 00:10:15] if you’re familiar with …
John Rowa: I can hear your …
Greg: Oh, crap.
John Rowa: I can hear your … That’s Greg.
So if you’re familiar with the sales funnel, there’s four layers of the sales funnel.
Greg: Dude, why won’t it turn off?
John Rowa: It’s our first one.
Greg: It’s live.
John Rowa: The top of the sales funnel is awareness. In the middle, there’s interest, decision, and an action. The cool part about AdWords is that people have already made a decision to purchase what you are offering, so … The awareness section of the sales funnel, that’s where you would build basically just general awareness for what you do, who you are. Those are like TV ads that you see, or radio spots, right? Businesses that are trying to get their brand known, that’s at the top of the sales funnel. Interest, you move further down the funnel. Interest is when somebody as been engaged with your brand, maybe they’ve liked you on Facebook and you’re running your Facebook ads. Nobody’s ever on Facebook looking for your product or service, right? You’re on Facebook because you’re liking cat meetings, like Chris, and you’re trying to talk to Graham or whatever. That’s where Facebook would come in, because we can target people demographically, or engage them based on their interest that they’ve already shown, because we’ve made them more …
Greg: Hey, Chris. Come and show your face so we know who’s the cat [crosstalk 00:11:47]
John Rowa: Yes, this is our cat guy, Chris. Here’s Chris. That’s Chris.
Chris: Represent.
John Rowa: Lemonade Stand. That’s our cat guy. That’s his actual title here at the office.
But the cool part about AdWords is that people are already in the decision phase by the time they are searching on Google. If it’s done correctly, people are searching for your products and services already. They’re already made a decision to purchase. If it’s done right, they’ve already made a decision to purchase. You might say like, “Well, there’s a lot of things I type on Google. I’m not looking for a purchase; I’m just looking for information.” Well, the cool part about Google is that we can target people and searches that are highly intentional, that are looking for certain services or products and things like that, so we can target them in decision mode, and that’s the cool part about Google. The thing that our job is to do is to make them choose your service, your products, your website, over your competitors. That will ultimately be the action part of the funnel: when they’ve come to your site, and they’re ready to take action, and ultimately make a purchase.
Another cool part about Google AdWords or paid search marketing is that it’s an immediate impact. If you don’t yet have an online presence, AdWords is the quickest way to build ROI. Now, that’s not to say it’s not also the quickest way to spend money. Google AdWords is the most expensive type of marketing you can do, but it’s extremely valuable, because it takes people at the farthest part of the sales funnel and pushes them down into your website right when they’re ready to purchase. So, it’s extremely valuable. It’s a quick way to build RO- [inaudible 00:13:38]
Established a cost-per-acquisition at smaller scale, and then gradually grow it. So, when you have a Google AdWords campaign, when a client comes to us and asks us like, “Hey, can I do this? Can I afford this?” What we tell them is, “Yes, you can afford it.” Google AdWords is scalable. You want to start with a smaller amount and then just grow up over time.
Another cool part about Google AdWords’ scalability and paid search marketing scalability is that you can control the volume as close to as monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly. So, for example, we’ve had clients who come to us, and say they’re a plumber, and they have so many trucks during the day to go out and service people throughout the city, right? And they tell us, “Hey, I-” [inaudible 00:14:35] fill those trucks and get them out with scheduled services. We can run ads. Once we’ve established a cost per acquisition, we’ll know how much we need to spend to get the phone to ring enough so that they can fill those trucks, or fill the booked appointments for those trucks.
For example, we’ve had a plumbing company actually call us at some point and go, “Hey, we need five trucks. We have five trucks sitting today. What can you do to push it out?” And we’ll run a really highly targeted AdWords campaign very quickly, usually that we’ve already set up before, because it’s difficult to just run this on the fly … But we can run a Google AdWords campaign that targets them, and then also accelerates the budget just to get them to purchase right away, get them to call right away. So that way, we can get the phone ringing for that customer, and those trucks out and servicing clients. And then afterwards, they’ll call us and be like, “Hey, we’re good. Turn off the AdWords campaigns. We’re all good to go. Please turn off the leads.”
[inaudible 00:15:48] are interested in that kind of scalability. They’re just happy with knowing how many leads I can get per month, right? Most people say like, “Hey, if I can just get five new leads a month,” if they’re small business, or, “If I can just increase my sales and get 10 more sales this week, that would be huge for my business.” So it’s really powerful in the scalability.
Why us? And this isn’t a sale for Lemonade Stand; this is just us telling you what we do, and why it’s important for other businesses like us if you’re looking to be an agency or interested in growing your business. These are the kind of standards that we think you should have when we sell a client. For us, transparency is huge. You’ll always know what we’re doing for you, and at a minimum, we send reports out monthly. It’s always on demand, but oftentimes, it’s more than monthly, but at least, at the minimum, people are going to know what we’re doing monthly.
We actually will touch on this at a future Lunch and Learn, but we do a reporting process called “the three what’s”. It’s what we’ve accomplished, what we’re working on, and what’s coming up next. And we do that every single month for all of our clients, so that way, they know those three things: what we’ve accomplished this last month, what we’re working on now, and what we’re coming what’s coming up next. So that way, they always can previously see what’s going on now and see in the future, and everybody’s on the same page and driving the business forward.
Also, you always know what we’re charging you. You pay us a monthly fee, and then you pay Google directly. This is a big thing for other agencies out there. A lot of other agencies, they will tell you, “Hey, pay us a thousand dollars,” for instance, “for a Google AdWords campaign. We’ll get a Google AdWords campaign launched for you.” The client pays them a thousand dollars. How much of that money actually goes to Google? It’s horrible, but they do this. They’ll take actually a huge amount. We’ve seen 30%, we’ve seen 40. I think I’ve seen up to like maybe 60, 50-60% of agency’s taking the money that was allocated towards Google, and then using it as their management fee instead of setting a baseline management fee, which we’ll talk about in just a little bit, and letting everybody know like, “Hey, this is what you pay us. Everything else, you pay Google.” So that way, it’s clear, it’s transparent, everybody’s on the same page.
Also, we are big on measuring everything. We believe you can’t manage what you can’t measure, so we track everything. This is one easy, cool way that we track everything. We use a really cool tool called Call Tracking Metrics, and you can search that online [inaudible 00:18:31] do a client’s business. So, we’d obviously track using Google Analytics, form fills, all that kind of stuff for most situations. But for say, a client who has the plumbing company, for example, they rely simply on phone calls coming in to their business. So what [inaudible 00:18:55] inbound call from the web. It will track who the person was, where they came from, Google Pay, Google AdWords, YouTube, wherever, the site they were on, the keyword they used, and it’s really cool. We can even actually audit the calls, listen to the call, know how the customer service representative did, if they closed the call, if they converted it. This is highly valuable, because it makes tangible the work we’re doing.
And if you’re looking for a way to do that for your agency, making tangible the work you’re doing is like the number one, most difficult thing you can do. It’s giving some value to the work you’re doing, and this is important, because we know exactly how many leads came to our client from the work we’ve done. It’s pretty cool, yes?
Greg: Yes.
John Rowa: Awesome. Thanks, Greg. Best feedback you gave all day.
Also, trusted partners. That is another [inaudible 00:19:57] Certification isn’t the end-all be-all of everything. Just about anybody can become certified, at this point, with Google if you just put your head down, and do the research, and become certified. However, it is at least the baseline we believe that you should do, because it certifies you, it makes you meet specific standards … Hi, Greg.
Greg: Hi.
John Rowa: And it also allows you to receive agency support. So we’re Google Partner Certified, we’re Bing Partner Certified. It basically is how we know that, or this is how clients know that we are basically accountable to Google, to Bing, in the work that we’re doing. There’s standards we have to meet. We’ve done our baseline certification, all that good stuff. Also, if you’re a Google Partner, you can get cool stuff like this. This is a cool little fridge we have out front. If you’re here, you’ve obviously seen it, but they give cool stuff every once in a while for some of their partners, and that was because we’ve met certain standards and did certain things. There’s our Google Partners mug. And there’s pizza.
Speaker 3: [inaudible 00:21:09]
John Rowa: Wow.
Speaker 3: I can’t take it.
John Rowa: Also, what I believe is the coolest part of what we do is that we do all of our work with no contracts. Nobody likes to be put in a contract, so we don’t do them. We earn your business every single month. Basically, nobody likes the sales guy, the car sales guy mentality. We see it every single day with our agency. Everybody comes to us going, “I don’t know where my internet marketing agency guy. I don’t know what they do for me, but I just had a really cool sales guy that I liked talking to, and he sold me on all this stuff, and well, they’re not delivering every month.” For us, we don’t do contracts because it holds us accountable to deliver every single month, to work our butts off for our clients, and it’s really important for us to do that. So if you don’t like the car salesman guy [inaudible 00:22:04]
On practical stuff. How to price Google AdWords or paid search marketing services, and then also, how to send a proposal.
So pricing: one, we set a base management fee. Our base management fee, for example, for, let’s say, a local business. We will charge them $400 a month to manage their ad spend. We’ll have all these things listed out on what we’ll do for them, and we’ll touch on that in just a second. But that’s our fee. You pay us $400 a month.
We might also optionally add a percentages of spend if the account grows. So if the account grows to a large amount, there is going to become more work involved in creating a campaign and managing the campaign, so we’ve got to charge more to do that. So what we do is just add a baseline management fee, or base fee, and then on top of it, a percentage of spend if the account grows. For example, we would charge $500 per month or 9% of ad spend, whichever is greater. That way, if the client gets spending more than $5,000 every month, they’re happy because their account’s grown, they know they’re investing in more and more, and now we’ll just take it out of a percentage of the ad spend, because the account is growing, it’s going to require more work.
Sending the proposals. So, take your time to prepare your proposals to be legit. We use a really cool tool that not many people have heard of. We actually heard of this, Greg heard of this, from a random Neil Patel blog or podcast, and he mentioned it just real quick, and we did all the research on it, and we got plugged in with this: qwilr.com. Q-W-I-L-R. It’s one of the coolest, easiest-to-use proposal softwares that we’ve found, and it’s really beautiful, too. But …
Greg: [crosstalk 00:23:54] What we were using, why we left it, and …
John Rowa: Yes. We previously were using a proposal software called Proposify, which was good, but it had a lot of deficiencies in not only the look and feel for the client, but also the user experience on our end. It had a lot of glitches, and … There were some cool parts about it, but we ultimately moved to Qwilr, because it was just so awesome, so powerful. So, take your time …
Greg: Make sure you tag Proposify.
John Rowa: We’ll tag them.
Greg: Put a shout-out.
John Rowa: We’ll tag Proposify. I’m sure they’ll be happy about it. Qwilr. So Qwilr.com, check them out. We don’t have any other reason to share that other than just to tell you it’s really stinking sweet.
So we took our time to make cool proposals. This is just a quick, cool example. Within the proposal, we can make these cool little splash images that feature really cool parts about our business. So people might want to know more about [malibus 00:24:52], or engage them to think like, “Wow, these guys are really good at what they do.” We had this cool little testimonial here from a company called centrexIT in San Diego. These guys are amazing, by the way. Shout-out to centrex team. But Dylan, here, left us a really cool review, and he talked about, “In less than six months, we’ve closed about 30K a month in new agreements,” and he just posted that on our Google Reviews … What do you call that? Google Maps … Yes, in Google Reviews. And he just posted that. We plugged it into Qwilr, put a little cool picture on it, and it looks awesome. It’s just a really cool way to feature some of the work you’ve done. Qwilr is cool. Really like it.
Also, customize each proposal per client as much as possible. So take your time, and there’s going to be some things that are … The cool part about Qwilr is that some things that are very … Give you ability to template, and they’re repeat over every single business, right? There’s a lot of stuff that we do for every single business repeats. But as much as possible, take your time to customize it, because it allows a client to know that you’ve invested, previously, in what they are what they’re doing already. You’ve done the research, you know about them, and it lets them know, like, “Wow, these guys actually really care about my business.” It’s going to increase your conversion rates incredibly by customizing as much as possible.
Greg: Hey, real quick on that.
John Rowa: Yes?
Greg: I get did a proposal for somebody, and for the background picture, it might have seemed lame, but it was a tile company. And I found a picture off of Facebook of the guy like kayaking with his son, and there was no back-and-forth. He saw it. Qwilr makes it look awesome. Right at the top of the proposal was about … I mean, it sounds lame the way I’m saying it, but if you saw it, it looked legit, and it just make made him look like, “Oh, these guys took interest in what I’m doing.”
John Rowa: It’s cool. It’s good.
Greg: The better mood you can put somebody in when they’re opening the proposal for the first time, the better off you’ll be.
John Rowa: It’s good. Also, detail out what’s included and what’s not included in each line item. Scope of work will save you thousands of dollars and hundreds of headaches. Everybody in this room is naughty, because …
Greg: Mike, get up there and talk. Get up there and talk.
John Rowa: Yes, come up here, Mike. Come up here, Mike. So this is … Everybody give Michael a big hand. This is Michael. Michael Garaysi. Have a seat in our little hots- [inaudible 00:27:28] Just sit on it.
Michael Garaysi: All right.
John Rowa: It’s sitting. So Michael is one of our developers here at Lemonade Stand, and man, how important is scope of work for us?
Michael Garaysi: Very important, because otherwise, you’re going to be stuck doing something for months.
John Rowa: Yes. Yes, and a lot more beyond what- So, [crosstalk 00:27:52] What is the most important part of like …
Greg: Art, get up there and tell it.
Michael Garaysi: Come one, Art. Come on this.
Greg: Let’s just have the screen full of …
John Rowa: Yes, we’ll just fill up people.
Michael Garaysi: Come up, Art.
Greg: Talk about scope creed.
John Rowa: Yes, tell us a little bit about scope. You’re going to have to scoot over.
Art: Am I in-frame?
John Rowa: Yes, it doesn’t matter. Just tell them.
Greg: You’re in.
Art: Yes, it can get out of control okay very easily if you just say, “Yes, we’ll make a website for you.” That entails a lot of different things. There’s a lot of people that ask for that.
John Rowa: So, when we’re doing scope of work, what is critical in building a good scope of work?
Art: Itemizing requests and things like that, and trying to … Just talking to the client, getting a good idea of what they’re after, what their requirements are.
Greg: It’s like building a house, right? Like you build a house …
Art: I never built the house before, but yes.
John Rowa: Cool.
Art: But like … You know, someone says, “Build a house,” and then they go, “Oh, well isn’t a deck part of it? Isn’t a swimming pool part of it?”
John Rowa: Yes.
Michael Garaysi: [crosstalk 00:29:11] Right, right, a bunch of add-ons.
John Rowa: Whoever’s watching online is like, “Who is this guy talking over this?”
Greg: It’s contractor Bob over here.
Art: It’s easy to have miscommunication. It’s easy for … When you say something, that you might know what you mean, but the client doesn’t, obviously, know what you mean, and it’s that breakdown in communication that can easily let things get out of control real easy, real fast. And you always want to do the best work possible, so it’s easy for us to bend over backwards, and we shoot ourselves in the foot.
John Rowa: Cool.
Greg: Perfect, Art.
John Rowa: Thanks, guys. Yes, Art and Michael. All-star developers.
Greg: Scope creed professionals.
John Rowa: Scope creed is the word.
So in saying that: when we build a proposal, as much as possible, we try to list out everything we’re doing, and everything we won’t do. This is one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard on how to build a scope of work. It’s very simple. We were racking our brains and trying to build these elaborate scope-of-works, scope of work documents, and things like that, when somebody told me this really simply: “Just tell them what’s included and what’s not.” And that’s exactly what we do.
So, this is an example of our proposal. [inaudible 00:30:26] simply what we’re not going to include. Makes it really simple, and it makes it very easy for the client to know what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do, and that’s super important. Some of these might be much longer, especially in web development. If you’re doing web development, or ever selling a website, or anything like that, you’re going to have to put like some elaborate scope of work. Trust me, if you could only know how many times we’ve heard the words, “Oh, can’t you just do this? It’s just a little easy … Can’t you just flip out a switch the color,” or things like that. It’s not. Nothing’s easy. Everything takes time.
It’s, just like Greg said, building a house. You would be like … Would you ever ask your guy to like, “Hey, can you just switch out the paint of the whole house?” That would be insane, but it happens all the time in web design, so it’s very important for us to do what’s included and what’s not. Also, winter is coming. Write your scope of work with that mindset: that “everything will go wrong if I don’t do this, basically. John Snow knows.
Discovery. So a few things we’re going to touch on: research volume and trends, how much can the clients spend, establishing KPIs, and then also ultimately identifying goals, limits, and targets for our campaign.
So researching volume and trends. So this is going to be pretty cool. This is, if you are … We’re going to get actually inside AdWords a little bit right now. If you’ve ever tried to sell internet marketing, or if you’ve ever sold internet marketing and paid search marketing, you are ultimately get to the question when you tell them like, “Hey, you need to Google AdWords.” The ultimate question that’s going to be asked by your client, especially if they’re new at it, is, “So, how much should I spend?” You know, like, “How much should I put into this?” And what we do is we use a cool tool called Google’s Keyword Planner. It allows us to estimate volume, bid amount, identify good keywords, much more. So I just want to take you guys through this real quick.
Can you see this with my fat body in front of it? You guys all good there?
Greg: No, you’re good, John. Don’t worry about it.
John Rowa: We’re good? Cool. So this is the Keyword Planner. If you’re in Google AdWords, in the tools, there’s a little buttons called Keyword Planner. Just click it. Eventually, you’ll see this little line right here that says “Get search volume and trends”. There’s a lot of stuff in here that we’re going to do, but I’m just going to take you through some of the most relevant ones for selling and starting a campaign.
So “get search volume and trends”. You’re going to go ahead and get taken to this page, or it’s going to expand, and you’re going to be able to put in some keywords. So, we need to know a little bit about our business, right? Or about our client’s business. So let’s just assume that this client is selling internet marketing, or we’re just doing it for ourselves. We’re going to start putting in keywords. “Internet marketing”, “online marketing”, “digital marketing”, “online marketing agency”, “internet marketing agency”. We can also identify what area we’re targeting, so we’re going to target California specifically. We could also even put in some negative keywords to drown, or to take out, like “how-to” searches, info searches, things like that.
Once you click that, you’re going to be taken to a screen that’s going to give you some forecasts on keywords, and there’s some really cool parts about this screen. The first one I wanted to show you is the Search Volume Trends. When a client goes like, “Hey, how much did I spend?” Well, every month isn’t necessarily going to be the same. For our business, springtime appears to be the most relevant time of the year, April. So internet marketing searches go up during that time. And then you’ll also see that, obviously, December, it’s the least amount time. People in December are with their families, not really searching for new internet marketing agencies.
In knowing that, it helps us prepare for each month a little better. You’ll see wide ranges on this, especially for services that are weather-based, like a HVAC company. You know what I mean? Those guys, they’ll … Like with summertime in California, you’ll have so many more searches than the rest of the month.
Also, there’s some cool other things you can search for and adjust this graph for. If you click that little button, you can actually even go in and see each location. So, if I’m searching for all of California, I’ll know how many searches, or what cities have the most amount of searches. So Los Angeles, obviously, biggest metro area, is going to have most of the searches for something like internet marketing, followed by the Barrett Bay Area, San Diego, Orange County, things like that. What’s going back here into this screen: if you look down beyond the chart, you’ll see the keyword ideas. This will show you a few keywords, the keywords that we put in, and the relevant information for them. You’re going to see average monthly searches [inaudible 00:35:21]
is a … It’s basically a percentage of … Google bases this on how much competition, or how many people are bidding, and how many people are in AdWords, compared to how many searches overall there are for those keywords. And then “suggested bid”. Google is showing us what they suggest you should bid on to get bound for these keywords. So obviously, if you noticed, internet marketing, digital marketing, online marketing, some of these are very broad campaign terms. They’ve got higher suggested bids. These are broad. But the cool part about this, as you’ll see, I put in “company” and “agency”. These are better search terms. We’re basically qualifying who we’re wanting to reach. Somebody who’s searching “online marketing” might be just searching for information, might be just looking up data, might be just trying to find stuff, like, “I want more information on this.” They’re not ready to purchase. But somebody types in “online marketing agency,” they’re probably looking for us.” You know what I mean?
So we’ve got to be in that search. Those searches, though, are much more … The bids are much higher. That’s because there’s other people like us that recognize that, and they’re bidding those keywords up. So make sure you niche up or qualify your keywords. That’s very important.
So to do that, we’re going to go ahead and go up here. We’re going to put in … We’re just going to add the word “agency” or “company” to all the keywords we had. Here’s another version of the graph that we can see, but it’ll also now adjust our keywords, our monthly searches, our suggested bid, so we can get a good idea of what we can expect to spend for each click, and how many searches there are within each area. So we know if we can get 2% of the “digital marketing agency” clicks, we’re going to reach about 260 people every single month. We’re going to get that many clicks for that, just by doing basic math.
Actually, if you want to do some forecasts, there’s this really cool part about this tool [inaudible 00:37:26] Copy your keywords and then enter upload back when you hit “review plan”, and you’ll be able to just plug them in here, click “get forecast”, and you’ll actually be taken to a screen that will forecast how much you can bid, or how much you can expect to bid every single month … Actually, this is a daily. Every single day. So, based on that last screen, I know that my suggested bid is about 20 … I think was 25, 75. I just pulled a random number out. And I’m going to say that I want to spend about $100 a day on bidding on those keywords. It’s then going to give me this cool information. It’s going to tell me I can expect to get 7.29 clicks a day. I can be seen almost two, three hundred times, and my click-through rate is about 2.5 percent. This is just giving me some ballpark numbers, but it’s pretty cool, right?
This is good information you can tell the client now, or potential client, whatever. You can tell them like, “Hey, how many clicks do you need? Well, we can get seven clicks a day for you if you spend a $100,” just based on [inaudible 00:38:30]
Sound great? A lot of information there, I know. We’ll have this available later, at a later time by the way, on the blog, just so you know.
How much can the client spend? First step: establishing a budget, know your client’s limitations. If they’re a small mom-and-pop business, don’t try to force them to spend too much. Know your client’s limitations. They’ve got to gradually grow it. Also, if they just can’t afford it, and they especially can’t afford your management fee on top of it, don’t bother. They can do Google AdWords Express. We’ve recommended that quite a few times to people who’ve called in and just aren’t ready to advertise with us at that point.
[inaudible 00:39:14] we also tell them only … I usually tell people, “Only spend what you can afford to lose.” That sounds very gambling-like. It’s not. Google AdWords is a scalable model for driving sales, inbound sales to your business, but you still don’t want to be stupid with it, because it cost money. It takes money, it takes investment, and you just might lose it the first month because you’re collecting data, or there might be ebb and flows within the month that you just weren’t aware of. Things like there’s competition, extra competition, just never know. So don’t spend more than you can afford to lose. It’s not a guarantee.
And then also, start out s-[inaudible 00:39:56] good cost-per-acquisition, then grow your account. Don’t just grow your account just like, “Oh, I got to leave. I’m just going to throw a bunch more money in it.”
Establishing KPIs. KPIs are key performance indicators, so you want to find out what matters to not only you, but the client. There’s some specific client
[inaudible 00:40:24] it starts with a … and now it’s AdWords, it starts with an impression. Somebody’s seen your ad, then they usually click on it if you convince them enough to click on it. Then they go to the site, they become a lead. If your site converts them into a lead, usually it’s a form fill or a call. If they call and they’re a qualified lead, meaning they’re somebody who fits within the customer service, like … For example, if it’s a IT company, and the IT company only services people who have 50 or more seats, but somebody calls in and they just want their WiFi router fixed. That’s a lead, but it’s not a qualified lead. Qualified lead is basically somebody who they can service, and it’s a opportunity for them to make a sale. And then obviously, the last part of the phone would be the sale. Sometimes, if they’re just like a e-commerce store, they might skip lead and opportunity and go straight to sale, but you get the idea.
So, for us, the most important part within this process … Does anybody know what the most important part of this process would be in tracking? What means the most to us in tracking and reporting to our clients? Actually, [inaudible 00:41:41] to their client, and hopefully send a qualified lead that becomes a customer. We can’t sell the customer in most times. We’re not going to be picking up the phone for them. So usually, for us, opportunity, or qualified lead, is our most important KPI. It’s what we would report internally and report to our client.
However, we don’t tell our client, like, “Oh, whatever. We did as much as we can.” No, because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters to the client is what? The sale. So, we have got to drive sales ultimately, at the end of the day. ROI is ultimately the most important thing. It’s the only KPI that really matters at the end of the day.
Greg: I lot of times, we’re able to help the companies through call tracking to increase their sales. I mean, how many times that we’ve sent qualified opportunities to people, and then the people picking up the phone don’t know how to close the deal, or things like that.
John Rowa: Yes. Cool. We got maybe about 10 minutes left before Q&A, so let’s roll through this real quick. This is really cool. “Identify goals, targets, and limits.” It’s really important to know what are goals. A lot of times, people will just get in there paid search campaigns, sell the world, and then under-deliver. We want to know what a client’s goals are. So, what does the client expect? There’s a lot of … Like scope of work. What does the client expect you to do and what to deliver on? How fast do they expect it? How can we manage their expectations?
So, if a client tells you like, “Hey, I need five new leads a day.” You’re like, “Okay, great, that’s no problem. I can do it.” “And I need it to start like in three days.” I’d be like, “Whoa.” We need time to establish a campaign and know how well it’s going to work, get data. You’ve got to really manage your expectations with clients and with yourself. Know exactly what your goals are, get as much detail as possible, write down numbers. It’s important, and then ultimately, manage the expectations between yourself, your client, and your team.
Also, what are our targets? So, what is our target cost per acquisition? This is really critically important for us. When a client comes to us, and they ask like, “Hey, I want to get my ad up on Google. I’m going to need more leads.” “Okay, great. How much can you afford to spend per qualified lead?” That’s our cost per acquisition. So, what we want to do is identify that. If you can tell me like, “I can spend $500 for every qualified lead, because I know I’m going to sell a $10,000, or $3,000, $5,000 unit,” then I would say, “Great.” Now we’ve established a cost maximum or target cost per acquisition. We know how much we can spend to drive that lead to the customer and to the customer site. It’s really cool. It’s really powerful in knowing this, and it’s really critical to get this up front during this discovery phase.
When should we begin seeing results? Also, that’s … What is our target? I usually tell clients, “Look, everything is month-to-month with us, but it’s going to take time for us to show results. It’s going to take time for us to get …” Or not just show results, but to get the best results possible. “Give us time to do that properly. It’s an investment for us and for you to do this right.” So, [inaudible 00:45:08] the competition, all that, to get it right, to do it correctly.
So, we’re just going to continue to work on it, and what we want to see is a trend, ultimately, but at the end of the day, the client’s going to ultimately ask, “When can we begin to see results?” And we’re going to tell them, “As soon as possible. We’re going to work our butts off to make that as soon as possible, but you can really expect to spend the most amount of money within the first one, two, three months of your AdWords campaign. After that, we’ll start really being able to drive down costs even more and build a long-term, viable solution that is much more scalable.” That doesn’t mean it can’t work out, by the way, at the first month. We’ve seen some clients just do great right out the gates. It’s incredible. It happens more than not, but we just want to manage expectations, of course
And ultimately, at what point should we begin to scale? And that’s something we talked about just a little bit ago. After we’ve established the cost per acquisition, if a client tells us, “Hey, I can afford to spend $500.” Okay, great. Maybe we got it down to $300. Okay, now it’s really time to scale, so that’s our target. And also, what are our limits? What is our maximum monthly budget? You’re always going to need to ask a client, “How much can I spend per month?” Everything in Google is calculated daily, but you’ve got to put in a … Usually, you talk to a client about a maximum monthly budget.
What is the most we can spend per opportunity? And that is the same thing we talk about cost per acquisition. We need to know what the max is as much as our target is. And then, ultimately, how long do we go without results before making a major adjustment if things aren’t expected? So don’t set yourself up to get to the point where the client goes like, “Hey, nothing’s worked. It’s been like five months.” You need to have set markers before that to make adjustments, knowing that like, “Man, if something’s not happening within the first month like I think it should, then I need to go back in there make some major adjustments.”
Last part of today’s lesson is about strategy. So, what type of campaigns should we use? How do we get a user to click our ads? Where should the user go? What should the user do once they get there? And ultimately, what factors will influence these along step? So these are just some cool ways to strategize how to build an AdWords campaign before you even put it into a- [inaudible 00:47:32] do paid search marketing. There’s obviously Google and Bing, our big networks, but within their networks, there’s actually other ways to do paid search marketing.
I showed you guys earlier the screenshot of the standard search network. And the search network ad is the most common, it’s the one that most people want to get into, because people are searching for specific terms that they’re wanting information on. Those are the ads that show up when somebody types in keywords on Google, and those are the first four ads that show up. But there’s also display network. So, if you’ve ever been traveling along the web, searching for cats like Chris, cat memes, you’ve probably seen a bunch of display ads on the those banners, those annoying banners, right? Those ads are usually run through an ad network that Google runs called … What is it? What is that? Display networks, yes.
So basically, what Google does is: in AdWords, you can actually send or bid on those areas within specific placements, so if you’re selling, for instance, if you’re selling cat toys in your e-store, and you are like, “Man, I need a guy like Chris who’s searching for cats all day long. I’m going to target sites that have cat-themed information, and we’re going to put our banner ads on it.”
Video ads. Those are the ads you see before YouTube; that’s pretty obvious. Like on YouTube, you see those five to 15 second video ads. Those are run through AdWords as well. Mobile app ads, those are also run through … Can be run through AdWords. You can actually, if you have an app, you can run mobile app ads and boost the sales of your app.
And then there’s also product listing ads. So, if you’ve seen Google Shopping … If you’ve been in Google and you’ve seen the shopping tab, this is one of the furthest places down the funnel that you can get inside search marketing. Anybody who’s clicking on Google Shopping is only looking to shop. They’re looking to buy. It’s like the Amazon of Google. If you can get your ads in there using product listing ads, you have a good chance of getting engagement on to your site, and getting people who are looking at your products. Because- [inaudible 00:49:57] in this process, I think in week three, but within that, you can really get into some conversion rate optimization and make some big sales using Google Shopping. But it’s a really cool tool.
Then the last one is retargeting. Retargeting is … Has everybody been on Amazon and searched for shoes, and then watched that stupid shoe follow you around the web wherever you go? All that is is retargeting. Basically, we drop a cookie on your computer. When you go and search a site or view that shoe, and then every time you go around the web, that cookie triggers our ads. It tells us like, “Hey, put that shoe up for them. Remind them about that shoe. We want them to purchase that shoe,” until they get to the point where they purchase it. Really powerful stuff.
So how do we get a user to click on our ads? There’s a few points. We’re going to touch on a lot of this in a practical way next week, but we’re actually going to go through building them, but for this week, I just wanted to touch on engaging a qualified user to click our ads, and just the principles behind it so we can strategize about it. You want your ads to stand out among the crowd. You want to create really compelling copy. You want to address a pain point, and your copy should also offer a resolution. Basically, you should write an effective ad that answers, or that does all-
[inaudible 00:51:26] I want to be a part of that. I want to choose these guys. Addresses a point pain point: you want to basically find somebody in their need and tell them like, “Hey, we got you,” and that’s part of the last part, yes, offers resolution. We can handle what you’re looking for.
Here’s a cool example of an ad we have out for centrexIT, which we featured earlier [inaudible 00:51:53] for IT company, and they’re in the San Diego area, they’re obviously looking for an IT company to service them. So, we’ve got an ad running for “IT company San Diego”. This is obviously, “Hey, this is us. We’re here.” “Award-winning outsourced IT.” We write this because it’s … Most IT companies are shady, and they have really poor practices. You can’t get a hold of them. We’re telling our searchers here, our users, hey we’re good at what we do. Then we have “14 years of”-[inaudible 00:52:29] “Hey, we’re here. We’re good at what we do. We can solve your pain point. Get a free IT assessment today. We’re calling you to action to do just that. We’re going to help you do this today.”
And then there’s a whole bunch of other cool- this looks way better than the other ads, because it’s got all this cool data on it. We just added all this good stuff here. Really effective ad, and these guys are awesome at what they do, which makes it really easy to get to as well.
So, where should the user go once they click on the ad? The landing page. Landing page should be specific to the ad group. We”ll actually have … For centrex, we’ll have quite a few different ad groups, and for some companies, potentially hundreds if not thousands of ad groups that changed the way that we write text, and write ads, and the keywords that we target for those ads, and how we push them to a specific landing page. So each ad group should have a specif- [inaudible 00:53:27] page that IT company, or IT company ad, that IT company ad also goes to a specific IT company landing page.
Explain why you are the solution to their problem in as few words as possible. Ryan will know this: we really stand on this here. People buy the products and services they understand the fastest. Donald Miller saying. It’s really, really powerful when you can build an effective landing page that answers questions, it solves a problem, explains what you do, all within like one sentence. And it’s a lot easier than you think. It’s simply making a landing page that says, “Hey, this is what we do,” and for example, for centrex, they would write a page that says, “We are an award-winning IT company in San Diego that helps small businesses or medium-sized businesses take control of their IT.” Very effective, very easy. It’s one sentence. It’s very easy to come across, and it answers questions very easily.
What should the user do when they get there? The “call to action”. Your call to action should resolve the pain point, and as much as possible, send them only further down the funnel. Be careful to include clicks that send your users on a journey to learn more, right? Everybody wants to explain everything about what they do. They want to put so much information about their … Keep it simple. You answer enough questions, they’re going to find what they need to know if they’re really looking for it, but for the most part, most people just need to know if you can solve their problem, and then they’re going to pick up the phone.
And then finally, if you targeted them correctly, they should be ready to purchase. Yes, so that’s just with that. If you target them correctly, they should be ready to purchase. You don’t need to explain much more than … You don’t need to send them to other pages in your site as much as possible.
And then finally, this last one: what factors will influence the user throughout- well, forgot “the user”- throughout the process. Some of the factors: these are the things that you’re going to need to know, strategize about, and what we’re going to really cover next week. Keywords, ad copy, landing page, competition, and the product pricing and positioning that you take on your site.
Overall that is, “Boom, out of here.” That’s it. That’s the final part of this, part one of this series. We have probably about what? Five minutes for questions and answers? Do we have any Q&As?
Greg: Boom. No.
John Rowa: You got some questions? Do you want to come over, Greg?
Greg: My thing won’t work. I’ll take your phone [crosstalk 00:56:13] open your phone.
John Rowa: Does anybody- why am I …
By the way, next week we’re going to do landing page creation. We’re going to learn how to create a pay-per-click campaign from start to finish. This is, I think going to be … This week, we touched on some of the pre-planning kind of stuff, but next week, man, we’re going to get into some of the really practical parts of creating landing pages and a pay-per-click campaign from start to finish. So there you go. I don’t have any anything on here.
Greg: Nobody had any questions. You just did too good a job.
John Rowa: Well, great. That’s awesome. I thought you were looking for some. Great, so I think that’s it. Greg, did you have any?
Greg: I just want to say how good of a job you did.
John Rowa: Thanks.
Greg: [inaudible 00:57:05] alarm told me that the office wasn’t closed last night at like 9 o’clock, so I thought someone forgot to lock it. And then John was here until … 11:00?
John Rowa: 2:00.
Greg: 2:00. [inaudible 00:57:25] stinking good job, and it’s appreciated. It’s really good.
John Rowa: Yes, glad to do it. This was cool.
Greg: Yes.
John Rowa: We got more.
Greg: Yes, and the next ones, I think, will be even more … That was like overview, really basic stuff.
John Rowa: Overview, getting into some of like how to build from an agency standpoint [inaudible 00:57:48] let’s getting our hands dirty and let’s build a campaign.
Greg: Natalie asked a question.
John Rowa: Natalie.
Greg: Look at you.
John Rowa: Go for it. Bring it [crosstalk 00:57:59]
Greg: Will you let Art answer that, or?
John Rowa: Bring it up here.
Greg: Yes, Art, you want to do it?
Art: I don’t know [crosstalk 00:58:05].
John Rowa: Come up here, Chris. Come up here and ask this question.
Chris: All right, it says …
Greg: Bye.
John Rowa: Bye.
Chris: Natalie [Meducci 00:58:10]], she says, [inaudible 00:58:16]
John Rowa: Appropriate amount of times after we’ve … So how many times, or how long?
Chris: That they should call.
John Rowa: Okay, it’s not how long, but how many times.
Chris: Yes, she said “we call”, so ….
John Rowa: So, after they send a request. That’s a great question. We actually, just starting on the time aspect, we actually have a rule here: if somebody fills out a form on our site, no matter- a support request or a quote re- [inaudible 00:58:43] the coolest sales tools we’ve ever used, and we try to trigger as much crap as we can to signal like, “Hey, we gotta call this person,” but I’ll get a text on my phone, whatever.
But if somebody sends a request in, we pick up the phone and go like, “Hey, I just saw you fill out a request,” like 99 times, they are blown away at how fast we did that. So, if you can do whatever you can, Natalie, to notify yourself when a new lead comes in, if you can respond as quickly as possible, it blows people away. Now, how many times you do that afterwards? That’s a really good question. I think … It’s a fine line between annoying and … What do you call it?
Russell: Proactive.
John Rowa: Proactive, yes. Thanks, Russell. Proactive and annoying. You really got to try [inaudible 00:59:33] not back away from their request. They actually asked you to call them at some point, but you don’t want to be too annoying. So usually, you want to … I’d call liberally, but you don’t want to call too much. Call them, leave a voicemail, send an email, and then follow up again maybe a day or two later, and then maybe do it again two or three days later after that. Just basically, keep them in your queue until they basically tell you to go away.
Chris: Yes.
John Rowa: Does that answer- hopefully that answers her question. Did I answer your question, Natalie? Any other questions from anybody in here? You guys have about any of this? AdWords, client interaction, any of that stuff?
Greg: It’s a peanut gallery right here, dude.
John Rowa: Yes, I know. These guys … You guys- you want to switch it? You want to swing this around so everybody can say hi and do this real quick before we come out? Before we head out, we’ll just show you the team here real quick. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. If you joined us online, Chris is going to swing this around and show everybody the team, so everybody wave. So this is everybody. We had a couple guests here with us today, too, as well, but everybody say hi
Chris: [inaudible 01:00:47] probably cost like $15.
John Rowa: Yes. So thanks, guys. Appreciate it. This is the team, everybody. There’s Greg sitting in the corner. So thank you all. Peace out, have a good one. We’ll see you all next week.

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