# Google AdWords: Stop Losing and Start Exploiting — Dave Collins — MicroConf 2012

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZkTeiJEm74
Duration: 58 min
Language: English
Words: 10484
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/hZkTeiJEm74

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[0:00] [Music]

[0:07] [Music] thank you Amy okay yeah good morning everyone thank you for making it out of those soft beds of the this hotel and this ungodly hour my name is Dave Collins I don't need so much about myself we've been going for about 15 years our company we're based in UK you can probably tell from the accent I'm not exactly a local we are only four people in our company two based in the UK and New Forest and two people in Chicago here in the US and actually that that's all you need to know about my business just a very quick show of hands how many people are using

[0:48] Google AdWords right now don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing how many people are actually happy with the results that they get okay that's good that makes me feel that little bit better my background I've been working with AdWords since the year 2000 which is quite a long ago so quite a while ago if you take twelve years off your current age figure out how old you were back then I was thirty years old I had no children I had more hair honestly I slept a fair amount more during the year that I was really getting my feet wet in AdWords this was a year that the film's

[1:27] perfect storm meet the parents were big in the box office if you listen to chart music you were listening stuff like Lenny Kravitz Bon Jovi and of a young and innocent looking Britney Spears so it was it was a while ago and I started work with the AdWords system round about five six months before it was actually launched to the public now in our company we actually track the work that we do a little bit obsessively more or less by the minute well very much by the minute and just well there's preparing this presentation back in the UK I pulled out some figures that I thought

[2:03] were we're interesting and relevant I turns out I work an average of four hours a day in the AdWords system so if we do some basic math let's assume a year is 48 working weeks if only that were the case right a week being five working days same same thing applies so I'd words a day four hours so it turns out a year I'm doing 240 days times for 960 hours a year living the AdWords system on top of that we run some AdWords training schemes locally various presentations webinar posts presentations like this and so on as we're looking quite comfortably a thousand hours a year that I am working

[2:46] in the AdWords system this hasn't been for the whole 12 years this has only been for lists eleven year so we look at eleven thousand hours of and words experience which is depressing I see most people are familiar this idea that ten thousand hours and you're an expert in more or less anything I can't I can't comment on the accuracy the phylidia that but I do know I do an awful lot of AdWords like everything unfortunately there's a price to be paid when I started work with AdWords I look like that genuinely today I look like that although in fairness these two didn't really help the aging process either I

[3:27] know got to throw a picture the kids into to the presentation where am I going with this over the next forty minutes one of my main goals is to take the eleven thousand hours of pain and suffering to take it and inject it into the next forty minutes were looking at two hundred and seventy five hours of AdWords experience per minute that I talk from this point on obviously so why AdWords there's a lot of reasons Google give you all sorts of reasons why you should be using the AdWords system but the main thing is it allows businesses to reach the world and expand into whole

[4:04] new areas of maybe not already targeting it's low risk the returns can be fantastic and it's relatively easy at least to set up take away all the hype in AdWords actually does one thing really really well and that's that it brings people who want to buy what you sell at the exact moment they want to buy it so it's very much it's the opposite if you like of interruption advertising the problem without words is that most people get it wrong most people lose money on AdWords and they don't need to the bigger problem is that many of the most people get it really really wrong and have no idea I'm sure I could have

[4:44] phrased that a little bit better but that you get the idea I'm hoping that by the end of the this presentation if I get it right that most people in here will possibly look at the relationship you have with Google a little bit differently and by doing so you'll be able to make it a healthier and a more profitable one for for you at least so contrary to popular belief Google are not evil they're not even bad but Google do place the well-being of their business above the well-being of yours which isn't unreasonable now within the AdWords ecosystem you've got three mutually dependent parties if you like

[5:24] you've got the advertisers people like you and I you've got the users also people like you and either people go there to search Google and you have Google now that whole framework that ecosystem only has one threat it's not Apple it's not Facebook it's not Yahoo or Microsoft or the Alliance and it's not whichever next big wall a big one that comes out that everyone's going to say this is the latest Google killer the threat that they take that they face is that you and I will stop clicking on the ads in other words you go to Google you do a search for something you click on

[5:58] the first add the second add the third add you kind of getting stuff that's relevant it's not exactly what you're looking for we're fine with that right that that's the way it goes but if you start clicking 9 10 11 12 ads and he's still not finding what it what you're looking for how long will it actually take before you start ignoring the ads completely or possibly even looking elsewhere and you can't underestimate the scale of what the the scale of that threat to Google over the past four years year-on-year 96% of Google's revenue comes from their advertising so to all intents and purposes Google is

[6:33] Adwords and AdWords is Google the whole infrastructure is based on ads all their products their service their applications their programs they all either push out the ads or they feed in the information to feed the system very much the beating heart of the ads system because of this Google understandably they they're quite scared they're worried that eventually we might start ignoring that phase them out not notice and start clicking on them which is why over time Google's that she started to quite significantly blur the differences between the AdWords ads and the organic results the ads physically moved closer and the organic results are starting to resemble more the the format in the

[7:16] structure of the actual ads so if you take a step back Google need their advertisers advertisers need the users and users need Google that's pretty self-explanatory right the mistake that people make is assuming that this relationship is a symbiotic one and it's far from it really simple example to to illustrate the point let's say having a company selling a product they've got an ad bidding on a certain keyword that's relevant they've gotten out it's it's a good ad it's a good because people click on the ad they like what they see and they're happy job done they're competing with a band that the bad dad still looks

[7:56] good people still click on the ad but what happens is people click on the ad they don't find what they're looking for they go back to Google so let's assume in this scenario that both of them per se can be convenient are both bidding $1 per click what then happens most people will then click the first ad because that's the one at the top find what they're looking for job done Google have made $1 in revenue but things get a little bit more interesting if Google swapped the order and they put the bad ad in the first place and the good ad in second place again they're still bidding $1.00 per

[8:29] click but what most people will do will click on the first ad first being the top ad they read the content it's not what they're looking for they go back to Google then they click the second ad the good I'd find what they're looking for and so they're happy it's a really simple point but it illustrates that this relationship between advertisers in Google is so far from symbiotic and the irony the icing on the cake if you like the company that running the AdWords the Babbitt chances are every time they do a search for their keyword because we all search for keywords right every time they do when they see their ad above

[9:05] their competition they can be delighted so welcome to the real the nature of the relationship between Google and their advertisers so pre AdWords the old way of getting customers very broadly speaking three ways one is faith in the product the belief that what you have is so good the world is eventually going to beat a path to your door second is faith in figures I've come across this approach too many times where someone says we have the as an example we have the greater side and you've ever seen from Microsoft Excel it is unbelievable phenomenal and if we can only hit 1% of the world's five hundred

[9:43] million Excel users you can see where they're going with that and the third is faith in organic traffic through through SEO or just naturally by the whole system kicking in and working faith in the product is it's it's a nice idea in theory but we all know right we all know that just having a great product isn't enough one way the other you've got to either push it out there you've got to push out what you do what you sell or pull in the people are interested faith in figures speaks for itself and for obvious reasons those people tend to move on and do different things

[10:16] faith in organic traffic we do a lot of SEO work and it works it really works but it's it's horrible it's a really horrible process you've got a brand new website today with no history getting out there and ranking for competitive keywords that drive volumes is next to impossible so the problem that many people have is that they hit this wall and I suspect that some people in the room can relate to that moment when you sit there and say we just need more people we know it's great the few people who use what we sell love it but we need more people can anyone here relate to

[10:53] that so the ability in my opinion ability to get past that wall differentiates the successful business from the dream of what what could have been and that's why 11 years on eleven years eleven thousand of fighting without words that's why I actually genuinely love Google AdWords it's it's not the system itself it's not the promotional gifts they send thank you for the umbrella and the lip balm that they sent me two months ago generosity is phenomenal it's it's not the joy of living the AdWords 11,000 our dream it's a fact that AdWords is a hugely powerful means to an end and that end is pulling in people to your website

[11:38] who really want what you sell so this point going to move straight into the actual the hard the hard core ideas if you like going to lay out ten different ideas some of which may be a new some which may not but ten different ideas for you to grab away control from Google and control the system the whole idea of segmentation at the heart the heart of AdWords is actually take away all the complexity all the technical stuff is actually a very simple system there's a need people put in the key word people see your ad people click on your ad and they land on your landing page that's it

[12:17] that's actually all there is to it and as much as I hate the analogy links and chains the stronger the the links between these different parts the better AdWords works so simple example your home are Wednesday Thursday were after this conference you wake up with shocked to find there's water on your face you open your eyes and you see there's a leak there's water dripping through the ceiling you jump outta bed you go to computer which thankfully is dry and you do search for emergency plumber whole load to different ads one of them addresses emergency service you click on the ad they explain how they taught you through

[12:51] turning off your water supply have someone out there in 60 minutes and so on that's how it works that's how AdWords works when you do correctly we work with this company an American company iolo technologists and they've got the system mechanic professional does all sorts of things that fixes your computer it speeds it up it optimizes your interconnection whole load of it the point the really relevant point and it's a really simple mistake is that when someone goes to Google and they do a search for speed up my PC then looking for a registry cleaner even though a registry cleaner at least in theory may speed up few PC when they do

[13:29] a search for stop PC crashing they're not looking for fix my PC even though you the advertiser it's the same thing but it's not exactly what they're looking for real-life example I did a search here in the US different part of the states I did a search emergency dentist I wanted to see what would happen this was the first ad that I saw the top-ranking ad which isn't the worst looking website it's slightly odd but but that's okay the problem with it is it doesn't say anything about emergency treatment doesn't even mention it and I'm sitting there holding my mouth in pain I want an emergency dental service

[14:05] so I go back to Google and I click on the second ad this is where I get taken a website that's questionably questionable in terms of design and sanity but the only the only takeaway point here is they talked about affordable anxiety free sedation and I never actually considered that the sedation aspect is something to fear so thank you very much webster dental care but again they don't talk about emergency dental care the third that I click on yet again no mention whatsoever of emergency dental treatment and this one really scares me cuz in this one not only is the dentist it unreasonably happy but she's not even noticed that

[14:45] her patient is apparently dead it isn't it is until the fourth ad that finally I find what I'm looking for a dentist that offers emergency treatment got it capital letters read on the top left it's in the side nav the headline is emergency dentist the first two paragraphs are all about emergency dental treatment now we worked with the dental surgery in the UK and I know how competitive and how costly these terms are you pay a lot of money for these clicks but the real irony is chances are at least some of those first three services did actually offer emergency dental treatment but they didn't put it

[15:23] out there wasn't there on the actual landing page now and I'm sitting there at home I am NOT going to take the effort to trawl through their website to see if they actually offer what I'm looking for it's a lot easier for me to click back and click on the next at even a basic landing page a very tiny tweak modified version of your main product page or your main home page and have enormous ly beneficial effects so this process of segmentation is that you take your keywords you don't have an ad group or campaign with hundreds of keywords you've cluster them small really focus groups for keywords then you have ads

[15:58] that mold around those keywords the ads directly address these specific keywords they're not generic they're specific as it can be but when someone clicks on the ads then they're taken to a landing page that carries on the work it carries on that process of the keyword at landing page it's slow it's a slow process it's tedious especially with a large account if you're not already employing it but it is incredibly incredibly pop profitable so tip number two balancing the odds with data data data is a weird thing in our industry when we started it was before analytics was popular not he sure to existed and we'd ask for access

[16:39] to our clients server log files if you remember him to work with those and a lot of them had no idea where are the server log files what are they they didn't have that whole mentality that they're sitting on this amazing information then it was the data revolution if you like and everyone sitting there saying hey data is cool and these same people that a few years before didn't know what log files were I'll suddenly describe themselves a data warriors data junkies now we're in things have gone full circle and now we're at the point where people are starting to say actually data isn't cool which to me is is a little bizarre from

[17:13] an AdWords point of view my experience is listen to the data in your AdWords account it is phenomenally important it's a vital part of the process and part of the skill set is actually knowing not only to what what to pay attention to and what to ignore but how to really really understand what you're looking at a really common example is average position some reason this is the thing that people fixate on and it can be very misleading so in this example up here you could see that the first three ads displayed above the organic results and the fourth a dozen top right our experience has been that

[17:48] more often than not at Number Four will outperform ads 3-2 and sometimes even one because effectively it's in the spot of the first position and there are various ways to get this data from from webmaster tools from your AdWords account but ultimately you're a bridge position is nothing more than the gauge on your dashboard it's useful but it's not something to obsess on ultimately you need to make sure that you're looking at the right data ignoring the irrelevant data and most importantly understanding exactly what you're looking at tip number three drop the narcissism this this is a classic mistake in SEO and Google AdWords and it's a belief that everything that

[18:29] happens is because of you it's because of your actions your average position raised or fell because of possibly you adjusted the bid last week your cost per conversion has dropped or increased because of what you did the landing page the actions of your competition will sometimes play a greater part in what happens in your account of the neurone actions and that's a really scary fact but that's that's what we see time and time again so with whether your competition are targeting new targeting new campaigns altering bids different ads different landing pages keywords is an infinite number of things that they can do all the which can have the most

[19:08] enormous impact on your actual account the point is your ads are not displayed in isolation they don't exist in a bubble they're displayed with your other with you're competing ads and sometimes sometimes just happens sometimes a keyword and AD group or even a whole campaign that you know full well should work phenomenally well sometimes it just doesn't now we were in a very bizarre position we worked for a US e-commerce company that had competing platforms all of which at separate businesses and we actually handled at one point four different accounts and all four had this overlap of terms that they were directly competing with so reen we're in this

[19:51] amazing position of handling four competing accounts and seeing what happens if we do something in one account and what if it will it have on the other three which was mind-blowing what we took away from that is sometimes we could really clearly see why something happens sometimes we'd say hey we just induced that new campaign this new targeting this new theme idea and it worked fantastically well so of course performance is going to suffer in the others sometimes we thought we knew what we're looking at and we thought we understood and time proved that actually were completely wrong and sometimes even Google were actually quite clueless as

[20:24] to why certain things were happening sometimes we were only competing on terms with the other three accounts that we were handling and Google didn't understand why they were seeing things but sometimes sometimes just happens and sometimes the things that's happening your AdWords account aren't just about you okay number four processes and cycles effective effective AdWords management involves this whole process of identifying the strengths and building on them seeking out new opportunities and identifying and ultimately killing the weaknesses in your AdWords account so you're looking for opportunities you're looking for the strengths you lose looking for the weaknesses all of which happened on a seven-day cycle so this first graph is

[21:11] uh clicks in an AdWords account second graph is visits from an analytics account now these are two different accounts and two different time periods but all websites and all AdWords account show this 7-day trend it's a really common thing is someone sighs get a little bit more advanced with AdWords ID let's have a look see what's happening and what do you discover your main campaign the ROI drops at the weekend horribly dramatically the needy response is say right we turn it off will only display it Monday to Friday but that's the wrong approach you don't need to do that without words a far better approach is duplicate the campaign have the

[21:48] original work from Monday to Friday and the new campaign only work and Saturday to Sunday and drop your book bids 50% 80% whatever it takes to make it work but you will make it work but this leads to the main one of the main problems with AdWords that AdWords takes time is time intensive and at the absolute minimum you need to be able to commit a minimum of a few hours a week every week to manage your AdWords that the reason being everything changes don't make this classic mistake of saying we've been working our ears off on this account it really works it's great you know what I'm going to leave

[22:24] it for the next six months it's fine it doesn't work like that everything changes it keeps changing the searches your competition Google themselves the reach of the Display Network everything changes now I see a massive massive number of neglected AdWords accounts as you can probably imagine and all too often the street in person handling it is a really common scenario they're not the AdWords person they're the marketing person and a tiny little bit of that is Adwords and AdWords always gets pushed to the bottom of the list an actual quote when I had this conversation recently with us someone was Dave you know what you're right I completely take

[22:59] your point but you know what we're only spending $150 $200 a week that's it so what do we have to lose the answer to that is $10,000 a year and the answer to them was and you've been doing this for three years doesn't time fly $30,000 and you throw in it all the way that that got the retention a little bit more the point is that AdWords isn't a charity the idea of AdWords isn't to give your money and support Google the idea is it makes you money it's supposed to actually making money and attract people to your website who want to buy what you sell and if you get it right and you

[23:33] should get it right it should never be questionable whether it's even profitable it should be very very profitable and it should be fairly clear but it does unfortunately involve time and work tip number five get ready for confrontation I am hypnotized by that image as well our company have a lot competition you can probably imagine even within the software industry there's a whole load of different people who offer some of the services that we provide I know most of them fairly well and I actually consider some of them genuinely to be my friends if someone approaches me has happens quite often saying hey this guy here gave us this price quote for a

[24:14] month to handle the AdWords count can you beat it the answer is no I won't do that it's a fair quote choose between us the reason I'm explaining this is I get the whole friendly competition thing I really really do but if you're advertised gonad words and your competition or after is gonna add words all of that goes out of the window the reason being that AdWords is probably the most direct and confrontational form of advertising that you're ever going to undertake I mean think about it you're targeting the same people the same keywords your ads are going to be displayed right next to theirs their gain is going to be your

[24:51] loss and vice versa it's a really common mistake that I see possibly the most common mistake in AdWords is people spend too much money on the bitts think about it your competition are spending three or four times your bid who's going to be in that whole situation we looked at before displaying the ads in order it's obviously going to be pretty tempting for Google to place their ad that will get three or four times a click the cost per click in the first position maybe you're thinking three or four times that that's not going to happen it happens believe me maybe you're thinking this is going to be short-lived they're going to

[25:26] realize quite soon this is under cannot occur they're burning through money well think again this year actually say this year since the start of January I have seen four AdWords accounts that were losing so much money on an ongoing basis that I recommend that these companies are hoping on them are in here right now I recommended they pause the accounts immediately whether or not they were going to use our services stop now all all accounts lose money all of them but these four were hemorrhaging dollars like you wouldn't believe the owners or that rather the people handling the accounts they weren't idiots far from it actually one of them was but the other

[26:08] the other three the other three weren't idiots but the whole system the whole system embraces waste the system is designed to make Google money and again they put their interests before yours and effect that this whole system can have on your competition even when they're inadvertent competition can be can be awful so your performance ultimately has to be better it has to be better than the performance of your competition and that's the only way to make it work do not get me wrong I'm not in any way advocating or underhand tricks and really not but I'm advocating really opening your eyes and understanding how the system

[26:48] actually works so tip number six be a stalker everyone gets this basic idea you buy something that company stays in touch with you and it generally works we buy something assuming the offers they send you're actually targeted and they're relevant and potentially interesting we're happy to receive them as long as we don't get too many remarketing AdWords remarketing allows you to target the people who visited your website but didn't actually convert in other words you can stalk anyone interested in what you sell for five hundred and forty days which is great obviously Google don't quite explain it that way now we've been using remarketing for quite a while for most

[27:31] of our clients I think now and it works quite well actually worked really really well we also ran an experiment with our own company the sort thing we could never possibly do with our clients and what we did is we open the floodgates we went all out bombarding people so what we did anyone who came to at one of our website one the main page is one of our main services anyone who came they pages we've got them they're in on it and from that moment on we bombarded them we handed them mercilessly wherever they went the results of this the first thing that happened was I had a voicemail left

[28:08] from a friend in London who thought had actually done something to her PC and she left me a voicemail begging me to make it stop you bastard the next thing that happened was I had an email from a guy from software company in a place called Italy he'll be basically explaining that he was seeing our ads everywhere everywhere he went he saw our ads and he wasn't sitting there going wow this is cool he was sit there going this is actually creepy negative so we wrote a blog post about it and in total we got 25 comments either comments in the blog post or email I know 25 is

[28:47] suspicious figure but generally 25 people contact me all of the 25/3 said that they did didn't really like it they spoke out against it over 1/3 said they didn't really like it that much but they conceded that it worked just under a third were bizarrely impressed and happy which I found the wildering but anyway the point is our experiment because of how went all out it actually may backfired a little we went for 90 days and we threw our odds at you no matter where you went as many as possible as often as possible two or three the the people like Pell D basically explained we're already using your services why

[29:27] are you bombarded us with this creepy idea stop following us proving the remarketing it is relatively clumsy it is relatively basic now we're on stage to Vox payment what we do now is I think we only show three or four ads a day total to anyone who comes to our site hopefully making that process a little bit less creepy and a little bit less obvious but can consider the power of this system I find my way to your website for whatever reason I don't buy I don't download I don't fill out your form I don't convert for whatever reason I then start seeing your ads but they're

[30:04] not generic ads because I know who you are and know what your product is I know what your service is they're gentle reminders and if you do it right if you really get it right it could be phenomenally effective the the old style approach if you like was we'd all we've all done this you put some sort of bait on your website a cool tool a good PDF a white paper a really good blog post a video that's interesting whatever and the idea is you hope that some of the people who come to your website some of them will actually explore your website and maybe say hey this is interesting

[30:36] maybe I'll sign up for this service with remarketing you don't need that second step just get people into your website and let the remarketing system take it from there it's a little bit clunky because it's a fairly new system it's only just over a year old but it works really really really well for now and if you're not using remarketing I strongly strongly urge that you look into it but I would suggest not going all out 100% Bob Bob and because creepy isn't good for sales tip number seven this this one's a little bit more technical for which I apologize but I hope it's useful enough

[31:14] that it that it's it's worthwhile it's pretty basic but it's a deceptively simple question is what criteria determines and adds success generally people use one of two criteria first is click-through rate you've got an ad group with three ads and ad number one in this case has the highest click-through rate there you go there's the best performing yet the other standard one is conversion rate and people say here that at number three is the best performer with seven percent the question is how do you decide between these two criteria criteria when they give you two different sets of results click-through rate is really obviously quite good it's a good thing

[31:53] to have it's not just that the ad works but has a knock-on effect on the other ads and your cost can come down you have for each position couldn't go up and so on in conversions obviously self explained to you that's why that's why we're doing outlets my approach is very simply ignore the percentages and just multiply the two figures with each other I call it the click-through conversion rate which really rolls off the tongue of a CTC R so you multiply the two figures CTR by conversion rate 5 times 1 3 times 3 and so on and in this case you see that's actually odd number two

[32:23] there's the all-round top performer now it's a basic approach and I understand there are issues and analytical issues in there that you've got to factor in but remember earlier I talked about that process of identifying the strengths murdering the weaknesses it's a really really effective tool for doing that and the only thing I can think of speaking against it is it really needs a better name and I'm genuinely open to ideas tip number eight bidding wars are for dummies anyone here in the past work would go to overture yes small number these but these were the good old days go go to became overture which became

[33:01] Yahoo which became Yahoo Microsoft which will become irrelevant in a few years but the the system was quite simple it's a really nice simple system you bid on the keywords that you want and ads are displayed in the size of you bits so the person who gets the best bid gets first place second highest bid second place so what happens your logins account you see you're in third place you raise your bids because you want to be in first place you spend more but okay it's worth it you're competing ads and positions two three and below then see that and then they raise their bits and so begins this never-ending cycle of

[33:35] raising bids how smart were the go-to people AdWords is considerably more complicated but in a way a lot smarter the principles of a are vaguely similar in that many people think that the average position is actually more or less they'd be on Endor that's what you need you'll want to get your ads as high as possible now if you do that I don't recommend it if you do want a verage position you've got two ways to get a better position one way is invest 11,000 hours at the expense of your physical appearance and hair or pay guess which is more common I mean look at me and then look around the

[34:14] room and you can see which one which one most people go for most people go for the relatively easier option of simply spending more and you don't need to it's not the end of the world at all if your competition are above you there may be above you simply because they're actually spending four or five times more than you are and if you're going to allow them to set your agenda you are in effect condemning your account to making a loss which is a really bad idea now over the past year and a half or so I have been studying a fairly relatively obscure martial art called Filipino

[34:52] Cuccia one of the things I really like about it well it's good for relaxation it stretches my mind and other parts of my body as well one of the things that really appeals to me is one of the core principles is that it uses technique over strength which I really like because I'm not very strong and I'd rather study technique and actually have to go to a gym and really work hard at that for months on end what really fascinates me is that the greater the strength and the force used by an opponent the more effective the technique in other words a stronger and tougher you are if you actually try to

[35:25] attack me I say try to attack me like I'm dangerous they're stronger the stronger and more into it you are and you try to attack me the more I'm going to be able to hurt you which is absolutely fantastic now you can probably see where this is going where this principle applies it applies really really well to ant words most of your competition or using or favoring strength over technique they're favoring budget over learning how to work the system but Google have to factor in both they've got to factor in relevance technique and strength in terms of how much you prepare to pay for it and my

[36:01] experience has been over and over again repeatedly it's one of the few things that never changes in Adwords a small improvement in technique can have the most enormous knock-on impact on performance and can be vastly more productive than simply raising a bit okay run the penultimate Quality Score people familiar with Quality Score what it is a few people it's generally it's complicated Google Basie say it's an estimate of how relevant your ads keywords and landing pages are to Google it's kind of like PageRank it's very it's very similar in a sense to PageRank for SEO it is in the sense the the concept applies to AdWords

[36:45] in that both these concepts are actually quite relevant but they are vastly overestimated as to the importance so it makes sense and it's important but people are sort of it's like become this almost quasi religious cult the people obsess over their quality score and if you follow various forums that sort of thing for particularly people dealing with Adwords you'll see people losing their marbles absolutely going crazy when their quality score plummets or they celebrate frantically fervently when they actually get a better quality score it's hype ignoring the accounts I handle I turn off the quality score column completely because my belief is it's nothing more than Google's very unsubtle

[37:28] attempt to get you to spend more on your bits and again based on based on experience it really works it gets people to spend more remember earlier we look to that chart the the advertisers the users it in Google at the heart of Quality Score is one word and that relevance that really is what quality score is about and really that's what about good AdWords is actually about if you as an advertiser only use relevant keywords relevant ads relevant landing pages you can see really really good results from your AdWords account and look at the second group users if users only see ads and landing pages that are

[38:10] relevant to their searches they're going to be happy they don't need to click through eight or nine different ads I need to click one or two they click on your ID and they found what they're looking for and here is a secret at the heart of AdWords where you have advertisers happy and users are happy Google are happy because that's how they make their money so what you're talking about is you need everything goes against again back to this process of everything being really really tight really tightly focused so again that process someone has a need they go to Google you make sure you are targeting

[38:43] them with the precise precise keyword that directly relates to what they're looking for you make sure that the ad they see when they put in their keyword precisely targets the need and when they click on the ad the landing page precisely carries on that process that resonance carries on from the beginning the whole way through the bottom line is it's all about relevance now you may sense as a slight contradiction what I'm saying here you might be aware that I'm saying relevance fine but your competition are spending a bit more on Google or sometimes put them above well you're right but the point is Google will not take place ads only according

[39:23] to how much you're prepared to click on your bid per keyword the reason being that there they are doing this same thing they want they need relevance remember that 96% figure that we looked at they are only going to maintain 96% if people like you and I when we search on ads and click on ads find what we're looking for so yes they factor in bids but the relevance is every bit as important so final point empathy empathy worked really really well in sales and marketing now in the UK from I think it's a little bit worse the financial situation in the UK is probably that little bit worse than the

[40:04] stage or at least we like to complain about it a whole lot more something that I'm noticing and it's probably the same here there's this astonishing astonishing number of ads on TV about what they called depth consolidation services now whether these are actually useful valuable services or parasites is debatable and ultimately it's not really relevant what I'm saying here but the ads all start in the same way they all show pictures of people looking stressed unhappy they're holding their heads they've got piles of papers in front of them they're miserable they're trying to create this resonance between the person sitting there on the couch in that

[40:44] circuit those circumstances in that situation they want that moment that they can identify with them when they do they're victim for one for better word becomes momentarily captive then you have stage two of the at stage two the ads really really fast it's probably the same here what happens is they they race through horrible terms and conditions obscene interest rates in the whole yes we exploit the needy but that's an H bar business and then state tree look what happens complete transformation everyone's happy different tone brighter images lots of hands held up in the air because people are delighted and it's great life is good in hindsight when I

[41:24] in hindsight I wouldn't say they're morally debatable there are they utterly heartless bastards but the point from this is empathy works it really really works in advertising but it is so incredibly underused in AdWords take a step back from the intricacies the system the keywords and matching all this something take a step back a lot of people when they go to Google looking for something or actually looking for some sort of solution so the common approach is well we have ads that show that solution that's that's really simple it works we all do that we search for something we see ads that use that exact phrase the exact keyword and it's

[42:04] bold the better ads actually tap into why why someone is actually looking for this not the actual search term themselves so I did a search for work at home and there's screenshot of some of the ads that I saw in the audit I saw them the better ads capture the ones they captured the needs that are underneath that are sort of pushing those keywords out so when someone searches for work at home it's not that they it's just lifelong aspiration to work at home maybe some of them but most of them it's not it's a means to an end most of them are looking for more money

[42:43] greater flexibility a better hourly rage wage than the one that they're getting right now I would really dearly love to be able to share examples of this approach of using empathy in Adwords by showing you some more Cline's ads and the results that we achieve with this but for reasons confidentiality I can't do so but I went all over Google all over Google I searched extensively in Google and I could not believe how difficult it was to find ads that use this technique it's incredibly hard to find them which makes it an incredibly effective and very very powerful technique so if you can show the people that you understand their

[43:26] needs you show them that you understand what they're searching folks it's not about the keyword it's why they're actually searching for the keyword then the effect that this can have on your performance and your ROI can be absolutely phenomenal empathy really really works that's ten ideas to have just gone through and I know it's early in the morning and it's day two we're all a bit tired because of this I would my own advice would be to prioritize it if you only go and take away three ideas from the talks three out of the ten the first is this whole idea segment and mold it's so easy and it's so powerful

[44:03] group your keywords really tightly clustered group small keywords ads that directly address the keyword and landing pages that directly carry on so you've got this really smooth seamless change try it if you're not doing it the effect it can have can be phenomenal see TCR I know the names horrible but again this process of identifying what works I then find the strength murder and killing the weaknesses and seeking out new opportunities it's a really good technique without getting technical if you use AdWords editor it's really easy you can copy and paste everything from Adwords or to straight into excel which makes it really easy to do those

[44:42] calculations and the third ideas ride the remarketing wave how many people are actually using remarketing wow wow really retargeting yet retargeting remarketing but it's you've got to give that a go if anything maybe I put this in the wrong order if anything number three should have been the first you need to invest a little bit of time there's a very very slight learning curve if you get it right and you go by being gentle the results are phenomenal or awesome as you like to say in the States I'm learning so I don't know how we're doing for time hope we've got some time for questions just for do I maybe I'm

[45:28] institutionalized 11,000 hours and made me go a little bit weird and there was 11 years ago but I love this stuff I love AdWords I told you why I love it so I'm not going to go into that again please do feel free to talk to me at any point you're in the conference and Beyond contact me through email I love this stuff I really do this isn't a plug but we're also offering this thing anyone if you're inside in me having a look through your AdWords account this URL that's in red software promotions comm slash micro conf you sign up there we don't ask for much I sign up there

[45:59] what we'll do I'll then contact you I'll have a look at your AdWords account and we'll arrange 30 40 minutes go to meeting whatever works for you and I'll go through your account with you showing you what's working what isn't wait you're wasting money what could be improved and I absolutely handler part promise you hand on mic apparently I promise you no sales pitch but for now thank you for getting up I hope it's worthwhile and I'm open for questions thank you [Applause] besides we're targeting how do you once the criteria for whether you turn on the display network it's it seems like a lot of your talk was about search mmm how

[46:44] does how does how do you decide whether you want to use the display network or not display networks a really weird one it's gone in cycles the number one tip about display network is don't listen to what anyone tells you about the display network apart from me obviously it goes in weird cycles for a while everyone in the various AdWords community if there is such a thing stands up shrieking with joy about how great the display network is and it's awesome we see these great results low cost fantastic and then it flips and everyone starts saying oh it's terrible you've got no control you waste money it's it's irrelevant the bottom

[47:21] line is that there isn't a standard answer the only thing you can do is try it we tend to see I'd say nine times out of ten it's either utterly useless or it's really effective and it's very rare it's in between actually it's really rare that you'll try it and be sort of neutral or mediocre but you do have to try it the nice thing about it is contrary to most of the Google system it's actually getting a little bit more transparent with time which is really strange because Google usually I don't know if anyone noticed but today is announced at least on my time zone

[47:56] whichever one I mean the Google have actually made quite a fundamental change into the AdWords system today of course they always do just before I speak and that the change is you know that whole setting for how you rotate ads they're taking they're taking control away and what they're going to do is say hey when you put a new ad once it's approved we will rotate it for 30 days and then that's it after 30 days it's going to be set to display by clicks by default which is a really typical Google thing that they they they just slowly take away control from you but the display

[48:30] networks is really odd because you're actually getting more transparency a little bit more control are you using Display Network

[48:41] right I'd love to give you a really clever answer that would impress you as to why sometimes works and sometimes doesn't but the truth is I mean maybe I need another 11,000 hours but I'm really not sure but when it works it can be incredible so yeah give it a go other questions well I was just wondering with that new change you just mentioned so does that mean you only be able to split test for 30 days now this is for actually delivery delivery of vats but you won't guild you won't be able to rotate I was talking maybe as you has talking to you about this last night in

[49:21] in the past that this is a really good example of what Google are about actually without making me sound like a conspiracy weirdo in the past I don't know if people remember but before the last round of changes to how ads were displayed there were two options one of which was to display ads more evenly and the other one was to display ad buy performance what people miss is very much lies at the heart of the AdWords system Google are saying if you choose a first option we will display your ads more evenly now I found that amazing because AdWords built on maths right it's all figures Google aren't saying

[50:00] evenly Google apparently can't figure out that if your ads are going be shown a thousand times a day you've got four ads they don't know how to divide that equally which is a little bit odd so what they say is more evenly so it's a classic more is actually less if they want to do evenly that's pretty easy but that what they've done here is they're taken they've taken control away again there's I'd say the last three months two three months there have been more horrific and dramatic changes to AdWords than any time before people familiar what's happening with keywords that whole change anyone not familiar

[50:37] that's brilliant oh you'll love this you know way we won't get into specifics but you know the broad match phrase might take that much well Google are changing that and what they're changed you get to in a sense is they're saying broad match will continue to be broad match potentially useful but you got to be careful phrase might exact match we're going to treat kind of like broad match so you can still choose it as phrase much an exact match but it will actually be broad match so even though you say exact no longer means exact and phrase actually could mean kind of similar related in a somehow tenuous

[51:10] connection to that's that's the new change but for now this is something that you can opt out of for now you'll be able to opt out at this change I can't as you remember when it's going live but quite soon I guarantee by the time microcon 2013 happens that won't be optional I guaranteed this is that's going to be the way the system works this is what Google do so some something maybe I should have paid more attention to in the presentation as a whole is I love Google I really do and we we do very well out of Google not clients do very very well at Google and they're not

[51:46] evil they're not bad but the system is horrible horrible and you really the greater you can develop this sense of treat your AdWords account like you're British be bit snooty a bit standoffish very suspicious smile at Google but behind the smile you you're thinking cool I don't trust these people that that's a healthy that's a healthy way to have a relationship with Google any other questions yeah we have time for one more you know as as small founder small companies were really sensitive to the money we do spend on Adwords and I see that I run campaigns that end up being you know 50% of them will cut me

[52:27] the clicks will pretty much be click-fraud you have any suggestions or tactics to try and limit that even on your smaller campaigns is this what you're identifying is click-fraud or or Google I am when I go and I see what keywords brought them through the ad and there's no way that person was searching for well using a lot of broad match yes okay the basically you the more you can tighten it up I don't mean this in any way disrespectfully I really don't but most times when people think there's click fraud it's actually it's more like google fraud it's that the system is doing what it's supposed to which is

[53:05] like I said smile at you while taking the money out of your pockets click fraud is an issue for you it's an issue for me in our clients but it's a huge issue to Google because if if 5060 percent of people in this room start realizing that you're actually losing a lot of money through fraud and Google don't respond to it you will start scaling back your budgets remember that whole 96% of the revenue comes from AdWords so it's a massive massive issue to Google if you're convinced that it's genuine genuinely fraud and it's not just the system doing what it's supposed to contact Google and

[53:41] be persistent but the trick is don't mention the word click fraud because you say that and they sort of climb up and they get very defensive and they they give you links to various autoresponders but what we found is we've seen a few cases of absolute blatant blatant click fraud where a 5 year old child could at apush recognize something weird was going on and what they've done each time it's been that blatant and we've given them all the evidence they actually they won't say you know what you're right the system's failed the hardwired system doesn't work very well and you have actually been a victim of fraud but what

[54:17] they'll do is they offer they'll say we've looked at everything everything's fine but as a gesture of goodwill we will refund that five thousand four hundred dollars that you claim might have been something suspicious but wasn't and we've seen that time and time again I'd say maybe five or six times over the years so if it's a really really dig there's this credibility thing if you go to Google screaming click fraud and then they prove it's not at that point they will never take you seriously again but if you're sure that it is genuine fraud get all your data first don't mention the word click fraud

[54:50] give them your spreadsheets you grass give them your proof and and then sit back and wait I'm tweeting about it really really helps as well and then you get a few other people to retweet it that gets your attention we have a patio 11 exception so we have one last question every speaker dreads a question from you it's it's not going to be an easy one this is it like what time is it in the UK I actually I have to get that out right now so a couple of times over the years I've had a customer support issues with Google AdWords and like probably mentioned the other day I found out the

[55:28] most effective way was to complain about it on the hacker news front page but not everybody has that option so for the folks here who might not if oh my god the campaign shuts off the business is dying because of something with AdWords what's the effective way to get resolution on that to be honest it's more the answer is a kind of political one it's a bit slimy it's not what you should do is more what you shouldn't do definitely don't bother emailing one of the for one for better phrases idiots who handle the technical support the AdWords support because they genuinely have no idea no idea and they will never

[56:06] acknowledge it as an issue no matter how blatant what I found the best way generally is just call them I don't know how easy it is to find the number in the states but it's it's it's sort of hidden away in the UK but we can get it and anyone needs the number and more than happy to give you Serge's phone number that you can raise these sorts of issues but but calling definitely seems to be the way but it's it's a kind of it's common sense but what I always do on the phone I'd say I call them twice three times a month for various issues and I always always say

[56:41] to them what I'm going to get their email address and the case number they've assigned and I always say I'm going to send a summary of everything that we discussed as soon as we're done here just so we're just so we're clear in everything and you do almost here it's a barely audible oh moment but that's actually quite good because then they take you seriously cuz I think like a lot of big companies understandably in fairness to Google most of their support queries will be absurd they will be things that people should figure out for themselves and so obviously they don't employ AdWords experts to pick up the

[57:13] phone but if you if you sort of go through these hoops make them realise that they're going to be accountable that made them realize that you are crazy obsessive and you will follow I tried it once it didn't work but I did say and I'll follow this up with you in about an hour and a half and we'll see what progress has been made which I think scared them a little bit but didn't help me in any way but yeah just phone that definitely don't bother wasting time with email phone need sort of balance that balance between scaring them a little bit but not make them dismiss you as a complete

[57:45] and utter fruitcake although sometimes that can be good as well but yeah phone phones are way to go David's going to be available during breaks and you staying tonight as well I'll be around excellent so if you have further questions approach them in person thanks again Dave [Applause] you

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