Having a higher click through rate is such a massive advantage in Google Ads.
Yep.
You're just getting more traffic without paying more for it.
If I've got all of that control and if I know that Google Ads is cheating on the auction, why would I then give the control over to them? Cause clearly, something's up here.
If you're trying to branch out and find new customers, your website has to be ready.
And if your website's not to scratch, don't even consider Google Ads.
Today, I'll be interviewing Darren Taylor, a top Google Ads consultant with over 1,000,000 views on his YouTube channel.
Not only has Darren helped some of the top 20 companies in the UK with their Google ads, but he's also helped small business owners like you figure out exactly what's wrong with their ad campaigns.
This is what we're gonna talk about in today's video.
Number 1, You're gonna figure out exactly what's holding your website back from getting more leads, more sales, and more conversions.
Open your website in front of them for 5 seconds, and then close the tab and then ask them, do they know what you do? Number 2, you'll understand what it takes to make a small budget work, even in a competitive market.
And last but not least, we're gonna talk about why Darren thinks that manual CPC bidding might not be the best approach for Google Ads anymore.
The reason I say manual CPC is dead is because you will both overpay and underpay for clicks.
And what I mean by that is I am so excited about this episode, and I'm sure you are.
So stick around.
It's going to be a great one.
What I'd like to know from you is if you were brand new, if you were starting Google Ads today, right, how would you advise that somebody starts? Where should they start when it comes to Google Ads for their business? So it will depend on the niche.
And I think one of the best things I can probably say for the answer to this question is you first have to figure out whether Google Ads is the 1st place you should be or not.
So I'm at I had a conversation this week with a, um, a potential client.
And sometimes I find myself doing this quite often, and it's I I do scare potential clients a little bit just just just so they understand exactly what they're getting into.
And what I mean by that is this particular client wanted to start a, um, you know, like water heaters and boilers and things like that.
Yep.
She wanted to, with her husband, who is the engineer, and she's more of a marketing person.
She wanted to start a business where people could subscribe to a boiler maintenance service where they pay monthly for a for a boiler service.
And looking at the numbers, I thought to myself, actually, the cost per click in this niche is x.
You're charging this And it means you're only gonna hit profitability by the time that person makes them payment a month 10.
Can you absorb 10 months of losses before starting to hit profitability per customer and you wanna acquire 100 of customers in the next year? Can you afford to take those losses, and then that conversation was quite.
It wasn't it wasn't difficult.
It was it was clear, and then and she did appreciate me being honest because there were plenty of agencies out there looking to bite her hands off and just start lots of stuff.
Yes, man.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
We're definitely definitely possible, just give us the money, we will handle it for you.
That is exactly what I what she said to me.
So for me, that's the first thing is make sure your business is fit and ready for Google Ads.
So there's numbers and the metrics behind the business, there's also your website itself.
Is it ready to take traffic from a potential user who is going to be looking at lots of sites? If somebody knows who you are, you can probably get away with, and and your and and most of your and if most of your business comes from people who know who you are already and you kind of just keep doing the same circle of small business, that's fine.
But if you're trying to branch out and find new customers, your website has to be ready.
Your website is competing with everyone else in your niche.
And if your website's not to scratch, don't even consider Google Ads.
It needs to be ready to take traffic from that perspective.
If you've got all of those boxes ticked and you've got traffic coming in.
Actually, you've got a website ready to take Google Ads traffic.
You've got your business model is is profitable, taking into consideration the cost of traffic, and you're in a position to advertise, then it's just down to the research phase.
You've got to understand what people are typing in to find your business.
And you can use tools like the g the Google keyword planner to do that.
That's probably the best place to start because as soon as you use the Google keyword planner, and there's a couple of options when you go in there.
The first one is to let Google find potential keywords for you from a sample of keywords you give it.
So give a few examples of keywords that you you think people would type in to find your business.
Google will then take that sample of maybe 3 or 4 keywords you give it.
Give you a full list of potential options, and it will give you the cost per click for those options as well.
That to me is the best place to start just understanding how people are searching for your business and what it will cost to get a click from that person.
And at that point, you can decide whether or not it's gonna work.
So this could vary very much niche to niche.
I've seen niches where the CPC is like £20 per click.
And if somebody in the business energy sector I, you know, they wanna start generating leads because they've got a few people handling phone calls.
And I show them the data, and they're like, you're telling me that for one person just to look at my website and not even do anything, it's gonna cost me £20.
I'm like, yes, that's how it is right now.
So that's the first place to start is to understand the key words you can bid on and how much they would cost you for that click potentially.
So I wanna take you back to something very interesting that you said.
You said, uh, we should look at the cost of traffic and you said that Google keyword planner, we can basically go see the keywords and we can see more or less how much they cost.
Mhmm.
But you also touched on something where you said, uh, you need to know you have a good website.
Now I'm sorry to play devil's advocate here, but doesn't everybody that I've met over the past 10 or 15 years? They believe they've got the best website on earth.
So what what are some of the objective things that we can look at so that we can know, okay, the is good enough for Google Ads, or this is not good enough for Google Ads? Cause I've seen some horrendous websites and people are like, we are ready to go.
We are absolutely ready for Google Ads.
What would you look at? So there's a couple of tests I normally do for businesses that that I when they when they adamant, they've got a good website, and it's it's I I can see it's not gonna convert.
I always say to them, right.
Ask a family member or anybody that you know or trust that hasn't really seen your website before.
Open your website in front of them for 5 seconds and then close the tab, and then ask them, do they know what you do? Do they know everything you do that quickly? 5 seconds the top hero section of the site should be able to convey that the user is in the right place.
If you go on that website and in 5 seconds, you can read the headline.
In 5 seconds, you can read the the title of the website.
You can read the blurb.
You can read the call to action.
You can see images.
Within five seconds, if you don't know what that business does, clearly, then it's wrong.
It's not working.
It's not gonna work.
So that is a simple test.
I often give business owners to say, try that.
If you're telling if if somebody can tell you exactly what you do in that seconds, then you're in the now you're in the right ballpark to start with.
If not, then that kind of tells you that you're probably not because that 5 seconds, actually, is quite a bit more generous than the user of Google Ads has.
There will be 2 seconds if they can't see very quickly, what you do, they will leave in 2 seconds.
Yeah.
Alright.
So let's say I do the 5 second test.
And it turns out nobody knows what I do.
Do you then recommend that I go? I work with a web designer or web developer then first.
Make sure that it's good looking.
It's accessible and then only start even thinking about running ads.
And even if I do that, how am I sure that the that that Google Ads is even gonna work for me, or how am I sure that Google Ads is even right for me? So, yeah, once you've once you've understood that there are issues on the website, they have to be addressed before you run Google Ads traffic.
To the site.
Some businesses, because they've got quite deep pockets, can get away with just running Google ads to website.
That's not necessarily the best, but they can afford to take the hit on their on their cost per conversion.
Just by nature of them having the budget to do so.
And there are businesses like that.
Interestingly enough, it's usually the massive businesses who do this.
Where they are so big, it takes 10 layers of of, um, of tickets and systems and approvals to make a change to the website.
Website just remain.
In fact, I'll tell you a story.
I'm outing myself here because my former employer is probably watching.
Um, but I provided training to this, um, former employer.
Exactly.
I I've provided training to this former employers that is is a big FTSY 100 UK company.
And I provided training to them.
Um, it was over, um, Zoom for for PPC for their for their marketing team.
And this was probably this was last year I provided this training, and I went through their website.
And I I used to work for this company.
I was providing them training as a consultant freelancing.
When I worked for this company back in 2015, there are things I put on the development board to improve conversion that hadn't been addressed.
And I asked somebody on the call after the because some of the colleagues I I had were on that call, a couple of them were on that call.
And I asked her.
I said, is is the stuff still on the board, or is it just been deleted? She goes, no, it's still on the board.
I said, are you telling me this stuff on the development board to improve conversion from 2015, 2016 that hasn't been looked at at all? And it should get Are you serious right now? It's still on it's it's still on the board.
It's still on the queue of development tasks.
Wow.
So you'll literally put something on the board and the years just went on by.
Yep.
Exactly.
This company's making 1,000,000,000 of pounds.
They don't necessarily care as much about conversion optimization as much as it is about their brand's name, their recognition, people coming to them first.
So from a task point of view, they could win a lot bigger on Google ads and, and indeed, for for digital advertising in general, but They just don't prioritize it.
And that's the that's the kind of business where I think they can get away with it.
But if you're a small business and you haven't got much budget and you want to try and win with Google Ads, you need to make sure your website's ready.
That's the first thing.
Definitely.
And I think also a lot of small business owners, uh, yes, you're watching this podcast right now.
I need to warn you guys again shiny object syndrome because what someone's gonna do is somebody's gonna go to Darren Taylor's um, website that he was just talking about, and somebody's gonna go, oh, these guys are the big guys in the market.
I need a website that looks just like this.
And what's gonna happen is you're gonna end up with a website that is so horribly suited to converting and yet you think that it's the best because the lead is the best.
I always advise, um, my clients, I always advise my students that you're site needs to look like your website.
It can't be somebody else's website.
You can borrow elements if you see something works.
But imagine if I took every single one of Darren Taylor's videos and I just made all of the titles, all the thumbnails, every single thing the same, I wouldn't end up being me.
I just end up being a clone of Darren, and that's what I don't want you guys to do.
So don't go out there and just copy, copy, copy, hire web designer, go through the necessary exercises, even if you have to talk about your brand, what makes you unique, that's how you're gonna figure out your special secret sauce, and that's what's gonna really elevate your website design, and that's what's gonna get people to convert at the end of the day.
That's it.
100%.
I think having your own personal touch is a big thing.
A lot of businesses do think that, as you say, going after the big boys and being, you know, trying to copy them is good, but if you're not original, then it's it's quite transparent.
People can see that you're you're trying to copy quite often because they will be browsing other websites.
They'll understand, um, that that your website is trying to imitate If you give your story, your originality, and your personality, and your stamp on it, you're gonna do better.
So if you have this nagging feeling that there might be something wrong with your ads, what I want you to do is I want you to check out my Google Ads setup cheat sheet.
Now, what I've done is I've taken every single setting that I use for my own business and I've put them in an easy to follow checklist for you.
You can basically just copy all of my ad settings.
How cool is that What I've also done in the video is I've included some explainer videos, so you'll understand exactly why you're choosing certain settings.
And I've also put some in-depth explainer sections where It'll basically explain stuff like what is focus on conversions, what does it do, what is focus on clicks, what does it do, and I'll basically explain to you every single step of the setup process.
So if that sounds like something you'd be interested in, what I want you to do is click on the link in the description below and you'll get access to my free Google Ads setup cheat sheet.
It's all there.
It's ready.
All you need to do is just click on the link below.
And let's get on with the interview.
The difference between you and a lot of other people that I see on YouTube is you try and make data and all of this fancy stuff that Google's doing.
You try and make it as understandable as possible.
It's actually possible to watch hours and hours of your content where with other guys that just end up falling asleep.
So how do you do that? It's a stranger.
I think I've always I've always been in a position where I've had to do that because, you know, when you work in a business, whether it's, um, when I first got into PPC in an agency and you're sitting across the table from a client and they're asking you questions about why their campaign may be working better or maybe the the conversation's not as good and it's, you know, my campaign isn't working as well as it has been, you've got to be able to tell that client why things are changing, why things aren't working with them being able to understand it.
Because if you start talking in jargon and you start talking about really technical stuff and they don't get it, then they're gonna withdraw, they're gonna think this person isn't the right person to partner with for my business because I don't understand what they're talking about.
So you need to be in a position where you're able to communicate things very simply, very straightforward.
And even if it's something quite technical, you can simplify it.
There's always analogies.
There's always ways to explain things.
And, you know, over time, people start to understand.
And I think just from being in that that scenario from a very young age where I'm I'm basically forced to have those conversations in an agency at 22, 23 years old, having, you know, conversations with with senior people in businesses Yeah.
With the guy who sold the contract next to me and I'm the technical guy.
The guy who sold the contract doesn't know what he's talking about because he's a good salesman.
He's not he's not PPC expert.
I'm the one that's in the room as the expert, and I had to very quickly learn how to have those conversations.
That is a very good point.
And what I wanna do is I wanna dive into how Darren Taylor came to be.
So I wanna talk about when you were growing up.
Tell me a little bit.
Tell me a story from when you were growing up.
What did you wanna be? Um, I can tell you that when I was growing up, I wanted to be a paleontologist.
So as you can see, digital marketing, youtuber, paleontologist, clear connection over there, dinosaur fossils, and digital marketing.
So tell me a little bit about growing up.
Like, what were you like as a kid? I mean, that was always, like, a a really happy kid.
I think be honest with you, it was well actually.
I was I was I was happy, but I was I was quite a lot more shy than I was.
The thought of me looking at myself in the future as a ten year old or whatever it might be, being on YouTube in front of a camera and giving, you know, talks or going and doing lectures at universities and that just wouldn't have been something I would have thought for myself because I was always quite a shy kid.
I was, I wasn't, I wasn't shy to the point where it was painfully shy, but I wouldn't initiate the conversation.
I could talk to people once they started talking to me, but I was never missed the outgoing.
Things changed when I got older, um, you know, when I went to university and, you know, that that kind of lifestyle of of partying and and things like that starts to take over.
And you you you kind of get more out there and you get exposed to a lot more.
But as a kid, I was I was quite quite reserved in all honesty.
Um, so yeah.
You mentioned to me that you wanted to be a goalkeeper when you were growing up.
Talk me through that.
Yeah.
So this is the thing.
I mean, I don't know if how many people in the UK are listening, but for the UK people, then the the common cliche you're gonna hear is the the hilarity of a Southern man United fan.
So if you're from the south and from London and that kind of area, which is where I'm from, then you're not gonna you you should be supporting teams like Arsenal or or closer to where my hometown is newly promoted luton, but I support man united.
And everyone's like, oh, you're just hunting, you're glory hunting.
You're just going for the team that's winning at a But actually, the reason for it is because I was a kid, when I was a kid, I really liked Peter Shemichael, the goalkeeper for man United, and I wanted to be a goalkeeper as a kid.
And he was kind of the person I looked at as the best goalkeeper at the time.
And when I first started watching football and saw, you know, when I was sitting down in the living room, watching watching football and my dad was watching it, and I saw him, like, jumping and saving, and I was like, I wanna do that.
And it was, it was Peter Schmichael.
I remember the jersey as well.
It was the one with the green sleeves and the dark purple in the middle and stuff.
And I thought, yeah, I wanna I wanna do that, and I wanted that jersey.
I never got that jersey.
Um, but it was it's always something I wanted to do as a kid.
And I think, you know, as you get older, you start to realize, actually, um, it takes a lot to become a professional footballer, and it was something that I wasn't ever gonna be able to do.
Yeah.
And I think it's it's so weird that also as you change as a human being while you're growing up, you could start off wanting to be one thing, and then you end up being something completely different as your interest change.
So I guess my question to you is, what made you say out of everything that you could possibly do with your life? Racing car driver, scuba driver instructor, What made you crazy enough to choose digital marketing? How how did that come about? Yeah.
It's a strange one.
So here's the here's what happened in my day.
So I went to, a college, and I didn't do a levels.
I did another qualification that was more focused around technical stuff, more so than, you know, maths, English, whatever.
Um, and one of the units in that course was was web design.
And I got really into kind of designing websites.
This is way back in the day.
You're talking 2003 here.
Is a long time ago.
Um, so the web design process looks very different than now than it was then.
But back then, it was like you used Macromedia, Dreamweaver, Macromedia fireworks, and it did graphic design that way.
And I remember doing that at college, and I really enjoyed it.
And then I got to university, and there was a bit of a bit of that at university, but what was interesting about my course, which was a multimedia and internet technology, was there was a unit on, um, 3 d design, like, 3 d modeling and and 3 d design and rendering and environments and things like that.
And I got into that massively.
I used to do spend all my evenings, like drawing items, rendering them, and and and doing the lighting, and and rendering these environments using 3 studio maps.
Anybody who doesn't know the reason why 3 d was so huge back then was we didn't get 3 d wasn't a thing.
You couldn't just have something 3 d.
So if you went on dreamweaver, everything was 2 d, It's really not like now where we can say that you could find three d shapes anywhere.
So to be able to create something in three dimensions, I mean, even the games we used to play, they were just just coming up with three d games around 96.
97, 98, but they weren't really, like, mainstream.
So to be able to just access the software, to make something three d, that was crazy.
In case you guys think that, uh, threedies always no.
No.
No.
No.
It was not like that.
It was not like that.
So it was so cool to me to be able to just get and not get create items that didn't exist and, like, look around them and create a room that didn't exist and walk around it.
And I wanted to get into game design.
So that was my main thing.
I wanted to be a games designer, like level designer, doing the objects, the modeling, But then again, reality kicks in and you realize, actually, there's there's very few jobs in that.
And when people do get a career in that area, it's usually because they know somebody.
I need nobody.
I didn't know anybody in that arena.
I didn't know anyone at the kind of, um, even indie developer houses or anything like that.
So for me, I was left in web design.
So I left university, and it was during the 2008 financial crisis.
So there was nobody was hiring.
Great timing.
Amazing time.
I think timing.
All the graduation schemes ended.
There was nothing.
Um, so I started working as a security guard for John Lewis, which is like a major UK department store.
So I'm, you know, probably can't tell from YouTube, um, but I'm six foot four, pretty big guy.
So I got a job as a security guard probably just for that reason.
Yeah.
And then while I was doing that, there you go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I scared I scared the criminals away.
Yeah.
Um, but while I was while I was doing that, I I still wanted to be in digital and the digital industry.
So I was left with web design.
So I started designing websites in my spare time in my evenings and weekends for different businesses, um, and When I started building these websites, they were asking, oh, thanks for the website, but I'm getting no clicks.
And I thought, okay.
That's not my problem.
Right.
You wanted the website.
It's not my problem.
And then another client would call me, oh, thanks for the website.
I love it.
My clients like it as well, but we're not getting any traffic.
And I was like, oh, okay.
Then he asked me, how do I get traffic? And I said, I don't know.
I don't know.
I was like, I don't know how to get traffic.
So I ended up having to go away, discover this thing called Google Ads, discover this thing called SEO, started testing them with with client websites, testing SEO.
Back then, SEO was just the wild west.
You could do some really shady stuff and get away with it.
And I did.
I did.
I created loads of bulk duplicate content.
I created websites with 200.
I used to use a WordPress plugin that would just auto generate pages from from a CSV file and all sorts of stuff just to get the website to rank, and it worked, and it didn't work.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
It's it's it's crazy back then how things used to work.
Yeah.
And then when that stops working and then SEO became a long term game and the businesses I was working with were saying, you know, we need traffic today because we need to, you know, I need my phone to ring.
Then it was PPC.
And I started testing the water with PPC a little bit, and then I got a job at an agency, um, didn't have any formal experience, um, prior to that in terms of working for a company doing it, but I I was good enough in the interview to kind of explain what I've been doing and they took me on.
And then the rest is history as they say.
Wow.
It's amazing to me how similar our stories are because I used to be I used to always design websites on the side.
I just used to love just looking at websites on behance.
It was like, one of my favorite things to do is just, like, surf the net and just look for some beautiful web design examples and I used to be a used car salesman.
Believe it or not.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Definitely.
The lowest of the lowest.
And what I used to do, what I used to do is in the mornings, I used to sit outside in my company car, and I used to steal the works Wi Fi.
X POSS, if you're watching, hi.
Thank you.
I used to steal the works Wi Fi, and I used to teach myself basically how to become a better web designer.
And eventually, I left, um, while I was very good at selling used cars, and then I kind of left that to start my own business.
And I designed some beautiful websites for people.
And every single time I designed the beautiful website.
I would come back in 3 months, and I'd say to the clients, um, so how's the website going? How's everything? And they'd be like, I don't have clients.
This website is I'm happy with the website, but I just I don't have clients.
And That was literally the stage when I said to myself, there has got to be a way to connect the website to the clients, and that's how I stumbled across Google Ads, not SEO.
But Google Ads.
So it's it's so crazy that your story is kind of very similar to mine.
There you go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it? I think the website side of things, there was a big need for web designers, um, back then.
And I think the way things work now where you have Squarespace And Wix and all these other website builders where businesses just getting started with 0 money could get a presence back then.
It wasn't the case.
So it was down to guys like us who were just freelancing on our spare time.
To get a bit of extra cash.
That's where businesses went.
They went to guys who could just quickly get a website, get them website presence, and and and then that was it.
So, yeah, it makes sense.
I think there was there was a definite gap in the market there, and I think it sounds like we both both took advantage of it.
So tell me if this sounds familiar.
You've been working really hard on your website, but somehow you feel like you get the traffic to your page and nothing happens afterwards.
Has this ever happened to you? Cause I know it's happened to me and it's happened to a lot of my students before.
And the one mistake that I see a lot of newbies make when it comes to Google Ads is they use the website instead of using a landing page.
Now, the nice thing about a landing page is it gets your client to focus on one offer or one service at one time.
And therefore, it increases your ability to tailor the message to your ideal client and also your ability to get that all important lead or that all important sale.
So with that in mind, I want you to go out there and build a landing page.
And you're probably thinking to yourself, Devin, I am not a creator, I am not a web designer or a web developer, and I sure can't afford a web designer or web developer.
And that's perfectly fine.
The reason why I interrupted this interview is to tell you about lead pages.
Now, lead pages is great in that.
They give you a whole lot of templates already built already done.
All you have to do is just find one that you like, customize it with your product or service, and you are literally good to go with running Google Ads.
And the best thing about lead pages is you don't have be a designer and you're not forking out 5 grand, 10 grand, 15 grand just to get that landing page up and running.
So what I want you to do is click on the link below and you'll get a free trial to lead pages and you can just pop in there, see if it's for you, and find a landing page that really matches your brand and matches what you do.
And, hey, if you like it, keep the plan, keep the lead page, and keep converting.
Alright? Let's get back into the interview.
Darren, I want you to tell me about your first, your very first, uh, Google Ads campaign that you ran.
Did you do like a skill shop certification first or did you just say, hey, man.
I'm gonna figure out how this stuff works.
I'm gonna get into Google Ads, and I'm gonna sort of start running campaigns.
Talk me through your first campaign.
And if the results were, well, tell us about the results of your first campaign, your first ever campaign.
Yeah.
My first campaign was quite a simple one, actually.
Um, and the results were actually really good.
And I think the reason it was good is because I think back then, not many people were doing Google Ads in this niche.
The niche was a car service garage.
So it was a, um, a repair shop and that they did, um, you know, you know, normal service intervals.
They did your breaks, disks, pads, and, you know, other services like that.
So, really, it was a case of a website I created for somebody with with all their services on, and they needed traffic.
That same scenario where I explained the start kind of, you know, they they couldn't get traffic.
Explored Google Ads, told them, you know, what what what options they had.
There was SEO, was a longer play, but they needed business now.
And then there's Google Ads.
They said, right.
Can you tell me what I need to do? So I went away.
I went and did the certifications.
Now, little did I know at the time that Google had their own spin on the certifications in favor And it wasn't as bad then as it is now.
Now it's way worse in terms of how they spin what you should and shouldn't be doing to build your campaigns in their certification program.
But back then, it was a lot more simple.
It was a lot more straightforward.
Smart bidding wasn't a thing.
It was all manual CPC.
Um, it was a case of you set the amount you wanna pay for a click.
You decide that.
You set your bids.
Here's your advert.
The adverts were way more straightforward than they were now.
It was literally one headline, one description, one link.
That was it.
It was multiple headlines.
No multiple descriptions.
It was very, very simple.
Oh, I wouldn't even go back to those times.
Oh my god.
Life was a lot easier.
It was very simple.
It was very, very simple.
And I think that that was the big help in getting into the industry because if I joined now, probably be a lot more difficult to understand smart bidding what Google is trying to do, what automation is, because I've gone through that whole journey of of before Target CPA was even a thing from, you know, manual CVC to Google's first target CPA products and all all the way through, it kind of helps.
But I think right at the beginning, it was very, very straightforward.
The exam was very straightforward.
The root the materials for the exam were pretty straightforward.
There were also websites that trained you on the Google exam as well.
There was, I can't remember the name of it, but there was one with, um, with mock exams you could take to understand what questions they'd ask.
And then the only thing that you really need to remember about learning Google Ads for the first time is exams can only teach you so much.
You have to go live with the campaign.
And for me, I was lucky enough that because I did a good enough job with this website, the business owner was comfortable giving me some budget.
It wasn't much budget.
It was £500 for the month.
It was the budget.
So we're talking about what we're talking about.
We're talking about, like, £20 a day almost just less than £20, about £15, £20 a day.
Yeah? That's right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very, very low budget.
And it worked for him.
He, you know, think he got a lead every couple of days, and that was all he needed from that £500 because that lead every couple of days would have been for a service or or breaks and discs.
And then because it's a a local service, you know, I think the radius was, like, 10 miles, those customers come back Once you get a good experience, a good garage, those customers tend to come back.
So he was happy with that.
That £500 getting a lead every couple of days.
So maybe 15 or 10 leads in a month from that £500, and he was closing basically all because they're all, you know, the the They've got problems that need to be fixed, man.
Exactly.
That's the thing.
So that's it.
And it worked really well, and that was my first campaign.
And interestingly enough, when I when I got the job at the agency, the account I was put on was for a network of garages, which was a kind of good side experience in that.
So That's like so serendipitous, man.
It just, like, it's through.
I don't know that's so serendipitous.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But that's that's how that's my that was my first campaign And, yeah, it taught me taught me a lot.
Just just being able to do that, set things up.
Not sure if it would work or not.
Not sure if I'm doing the right thing, going to these forums, all sorts of stuff, just to kind of see if it would work.
Yeah.
So tell me something when it comes to learning Google Ads.
Now there's a whole lot of business owners, uh, some digital marketers as well consultants that they and I get these inquiries all the time.
I don't know if you do, but it's actually sad because a lot of people come to me and they say, Devin, I'm a marketing professional.
Um, I'm in charge of this Google Ads account.
I have my certification, but I just don't know what to do.
I get business owners as well that say, okay, we're gonna go to the free training from Google.
We're gonna learn everything they tell us to do, and then we're just gonna start.
What do you think most people get wrong in their learning journey when it comes to Google Ads? I think it's difficult because it's it's more so, I think, because Google Ads is marketing, but not in the traditional sense.
So people are quite quite often think when it comes to marketing, it's about your message, it's about your your website.
And it's about all these other factors that are more visual, more storytelling, more explaining who you are communicating with the customer.
And all those things are 100% important, and the bigger your business gets.
And as as, you know, even as a professional in Google ads, I'm happy to say this, you get to a certain level in business, your brand is more important than Google Ads.
That's true.
At the end of the day, the biggest department stores in the UK don't get most of their business from Google Ads.
They get most of their business from people knowing who they are.
The biggest players in the world don't get most of their business from Google get the most of their business from branding, from people knowing who they are.
I think it's grand code down.
Let's said, uh, sorry to interrupt you there, but I think it's grand code down.
Let's say in life, you will only be overpaid or underpaid.
There's no middle.
So you will only be the popular guy that's overpaid or you will be the unpopular guy that's underpaid, but there is no middle.
You will not get the direct one to one, uh, compensation for your work and your business.
That's it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
That makes a lot of sense.
Actually, I think that's true.
And I think going back to kind of the, um, the the balance between Google Ads and and traditional marketing, I think because of that approach of Google Ads being more numbers based in very kind of separate from your business, it's it's more difficult for businesses to kind of and business owners and even people in marketing already to get their head around it.
I exam, for example, today, I had a consulting call literally yesterday with a business who is a marketing agency.
They have 5 clients on just starting Google Ads campaigns, and they do the marketing and the website for the business.
They don't have any Google Ads experience.
They started running campaigns in Google Ads.
And they panicked They they they they got in touch with me to to help them.
And I, you know, happy to do so.
I consult for businesses all the time, but it just shows you that the balance between people who are in marketing, but they can't get their head around Google Ads.
And I think that's the biggest challenge is that because it's numbers based.
It's about knowing what Google is trying to do as well more so nowadays than previous.
You know, I've had a conversation.
In fact, his, his, uh, is a record for you.
I had a, I was doing an account audit yesterday.
And I found this account still had running the original text ads from back in the day.
So just a bit of background for people listening.
Text ads, as I explained them back in 25th, not before then, even, like, 2020, 14, kind of time, they were 1 headline, 11 description, and 1 hyperlink, and that was it.
Then Google moved in 2017, 18 to, um, expanded text ads Now they're gone and now you have responsive search ads.
So we're talking 3 generations of ads to go where they're so old, you can't even edit them who locks you out of editing them.
And I saw this in the account.
Yeah.
Definitely, man.
That must have brought a smile to your face.
That must have brought a smile to your face.
It it didn't.
It didn't.
It brought a smile because I thought to myself, oh my god.
That's that's like, that's like, you know, nostalgia.
Kind of seeing these ads I used to work on back in the day, but then actually, I thought to myself, oh, it's a shame.
It's missed out on so much.
Yeah.
Because he's running these ads that aren't gonna even get a fair shake in the auction because they're so old format and so underutilized, and now he's in a position where his his his account smiles behind where it needs to be.
So that to me was like, oh, actually, maybe maybe that's the difficulty.
And I think that's the problem.
Google Ads changes so quickly as well.
It's not just the the technical side of understanding.
It's about numbers and about being separate to, you know, the the visual aspects of your business.
It's also about the numbers behind the business.
And that can be quite a hard thing to confront for a lot of, um, people in marketing and business owners as well.
Going back to what you said, a lot of people look at their website and go, I love my website, then they run a campaign on Google Ads, and it's not working so well.
And it's like, uh, well, then then it's the question of why isn't it why isn't it not working so well? Yeah.
Then you gotta dive into the days.
You've gotta understand how people interacting with your website under and the search terms people are typing in, you need to make sure they all match.
And it's kind of that that that chain of, um, of relevance in Google ads that I think is quite difficult for a lot of people to get their head around.
Yeah.
And I I always tell people this I feel sorry when people go to learning institutions and they come out with, quote, unquote, uh, Google Ads marketing degrees or they come out with these, uh, Google Ads certifications because yes, there are some programs that are very well run.
They are ran by very well informed people like my good friend Pamela Wagner.
She's always up to date, and, you know, she's teaching at the University of, I think, it's economics and business in Vienna.
But there's also some programs where they are literally giving you a textbook with stuff that you're just not gonna see when you go into your Google Ads dashboard.
In fact, if I take you through all of my YouTube videos from this year, early this year.
You go into the Google Ads dashboard.
It's completely changed.
So, yeah, some people are the they're paying so much attention to the theory of Google Ads that they actually not learning by doing.
And this is why I always recommend that you actually go and do something inside the the dashboard because you're gonna learn so much more about the fundamentals of running a Google Ads campaign than you are by just, oh, I'm gonna do this course.
So I'm gonna do the certification, and I'm gonna hope that it stays exactly the same when I start running an account.
Exactly.
And this is the thing.
It changes so quickly and as quickly as things change to stay up to date is even more difficult these days because at this stage, it's sad it's sad to say, but you can't really trust Google.
You can't trust them.
So it's it's sad to say.
So the whole way through, if you're a business owner or somebody in marketing using Google Ads day to day, and you go in and do something and you see a warning message, like, for example, something simple, you go to build a search campaign and it pre ticks the box that opts into the display network.
Yep.
You might hear a YouTube video saying, don't go into display and search, focus on search because that's where most of your customers are gonna come from.
If you wanna approach display in the future, then you can use display in the future for a different campaign.
That's that's the best advice really to to to set up a search campaign You untick that box, Google will give you a warning message.
Hey, you need to be on the display network.
You can get more conversions at a similar cost, but what they mean by that is you might get 1 or 2 more conversions, but it will cost you a lot more.
Exactly.
And what I absolutely love about that error message because, uh, I was looking at it on another podcast.
Um, I think it was on Monday.
When you untick and you get that little flashing box, it tells you did you know that if you select the setting, it may lead.
If you dive deep down, Google Ads isn't guaranteeing you more conversions.
They are just saying that the likelihood of it converting.
Hey.
You know, it might something might happen and you're missing out on this good thing that might happen.
And it's this type of wording that they use.
It's very vague.
And it, uh, it confuses somebody learning Google Ads for the first time because now You're not sure.
Darren Taylor says I shouldn't tick the box.
Google ad says I should tick the box.
Then I watched Devin's episode, uh, Devin's video, and Devin said you shouldn't even have this type of campaign.
So what do I do? And, um, I think a lot of people need to just stand back and they need to understand one thing.
Um, I literally have a course and in the module of the course, it says never trust Google.
The reason why it says never trust Google is you need to make the best decision for your business.
And every single business is unique.
And most of the time, speaking to guys like Darren and myself, guys who are doing this day in and day out, we'll be able to come to you and we'll say don't tick this box and you will ask us why, and we can show you multiple examples of customers that have ticked the box and have the wasted, um, $15,000 ad spend to show that you shouldn't tick that box.
Whereas Google will never give you any tangible proof that this is really possible for you.
And when we advise you guys, when we tell you guys to do something, we're not doing it because we feel like that box should be unticked Now we've said literally year in, year out customer of the customer, and we've watched them lose money.
That's why.
Exactly.
You should trust us a little bit more than you trust Google Ads.
There you go.
It's a 100% true.
I think The other thing as well is what do you have to gain? If I'm working with you on a campaign and the success of the campaign depends on my future working with you, my advice is gonna be better than Google who basically in a position where the more you spend, the better off they are.
And in addition to that, even if it doesn't work, where else are you gonna go? There's no one else there.
Where are you gonna go? Yeah.
You're gonna control, like, 87.
Are you gonna 87% of search traffic? Where are you gonna go? Exactly.
Yeah.
If you go on Bing, you'll be getting 4%, 3% of the volume you'd be getting on Google.
They know this.
They know that's where their their position is, and that's why they've now got, you know, call centers across the world that they've they've hired and and recruited to call up businesses and say, turn on all the automations, opt into the display network, do all these terrible things for your business because, first of all, Google, they wanna make sure they hit revenue targets.
And by doing these things, they can do that.
And that's a cynical thing to say.
Google will never admit it.
But that's what it looks like for me, especially after the recent court case where they were courts, you know, increasing CPCs at the auction to increase their revenues to hit targets.
So it's not impossible.
And because that's come out, that that's that's a fact it's come out.
But in addition to that, They do want to actually improve their automation and smart bidding.
And the only way they can improve their automation and smart bidding is if everybody uses automation and smart bidding, and they get loads of big data.
So these call centers calling up businesses and customers to kind of say, you know, turn on all these automations and and listen to us, they're doing it so Google can continue their research and development.
They can continue building the product.
But that's not it's not your budget.
That should be used for their research and development is is your money.
You you spend it how you treat fit, and you spend it on what works.
Simple as that.
So let's say I'm a small business owner, and I'm starting out with 20 quid a day, 50 quid a day, and I just wanna try this Google Ads thing out.
My website, I feel like it's more or less okay.
Um, I've done the 5 second test.
Um, where would you recommend I start out? If I was looking for leads let's say I was a electrician or let's say I was a plumber and I was just looking for leads.
I had $20 or $50 to spend, and let's say my cost per click was relatively it was relatively low after doing my research.
How would you recommend that I start out? And is there any type of campaign that you think I should completely avoid when I start up? Yeah.
I think you should start the easiest area to get leads.
And for for Google Ads, that search, people looking for your products right now and right this second, where you need to be.
Forget display.
Forget performance max, um, unless you're an e commerce business status.
But as you say, if it's a service based business like an electrician, um, then, yeah, you wanna start right at the bottom of the funnel, and that means starting off with a campaign type like search.
So you start with search.
And then from the keyword research you do on search, you will understand where the high CPC and low CPC keywords are, what the, um, the kind of long tail looks like in terms of the keywords that aren't searched as frequently, but still have good search volume.
You'll understand what the the big kind of keywords are, the kind of headline keywords with loads of search volume, but probably more competition.
If you've got a very low budget, it doesn't make sense to compete with the highest volume terms with that might have more cost attached to them.
What you'd be better off doing is looking at the kind of smaller niche terms and starting off there and making sure your website copy is matched up to them.
So going back to that car garage, um, campaign, for example, which was a very low budget, they didn't bid on car garage or car repair garage.
They didn't bid on those terms.
They bet they bid on brake replacement, brake pad replacement.
I see.
Car service.
Like, those kind of specific service based keywords, not the top level ones because otherwise, their budget would just get eaten by people who don't even actually necessarily convey in their search what they're looking for.
They wanna sit at the car garage, but then the thing they might be asking for might not be even in line with what this business promotes.
It could be the, you know, the the person might want to get their tires changed, but the the business I work with doesn't do tires.
So you you start off very, very niche if your budget is low, you start off with this, the the lowest hanging hanging fruits, but keep it more towards the long tail keywords because that will ensure that you're not competing with the highest kind of competition keywords, and you're you're focusing more on the niche.
Yeah.
Definitely.
And I wanna come back to something that you said.
Now you said search volume.
And the average business owner, what do you mean by search volume? Is there a volume knob that I'm gonna adjust in my group? That's that's what could you explain just for, uh, anybody listening, you know, anybody watching this.
What do you mean by search volume? Yeah.
Search volume is essentially the amount of people looking for a specific keyword.
So if I go to Google now and I type in car servicing, that's one search.
So what Google does is it looks at all the data of all the searches performed across their platform, and they aggregate that data to kind of say, on this particular keyword, on a monthly basis, x number of people search for this, and that is what is the keyword search volume.
The number of people searching a particular keyword.
And Google aggregates all of that data in the keyword planner and gives you an estimation as to how many people are searching for that particular keyword.
Fantastic.
Fantastic.
Thank you for that.
And if I was an e commerce owner now, how would this Oh, sorry.
It's because I said Google.
My phone's talking to me.
I've got a Pixel.
They're always listening.
They're always listening.
They're they're always listening.
By the way, now Darren's gonna get added to our audience now.
You see? Anyway, of if I was a e commerce business owner, right, how would it be different? Um, you mentioned search going into search if I was a service based.
Now if I was a e commerce owner, how would that be different? What type of campaign would I be different? Yeah.
Yeah.
So for for ecommerce, it's different to it's different to service because you're selling a product that is very much a a a a it's it's subjective.
People will have different tastes.
So if you're looking for a service just want service done.
If you want electrician, you want an electrician, you want the the problem solved.
E commerce isn't a problem solved.
It's somebody indulging in a purchase that they want to make.
Very different.
Even though some e commerce products do solve a problem, it's more about the person shopping.
That's what e commerce is.
And that's why it makes more sense to take that angle than the search angle.
So for me, I think I would say if you've got a lot of products and you're trying to promote them on an e commerce store, then a performance max campaign is probably the best route to go.
Because the advantage is you can plug your shopping feed into that campaign.
So you've you've once you've set everything up from Google Merchant Center, um, you've got all your products listed, from your website in there.
And if you're using something like Shopify, you can, you know, you can plug that in quite easily.
WordPress WooCommerce again quite easy.
And if you have any kind of bespoke build of website, there's still a way to to connect your your shopping data with, um, Google.
Once you've done that and you can advertise on shopping listings, basically the reason you would do this more so than than search is because the person can see what they're looking at before they click.
So if you're selling cushions Yes.
If I fit on the keyword luxury cushions, that could mean anything.
That could literally mean, um, velvet cushions.
It could mean they're made of wool.
It could mean they're they're red.
It could mean they're green.
Doesn't matter.
You're not gonna be able to get to the core of what that person is searching for.
And if you bid on those kind of terms for an e commerce business, and, you know, even if you do use a landing page where it's, you know, showing multiple products and it's like a collection page, you still have the same challenge because your aesthetic or your style or your product might not be as or in line with what the person's searching.
So I would always start with a product listing ad because it means the person can see the product before clicking.
They can see the price before clicking.
So if you see a, um, if you're if you're looking for, um, a luxury cushion, but you want the color to be gray, or you want it to be kind of neutral toned or, like, something like that.
And you click on a website where everything is a luxury cushion, but they're bright green, they're garish.
There might be, you know, some of these big brands that do, like, really colorful bright patterns and stuff.
That might not be what you're into.
Yeah.
But if you if you advertise on shopping, you can see the product before you click.
So if you are looking for that gray cushion, that's just a luxury solid gray cushion for your sofa.
You can see it, and you can see the price.
You can say, okay.
Here's my options.
Oh, this one looks good.
Yes.
Before I even click it, I can see it, and I can vet it.
So I'm much more likely to convert because I've seen the products.
Okay.
That's why I would say for an e commerce business, it's important to go with a product listing ad.
Now there's obviously standard shopping, and there's obviously performance max.
If you've got a very small product portfolio and you wanna have full control over everything, I would advise a standard shopping campaign.
Because it means you have full control.
You have a very small number of products, and you can get away with manually managing it.
If you're running a large product portfolio, then PerformanceMax is the way to go for two reasons.
Number 1, you're gonna take advantage of the the the bidding that Google has and the assets Google has as well.
But in addition to that, you Google are moving in that direction.
They're they're it makes more sense to to use performance max when you know for sure if you've been in the game as long as I have, standard shopping will will go soon.
It will go.
There's no doubt about it.
Smart shopping went.
That's gone.
Standard shopping is probably gonna go as well.
So just get on board with a campaign type that you know is gonna future proof your business as opposed to hoping and and and using a campaign type that they know is gonna get sunset.
I actually think that's that's a beautiful piece of advice because I think we have to run ads for we have to run Google ads based on what works in 2023.
We can't run Google ads based on what used to work in the previous years.
Uh, which brings me on to my next question.
Now you brought out a video saying that manual CPC is dead.
It's completely dead.
And as somebody who loves manual CPC, as somebody who teaches manual CPC to all my core students.
Mhmm.
When that video got released, I had students coming up to me saying, hey, Devon.
This guy has a million views.
Why should we listen to you and this popular YouTube over here, this popular YouTube over here, Darren Taylor, whose far more experience is telling us that manual CPC is dead.
Can you maybe tell me why you say manual CPC is dead and also I'm gonna throw a little counter question in here.
Mhmm.
You also release the video saying Google cheats in the ad auction.
So for those of you who don't know, manual CPC kind of allows you to control your bits.
It allows you to control how much you pay per click on keywords.
So what I wanna know is if I've got all of that control and if I know that Google Ads is cheating on the auction, why would I then give the control over to them? Because clearly something's up here.
So could you please just clarify that not only for me, but for all my students so we can settle the matter once and for.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So the reason I say manual CPC is dead is because you will both overpay and under pay for clicks.
And what I mean by that is Google has got to the point now where it can understand the intent behind a user more so than the keyword itself, because you might bid on the keyword, and that person clicking your ad might have zero intention whatsoever to buy anything.
True.
They will click the ad, and you'll pay for that click.
That's fine.
But if you have smart bidding and Google understands the signals as to why that person won't be buying, they can lower the bid at the point of auction and reduce your risk on that particular click.
Whereas if somebody is really likely to buy and they're really, really in market, Google can see the past 5 days they've been searching the market for your service.
They've been clicking on other websites, they've been doing loads of research.
And then they're gonna go in and do a search to finally convert.
You wanna show it prominently for that user.
Manual CPC can't do that.
You're gonna be hidden, and all your competitors using smart bidding, they're gonna get the click.
And that is the balance, I think, of what, as to why manual CPC is dead because you will both overpay and underpay for traffic.
You're gonna miss out on the clicks that you could have had that would have converted.
And because you've set a max CPC, Google will always try and move towards that max.
You're gonna be overpaying for clicks that you should've shouldn't have had in the first place.
Yeah.
I think so that's the balance, I think.
I think you're very right there.
I think you're absolutely right there.
And we have seen some situations where your smart bidding is just gonna be able to adjust itself in real time, whereas manual CPC is gonna be more rigid.
I also here's the thing.
This is why I teach manual CPC to all my students is I strongly believe that a lot of people come into Google Ads expecting to set up the ad, set up the website, let it run, and Magic's gonna happen and customers are gonna pop out.
And when we're talking about smart bidding and bidding strategies, people are like, okay.
Yes.
Cool, but they don't really understand the mechanics behind they work behind how they work.
So what I like to do is I like to have my students go through manual CPC.
I like to watch them as they sit but it's lower set but higher, look at the data, see how it's affecting their ad ranking, their scoring, their search impression share.
And once they start understanding all of that type of stuff, that's when I can say, okay.
Now you fully comprehend what bidding actually is.
Because I mean, we can talk about putting all day long.
Somebody could just nod their head, but it doesn't necessarily mean they kind of understand how the system works.
And that's usually at that stage where I tell them, listen, now the choice is yours.
You can give over to the automation and let the automation do all of this for you.
You won't have to be in your account 2 hours a day trying to figure this out.
Google Ads will kind of run this automatically.
Or if you're a control freak, like some of my students are, You can stay with manual CPC, but you need to understand that there's gonna be a trade off.
Would you think that's do you think that's a fair thing to say to my students, Darren? I think as a studying method to understand the fundamentals of Google Ads, then you need to discuss manual CPC because that's technically the history of Google Ads.
It it was a case of you you you set your bids, you set how much you wanna pay per click, the term PPC itself, pay per click, you set the bid you pay per click, that that that in itself is the fundamentals.
The only issue is when you're looking at the landscape right now across all platforms, not just Google ads, but the but pays traffic in general, you're not setting bids anymore.
That's the difficulty they're gonna have.
And I think the other thing as well is if you've got a campaign with, I don't know, 300 keywords in across different ad groups or 200 keywords in and you've got to set bids manually for all of those keywords.
It's work.
It's a lot of work.
It's a lot of a lot of work, a lot of admin, but not just that You're gonna completely miss trends because you're gonna be seeing collecting data on, um, on on negative trends and positive trends before you can react to them where a smart bidding will just react to them.
So say, for example, you have a keyword in your account that's starting to decline you're seeing less and less sales from it over time.
And the only time you're gonna be able to manually adjust that bid is when it flags when you're like, hold on a second.
In the last 3 weeks or 4 weeks, this keyword is really underperformed.
I'm gonna set the bids low.
Yeah.
But little did you know that keyword in the next 3 months could increase? Yes.
But you've cut you've ruled it out completely.
Yeah.
So that's why smart bidding.
I think I was definitely where you are not too long ago.
I think there was a time where I was 100 percent manual CPC.
Don't trust Google smart bidding, but now I've seen enough data and transitioned enough people away from from manual CPC over smart bidding to know how much it works.
I'll give you an example.
So I'm working with a company who a lead gen business for the architectural industry.
So they generate leads for architects, and they get a piece of the action whenever it converts when when the public goes ahead.
Okay.
They were on manual CPC.
They were on manual CPC for years, and he came to me because it didn't work anymore.
He was getting leads at £20 a lead from, you know, 2018, 19, 20, 21.
And then in his account, I started to see from 2022 and then this year Things have dropped off a cliff.
He's done nothing different.
He set his bids manually.
He knows how to adjust bids.
He's done nothing different in terms of management of his campaign, but things have started declining.
And I said to him, the reason things are declining is people are using smart bidding.
Yeah.
That's why it's declining.
You're fixing your bids and other people aren't fixing their bids.
So the transition was made, removed all manual CPC, moved over to smart bidding, set a CPA target, basically in line with what he was getting already.
And without even having to lower it, the CPA came in lower.
Because Smart bidding understands better.
As long as there's enough conversion data, if you're in an account where there's not a lot of conversion data and you've got very few conversions coming in, maybe because your budget is that restrictive.
Yeah.
Maybe manual CPC is probably the best way to go because gives you control.
Because ultimately, if your budget is low and then Smart bidding decides to spend a lot more for a potential click, all of a sudden, you're like, oh, my my budget for the day is gone.
That's usually where most of the students are in.
Yeah.
They they spend, like, $20, $10 per day, $30 per day, and they're still learning the system.
So we kind of want them to ease into it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if if if their budget is low, Um, it makes sense to use manual CPC because Google will with smart bidding.
There will be a potential for, like, if somebody is gonna be very likely to convert, Google will just charge $9 for that click.
Yeah.
And then there's 50 percent of your daily budget gone.
Whereas you need the traffic to be able to get the conversion, you need enough people to find you to convert.
You're not gonna convert everybody.
So spending $9 of your 20 a day on a click isn't gonna work for you.
But then the question then becomes, how do you how do you build up your budget to the point where you have enough behind you to to to use smart bidding and to get get the leverage from Google's smart bidding system.
So, yeah, I think the the the journey is there.
You start with manual CPC.
You start with low budget, maybe just getting, you know, started with Google Ads for the first time.
Then as soon as you start generating business and you wanna scale the account, you will not scale an account with manual CPC.
It's not possible.
Yeah.
Because smart bidding now is is is so sensitive to use the signals.
And I I know there's an additional layer to this on top of that, which is the broad match side of things.
Yeah.
I've seen broad match go very well.
I've seen broad match go very badly.
Um, I've seen, I I'm gonna be honest.
I think probably 10% of businesses I've ever worked with broad match as well for.
Yeah.
We're not even gonna cover broad match phrase match and exact match because it changes every 5 seconds, and I'm just tired.
I'm just tired.
I've even thought about, um, putting in, um, out of video about just, you know, keyword match types, but it's just it's so fluid at the moment and so many people are getting such different results that, um, it's actually scary, you know, to put out some learning material because you know already people will have a 100 different outcomes So I don't even wanna do that.
Now you've got a video on your YouTube channel about transitioning from manual CPC, um, over into automated bidding and how it's better.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna link that down in the description below.
Check it out.
It's a very good video where Darren Taylor basically ex he shows you basically a case study and he explains to you how to transition and everything included there.
It's a wonderful tutorial, and I'm gonna link it down in the description below along with of course.
Now the next thing I wanted to move on to is because we're we're we're having a good conversation over here, but we're also running out of time here.
So I wanna quickly cover I wanna quickly cover a few things.
So let's say I'm a business owner and let's say I'm running my campaign and I'm like, hey, it's been 2 weeks now.
I've got no conversions whatsoever.
I'm starting to get scared, and I know there's a bill from Google ads coming what should I be looking out for if it's only been 2 weeks and let's say I only had 33 clicks on my campaign and nothing's happened.
There's no conversions whatsoever.
What would you do in that situation, or what would you advise the person to do in that situation? Yeah.
For me, I think if you've had 30 clicks in a campaign, it's very early still.
Even if you've been running for 2 weeks, I only have 30 clicks.
It's it's the the the time matters less than the data you have.
If you've had 30 clicks, 40 clicks on a campaign, there's not a huge amount of optimization you can do because you haven't simply got enough data to make those decisions, but you should still check these things.
You should still check the search terms reports.
Data in there will give you a good insight into what kind of traffic you're getting.
If you're getting traffic that's completely misaligned to what you're promoting, then you know there's a mismatch.
You know, you need to look at your keywords.
You know, you need to look at your keyword match types.
You know, you need to look at your negative keywords.
Need to make sure the traffic is targeted.
That's the first thing I would look at for sure just to kind of make sure that the the the sense check is there, that the right type of traffic is is coming in.
The other thing as well to mention is quality score.
So this is an this is a mixture of things.
So the quality score is how Google sees your relevance because that's very dis different to the the idea of relevance in general.
Your ads might be very relevant to your keywords, but if you've got a low quality score, Google sees you as in the wrong place.
So there's definitely a mismatch between the search the person's putting in and what you have on your website.
Even if your ads look good and your website looks good, there's a mismatch somewhere.
So your traffic quality is where you need to start.
For sure.
That's that's that's that's the first thing you would wanna do.
The second thing is website conversion, what are people doing when they hit your website? Cause if they're coming into your website and then they're leaving straight away, something is up.
And again, it goes back to either that mismatch between what the person searching, And that could be the mismatch.
It could be as simple as, you know, the traffic quality is not there because you've not used negative keywords, because the keyword match type isn't in line, or maybe even the keyword research you've done is incorrect.
Maybe you think people are finding your business in a particular way, but in actual fact, it might be a bit different.
The other thing to do is to look at the search results page.
So to make sure you are in the right place, do a search and see what comes up.
Quite often what you'll find is, and I've seen this before in campaigns in an industry I'm just learning about for the first time, I'll go in and look at a campaign with low conversion and have a look at the search terms report.
Everything on the surface looks like it's right.
Then I type 1 of the search terms into Google, and I go, oh, it crosses over with all these different things.
Okay.
We're not bidding on that.
It looks right to me.
It sounds right to the business owner, but the search results page is completely mismatched.
Which means that the keyword isn't valid.
It's not something that's gonna work.
So in case of if I'm picking it.
Yep.
Sorry.
Sorry to interrupt you there.
So if I understand you if I understand you properly, it's not only setting up the ad and making sure the ad set up the right way, but I actually need to go on the page and I need to see where does this ad live amongst all the other ads and does it make sense for my brand and my business? Correct.
Google is very good because this is their whole business model, and it's why they've got the market share they have.
They're very good at understanding what users are are looking for or what they mean on a search results page.
So this kind of ties in a little bit with SEO.
And what I mean by that is If you perform a search on Google and all of the results are, um, are blog articles and help guides, it's very, very unlikely you're gonna get product page to rank for that page.
Yeah.
Because Google sees that as the more useful thing for the user.
If you go onto a page and you type in a search term that you've seen on your account and the content on the page does not match what you do, then there's a mismatch.
You've you've you've crossed over into another industry or sector or something that could be interpreted differently to what you're promoting.
So that's where mismatches can happen as well.
Okay.
What would you say to somebody who says, oh, I've got a great optimization score.
So, therefore, my quality score should be great.
What would you say to that person? So they're very different scores.
The quality score affects what you pay for traffic, and it affects your ad rank in auction.
It affects what you're gonna see.
It affects how visible you're gonna be.
It affects how Google sees your campaign, your ads, your keywords, Your optimization score is basically how Google sees your setup.
1 of them affects your money and your income and your campaign performance.
1 of them doesn't.
Optimization score does not affect your campaign performance.
Not necessarily, anyway, depending on how for how bad the score is.
If your score is really low, because you're doing some things that are very kind of obvious to Google that you should be doing.
So safe, say, for example, you're running a campaign and your you've you've got duplicate keywords in and you've got negatives blocking positive keywords and simple things like that.
Yeah.
Then that's gonna affect your optimization score.
But if you look at things like um, Google's suggestion to join the partner networks or use display or you have to set up a performance max campaign, they're not mandatory.
Google are just using that as an as an indication for what they want you to do.
And if you don't do them, it's not gonna affect your current campaign performance.
It's basically score as to how well you're doing the things Google wants you to do, whether you should do them or not is another question.
Yeah.
Also, you mentioned that, um, we should keep track of how long people are staying on our website.
Do we do that in the analytics? Is there a particular report that we look at, or do you have specialized software for that? So Google Analytics is basically the 99.
9 percent of the market I've looked at.
I've used Adobe Analytics historically, um, for for larger businesses, but Generally speaking, Google Analytics will get you everything you need.
If you have a website and you're running campaigns to Google, it makes sense to use Google Analytics, which is now GA 4.
Um, if you use that system, it plays very well with Google Ads.
You can link up the 2 together.
And when you do that, it means you can import conversions from your analytics into Google Ads as well.
So you can get a a lot more data sharing between the two platforms.
And when you go into Google Analytics, you can see some of the dashboard reports when you just open the the system up.
That will tell you how long people are on-site for.
It will tell you how long your how how your traffic's behaving.
It will tell you how many people have visited the website.
So if you're generating traffic in Google ads and you're seeing sessions aren't lasting very long, then there's an issue.
You know there's a mismatch somewhere.
Okay.
Got it.
Got it.
Fantastic.
Alright.
So before we leave this part on just optimizing your ad account for conversions, are there any best practices, um, that you think business owner should follow? Like, what are the patterns that you see over and over again? If you can tell people just, you know, go in there and sort out usually the culprits are 1, 2, 3, 4, what would those things be? So the first one I touched on traffic quality, check your check your search terms, Got it.
Once you've done that, you'll understand your, um, your, your, your, whether you're in the right place or not.
Secondly, your click through rate.
Massive, massive indication as to whether or not you're in the right place.
If your click through rate is low, then your ad content is just not working or you're in the wrong place again.
You're not you're not advertising for the right people.
Having a higher click through rate is such a massive advantage in Google Ads because you're just getting more traffic without paying more for it.
You're just getting more traffic.
You're not having to increase your bids to get that traffic.
You're not having to do anything else, add more keywords to get that additional traffic.
You're just getting more traffic of the existing pool of searches.
That's a massive one.
Optimize your click through rates.
Use, I guess, test your ad copy.
Put your best USPs and your unique selling points front and center in your ads.
Make sure they're very visible and optimize your click through rate.
That's a massive metric because that also ties back to quality score as well.
Good click through rates usually help inform a good quality score.
So that's that's something to look at as well.
And the other thing as well is, I suppose, is to lean into, and this goes back to our conversation around, you know, manual CPC versus smart bidding.
Yeah.
Lean into a simplified setup, more so than a complex setup.
So years ago, I used to run something called single keyword ad groups where literally every single keyword in my account would be exact match, every keyword would have its own ad group, and every ad group would have its own ad.
So there's a full chain of relevancy from the exact keyword all the way to the ad and all the way to the search results page.
That no longer works very well.
It doesn't give Google enough data to optimize with when you're using smart bidding, want to make sure you group your keywords into themes more so than than than individual.
You don't want to go too complex with your with your ad group setup.
You can be highly relevant now without having to segment to that degree.
So I think that's a very important part of the setup as well is to use a more simplified setup to allow Google to learn.
Things have changed a lot since that used to be, you know, the complex setup days of of having a single keyword ad group.
Yeah.
I've heard some of that.
That's a major thing.
I've had some customers that have had, like, 500 keywords and they wanna run, um, single keyword ad groups everywhere.
I've had some people and I've looked at it and I said to them, the first thing we're gonna do is just simplify.
We're just gonna break this down so that your account actually makes sense to you when you see it, and you can understand exactly where the money is being spent.
Mhmm.
And a lot of people have told me, like, after I've worked with them, they're like, Devon, but nobody's ever done it this way before.
You know, usually when we hire consultant or somebody comes into the business, they end up adding a layer of complexity, uh, to our workflow or they end up giving us more work and stuff like that.
And what I always tell people is your Google Edge if you're a business owner, right, you shouldn't spend 5 hours in your Google Ads and then spend another 8 hours in your business.
Your ads should be based on the fundamentals.
You should get most of it right.
You don't have to get your ads perfect.
But your ad should not end up getting in the way of you actually running your business.
100%.
Yeah.
Getting too complex.
Every layer of complexity you add is added time management on Google.
You, as you say, you don't want to spend all your time managing ads.
And even if you're a professional Google Ads manager, having to manage manual bids on single keyword ad groups to try and achieve the results that Google could do with automation, isn't gonna be the best use of your time.
The idea is now as a as a PPC expert or, um, somebody who wants to be a PPC expert, you use your time for analysis, you use your time to understand what Google is trying to do, and solving problems in the account more so than adjusting bids or looking at ad groups and and and segmenting them even further.
You can pull keywords out and put them into their own campaigns and ad groups.
That can be a thing.
And it can work well for very specific specific use cases.
So say, for example, you're a business and you have a particular keyword in your account, and that's performing incredibly well.
You wanna maximize the hell out of that keyword.
You can set it up as an exact match keyword and have it its own budget behind it in another campaign.
And I've even seen people in the b to b sector change that to a, um, target impression share bid strategy and just send it to a 100%.
Because they know that it works.
And it really works.
And it works.
And it works.
But generally speaking, you want a simplified setup and you wanna use your time on analysis and, I guess, developing the account more so than managing the day to day smaller tasks.
Yeah.
What I like to tell people as well is when it comes to Google Ads, there's the settings and all those settings are extremely important, you know, getting everything right, but also you need to understand that it's about the creative.
It's about the landing page.
It's about the whole experience of the buy from beginning to end.
A lot of people focus so hard on their ads that they forget that, oh, there's actually human beings that are reading these ads.
And if it doesn't make sense on a logical and emotional level, it doesn't matter good your settings are.
You're not connecting emotionally to what that person is looking for when they're on search.
Um, the last thing I wanted to talk to you about is the future of Google Ads and where you see it's going.
Now I don't wanna depress everyone.
On this.
Uh, watching this podcast, but I do wanna talk a little bit about where do you see, um, all of this going with Google Ads? You know, everything we've been doing, what do you think is gonna happen in the next 5 to 10 years with Google Ads? I mean, like, what, to to answer that question, I think it goes back to if you were Google and you wanted to maximize your revenue, what would you do? The answer to that question is you want as many businesses as possible using your product and you want them to have enough of a degree of success that they don't leave.
The only way to achieve both of those goals is through automation.
Because first of all, if you're a business and you're just getting started with Google Ads, and you don't understand how it works or anything like that, there's a big learning curve to get over.
You have to learn the fundamentals.
You have to go through training.
You have to keep testing things, learning things.
Imagine a world if you're Google where there is no learning phase.
All you do is you send your URL in.
You your website URL, a list of your services, and your credit card, and then you're up and running.
That's it.
Google want their smart bidding technology and their automation to get to the point where that's all they'll need.
They'll need to understand the fundamental services you provide, a link to your website, and they generate everything else.
They've tried this a few times in the past.
There's there've been campaign types that are like this, and they still they still do them now.
They're not there yet, but I don't doubt that they will get to a point where near enough they're gonna be automating everything end to end.
There will still be a need for experts and need for people to understand what the data is doing and to steer the automation, but it's all gonna be about steering automation as opposed to managing campaigns.
Directing it in the right direction.
So for me, that's gonna happen.
I think manual CPC will be gone in the next 5 years.
Within the next 5 years, it'll be gone.
Yeah.
Yeah.
How could it how could it remain? It it it can't if Google's plan is to maximize their revenue and on board as many advertisers as possible and to get a smart bidding to work as much as possible, manual CPC will have to go.
It's in the way.
It's not even in the setup menu anymore.
You can't even pick it when you're setting a campaign, so I don't doubt that whatsoever.
Yeah.
It's gonna go.
It will 100% go.
Within the next maybe even 3 years, it might might might be gone.
And that is that that's gonna happen.
In addition to that, they've already hidden, like, 70% of the search terms in an account.
Because, again, their smart bidding needs to rely on learning from search term data and understanding what users are doing.
And what they're saying is as well is that the keyword doesn't matter as much as the person searching.
If I type in car as a keyword, It's a very broad, very generic keyword that could mean anything.
Exactly.
I would Yes.
If I was running a campaign for BMW selling an s a 3 series, I would negative the word car.
Google doesn't want you to do that because what they want you to do is leave it as an open keyword but they would bid on that word car if that person who searched car had searched for BMW and done research on BMW historically, they wanna bid on the person, not the keyword, So that's the direction I think they're gonna go in.
The the keyword is just a signal.
It's not gonna be about the text in that keyword and the phrase anymore.
It's gonna be about the signal of that keyword.
And I can already see this happening with, um, with broad match.
So campaigns on broad match that are using smart bidding, Google calls it Smart Match now to try and, you know, promote it and say you should use Broad matt.
At the moment, this is what is the bit PR they've done.
Why do everything that they say they're like in smart campaign, smart match is always smart match.
They've done that.
And that that and to be honest with you, there is a particular client I'm working with now where it's working really well, and you'll be absolutely shocked at the search terms that come up that convert.
What? It's insane.
So this particular client is in the, um, kind of internet.
You know, when you're trying to get new internet for your house Yep.
They do the compact they have a price comparison website for that.
Got it.
They are getting 100 of conversions a week.
From someone just typing in the word wifi.
That's crazy.
And that's so broad.
That could mean anything.
It could be free wifi.
It could be anything.
Wow.
Yeah.
It could be absolutely anything.
But the reason they're getting those conversions with broad match on is because it's, first of all, it's a big consumer market with loads of people searching, loads of data points for Google to use.
But if I type in wifi, but ultimately, I've been looking at deals and discounts on on on those pro products, or maybe I've gone on to, uh, websites that have have those products on.
Historically, if I type in wifi or get wifi, I'm in the right place.
So Google sees that, and the smart bidding works well for that.
And there's there's if I was setting that campaign up from scratch today, I would never have the word wifi as a keyword.
I would make that negative.
As soon as I started seeing searches for that coming in, but interestingly now, I'm seeing dozens of conversions a day for that keyword.
So it's it's the way Google are going.
I think we as human beings are we are visual learners, and we learn from experience.
But the problem is you're only looking at 1 ad account with 1 set of data, whereas Google's AI is looking at everyone's ad account at the same time.
So Yes.
In other words, the scope that the AI has, the data that the AI has to work with is so much vast has has got such more depth than the than the amount of data that you're working with because they can see what's working well on other accounts as well.
And then they can optimize it across all accounts and bring you that traffic that you might have never ever even thought of.
And I think that's the good that's the good thing.
Wow.
You've actually you're actually starting to change my mind about this whole.
There you go.
But in things Yeah.
Is actually worse than what you said.
Google can't just see what other ad accounts are doing.
They can see every single search performed on their platform, and they will use the data points from every single search that takes place every single day to inform the signals of behavior that users exhibit.
And I remember listening to that at a Google conference, I think maybe 3 or 4 months ago.
And I thought, woah, they're using every search.
Every single search is a data point? Yes.
It is.
It is.
That's crazy.
So if you would rate Google's AI today, out of 10, what score would you give it? Out of 10 versus maybe it's gonna go to the part where it's perfect and it knows how to do everything seamlessly.
Now we're not there yet, and you mentioned that we're basically being used for Google's r and d.
When you look at the r and d, where would you say we are at right now in the score out of 10? I would give Google's ai right now.
That's 7 out of 10.
Now the three points remaining, they I think they can claw back maybe one point and get to 8, but the last 2, I don't think they'll ever get because the last 2 are counterintuitive to their business model.
So there are days on smart bidding where you will pay stupid amounts of money for a click because Google has the budget to do so.
So there's a campaign I was running, um, a while ago.
And because it was quite a niche campaign with a lot of budget behind and maximize how much it could spend and how much visibility it got.
We moved over to Target CPA.
Um, actually, we we moved to maximize conversions first before moving to a Target CPA.
And I remember going into the campaign because it had a lot of budget behind it, it got I think I saw the spend was like, um, I think it was like £400 for the day.
And I was like, oh, right.
So there's been plenty of activity on the account.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I clicked in 6 clicks.
£400 gone.
Yeah.
£400 disappeared.
Evaparated into thin air.
So I thought to myself, woah, this isn't this isn't gonna work.
Why are we paying £80 for a click? Google has decided that we should pay £80 for a click.
That's never gonna work.
And that smart bidding So it needs guardrails.
So there are things you can do that.
A bit more complex like portfolio bidding strategies where you can use smart bidding, but also use a a cap on a max CPC.
There's things you can do like that as well.
But I would say that part, that last part of utilization, Google will always utilize regardless.
If you set a budget at a certain level and use smart bidding and it's not spending, Google will just keep pushing and pushing the bids up and pushing the bids up until you use your budget.
And I don't think they'll ever get rid of that.
So that to me is why they would never get the last point or 2 because they will always utilize your budget badly because it's gonna help them.
Yeah.
That's very true.
Uh, Darren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you.
Clearly, you're a very smart man.
So tell me what are the things that you are working on right now and, uh, where people can go to support them.
So right now, I'm actually looking at a few few avenues.
So the first one is obviously my YouTube channel.
So if you go to Darren Taylor on YouTube, you'll find me there so you can find all my latest videos.
I'm also looking, and I'm starting to build a, um, a training course as well.
So that's a new course.
I did have a course previous to that, but it's basically not quite as in date as I'd like it to be.
So I've basically sunset that.
There's a new course coming.
Um, the website isn't even ready yet, but it's gonna be called impression academy.
And that's coming.
So we'll we'll we'll get I'll get that live, and I'll keep it updated on the progress of that.
So that that's that's definitely gonna happen.
But in addition to that, I've always been, and I think we talked about this, um, offline a while ago, is I've always been that balance between Google Ads and and tutorials and help content around Google Ads, but also, um, generally kind of what's happening in the digital marketing space for other marketers as well.
So I kept flip flopping between the two, but now I'm segmenting them into two channels.
So as of, like, last week, um, I've re reignited my old channel that I started uploading to over a year ago called this week in digital.
So that's on YouTube as well.
So I've only uploaded started uploading to that this week.
It's a brand new channel, so I'm starting from Xero.
So there's there's an interesting time, but that's another thing I'm working on at the moment as well.
Definitely.
So what we're gonna do is we're gonna link all of that goodness that Darren was just talking about.
We will link it down below in the description section.
And if somebody says, hey, Darren.
I've heard you speak now for an hour a half about Google Ads, I really think that you're the right guy to work with.
Um, what type of clients are you taking on? Are you doing the agency thing, or are you just straight up consulting? What type of clients are you taking on? And is there a place that they can just contact you directly? Of course.
Yes.
So I I I'm consulting directly.
I'm not doing an agency thing.
I think the problem with an agency is you get into management more so than hands on quite often, and I wanna be hands on with campaigns.
So I work with all of my clients directly 1 to 1.
And if you wanna work with me, um, submit your details on darrenhyphentayla.
com.
Fantastic.
Darren, absolute pleasure to have you on the show.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.
Me too.
That's been fun.
Last but not least, I wanna say thank you so much for watching till the end.
If you're brand new here, make sure you like and subscribe so you don't miss out on any of our future podcasts with digital marketing pros, And if you wanna see our next podcast episode, I want you to click on this box over here and enjoy.
I will see you on the next one.
Peace
