What do you say to someone who says I only have $30 available for, like, 2 weeks? I started my first Google Ads campaign with $1 per day.
How were you able to make that work? Basically, what I did was In this episode, we're gonna discuss everything you need to know about running Google Ads on a tiny budget.
We're gonna discuss what works and what doesn't work with small budgets.
Usually, in my 7 years of experience, I haven't seen one of those businesses really succeed.
And we're also gonna discuss how much you actually need to spend to get some great results.
And last but not least, what we're gonna do is go into the Google Ads dashboard and we're gonna show you a couple of hidden cities that you might not know about that's gonna allow your budget to stretch that much longer.
And then click on more.
So it's a tiny button, and nobody would ever think of clicking that, right? Wow.
That is so cool.
That is something I did not know.
That is super cool.
My name is Devin Thomas, and I'll be teaming up with Pamela Wagner, an ex Google Ads employee who's optimized over 3000 Google Ads accounts.
And together, we've helped entrepreneurs all across the world, figure out how to make Google Ads work for their businesses.
So stay tuned because it's gonna be a good episode.
What is a small budget I think we should start there because I feel like some people would say $500 a day is a small budget.
Other people would say a $1000, $10,000 a day is a small budget.
What exactly is a small budget in your mind? Yeah.
You you took the question right out of my mouth.
Um, oh god.
Because he's a tiny budget.
Right? So we we're we're going a level up here from tiny to small.
Um, uh, let me let me I'll I'll define tiny, and you get to define small.
Okay? So tiny for me would be $10 a day.
Now what would be small? I would say I would say small would be 50 to a $100 a day.
I think that would be a good range for small.
Uh, I see a lot of people starting off at the $50100 per day budget.
Okay.
So what do you say to someone who says I only have $30 available for, like, 2 weeks? Well, I I have the best answer in the world.
I started my first Google Ads, uh, campaign with $1 per day, and I still got results.
So there is nothing that you're gonna tell me that scares me because when I started out 7 years ago, I had a $1 per day budget, and I had to somehow make it work.
And I was able to get leads.
I was able to get clicks, and I was able to actually build a business, uh, and actually get clients through the door.
So $30 a day, I'm really not scared.
However, I think we need to be practical about the way that we're spending our money.
Um, I feel like online, there is a lot of advice out there that says, oh, you should just, uh, switch on a performance max campaign let it run and hope it works out for you might work at certain budgets.
But if you're on a small budget, literally, every dollar counts and you have to be very, um, you have to be very careful about what you're doing with your Google Ads? So okay.
Let's define $1 a day as, like, teeny tiny budget.
How did you how were you able to make that work? Well, basically, what I did was I failed a lot.
I had so many mistakes.
I tried every single type of campaign.
Like, I tried display ads.
I tried the Gmail ads.
I tried the YouTube ads.
And eventually, what I started, uh, learning is that there are certain ad types that are really good and they are really efficient and you can run them pretty lean and you can still get good results.
But there are other campaign budgets that seriously you could just be pouring money in every single day, and you almost never get a result.
So what I try to do is try and focus on those campaign types that were actually going to produce leads for my business.
And I mean, like all business owners, right, you don't just want a guy who accidentally clicks on your ad and accidentally fills out a form and he has no interest in who you are, what you do, what your product or your service is about.
You really wanna make sure that the people who are clicking on your ads actually have intent.
And I think that's the magic word.
So I try to focus on campaigns that produce high intent customers.
So okay.
I I wanna do something different now.
And we're gonna are you okay with us going shortly into the account? I'm gonna try it here.
And so that people actually, like, have a visual of what we're talking about right now.
Yeah.
Sure.
No problem.
There we go.
Okay.
So I just clicked on plus new campaign in my in my ad account.
Right? And then, ideally, would you say the best fit in campaign type is, like, here are leads in this case or sales.
And what would you click on? If you like it.
Okay.
So if you're starting off, if you're a ecommerce owner, of course, you wanna go for sales.
But if you are a business owner, try and avoid website traffic, try and avoid awareness and consideration, and I want you to go for leads because that's what you're after.
Right? You want the algorithm.
I say algorithm.
You want the machine learning to optimize for leads.
I'm I'm thinking with my YouTube brain, not my Google Ads brain.
That's okay.
Okay.
So everybody, this is how leads looks like.
Right? So we really wanna make sure that we use the campaign budget as efficiently as possible.
Now why would you tell someone who says, hey.
I've had my campaigns run for, like, 2 weeks back to the $30 day budget question, um, and saying, it's not working.
What do you what would you tell them? Okay.
So the first thing I think we need to set up is a couple of realistic expectations.
Right? So what I find with a lot of business owners is they come to me and they say the campaign has had 12 clicks.
They've spent a whole bunch of money, like 12 clicks.
Each click cost them $3 each.
And they still don't have any conversions.
And they can't believe that they they'd spend all of this money and, like, nothing's happened so far.
Well, realistically, we need to look at a couple of Now we know that search ads, they convert about 3 to 3.
73 percent of the time.
What does that mean? It means for every hundred clicks that you get on the search ad.
This is across every single industry.
Only about 3 of them are going to turn into real live form submissions, real live leads on your website.
So the first piece of advice that I'd give somebody is don't rush it.
Wait till you get that data in and make your mind up once there is enough data.
Don't just say something is failing or not working when we only have a couple of clicks and a couple of impressions on our Google Ads.
The second thing that I would advise that person to look at is I'd also advise them to look at which type of campaign they're actually running.
Um, because your campaign types will drastically drastically affect what sort of performance you get out of your Google Ads.
Now I'll give you an example.
If you have a screw to tighten in a disc and you tell me you've been using a toothbrush the whole time and the screw is just not tightening, then I would tell you, yeah, well, of course, you're using a toothbrush.
You're using a blunt surface to try and tighten a screw.
So each and every single campaign in Google ads is set up for a specific purpose.
And as a small business owner, you better learn which type of ad is gonna suit your business best.
Don't just assume that because some YouTube guru or you watch Devon's YouTube ad, um, YouTube ad video on YouTube.
And now you're assuming that YouTube ads are the one for you.
No.
They might be a good complimentary campaign, but they might not be the necessarily main campaign that you want in your business.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I mean, that's a good point.
Right? A lot of people just try way too many campaigns and it just it doesn't work out.
Um, the one thing I wanna do right now is to actually hop in and, like, talk numbers.
So I'm trying to pull up right now a sheet here.
Where we can visualize this for people a little bit more because I think about Pamela.
Like, Pamela is so so good at at at at getting the point across.
And I think it's beautiful because we really want you guys to see what you're seeing in your dashboard.
You know, we could be sitting here talking about Google Ads all day long because Pamela and I had, like, kind of nerds But we really wanna show you guys where you're supposed to go and what you're supposed to do at certain points in your campaign.
Oh, yay.
And then, you know, the other question of most, like, small business owners is how much budget do we actually need? Right? So most of them, like, mean, if they're already able to tell you a number, then that's that that means they're already far ahead.
Like, they've already done their job.
Right? But so, ideally, what do you wanna do is and I'm right now completely failing to bring this up.
I've been trying it and it's not working out the way I want it, but let me see if I can share my screen and then at least people have a visual for this.
So I put up a simple Excel sheet.
Right? It's very, very easy.
So you pretty much just put in the number of the clicks, right, and then you look at the average cost per click.
Now if I've never run any ad campaigns before, how do I know my average cost per click? That is actually a very good question.
Alright.
So let's say you've never ever uh, ran a campaign before.
Number 1, you probably wouldn't know until you run your campaign, but number 2, there are a couple of things that we can look at.
So, for example, uh, Google keyword planner, Google keyword planner is an excellent way to figure out more or less a low range and a high range and more or less try and see what is the average that people are paying in your market.
So how it works is you basically log in to your Google Ads account.
There's a little tab over there that says keyword planner.
When you click on that little tab, what it'll do is it'll prompt you and it'll ask you to enter in your specific keywords.
Like, let's say, for example, I am an architect.
Uh, so whatever you need to do is you could just type in architecture services, Um, and then basically what it's gonna do is it'll come up with the volume.
It'll come up with a little forecast, but most importantly, you'll see two columns that say, oh, that's great.
Let's try another example.
Let's try.
We take the right example.
It always honestly, that always happens to me even in my classes and my lectures where I'm like, hey.
Let me show you this.
Literally, I choose the 1, but that's not Yeah.
Definitely.
With me, what happens is I tell my students, oh, I'm gonna show you this Google ad.
And then I start googling stuff and, like, no Google ads stop popping up.
That always happens with me.
Alright.
Yeah.
Without without placing a brand here, my go to is always a certain airline.
Um, from the Middle East, not gonna name it, but they're they're at always shows up.
So but look.
I switched it to United States.
Obviously, it can adjust it to country, and then you have the data here.
There we go.
So if we look at the two columns on the right hand side, you'll notice that one says top of page, but low range and top of page, but high range.
Right? And that's kind of how we figure out more or less what is the cheapest that somebody's paying for a click to be in the top 4 search results.
And what is the highest that somebody's ever paid to be in the top 4 search results or at the number one search results.
So we know that this is a metric that's based in reality.
Now some of you might be saying, Devin, I only wanna pay 50¢ per click.
I don't wanna pay a cent more.
And this brings us into a little bit of a problem because if you're willing to pay less per click, then the other business owner is willing to pay his $2 or $3 or $5, what that actually means is your ad is not gonna get shown as much.
It's not gonna get clicked on as much.
And most importantly, you're not gonna be in a competitive place in the Google Ads rankings.
So in other words, you're suffering by and you're losing business because you're stingy and you only wanna pay 50¢ per click.
So always bear that in mind.
So if I switched over here, right, so we said, now let's say we got 15 clicks, right, and then we spent $9 99.
That actually means we need a daily budget here.
Let me go out of this.
But so our daily budget would be, obviously, in this case, if you wanna get 15 clicks, Uh, this be one times this.
So I would need a $148 in the beginning.
Right? So now if I see a small business owner a $148 a day just to get 15 clicks on my website, Some people might even get a heart attack.
So when would you respond there? Alright.
So I'm gonna pause the screen share just for a second, and I'm gonna show you this beautiful book.
Uh, I was interviewing this very, very smart, uh, woman on my podcast Uh, it just arrived now.
Right? So this is very wise woman recommended that book to me.
So here's the thing.
Business owners tend to have this hope strategy.
And I've talked about this before, but you can't build a business on hope.
You can't build a business because you want things to be a certain way.
What you have to do is you have to look at numbers and you have to figure out what is the most cost effective route for you to get your customer.
So for some people, you might say there is no way that I'm gonna spend a $150 per day because every lead that I get I'm only gonna get a $75 customer.
And I am perfectly fine with that, and I'm perfectly okay for you not to spend that money if you're gonna operate at a loss.
But what I also want you to realize is there is still so many other options in Google Ads.
Like, don't give up we've got so many different types of Google Ads campaigns that you can run, but you should also know that this is a search campaign.
It's probably your best chance of converting a client, especially when you're starting out and you might not be might not be confident in your way site or you might not be confident in your offer, it's probably your best chance to get a client.
And remember, this is just the starting point.
We can always optimize your campaign to bring it down and bring it in line, but don't think that you're gonna go from a $100 a $150 cost per acquisition all the way down to, like, a $2 cost per acquisition.
That's probably not realistic.
So the main thing that I want you guys to remember is keep profit first.
Figure out what is a profitable route for your business.
And I'll give you a practical example of this.
I have got a Google Ads course that I'm basically selling for $650.
Now if it costs me more than $650 to get a lead in, if all my clicks on my ads are costing me $50 each, that's probably not how I wanna advertise my course.
I could go with Gmail ads, which will cost about 20¢ per click, I could go with YouTube ads, which is far cheaper, and I can reach so many more people, um, with the same type of message.
So I wouldn't go for search ads.
I would go for something else if I find that my clicks are too expensive.
Yeah.
That's a good example.
And, um, I'll I'll bring up my screen again because this is this is something I actually let my students go through as well.
And I finally made it work.
So we have a daily budget here, right, according to the the number of clicks and the the cost per click.
Again, this is the high estimate.
Right? Remember, the low one was 2.
61.
Obviously, we're mixing up currencies, but we are not caring about that right now.
This is just for you.
I'll have an example visual in front of you.
And our conversion rate 3%.
Right? So then if my conversion rate is 3% out of the 148, I can expect about 4 to 5 conversions out of that.
Now let's go with the low one.
Let's say I got 4 conversions, then that means out of the 148, I got 4 conversions.
Now if my price per product or service is a 150 bucks, and that means they got 4 purchases times a 150, which means $600.
So in this case, uh, it would be a win.
If my product is only like $10, then obviously, I made a loss of about a hundred bucks.
So this is kinda like to show you.
And that's a very simple calculation.
You can literally copy pastes into any spreadsheet and do this on your own, but this gives you a better idea of like, hey.
Where are my numbers at and where do I need to change something? And something that, you know, I also always tell people it's good to be brought up the book is that if your numbers are really far off in terms of spend and what are you getting back, then probably you first have to work on your business.
Rather than getting ads up and running.
After the break, we'll get into which products and services work really well with Google Ads and which ones just absolutely don't.
So stick around.
Oh, hi there.
Guess what? There's nothing for sale here.
Absolutely nothing.
Just the freight training, which is called the top 5 Google ads mistakes that cost businesses time, money, and sales.
And why is there nothing for sale here? Because I genuinely don't know if I can even help you.
So head over to the link in the description, try to see what's not working with you in campaigns.
If you am maybe making one of these 5 mistakes or all of them, And if you feel like it's a fit at the end, if you feel like you need help, then we're here to support you.
But for now, just a free training, that's all.
And as most of our clients have said, it's 45 minutes, but a lifetime of value.
Uh, we also need to talk about another false belief in business, and that false belief is, oh, if I put my product and serve as super cheap, eventually, I'll get plenty of clients in and eventually at a later stage, I'm gonna be able to raise my prices.
So, um, we get a lot of this as well.
So what happens is a lot of business owners think that they have to start off at a loss, and they have to lose for the 1st 3 years that they're in business, not make any profit because Warren Buffett said something or Jeff Bezos said something.
That's completely the wrong way that you wanna approach advertising.
If your cost per acquisition is a little bit high, like, let's say, for example, it should be at a $100 and it's at $200.
There is no problem.
You can work on optimizing that.
But you also get to a stage where fundamentally your business numbers don't make any sense.
And it's very important that at that stage, you take a step back and tell yourself, I need to raise my prices if I wanna run digital marketing or advertising, or I'm just not gonna do it at all.
Uh, rather go the organic route or rather go the content creation route, but don't try and have a $10 product and try and convince yourself that you're gonna run ads to a $10 product and somehow it's gonna work out.
Usually in my 7 years of experience, I haven't seen one of those businesses really succeed.
I don't know about you, Pam.
Yeah.
It's and and before we get to the next question, like raising prices, I just wanna say that is not always that simple.
So raising prices, you will probably have to confront your own deepest fears and thoughts about money because it's gonna it's literally that.
It's whatever you believe about money and how people spend money, that's what's historically reflected in your business.
Right? Yep.
So in terms of businesses, is there any type of business that Google Ads doesn't work at all for? I I've honestly not seen I've not seen one that it doesn't work for.
This is in my experience, but I've noticed that affiliate marketers tend to have the roughest time with Google Ads, uh, especially affiliate marketers that are promoting products and services that are kind of untested in the market.
So I'll give you an example.
This new product or service is saying that they have glow in the dark underwear, and now they want you to be a affiliate marketer for their glow in the dark underwear.
You don't know if this offer works.
You don't know if this offer converts.
You've got no information whatsoever, but you know that if you sell one of these beautiful glow in the dark pieces of underwear, you're gonna get $25 commission.
So what happens is you start running, uh, your ads and you start noticing that you're losing and you're losing and you're losing.
But affiliate marketers are, like, pretty hopeful, and they're always looking for a new strategy or new piece of information that's gonna, you know, give them that edge.
But sometimes if the product is unproven and if it's clear that nobody is converting on the product, sometimes you need to let that product go and move on.
So I wouldn't say that a affiliate marketing is a bad idea just think a lot of affiliate marketers hold on to products that they shouldn't be instead of searching for the right type of products that they can easily market and easily convert even if that is at a lower price, uh, a lower commission point.
That's really interesting.
Then you mentioned glow in the dark underwear because I recently discovered this glow in the dark toilet seats.
I chose your glass and this is the biggest hidden business idea.
So if Unifiliant marketer looking for a product, please go ahead.
It's a dream.
I wanna know more.
Tell me more about this glow in the dark.
We have 5 minutes.
I'm sure we can talk about this.
Like, it just glows in the dark.
So you don't even need to turn on the light and it's a genius idea because most people, if, you know, in the night, you gotta go potty or whatever, like, you just turn on the So imagine you don't have to turn on a light like that doesn't flash you, but you immediately find where you're going.
Can you imagine sitting on the toilet looking down and just seeing this beam of like like car lights? Don't know.
It's not super bright.
It's a very light glow.
Numinous type.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's like it's I was like, okay.
Okay.
South Africans load shedding pay attention.
Tips.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
On this podcast, we got your back.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pamela, I I wanted to ask you, sorry, before we move on, I wanted to ask you the exact same thing.
Have you seen any businesses, um, that just don't work on on on small budgets with Google Ads? Um, I would have to grant the affiliate marketers.
I I think it really strongly depends on the on the type of product you have.
I mean, if let's say you're you're a high ticket offer.
High ticket is usually something like mid for figures in in the range of my own world and my definition.
And obviously then if you wanna sell something for, like, 5 k, like, you first gotta spend some money.
So you're not gonna be you know, happy product.
You just spend 2, 300 bucks.
So if your product is in the 4, 5 figure range, then you might have to spend quite a bit.
If your funnel is already working, right, given that your funnel is working, and that you actually believe that you can sell, then you have the results to back it up and you offer the respective value.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I I would definitely agree with that.
I think the the the rule or the statement that we can just close this on is running ads is not enough.
You can't just blindly do it.
You kind of have to give a little bit more thought about the offer that you're putting in front of people.
So, for example, if you, um, have popcorn that's flavored like banana, you wanna make sure you put it in front of people who actually like that and you wanna make sure that that popcorn is actually, uh, something that is gonna work in the market before you run advertising towards it.
If so, if everybody hates your product, don't go advertising your product because you're just gonna find more people that don't like that product.
Yep.
Yep.
So talking with people that don't like a product, what is, like, one thing that you'd say most small businesses waste our budget on? Oh, man.
I could go forever.
I honestly 1.
Okay.
1.
1.
1.
I have to think really loud.
Number 1, saving money with no conversion tracking and trying to do it themselves.
Yeah.
I I would say that for me, that's number one up there.
It's one of the biggest mistakes that I see whenever I go into a campaign, I'm always like, where's the conversions in the the client? Oh, yeah.
We can see the conversions on our Shopify back end.
Look over here.
We made 3 sales on Wednesday.
And I'm like, okay.
This is all good, but how do we know that the ads actually made those conversion? No.
I know that I I I know I know that because I had 15 clicks on my ads.
So somewhere in there, I'm sure there was a sale there, and that's how I got the 3 sales.
Or what if 3 of your friends bought, or what if 3 of the people that you handed your business cards to enter the up buying No.
No.
No.
That's impossible.
It has to be the ads.
I know the conversion rate.
That's the conversation that I have more often than not.
Yeah.
And that's rough.
And then especially, like, because you can't leg base any kind of decision on it, and Google also doesn't get that data.
So whatever data Google doesn't get, they cannot optimize for it.
Right? So that's another big reason why you'd want your conversions actually to be tracked by Google in order for Google to do its job and then send you more of that.
Especially if you are generating purchase from your ads.
Right? Definitely.
Definitely.
And I think what I wanna do as well is I'm just logging into, uh, one of our Google Ads accounts over here is wanna actually show you guys what it looks like in the keyword report of Google Ads, and I wanna show you guys what it's gonna look like when you do get that conversion and you do have conversion tracking enabled.
So just give me a second over here.
Let me share my screen.
I want this one.
I'm gonna say share.
So okay.
So we've got our Google ads over here.
We can see that we have you see, I'm switching to my YouTube voice.
You can see that we've got 42 conversions over here.
Now This is great, but we don't know where those conversions are coming from.
Which countries are they coming from? Which people are they coming from? So that's where you kind of have to go look under your keywords.
So I'm gonna go under keywords.
And when I do that and I go over this way, I can now see that, like, for example, with us, we're marketing a Google Ads course.
So you can see the keyword skill shop is actually a very high converting keyword for us.
So we had a 20% conversion rate on that.
Cost per conversion of $5.
You're not gonna get any of this if you don't have your conversion tracking set up, and it's gonna be so difficult for you to know which keyword is actually working.
And this is uh, working against yourself as a small business owner because now the little budget that you're spending, you kinda don't know where it's being, um, where it's converting, basically.
Yeah.
That was a good example.
Um, now in terms of setting up my first campaign, let's say I'm really in a shoestring budget, a tiny budget, and I cannot afford an agency yet, but I really, really wanna try to set up a campaign myself.
How do you recommend people to go about that? So number 1, definitely do your research first.
That Google keyword planner that we showed you, you have to go look at the keywords and we wanna focus on keywords that have good search volume and also have high intent.
Because you could have a bunch of keywords that only get searched five times a month, ten times a month.
You cannot build a stable, reliable, dependable campaign on a keyword that only gets searched ten times a month.
Some of you might say Devin, but I'm in the niche.
And, uh, this is how many searches they are.
I've got a very unique business.
Well, I'm very happy for you, but you gotta remember that those ten clicks are not all coming to your website.
Remember, We just talked about how it takes about a 100 to 200 clicks sometimes to generate just a few leads for your business.
And, um, it's not going those figures, those statistics don't magically change because you're in a niche and you have a niche product.
So if you have keywords with a lot of low search volume, you need a lot.
You need a lot more than the average campaign.
But if you choose a couple of keywords with high search volume, then you will be able to build a dependable campaign on that.
So that's part number 1.
Um, Pam, is there anything you wanna add to that? I I would.
I I may just go a little bit far by that, but I I would just tell people more is not always better in terms of keywords.
Just be careful to not apply your SEO strategy to your to your Google ads.
I mean, I've literally seen accounts with, like, thousands.
Max was like a six figure number of keywords, and that's horrendous because you never need that much I would say if you're a small business owner, then probably having 10 to 15 keywords in one ad group is gonna cover everything that you need for a starter.
Yeah.
And step number 2, that will be setting up your conversion tracking.
Now I know that you might not have, uh, uh, money to spend on a developer or you might not have money to spend on somebody who's interested in coding and all of that type of stuff.
But if you keep your setup very simple, it's actually quite easy to set up conversion tracking.
All you need is literally a landing page.
And when somebody submits a lead, it goes to a thank you page and then measure the submissions that go to the thank you page.
That is it.
As soon as you start complicating stuff by your add to carts, your conversion values, dynamic conversion values, trying to add remarketing, trying to do all of these stuff, trying to, uh, I've even seen some clients every click on their website.
They count that as a conversion.
Oh, that's so bad.
Not so bad.
It's so confusing.
Every click on your website counts as a conversion.
So let's think about this.
It's kind of like having a sweet store and saying that every time somebody comes into your store and just looks at the licorice, Yeah.
That's a real client.
You see what I'm saying? So, also, if you are trying to track everything on your website and you're brand new to this, maybe just start off with one conversion.
It's not gonna kill you.
Like, just measure leads, nobody has to die.
Just measure leads.
And then once you start getting enough money, and I don't mind you wanting to track everything, but get a good developer in and also be very sensible about what you're tracking on your website.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
I mean, if and if you are in a situation where let's say you are taking people somewhere else, you have a book now or a schedule now button and you don't know yet how to track that other page because it might be connected to a different domain.
Just look into button tracking.
Like, just track the the click on a button.
Right? So that's the first kind of like intermediate solution where you at least know, okay.
You know, I've I've had that many people interested in my product, so to speak.
Right? After the break, we're gonna take a deep dive into keywords, and we're gonna figure out whether the right keywords or the wrong keywords in your ad campaign are holding you back.
But before we do that, what I wanna do is I wanna ask you a real simple question.
How would you like to steal my ad settings? No.
Literally, how would you like to steal every single ad setting that I'm using right now in my business to generate leads to generate conversions and to generate sales? Well, If that sounds like something you'd be interested in, I've just launched my Google Ads setup cheat sheet.
And basically what this does is it gives you every single setting I use when I set up a Google Ads campaign.
It's gotta explain the videos to talk you through why I make certain decisions and it's even got some extra explainers in there that will help you understand bidding strategies and understand what the settings are and how they affect your ad campaign performance.
And the best part, my friends, is all of this All of this wonderful goodness is yours for absolutely nothing.
All you need to do is click on the link in the description below and you can swipe it and start using it in your business today.
So I hope you enjoy that, and I hope you really get the best out of stealing from me, which is weird to say, but, hey, it is what it is.
And let's get back into the podcast episode, and let's talk about these keywords.
I have this LinkedIn group, and we tend to ask questions here and there to people.
And we ask them what they should focus on in terms of when they have a small budget in Google Ads and why.
And the majority really, really said keyword research.
So I just wanna circle back to that one more time because it seems something that's very, very important.
What have you seen in terms of, like, misleading thought patterns that people went ahead with when choosing their keywords.
So number 1 is going super broad with your keywords.
Um, I'll give you an example.
Let's say you have a recipe book and you're trying to show off pizza recipes in your recipe book.
So every single page on your book is a pizza recipe.
Now some people would go after the keyword pizza, which is a terrible keyword because when somebody's typing in pizza into Google Ads, they're hungry most of the time.
So they don't have time to read a recipe book.
Number 2, they're probably looking for a pizza shop takeaway or they could want, um, they could want really anything.
So this is what we call in the industry.
We call it a very broad keyword because it's kind of like a catch all keyword.
So what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that the keywords that you have, it actually makes sense for your ad to show up in the search result.
So if you just have pizza and you have pizza recipes showing up, it's not really gonna help somebody.
But maybe if you have pizza recipe book or a homemade pizza recipe, then you do want those keywords because those are keywords that have intent behind them.
You know, the person who's searching them has actually got the intent of using those recipes, and you'd find that the search volume on them is pretty good as well.
And sorry, I keep on saying search volume.
For those of you who don't know what search volume is, let's pretend we're in a city like New York, and we know that 21,000 people are searching for the word pizza every month in New York.
Then the search volume for that keyword would be 21,000.
But let's say we're in a tiny area, like, we we're in the small street in New York.
The search volume for pizza in that street might be 0 because almost no one in that street searches for that.
And the reason why this is important is because it's not only you bidding on those keywords, it's competitors as well.
So in other words, if there's 21,000 searches in the area like New York, you have a very good chance of showing up for one of those searches.
But if there's only 10 searches or 5 searches in that specific area, you might never get shown because you're still competing with other businesses, other brands for those same five searches in that specific area.
Yeah.
That I think we should also clarify the word intent because for me, that was a very difficult word to deal with in the beginning, especially as like a non English native speaker.
I was like, what does intent mean? It seems so hard to grasp.
And what you can literally translate that to is want to.
People want to take a certain action.
That's why they're searching something and people express that one too with words.
So if they just say pizza, you don't know what they want.
Right? But if they say pizza recipe book, then I already have a better idea of what they want to do.
And with that, my ads are gonna be more targeted.
Right? Yeah.
And and also another thing that I I'd love to add to that Pam is There's also this concept, um, and I I find it very pervasive amongst beginners that if you have this the right keywords, somehow your entire ad campaign is gonna work, the keywords uh, going back to the pizza example, there are only one ingredient in making a great meal.
There are only one ingredient in making a great pizza.
Like, I could have a pizza, a pizza, and I just put pineapple everywhere.
It doesn't mean I'm gonna have a great Uh, doesn't mean I'm gonna have a great pizza afterwards.
So keywords is only one small part of making a small budget work.
Just one last question about keywords before we move on.
Remember how sometimes people say, uh, keyword, these keywords are expensive.
What do you tell them? What do you what do you say when people use the word expensive? Okay.
So advertising is an investment.
Right? So we are spending money now so we can have clients in the future.
So if you think that your keywords are expensive or they are overpriced, number 1, I want you to go back to that beautiful Excel sheet that Pamela shared.
And really work through the numbers.
Number 2, you don't have to have only expensive keywords in your campaign.
Um, we constantly look for more and more keywords that are actually affordable.
I'll give you an example.
You could find one keyword in the niche that costs $25.
For example, um, for lawyers, accident lawyers, we're always finding these keywords that are, like, extremely expensive.
Like, one click will really set you back a lot of money.
But we've also find we've also found some, um, keywords that were just instead of motorcycle accident lawyer, we found one that said maybe biker accident lawyer.
So much cheaper.
Just because we use the word biker instead of, um, motorcycle.
And all of these keywords are happening all the time, but it's up to you to go into your search terms report and really find that gold.
It's Google's not just gonna give that to you.
You kind of have to keep on looking at your search terms to figure out where the new keywords are, where the new opportunities are.
Um, even with, um, one of my keywords, and I'm looking at it right now, uh, the Skill Shop 1, Uh, I'll I'll just present my screen so you guys can see what I'm seeing.
Uh, so let's just do this.
Do that.
Alright.
So this keyword over here, Skill Shop, I never knew that this was a high converting term.
I literally went into my search terms report one day, and I looked and I noticed a whole bunch of people were just searching for Skill Shop and those people were just converting on our course, on our products, on our services all the time, And so I decided to focus in on it.
And if you look at the average cost of this keyword, it's only costing me like a dollar 10¢, uh, per click on that ad.
So for me, this is an extremely cheap, extremely affordable keyword uh, and you wanna mix those in with the expensive keywords as well.
And also don't feel like you have to have the expensive keywords.
If you can't afford a $20 cost per click, then exclude that keyword and look for some alternative solutions.
So We have talked a lot about keywords right now, and I wanna switch a little bit to another aspect of ads that many people oftentimes forget, and they're gonna be two words that mean the same thing, and we're gonna use them interchangeably.
Which are add extensions or ask Google calls them now assets.
Now in terms of add extensions or assets, sometimes people might say, hey, there's pieces in my ad that I didn't put there.
Where did they come from? The thing that you need to understand about, um, assets and extensions.
Oh, there's so many names for this is Google is constantly trying to get the most amount of people clicking on your ad.
They wanna make the ad as enticing as possible because you have to remember something.
Google does not get paid if people are just looking at your ad.
It's called pay per click advertising.
So in other words, Google wants people to click on your ads, Now if your ad is not well written, if it's, uh, not well presented, there's no incentive for somebody to click on that ad.
So what Google has done is it's come up with these ad extensions, which is they are amazing if you know how to use them, which is Google will give, um, some more ad space to you if you add your extensions.
Uh, so, for example, you could have plumbing services as your main ad.
And underneath it, you could say something like, uh, click on this link to book us now, and that could be an add extension.
You could also have photo extensions.
You could also have video extensions, and Google will also sometimes go and automatically generate some assets for your campaign.
Now I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing because I've seen some pretty horrible ad extensions over the year.
The point I'm trying to get at is Google is always trying to find the biggest click through rate They're always trying to get the most amount of people to click on your ad, and this is why your ad is constantly changing.
Uh, they're swapping out your headlines and your descriptions.
They're kind of mixing and matching everything to find the perfect click through rate so that the most amount of people click on your ad.
So this system kind of works in your favor.
But one thing that you have to be very careful about is you have to be very careful about the message that you put out there.
I'll I'll give you an example.
You could easily have your ad copy and your ad copy says, um, greatest, um, greatest, uh, Google Ads course in the world.
Okay? So that's just that's just your ad copy.
That might mean a lot to you as the business owner, but in terms of somebody searching for it, that's kind of what everybody says.
Everybody says they're the greatest at something.
Everybody always says that they have have the best customer service They are so reliable.
You can depend on them.
These are all generic words.
So you have to be careful about the wording that you put out there.
I would rather let, uh, I'd rather have you put out something that's specific and true than something that's so just a a generalist statement that sounds good in the boardroom that doesn't really translate well on your ads.
So it doesn't matter how many ad extensions you have.
It doesn't matter how many assets you have.
What's more important is what those assets are actually saying and how you are clearing space in the customer's mind of is this for me or is this not for me? Yeah.
So I think there there are 2 concrete tips that I wanna give people on the way in terms of, like, languaging.
First of all is numbers.
Use as many numbers as you can.
So for example, more than 500 happy customers something like that.
Or the second one that you could use or and actually is social proof.
So you just feature a testimonial, right, and you can literally do it as much as, like, typing it up in your ad and then adding it or adding it as a callout depending on how short or how long it is.
And the second part is actually with these automated assets, you can deactivate them.
And most people don't know how this works.
I'm gonna quickly show you how because this it it it can make a major difference because sometimes Google adds pieces of information your ad that are really not yours and they're really not fitting to your message.
So when you are in the ad account, I'm just noticing we're using, like, different interfaces.
So Devon is using the new interface, by the way.
I'm in the old interface.
So whenever you're watching this video, don't be confused.
This is why you see 2 different interfaces.
Once you are in your ad account, just click on assets and then click on more.
So it's a tiny button and nobody would ever think of clicking that.
Right? And then click on account level automated assets and then again on more and then on advanced settings.
And now you can see all of them are on so you literally can turn them off one by one Wow.
That is so cool.
But literally turn them off 1 by 1 and then you just avoid any information to show up that you don't want and you have full control of what you're doing.
Um, obviously, Google is gonna keep telling you and it's recommendations that you should turn on again, but don't.
Wow.
That is so cool.
That is something I did not know.
That is super cool.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
Yeah.
And here's the here's the thing about automatically generated assets.
I always tell my clients, look, nobody knows your business better than you.
Kinda know what works.
You kinda know your clients.
You kinda know the ins and outs.
So don't just hand over control of how your business shows up to some $1,000,000,000 company that's never done plumbing before, never done electrical work before.
You have to be very clear that, um, your ads have wording that is specific like Pam said and also be kind of very strict on how your ads are showing up because I mean, this translates into real world results for your business.
I once had a Google Ads, uh, campaign, uh, that I ran for my course and they put kind of like a Christmas jingle, uh, music over my video.
And I was like, why what is this has got absolutely nothing to do with my business and what I do.
Like, I'm not in the business of selling Christmas albums, so I don't know why they're doing that.
Maybe it's because I smile and I look a little bit like Santa Claus.
I don't know.
Motion of the beard.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Especially this this long white beard that I have over here, but that's the type of thing that we run into all the time when we're managing these campaigns and we're just seeing all of this ad assets and it looks nothing like what your ideal client would click on.
So be very careful with that.
So so finishing up on this, and I know we could go probably another couple hours on this.
Or a day or 2.
So if I'm now completely confused a small business owner, what's which campaign would you suggest them to start off with? Which type of campaign? Now this is one of my favorite questions.
Okay.
So let's talk about the different temp campaign types.
Let's also think about what these campaign types look like.
Right? So we've got your traditional your AdWords campaign.
Usually, somebody has a problem and they go to Google and they search for that problem.
For example, I need a wedding photographer in Los Angeles.
Somebody would search that in the Google bar.
Now if you're a wedding photographer and you're looking for leads, yes.
You wanna show up on those searches because you know those people have the most going back to that magic word intent.
You know that people are searching for that.
But if you have a display ad, right, you have to remember that somebody might see your ad, but they are not necessarily right then and there looking for your awaiting photographer.
So the chance is that your ad could show to somebody who is not specifically looking for what, um, you do at that exact moment.
They probably will, and they probably they probably have it on their mind somewhere, but it's not necessary that that person is specifically looking for wedding photography right then and there.
This is why search ads convert almost three times as much as your display ads.
It's because of that intent.
It's because of Google search engine, and it's because people go there because they know they are burning and they have the desire They have a burning desire to get an answer to the question then and there.
Now I want you to use YouTube ads.
I want you to use display ads.
I want you to use, um, demand gen ads.
They used to be Gmail, uh, ads.
I want you to use those, but 80% of your budget has to go to your search ads.
Why? Because that is where you're gonna find the best clients, the best leads, and that's where you're gonna have the best chance of converting.
The 20 percent of your budget I would more than be happy for you to spend it on retargeting, spend it on, um, Gmail, spend it on all of those other things.
But remember, when you're on a tiny budget, you might not even have that much money lift.
So maybe just focus all in on search Once you start getting good results, then you can start expanding to these other campaign types, but do not just go on a display campaign because you can reach 10,000 people.
People, I can reach 10,000 people all day long with paper pamphlets.
It doesn't mean those people are actually in than what I'm doing.
So be very, um, wary of that.
Pamela, is there anything that you wanna add to that with campaign types? Uh, I think you said it.
You said it pretty well.
And and what I tell people, look, once you grasp the the functionality of a search campaign, you will understand the other campaigns as well.
So, like, focus on getting that right first and then you can, you know, focus on generating brand awareness or other aspects.
But, yeah, you you said it pretty well.
Awesome.
Awesome.
And I think for the news section, we don't have a news article that we wanna talk about today, but what I do wanna talk about today is my shiny new Google Ads dashboard a couple of things that I've noticed.
Right? So I am going to share my screen.
Is that okay, Pamela? I'm just gonna share my screen.
Let's get let's get into this.
Man, I am so excited.
I've been waiting on this dashboard.
Oh my gosh.
To update my Google Ads course and the tutorials and the YouTube videos, I really, really wanted to get into this.
Is it that good? I absolutely hate it, but, hey, this is what everybody's gonna see.
So It's true.
It's true.
I honestly recently, I found a screenshot still on a video from when I recorded a video, I think, like, 8 years ago and, like, how it looked back then.
And you you know how Google Ads looked 8 years ago by actually going into Microsoft ads.
Because we are always behind on that.
That is so true.
I never thought about it, but that is super true.
Yeah.
Alright.
So there's a couple of weird things that I found so far.
So number 1, Um, most of the stuff is here.
Right? But I I'm noticing also that they keep on pushing this interaction rate and interactions as well.
It's so annoying, but I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm like, interaction is almost like intent.
What the heck? There we go.
And we have click through rates.
So I don't know why we needed, like, who was asking for interaction rate? I I don't know because it's kind of misleading sometimes because you can say, oh, yeah.
You had 5 interactions on your ads.
What does that what does that mean? Even on my video ads, it says I had a 20.
I had a 80% interaction rate, but I only had a 12% view rate.
So which one is it? Are people not watching my ad or people watching my ad 80 percent, um, or to 80% duration? So it's pretty confusing.
Another thing I've noticed that if you go into, uh, a campaign, any campaign, and you can see your people I stick to $1 budget per day.
Why? Because I all will always have students telling me it's not possible.
Well, here it is $1 per day, and I'm still making it work 7 years later.
It is very possible to do Google Ads with a small budget.
You just have to know what you're doing.
And, um, so I'm over here and you'll notice Pamela, do you see a settings tab? Because I don't.
They they hit look.
They hit settings.
They moved search terms.
Like, I found, honestly, search terms on the keywords was very intuitive, and then they started moving it to insights and reports, which I don't think is very intuitive.
So it's interesting though that they put change history this prominently because change history wasn't this this One thing I've noticed about change history is you can't really go back past a certain date.
I don't know if this was because I don't I've I'm mostly on manual settings, but one thing I've noticed is the undo button is kind of gone.
Um, so that's one thing I've noticed, but I don't know if it's because I don't change my ads that much, or I don't know.
I don't know.
But one thing I've noticed is I'm not new, but Oh, interesting.
It's gone.
Oh, that's what you mean.
Oh, it looks like a month.
It's it looks like you can't undo changes that are older than a month.
I think that's the logic.
Exactly.
Also, and this is me and Pamela as digital marketers.
This is our favorite tab.
It's the recommendations tab.
Shall we have a look and, uh, just see what they are, uh, recommending? Uh, okay.
So first things first automated bidding strategy, um, it's telling me to raise my budgets because my ads have stopped running on my busiest day.
Um, alright.
So I wanna give you guys a quick tip about just raising your budgets in general because I get this question, like, a hundred times a day.
Devon, should I pay more? Should I raise my budgets more? I'm getting all of these alerts.
I'm getting limited by budget and everything like that.
I want you to go to your overview.
I want you to look at your cost per conversion, and I want you to ask yourself, does it make financial sense for me to raise my budget.
For example, if I'm selling a $150, uh, product and yes, my cost per conversion is $10 per day, then I got no problem.
Raise your budget and keep on raising your budget.
However, I do find a lot of business owners that have the false belief that somehow if they raise their budget, somehow their conversion rate, I'll get that up here.
The conversion rate is going to increase because they've now raised their budget.
So Pamela, maybe talk to them about that, um, false belief.
Well, it's it's not always logic.
Yeah.
It's just not logical, like mathematically even.
And Also, like, you gotta consider ideally, like, don't raise your budget by more than 20% per week.
Um, Google may sometimes go beyond that.
So increasing your budget by a lot doesn't always mean getting better conversion rates.
Like, ideally, it stays the same, but it depends how Google works with more data and what more data means for your campaigns.
Yeah.
I I second that.
I definitely second that.
Okay.
So Uh, there's a lot that I don't like about the new dashboard.
I'll tell you what I do like about the new dashboard.
I absolutely love, um, the fact that I can access keyword planner over here.
Can just go to tools and I can just go straight into keyword planner.
That for me, I like.
And the second thing, um, and this is somebody on, uh, LinkedIn that brought this up was if you go into your insights, there's actually a new report that you can pull and it's going to show you the new search terms in your area.
Um, I don't know if it's this 1.
I think it's Performance Max also does that.
Yeah.
Performance.
Okay.
Performance Max also does that, but I I'm really enjoying uh, being able to see what the new searches are in my area.
So that I'm enjoying.
Other than that, I don't know what the change was for.
It's just them trying to hide a lot more data.
Okay.
I'm gonna be a little bit I'm gonna throw a little bit of of how do you say it's something in the fire? Oh, god.
Some, uh, you're gonna throw some, um, you're gonna pee in the fire, basically.
No, not.
Well, I thought we stopped talking about toilets a long time ago.
Okay.
So, anyway, oh, god.
Okay.
Let's just picture go out of our heads, please.
Um, I think see, performance max was the first step to give users less control and less data.
So I'm I'm gonna play devil's advocate.
That's probably the right word to use here and say, what if Google just wants us to even see less data? And so that's why it's introducing a new dashboard because that's where it's easy to just confuse people and not show certain things anymore.
Yeah.
I think a lot of people have your same gut feeling.
It's the same gut feeling I had.
I think I'm happy from a content creator perspective because I won't get that comment of, oh, my dashboard looks different than you.
I'm not gonna get that comment anymore, and I'm not gonna have to explain to them that they should switch to expert mode.
Here are the things that kind of scare me.
When I look at that search terms report, it is not just 28% of the search terms that they are hiding anymore.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
No.
In most in most in pretty much all accounts is about 50% now minimum.
Yeah.
I am seeing a lot of search, uh, spend that I can't account for.
Also, when I look at the audiences tab, I don't know if it's in this specific account, but we can't really see, um, you they usually have other audiences and optimized targeting.
That optimized targeting is accounting for 93% of ad spend.
In some cases.
So I think what Google wants us to do, and we've always been saying this.
We've even said this on previous podcast as well as they literally just want you to give them their credit card.
Just give the credit card, and they'll make the decisions.
You just sit back and they will tell you if if if it's going well or not, but, uh, it's it's turning into this thing where people are even getting emails.
Have you gotten these emails that show you, oh, your ad campaign had 3 conversions this week? I think they're emailing people to prevent them from going into their dashboard and really looking at stuff because now if they get these emails, let's say you had 3 conversions last week, you'll go, as a business owner, you'll go, oh, okay.
Fine.
I opted out.
I think that's why I'm not getting them.
So I opt out of all these things.
Yeah.
Um, I'm very, very controlling of my inbox.
So that's basically what they've been doing.
Um, but I personally, I don't trust I don't trust anything they say.
Even if they told me I had 4 ad clicks, I wanna see what did they cost.
Um, these are all metrics that you as a small business owner, um, need in order to build a cost effective campaign.
Actually gonna help grow your business in the long run.
Guys, I don't want us to seem like negative people on this podcast, but we're trying to protect you, the listener.
We're trying to show you that it's not just the case of trust the automation, trust the AI, and your business is gonna make a $1,000,000,000.
You have to pay attention to these things, especially if you're on a small budget because they can easily, uh, put your business in the red.
And I don't want that for any of my listeners.
I don't want that for anyone listening to this podcast.
So know your numbers, be alert, and the last thing I'm gonna say from my side is make sure you know what your ads look like and where they're showing up.
Hey there, my friend.
Thank you so much for watching till the end.
I really appreciate it.
And if you're wondering when the next podcast episode is coming out, all you need to do is hit that like, hit that subscribe and hit that bell button so you will be one of the first to know when it drops.
Now if you want to reach out to either myself or Pam, all you have to do is check out the links in the description below.
It's all there for you, but I cannot thank you enough for watching all the way through to the end.
We really appreciate it.
And I will see you next time.
Piece.
Yeah.
And look at how big my head appears in terms of yours.
Like, what? Okay.
Cool.
Maybe you should just, like, distance yourself a little bit
