You've been spending all of this time optimizing your ads.
You differentiate yourself by taking care for small items, branding, how do you communicate? But you still feel like you're missing a big piece of puzzle.
How do people actually make the how do they start to connect with the brand? Why you're actually hurting your conversions on your website? Business owners are underestimating how important their websites are, and this is something that stop you from growing your business.
That's exactly what I wanna talk to you about today.
My name is Devin Thomas, and I'll be joined by Pamela Wagner and x Google Ads employees optimize over 3000 different ad accounts.
And together, we'll be up entrepreneurs all over the world, figure out what works and what doesn't work with Google Ads so they can get better results.
So stick around.
It's gonna be a good episode.
Now in this episode, we're gonna talk all about why you're actually hurting your conversions on your website.
Now I know that sounds kind of strange, and I know a lot of you are not doing it on purpose, but what we wanna talk about for the next hour is a couple of things that you should look out for and a couple of ways that you might be unintentionally causing people not to sign up or not to buy on your website.
And I'm joined as ever by the lovely Pamela Wagner And what she's gonna do is she's gonna help us figure out what are these traps and why do we keep on falling into them? Can we can we start off? The worst thing you've ever seen in terms of the of a website when someone came to and was like, Hey.
I wanna start Google Ads, and you looked on the website and you were just like.
I think my absolute favorite examples of those, if I can think of the worst possible one, all I remember was the website was gray.
Like, Windows 1995 gray, and it was just words.
Like, literally just words, words, words, words, words, words, words, words.
And the parts where they wanted you to take action uh, the words were highlighted in yellow, like, not like a hyperlink like a blue.
And even worse than that, the part of the website that wasn't gray would switch over to a kind of bright orange.
Mine would be about mismatching fonts and colors when there was an introduction of a new logo, which included one new color that wasn't properly replaced.
Like, the old one wasn't properly replaced with a new one everywhere, So you would see, like, the old logo in the in the tab.
And then you would have the new logo on the website, but there's still some buttons where, like, the old color, and then the logo was the new color.
And I think it was, like, 3 different fonts.
They were wondering why their conversions had gone down.
We kinda need to talk about why these are all big deals.
Like, some of you are saying, uh, but we're even most website backgrounds are gray.
Most website backgrounds have wording on them and Pam, most website, um, have logos on it.
So what's the difference if there's, like, variations on logo? So what do you think would be the main thing that you want people to understand especially visually about a website and why it gives you such um, a massive boost when things are aligned visually.
One thing we have to understand is how the brain works in terms of congruency.
Our brain loves congruency.
So anything that's congruent and it can make a pattern off, it automatically relates to, and it automatically increases the likelihood of it engaging.
So if you have fitting colors, if you have concurrency with your fund on your website, then that automatically and subconsciously gives whoever the visitor is, an impression that, hey.
This is a serious business.
I can trust this, right, because all that you're trying to do beyond the click on the ad is to increase the trust and build up trust.
Do you die by providing these, like, subtle, signs that, hey.
You can trust me even if you haven't read a thing about me yet.
And when you say congruency for our non English speakers that are listening in, maybe break it down into a more simpler word that they could understand.
I would use alignment here.
So make sure that whatever your brand font and color is, that that is reflected throughout your website.
So don't necessarily deviate from that.
But if you choose to deviate, choose it very consciously.
So maybe you can have a different phone for the call to button, but then make sure that every call to action button actually isn't that different font.
So what would you say to someone who they're looking to quit their job, and they wanna make a little bit of money on the site? So they decided they're gonna open a little bit of a drop shipping store on the side, and they're saying to you, Pam, I'm I'm bootstrapping, man.
I'm I'm just trying to get this thing off the ground.
I don't really care about the logo.
I don't really care if the colors are off.
I am just trying to get to the part where start making some money so I quit my job.
Um, so, therefore, it doesn't really matter what images I choose.
I mean, if the product image is there, they can see what the product looks like.
If I put any old logo on there, I mean, they can see I have a logo.
They're legit.
So what what difference does that make? So that's how it used to be, like, 20 years ago when there wasn't much competition yet online.
What has changed in the meantime is that there's a lot more people out there just like you.
Believe it or not, most likely what you're doing somebody else's done before you are not standing out in your business just by just by having a Right? You gotta understand that you differentiate yourself by the by taking care of the small items and and the small aspects of your business are, you know, your branding.
How do you communicate? Oftentimes when we are looking for someone to establish trust and and buy from us, than people do it on an emotional level, not on a product based level.
The way we build a trust on emotional level is that we understand how do people actually make decisions, and that is like me.
And When they are looking to make a decision, they're looking at, is this something that I can relate to? And this is something that works for me.
Also, when you have a product, just having a product image is not anymore enough, you need to show the product and use can I actually relate to using the product? That's why, for example, certain ads are so powerful about, um, mixers.
So there's this, uh, series of ads on YouTube, which is called Kenneth Blend.
And I think by now, it's like twenty years old, but Yeah.
Usually through, like, an iPad into the blender and check if it blends, right, or, like, for use, but just to show in a really crazy way is, like, look, that product works.
And that draws attention.
So you gotta make sure that when you build a website that it shows the customer and answers to questions like, can it work for me? Now 9 years ago, I used to work at Google.
And 8 years ago, I founded my own ad agency, Ajala Digital.
And since then, we've helped over 3000 advertisers all over the world grow with Google ads.
In the matter where they're based on this globe, they have one challenge in common.
They are usually tired of having to figure it all out on their own with ads and not getting the return that they are looking for.
If you are currently tired of your ads, if you are tired of figuring it out on your own and you need help of a real an expert, then feel free to reach out.
Check the link in the description below.
Let's say I'm a brand new business owner, and now I've got your advice on board, and I understand I'm supposed to show my product in a very visual way and a very in a very appealing way.
The only problem is I kind of don't have the product because I've kind of never done this before.
Let's say I've got a drop shipping store and I I can't actually get my hands on the product.
Are there a couple of things that I can start doing right now.
That'll start improving my website conversion rate, or maybe even just help me get my first conversion.
If I'm starting out, what would you advise should be the most important thing that I focus on or the most important set of things that I focus on.
Yeah.
So what I know from people who've started drop shipping businesses is that, and I've dabbled in this a little bit where I've gotten in touch with suppliers and so on.
They always have these product images available.
So you can actually ask these suppliers and ask them for product as well as lifestyle images.
And otherwise, hey, look, there's AI.
Right? So you can always create these images with the help of AI to help you out on that.
On the other hand, with your landing page, make sure that you have a call to button, but not just one, have multiple throughout the page because you gotta remember that people keep scrolling.
And when you read through information and they wanna buy it, don't just wanna scroll up again.
Make it as easy as possible for me to say, yes, tell me what you want me to do don't assume that people are gonna click on a shop now button.
Tell me to go get the product and buy by clicking on the button below.
Show me the the emotional benefits of the product.
And even if you think it's it's a very plain product, trust me.
It's solving something.
Solving some sort of a problem.
I mean, you know, we keep seeing video ads of, like, simple brooms or lighting on the ceiling because people manage to really display it well.
So don't just show me to broom, but show me, hey, a dog running in the video and then how to brew does away with the hair.
Right? So make it attractive for me.
Engage me.
Do you think that business owners are underestimating how important their websites are? Do you think it's just laziness? What are the reasons why whenever a consultant like yourself or me takes over a website or looks at a website, we can clearly see there are a lot of things that are wrong with that website? Is it because we've been doing this for, I don't know, probably 20 something years if we combine both of our experience? Is it because we spend all day focusing on these things, or is it more that business owners just underestimate how important that this stuff is, and they really don't see how it connects to them converting on their website.
Typically, those would be people that say, oh, you know, people anyway come into my store or to anyway call.
Right? Like, why would I need a website or a proper web site.
The thing is that these days, it's not your business card anymore, and it is your business card.
It's your website.
It is your business card.
People judge you by that.
Whether people gonna tell you yes or no to that, trust me, subconsciously, everybody does.
If you want to show that you're a credible business, you gotta invest in your website.
There's no way around.
Even if people call you, give them a first impression.
Right? Give them something to look at.
Show them testimonials.
Right? Like, imagine if they call you and have already seen testimonials versus they haven't seen any yet.
Whole different conversation because on the one end, your website has already answered the question of, like, will this work for me? Yes.
Because it works for others.
And on the other hand, there was nothing yet.
So you'd spend much more time trying to convince them to buy from you.
Your website is a really important tool to kinda, like, warm up your leads make the yes and the end a little bit easier for them.
You know, when I started my business out, I was actually doing website.
I wasn't doing, uh, Google Ads.
I was literally doing websites and every single website that I came across I I used to, like, look at these websites and I used to ask myself, like, how are these companies still in business? Like, how do they manage to stay in business? And what I've noticed is a lot of companies have this They have the initial 5 years where they wanna push as hard as they can on the marketing front.
So they wanna make sure their business cards are good.
The branding is good.
And eventually what happens is you start getting a few clients and you start stabilizing.
I I won't say the reluctance, but that's usually where you start getting comfortable and you start just leaving your website as it is.
And eventually what happens is the new guys come along.
They've got beautiful new websites, and what happens is they start taking more and more of your market share until eventually you're in the desperate position where you have to change your website.
And this is the scary thing.
This is the thing that a lot of business owners find themselves in this situation because if you had been a little bit proactive, if you had just looked at what your other competition was putting out there and if you maybe worked a little bit on your website every now and then, you would have such a massive leg up versus just letting it die or letting it slip away.
An important factor when it comes to this is your ads and your website kind of work together because your ads are what's gonna give you feedback as to whether your website design is working or whether it's not working at all.
So, Pam, can you talk us a little bit through that process of how the 2 kind of inform each other? One of the main aspects of how Google judges the quality of your ads is the landing page experience that users have.
So if people keep dropping off quickly, if they don't stay along on your website, then it automatically factors that into your ads.
And then things that, oh, the landing page isn't that interesting.
So the quality of of the ad is actually not that good.
So your ad is gonna be shown less and less, or your click through rate is gonna decrease and so on.
Your position might go down, etcetera, etcetera.
You know, from time to time, you also gotta update your website.
And that's almost the same with ads.
Right? It's not just that you create campaigns once and then they run forever.
You also gotta optimize them.
What I see for business owners that are usually very heavily driven for, like, phone calls or something, update the website once a quarter.
Right? If it's a little bit of an expense for you still, if you're still new, have an arrangement with someone that just checks your website once a quarter and then implements updates.
What I see with business owners is there should be some sort of a monthly arrangement because things just keep changing and you need to update it and whatever.
If nothing else, once a quarter, update it.
That's a good rule of thumb because you don't this is another thing I wanna tell business owners like in.
Your website is never ever going to be perfect.
Hear me now quote me later, your website will never be perfect.
I just finished a website design.
There used to be a time where I made my website.
And as soon as I finished making my website, I absolutely hated it, and I went straight back to working on my website again.
So I was that guy and I just kept on working on my website.
And I think it's important for business owners to also understand this other thing that if your website looks like garbage for 5 years because you're making the perfect website in the background, you still have a website that looks like garbage.
I'm sorry, but at this moment, when you send traffic to that website, this is what they get.
They do not see the ideal picture that you have in your head of, oh, uh, we're getting this guy and he's really good and we're working on some all they see is whatever's in front of them.
I would also advise you, and this is what I tell all my students as well.
If a website is too much of a commitment, reduce it to one landing page, and for on making that landing page as good as it can be.
I know that you have your about, you have your products and stuff like that, but if you focus on just doing a landing page, eventually, what's gonna happen is that landing page is gonna excite you, and you're gonna end up wanting to transform your whole website to look like that landing page.
But if you know that doing your website over is gonna be a headache, start off with your landing pages.
You know, for everybody who might get a little bit overwhelmed by the thought of a website and development and feels like non techie, Google actually has quite some options where you can easily create a website yourself that's called accelerated mobile pages.
So AMP, if you just Google Google AMP, you're gonna find solutions where a basic landing page is pre built for you.
So that's, for example, perfect for, like, pediatricians.
Right, that oftentimes need only 1 or 2 landing pages.
You have your phone number on it.
You have your contact details.
You know, you have testimonials on that.
So it doesn't have to be a WordPress or a developer's website.
Sometimes in the beginning, the basics are fine.
And later on, if you wanna focus on SEO, then you can always change to a different system.
And some of you might also feel like but Devin, I am gonna end up paying Shopify or Squarespace.
I'm gonna end up paying them so much money per month.
So I need this to be perfect.
Well, there's a couple of other options that you can look at as well.
If you check the link in the description, we've got lead pages over there where basically they've already built the page.
All you need to do is literally just fill in your company details over there, and it'll match your business color scheme and off you go.
Or you can check out elementor as well.
A little bit more complicated, but it's very intuitive in a way that you can really build a website very quickly.
You can do it with WordPress, which means it doesn't cost you sent.
You're only paying for, literally, you're hosting on your website per month.
So even when it comes to tiers of websites, you know, you do not have to fork out a $100, $200, $400 a month.
You can start off where you are right now, but the most important point that I think both me and Pam are trying to drive home is do not lie to yourself.
I say that because I it's just so common for us as business owners to think it's fine.
I'll get to it.
And then you just never get to it because all of your work stacks on top of one another.
Rather tell yourself that this is an urgent thing.
This is a thing that's holding back your sales.
This is a thing that's holding your revenue back, and this is something that's stopping you from growing your business.
Put it on the top of that to do list because a website touches everyone that you ever interact with on a daily basis.
What I'm about to say next might sound a bit harsh, but don't be cheap on it because you don't want your clients to be cheap with you either.
You probably charge certain prices that you're very proud of or that you charge for a certain reason.
Don't let them be reflected back in the website that you create because you can only charge certain prices when you also put in the quality and the back end that shows people and crates, helps them create that first trust.
Them be ready to pay whatever you're gonna charge.
I also think a lot of business owners would say here, but, Pam, I know of X person that's got a 7 figure business.
Their website looks like garbage.
So why why can't I just have a website that that looks like their website? What what about x person? Like, for example, maybe Gary Van DeChock or your grand cord d1s and stuff that maybe their websites don't look as good back in the days.
Somebody would say, but that that guy's website wasn't so good.
So why should my website be that good? What would you say to that person? Because you know better now than them, and they also only knew so much back then to learn from their mistakes.
Right? That's very important.
Learning from other people's mistakes.
I wanna tell you about a step that honestly shocked me when I heard it.
Did you know that the average online course completion rate is only between 5 to 50%.
I know right.
Pretty shocking.
And Here's the thing.
As somebody who has his own Google Ads course and somebody who has taken multiple Google Ads courses, when I thought about it, it became pretty clear why the average online course completion rate is only between 5 15%.
Sometimes, You just get stuck, and you have a question to ask, and there's nothing longer than taking an online course and not being able to ask anyone a question while you're learning something.
And this is exactly why I started my Google Ads community called the feedback circle.
Now inside the feedback circle, you're gonna get weekly coaching calls with me where you can ask me anything.
We are going to give you master class that are gonna help you level up your Google ads and learn super quick.
And last but not least, you're gonna have a community of people that you can talk to, that you can ask questions, that'll keep you accountable.
And most of all, it'll keep you learning and keep it fun.
So if you're interested in finding out about the feedback circle and seeing everything included in my Google Ads community, what I want you to do is click on the link in the description below.
Now, let's get back to the video.
If we were to summarize the section, we would just tell you that, look, if you have a bad quality website design, it's kind of like fighting with one arm tied behind your back.
You might land a few punches, but you're gonna get punched a lot more then you are dishing out bunches.
One of the easiest ways, Devon, to see that is actually if you're already running Google Ads, go into your auction insights report, and you're gonna see who are your current competitors and your campaigns, and then check out their websites, see what they're doing.
Learn from their mistakes as well.
Speaking of auction insights, you mentioned a couple of things, and I wanna dive a little bit deeper into that.
You said every landing page gets a score from Google.
So what I wanna do is I wanna understand how how does that work? What do you mean every landing page gets a score from Google? 1 of the main 3 main factors for the quality score for Google to judge whether your ad is good or not is the experience of the landing page of your users.
So You got your tracking code implemented, Google tracks your website, Google sees the performance.
It compares that against, you know, the metrics that it has where it says, okay.
This is how a good landing page should be and sees where you are, and then it judges it whether the landing page is below average average or above average, and then that adds up to the quality of your ad.
And with that, it adds to the whole auction process.
Like, just today, I had a call with a client and their impression share with the campaign was below 10%.
There were about 5 competitors above him, which were somewhere between 10 to 20%.
And that's because those 5 companies, we know we're all much bigger companies.
There were chains.
He was pretty much a one one location.
But the interesting thing was the top of the pay trade was for him much higher than for anybody else.
He was the highest, actually, and that's because his ad kept being shown on top above everybody else.
Pretty much every single time you entered the auction.
And one of the main reasons for that is not just because the ad is set up well, but also because the landing page is really, really well optimized.
Huge advantages to having an optimized website, even if you don't have a lot of budget, if you have competitors are much bigger than you, the impact can be massive.
What you're basically saying is I don't need to have I don't need to have a big budget to beat the big guys.
If my landing page is good and Google scores it well, I could still rank above him.
Yeah.
Exactly.
A lot of business owners are stuck on a few things.
So some business owners might say, Pam, I really couldn't care less about a landing page because I have a good product and I have it going at a great price.
It's almost the steal.
Anyone would buy that product at the price that I'm selling it at because I'm way lower than my competitors.
I would be like, okay.
So is this good enough for you? Are you okay with where your business is at right now? Is this how you wanna keep it? And most times, people go like, no.
I actually wanna grow it.
I'm like, well, okay, if you wanna grow it, you gotta work on a couple of aspects and you also gotta be a couple of steps ahead of your competitors, especially if you say you're working on price competition, right, then being able maybe to upsell something would be a good opportunity.
Right? If people like, oh, I gotta steal here.
Oh, yeah.
Just let me spend another couple of bucks, and it's fine.
If you add something that's, like, 50% of the of the normal sales price, imagine you suddenly make 50% more revenue.
Like, there's a lot of potential with simple tweaks in the sales process as well as on your website to increase your revenue.
And I've never heard anybody who said to me, oh, I don't wanna make more money.
And also remember, just because somebody else, like your competitors aren't doing it, doesn't mean that it's a good idea to not do it.
I'll give you an example straight out.
So most agencies work with a 60, 90 day pay range.
And they're like, oh, yeah.
That's because other agencies have are doing that, and that's just how the market is.
I just had this conversation last week with someone, and I'm like, you know what? I found it is because I really wanted to be my own boss and so on, but now I'm just feeling like I'm being bossed around by my clients.
And so I'm like, well, why do you then charge? The way you do, right, with the 60, 90 days.
It was like, oh, that's just how it's being done.
That's how it was told.
And I was like, I'm from the beginning.
I was like, I charge in advance because I don't run off to my money if I always gone for, like, what other agencies are doing.
Yeah.
My profit margins would be a lot less.
The quality of my work will be a lot less because if I compared myself to them, forget it.
We wouldn't get anything done.
You really gotta find what works for you and then build on that because it's your really unique competitive advantage.
I put out a post on, uh, LinkedIn today that said if you keep on accepting deals in your business because you're desperate for the money and if you keep on doing that, you will build a business that has a desperate appearance, right, because you're desperate for the money.
You keep on saying yes to deals.
You keep on designing maybe a website that's subpart to what you actually want uh, you keep on making all of these decisions based on I don't have enough money.
Eventually, you're gonna look like I don't have enough money.
com.
Your whole website, your whole business, every single thing is going to look that way.
And one thing you need to understand and, yes, we are gonna talk about mentality here because mentality is a big fact in how you approach your ads, how you approach your marketing, and how you build your website.
But if you don't approach your website with that abundance mentality of I am gonna make something that looks beautiful.
I absolutely love what I do, and I want my customers to see that I actually care about the way that I'm coming forward.
When you do that, guys, it's like it's like, you know, when you have a castle and you have that moat, they always add in the cartoons, they have the castle with the moat and the alligators around, you're literally building a castle and putting a moat between yourself and your competitors because your competitor is gonna go to the cheapest design on fiber.
He's gonna spend a hundred bucks.
He is going to make sure that he has 3 logos, like Pamela said, you know, that might not even be the same type of logos.
They might not even match, but there's 3 logos on his website.
Stolen somewhere.
Logos that might be stolen somewhere.
Oh, by the way, Just a quick tip.
If you wanna protect yourself, if you're not sure that your logo is original or fake, there's this lovely search engine called tin eye.
It's got a reverse image search.
That's tineye.
And what you do is just upload that photo and it'll search the whole internet and it'll look for look alike logos.
And that's kind of how you figure out if this guy is just selling you a logo that's been made already, like, for five hundred people.
So, anyway, what was I saying? I was talking about how you design your website, how you brand yourself.
It can give you a massive leg up because you have to understand something.
Sales and marketing is a game of trust.
If I trust you, I'll be willing to put my credit card into your website, and I'll be willing to buy or you have.
If I trust you, I'll be willing to put my details in and say, hey.
Call me because I'm interested in the product or service.
But if I do not trust you, you're gonna have a problem even if you spend a $1,000,000 on your ads.
Because it's a game of trust.
Especially, you know, one industry that came to a mind as a tourism industry, when you deal with people who are new to the country, who are new to the place, building trust before they come to you is more important than ever because they're already going into a new Tourad.
They don't know how the country might be, maybe they've heard some weird stories.
Right? So all about trust.
And the more you can portray that, the more you can build that up action by action, the easier the sale is gonna be in the end.
If we could give somebody 5 action points, or the 5 main ingredients of a high converting landing page.
What would that be? Where would you start? Let's say this guy and he's saying, hey, guys.
I'm brand new to this.
Don't go, like, super technical on me.
What are the five things I can do right now to make sure that I'm not struggling with conversions in a month's time.
Have 5 to 10 product images ready or a lifestyle depending on product or service, whatever you offer.
Put in the effort to take them yourself.
And most times, you don't even need to pay somebody.
Like, you already have a phone that's good enough to take this reach us by yourself.
Create testimonials.
Right? And oftentimes, you know, even people ask me when they start off with a business, I'm like, if you're a service provider, you, oftentimes, will need a website straight ahead from the start.
You can get your first work done, get your first, what, 4 to 5 testimonials, and then use those? Uh, a lot of e commerce store owners say that, um, they can't get any testimonials or they can't get people to review their products no matter how hard they try.
9 out of ten times when I asked them, did you actually email and did you actually ask somebody to give you a review? They're like, oh, no.
No.
They wouldn't do that.
And I'm like, yes, they would if you would ask.
Your business didn't start off from nothing.
People have bought things from you before.
People have signed up for your service before.
It's your job to go back even if somebody even if you serve somebody a year ago and say, hey.
I did your logo for you that time.
Would you mind just lighting a short sentence on my website just to say how the service was? Even if it was the worst logo I've ever made for you, please just give me that feedback so I can put it on my website in 9 out of 10 times.
It'll happen.
People will just do it because people are nice like that.
And if you if you're not sure where to go, just go on YouTube and literally type in how to ask for a testimonial, and you're gonna get tons of videos literally giving you scripts of what to write to your to your client.
So we got images.
We got testimonials, them brand, invested in some sort of branding, right, so you got the color clear.
You got the font clear.
That's extremely important.
Fourthly is decide on a call to action.
So that is congruent.
I have worst case scenarios.
I've seen 6 to 7 different call to action buttons on the website on one landing page.
How the hell is the customer gonna know what they want if you were making him choose between 6 different call to Can we just clarify for people who are saying now, what is a call to action? Is the call to action the buy button? Is that what is the call to action button? Yeah.
So it's pretty much the button that tells people which action to take.
Right? So that could be register, sign up, obviously, there's ways to be more creative with that, but keep it simple in the beginning.
Then in terms of the website copy, this can this is probably gonna be the most difficult part, um, especially if you're already wondering about, you know, how the heck am I gonna do a website? For the copywriting card, you have 2 options.
Either you say, you know what? I have a little bit of money.
I'm gonna outsource this to someone to a copywriter.
Or if you're gonna do it yourself, don't just talk about a product.
So what I always tell people is use as little as possible whee's and eyes and my talking to third person, show the customer how that product is gonna help him solve his problems, how that contributes to his or her life.
This is a bit easier for women than for men actually because men are usually straight to the point by this.
We got XYC and whatever and women are more emotional.
So if you are a guy, try to bring in more emotional words.
And, I mean, you can go to websites like tisaros.
com, or you can use any kind of AI tool to give you suggestions But think about what is the emotion when you hold the product in the hand? What do you want the customer to feel and then incorporate that in the text on your website? Ed copy is so massive that you could have the best design landing page in the world but if your wording isn't right, it's gonna be bland.
And if something is bland, it's boring.
And if something is uninteresting, you're gonna look exactly like your uninteresting competitors, and the client's not gonna know what to do, so they will go for the cheapest price.
What you wanna do is you wanna show the customer that you understand them, you understand where they're coming from, and here's where logic and emotion plays a big role.
People don't buy for the reasons why you think they buy.
When it comes to your own business center, your own product, and I find a lot of business owners struggle with this, don't be so into your product that you're not into your customer.
Be into your customer.
Understand what they want, and then the wording becomes so much easier.
You wanna look up a good example about that, look at how Apple sells your MacBook and how receipt dispense has their product configurator.
Yes.
These are 2 completely different price points, but both are not simple buys for most people.
Apple, you make one decision at a time, and then you continue.
Mercedes Benz literally throws 10 different choices at you.
Yes.
For some people, the technicalities aren't important, but I would bet for most people there or not, because especially from Mercedes Benz or anybody who I that drives a car of a certain price range, they go forward to feel like, oh, I feel comfortable, you know, or I feel good when people look at me in this car.
Yes.
That's actually a huge thing.
If you look at most car ads, they show how the car looks like in a driveway.
Now let's talk about this in website terms.
What does this look like on your website? When somebody visits your website, when somebody visits your landing page and they're looking at the landing page, Can they see that product or service in their lives? If you're selling a vacuum cleaner, show the vacuum clean cleaner, but show it on the beautiful white carpet, people wanna know what their lives are gonna be like once they buy your product or yourself.
They don't care how strong the vacuum cleaners sucks up the dust.
They couldn't care less about that.
You might care a lot because you're dealing with manufacturers and suppliers all day long, but what people really wanna know is Hey, what's the benefit of this in my life? How is my life gonna be better once I get your product or your service? If you manage to encapsulate that in your website, even if you have a landing page that's only 3 scrolls down, you will end up converting so much more than your competitors.
One thing I wanted to ask you is, let's say I'm designing this website.
I've got it in front of me.
Do you think that mobile is more important? Or do you think that desktop is more important? When I'm looking at this and I'm saying, okay, which one should I focus on more? Thank you for bringing up that important aspect.
It's probably the most important aspect.
You should design mobile first because over way over 50% of searches are on mobile by now.
And especially if you're, let's say, a call driven business, then you'd want everything to look well on mobile.
Are there any extra rules or any extra design considerations that I should uh, think about when I'm doing this on mobile for my business.
There's pretty much just two aspects to consider, which is speed and ease of reading or clicking on an item.
Just make sure that everything loads properly so maybe remove videos or something or make sure the videos are properly rendered and load quickly and they're not on top.
Never have videos on top.
They just slow everything down.
Like, really make it easy for me to click something.
Tap on it.
Don't make me zoom in and out.
Just make it easily legible for me and very easy for me to just click and take the action you want me to And guys, I know Pam said this before, but I'm just gonna repeat it because I think this is the most crucial.
This this is the most crucial part of the whole conversation.
If you're not that guy and you're not confident in your web design skills, There are people out there designing websites all day long.
They do not charge that much, and they are amazing professionals.
So sometimes as business owners, we need to get out of this habit of feeling like you should do everything yourself.
You should answer the phone yourself.
You should reply to every email yourself.
You don't have to do everything yourself.
If you feel like you're not confident in your web design skills, if you feel like you're not confident in your website, the way it's looking on mobile.
Yes.
It will cost you money in the short term, $500, a $1000, $10,000, but with all the money that you make back of ads, of marketing, of just people seeing your website and deciding to work with you, guys, it might actually be the best choice that you make in your business this year.
Uh, so the reason why we're bringing this podcast episode for you now is when we find you and that and that website doesn't convert, we're just gonna send you this podcast episode.
We're not even gonna talk to you Uh, but what we don't want you to do is we don't want you to bump your head.
Like, in it's better for you to implement all of the stuff now, even if you're new in business, even if you're about to start a business than to really suffer for 3 years just because you wanted to save every penny you can.
Trust me.
It's gonna make things so much easier.
And just like, imagine the website is done.
Imagine it's working for you.
Clients are coming to you.
When they call you, they're already presold.
Right? It's just easy for you instead of, like, closing every, you know, 4th call.
You close every second call now.
It's gonna do so many things for you to that makes things along the way easier that trust me, the whole business experience is gonna be better for you and smoother and hopefully gonna make you more money in the end? We have to get into some news now, um, since we're nearing the end of this podcast.
Yeah.
So how old is Google now? Google is 23 now.
So Google, like, Google Ads technically.
So the first popped up in 2000.
And back then, it started off with 300 advertisers.
Right? And by now, I think there's over 2,000,000.
And if not, a lot more.
I mean, Google was called Google Ads was called AdWords because it used to be focused a lot on text ads.
Right? And then so as time went by, Google added a lot more different campaign types, like video, like apps, and so on, and that's why then in 2018, you rebranded from AdWords to Google Ads.
So if I hear anybody out there say AdWords 5 years after the rebranding, please just don't Google Ads.
It's I swear to you, I still read that, and it just, like Yeah.
Me too.
Me too.
All the time.
All the time.
I get AdWords.
Like, all the time.
I'm like, people, if you rebranded your company, wouldn't you want out of people to call you company the new name? So there's been a lot of new changes a lot of changes over the years attribution models and, like, you know, the whole GDPR and, I mean, we're getting into some real advanced, like, terms here, but I think what what we keep seeing.
And, I mean, is that Google just changes everything quicker? So to give you an example, I used to work at Google in 201450.
And back then, when we had to change, it was max once a quarter of, you know, once half a year, and then the whole team prepared for at least 1 or 2 months.
Right? So how are we gonna communicate it to the customers? How are we gonna teach them about it and so on? And by now, you literally have changes in Google Ads coming up every other month or so.
What year did you start using Google Ads? 2014.
2014.
Okay.
That's good.
Uh, cause I also started.
Let's see.
I started 2016.
We're gonna look at 2014 right now.
Tell me what was your biggest shock, um, when it came to all of these changes that Google Ads made.
And I'm talking about when I say biggest shock, what impacted you the most in terms of how you worked with your clients, uh, from 2014 upwards.
I think I'm fairly neutral.
I'm not really like a person that that goes like, oh, Google Ads is doing this and it's hurting me, but I'm I'm not a fan of performance max campaigns because that that takes away real insights and data from people and from advertisers, and I can't do anything about that with like, when it introduced YouTube campaigns and video campaigns, cool, that was, you know, I I can work with that.
But now all the new campaign types is just introducing is just less data.
It's it's it's less control, and I don't like that.
I liked it because Google Ads was really cool in terms of data.
You could very easily say because of that metric, that at that app performance went down or if I change this, then I know X Y Z is gonna happen.
I learned to love it because of that very straightforwardness of data and actions that you could take.
I mean, I have this conversation with a cloud.
It was like, you know, Hey.
You know, what'd you see, like, with people? Like, how long does it usually take for, like, campaigns to work? And I was like, honestly, 2 years ago, I would have told you probably, like, 4 to 6 weeks.
In some cases, if you're lucky a week or 2.
But by now, literally, you can't tell because every other quarter things are different.
I mean, we try to perform its max campaign earlier this year with one client, and then we turn it off because it didn't work.
And in same settings, 6 months later, we turn it on.
Again, it's on lead works.
Just more unpredictability I had come and I'd learned everything I I needed to learn about Google Ads between 20, like, the 2015 to 2020 era.
And like Pam said, it was a very stable error.
You could easily predicted if you did this and this and this with a campaign, you would get these results.
And sometimes you'd get some weird data, but the data was always there for you to look at.
It was never hidden.
It was never, like, squeezed away in some weird report that you kind of had to do, uh, had to pull out.
It was always there for you.
And what I started noticing is number 1, the keyword match types were starting to get very weird.
Like you would choose a phrase match and all of a sudden your phrase match would show up for just weird keywords.
Like, for example, you could have a keyword of cooking book and then you would show up for cooking appliances.
It's very weird.
I felt like I didn't know anything about Google Ads after been doing it for the past 5 years, 5 or 4 years at that point.
I felt like I knew absolutely nothing, and I didn't even feel like a expert anymore.
In fact, I even wondered if I should shut down my business and if I should do something else.
And then what happened was with the keyword match types changing, it's fine.
We can still look at the search terms report.
We can still figure out if our keyword match types are working.
Now what Google did in tandem with the keyword match types being weird is they changed the search terms report.
So you can't see 50% well, now 54% of the searches that you were showing up for.
And initially, they promised us only 28% of our searches would go missing.
They'd still show us 72 percent of the data.
That is not happening right now.
I would sit in front of clients and they would say, but Devon, I followed every instruction you gave me, but now I'm still losing money.
Can you please show me where I'm losing money? And I have to sit there and put my hands up and go, well, actually, uh, we don't have search terms to show you.
So, yeah, where do we go from here? So what that's led to is a whole lot more guessing on my side when I used to have data.
I have to go through this set of educated guesses based on my experience, and we have to work through a lot more frameworks to get out to the same result that we would have gotten to if I just had the data in front of me from day 1.
So, guys, um, this is gonna be an interesting read for you.
Um, we are going to, uh, link it at the bottom of this podcast in the description, but you can find it all here and we didn't start out back here.
So we wouldn't know what was happening in 2008, but one thing that I can tell you is that I'm happy I stayed.
I'm really happy that I didn't let it get in my way.
I'm so happy that I still decided that I was gonna do Google Ads, and I'm enjoying it a lot more because, yes, marketing has become more difficult or at least working with Google Ads has become more difficult, but it's also become a lot easier because I've matured.
I've seen how businesses interact with their clients.
And purely just from a marketing fundamentals level, I can still more or less figure out whether you're gonna lose money or whether you're gonna make money with your advertising because I now know that I can't only rely on Google Ads.
It's a whole line of actions that are connected.
Thank you so much for watching this episode.
We really appreciate it.
And if you're listening to us on Spotify, be sure to give this podcast a good rating if you wish enjoyed it.
Be sure to like and share with a friend, and next, check out this video where we talk about how to make a small budget work in Google Ads.
I'll see you in the next one.
Peace
