Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: In this episode, you'll hear from John Horn, founder and CEO of Stub Group and probably the most impressive Google Ads expert I've ever spoken with in my entire life. Having worked in marketing for years now, it was really incredible to be able to talk to John and just pick his brain about Google Ads. So stick around to the end of this episode and I guarantee you're going to walk away with some new information about how to run your Google Ad campaigns, what you should do for maximum roi, how to, to audit Google Ad campaigns, and just a world of other info.
So John, where do Google Ads fit in? Sort of any online business's strategy.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: I will kind of talk about two categories for businesses. So for most of them, I would say ads is an amplification, an amplification of what you're doing. So advertising is a way to go out and get in front of people that you can't otherwise reach. The reason I say amplification is because what you want to be reaching those people with is ideally messaging an offer that already, you know, is interesting to people, it's engaging with people, it's compelling. You've got processes in place where you are handling leads that might come in from advertising. Well, you have a process to turn those into clients. You're building your reputation online, things like that. And that's where I'd say for most businesses, advertising fits in. The caveat I'll make to that is that for some businesses, advertising can be a way to kind of prove the concept for various things. So for example, a startup, brand new business, it takes time to build an organic presence to get customers. You can't do that day one. Whereas advertising is a way to shortcut that. And so a lot of new, new businesses, startups or maybe even established businesses who are launching a new service line and want to see, hey, are people interested in this? Can we, you know, make this a profitable service line? They might use advertising to test, test the waters and to find out whether or not their concept is, you know, is, is workable.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I actually had a friend who, he was telling me not long ago that, so he's a startup founder. And before they ever launched their startup, they basically made landing pages and the brand asked the landing pages saw, would people convert. And I think they did this in like a legal way and like not nothing crazy, like they didn't charge me one for something that didn't exist yet. But sure it was their sort of way of being like, is this like actually viable? And that is one thing that I really enjoy about ads. I'd like to get your take on as far as like where it fits in compared to like SEO or social media or whatever. Because one of the things that I really find frustrating about a lot of other platforms is how long it takes you to get up and running. So on SEO in particular, I think if you'd have asked me a couple of years ago, I'd have said it would take at least six months. But now probably looking at like nine to 12. Unless you just get really lucky and grow out some really low volume keywords. Quite a really big business already. Sort of the whole display of options available to marketers, whether that's SEO, whether that's YouTube, whether that's social, how should people be thinking about building ads into that strategy as far as time to recover investment, how much of their business should be built on ads and just kind of sort of that whole breakdown there.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'll try and talk kind of in frameworks because obviously the specific answers are going to be very different for specific businesses. But some of the ways I think about this big picture are first of all, when you're running advertising, you need to invest enough to be able to collect enough data to see whether or not it's working and specifically what aspects are or are not working. So for example, a lot of businesses have been like, hey, let me throw a little bit of money at Google, let me throw $500 and see and see how it works. And generally speaking, I mean you, you might, you know, get lucky and get something really good out of that. But generally speaking, that's, that's not going to work. Because even if you get lucky and you get some really good business out of that, you haven't yet figured out how to make that repeatable and scalable. You might have gotten lucky and maybe the one person who clicked, you know, that was a $10,000 sale and awesome, but you don't know, okay, this category of keyword is working. This isn't, this ad copy is resonating. This isn't those types of things. And so when we work with clients, we encourage them. Hey, if you're going to get into the advertising space, we need to invest enough money to collect enough data. What enough means depends again on the industry, how expensive clicks are, things like that. I would say for the majority of businesses, if you have less than $2,000 of monthly ad spend to invest into Google Ads, you're probably not ready yet. Now there are exceptions to that. We have clients who spend less than that and who do see great results. Usually those are situations where it's like a really small, maybe a small niche or a small geographic area and there's just not a lot of traffic to spend money. But what traffic there is can convert well, so it's doable. But for most businesses, that kind of $2,000 mark is my initial rule of thumb. And in terms of time, I kind of have two answers to that in terms of how long it takes to see results. The first answer is that we can very quickly see what's happening. So for example, we can very quickly see if nobody's searching what we're targeting and we're not getting clicks, okay, we know that very quickly. Or hey, people are searching, there's traffic for it, we're getting traffic to the website, we'll know that very, very quickly and you can start getting a sense for how that traffic is converted on your website. Is it turning into leads, stuff like that pretty quickly. But it does take time to collect enough of that data again to see which parts are working, which parts aren't, which part to iterate to say, you know what, I thought these keywords over here were relevant, but they're not converting. I need to cut those, I need to focus more on these over here, things like that. And so for most of our clients, we like to talk about an initial three month agreement with them. It's not always codified as a three month agreement. Sometimes it's still month to month, but we kind of set that expectation of, hey, it's going to take a couple of months for us to really figure out what's working right and get things, get the right trajectory, get things nailed down. Doesn't mean we won't necessarily see good results during those first three months. That is very much the goal. But have some patience while we figure things out for your unique business.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean pretty much everything in marketing takes some level of patience. There's very little you can just turn on today and have it see results tomorrow. So that's totally understandable about the three months there. And compared to a lot of other platforms, that's still extremely fast. I think SEO is the prime example that I keep going back to. But even, Even platforms like YouTube or a lot of times like decent growth on social, that's all gonna take time. But I wanted to go back to something you said about the kind of $2,000 mark. So when you're looking at how much is being invested there first, I don't think I understand why is that 2000 sort of important. And then what are you looking for with that? Say, 2,000 or 20,000, whatever. But what kind of data is available at that level of ad spend? It's not available with less than that.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: Yeah, great question.
Really what I'm looking for is volume of clicks because that's where I can get statistically significant information. If I have, you know, 10 clicks a month, I have no, I don't have any data points to work with. If one of those clicks happened to convert, awesome, cool. But I don't know, you know, was that going to be a consistent 10% conversion rate? Was that a lucky thing? The next 500 clicks aren't going to convert? You don't know. And so, you know, I want ideally hundreds of clicks at least over a month time period to be able to pull data points out of that and say, okay, you know, we got a couple hundred clicks to this landing page and X percentage of people converted. We have a general idea that this is probably, probably the benchmark of what we're seeing right now. And so now if we make a change to the landing page or make a change to what we're targeting and we see the conversion rate change, good or bad next month, we can say it probably was impacted by this change and so forth. And so that $2,000 mark is for a lot of businesses at a place where, based upon the average cost per clicks, they might see it would allow us to get enough click volume over a month for me to be comfortable making some decisions about what's happening. Now, again, there's exceptions. If you're a lawyer and you are paying $150 per click, if you're a personal injury attorney, which is, that's very, very possible, that's not a lot of clicks in a month. And so that's not going to get you hundreds of clicks. But you know, for most businesses that are in much, much cheaper cost per click territory than that type of extreme, you'll get a decent amount of click volume to then be able to work with.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Interesting. And when you're looking at that click volume. So I mean, this is going to vary from business to business, but I'm really curious to hear sort of your overall objectives with that click volume. So I'll give you some context on us at Turnkey. Our marketing strategy right now is like 3/4 ish legion and then 25% brandish. So a good chunk of it is like, how do we get our numbers this month? And then a good chunk of it is how do we get our numbers next year? And the next five years and so on. So this is kind of a broad question, but sort of what are you looking for in those clicks? Are you more focused on the ROI itself, like click to sales, or are you more interested on the branding side like I see the impressions or kind of what do you tend to go for there?
[00:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. For most of our business or most of our clients we work with, very performance oriented. So we're looking at how is this turning into what are the actions that we want people to take. So that could be a purchase online, it could be a demo request, it could be, you know, calling to ask a sales question, things like that. And for most of our clients, you know, there's very specific KPIs that we're trying to hit and we're trying to draw, you know, specific correlation between you spent this money on advertising and this is what happened in terms of your bottom line growth. It's the leads and the orders that came from that. To that end, some of the key metrics that we're looking at when we're analyzing performance is first of all, the relevancy of the search terms we're showing up for. So digging into that search terms report in Google Ads, which is kind of the beating heart of what you're actually paying money for. And sometimes depending on your keyword strategy and your match types, you'll realize that what you're actually paying for is not what you were trying to pay for. And you'll have to change keywords or add negative keywords, keywords and things like that. So the first thing I want to do is am I getting the traffic that I think that I want that should convert? In theory, the search terms are relevant. You know, I'm selling X, Y and Z service and people are saying, you know, best XYZ service. Okay, cool, that's relevant. The next thing is really conversion rate on where I'm sending the traffic because that's going to impact obviously how many leads we get and the cost per lead. So my goal is always going to be how can I increase that conversion rate. I want as many people as possible who are clicking on my ads, who I'm paying for getting to my landing page than actually taking the action I want them to take. And then kind of one step above that is going to be click through rate, which is just the percentage of people obviously as you know, who see an ad and then click on that ad. I'm less concerned about that than some of the other things because that's going to be really impacted by. Hey, if I'm go a little bit more broadly in my targeting and show up for some stuff that I'm not as relevant towards. Obviously my click through rate may be lower, but that's not necessarily a problem. If I'm still getting good quality clicks, I'm getting good quality conversions. So click through rate in and of itself is not a metric where I'm like, it has to be 10% or 5% or 1% or whatever. But it's something that I as a kind of a gauge over time to help me see how relevant are my ads to what I'm showing up for. And as I make changes, as I add negative keywords, as I add new keywords, things like that, how is that click through rate changing? There's lots of other metrics obviously that play a role in everything, but those are the kind of the core first metrics I look at when I'm looking at performance.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: And when you're looking at those metrics, I really appreciate how you said that they're very performance driven because this was I think an error in our strategy. So we used to be much more like awareness focused, branded focus with our keywords and it led to this problem where we're like, we don't really know the ROI of a lot of this stuff. It's like we know, like we know we're spending money and we know we're making money. Like how much are we making due to how much we're spending? We don't know. So we've changed that over time. But I'm really curious, how difficult is it to attribute say a click to a sale? Because I know and the reason I ask, it sounds like a very simple problem. Like you get a click and you know whether or not it turns into a sale. It feels like this is a problem that I see and hear people having more often than makes sense. So like is this a them problem or is this like an industry wide thing where it's like attribution is fairly difficult from Google Ads or are they just doing it wrong?
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Yes, this is a very important question to be asking because this is obviously like you said, t and understanding how the campaigns are performing and how to make them better over time. I would say a couple things. I would say attribution looks deceptively simple. It is challenging.
It's not always as challenging as people make out to be. And then it's also more challenging than many people say it is. So there's all sorts of kind of paradoxes going on here, which I'll try to unpack. So the first is from a very logistical perspective, it is relatively easy to track what happens after someone clicks on an ad, gets to your website. So if there's an action you want them to take, filling out a form, for example, we can put some code for Google Ads on a thank you page that people reach after they fill out the form. And then Google will track, you know, five people today clicked to the ads and filled out this form by firing this tracking code. And it'll tell you which keywords that came from, search terms, et cetera. You can even track phone calls. So we work with call tracking software where we display specific call tracking numbers to people who click through from Google Ads. And then when we receive calls, we can record those calls, we know where they came from again, we can track them back to keyword level, ad level, things like that. So there's a lot of that stuff that you can do, and it's very important to do as much of that as possible.
Where things get tricky are a couple areas. So first of all, the customer journey is often not linear or immediate. And here it really depends on the business. Because if you're an impulse by business, you're selling a $10 widget and people either do or don't purchase right after they click your ad, you're going to have really good tracking probably because you know, right away do they or don't they purchase and they're not kind of moving between devices or, you know, sending this to their spouse or to their boss or to their coworkers, things like that. But the longer that sales cycle gets, the more gaps there are in attribution. You know, if you're in a B2B space and it's a type of thing where you've got, you know, multiple stakeholders need to sign off and purchasing the software and you might have, you know, demo requests going on and hey, this person was on their phone and clicked your ad, but then they copied the URL and they emailed it to their boss who clicked it from the URL. That's where things get very, very tricky because you lose a lot of tracking there. And then also there's a reality that a lot of the browsers and platforms and whatnot these days that are more privacy oriented are, you know, pushing back on tracking capabilities, even where it seems very straightforward. So for example, Safari is kind of pretty anti trackers at this point. So depending on how you're using Safari, they may block tracking code from actually firing Or a lot of people have ad blockers just inherently installed. And those ad blockers often track the fee or fire can't talk. They block the tracking code that needs to fire for you to see that a conversion happened. And so there are lots of those kind of technical things that can get in the way of tracking. And then there's also things that Google and Meta, for example, are doing to try and get around that. So there's these things called enhanced conversion tracking, where what you can do is let's say you have a form on your website and someone fills out that form. Form you can send back to Google. Basically, you can say, hey, someone with this email address filled out my form. And Google can go and see, hey, if someone with that email address, let's say they use that email address on their Google profile, they have a YouTube account or they have Gmail or whatever. Well, Google knows that someone with that email address clicked your ad. And even if the firing code, if the tracking code was blocked maybe by an ad blocker, they still know, hey, Brady, with this email address clicked an ad, and then you're telling me, you know, he converted. And so they can still track that back. And so there are some gaps that we're able to fill to kind of backfill through some of those more sophisticated methods. But at the end of the day, it really comes down to sales cycle, how many people are involved. And, you know, the more complicated that is, the harder attribution gets.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say let's start from, like, let's imagine a scenario that's pretty much as hard as possible. So B2B, really long sales cycle, multiple decision makers. Could you lay out some best practices for attribution? Because I feel like this is a problem. Like, if someone could solve attribution in the B2B space, it'd be like Nick Zuckerberg. It'd be a really big deal.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: Absolutely, yes. I'll share some tactics that can help along the way. So first of all is have a CRM where whenever you are collecting information from somebody, you are putting that into the CRM. And then you have a consistent journey in there. So, for example, HubSpot, we use HubSpot here at Stub Group. And what we'll do is let's say someone comes to our website and they fill out any form on our website. Well, okay, now they're in our CRM. And what we do is we capture as much information as we can about how they got to the website to begin with or not so much to Begin with. But when they fill out that form. So if they click through a Google Ad, we've got code on our website that's capturing information about that. Click, okay, the campaign name, the ad group name, the, the keyword, things like that. And we're actually inputting that into our CRM, into HubSpot. So that then when I go and say, you know, Brady filled out a form on our website, I can see, okay, in HubSpot, I can see Brady clicked our ad from this campaign that was triggered by this keyword. And so now I have that kind of granular information about you. Now it's not perfect because, you know, you might have, you might click an ad today and then bookmark the browser and you know, come back two days from now just by clicking the bookmark or by doing an organic search, things like that. So there are, there are gaps in there, but that, you know, that's, that's one way. Another way is think about how you can get people to engage with you in a way that's giving information kind of during your sales process. So in a lot of B2B spaces, they'll do things like lead magnets, white papers, where it's, hey, someone's not ready yet to schedule a demo necessarily, but they're interested, they're browsing around, you've got helpful information to give them. Great, well, track if they fill out a form on your website to download a free guide or whatever. Great, track that, make sure that's in your CRM and again, try and track how they got to the page before they filled out that form so that you have at least that data point for where they came from. And then the last thing I would say, and it's a flawed method, but still just asking people, how did you find us? What was that like? They're not going to remember perfectly. They're not always going to remember, oh, it was an ad, it was an organic result, stuff like that. But there's still a lot of helpful anecdotal information you can get by just, by just asking and then actually tracking that information over time.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that's one thing that I have a love hate relationship with. It's like asking people how they found you because a lot of times they'll be like, I found it on Google.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: Okay, great, that cost me money. Or not, right?
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Or how does it cost me money? How much money does it cost? You know, so even that, it's pretty funny. I did want to talk a little bit about, say someone has an ad campaign Maybe they are having trouble with attribution or maybe they're not sure what kind of campaigns to run. If you could start, let's start from that base of like hardest campaign possible. But how would you go about coming into an existing sort of business that's running ad campaigns, an existing marketing department and auditing their ad campaigns? What would you be looking for? What would you be looking to change? I mean, that whole kind of rundown. There's.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Yeah, we do love talking about this because we do a very detailed audit as part of just our sales process. A free audit that we'll do, a deep dive into people's accounts and there's a ton of stuff that we look for. Some of the high level stuff first of all is tracking. Because the vast majority of businesses come to us and ask for an audit, they're not tracking things properly. They might be double counting something like they're counting form submissions twice or three times and they think that they're doing fantastic. And we're like, your cost per lead is actually double what you think it is. We need to revisit things. And often there's gaps in it. There's, hey, they don't have phone call tracking. And so they're telling Google, hey, these are the forms. And that's great and awesome but you know, half of their leads come by a phone and they have no idea where those are coming from and how to get more of them. So we want to make sure the tracking is as comprehensive as possible and as accurate as possible. Then we look at the search terms. Report is, you know, great example as we talked about earlier, I want to see what are they actually paying money for. And there's very often things in there that they don't realize they're paying money for. A good example would be we had a, a moving client come to us. They're a local and interstate mover and we looked at their search terms report and they're spending a bunch of money on things like freight forwarding, freight forwarding to Mexico, things that Google thought were, you know, in the moving space and kind of broadly matched to their keywords, but they don't do that, they don't do freight forwarding. So that's completely wasted ad spend, zero value to them. And so, you know, you can cut that out by just adding negative keywords and, or tightening the keywords that you're targeting. Other things we'll look at is, are the ads pointing to the right landing pages? The landing pages are going to, are those good landing pages? Because this is another area where businesses put a lot of focus on their advertising and a lot of, you know, blame on their, their Google Ads. Like, oh, the ads aren't good enough or whatever, whatever, but they're sending to a crappy landing page. That is just not a good experience. It doesn't say what they do. It doesn't have credibility elements, it doesn't have a clear call to action. And so they're just wasting money by people. They click the ad. Oh, that's not a good experience. It's slow loading, whatever it is, you know, click back and go the next day. I guess the last thing, the last thing I'll say on the audit side because I could talk for, for an hour literally about it, but bidding strategy is probably one of the other biggest things we look at. So as you obviously know, Google Ads is an auction based platform. And so the way you go into that auction is there's a variety of ways you can tell Google what you're willing to pay for a click. You can do it manually. You can say, I can pay up to $5 for clicks in this keyword. Or you can use different automated strategies. And for most accounts, those automated strategies work better as long as you're feeding really good conversion data into the account. So you could say to Google, hey, I'm telling you what my leads are. I'm importing this information into my account, firing tracking codes and I want to pay $100 per lead. So I use maximized conversion bidding with a target cost per acquisition of $100 as my goal. And now Google knows, okay, based upon the signals they have, the conversion rates of different things, I can bid more aggressively for this search because it's more likely to convert into a conversion. I can bid less aggressively for this one because it's probably not going to turn into a conversion. And I have to try and hit this average of $100 over time. And it gets pretty complicated. Just kind of thinking through the right way to use bidding strategies, which one to use, and then again making sure the conversion data is accurate that the strategies are using. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about that, looking at that and making recommendations about that.
[00:23:01] Speaker A: Okay, well that's really good. So you said you can talk about this for an hour. I might just, I might just hold you. Too bad. Yeah, let's kind of go through all of that. So make sure I have the high level stuff. Right. So auditing, tightening keywords, having good landing page. And then your bidding strategy is that kind of the high level or did I miss any right there?
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Those, I would say are the most important ones. Yeah. Cool.
[00:23:22] Speaker A: So I think we've talked a good bit about attribution. Might come back to that in a little bit. But let's talk about kind of the keywords and campaigns that you've really found to be both effective. Yeah, so I'm really curious. I read a study sometime last week, like branded keywords have. I think it was like 19 times the ROI of other keywords in general or something like that. But I'm really interested in what kind of keywords that you'd like to target. Like is it top of funnel awareness type stuff, or is it very low funnel, like very close to buying intent or just all of that right there?
[00:23:53] Speaker B: Yeah, we definitely think of it as a funnel. And generally when we start working with clients, we'll work our way kind of up the funnel. So we'll start with what I call low hanging fun through. Now, branded is kind of its own bucket because like you said, ROI is, is generally very, very high from branded. But that's because people are already looking for you. They know who you are. And so the question is, would they not reach you if you didn't pay for that ad and instead they just clicked the free organic result? And the answer is going to be a little bit different for different industries because, hey, often competitors are targeting you and you're targeting competitors. And so targeting your brand and keywords is this kind of an unfortunate reality of needing to, you know, capture real estate. And if someone searches for stub group, I would rather have stub groups added here than someone else who happens to be targeting us and who has an opportunity to try and steal traffic away from me.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: Yeah, paying for branded keywords almost feels like paying the mob boss. Like it would be a real pity if someone searched your name and your competitor came up like, okay, the pay.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: To play with Google.
But I guess I can't complain about it too much because then we'll often also, you know, target competitors with our ads. And that can be an effective strategy as well. So it goes both ways. But branded is definitely kind of a unique bucket. And usually for most clients, we do run branded ads. It's not particularly expensive because you have super high click through rates because that's what people are looking for. And so you can spend way less than a competitor has to spend to show up. Because Google, they care about click through rates and they want the ad to be as relevant as possible to people. And so branded ads are often relatively cheap. To run for a cost per click basis.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Let me, let me kind of detour us off right there. So are there any situations in which you would not buy branded ads?
[00:25:37] Speaker B: There are some. So client comes to mind right now that we're working with and you know, we did some analysis. We've run branded ads for them for a long time on, on Google, but we're doing some analysis. I'm like, okay, everyone who's, when I, when I search for their name, everything that comes up organically is them and we don't see any other competitors ads coming up. So basically for them in particular, it's either the ad comes up, says their name and everything else says their name or does it. And so we did a test with them. We said, all right, let's, let's turn off the branded campaigns and let's see whether or not the organic traffic for their brand name picks up in at least a similar volume amount as the number of clicks that we were receiving when we were running the branded ads. And that's what we saw happen. We saw, okay, you know, obviously paid traffic died completely because we paused that campaign and then we saw organic traffic on their brand name significantly increase and it didn't look like they were losing much total traffic volume and we were able to save some money. So in a situation like that where you kind of fully own that first page for your brand name and where there's really not competition that's targeting you with their own ads, then it could be more cost effective to not run during the dads.
[00:26:50] Speaker A: Interesting. I like how you guys said to that too. That's pretty cool. But sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. I think you were on. Well, I guess I didn't mean to interrupt. So sorry about that. But yeah, so I think you're talking about low hanging fruit.
[00:27:01] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I love the back and forth. No interruptions at all. I love talking about this stuff. So yeah, low hang fruit kind of after Brandon then it's okay. Usually it's people who are searching for exactly what we sell. So if it's a moving company as I'll go back to them as an example, someone who searches, you know, local moving company that's probably the next, you know, most likely to convert type of traffic. They are telling me that they are looking for me and I need to get in front of them and say I'm here and here's why you should work with me as opposed to the other people that are showing up at the same time. And so, you know, usually we'll try and capture as much of that traffic as we can profitably. That low hanging fruit. Now there are sometimes exceptions to that. An exception would be let's, let's say maybe you're an email marketing software and there are massive players in that space, you know, mailchimp, constant contact, et cetera, who are willing to spend basically whatever it takes to make sure they have as much impression share as possible. They don't really care about the don't really care about the cost per click. They just care about want to show up as much as possible. And so you might say, hey, it's just prohibitively expensive for my new startup email marketing software to show up for these really juicy searches like email marketing software company or best email marketing software company. And so then you've got to be, you know, really creative and think through okay, well what are other ways that people are searching on Google that indicate they have a need for what we sell but that maybe aren't quite as expensive or quite as competitive as the really obvious things? So one example I'd like to give is let's say there's a particular feature that you're really good at or a particular pain point that you solve that some of the big boys in the space don't solve. And let's get more specific. Let's say maybe you know that there's an error code that people see often in constant contact. I'm not picking a constant contact. I have nothing against them, just grabbing a name that comes to mind. But let's say that there's a common error code that people reach and get frustrated about and you know, they go and search for that on Google. And so you can run an ad literally saying, you know, experiencing error 575Switch to fill in the blank email marketing software for ease of mind or whatever. And so you can probably get much cheaper traffic for something like that than you know, email marketing software, 2025, that kind of thing. But really it's about, in that funnel, it's about okay, you know, figuring out how do people search for what I'm selling and then working my way up the funnel. First it's how they describe exactly what you do. Then it might be pain points that you solve like the error code example. And then sometimes it might be even, even higher level stuff. One example that I like to give is we worked for a while with client that installed walk in bathtubs for veterans and they targeted veterans specifically because there were, I think various kind of grants or things. I think if I Remember correctly, the VA would pay money towards a walk in tub being installed just kind of as parts of the benefits package. But veterans didn't necessarily know that was a thing. And so they weren't necessarily searching for walk in tub. And there's lots of other people who weren't veterans who would be searching for walk in tub that weren't really particularly relevant to what their client was targeting. And so what they would do is they would go after other keywords that veterans would target. You know, it could be, hey, VA benefits, it could be, you know, American Legion, near me, things like that, where hey, if someone searches for this, we know they're probably a veteran. And then they would have an ad be like, hey, you know, you qualify for a free walk in tub, stuff like that. And that doesn't always work. It kind of depends. It's very case by case. But sometimes something really creative like that can just take off and, and work really, really well.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Whoa, that's really cool. And then I think kind of maintaining on that, that sort of going up the funnel, let's sort of start at the bottom. So how much luck have you had with say like competitor pages? Does someone searching like competitor alternative or competitor versus stuff like that? Have you had any luck with those? Or those usually like, yeah, like not really.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: It's hard. I have seen it work. But you have to be really strategic about it because when someone's looking for a competitor, they're looking for the competitor. So it's going to cost you a lot to convince Google to show your ad because Google likes ads with high click through rate. And so if your competitor's ad on their own brand Name has a 25% click through rate because the people are, they want to get to your website, they see the ad and they click on it. Great. And then your ad has a 2% click through rate because relatively few of the people actually want to click your ad. Well, you're going to have to pay way, way more in terms of bidding and cost per click to convince Google to show your ad than your competitor will be for having their ad on that branded term. So it can get expensive from a cost per click perspective. But where I see it work best is again being really creative, where people are creatively saying in the ad what their kind of difference or distinction is from the competitor. And when I say this, don't use your competitor's name in the ad because you got trademark issues. So it's not, you know, it's constant contact. It's not like we are Better than Constant Contact because then they're going to not be happy. They're going to make you take that down for trademark issues, you know, policy issues, etc. But if, you know, again, not to pick on Constant Contact, but let's just say, let's just say their platform's really slow. And, you know, that's a pain point for people who are using Constant Contact. And, you know, a lot of existing Constant Contact customers, as well as people who are searching for them, are googling their name. You might have an ad where the headline is, you know, something like, we are five times faster than the competition. Or, you know, tired of slow loading times, question mark. Stuff like that, where you can, you can hit kind of that pain point that snaps someone who's looking for your competitor be like, oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I am tired of sitting in front of my screen waiting for this screen to load. They say they're really fast and they go check that out and then they click the ad. And then your landing page needs to back up that promise. You can't just send them to your homepage where you're like, oh, we're the best email marketing software. You gotta be like, no, it goes to a page. We are five times faster than the competition. And maybe on your page you can, you can get more specific about your competitors. You could have one of those matrixes where you're like, okay, these are the features. Constant Contact has a mailchimp has and whatnot. Here's why we're better. And then that's that type of approach. If it's going to work, if kind of competitor conquest is going to work, usually that's the best way to increase your chances of it working.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: Okay, well, I think that kind of brings us nicely into the next thing I'd like to talk about, which is your landing page.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: So could you just walk us through sort of landing page best practices, whether that is, say, a competitor page or if it's not a competitor page, just kind of watch what people be having in the landing pages, how much products that they show off. This is kind of an internal discussion we have is like, well, how much do we want to show off the product? Is there too much? So what have you seen work best?
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Yes, I love talking landing pages. It's very much an art and a science because there are so many different types of landing pages out there that all can work well. So it's not that there's this one template you have to follow, but there are a number of best practices. That have been kind of proven over time to in most cases be the best way to go about things. So first of all, just from a very technical aspect, the page has to load really, really quickly. People do not have patience. And Google itself even penalizes you if your page loads slowly because they know people don't have patience. It's a bad experience. So very first thing you need to do is make sure that your page loads quickly on both mobile and computers or otherwise you're shooting yourself in your foot kind of from day one. Then, in terms of the page itself, you need to think through what is it that you want people to do. A lot of businesses don't think about this. They just kind of think, okay, I need to describe my service. And they throw a bunch of information about their service on the page. But there's not a clear call to action. Do you want a demo request? Do you want a phone call? Do you want them to sign up for email, newsletter, whatever it is that needs to be the entire focus of the page. The buttons on the page as people scroll needs to reinforce that. Get your free promotion now. Get your free audit now. You click that, it takes you right to the form to fill out. You know, the phone number up at the top. Hey, call to get your free promotion. Here's our phone number. You have to tell people what you want them to do because we're all lazy and we don't like spending time on things and we get confused easily. And you just have to keep it super, super simple and straightforward and you got to reinforce it. You know, your, your headline in most cases should be about that or at least your sub headline. You know, get your free email marketing audit, whatever it is. The design elements of the page should just kind of visually orient people towards that call to action, whether that be through arrows or just kind of how you progress the story as they scroll the page, whatever it may be. And then credibility elements really, really important. So reviews, testimonials, video case studies, you know, logos from things like Better Business Bureau or, you know, seals awards that you've won. Everything you can do to establish credibility and say, hey, we're an expert in this space. We're a legitimate company. We're not a fly by night operation. Here's why, here's what our customers say about us in their own words. That's so, so important. You can say anything you want about your company, but when you just say, hey, here's a review from our, from our client. Here's a video review. Videos are awesome. From Our customer. That's going to be 100 times more effective than any of your sales copy because people perceive just there's more trust there. It's not you, it's someone else talking about you. And often the way that someone else talks about you is going to be using similar messaging, hitting similar pain points as what the, the potential customer is experiencing as they watch that video or read that review. So those things are all really important.
And you know, there's again, there's a million ways you can, you can do more information, you can do less information. There's not a right and wrong answer there. It's more of a test. And see, so the ideal scenario is, you know, let's say, hey, let's do a really short landing page that's got no fluff and right to the point, let's do a really long landing page. It has all sorts of information people can scroll through and let's test them against each other. And again goes back to conversion rate and see which one has a higher conversion rate. And sometimes you'll be surprised. You may think one thing is going to win and for whatever reason, something else wins. And so there's where you got to kind of let the data dictate and help you improve over time.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And just going back to that sort of split testing of landing pages and seeing which ones convert better.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:37:46] Speaker A: Are you more of like a change one thing at a time and then split test kind of guy, or are you more like, let's just read the whole page and then try both against each other kind of guy?
[00:37:54] Speaker B: It really depends kind of where you are in the testing phase. So especially early on, you know, it can take forever if you're like, okay, I'm just going to move this button here and I got to wait a month and then move it over here. Like that's, it's going to take forever. So there I might be like, okay, here's, here's the really short page. Here's the really long page. These are completely different from each other. But I want to see which approach works better. And then, okay, maybe the short page is winning. Great. Well, now maybe let's start getting more nuanced in our testing. What happens if we have the form at the top versus the bottom, things like that. And then you can get more into that kind of honing an approach that is working and making that better. But sometimes you just got to swing for the fences and say, maybe let's try a completely different approach. And you know, let's just see either validate, we're still going in the right direction, or maybe we'll realize. No, actually this other approach is way better and we should switch to that and then start honing that from there.
[00:38:49] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, I used to be more of a, like, change one thing at a time kind of guy. Like, very, like, scientific, methody, like, let's try this one thing, change one variable, see what the results are. And then it was. I don't remember if it was this week, last week, with Jason Creed, the owner, founder of Basecamp. Familiar with that?
[00:39:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So he. He sent out an email where they were trying to increase conversions for Basecamp. Did you read this? I did not do nodding, no. Oh, my gosh. You really should just search Jason Freed when you have a moment. His blog is going to come up and should be the last entry as far as right now. So they changed a whole bunch of stuff on Basecamp and they increased their conversions 30%. And they had no idea why. Like, they just did a bunch of stuff.
They just did a bunch of stuff to their onboarding flow. They were trying to increase conversions from trial to page. And I actually emailed them about this, and I was like, how do you guys not know? And he was like, we just. Like, we just did it and it worked and that was good enough.
Okay. Yeah. So actually, I feel like my philosophy has been a little bit rocked this week because, like, I feel like changing one thing at a time. I would probably work for years to get started.
Like, if you change one thing at a time, you're often fighting for, like, just fractions of a percent, maybe 1 or 2%, you know, whatever, but it's all small. And then they got 30% in six weeks. I'm like, gosh, what am I even doing? My life, like, I need. I need to work with this guy, figure out what the heck he's doing. But they did a bunch of just, like, common sense stuff. So, again, this is going to be different than Google Ads because they were converting trial in their software to paid in their software. So it doesn't have a ton of overlap, but they're doing, like, fairly common stuff to make things better for users. So they were adding, like, a sample project.
They were making it easier to, like, get started, like, all of this kind of stuff, which I guess does have some overlap with Google Ads, but when you read it, it's like, oh, yeah, like, all of that makes sense. But then it's like they didn't know what it was exactly, and they just released basically everything at once they're like, oh, yeah, conversions are up. And then they just left. And it's like amazing and horrifying.
[00:40:54] Speaker B: It is scary. Yeah. It's like, okay, well, where do I go from here? Which one of those changes, you know, was it all cumulative or was it one big one? If I change that? Yeah, it is a little scary, I think. I think it's a good example too though, of it's easy for businesses when they're testing landing pages or ads or whatever to get too, too focused or granular is maybe the best way to put it in terms of things like, okay, what if I have my review section at the top versus the bottom. Things like that, which are not bad things to test. There's a place for all of that. But sometimes you do need to take a step back and say, wait a second, we've been offering a free consultation as our call to action for a year. What if we change that up? What if we split test, hey, get a free first month or hey, get a, you know, download a white paper, whatever it is. But really changing the entry into your funnel, your offer, and often those things are going to have the biggest impact on conversion rate way more than, you know, moving information around on a page or testing button colors or things like that. Because that gets to the root of why people are interested in reaching out, how much friction they do or don't see in the process. And you can see massive conversion rate changes by going a little more first principle and saying, ah, let's, let's actually offer a different thing or maybe a different place in the funnel.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I think the changing the offer has, in my experience, that's got the biggest conversion rate changes way more than like changing the color of a button, you know, something like that. From a logistical standpoint, how do you end up testing these changes against one another? How do you run these split tests? Are you using different tags or are you totally separate landing pages? What's happening there?
[00:42:36] Speaker B: The easiest way is we liked Unbounce. So Unbounce is a landing page creation tool. And they have, they have it built in to where you can have two variants and basically you can set what percentage of the traffic sees each variant. So it's the same URL. So you don't have to have multiple different ads, different URLs, which is really helpful because if you have multiple ads, then your data could get skewed. Bio. Well, Google's showing this ad more often and less often with things like that. So it's ideal when possible to have the same URL in your ads or wherever you're sending traffic to, and then just switch through what content is actually appearing on that URL. That's how we'll do it most often. Sometimes that's not an option. Client's not willing to do that, or they're using a website, it's just not friendly to that. And then on the Google Ads side of things, what we might do is use an experiment. There's a feature called Experiment within Google Ads where you can basically take an existing campaign and you can make one change and you can allocate a percentage of traffic to that. So, for example, if you have two different landing pages you want to send traffic to, you could say, all right, Google, keep everything the same in this campaign except for the ads. And the ad is the same ad text. But one has, you know, each has a different landing page. And then Google will not perfectly but kind of try to evenly distribute the traffic between those ads, which then means that the only variable, by and large, is the landing page experience that people are being sent to.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: Okay, that's really helpful. And so I wanted to backtrack about one thing you said as far as credibility on the landing pages. So this is one thing that I feel like looking at it from a marketing perspective. Every landing page I look at, I look at, you know, see the logo, cloud, customer testimonials. And consciously I think, like, that's not effective. Like, that doesn't change my opinion. But this happened to me just before this call. I was looking at a company looking at buying coffee sleeves for a conference, and they didn't have any of that on the page. And I actually thought to myself, it's like, is this legit?
And it's just funny. One of those things, like, you look at it and you're like, that can't be that important, like in your conscious mind, but in the subconscious, like, we're just pack creatures.
We just kind of stick together. So what have you seen work as far as that kind of credibility? Is it just logo clouds? Is it customer written testimonials, video testimonials? What do you like to have? You could build a perfect landing page. What would that have as far as credibility?
[00:45:02] Speaker B: My perfect landing page is going to have multiple things. First thing it's going to have is video testimonials from customers, because there's nothing else that beats just seeing another human authentically on camera talking about the service that you're looking at. So video testimonials, number one ideal. They're Also often the hardest to get from people because people don't like sitting down in front of the camera and taking time out of my day to talk about your business. But that is a way to stand out a little bit because most people have written reviews these days because they're easier to get. A lot of people don't have video reviews reviews. And so when you've got those, you are standing out a little bit from competition. So that's, that's kind of the first thing then definitely written reviews ideally. And ideally in most cases I like pulling them in from another platform because there's some authenticity from that. So for example, just having a widget that pulls your Google reviews, your Facebook reviews or whatever, I feel like that that shows more authenticity than if you're just copy pasting what someone said. Because you can make that up. You can say whatever you want, which you shouldn't, but you can and people do. Whereas if they can actually say oh it's on Google and they could click and go read the review on Google, there's just, you know, instantly more credibility that comes from that. And then lastly, you know, well, not lastly, but yep, logo clouds, I think there's, there's definitely a place for them. You know, it depends on the business. But definitely in the B2B space, if you've got some, you know, some helpful stuff, whether it be recognizable names or, or at least, you know, logos that communicate that you work with other businesses in the same vertical and space as what you're targeting, I think that can be very helpful. And then lastly, I think again, any kind of seals, awards, things like that, you know, if you're industry magazine that rated you the top five, whatever or things like that, they're not make or break it, but it just all goes towards building your credibility. And I don't think it's going to hurt you by having those things. I think it can only help in most cases. So you know, ideally you have all of that together on that landing page.
[00:47:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Going back to the kind of awards and certificates and stuff, I would have said before our call today, that that was the least important to me. But now after not seeing any reviews on that landing page and then I just don't trust my own judgment. So how defer to you and, and your judgment that's better than mine, but that's really helpful as far as kind of everything landing page. So let's move over to bidding strategies. I don't even know what questions to ask here, so can you just kind of run me through sort of, what's your overall bidding strategy read like, see, do what, should listen to, et cetera.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: Yes. There's two ways you can approach bidding with Google. You can do it manually or you can leverage their automation. And on the manual side of things, it's pretty straightforward. You're basically saying, here's the maximum amount I'm willing to spend for these searches for clicks on my ads for these searches. And then if you want to get real fancy, there are bid adjustments you can add and be like, okay, well if someone's on their phone, I want to bid up by 10% or if they're in, you know, New York, I want to bid down by 50% or whatever. There's tons of bid adjustments you can make. And in the old days of Google Ads, you know, back in the day when we were doing things, this was a big part of what people were doing to manage ads because there weren't good automated solutions and place and so you'd be looking be like, oh, our conversion rate's better for mobile, so we should increase our bid so we can get more mobile traffic or you know, so forth and so on. But there are so many different options and signals that you can kind of bid adjust that humans can't, can't effectively do it just manually. And so that's where automation comes in. And Google has a number of automated options. Let's kind of walk through them. The kind of two first basic ones or the most basic one is maximize click clicks. And maximize clicks is simply where you tell Google, here's my daily budget, give me as many clicks as possible from that. Now Google gets to decide what maximize means. So if they're like, oh well, you've got a hundred dollar budget and you know, we're not sure if you're gonna get clicks later in the day and here's a $10 click we can get you right now. Maybe they'll do that and maybe you'll have cost per clicks that are, you know, way more than you want to see. But generally speaking, maximize clicks is gonna get you a higher click volume. What it's prioritizing though, to some extent is cheaper clicks. Because if you have a hundred dollars and you could get $2 clicks or $10 clicks, well you'll get more clicks from $2 clicks. And so Google might prioritize more of the cheaper ones. What that also means is they might be cheaper because they're less relevant because competitors aren't bidding aggressively on them. And so maybe they're cheaper clicks, but they're not likely to turn into convert conversions in your website. And so there's some downsides to that. So kind of from there then we go into what they call smart bidding, which is bidding strategies that are based upon the conversion data that you send into your account. So if you're doing those things we talked about earlier, if you're tracking form submissions, you're tracking phone calls, orders, you know the actions that people take, and you're getting that data back into Google Ads, then you can leverage a couple different types of bidding strategies. You can use what they call maximize conversions, which is where similar maximized clicks but maximize conversions. You know, Google, here's my daily budget. Get me as many conversions as possible from it. And Google's going to look and see, okay, these are the signals that seem to be converting based upon the conversion data that we've been given. When we see other people who match those signals, we're going to bid more aggressively to get them. Or when we see people who don't match those signals, we'll bid less aggressively to get them. We're trying to get as many conversions as possible. Then a step up from that would be adding a target cost per acquisition. Target cpa, that's what they call it in the shorthand. And this is where you're telling Google, hey, I want to pay X amount per conversion. And now Google has to get really strategic and say, okay, well this traffic over here is converting above average rate. Let's get more of it. Great, we can bid more aggressively. This over here is not, we can't bid aggressively for this because we need to hit this average $100 over time. Now, it's not a guarantee that Google's going to hit that. You are asking Google try to hit this basically. But it's not a cost per lead model. There will still be situations where you're not actually seeing what you want to see, but it's, you know, you're trying to get where you want to be. And then I'd say lastly, on the automated business strategy side of things, you have target return on ad spend. So this is relevant if you're feeding value data back into Google about your conversions. So especially think of an E commerce website where people are placing orders and as orders obviously have different dollar amounts. And so here you might be telling Google, I want to target return on ad spend of let's pick a number of 5x. So they're going to look and say, okay, well this signals over here led to $500 orders. These signals over here led to $50 orders. We can be a lot more aggressive for the people who are turning into the $500 orders less for the $50 orders. And so they try and customize their bids and who they target based upon hitting that average return on ad spend over time. That's high level. There's certainly nuances to all of it, but that's kind of a, you know, in a nutshell, the options and that you have for bidding on Google.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I know we're running out of time, so I just kind of wanted to ask, I think one last question. When people are looking to run or hire someone to get Google Ads, kind of, what should they be looking for in that hire?
[00:52:20] Speaker B: They should be looking for someone. So ideally the first place I start is, you know, asking them to, let's say if I'm running ads right now, ask them to look at my account and give them, give me their perspective on it, or if I'm not running any ads, asking them to kind of put together, you know, how would you go about this? What's your action plan? And kind of look at that and see does this make sense? Does this make logical sense? It looks like they took the time to understand my business, to really look at things, and that's going to be a good intro into whether or not they might be a good party to work with. I'm going to ask for things like what does communication look like, how and how often do I hear about the work that they're doing for me, what does reporting look like, things like that, Do I have a dedicated person that I'm going to be working with or is it like a ticket system where anybody might be working on my account and I don't know who I get? And there's not a lot of, you know, context that's communicated between people necessarily. So those are some of the things, you know, obviously I'm going to go and look up their reputation online. I'm going to search for reviews and see are there reviews, are people happy? How many reviews? Are there? What are people saying about their experience, things like that. And you know, it's, it's difficult because there's so many different things that go into that decision. And you know, different companies will have pros and cons and obviously cost factors into it as well. But really trying to get a sense for do they understand my business, do I like speaking with them initially, do they seem like likable people who are professional and do they have a good reputation online? And those are, I think, some important places to start. To start.
[00:53:54] Speaker A: Totally. Well, John, thank you so much for your time. People are looking to find you. Where should they go?
[00:53:58] Speaker B: Two places. So stubgroup.com, best place to learn about us. And if you want to reach out, get one of those free consultations for yourself. You can do it through there. And then we also put a lot of free video content on our YouTube channel. So just search stub group on YouTube and subscribe there for lots of, lots of content about Google and other platforms.
[00:54:16] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, John, thanks so much for coming on. This is super helpful to me. As marketing manager at Turnkey, I feel like I just got an hour free consultations. This is really great. I really appreciate your time. And yeah, excited to keep chatting in the future.
[00:54:29] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me on Brady.
