Google Ads 101: Expert Tips for Small Business Owners – with John Horn, StubGroup

Welcome to the Bring youg Product Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly, practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started. Hello.

Today on the podcast, I'm speaking to John Horn, the managing partner of StuvGroup. John helps people use digital marketing to find and connect with customers on online.

I've invited John onto the podcast today to talk specifically about Google Ads. As you may know, Google Ads are huge. I don't actually know much about them, and this was a topic I know John is an expert in.

So we really go into detail here.

So if you've ever wondered whether Google Ads are right for you, you've ever wondered how to get started, if you're running them and you're thinking, are they working? Are they doing what they should? Should I be spending more money?

All of the questions you've possibly ever asked or ever, or maybe questions you didn't even think to ask about Google Ads we cover in this con.

As I say, Google Ads might be something you've never even considered before, but do have a listen because you may find that they're actually something that could work for you. And John will tell you how you can tell that. So I would love now to introduce you to John. So, hi, John. Thank you so much for being here.

Hey, Vicki, thanks for having me on.

Can we please start with you giving an introduction to yourself, your business, and what you do?

Yes. So my name is John Horn and I'm the CEO of Stub Group. Stub Group is a digital marketing agency.

We've been helping businesses for over a decade at this point to navigate the online world and ultimately connect them with customers through things like Google Ads and Meta Ads and many other platforms.

Brilliant. Thank you. So I've invited you on TODAY to talk to us all about Google Ads. I'm going to start with a really basic question.

I think most people will know the answer, but just in case, can you explain to us what a Google Ad is and where someone might see it?

It's a great place to start because a lot of people think of Google Ads just as maybe the text ads that come up when you search on Google and don't realize really how big Google's ecosystem has grown to be at this point.

So there's a number of different places you can see Google Ads again, kind of the most obvious, the first one people think about is you type something into the Google search engine and you see a text ad pop up. So that's one place.

You're also going to see in that same place what Google calls shopping ads, which are those ads, of course, where you have the image of product, the price, the name of the product, and so forth. But in addition to those, you also have what Google calls display ads. So when you're on the website going to many, many different.

When you're on the Internet going to many, many different websites, you'll see image ads or video ads showing up. And those are often also served by Google and then YouTube as well. Google owns YouTube, so all the ads on YouTube are Google Ads.

And in addition to that, you've got Gmail now that has ads. You have Google's Discover app that has ads. So there's a lot of different places that Google can reach you with advertising these days.

Well, thank you so much for explaining that, because you're right. I mean, I knew about most of those, but there were some that came as a surprise.

So Google Ads is obviously a huge area and there's lots we could talk about. But let's start by breaking it. But I'll make this super simple for everyone listening. If you've never run Google Ads before, where do you start?

So really, the first place to start is with your, with your product and with your offer, because not every product, product, not every offer is going to be the right fit to be advertised by Google Ads. Generally, when I think of Google Ads, I think of it as a funnel.

And so the bottom of that funnel is going to be those search and shopping ads, going to be ads for people who are searching for a specific product right now.

And so, you know, start doing some research to see what the competition looks like in that space and how your product, how your service compares to them. Because it's a, it's a crowded marketplace.

We're no longer, you know, a decade ago, when you could get really cheap clicks and there was all kinds of arbitrage opportunities, it's a very mature platform. And so if you're selling, you know, let's say you're selling a $5 product.

Well, unless you can figure out how to have that, be a loss leader that gets people into your ecosystem and then you can sell more to them, Google Ads is probably not going to be the right fit for you because there's just not going to be enough margin.

You know, you might be paying 50 cents a dollar easily for a Click and you're not going to see conversion rates high enough to actually make money on a really low price point product.

So you got to think through price points, you got to think through what the competition looks like and what kind of unique spin or edge can you put on your product or service that can stand out to some extent from what you see when you search for that product on Google.

That's really helpful. Thank you.

And in terms of finding out about your competition on Google, would that be just going through and as if you were a consumer looking for products similar than yours and seeing what type of Google Ads come up?

That's where I would start absolutely.

Just stepping into the shoes of potential consumer, trying to think how would they search for something and then just, yeah, see what's, see what's coming up. I would always recommend using an Incognito browser when you do this because Google does customize results and ads to you.

And so if you start clicking around on a bunch of different things in your normal browser, you're going to start getting a different experience than what the average consumer would do. So just keep using Incognito, searching around and see what is, what does that marketplace, what does the competition look like?

That's a great tip because I assume as well you're going to get starts getting served ads like that whether you're interested in them or not. Because by doing those searches you're telling Google, oh, I'm actually interested in these products.

Exactly. Or vice versa. Google might be like, wait, you're doing a ton of searches and you're not, you're never clicking on ads.

So I'm going to show you less ads because you're not interested, whereas you're like, no, I don't want to click on them. I just want to, you know, I want to see what's coming up.

Thank you. And how about budget? So how should small businesses think about setting a budget?

And how do we have an idea of what it might cost us per click before we even get going? Because it might turn out, as you say, that it is actually so expensive that Google Ads aren't the right channel for us.

But is there a way of telling that before we even start?

So answer this. It's a very important question. Answer in a couple different ways. There is a tool that you can use that Google offers.

It's a free tool, it's called Keyword Planner. And you can access it through any Google Ads account.

And Google will give you a bunch of different estimates about how many people are searching for different keywords and what Google estimates the cost per click might be for those keywords.

Now I always take this data with a very big grain of salt because it's so kind of averaged out and extrapolated that what you're actually going to see when you run campaigns is probably going to be fairly different than what they estimate. And but it can be helpful from us from a direction perspective to say, okay, so this is more expensive than that, things like that.

So that's, that's one tool you can, you can play around with.

When I think about setting budget, I'm really thinking about how much budget do I need in order to collect enough data to know whether or not this is going to work. And ultimately that's, that's really, like you mentioned, a measure of average cost per click. So let's say I have a $2,000 monthly budget.

If the cost per click is a dollar, I can get 2,000 clicks of that. If it's 50 cents, I can get 4,000 clicks out of that. And so the specific budget you can start with will depend upon what industry you're in.

If you're in an industry with lower cost per clicks, then you can generate data more quickly and you can see what is your conversion rate more quickly, what's that cost per acquisition, roas, things like that, more quickly.

But for most businesses, the kind of rule of thumb that I recommend is be prepared to invest at least $2,000 per month into advertising when you get started.

And the reason I say that is because for a lot of businesses that's going to be enough money to generate enough clicks and volume for you to start having a sense of hey, is this working or not?

Or are there parts of this, are there categories or keyword or campaigns or things that are working that we can double down on and then, you know, stop doing this stuff over here that's not working.

Okay, thank you. Now to some, that will be a lot of money. Can we do this with a lower budget if 2,000 pounds a month just isn't feasible?

It's one of those things where anything is possible. Certainly there's no, you know, there's no required minimum. You could have a dollar a day budget for example, if you wanted.

Really it comes down though to are you positioning yourself for success?

So for, for a lot of businesses that are very crash strapped and say, hey, we have maybe or a thousand dollars spent on advertising, I'm usually going to say you're probably not at a place yet in your business where Google Ads is the Right fit for you. Because Google Ads, it takes investment, it takes time, it takes trial and error to really get it to work well.

And once it's working well, it can be very, very powerful, it can be awesome, it can make you a lot of money. But you've got to have some Runway and some ability to invest into that without destroying your business.

So, you know, when businesses come to me like, hey, we, you know, this is our last ditch attempt or hey, we have, you know, we're going to put all of our money into Google Ads, that, that scares me.

And that's where I say, hey, this is probably not the right channel because there's a very good chance it's not going to work fast enough for your needs. And if you're, you know, betting the farm on Google Ads, that's not a good position to be in.

It's much better when you are in a position where you say, okay, hey, things are working well, people are, you know, our product is doing okay.

We've got X amount of money where obviously we don't want to waste it, we don't want to lose it, but if it does not drive a return, it doesn't put us out of business. And then we say, great. That allows us to give us the Runway to do the testing.

We need to get you to a profitable, profitable place and then be able to scale your Google Ads from there.

That's great advice. Thank you. So let's say you have got the budget to get started. What sort of results can we realistically expect in the early days?

Because what I'm taking from you, John, is it might take time to actually see results. Should we be panicking if things aren't looking positive in month one, month two?

It's. So Google Ads is one of these interesting things where you can see immediate results, but you also have to give it time.

And when I say immediate results, I'll often compare it to something like SEO search engine optimization where you might put a bunch of work into trying to rank organically for keywords. And it's going to take, you know, it could take months for you to find out, am I, am I there? Am I moving up, things like that.

Whereas with Google Ads, you're going to know immediately whether or not people are clicking your ad. And so you do get some instant feedback and you can see what the search terms are they're searching for, if they look relevant, things like that.

But then the flip side, why I say it does take time is because you then have to take action upon that Data. Now, very rarely are you going to have the perfect setup when you start. That's going to be amazingly profitable for you.

And that's because every business, every industry is different.

And so when you work even with someone like Stub Group, where, hey, we can bring the best practices, we can bring what we know is most likely to work for you to bear, but then we still have to see what's unique about you, what's unique about how people are interacting with your website, what's converting, what's not converting, and then make changes, make optimizations to your strategy based upon that.

And so what I'll say to most clients when they come on board is we're going to start seeing very, very quickly what is happening, what Traffic's coming through, etc.

But generally speaking, we want to be prepared to invest at least three months worth of time into, again, optimizing on that, seeing what's working, what's not working, and building the trajectory of going to where we need to be. Highly profitable. Campaigns, in other words.

And would you over those three months be making changes to your campaigns or would you be holding tight and seeing what happened? How soon can you start tweaking things? Because I think there's definitely a tendency with ads.

I see this with business owners, but they set up ads, they don't deliver in a couple of days and they immediately panic and I want to shut them off or want to start changing things. What's a good amount of time to let it run before you start playing about and tweaking it?

Yeah, that's, that's a very important question. Like you said, it's, it's very, you know, very natural, human nature is. I turned ads on, I should start getting orders today. I'm not.

There must be something wrong with the ads. And so really the optimization process comes down to understanding what metrics and what data points to look at.

So, for example, from day one, as soon as we turn on ads, we can start seeing what the search terms are that people are typing into Google in order to trigger our ads. And almost always we're going to see things in there where we realize, you know what, that's not relevant.

You know, Google system is matching that to our ads, but that's not actually people who are searching for a product.

And so from day one, you can start doing things called adding negative keywords, where you can basically tell Google, I don't want to show my ad for someone who searches for this thing or that thing. And so things like that again, from day one you can start making optimizations to improve the quality of the traffic coming to your, to your site.

But then there are other things, like looking at conversion rates, where you do need to build up more data.

So if you're like, hey, I've got 20 clicks to my landing page, I don't know yet what the conversion rate is going to be, what the percentage of people who are clicking to the site and then converting, placing an order on the site is going to be.

I need to see ideally 100, couple hundred clicks to start getting a statistically significant idea of, okay, you know, 5% or 3% or nobody is converting. And then I need to look into, okay, why is that? Is it a problem with the quality of the traffic?

Is it a problem with the website, how people are navigating it? Is there a mismatch between the messaging and the ads and what's on the website? Things like that, and then digging in and optimizing from there?

That makes sense.

So you definitely need to leave some time and hold your nerve a little bit before starting to, to panic and change too much or give up on it entirely.

Exactly. Yes. There's this, yeah, this combination of. There's.

There's some changes you can make relatively quickly, but then there's other bigger things where you need to say, I've got to, I've got to let the system work. I've got to let it collect enough data, optimize in to then really know whether or not this is working or not.

And if you pull the trigger too quickly, you just never give yourself the ability to reach that, that point of success.

And you're always kind of restarting that process and, you know, spending all your time in that messy, messy beginning rather than getting to the more profitable middle.

And I suppose that is where you're potentially losing money as well, if you're consistently going through that cycle of starting and stopping because presumably you're not getting enough data to actually be useful.

Exactly. Yes.

Those early days, the money you're spending, generally speaking, is not going to be very efficiently spent because you're trying to figure out what's working and there's going to be waste and just areas where, hey, you think this is going to work, but you realize it's not working.

And so if you're constantly, like you said, restarting that cycle, then you're constantly spending your money as inefficiently as possible and never allowing yourself to get to a more efficient place.

Okay, thank you. And what about the ad itself? Are there any.

Must haves when it comes to the copy the images, is there anything that you can tell us about what, what works, what doesn't work?

There are definitely some best practices. You know, as with most things, there's wide variety. You can have very, very different types of ads that can, can all work.

But you know, some of the best practices and let's talk really right now about, let's say the text ads and the shopping ads that come up when you search on Google is you want, you want those ads, you want the messaging in the ads to be relevant to what people are searching for.

So if I'm searching for a red umbrella, then ideally the ad's gonna say the words red umbrella and the picture of the product is going to be a red umbrella.

So obvious things like it's making sure that the ad is as relevant to what people are searching for as thinking through why, why do people purchase from you? And this comes down to understanding your, your customers. So are you, you know, is it price? Are you the cheap option? Is it quality?

Is it you've got some unique feature or you meet some unique need and trying to identify those things and really emphasize those things in the ad itself in order to make it more likely a, that people are going to click your ad as opposed to click competitors.

And then the, and then make sure they have the right mindset you've already primed them for, then the messaging you're going to display when they reach the landing page. And sometimes too you can use the ad copy to try to discourage the people that you don't want to click.

So, you know, very often you might have a product you're selling that's a more expensive, higher price point. And there are people that you don't want clicking your ad because they're looking for the cheapest, they're not looking for quality.

And you're never gonna prevent all of them from clicking your ads because people often don't read ads before they click.

But you can do things like emphasizing whatever luxury or minimum order amount or just things like that in your ad to try to say, hey, this is not the right product for you. Maybe don't click my ad. And the reason you don't want them to click your ad is because you pay Google when they click your ad.

So the more people you can discourage from clicking your ad who aren't actually going to purchase the product, the more money you can make. Or I should say that the less money you lose is maybe the better way to put it.

That's really helpful. Thank you how about placement? Because obviously you mentioned at the beginning all the places that Google Ads are shown.

Do we have, when we're setting these ads up, do we have any say over where our ads are shown? Does Google decide that? How does that actually work?

John, There are a variety of controls or lacks of control depending upon what campaign types you use. So campaign type, think of a campaign as kind of a grouping of telling Google what a I'm targeting and then what ads I'm showing to those people.

And that's a simple version, but we'll kind of go with that. And so there are some campaign types where you have a lot of control over where the ads are serving.

So for example, you could run a search campaign and that's just going to show up when people do searches. Or you could run a campaign like what they call a performance max campaign, which gives Google a lot more permission to decide where the ads show up.

So if you run a performance max campaign, your ads are eligible to show up on search and shopping and Google's display Network and YouTube and Gmail and so forth, forth.

And so a lot of, or well, one of the many things that goes into managing Google Ads is understanding what is the right type of campaign to use for different situations, how to combine them in the way that's most effective, and then also for those campaign types where Google is doing a lot of the decision making about where to serve your ads, understanding how to, how to read the data, how to get as much data from Google as possible about the decisions it's making, and then trying to have as much input into that, try to shape the system so that Google is, is going in the areas you want them to go, even if you don't necessarily have the ability to specifically say, you know, do this or do that because of the campaign type.

That makes sense. Thank you.

And I guess, can we assume that because Google has been running however many ads for a long time, they probably do have some knowledge and they are probably quite well placed to know where to place ads.

Yes, Google has tremendous, tremendous knowledge, tremendous history. They use AI very, very effectively to understand where to serve ads.

But you have to be giving it the right guardrails because generally speaking, for a lot of campaigns these days they use something called smart bidding. And this idea is where you are feeding information to Google about what's converting on your website.

So hey, these orders are happening on a website or form submissions or whatever, and then Google's working with that data to say, OK, okay, let's get as many of these as possible.

But what we see happen all the time is when you give incomplete or inaccurate conversion data to Google, then it's going to be making the wrong decisions because it has the wrong guardrails.

And it might be really good at getting you these conversions, but if you're sending wrong information to Google to begin with, then it's going to do a really good job of getting you bad conversions or getting you stuff that isn't actually working on your website.

And so you always have to have these human kind of thoughtful guardrails on top of the campaigns and then marry that with Google's incredible amount of data and machine learning that can execute at a scale that humans just literally cannot perfect.

Thank you. So it sounds like if you're really thoughtful about what information you put in.

So the more, I guess, the more precise you can be with the information you give Google, the better the results you should then get.

Exactly. The more precise and the more comprehensive.

So like one quick example would be a lot of e commerce businesses, they'll take orders over the phone, but they may only tell Google about orders that are taking place on their website. And so what happens is in Google has no idea that those people who are placing phone calls are placing orders.

And so Google doesn't try to get you more of those people, even though they might be some of your best customers, because they're placing high order, high value orders. They want to talk to you before they order.

And so a way to fix that is to use something like call tracking to connect those dots and import that data about those orders into Google. So Google sees, oh, hey, these people are also converting. Let me go get more of them.

That's really helpful, thank you.

So once our ads are up and running, what are the key metrics we should be looking at to first of all work out our ads successful, and if not to identify issues or things that we might need to change?

I'll boil it down to a couple key metrics. There are tons and tons of metrics that all kind of build upon each other, but there's a couple of really, really key ones.

First one I'll say is conversion rate. And conversion rate is simply the percentage of people who are reaching your website from your ads and then taking the action you want them to take.

So for example, placing an order. And so conversion rate is going to have a massive impact on how successful your campaigns are.

Now, if you have a 2% conversion rate versus a 4% conversion rate. Well, just inherently, if you have a 4% conversion rate, you're going to be doing twice as well.

Regardless of what clicks cost, how much traffic is coming in, you're just going to have double the number of orders because you have double the conversion rate.

What you do when you're monitoring that conversion rate, things that go into that really is the relevancy of the people coming to the website and then the experience on the website.

So you can improve your conversion rate by making your website better, by removing opticals, by adding credibility elements, people trust you more, things like that.

And then on the ad side of things, again, you can be looking at the actual search terms, the traffic coming to your website, weeding out irrelevant traffic, people who you know aren't going to convert, and then also making sure the ad copy is really aligned with what people are going to see when they get to the website. So conversion rate, super, super important. And then cost per click, very important.

Because this is going to, again, directly bear on what it's going to cost you to acquire this traffic and therefore what it's going to cost to acquire orders from that traffic. And so when we look at cost per click, it's not that there is a quote, unquote, good cost per click or bad cost per click.

It really depends upon the context of your campaigns and your website.

So if you have a higher conversion rate, you can afford higher cost per click and therefore get more aggressive and get more traffic, because that traffic is turning into orders. If you have a lower conversion rate, you can't afford that because it's going to be too expensive. And so you have to go for a lower cost per clicks.

And so that's a metric.

There's a lot of other things that go into what that cost per click is, but a lot of that is just the competition level, what other people are willing to pay for a click. And so you got to be monitoring that. And so those two things. And there's tons of other metrics you can look at.

But if I had to choose two, I'd look at conversion rate and cost per click.

That's really helpful. Thank you.

And I found it really interesting what you're saying about looking at your conversion rate and identifying if there's anything you can change on your website, because I think that's something that possibly people might miss. You could be very focused on your ad, but it actually could be your website that that's stopping you converting at a higher rate.

So that's a really good point. Thank you for that.

Yeah, I'm glad you highlighted that because we do see that all the Time where businesses will hyper focus on the ad side of things. And the ad side of things is important, obviously, but it's truly just the tip of the iceberg. It's what gets people into your website.

But 99% of the time that they're going to spend deciding whether or not to purchase from you is after they've clicked the ad and they're on your website. And so you've got to spend a lot of your time thinking through what that experience looks like and making it as possible or as seamless as possible.

Thank you. And that actually leads me on to. So that sounds like something that people potentially miss.

Are there any other common mistakes that you see when it comes to Google Ads, things that you'd like people to be aware of?

There are a lot, a lot of different ways we can go. One that comes to mind is trusting Google's best practices too much.

And what I mean by that is Google has lots and lots of best practices, things they want you to do.

And if you're, if you're running campaigns yourself, you're kind of doing diy, there's a lot of things they're going to push you into be like, oh, you're automatically opted into this, this thing over here, this thing over here, hey, you should do this, you should let us do this, et cetera. And for some businesses at times, those are best practices, those are good things.

But the reality is there's so much diversity between different businesses, different industries that there's no way for one set of best practices to be best for all.

And so you really want someone who understands the nuances of things to be able to say, okay, for your business, no, we shouldn't let Google do this thing. We shouldn't let Google make up ad copy. Or for this one, hey, yeah, no, this makes sense, let's keep this turned on, let's turn that off.

So that's a big thing. I think the second big thing I would say is not understanding the difference between what Google calls keywords and search terms.

So when you run campaigns, specifically search campaigns on Google, you get to enter keywords into Google. So again, we're selling umbrellas. You might say, hey, buy umbrellas, buy umbrellas in bulk, get a red umbrella.

Things like that, you might enter those as keywords into Google. And then you think, okay, well, the people who search for those things are going to see my ads. Right?

Well, the way that Google works these days is that Google takes a lot of flexibility in what actual searches they match to those keywords.

And so you might think people are searching by a red umbrella, and actually the Traffic's coming from 100 different search terms, some of which may not have the words red or umbrella anywhere in there. But Google says, oh, we think someone looking for maroon rain cover is relevant to red umbrella. And sometimes Google's super right.

Like, people use many different words to search for things, and that's fine and great, but often Google's wrong and you end up spending, wasting money.

And so that's why you need to really regularly be looking at your search terms report where Google tells you what people are actually searching for and seeing those words to add as negative keywords to prevent waste, or sometimes getting new keyword ideas. Be like, oh, yeah, people do use that word. Great, let me throw that in and see if I can get more traffic like that.

Thank you. I mean, I'm definitely getting the sense that this is something you really need to be on top of.

So you need to be, you know, really monitoring your campaigns, optimizing them. It's not something to just set and forget. How often should business owners be reviewing their campaigns? Let's assume they're doing it themselves.

How often should they actually be looking at them?

So to some extent, it's going to depend upon how much you're spending. Because obviously if you're spending, you know, if you're spending $10,000 a day, you should probably be looking at things every day.

If you have, you know, a $500 monthly budget, well, it's going to take time to collect enough clicks to really see what's going on, what's not going on. And so what I would say is glancing at things on a daily basis is ideal to look for problems, because there's always things that can happen.

An ad could be disapproved by Google or some weird thing could happen and you see a spike of clicks and you got to figure out why. So just kind of keeping an eye on things on a very regular basis so that there's no anomalies or weird things going on is important.

And then it comes to actually really making decisions and making changes. Again, it really comes back to how much you're spending.

So the more you're spending, the faster you're collecting data and the faster you can make decisions.

And so ideally, you're looking at, hey, if I have a couple hundred clicks, then I can make some decisions about what the conversion rate is and if I should make a change or things like that.

Perfect. Thank you.

So let's say we're reviewing our ads and they're going to really well, what are some of the signs that we can scale up our ads a bit, so whether that's maybe investing more money into them? So how do we know that, that we're ready to do that and when we feel like, okay, we can do that, how do we do it in a way that's sustainable?

Because I'm assuming that you don't just double your budget one day and hope for the best.

Exactly. Yeah. So there's a couple, couple of different routes you can go here. So the first, I always like to start with what I call the lowest hanging fruit.

And usually if you're running search and shopping campaigns or performance max campaigns as well, Google's gonna give you a couple different metrics.

They're gonna tell you how much impression share, basically how many times your ad could be appearing and it's not appearing that you're losing because your budget is limited, and how much of that you're losing because of low ad rank. So on the budget side of things, we'll start there.

Google's basically saying, hey, if you increase your daily budget from X to X, you should be able to get this much more traffic at really no more expensive cost per click per traffic, because you're just not showing up as often as you could be. That's the first place we usually start is, okay, well there's more market available for what's already working.

Let's just gradually increase our budget to capture that existing market.

Then on the ad rank side of things, ad rank is a combination of how much you're willing to bid for traffic and the quality of your ads, the quality of your landing pages, things like that. And so there, the biggest thing that you can generally control is going to be the bidding.

And so if you're saying, hey, things are working really well and I've got some margin to work with, and Google's saying, hey, you're losing a ton of impression share because of low ad rank, then you can start experimenting with, hey, what if I increase my bids, can I get more total profit? Because even if maybe my return on ad spend drops a little bit, I'm still getting enough additional orders to make up for that.

So those are kind of the first two places we'll start with, let's say search, shopping, performance max campaigns. And then a different way you can think about it as well is thinking about the funnel of how people find you.

So again, if you've started at the bottom of the funnel, let's say with search and shopping campaigns, eventually you're going to run out of people who are searching for what you have. There's going to be a cap where hey, there's only so many people each day who are searching for these products.

And then you have to think about, okay, how do I get more people aware of the products? And there's a campaign called Demand Gen that Google has for generating demand.

And so this is more going into places like YouTube and Google's display network. And now, you know, think of this.

It's much more comparable to meta ads, for example, where we are identifying the right type of person because hey, maybe lookalike audience of people similar to people who are purchasing on my website right now, things like that.

And then we're saying, hey, here's these awesome video ads, these image ads, creating awareness of your brand, generating interest, getting people who will then come and search.

And so you kind of work your way up the funnel once you tap out the audience, people who already are searching for what you're trying to sell to them.

That makes sense. Thank you. And I'm assuming that Google had. Because Google has all of this data.

As you start to scale your ads, they can really help with this because they've got an idea of who are the people who are buying because obviously they've, they're gathering that data from everything you've done previously.

Exactly. And again, as long comes back to as long as you're sending them the right information.

So as long as you're tracking things properly, tagging things properly, and then additionally you can also actually upload customer data into Google.

So if you have a list of here's a thousand people who purchased from me last year, you could upload that list of email addresses and phone numbers and Google can match that to people who use those same email addresses and phone numbers and Google profiles like they have a Gmail account or YouTube account or things like that.

And then specifically in those Demand gen campaigns, you can have Google create a lookalike audience, people who are similar to those customers and then target those people and build out from there.

And I presume you can also target people who purchased from you before but haven't bought for a while. Is there all of that functionality as well?

Absolutely. Yep.

So you can, you can remarket to people, you can, you can, you know, create a list of people like you said, who haven't, who haven't purchased, let's say in the last six months and they're kind of due to purchase again. Great, let me serve ads to these people as well as you can do remarketing ads to people who haven't yet purchased.

So people who reach your website and maybe you know, hey, it takes a couple days for people to make a decision about purchasing my product. Well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna follow my, follow them around the Internet. We've all seen those ads.

You go to a website and you start seeing ads for that product. But there's a reason for it. It works. It keeps brands front of mind.

It's not particularly expensive because you're going after a very specific audience. It's just people who've already reached your website. It's not everybody on the Internet.

And it's effective way of getting them back to your website and ultimately placing that purchase.

Thank you. It feels like there is a lot that you can do on Google Ads, certainly a lot more than when I was first looking at them.

I want to say about 10 years ago.

Definitely the biggest change in this last year or so is how AI, specifically large language models, is impacting how people search and how search results are displayed to them.

The obvious way this has changed on the Google side of things is now lots of times when you go and search for something, you're going to see an AI overview come up at the top where Google's trying to answer your question through AI. And so this is starting to change how people search, how people think about things and how they find information online.

And so in the SEO world, so the kind of, the free, the organic side of things, people are spending a lot of time figuring out how do I get to be sourced by those AI overviews?

On the paid side of things, it's a little bit different in that generally speaking, those searches that have kind of purchase intent, the types of things where you want to serve ads on those are a little bit less likely for Google to be displaying AI overviews. It still happens, certainly, but Google's still very incentivized to show ads to make money, to get people to click through to your website.

And so a lot of things that we're thinking through monitoring right now is going to be how is Google going to fully integrate advertising into this AI overview reality? How are they going to mesh? What is that search experience is going to look like a year from now as Google makes changes?

And then also from a bigger picture perspective too, how many people are going to Stop using Google as frequently and use things like ChatGPT or Grok or Perplexity, et cetera to actually do searches and get their information.

And as an agency helping our clients be where customers are thinking through how do we make sure that we leverage these tools, especially as they start to add advertising and kind of user inputs to make sure that when someone goes to ChatGPT and searches for a red umbrella, they're going to be able to find Irish to buy.

Thank you. That was really interesting. I hadn't actually thought about the role of AI at all but I mean it's, it's here as you say.

I've noticed recently the AI summaries hadn't thought about the impact on shopping. Do you have any predictions of what that might look like? I mean obviously we, we can't tell at the moment but what are your thoughts?

I think we're definitely going to see a significant percentage, maybe a percentage of people start to use tools like ChatGpta to actually discover products to purchase. I think there's going to be a generational aspect to it to a certain amount.

You know, younger generations who A are just more tech prone and then B don't have the habits build up of the older generations of going to Google first are going to adopt these things more frequently. And so I think the younger generations are going to be faster at saying yeah, I think I bought X, Y and z from a ChatGPT search.

Just like right now a lot of the younger Generation is using TikTok as a search engine which older generations definitely do not do to the same extent.

So my prediction is that you're going to see over these next several years a very significant fight for market share and mind share between Google, who's really the current monopoly and these other LLMs like ChatGPT who want to take over how people find information online.

And I don't know who will win but it will be a very, a very interesting fight to watch and very important to be on top of it because it has direct impact on business owners because again it impacts how people find our products to purchase.

That's really interesting as you was organized. Yeah, that's really interesting and it will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Definitely not something I thought about, so I will be giving that some more thought.

Yeah, it's a brave new world, as I like to say that we're in, but it's changing so frequently. The speed with which AI is iterating is just kind of wild right now.

Oh definitely. And I mean, more and more people are starting to use it as well.

Absolutely.

So are there any myths or misconceptions you've heard about Google Ads over the year that you'd like to, you know, use this as your opportunity to just, you know, break them wide open?

Let's see. First one that comes to mind is just Google Ads is easy. It's not easy.

It's sad because we'll often see people go through these, you know, drop shipping courses or e commerce guru courses where they're like, oh, this is super easy. You know, follow these five steps and you'll just start printing money from Google Ads. And that's just not how it works.

Generally speaking, there's always some exception out of the blue that you can grab, but generally speaking, it is hard. It's a very mature platform. It takes a lot of work, a lot of thought, a lot of investment to make work.

And so, yeah, if someone tells you Google Ads is easy, that's a big red flag.

Other myths that come to mind, I think it's not a myth, but I do just kind of want to go back to this idea of putting so much focus on the ad side of things and not thinking through the product, the offer, the website side of things.

Because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good an ad is if your product is overpriced or it doesn't look good or there's no people don't trust your website because it's a janky website, things like that. I can't fix that with an amazing ad.

No amount of work that we do, no amount of getting in front of the right people is going to actually make up for a bad offer or bad product. And so while the advertising is super important, even more important is what the actual offer and product is.

So you've got to spend a lot of time focused on that, thinking through that and also thinking through how can you continually just be improving that and improving things like your average order value.

So if you can get people to purchase more from you, then you can get more aggressive on the advertising side of things to get more people to make those purchases because you have more margin to work with. And so it's always a cycle of you got to build upon it, optimize it.

And like you said earlier, it's very much not a set it and forget it type of advertising channel.

Thank you so much for all of those and thank you for everything we've shared. And I have to say, and I mean, this is a compliment you haven't left me with the impression that Google Ads are easy.

Mean that as a compliment, because I think it's, I think if anyone is going to, you know, go down the route of Google Ads, it's good to have a full picture.

It's good to know exactly what's required because as you said right at the beginning, someone may listen to this and go, you know what, I'm not ready, or this isn't right for me. And that's actually, that's good. That's good knowledge to have.

Absolutely.

I'd much rather someone in that position say, I'm not going to spend my money on this because I don't, I don't want to see people wasting money on Google Ads. So, yes, whether this discourages you or encourages you, I think that that's a win either way. From my perspective.

Absolutely. And one final question, John, before we finish, if that's okay.

So if you could give one piece of advice to a product business owner about trying Google Ads for the first time, and let's assume this is someone who's listened to this and gone, yes, this is for me, got the money, happy to invest, what would that advice be?

One piece of advice.

I'm biased in saying this because I run an agency, but I do truly believe that for most businesses, they're going to see more success if they partner with someone. Could be a freelancer, could be an agency that already has experience in the space.

And I usually create the analogy of, let's say a plumber, for example. I can go fix my pipes in theory, I can go learn about on YouTube and whatnot.

But there's a very good chance I'm going to break something and flood my house and end up spending way more money repairing that than if I would just hired a plumber to help me out from day one. And so, yeah, that's, that's my number one piece of advice. Again, again, biased since I run an agency.

But I truly believe that it's important for most businesses to, to have someone along for the ride that already has been through this and has the experience and knows how to shortcut a lot of those early learnings.

Thank you. And I'm absolutely with you on that because as a small business owner, you have so much to do and learn already.

I can tell from this conversation, Google Ads is a huge learning curve and it would take a lot of time and a lot of energy and resources to get yourself up to speed to the level of an expert. So I think if you have the budget to pay someone who already has expertise to do it for you, why wouldn't you?

Because actually, I think doing it yourself can sometimes be a bit of a false economy. It might seem like the best way to approach something, but in my experience, you often come unstuck doing that.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much again, John, for everything you shared.

Yeah, I enjoyed the conversation. Great questions and yeah, thank you so much for having me on.

You're so welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. Right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickiewinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend, friends who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.