Demystifying Paid Search for Tech Leaders Using Plain English - Episode 7

Pay per click. Fundamentally, the idea is that obviously you pay for every time somebody clicks on one of your adverts.

So appearing in, um, a Google search result with something that looks like a normal search result, except it's got the word ad next to it. Who do you think most benefits from PPC?

Yeah, I think there are two core groups, I guess that benefit from pay per click. I think there are people in the process of making their website or their offering or whatever better. And I think the other group that really benefit from it are people who know their kind of sales process inside and out, and they just need more volume, right? It's just get me more people. It works really well when you know how to use it properly. You have to know the system, right? It's like anything in any business or industry, I imagine. You know, if you don't understand how something works, it's easy to lose money.

Testing, testing one, two, three, four. Now we're recording. Okay, so we've started on podcast two. So, digital marketing from the coalface, what we thought we would talk about is paid advertising, paid search advertising, because there's a lot of people, I think Alex anyway, I think confused about what it is as confused as the people who in the invitation to tender we once got, said they needed help with paperclip advertising. So they'd obviously heard somebody say paperclip. At least that's what they thought they heard, but it was pay per click. But so pay per click advertising. I mean, we were having a conversation with a client today about it. And, um, as you pointed out, you know, it's still quite surprising that people don't really understand it. And probably there's people who are paying good money for it, don't really understand it. So let's, you know, in our own inimitable way, let's, let's discuss, um, pay per click and see if we can, uh, uncover some of its mysteries. And so, I mean, you've got a lot of experience in, in that marketplace and helping businesses with their paid search. So, you know, give us your spin on it and then I'll maybe chucking my two penn'orth.

Yeah, I mean, so I guess both helping businesses and I did coach PPC for a while. So I've gone to businesses and taught kind of marketers internally how to use it. Yeah. And what it is, and I guess, yeah, the first thing, like you say is.

That creative CV writing to get a gig like that, I assume.

No comment, I am qualified.

Is anybody qualified apart from.

My Google badge and everything.

You've got, you've got your Google badge.

That's the exam. And I definitely at no point with the exams. That was another laptop screen open. Googling the questions. Okay, never.

Happened. The Google badge is a good one, isn't it? Because I mean, anybody with, you know, a modicum of intelligence can pretty much get a Google AdWords, um, qualification pretty quickly.

And at the risk of kind of, um, dragging our own name into the mud. I think the same is also true of the Google partner badge, right? Because it's mainly based on ad spend. Yeah. That's right. And there's this whole thing. I'm sure we'll get on to later on where like in the Google ecosystem in general, you're rewarded for spending people's money irrespective of whether or not it garners results. But yeah, I guess so. Pay per click. Fundamentally, the idea is that obviously you pay for every time somebody clicks on one of your adverts. Yeah. The idea.

And where do those adverts appear.

So on. Well it's your choice mainly Google search. Right. So when you search something the little the little yellow boxes at the top of Google search. Yeah.

They're not yellow anymore.

They're not yellow. You're right. They've got slowly over time they're becoming less and less.

Well, they're kind of disguising them and trying to make them look more and more like just regular search results. Because there's a lot of people like, oh, I don't click those adverts despite.

Right.

Billions that Google makes.

Yeah. So this is one of my favourite conversations to have. Like whenever I do PPC training, everybody always says, well, I'm a marketing manager and I've never clicked a Google advert, so none of my clients will either. And it's like, well, you know, statistically that's completely incorrect. And I'm absolutely sure you click Google adverts all the time, whether you realise it or not. Yeah. So yeah, they either appear at the top of Google search or sometimes they appear on other people's blogs when those people are a part of Google's advertising display network. So when you have the little banner images and stuff like that. But yeah, for the most part, we're talking Google search. And the idea behind it is that you can pick a keyword, any keyword, any phrase.

There's that thing again, keywords. Now, people might not have heard the first podcast. So this is the digital marketing from the coalface. So we don't use jargon. What's a keyword?

And what you can't see is he has a ruler that he just hits me with.

Every time we just dub out the sound of it being whacked.

Thanks, Leslie. No. Um, so yeah, any phrase, I guess any word that you like. Um, it could be red tricycles. It could be twelve volt motors to to use something we talked about last time, anything you like and you can choose to target it. You can say whenever somebody searches this, I want my ad to appear. And if somebody clicks it, I'm willing to pay X amount of money, right? And then you're entered into a kind of competitive marketplace, a bit like eBay, where you're bidding against other advertisers for that top spot for that keyword. Yeah. Um, and you can, you know, you can say, I say, I want to pay a pound, I want to pay fifty P, whatever. You only pay if somebody clicks your ad. So the idea is that it's very controlled and it's a very effective way of getting traffic very quickly. It's also a really good way of skipping all of the hard work that has to be done with SEO. People think so the idea being that instead of spending six to twelve months investing in an SEO campaign, you can just pay to have your ad pop up at the top of Google, and you don't need to bother with any of that stuff.

Okay. So just just very quickly, SEO, search engine optimisation, the act of the act of trying to make sure that your website appears when somebody carries out a specific search in Google. And we will go into more detail in other podcasts about SEO. But yeah, just broadly speaking.

Yeah. And obviously, you know, it's worth mentioning as well that it doesn't really work like that, right? So you can't use pay per click advertising to cheat and kind of skip the queue if you like. I mean.

That's a question I've, I've been asked a lot and even anecdotal evidence. I mean, people have said to me, oh, you know, I started paying for ads and I didn't appear in, in organic anymore or I stopped paying for ads and I started appearing in organic as if like Google was like, well, let's leave them out of the organics because they're going to pay us for these clicks instead. They're not doing that, are they?

No. And the other conspiracy theory that I often hear is the opposite, right, which is that you have to be paying Google money for your site to rank organically and stuff. And I think, you know, this is this is one of those like classic human psychology things, isn't it, where it's just like they see something and they invent a pattern. I don't think it's true necessarily. No, I to be honest with you, I don't think Google cares that much. There are so many people flocking to use pay per click advertising that they don't really give a monkeys whether you do it or not or whether it works for you. Um, but yeah, um, I guess fundamentally the idea is that it is cost effective and that yeah, you can just kind of set it and forget it or that you can set it up and run it for a limited amount of time.

You just said they're set and forget. I mean, with obviously we'll get to this movie, but that that is the cardinal sin, isn't it? Because that's where you basically flush money down the toilet set, forget and hope for the best, right?

So I think pay per click advertising can be amazing. It works really well when you know how to use it properly, but it is probably, I would say, the easiest. I want to say the word channel, but I'm scared of the ruler. Um, facility marketing thing that you can do, um, where you can waste inordinate amounts of money without even realising it. And I mean, you know, I tell this story to people all the time. Um, it makes me look a little bit bad, but I worked on a campaign once that spent one thousand pounds in a day, um, accidentally. Um, we were advertising on ghd hair straighteners. Um, they're expensive. They are keywords and people are willing to pay up to four or five pounds a click. We thought, oh, we'll bid at six pounds a click, we'll go home, everything will be fine. Um, GHD ran a TV advert that night and we came back the next day to find that our ad had been clicked, you know, kind of three hundred times. Yeah, yeah. And we had to go back to the client and be like, well, you know, your month's pay per click budget. We spent it. Um, so yeah, I mean, those things are like really, really easy to do with pay per click advertising. Yeah.

Which is also really easy to make sure you don't do that, isn't it? I mean, you know, it just simple things like setting daily limits, etc., you know, because so it's not what I'm trying to say is it's not something you should be scared of. You can decide exactly how much money you're prepared to spend.

Yeah, and that's exactly it. It's just you have to know the system, right? It's like anything in any business or industry, I imagine. You know, if you don't understand how something works, it's easy to break it. It's easy to waste money. But as soon as you know the rules and you know what you're doing, then yeah, it's absolutely fine.

Mhm.

Makes sense. I think people are I mean, just to pick up on what you were saying there, I think people are really frightened of of pay per click advertising. They're either frightened of it or kind of enthralled by it and think that it's some kind of strange black magic. But it is in essence, you are simply bidding for keywords against, you know, other people, your competitors. And as long as you know exactly how much you're willing to spend to get a customer or how much you're willing to spend to get people onto one of the pages of your website, then the whole thing is very controllable from start to finish.

Okay, so, so let's, let's explore in really simple terms, how does the auction work? Okay, so I go to Google and I type in car insurance, right. What happens next?

So Google goes away and looks at all the people who are trying to advertise on the phrase car insurance. Um, it looks at whoever's bidding the highest. Um, and then it, the idea is that it places them in order of how much they're bidding right from highest to lowest. And then it looks at things like for your, as we said last time in our last podcast, Google's always trying to create a good user experience, right? So then it says of the ads that are currently bidding highly for the search term, which of them is most relevant for the search term? Right. Because what they don't want to do, if I have an advert that talks about white apples or, you know, whatever, and I'm bidding on a phrase like car insurance, they they don't want their customers looking.

No matter how much I'm prepared to pay to get my advert in front of those people.

Exactly. Um, so the idea is that then they go away and look at how relevant the ads are, and then they look at the landing pages behind the ads landing page.

Landing page. Ooh. Rewind, rewind. What's the landing.

Page? The landing page is the page that you will land on when you click the add.

Okay. And is that always the website or is it something different?

It doesn't have to be. I mean, we run for some of our clients. We use things like Unbounce and HubSpot. So we'll create specific landing pages just for highly targeted.

And that is one of the ways of arguably getting more bang for your buck with paid search, isn't it?

Absolutely. Because as, um, Julie, our head is she head of strategy.

Julie's head of marketing.

Head of marketing. Yeah.

I'm head of strategy.

Let's come on.

Just promoted Julie and I haven't got a job anymore.

No, uh, as Julie is fond of pointing out, you know, um, navigation at the top of a website, all the little drop downs and stuff. It distracts people, right? So if you're paying three pounds, four pounds, five pounds to get somebody on a web page about car insurance, you want to make damn sure they read the whole page and don't go somewhere else.

So I mean the opposite to that, or rather an argument against that, because there is an argument against landing pages. Landing pages have got all the fluff removed. You can only do one thing. Ring this number, fill this form in kind of thing, you know, there's nothing else to click. Yeah. That's right. It does a little bit. And some people argue, and I think there's evidence to suggest that if you let people leave the landing page, you know, where they where they came from, clicking the advert and wander off onto your website, as long as your website's great and it helps them more and it can actually make them more engaged potentially.

But that's the key, isn't it? You do have to have a good website for that to work otherwise. Yeah. You're essentially. Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Right. Yeah.

Um, but yeah, so, so that's fundamentally how it works. Google looks at the page you're sending people to and it says, is this relevant? And if it is, it awards you a quality score, right? So it's rating you out of ten for kind of every auction that you try and involve yourself with.

Okay.

And the higher you score, the more they discount your auction. So if you say, I'll pay a pound per click and Google looks at your advert and it looks at your landing page, it says, well, actually what you're offering is really valuable for this search term. So when somebody clicks, you actually pay eighty P or seventy P, and they have a very complicated and long winded formula of how they work this out. But what it essentially boils down to is if you play nice and make sure that the experience you give people is really good, then you pay less and therefore your advertising is cheaper.

Okay, so is it as simple as figuring out what your ideal customers are searching for and bidding on those keywords, and slapping an advert in front of them that sent links through to a half decent landing page? Is that it? Have we nailed it?

It is that simple, kids. Um, no. I mean, there's a lot more to it, right? So when you kind of dig down into Google AdWords, there's a lot of different things you can do, like the way that you target keywords, for example. So that's like a really good place to start when you say, for example, when somebody searches red wheelbarrow, I want my advert to pop up. The question then is like, if they type in small red wheelbarrow, yeah, your ads are still going to pop up, right? Yeah. And that sounds kind of innocuous and like, oh, that's cool. Except when you stop to think about things like, I don't know, the size of alloy wheels, for example, if somebody searches for a specific type of alloy wheel for a specific type of car.

I hope somebody answers that phone.

I'm sure they.

Will. Yeah, I'm sure they will. Well, they have, they have.

That's good. Um, yeah. So like if you're selling alloy wheels for jaguars. Yeah. Um, you don't want your advert to pop up when somebody types alloy wheels. Mercedes. Right. Okay.

So, so is there a mechanism within paid search to say show my adverts when people type this in. But opposite to that do not show my adverts if they also type this in.

Right. So there's this whole facility built into Google AdWords called negative keywords, where you can add keywords that you want to kind of block your ads for if you like. Um, so in the example just given, you'd say like Mercedes is a negative keyword. When somebody types in alloy wheels, Mercedes, your ad won't ping up. Okay. Um, but there's also stuff you can do around like match types so you can.

Find really annoying me now. Yeah.

We'll give it a.

It's answered, it's answered. It's good.

Um, yeah. So there's also stuff you can do around match types as well. So you can say.

Match types.

Right? So when you're bidding on a keyword red wheelbarrows. Yeah, you can say, I want to I want to bid on any search term that somebody types in that contains the word red wheelbarrow. Okay.

Or like your example of small red, red wheelbarrow. That's not easy to say, by the way.

It's not it's a bad example.

Red lorry, yellow lorry. It's one of those kind of things. Red wheelbarrow.

Um, or you can say I only want it to my ad to pop up when somebody very specifically types this exact term.

Ah, right.

Okay, so you could say something like small red and yellow wheelbarrows, and it would only trigger when somebody typed in that very specific set of instructions. Okay. And you used to be able to do clever things around broad match modifiers as well, where you could say, for.

Example, that sounds horribly complicated, broad match modifiers. I mean, come on.

So that's where you'd have a search phrase like red wheelbarrows. Um, but you could put a little plus symbol in front of one of the words. And then as long as that word was in there in that order, okay, it could sub out words that it thought were synonymous for the rest of the search term. Okay. Um, that's all been removed anyway.

Yeah, it's fairly recent. That was removed, isn't it? Certainly in the last twelve months. I used to find that very, very useful. You could literally put together four or five broad match phrases and that would cover off a lot of stuff, but it doesn't anymore. You can't do that anymore.

Absolutely. It used to be one of those kind of like in the know hacks, I guess, for people that have been around for a while and knew how the system worked. Um, but yeah, all that's gone now. Um, I think in general, AdWords is kind of always pushing towards a model where Google has more control over what you're triggering ads for and what you're spending and that kind of thing. Um, I'm sure we'll come on to bashing Google for that later. Um, but yeah, so like.

We love Google, by the way, we love Google. We do genuinely love Google. We use Google every day. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, I think it's worth pointing out that Google isn't, isn't cuddly. Google makes billions and it makes predominantly makes it from, from paid search.

I think most of their income is from paid advertising. Yeah, I think that's pretty much what they do now. Um, and yeah, I mean, I guess that's the, the one thing that we always say to clients, right, with with Google AdWords. And the one kind of piece of advice I'd give to anybody that's thinking about using it is be very careful whenever you're setting campaigns up, because if you, you know, things like when you're setting up a campaign in Google and you're setting your budget, you talked about earlier, they will try and tell you how much to spend. They'll try and.

Yeah, they will.

You'll get more results if you spend X amount or like, did you know if you doubled your budget, you get double the clicks.

And quite often in doing that, demonstrate that they don't really understand what you're trying to achieve.

Absolutely.

Because because it's AI, isn't it? It's automated. And it just, it's like, well, you know, you're also saying I should bid on these keywords. It's like, that's not even related to what I sell.

Right. And you know, when I first started doing PPC, there was only the option to kind of manually enter a bid on a keyword and say, I want to pay one pound fifty for this click. Nowadays, you can go into Google and you can say, oh, well, instead of me setting the bids, I'm going to let Google's algorithm set the bids for me. I'm going to say I'm willing to pay X amount per conversion and let Google do conversions conversion. Talk to me about conversions. So when somebody actually buys your product or downloads your e-book or whatever it is you want them to do on your landing page, you send information back to AdWords that says, you know, somebody converted, somebody did what you wanted them to do. And the idea is that you can tell Google, like, I'm willing to pay X amount per download, sale, whatever. And then Google will kind of set the bid prices accordingly to attract the kind of customers. But you know, it's all nonsense because ultimately it's not a very sophisticated piece of technology. It's just going to guess.

Yeah, you know what? I think you're right, because I think PPC is often looked at as being really complicated and difficult. But when you think about what they're trying to achieve, somebody is typing a search into Google and your advert appears as if by magic, you know what I mean? It's almost like a a t TV advert. If the people you know on on a, I don't know, watching channel four catch up service, for example. I mean, you know, they play the same adverts over and over again, which are completely irrelevant to me. It's almost like if they knew that I was into, I don't know, cycling and running and things like that. They would only show me adverts about running shoes and, and and bikes and things like that. And it's kind of that's what Google ads can do. It can actually put very time sensitive information in front of people, can't it?

Right. And that's, I think the real.

Butterflies coming again, by the way. Yeah. There's a butterfly floating around the office now. Oh, lovely. I'm sure it'll find its way out. If not, I'll help it after. Sorry.

Go on. Either that or it'll just bang against the window.

Yeah, it might just do that.

Um. Yeah. So I think that what you're touching on there is like one of what I think is the most powerful thing about Google AdWords, right, is that you can choose when you target somebody. We talked in the last podcast a lot about this whole like principle or concept of, you know, where in the kind of research or buying process somewhere somebody is and how you can kind of reach them with digital marketing.

Yeah. Whether they're researching a product and they're not ready to buy, or whether they've figured out exactly which model of whatever it is they want, and they just looking for the place to buy it from.

That's exactly it. So the great thing about AdWords is you can do stuff like saying, you know, somebody types in like, I don't know, like, which MacBook do I choose? You can, you know, choose to have your ad triggered then and you can have a guide, a downloadable, whatever that says, here's how to choose your MacBook, or you can skip all that crap entirely. Wait until somebody says, you know, buy a MacBook now and serve your ad then, and just kind of skip the queue and let somebody else do all that work for you. Um, it can be hugely powerful. It's just, you do have to be very, very kind of targeted and very careful with it, I think.

Okay. Yeah. Got you. All right. So what we've established is having a landing page is usually a good idea. So that might be separate to your website altogether. That doesn't have any distractions. It very much talks to the problem that that person's trying to solve. So if they're trying to buy car insurance, then the landing page says, fill in your details here to get a, get a quote for car insurance. It's not talking about anything else that the company might do.

Yeah. And I think just to kind of take things back to first principles as well, I think it's important to point out that that landing page probably should tell like a fairly decent story, right? One of the things I see a lot of, and I'm sure you've seen it too, is people pointing kind of paid search traffic at a page that is literally just like sign up now or yeah, like, here's where to buy your thing. But the thing you have to remember about pay per click advertising is you have no control over whether somebody previously interacted with your brand, right? This could be the first time they've ever seen your website, and you're going to land them on a page and say, sign up now. Yeah. And they're going to say no, like, you know, yeah, I'm doing that.

Yeah.

You know, to anybody listening to this, I'm sure they'll have had that experience where you Google something, you click an ad and you land on a page that's like, do this. Yeah.

It's also a common mistake that people make is that they just send people to their homepage, right? So like, you know, like it's almost like Amazon sending people through a paid search ad to their homepage if the person has searched for. Well, I recently bought for one of our guys for Leslie, I bought, um, a backup disk, you know, one a Lacie four terabyte. So, you know, when I search for that, Amazon came up in the paid search and it took me straight to that page. Exactly. But a lot of people don't do that. It's almost like they would send you to the Amazon page where you say, right, it's in there somewhere. Go find it.

Yeah. So thanks for that.

I mean, you know, you're not going to do that, are you?

I worked not naming any names for a company once that helped builders match bricks. Right. So you'd bring them a brick and they'd say, oh it's this brick.

You've had some amazing jobs.

There's a thousand of them. It was terribly boring.

A brick matching company. Yeah. Right.

And they did this thing where they were paying lots and lots of money to target very specific search terms in Google for like the name and batch numbers of bricks and then landing people on their homepage. And then they were like, why isn't our campaign working? It's because, you know, if I'm, if I'm on the internet looking for like a red masonry brick and I land on a generic page that's just selling lots of different bricks, I can't be bothered to search. Like I'm not gonna stick around.

You've got choice. You're gonna hit the back button and go and find somebody who bothered to do it properly.

Yeah. So if you're targeting a search term, I guess the takeaway there is like, be damn sure that the landing page you're pointing people towards is actually relevant to that.

Yeah. Okay. So we know that we're like bidding on words that people are typing into search engines. We can show adverts which we hope people click, and when they do click them, we pay an amount of money depending on lots of things, including how competitive. Actually, it also depends. I'm writing saying I think on on the the potential, the perceived commercial value of a click. So if I'm if a search term like, um, buy Aston Martin DBX nine. Oh, you know, that is likely to have a click of it could be it could be a very expensive click. I could be paying forty, fifty quid for a click on that because that's somebody who's actually got the chequebook out and wants to spend hundred and thirty thousand quid on a car.

So this is, this is like, um, one of the things that's really interesting about PPC advertising, right? So it's been around for ages. Yeah. And over time, people have learned which keywords are valuable to their business. And you'll see like in the example there, um, or in any kind of insurance related keywords and stuff like that. Other people have cottoned on to the fact that if somebody converts on your Aston Martin DBX nine keyword, that could be like what, seventy, eighty grand in the bank for you if you're a guy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's worth bidding more for. Yeah. So some keywords can get crazy competitive because there are people out there who are willing to throw kind of ten, fifteen, twenty quid a click at them.

Yeah.

And that's, you know, that I think a lot of the work we end up doing for clients is trying to find ways around that, right? It's like trying to find search terms that other people haven't necessarily found and kind of exploited to death yet.

And while we're on that subject, we you also spoke about negative keywords, which, which which is easy to understand. It's basically, I mean, an example I sometimes give if somebody searches, I don't know, Web Design Scotland, then I might want our advert to show because that's something we could help with. But if they searched cheap Web Design Scotland, I definitely don't want them to see our advert because that's not a good fit for us. That's not going to be an enquiry we can service. So we've established that, which is good. Um one of the things that's also incredibly useful I think with, with paid search, interested to hear your view on it is, you know, as, as a campaign runs. Google actually gives you the search terms that people actually typed in that triggered either impressions of your advert or actual clicks on your advert. And they do. And that can be incredibly valuable, can't it?

It's super useful. There's a couple of like weird limitations on it.

They're super useful. Super useful. I mean, we might have to edit that out.

Not just useful. Gross. I'll try not to get so excited. Um, yeah, it's, um, it's it's huge. There are a couple of weird limitations though. So like the data from that, it's not for all the searches. It's like a given percentage. Yeah. And the other rule that I've never really like, been able to wrap my head around why this is the case, but it's only from people logged into Google Chrome, right? So yeah, but it is hugely useful because then you can kind of troll through that list of keywords that have actually triggered your ads. And you can say, okay, these ones are actually really cool. I hadn't thought about that. I'd rather bid more for people clicking on those keywords. Or you can say, actually, hang on a minute, you know, where where, you know, for the Aston Martin example, where somebody. Searched for like restoration projects or something like that. And you see. That that's triggered your ad and you've paid ninety quid for that clip or whatever. You can say, oh, actually, hang on, I should, I should add that as a negative keyword. Yeah. So that's, I guess like day to day with PPC when people talk about like PPC. Management or PPC maintenance. Yeah. A lot of that is just kind of going through those keyword lists and saying.

So this is what I was saying earlier about, you know, if you set it and forget it, you're going to get a hiding, you're going to really waste a lot of money. Whereas if you spend the time going in and looking at the keywords that we've just mentioned, the ones that Google is saying, look, people are actually typing this in, I've always found that a really valuable source of additional negative keywords, which is exactly what you just said. You know, it's almost like, like, oh my God, we're paying for, we've just paid, we paid one hundred quid for clicks for this. And like, we don't even do that. You know what I mean? Somehow it sneaked through our analysis of what negative keywords we should be using, but you could just immediately add it to the negative keywords and limit the limit the damage.

Right. So I think, you know, one of the important things that we always say to clients whenever we start is that the first kind of month or two of a PPC campaign is really just like kind of us getting to grips with all that, right? It's that whole process of kind of learning which keywords we should be blocking and which ones we should be allowing, because you are kind of inevitably to gain the data you need to make those decisions. You're going to waste a little bit of money. But ultimately, until you know what people are searching for and what you do or don't want to bring people to your website, you can't just guess like with, you know, with the best will in the world. I see people out there all the time that work for PPC, kind of solely PPC companies that just do programmatic paid search.

And yeah, and that's something that we don't touch. I mean, it's a specialist area of PPC where it's basically automated. And yeah, you're bidding on thousands of keywords, aren't you? But not because somebody painstakingly created a list of keywords. It's actually done in a programmatic way.

Right? And this is the problem because they, they, you know, they have these huge big spreadsheets or lists of negative keywords that just ram in every campaign. And like, I can't count the amount of times I've logged into someone's AdWords account and just found these huge lists of kind of negative keywords, but they're not necessarily the negative keywords that needed to be blocked. You actually have to go through by hand, I think. And, and actually it sounds really boring. It is really boring. There's no two ways about it. That is the kind of hard work it's not. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there's no kind of finesse on your story. You just have to sit and read all the keywords and say, this is a good fit. This one isn't. Okay. Um.

So I mean, one of the other areas of, of, uh, paid search, which maybe people don't fully understand is the degree to which you can tag it. So you can literally tag it down to a particular city.

Yeah.

So you could say, show my adverts to people in Birmingham and only show them on Monday afternoons and Wednesday afternoons and between certain times, if you, you know, you can just get to the nth degree of targeting with it.

Absolutely. So I worked for a little bit with a sunglasses brand that only advertised in two.

So you did have some cool jobs.

The only advertising two postcodes in Wimbledon that was. Yeah, that was because that's where they knew their target demographic lived, right? Nobody else is going to spend five hundred pounds on a pair of sunglasses. So they just just advertise to people in that area. But you can do really smart things like that. And you can do some really interesting things as well where like, if you know that, um, people aged fifty or more are more likely to buy your product, you can, you can say to Google, I want to bid ten percent more if you think somebody is over the age.

How accurate do you think that demographic data is?

I mean, yeah, you have to take it with a pinch of salt, right? It would be really.

Anybody using my laptop couldn't it?

It could. I wasn't attacking you. But yeah. I wouldn't put you a day over thirty. Um but yeah, no, I mean that's the thing with the demographic data. I think you have to take it with a big pinch of salt because yeah, Google are making their best guess based on your search history and your behavior and that kind of thing. But somebody like you, for example, who works in digital marketing will have a very different search behavior to somebody who works, you know, down the road in a library. Yeah. So you can't really make these kind of guesses or estimates very well, But.

How accurate is the geo stuff? Because I've seen that kind of struggle a bit sometimes as well. I mean, what's it using? Is it using IP addresses and like best guess because I mean, let's face it, we've all been logged into Google Chrome and Google Chrome. You know, somewhere in the bottom left hand corner is saying you are currently in, I don't know, Rochdale. It's like, no, I'm not. I'm in Aboyne in north east Scotland, but I'm using Zen Internet who are based in Rochdale. You know, it's not even a good guess.

Yeah. So not only does Google get it wrong, but also when you're setting up pay per click campaigns, there's a sneaky, sneaky thing in there where you choose to target a geographical location. And there's two tick boxes underneath the option where you input the geographical location, and one of them is for only target people in this area, and the other one is for target people who are in this area or have expressed an interest in this area or have ever been to that area. And that is the one and that is the one that's ticked by default. So lots of the time people will set up like a PPC campaign. They'll be like, I'm just targeting Birmingham. And then they'll be like, but I looked in analytics and all my paid search traffic is from Scotland. And it's like, well, yeah, because you didn't notice the the tiny hidden tick box that was inserted.

I mean, does this go back to the idea that although, I mean, I've said before, we love Google, we use Google all the time. Should we be slightly cynical with this stuff? Should we really assume that Google is basically trying to get as much click budget off us as it can? Or is it trying to help us grow our businesses? And it's a really soft, cuddly thing.

If anybody, um, listening hasn't already got an AdWords account, if you go and try and set one up, what you'll notice is that you get kind of like a baby's first version of AdWords that it loads you in.

Is it still called AdWords express or have they changed the name of it?

I'm not sure what it's called now. It's awful. Yeah, exactly. And you have to.

Absolutely awful.

Yeah. And there's this hidden menu option that's like, like take me to expert mode now. And that's like where actual AdWords lives, right? So it's like right from the word go, Google kind of trying to create this experience where they're like, we'll hold your hand, we'll do this for you. And yeah, I think you have to be very cynical about what they're actually trying to do because nine times out of ten, what they're hoping for is that you, the advertiser, will just say, oh, well, my business sells blue widgets. Please pick some keywords for me. Pick a budget, make some ads automatically, and send me traffic. And then you would just pay Google, you know, five hundred pounds every few days and they would be laughing all the way to the bank. Yeah. And I think to kind of take the reins back off Google and kind of build a PPC campaign from scratch, you do actually have to kind of know the ins and outs of the system and how they're going to try.

And I mean, maybe people feel safe, like Google, Google's going to look after me. It's going to automate this whole thing. And let's face it, in digital marketing, you know, people may be inexperienced people. They kind of like the whole automation thing because, oh, it's just going to click a button. It's like, you know, we joke like about how our web guys, the web design guys can just like, you know, click the make it pretty button. You know what I mean? It's like, isn't there a button for that in Photoshop or whatever it is these guys use? Yeah. You know, it's, it's, it's that, isn't it?

You know, it's, and I think it's like a really kind of basic human instinct, isn't it? It's to look for a shortcut to look for a way for somebody else to do the heavy lifting for you. Because like, do you really, you know, as a business owner, want to sit down and Google all the different search terms that people may be used to find your product. Work out which ones to bid on. Write an advert like it's exhausting, right? I'm bored talking about it, so I can imagine how boring it must be for people to have to do it on their own without any guidance. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I can see the appeal of just, you know, hitting the kind of magic wand button and saying, you know, do all this for me.

So I mean, what, who do you think most benefits take Google out of the equation. Who do you think most benefits from PPC? Is, is it businesses who are going great guns and want to get even more business in, but more business? Or is it businesses who who've got a pretty crap website and they're not getting any traffic from Google through organic. And so they need to start establishing getting eyeballs on their website. I mean.

So I think, yeah, I think there are two core groups, I guess, that benefit from pay per click. I think there are people who not have a website because that doesn't work. You can't send people to a website and.

You can have a landing page which is head and shoulders above your website.

Could you? So people who are in the process of making their website or their offering or whatever better, they've got to grips with the idea that what they're telling people currently is shit, and they need to sell them something better. Yeah. Um, and then, you know, if you're in the process of doing that, but you're not yet getting the kind of traction in organic search, PPC is a great way to kind of kick start things, right?

Getting traction in organic search. You've done it again. We've just gone down a digital marketing rabbit hole.

I'll go home after this. Slam my head in the oven.

Yeah. I mean, I was always saying is if you don't appear in Google and let's face it, clients get that. People understand that, you know, the company was when I search for so and so in Google, I'm not coming up. Right. You know, that means you haven't got any traction in search, right.

And, and, you know, you're going to get it later. You're going to invest in SEO, you've got a great new website. How do I get eyes on the page right now and get some leads? PPC is great. Yeah. And I think the other group that really benefit from it are people who know their kind of sales process inside and out. They know how to take a visitor and turn them into a paying customer and they just need more volume, right? Just get me more people. Yeah. And their PPC is really good because you've got all those systems in place already so that when you're paying eight, nine, ten pounds a click to get somebody on your website, you know that you can convert three percent of them. But if you don't know that, that's when I think it's a.

Yeah. Actually, you just you just reminded me we've got a client who. Remember she contacted us and said, please turn my paid search off. Yes. She couldn't actually handle the volume of search, the volume of enquiries that was coming through as a result of the paid search campaign. So yeah, it absolutely. There's a shining example of it working, you know, and equally, you know, hands up. We've run campaigns and we've really struggled to get traction. Yes. You know, whether that particular market doesn't respond to Google ads, we couldn't get clicks in the first place, or whether or not.

We just have a knack for picking customers in industries that are just not.

Well, I mean, yeah, we certainly like the thorny ones. We certainly want the, you know, we're not afraid of taking on the difficult challenges, that's for sure. But, um, okay, so, you know, we, I hope people now get a better idea of what paid search is all about. It's about appearing in a Google search result with something that looks like a normal search result, except it's got the word ad next to it, and increasingly, it's hard to differentiate between.

You and the.

Search results.

I wouldn't be surprised if that vanishes altogether.

You know, I, I think they would love to remove that, but I don't think they will because even though they've dropped the whole don't be evil out of their out of.

Their values.

Or mission or whatever it was, you know, they've kind of quietly dropped that one. Um, I, I still think even for, um, you know, what is now a huge, uh, business, um, organisation, clearly, I think even they will be like, we really still need to make sure people know that, you know, because we both come across all the time, you know, as you mentioned earlier, customers, we were thinking of using paid search as part of them. Oh, I don't know. I don't know why we're doing that either. I tried it once and it didn't work because as we've already agreed, it's dead easy to get it wrong or because, well, I never clicked them and I don't know. I don't know anybody who does. It's like, well, okay, Google's making forty billion a quarter. Somebody's clicking them, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, people are absolutely click them every day. So yeah.

Okay. There's a lot more to it. I mean, there's, um, we have, we're not going to touch it just now, but I mean, there's, there's remarketing as well. So that, you know, if people have, uh, been on your page having clicked a Google advert, uh, we can then show. I mean, that's the thing that a lot of people find a bit creepy. You know, I was searching on something and then every website I went on, this advert kept cropping up for this. You know, I got it. You know, previously we mentioned they're doing the e-bikes and it's like I kept seeing e-bike adverts. Like I've already bought them. Stop showing me adverts.

Well, that's the thing. It's not just creepy, it's annoying.

It's annoying.

Yeah. It's like you go on like lazy. Yeah. And it's fashion websites are the worst culprit for it, right? You'll like, look at one thing and then for the next thirty days, you'll be followed around by this, like, blazer jacket on every website you go to. I know. Just give it a rest, man. Right, right. I wasn't buying it then and I'm not buying it now. But yeah, I mean, yeah, there's loads to AdWords. And, you know, it's also worth pointing out that people do use the phrase kind of PPC, um, to talk about Facebook, um, adverts as well. LinkedIn adverts, social media advertising. Yeah. Um, and that's not really something we've touched on in.

No, not in this, not in this podcast now, but yeah, basically whatever you're putting a message and offer some sort of advert in front of people and if they click it, you pay is pay per click, isn't it? So there's all sorts of different but, but, but I mean, Bing the Bing system, Microsoft's it's, it's more or less the same as Google ads.

Well, to the point where there's an option in Bing to import your Google Ads campaign as is. Yeah. Which I think is like, you know, just if you need a kind of like, um, confirmation of the fact that Bing just understands that Google has beaten it in every way. It's right there. But I will say that Bing advertising is huge. Um, in a lot of industries and a lot of people don't really realise how powerful it is. Um, I think partly because Microsoft Edge is still kind of automatically installed on a lot of windows computers, but also just because a lot of people just don't like Google that much. So they're still using Bing and you can kind of reach them using it. And it's very, very cheap in comparison.

I'm sure I read some research where as you, as you say, in certain industries, it's going to, it's going to be way more popular. And I think there was some anecdotal evidence like, well, we tried Google ads, we tried Bing ads. And actually we got a much better return off the Bing ads. So yeah, it's not just about Google. You're right.

Well, some of them are like some of the things I've seen where you'll pay kind of two or three pounds in Google, you'll pay ten P in Bing. So it's, it's a huge difference. Yeah. It's a, it's a really interesting.

That's right. Okay. Okay. So, um, I think we'll maybe wrap this one up just now because I think we've covered the big picture stuff. Like, you know, it's easy to get it wrong, but it's actually not that complicated. Um, and, you know, there's lots of great tutorials and information out there. If you choose not to work with a paid search, um, partner on, on something like that. I think the important thing is do not set and forget, make sure you use negative key. That was the one that people always missed. I mean, you know, I mean, maybe not so much now, but I used to always like, if I, if I got to analyse a PPC campaign for somebody, the first place, I would look with negative keyword, you've got no negative keywords. You know what I mean? It was just like, it was just an easy, an easy win to sort of like go and go and sort that out.

Yeah. And make sure that you're pointing people at a landing page that is actually relevant to what you're bidding on. Because that's the other thing that I see time and time again. And it drives me absolutely bonkers when people will pay, you know, three, four pounds every time somebody clicks their advert and they'll just land them on a generic page. Yes.

That's right.

You're throwing money away.

Totally throwing money away. Yeah. Okay. Um that's good I think. I'm not sure what we're going to talk about in the next episode of the podcast. We will start getting into some more detail around some of the apps and.

Things that we're making this up as we go along. Yeah, we are, we.

Are a little bit, I mean, yeah, I like how it's going. It's good because I think, um, you know, I think people will appreciate that. What we're trying to do here is, is be, uh, is demystify and just tell it like it is. And yeah, we're not going massively into detail because there's plenty of others that go into massive detail. Um, you know, if you want more detail, you can reach out and have a chat with us. And we'll more, more than, more, more than happy. Or if you, if you want us to go into more detail in another episode of the podcast, we can do that as well. Yeah. But it's kind of not what we're about. We're kind of about like making sure people get the big picture. Because a lot of the time, I think what we found is that it's the lack of even understanding the big picture that's confusing people. Yeah. And once you actually understand the concept, even at a high level, you think, ah, right. Yeah, Penny just dropped. I get it now.

That's exactly it. You need to understand the basic concepts, don't you? And after that, you can kind of do your own research, learning, development, whatever.

That's right.

So yeah, paid search in a nutshell. Good.