Pay Per Click Advertising to increase sales

Damon Pistulka  00:02 

Alright everyone, Welcome once again to the exit your way business roundtable with me today. I have Jeffrey Graham. How you doing today, Jeff? 

Jeffry Graham  00:12 

Good, good hanging. There’s a little warm here today but 

Damon Pistulka  00:15 

yeah, yeah. So what you got going on there? Is it like 90 degrees warmer? 

Jeffry Graham  00:20 

Like 92-93 but it’s dry in Colorado. So yeah, it’s it. It’s not like Arizona heat or Texas heat. But yeah, it’s a little warm. But you know, it’s been like that all summer seems like it’s been it’s been kind of It’s okay, it kind of fluctuates. The weather here is interesting changes next week supposed to think we’re in might snow I mean, you 

Damon Pistulka  00:45 

know, in Denver, yeah, that’s for sure. Well, good stuff, man. So this has been working on we worked on this a lot together in the past four or five years, that’s for sure. And in the year, you know, a lot of it and you on that, so we’re talking about Pay Per Click today. And for people that don’t understand, or I’ve heard it, might be called PPC or something like that, and really what they’re, they’re talking about is paid advertising on a search engine like Google or Bing. So that you’re, if you’re, if you’re selling cars and you want to you want your ad for a certain car to show up on the search, when somebody searches for a, that kind of car, you can pay money to Google and they’ll put it there for you. Right. And that’s as simple as it is. It’s, it’s certainly changed a lot over the last 10 years. 

Jeffry Graham  01:43 

Yeah, if I remember the beginning, yeah. Not the same. Yeah, yeah. You missed your ad spots. And now I’d say it’s five. It’s five on top. I mean, give me five give me 10 on one page now, yeah, yeah. You know, used to be a lot less. 

Damon Pistulka  01:58 

Well, and that’s, that’s a really that’s about it. point because we’re going to talk about the difference between SEO and pay per click. But, you know, when you look 10 years ago, you used to be able to if you rank good for SEO and for certain keywords, that was a big deal, because yeah, there there were less ad spots on a Google page. And there are now there were there, you know, there are a couple at the top, a couple at the bottom or there weren’t even before that they’re off to the side. And now like you said, Google’s got three or four at the top of the bottom. So basically, even though you are still ranking good, there’s fewer spots on each page to get on the first page. You have to pay to play as you Yeah, in the olden days, 

Jeffry Graham  02:39 

I you know, I shouldn’t say old days but years ago used to be able to game the system, you know, there was a big arbitrage of backlinking. If you made backlinks you’d rank well, you know, people would hire people to backlink them or crosslink them or affiliate marketing. It was just a really big thing in order to get the algorithm to be interested. And then that would obviously change you know, the SEO aspect So things were people were ranking better Well, now the internet’s become more crowded. So we have a lot less space to work with. So companies now have no other option to be seen. Other than pay per click, and so you can get yourself into a lot of trouble with PPC, you can also do very well, I make ton ton of ton of revenue and convert a lot and things will be really, really great. So I think what we want to try to do, I think is talk about the things you know what it is that what is pay per click, if you haven’t run effective campaigns before, what are the things to look out for? What are the things that Google tries to get you to do that maybe you shouldn’t avoid? And yeah, and so you don’t end up costing yourself a lot of money and time. And then also just being weary of making sure that you have write help, or professional help that can run campaigns for you if you’re not an expert, or don’t want to become or learn this kind of stuff. So, 

Damon Pistulka  03:54 

yeah, yeah, I mean, that’s so that’s you covered a lot there. I think it’s a lot of really Good points. And when we talk about this, it is got tremendously more complex as the things have changed with, with pay per click, as you said, competition is made it harder, you’ve got to be better at it. And, and the rules keep changing with Google. I mean, because when you look at what Pay Per Click was at the beginning was simply, I choose a keyword or key or set of words, and I say, I want to when someone puts that in, I want to be at the top of list or as high as I can, and I’m willing to pay so much do that, for that to show up there. And when someone clicks on it, I get charged. Simple as that. 

Jeffry Graham  04:46 

Yeah. And and now, you know, originally Google adopted PPC, they’re kind of the creators of pay per click advertising as a May and then now now they do PPC on Amazon platform. So you’re paying per click for people to view your product. listing paperclips run through eBay and all the major outlets run PPC as a as a monetization method, Facebook. So understanding pay per click and understanding what it costs per click. LinkedIn also is is running a lot of POS very expensive clicks. But you know, we can talk a little bit about, you know, the main the big one, right. The big one is Google, right. That’s Yeah, kind of focus on Google as as as kind of a starting point, then we could down the road talk more about like Amazon, PPC campaigns and things like that, but Google is a good, yeah. Is it? Yeah, good place 

Damon Pistulka  05:36 

to talk. We talk about pay per click. There’s people that do like hours and hours and hours of courses just on Google Pay Per Click when you get into it, because there are companies out there that are spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on pay per click, you know, and then and then there’s the the, you know, the whatever door on the corner that spin in, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month trying to trying to just stay relevant in the local market. So it really there’s a wide variety of people. And when you when you start to look at it, let’s just take this take a quick dive into pay per click and sto people talk about SEO or search engine optimization. And they they might talk about Pay Per Click on the same thing, but those are two different things, right? 

Jeffry Graham  06:26 

Yeah. So a lot of times, people get confused, especially if they’re just not as savvy in this space. But yeah, it is confusing, right. So SEO is focused on organic search. organic search means I type in a search term, let’s say exit your way and exit your way pops up where I type in business broker and exit your way top pot pops up from an organic meaning you’re not paying for it. And then PPC means that you’re paying for ad ad space above that, or below organic search. And typically in Google’s world, it’s a top and the bottom it says a little ad it says ad on there. So that’s how you know it’s an A lot of people click them, they don’t even know their ads. They already know, we know their ads. But a lot of times folks just see that and they click it, even if it’s even if it’s, you know, those are the things between the abusing SEO and PPC, SEO is all organic, focusing on just google putting you in front of people by search. And, and and giving you impressions and an impression is how many folks see something think of like driving past a billboard, they would consider that an impression on a billboard, calling the number on the Billboard would be considered, you know, some type of conversion or click in this world? Yeah. So it’s just like that someone scrolls and sees your ad. They consider that impression. Yeah. And they, they have, you know, algorithms and things that, that measure all those things. So yeah, now we can dive into the type of ads that exists. 

Damon Pistulka  07:54 

Well, as you said to the search, SEO or search engine optimization really depends about what your website says and the kind of content that’s on your website, because if your pages are all about, you know, ducks and you want to try to to talk about sheep, you know, it’s not gonna work, you know, because the SEO is going to come up for, for ducks because that’s what your website talks about, well, if there’s a certain subject matter or keywords that you want to rank for, you need to have those relevant on your, on your website, if you want to organically, as you say, come up in search. And that’s that’s drives SEO. But now, when websites are starting out or a company is starting out, SEO takes a while to go and SEO doesn’t get you all. You got to 

Jeffry Graham  08:44 

think years and it won’t get you there quick. The one thing about PPC one of the huge benefits is there’s no you don’t have to wait long it’s within a day or two your campaigns can be live and you could be getting a track. traction on your website. You could be getting shopping clicks, you can be getting conversions. Um, you know, we can talk a little bit about, if you’re going to build a PPC campaign kind of where I start, you know, I think is really helpful. It’s a big picture, like, where do you start? So? Yeah, so like most folks will just go in and create an ad and drop them on a homepage, right? That’s just like generic things that people do. But what I what I encourage people to do and I think is important is go all the way from where you’re wanting folks to land and then work your way backwards. So it would be everything from like, what Where do I want them to land so landing page or website. From there, you’re going to work backwards into the type of search, you want to land on that type of relevant content. And then the type of ad text and the type of you know, so what you want to do is take your your, your your page, or wherever you want to put people from an ad PPC perspective, and back it all the way out. And you’re going to want to create your ads around that relevant content, right. So so things like landing page relevant I haven’t read a keyword relevant, you know what keywords are relevant for that landing page. So if you’re talking about selling cookies, you know, you’re not going to have brownie as as a keyword because you’re selling cookies, not brownies, and you don’t want to waste money on clicks. And that can happen. So keyword relevance is very important. ad copy relevance. So what are you typing in your ads with those minimal amounts of characters that you get to work with a while, like, you know, tweets and Twitter where you only get a couple of characters for a subject and then description? Yeah, we’ll go into a little bit of that. And then and then engagement quality, you know, bounce rate. So and we’ll talk a little bit about how they kind of measure where your ads show up or why budget might not be used or why budget would be used in the first place. And then of course, the type of bid strategy is going to be huge. But I always say that start with where you’re trying to land, a potential customer client or traffic, let’s call it and then work backwards. On what is important to that page? So let’s just go homepage, maximize clicks homepage, you know, and it’s it’s not effective anyway. So, 

Damon Pistulka  11:10 

yeah, you will waste a lot of money that way. Because you don’t know you can’t get the thing that’s happened in pay per click. And this is why, you know, this strategy might have worked years ago, but it isn’t anymore because there’s so much competition for every single keyword now that it just costs. It’s not cost effective anymore to dump people on there. So if you’re, if you have a site that like you said, you’re selling cookies, you don’t even want to just say cookies, you want to drop them onto a chocolate chip cookie page, and you want your ad your keywords need to say, shot milk chocolate chip cookies with nuts, almost that’s the kind of keyword phrase that you want to have because you want to drop them right onto the page, or they’re going to find that if we’re doing a product because you’re going to minimize your keyword cost and you’re really going to get relevant People dropping onto that page when you do that, and as you said, and then explain some of the things like that. So say we do have a chocolate chip cookie page, and I’m, I’m building an ad. I don’t want to just put a general cookie page or cookie add to drop on to that chocolate chip cookie page because my relevance is 

Jeffry Graham  12:24 

I think what we would want to look at is, is it is it is it through the internet? Or am I a cookie shop? You know, my cookies at a store? If I’m or am I selling cookies, and I’m delivering you a bag of cookies or whatever, perishable right? So yeah, um, you know, that’s all going to come down to you know what it what it is, first and foremost, if it’s a local shop, then you’re going to want to focus your PPC efforts on local, right. And there are demographics and things you can do inside pay the pay per click interface, at least for Google ads, will drop folks in within a certain mile radius. City or something like that, but there are some nuances that you have to pay attention to. A lot of times it’ll say people that looked in this area. So you’ll be getting clicks from people in Canada, you know, that have looked in, let’s say, Denver or Seattle, and you don’t want that, right. So you want to make sure you exclude that stuff. We can’t get stuck in the weeds on this, I know me and you could get started or we could do it. And I was just I’ll make sure that I, I smacked myself on if I started going 

Damon Pistulka  13:26 

down a rabbit hole. I got 

Jeffry Graham  13:28 

back way out again. Some of the big some of the big things is just first understanding the type of campaign right so there’s multiple types of pay per click campaigns. Okay, so search campaigns, a search campaign, which is we type in a keyword and, and, and off of search in Google’s search bar or Bing search bar. If you’re running Bing Ads, it will just create an ad an ad copy would then show up right so there’s a search ad. Right then we have display ads now display ads, typically image attacks, they usually stick those on different websites. affiliates and partners, things like that. That’s where display ads come up to display ads do generate a lot of traffic, they don’t always generate generate a lot of conversions. But there are reasons for certain companies to run display ads, then the next one that you’re going to run across is going to be, you know, smart campaigns. Google will run a smart campaign if you’re if you’re, if you can specifically do that within their platform. If your business has that ability. A smart campaign is Google’s algorithms are going to generate your ads, your clicks, your impressions, they’re basically going to automate your IDs, easy way to go if you’re not a savvy person when it comes to ads. But it does have its limitations. And then the remainder of pay per click campaign from a Google front is shopping, Google Shopping or being you know, being has been shopping i think is you know, I don’t do as much to spend as much time on things as traffic isn’t important there. But nowadays, we might write we might spend a lot more time on Bing Ads. Yeah, well, you know, you can import your Google ads to Bing. There’s a lot of ways to do that. One of the big things I think is scary is the interface. Google has from a PPC standpoint is is intimidating. Yeah. If you first go in there, it’s just like, what is this? Well, it was developed by a bunch of developers. It’s not it wasn’t developed by people that that want to make things simple. So it is very complicated. There’s too many buttons. There’s, there’s they’re trying to tighten it up. But it’s very complicated. So I think it can be very intimidating. Yeah. So understand the type of campaign you want to start, or try for the reasons you’re wanting to try it. And that, again, is going to come down to where you’re trying to land people what you’re trying to land them for, and what kind of action do you want from that? In addition to just the campaign types, we need to be thinking about tracking, right. So making sure your analytics is hooked up to your website, making sure sure that you have advanced analytics, so it can track final clicks. So that you’re, you’re not showing conversions and not getting sales at your cart, where you’re not showing conversions and not getting phone calls. And so we want to make sure that the back end analytics piece on the final click is, is tracking well, and it’s never going to be perfect. It’s never going to be 100% accurate, but it’s important to make sure Google Analytics is hooked up to your Google ads. Yeah, and they’re relevant on your website. Yeah. those are those are just the ad types. And that’s 

Damon Pistulka  16:29 

that’s one of the things yeah, that’s one of the things is tracking conversions. You’re right, that’s that’s one of the hang ups that a lot of people have as you’ll go ahead and you know, you’ll set up a campaign and and it’ll say you’re converting and it’s not and you’re not or it’s not saying you’re converting and you are it is it 

Jeffry Graham  16:46 

might be counting that conversion as a click on buy, you know, add to cart or something. Yeah. And you assume that the sale and they abandon cart or something. So yeah, want to make sure that it’s set up at the right process and time in your ecosystem of a sale. Online depending on the business right if you’re a profit or if you’re a service based business you know those are going to be two very different types of ads going after very different types of things. You know, if your product company you’re probably gonna want to run Google Shopping gonna be a huge benefit to you if you’re a service business search is obviously the way to go. 

Damon Pistulka  17:22 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, cuz See, shopping in Google Shopping, it’s basically like a mini Amazon where you can upload all your products and and an advertise them and sell them right through. 

Jeffry Graham  17:37 

Yeah, just use it in it auto generates from your web store or your cart and Yep, displays the ad. And you have to meet parameters, of course. And then, folks, typically, when they do a Google search, you’ll see a shopping tab up there, people click shopping, they run through products, click, then it’ll also show that this is products in multiple stores and things like that. So Google Shopping if your product is product based business is definitely something that you need to be doing. It’s affordable. And you’re getting folks right to a product page. So I think that that’s, you know, a huge can be huge benefit for a private business, search for services. You know, those are going to be important things, you know, but the interface is the scary part of Google ads and running PPC, even on Amazon, you know, its target ROI as return on adspend. Just now, I want to touch a little bit on some things not to do I think, while people are paying attention and not fall asleep, about Google ads, 

Damon Pistulka  18:39 

yeah, it’s like, yeah, 

Jeffry Graham  18:41 

so So everyone just that’s watching this needs to understand that Google has one mission, and that’s to make you spend money. So yeah, guess what, they’re not your friend they don’t like care about, you know, they care about your results slightly, but at the end of the day, they want you to spend money, so they’re gonna suggest bid amounts, which means I’m going to charge you more, they’re gonna expect you to do all the recommendations they like to see. And there’s a lot of things that Google is trying to push on you, because all they’re trying to do is get you in the game. And then they’re going to try to make as much money off you as possible. They know that if you’re not successful at all, you’re not going to continue to run PPC. But they also walk that fine line between keeping you successful and also keeping you poor. So you got to make sure that there’s some things that that don’t always fall for the Google what Google tells me to do. Yeah. Because, you know, I’ve been the guru. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it. And yeah, there’s a lot of things there that they recommend, you know, you did your campaigns that I’m like, no way. It’s not going to be effective, but they’re trying to sell you on that. So that’s something that I think people need to be wary of and see, that could go for Amazon, LinkedIn, any pay per clicks it just Be wary of the suggestions box. Some of them are valid. But a lot of times, let’s just say you have limited keywords, they’re wanting to throw more irrelevant keywords into your mix. And that’s because that can create more impressions, therefore more clicks, therefore, they make more money, but you don’t get more sales. So all of these things are stuff that are major pitfalls. And when you’re first starting a Google or a pay per click, campaign, just start small and test a lot, you know, don’t go get into deep don’t go throwing $100 day budget on things or, you know, it also is going to take a little bit of time for Google’s algorithms and Amazon’s and whoever’s writing your pay per click advertising, to kind of settle you in on what impressions are getting the best interaction. And when Google looks in interactions, that’s clicks. If we want to call that what however, someone’s interacting with that. You as your interactions are going up and your impressions go down, your click through rate goes up, and that means that they’re hitting the On the type of traffic, and then ideally, you’re converting from there, you know, those are all going to be things that are going to take a couple weeks month, you’re going to do some testing. So don’t expect it to be super successful or right out the gate. You can be Yeah, about the gate. But don’t don’t. Don’t be misled Google Shopping is probably the only one that that could probably drive a sale. Day one, you know, yeah. And sometimes you get lucky but but for the most part, we got to think about you know, what are they here for and then how is it going to help your business and what do you what not to do? What to do? 

Damon Pistulka  21:37 

Yeah, cuz there’s, there’s, as you said, There, I mean, it starts with the impressions. Are you getting enough impressions? So is that your keyword or whatever? Or even are you spending enough to get get an impression? 

Jeffry Graham  21:52 

Yeah, that’s legit. Yeah. 

Damon Pistulka  21:53 

Yeah, you’re using if you’re good enough for the budget, and then if you if you’re getting the impression But you’re not getting the clicks. That’s another problem. And if you’re getting the clicks, you get to pay for it at that point, it gets to be a little more concerning problem. Because if you’re getting the clicks, but you’re not getting the conversions, then you’re paying money, and you’re not getting any return on it. So so you really all the way through the process, you got to make sure I’ve got enough, it’s being shown enough, I’m getting the right amount of clicks or is maximizing the number of clicks I get for each time is shown. And then whatever you need to happen after that click happens. You got to maximize that too. So there’s several steps in the process. 

Jeffry Graham  22:35 

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the, like, if you look at an A PPC campaign, the most important thing I think for PPC campaign is just making things relevant. So if I’m searching for shoes, let’s have a shoe page show. A lot of people just don’t know what keywords that they’re running. They don’t know. It just automate You know, they’re just hitting create, automate the click the click and adding You know, 100 keywords that are just make no sense. And it happens all the time is Google’s training to trains to do that. And then you have different types of things. You have phrase matches, which is like, Hey, I type of phrase, there’s broad matches where you type something in, it’s more of a broad scope that Google is going to pull from. And then there’s going to be like, specific keywords. And then there’s going to be specific keywords and also like, similar things like so. Yeah, it’s consulting, it’d be consulting and advisory might be another impression they would put you on. Yeah, things outside of consulting so you can have exact match, which means only consulting. If they type consulting, I want to show up and so you can be really specific with PPC or you can be more generic depending on your goal and initially, I think a lot of folks are a little bit more generic to see what things are biting on from AdSense stance and then they’re diving into Okay, now let’s, let’s inch this thing forward, with Yeah, implications and changes in color. To action and stuff like that are going to be important. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there’s a million you know, I hate say there’s just no quick crash course on pay per click. It’s, it’s, it’s a lot to learn and there’s a lot to it but understanding it from a superficial level will help you at least guide your advisor or help guide you to learning it yourself. And, you know, that’s why I hope that this will do well, 

Damon Pistulka  24:27 

yes, because if you know enough to call bullshit, that’s the first part of it. I mean, I think 

Jeffry Graham  24:31 

that’s big, right? Oh, it’s it’s working right? Look at our click through rates 8% Well, I’m not converting so my bounce rates higher. So you’re not, you know, and what are those things? So I guess we could talk a little bit what those are. 

Damon Pistulka  24:44 

Yeah, let’s do that. Because I think really what we’re trying to do here today in the in the short amount of time we got is to give people some idea of what they should look for in it really is someone that’s going to do it well or someone that’s not because it’s it 

Jeffry Graham  25:01 

Yeah, so Google, so Google, um, if you’re in Google’s interface, you know, your campaign, which is that what you build, you know, then you’re gonna have ad groups, which is, you know, a grouping of ads that are hooked to certain keywords. But you have you have the basis is impressions means people see it, then you have an interaction with a click, they have the, the rate in which there’s an interaction from an impression. So that would be like, hey, however many impressions by how many clicks gives you a percentage or a number, and that’s how they percentage build out a percentage of interaction rate, which you can see in your platform. And you’re going to have your average cost per click, cost, the cost in total, here it can be conversions and then the cost to convert. So how many people clicked? How many conversions and then how much money did you spend? So then, you know, it’s cost me $12 to convert a sale or to convert a phone call or whatever There’s going to be, you know, bid strategies attached to those things. And there’s a bunch of different bid strategies that you have to understand, you know, the big ones is target search page location is what Google shows. So essentially, where you’re, you know, that’d be more like a local target target CPA with CPA means cost per acquisition, so you know, how much it costs to acquire a customer. And that, again, is going to depend on how you set up your analytics platform, you’re going to have target rows, which row is ROI. So you’ll see that a lot its return on adspend. So how much money am I making by how much money I’m spending on advertising? So if I’m spending $10 a month making 100 if I’m spending $10, am I making $10? So target ROI is usually those are campaigns that after your PPC has been running while you’ll convert to those types of campaigns, but that’s not typically where folks start. There you No, a little bit more focused. Yeah, but target outranking share again, this does gets complicated because so now that means that when you when you don’t follow on first page ads and you go into second page ads. So if you’re getting out ranked around bid, you know, that’s going to be also a key component on if you’re going to be in the first ad slot or the 15th. Yeah, then yeah, maximize clicks, which is just about getting you as many clicks as possible. I use that campaign a lot those campaigns a lot to start with, because I set a click amount that I will spend over so I don’t ever get myself in trouble and I’m going to start testing the type of traffic I’m generating right away. So typically my go to start as a maximize click campaign in Google. Most Google reps have a gap, do that. And then you have maximize conversions. But if your conversion tracking isn’t on point, you’re gonna have bad numbers. They’re on date, bad data ends bad data out right like you know, and then you have enhanced CPC which is cost per click, that’s a Google machine. And then you have manual CPC, which you could actually manually adjust what you want to spend and all those things. And those are the strategies and bid types will be in most platforms. minus a couple, but for the most part, you know, maximize clicks target in Amazon, it’s rose. 

Damon Pistulka  28:25 

Yes. So if if I’m a business owner, and I’ve got somebody that’s coming up to me in somebody that I’ve hired to do some Pay Per Click work for me. I mean, if you’re looking at what are some of the things that they key numbers that you’re going to be looking at, so they’re there, they’ve they figured out your keywords, they’ve got some ads running? What are you looking at? 

Jeffry Graham  28:47 

Yeah, so I think that’s important, you know, for business owners to understand is important that there’s certain baseline metrics. I think that that you have to hit Google ism like you’re not hit those. So if you have someone running ads for you, and you’re not hitting your basic metrics, and they’re obviously not being effective. So one of them is a click through rate. All right. So, you know, a click through rate means that they saw your ad and they clicked, what percentages of people saw your ad clicked. So that would be considered a click through rate. 

Damon Pistulka  29:16 

And that’s called Ctr. To some people. 

Jeffry Graham  29:19 

It’s called CTR, they obviously use acronyms for everything because yeah, it’s easy, but a click through rates gonna be really important to engage on your ad relevance. So if you have a high click through rate, that means that people that are seeing your ad find it relevant, and they’re clicking through at a higher rate. So let’s say it’s 10%, you know, sometimes as high as 10%. I’ve had them higher, but that’s pretty darn high click through rate. You know, if you get below 3%, two and a half 1% you start getting, not much, you get a lot of impressions, not a lot of clicks, Google just stop serving your ad all together. And so you’ll wonder why isn’t my budget being spent? Well, because your ads not relevant to the traffic they’re putting you in front of. And the problem with that that they have with that is that they’re there to help it make it easy for Google find things that are relevant. So means that you need to adjust your ad copy. That means you need to adjust your strategy on how those are runs in order to make sure that your click through rate is maintained at a certain level. Those are going to be important things but but when you look at a professional or someone is going to help PPC you need to make sure that you are clear and understand what your goal is. Right. So if my goal is to get form signups, you know, like, like a click funnel, I want people to fill out a form. Okay, well, that’s a very specific goal and a very specific conversion. So I need to run very specific ad content, relevance and keywords to get those filled out. And then what is the expectation I expect five filled out a week for $500 or I expect five kilo a week for $5 what’s realistic, what’s not realistic. Um, you know, Understanding what the ask is for pay per click advertising SEO is great. But you really have to understand what am I trying to get out of this and is it in and having a lot of traffic means nothing if you can’t convert it into Seo? Yeah, you can’t convert it in and a lot of people like I have a lot of visitors on my site doesn’t mean anything. I’ve had companies I’ve had lots of visitors no selling companies, I have very few and in sell. boatloads. You know, the other thing outside of click through rate that Google is pretty hard on is bounce rate. Bounce Rate means that they came they saw they left. And it happened quickly. And a lot of times, you’ll see bounce rates, you know, can go up as high as 90% of everyone that goes to the site leaves, that’s not good. You want to get your bounce rate down, you want to get your click through rate up. You want to get your conversion rate up, you want to get your impression rate down for clicks. And so all those things are kind of creating a data file and historical data that you can Then track and adjust. But it’s a constant battle, and it’s a constant adjustment process. Professionally, there’s a lot of folks that understand PPC. But there’s a lot of not a lot that execute well. And, you know, unfortunately, that’s the world that we live in. So learning it, you know, learning from someone that knows, and has done it success. Yeah. How many? What size budgets out ask how, how big of a budget? Yeah, 

Damon Pistulka  32:29 

that’s that’s the big thing. Because if you’re running 1000 

Jeffry Graham  32:32 

a month budget or a million a month budget, right? Have you have you managed, you know, 500 per month budget, the budget amounts is going to be very important, right? Because sometimes with the past clients that we’ve had worked with huge budgets, you know, you’re spending 5060 hundred grand a month and pay per click. Yeah, and those budgets, you really better know how to run a campaign, as well. Yeah, with small budgets, you can get away with more slop and things like that. But if you burn through 100, grand and PPC, better Better be converting? Right? Yeah. So those are good questions, right? Like, like, how big of a budget have you managed? Not that it means that anything if they manage big budgets, it just gives you an idea of where their skills lie and their skills lie of Hey, I’ve managed large campaigns and small campaigns. Good. 

Damon Pistulka  33:15 

Well, yeah, and I think another one two is really about what types of products have you used Pay Per Click on because someone that’s someone that has, has done Pay Per Click for say, a law firm or a CPA firm or other an engineering firm professional services is very different from someone that’s trying to do pay per click on a flower ecommerce site that selling flowers or selling toys or something, it’s way different. Okay, so, 

Jeffry Graham  33:48 

so the big differentiation between like services, PPC and product PPC, I would say that in a service Pay Per Click model, you really want to be engaging trustworthy content. So trust trustworthiness Next time in business, you know, you know, trusted like, you want to build trust with your ad copy, right that that’s going to be really important for a service based company. For a product based company, it’s about how relevant to what I’m searching for is this product to what I want and need. And is, is solving that problem for me. So it’s a little less trust oriented and a little bit more specific to a good or service hence why Amazon has become so big because it’s just about products. It isn’t about anything, but yeah, Google, there’s two or three more steps involved, right? And for service based companies like like ours, it’s, it’s about Hey, can I trust that this person is legitimate and and what they’re saying and then also making your ad copy compelling. You know, something that I recommend a lot of people do and even the, you know, if you’re hiring somebody to stuff is to look at competition, you can do that through tools like Moz, sem, rush SpyFu and You can look at and see what kind of ads they’re running or look and read the type of ad copy that they’re running through. Or you can see what top competitors you have that are running PPC against you. That’s going to be really important because you’re going to want to see what’s working for them and it’s not working for them and you can learn from their mistakes or learn from their their copy. It’s not stealing, it’s not plagiarism. It’s just a matter of educating yourself like, hey, that doesn’t work, obviously, because they don’t they don’t get much going on that ad but man look at this ad that they spend this much money on every month like okay, yeah, 

Damon Pistulka  35:33 

yeah. And so most people do they do a good job of that, too. 

Jeffry Graham  35:37 

Yeah. And or even though even I run Google searches, and just look at ads, and you will actually see as you get better at PPC you’re gonna see ads that are just atrocious. Yeah. Oh, is that even? Someone’s managing that overseas? That’s fact. You know, most of those horrible ads, poor English, whatever. You know, a lot of that stuff’s managed by companies in India and Asia. In the Philippines, it’s very common that PPC professionals outsource their their work. So that’s also something that we should be you should consider if that’s something you’re okay with doesn’t mean it’s gonna be bad. Yeah, it’d be good, right. I mean, you know, I’ve had folks run campaigns overseas, it can be very good if it’s explained well, and it’s thorough, but it can also be, you know, yeah, pretty bad in and it can, it can hurt your business. So those are also important. You know, things to look out for, for sure. 

Damon Pistulka  36:32 

So, one of the things that you mentioned mentioned earlier, that people might not even be thinking about is click fraud. So explain what click fraud is a little bit. 

Jeffry Graham  36:44 

click fraud. So everyone’s been a victim of this. And basically, there’s companies and groups out there that will click your ads. people hire people sometimes to do that. And what it does is it kills your budget. And it’s not traffic that’s relevant. There are protections, you know, so some things that that, you know, Google has kind of gone into is you can there are software systems that will help you avoid click fraud. Yeah, but it, it’s a big deal. And basically, let’s say I’m the largest law firm in, in Seattle, we’ll just use whatever LA and I see that there’s people that are competing with me on my ad spend. A lot of times they’ll go and they’ll hire folks to to click fraud, you know, and they’ll just click those ads and they’ll burn up the other their competitors ad spent and they’re not getting anything and you’re like, Man, I’m getting all these clicks and shit. You know, no calls. No, this isn’t good. And so that does happen. It’s something you need to be conscientious of. And in understanding locations of clicks is important. You know, IP addresses If you start getting a bunch of clicks from India or something like that happens there a lot and know that you’re you can be, you know, a target of something. Yeah. So that is also something that folks don’t talk about are things to worry about or concern themselves of, because early on, you’re just new and you’re trying to build campaigns and you’re getting all these clicks, but you’re not getting relevant ones or good traffic. You can exclude those countries in your search. in Google’s settings, you can exclude those countries because if you don’t want clicks, you can exclude anyone in India cannot see an ad of mine so you have more to do that but a lot of people just don’t know how to do it. Yeah, that’s something that you can fall victim um, just be careful. It happens to all of us happens to everyone. It’s just it’s the nature of the beast. unfortunate. Yeah. 

Damon Pistulka  38:50 

Well, the in the another thing around that is is a brand name clip. Our keywords have not generated But so yeah, 

Jeffry Graham  39:00 

yeah, I have a trademark, right? If you have a trademark, I can’t use your trademark in my text or copy. Because then you can write, you can then file thing with Google saying trademark infringement. And they’ll pull that. That does not mean I can’t run the keyword to your brand name. Yeah. So let’s just say that I put, you know, ABC deal advisory, and then I use eggs a year away as a keyword. So a lot of times, Google your own name and see what ads are popping up and just understand that those folks that ads are popping up when you Google your own business name or buying your keyword, meaning that they put that into their ad keywords so that when someone types in ABC business that comes up, even if it’s not there, it’s a competitor. Yeah, keywords is a strategy I’ve yet man and it’s not a bad one. You want to be there when people are looking at other companies. I am. And so it’s frowned upon for sure. And I think that it’s, you know, it is what it is. Right, but it’s gonna happen. So yes, and that, that buying your own keywords is important and bidding on your own keywords so that if you do have someone stealing your keywords your first not second, yeah, most people are just going to click on the top. 

Damon Pistulka  40:22 

Well, and that’s that’s the sad thing about it is because they could put if my name was my company and somebody else could just use my name for their keyword and put a different company in there, put their own company different website and people will click on the first one and not even look their minds. The second one 

Jeffry Graham  40:39 

happens all the time. And what you see a lot is you see a lot of landing pages that are just gathering information and things like that. And you know, that’s what that says for Yeah, for a competitor standpoint, they’re going to buy your keywords and you’re going to buy their keywords and that’s probably what’s going to happen. Yes, especially As you get bigger, you know, go look at. I mean, Amazon buys every competitor, ecommerce competitor on earth keyword, and they advertise it on Google. So if you google something Amazon ads gonna show up. Yeah. If you Google target, pay to break into Amazon ads most likely going to be there somewhere. Yeah. And that’s because they’re buying targets keywords, and they’re buying Walmart’s keywords, and so on and so forth. So be careful of that. Make sure you check on that stuff. 

Damon Pistulka  41:28 

Yeah. So this, you know, pay per click is a big topic. There’s no doubt about it. And I think, you know, trying to navigate through the high points is difficult alone. And just you and I trying to explain this that to someone that may not know Well, I think really is if anyone wants to get into pay per click. I would say you either are going to have to invest a fair amount of time just learning up front and then different your toe into it really slowly for quite a while. And then to gradually work up because or just find, go out and find a good professional to help you because you can never get there. And that’s the point I’m trying to make. It’s one of those things that it’s like complex law, you know, you’d never want to try to do that yourself. And there’s, 

Jeffry Graham  42:22 

there’s a lot of riffraff right, because it’s easy. Take advantage. Point. Yeah, it’s a lot like SEO companies. Yeah. Oh, we’ll get you on the first page of Google. No, you won’t. Yeah, you don’t decide that Google decides who’s on first page go with their algorithms decide that you don’t decide that you can put yourself in the best position to get there. But don’t make promises like that. That’s all baloney. This was for PPC. So you know, you have to be worried that there are a lot of people that are that are going to victimize and take advantage of that that this intimidating interface and is complicated. so complicated, overwhelming, not is but if you break it in simplest form, it isn’t as complicated as it needs to be not to run really, really good stuff. And real magic campaigns. Yes, it’s, you need somebody that that knows what they’re doing. Yeah, Google will help on occasion. But again, they’re there to make money. Helping you is second to making money for them. So you have to understand Be careful that Yeah, but but the big takeaways for PPC if you’re starting a campaign, or you’re just, you know, going to advertise a bit more is, you know, the big components of it. So you know, page relevance, keyword relevance, you know, and then the rates in which you’re getting click throughs and conversions. Some of those you want hide some of those percentages you want low, but those are good gauges to start with. Yeah. But there’s a reason we go off historical data and pay per click land. And that means that you know, you’re looking over a trending period of time. You cannot, you’re going to run a campaign. And we’ll run a campaign for two weeks. And you know, you don’t just pull it right away because not hitting right away. campaigns that take a couple weeks and they start just blown up ad campaigns that that don’t hit in three weeks, and we change it and it blows up right away. I mean, there is it is a science project because Google doesn’t tell you the best way to do it. 

Damon Pistulka  44:25 

Yeah, yeah, it there’s just so many variables to that too because if you have a business where people are going to come back and repeat by you know, your campaign in the beginning, you might get a conversion and beginning and then that customer may be a customer for three or five times after that too. And you might see that your your your sales are going up, up and up, because I’m building my customer base in like a maybe in a b2b sense or something where they’re coming back 

Jeffry Graham  44:53 

at you brought that up because take advantage of remarketing, which is what we’re talking about. Yeah, you So I feel like you know, anytime you ever talk about salad bowl Salad Bowl ad comes up in your feed, right and yeah, essentially a remarketing campaign or they visited your website and then suddenly they’re getting you know, ads about your website all the time. those are those are remarketing campaigns remarketing campaigns can be done a bunch of different ways. But they’re very good because they kind of take you and they put you back in front of people. Yeah, especially if you’re if you’re getting new, new relevant traffic with your ad campaigns. If they click through your website, you know, remarket to you right. So your IP address that email address things like that is how they find you, right? Cookies, you know what those are? Everyone hates to cookies, but the cookies is how those things happen, right? Yeah. So remarketing is a real good opportunity for someone that is starting ad campaigns or PPC campaigns early on, but again, you want to make sure your remarketing relevance. You know, I’m looking for shoes and you’re remarketing me a pogo stick going to work, right. So if you’re a product company and you’re doing remarketing campaigns, you know, you have to bring it down even further to like, you got to get more in the weeds. Yeah, just your website, right is 

Damon Pistulka  46:14 

Yep. Yeah. Again, it just, it just brings up to complexity at some of this for people. And it’s not a topic that you can just jump into. I mean, and Google doesn’t care either. Quite honestly, if you set your budget high, and you you go to bed and that someone clicks away on it overnight, you can wake up with $5,000 in your got to pay in the morning. And yeah, it’s happened and we’ve been puking over it too. You know, it’s just the way it is. And there’s nothing I mean, you spent the money. So this this is why I think it is it is important, as you said to find, either do spend a lot of time getting yourself prepared to do it and do it slowly or find a good professional and vet them as you said, and get Some examples will talk to people they work with or, or whatever you need to do to feel comfortable with it. And then be the you know, it is a numbers driven thing they need to be giving you updates and weekly numbers of where you’re, you know how things are performing. So you can accurately determine for yourself Is it really making a difference or not? 

Jeffry Graham  47:21 

Yeah, and some one of the good things that I you know, we didn’t really touch on was like social media pay per click. Yeah, the thing I’ll say is there’s there’s differences searches. And I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before Damon is in a Google search is saying you’re fish, you’re a fish and you’re looking for food. a Google search means that I’m a fish and I’m searching for food. I want to find food and I know what I want and I’m looking for that same thing would be an Amazon search would be searching for food. a Facebook ad or social media ad is on the fish. I’m sitting here in this little Edie just floating around and a piece of bait comes by my face doesn’t necessarily mean that Looking for it, it doesn’t mean I’m interested in it. And but it’s just up there some bait, I could jump on it or not. So there’s two very different ways in which you run pay per click advertising on social media and Google social media is highly developed off curiosity, click bait is a huge thing. But for the most part, those are the two difference in the two nuances between a search campaign social media campaigns, social media campaigns, or just dropping something maybe relevant in front of you You weren’t looking for, and, or thinking about maybe, and there it is, versus I’m actually looking for that. And I’m searching for right now. Yeah, yeah, those are two things, the way to kind of put your mind and how people are finding you on Facebook versus on Google. If you run your Facebook ad. They’re very friendly and the way they’re run is very different. But that just gives you kind of a general why and the way it works, per se, super superficial way. 

Damon Pistulka  49:00 

Really good point there. Well, Jeff, it’s been great talking about pay per click a little bit, I know that we probably gotten in the weeds too far for some, but I just come back to this Pay Per Click is critical in business anymore. I mean, really, I don’t know there’s a business that you can really run anymore without at least considering it because you’re, you’re missing out on getting in front of a lot more customers. And doing it now it’s not easy, or anything like that. But people like yourself, if someone wants to reach out to you, the best place to get you is through LinkedIn or through the Denver consulting firm. And they can get all your hair 

Jeffry Graham  49:41 

and even if I’m not going to do it, or you know, but I’ll know somebody and we know people that that are affected by this and I still run PPC campaigns this day, you know, and yeah, it’s, it’s something I’ve done a long time. And I love to do it’s just, you know, we we had to learn by screwing up a lot. Making a lot of mistakes and, and it’s evolved a lot changed. But just think about it, the internet is getting more crowded every day because now more ecommerce now more remote. So and there’s still only the first four or five pages of Google that exist. There’s ever going to be more than that. So let’s, you know, you have to be thinking about leveraging PPC to give you a chance. Yeah, just to give you a swing, you know, swing of the bat to swing the bat, because otherwise, the more crowded against the harder the SEOs gonna become and has become, the harder the, I mean, there’s so many things, they’re changing all the time. 

Damon Pistulka  50:36 

Yeah. Yeah, you bring up a good point, and we’ll talk with others about SEO. But you know, SEO is a part of it. It’s just pay per click and get you there today. And SEO needs to be working in the background to get you there over the long run, but help reduce your overall costs and increase your traffic but it’s, it’s a combined effort in all these strategies to get more more relevant people to your websites. 

Jeffry Graham  50:58 

And a lot of times, we get SEO On stuff we don’t want SEO on. Yeah, like man that that keywords give me traffic but I want this keyword to give me traffic but they’re not giving me no love there because they have this other company that’s been doing it for 10 years and has a lot more tenure and relevance and things. So they’re winning this Yeah. Battle there. So yeah, but I can I can play with anyone on PPC. Yeah, the one the one with Amazon head to head. Yeah, you know, obviously me almost trillion dollar company and with some little company can compete with them one to one, we have that ability. But just be careful with how you do it. There’s a lot a lot too. And, you know, maybe down the road, we’re going to do more specific ones and how to make an ad and stuff we can get into that. But for the most part, I think we covered a lot of the basics. 

Damon Pistulka  51:45 

Yeah. Yeah. No good stuff. Well, thanks a lot, Jeff. Very happy again on the on the roundtable. And we’ll look forward to getting you back again. And I think I think one of these next ones, we’re going to get get some of these assets. Yo guys on that we know and toggle. It’d be fun. If you find it out. We’ll find out. We’ll find out that it’s all good. You know, cuz like I said, it’s all got to work together to do it right because it’s good. Yeah, you know, there’s just a lot of pieces they got to fit. So 

Jeffry Graham  52:15 

it’s live scan of cat de se or something. Yep, 

Damon Pistulka  52:17 

yep. Awesome. Yeah, and thanks, everybody for watching, and we’ll be back again next week. 

Jeffry Graham  52:24 

Sounds good.