James: James Schramko here from jamesschramko.com with Ilana Wechsler from teachtraffic.com. Good day, Ilana.
Ilana: Good day, James! How are you going?
James: Great! Love having our little conversations about traffic with you, especially recently, I’ve been more active in my Google AdWords account, started up a couple of little campaigns. I’m curious to know, at this point, what sort of advice would you give to someone in terms of the essential campaigns to consider for a new AdWords setup?
Ilana: All right, really good question. So for someone like you, where you’ve got a bit of a name out there already, I think at an absolute minimum, I would have a brand campaign. Own your own real estate, bid on your name James Schramko, bid on your business name, etc. Because if you maybe did a Google search of yourself, you might see that other people are bidding on you and your brand and your name.
So I’m a big believer in owning your own real estate. Some people think, Why would I do that? You know, people are searching for me anyway, why would I pay for that? And the answer is, you don’t actually pay that much when it is your own brand name. I mean, it’s really like cents on the dollar kind of thing. And if someone’s searching for you, I think you want to be, as I said, own your own real estate. Do you agree?
James: Yeah, it is actually the first campaign I set up and the primary driver for me being interested in it, it makes sense to me to convert back people looking for me back into my own assets. And as you said, it’s not that expensive, and also a very high conversion. I’m sure it’s super relevant. And that’s what Google’s trying to deliver, right?
Ilana: That’s exactly right. So yeah, at a minimum, I’d bid on your own brand. For your ad that you are showing for your brand, I would make sure that you are utilizing all the available real estate given to you in that ad copy. So that’s up to three headlines and two descriptions. As well as what’s called ad extensions, which are as they sound extensions to your ad. So make sure you’re doing that.
So you got all the available real estate that you can utilize for the same cost per click, it doesn’t cost any more for the ad extensions. And if you kind of want to get really, really snazzy and up to date with the latest technology, you can kind of lean in on Google’s AI machine learning. And maybe you’ve kind of heard a little bit about that bandied around where you can do what’s called responsive search ads or otherwise known as RSA, where you give Google lots of variations of headlines and descriptions, and they will mix and match them. And split test the different variations of combinations. It’s pretty cool.
James: It’s kind of like what we used to do manually. And they’re putting their machine to work. Definitely been hearing a lot about it on some of my podcast guests, people speaking at my event, I’m seeing evidence of it. They’re even good now with their suggested email replies, their analytics is showing me future trends and things, there’s a lot happening there. So I’m sure their platform is definitely worth paying attention to in terms of the power that it can deliver.
And so what I’m hearing is, it’s worth taking that time to put a few extra headlines and body copies and calls to actions so that you’ve got more potential success recipes.
Ilana: That’s right. And I guess, you know, Google will mix and match them so many different ways and different variations that would be so labor intensive for an individual person to do manually. And why not kind of get them to split test and then they can optimize really quickly as to the variations that will work.
But I will mention that the responsive search ads you need, it’s a different ad type in your ad account, okay? So it’s different. It’s not just a standard text ad. It’s a responsive search ad.
James: That’s where I get a little bit lost, logging into their interface. And it’s handy having someone like you to help me out.
I like what you’re doing at teachtraffic.com. You’ve got an education portal where people like me can ask questions, you will answer it. It’s kind of like you don’t have to do this by yourself or figure it out or pay the dreaded Google tax for making all the mistakes possible.
Actually, the chances of someone setting up an account from scratch, without making several blunders, will be quite rare. So someone who’s in there every day, spending a big budget, sees everything and can lead you to the gold much faster. So I appreciate these tips.
Ilana: No worries, James. Yeah, there are lots of little sneaky, default or recommended settings that Google put in. I call them the Google land mines that are really designed to make Google more money and you just spend more money unnecessarily often. So yeah, there’s lots of those little things around that you got to watch out for.
James: Gotcha. Well, I’m going to ask you a few more questions on the next training. So thanks so much for sharing today, Ilana.
Ilana: No worries. Thanks, James.
James: There you go, Ilana from teachtraffic.com.
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