198: Using Google Ads as a Blogger with Chris Schaeffer

In this episode I talk about some new courses on Food Blogger Pro and then Bjork interviews Chris Schaefer all about Google Ads. Hey, hey, hey, lovely listener. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Happy Tuesday once again. Before we hop into the episode today, I'd like to take a second to thank our sponsors, our sister site, WP Tasty. WP Tasty is the place for handcrafted plugin solutions for Food bloggers. If you're in the market for a beautiful and SEO friendly way to display your recipes, a way to optimize your images for Pinterest, or a way to maximize affiliate revenue and internal linking, WP Tasty has you covered. You can learn more over@wptasty.com and for today's Tasty tip, I want to take a quick second to chat about some of the new courses we've actually just published on Food Blogger Pro. Now, these courses are only available to Food Blogger Pro members, but if you're not a Food Blogger Pro member, my hope is that you'll find this quick rundown helpful as a way to show you what we're working on and what we're finding helpful as we navigate blogging in 2019. Some of our new courses and course updates include the Pomodoro technique and this is a time management method that helps you break down your tasks into manageable 25 minute distraction free intervals. It can be an extremely helpful technique if you're having trouble getting started, staying on task, or actually completing your tasks. This course has a downloadable PDF to go along with it to help you track your Pomodoros as well. The next one is how to add emojis to blog posts in forum threads. So we just migrated our Food Blogger Pro site over to WordPress and one of the things we're most excited about with this switch is the fact that you can now use emojis on the foodlogger Pro forum. That is pretty awesome. Adding an emoji to a conversation on your phone is incredibly simple, but on your computer it's it's a little bit more difficult. This course will actually teach you three ways how to easily add emojis to not only Food Blogger Pro forum threads, but to your blog posts and beyond. The next new course that we added was actually a course update for Adobe Lightroom. So Lindsay, our fabulous co founder and pinch of Yum boss woman, updated our old Lightroom course with new workflows, tips and tricks like using presets, editing for different moods, efficiency and more. And then last but not least Another course update was for Facebook. So we all know what Facebook is, but there are a few tips and tricks that you can use to help you share the best content for this platform. You'll also learn some tips and tricks for stories, Facebook Live groups and more. And that's just within the past few weeks. We are always adding new content and updating older content. So if you're a member, be sure to keep your eye on our courses@foodbloggerpro.com courses and if you have any ideas for new courses you'd like to see on Food Blogger Pro, I am all ears. You can let me know@alexaoodbloggerpro.com. And now the interview. We see ads all the time, but do you know how to run, optimize and analyze your own ads? Enter Chris Schaefer. He's actually working with our WP Tasty team to help them optimize their Google Ads. So so he's here today to chat about the strategies, tools and placements you can consider as you're getting ads set up for your own content. If the idea of running your own ads makes you want to cry, I am right there with you. But this episode will actually calm those nerves and give you a great starting point to a pain free ad strategy. So without any further ado, Bjork, you can take it away.

Chris, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Yeah, it's going to be great to chat all about advertising and advertising as it relates specifically to Google, but what I wanted to start with is actually maybe a little bit of a branding question as it relates to ads and Google Ads. Because there's this change that happened recently and I still it reminds me of growing up, we had this small grocery store and it was called More for and then it rebranded to County Market, but everybody still called it More for. And I feel like that same thing applies to Google Ads and AdWords. So can you talk about what this change is, what's happening and for a lot of people that used to call it AdWords, what it is now and why it was rebranded?

Yeah, I know that there's been a lot of confusion about that and in the end it's still the same system. AdWords is the old name and with a rebranding, Google has named it Google Ads, which makes sense because they wanted their own name in the Google Ads name. So it makes makes sense that they would do that. As far as how the system works differently from a user perspective, someone that's searching on Google, there's basically Some longer, more detailed ads that show up on Google is if you search for something, you'll see more content. The ads will be longer, they'll have more what we call headlines and description lines. But as far as the user end goes, nothing's really changed. But if you are a AdWords manager, things have changed a lot. There are no more features that used to be very common to managers. Back in the day, we would have a lot of features that have changed or been repurposed for something. Now we have a completely different user interface. The colors have changed, which was quite a shock. I mean, I'm in. I'm in AdWords every single day. And, you know, when they changed the colors from red to blue, it was, you know, it was quite a.

Quite a shift. But so this is interesting. It's even. You even kind of pulled them more for there were AdWords, so it's technically that goo. Is that Google Ads? Like, is it still kind of this synonymous thing where people say Google Ads and they mean adwords or adwords and they mean Google Ads? You can switch them out.

Yeah, they're both. They're both exactly the same. They mean the same thing. And I use them all the time, interchangeably. I try and use the right Google Ads name, but it's the same thing.

Got it. Okay. And what was interesting for me, I didn't actually realize that I thought it was just a rebranding, but in talking with you, I just realized, oh, there's actually things that changed about the product and even about the deliverable. So you talk about what the ad looks like when you do a search. I didn't realize that in changing the name to Google Ads, there's also some things that changed behind the scenes. And you talked about, especially for you as a Google Ads Manager, and so now that people have a kind of an idea between the difference of these two things, maybe if we even zoom back a little bit more. Can you describe what Google Ads is? Or AdWords as it used to be called. And for a consumer, or like a Muggle, normal people that aren't Google Ads managers, how would we know what our Google Ads and how do we see them every day?

Yeah. So Google Ads is basically the platform that you log into to tell Google where you want your ads to show. That's the simplest way to explain it. You have to have some way to explain to the Google system, the Google Ads system, what keywords you want your ads to show up when they're searched or what websites you want your image ads to show. Or which content you want your YouTube ads to show. It's. It's a, I think, incredibly direct system. I mean, there's very few advertising platforms where you can choose. You know, I want to show up when someone types size 9 red women shoes. You know, I mean, there. There's not many ways that you can be so direct. And this is the platform that you do that on. And after years of working in the system, I think it's wonderful. But if you're new, it can be very complex and confusing. There's a lot of buttons, a lot of options, and it can be very overwhelming.

Yeah, it's interesting. One of the things that I've noticed with Google Ads as a user of Google, as I'm sure everybody listens to this podcast, is, is the actual ad display. And there's lots of different types of ways that Google Ads would show up. But right now I'm speaking specifically about using Google as a search engine. You type in a keyword and. Or type in your search phrase and there'll be ads that show up. And I remember back in the day, way back, if we roll back the tape of Google and the UI of what it looks like, the ads would be in this box, and I think it was maybe like a yellow background and it'd be really, really obvious that those were ads. But that's kind of changed over the years. And Google Ads are. They still have a little. And maybe it's a green. I'm trying to remember what it is, a little tag next to them. But they look more like a natural search result. So have you noticed that ads are, over time becoming more effective as Google kind of merges them into search a little bit more so they look a little bit more natural?

Well, I think Google Ads has always been effective in bringing the right kind of traffic, but I think now users are less aware when they click an advertisement. They look very much the same as an organic ad over the years, you're right, there was a background color, there was a couple different types of colors they used, and if you remember, this kind of disappeared very subtly. But there used to be ads on the right side of the search result, and now there's only ads at the top and ads at the bottom. You may not even know there's ads at the bottom, which there's a reason advertisers don't show up there much. But that is absolutely something that's changed because it's a blending of the content. And overall, I'm happy. I think a lot of advertisers are happy because it does help us deliver the right kind of content to people without them being skeptical that, oh, this is in the yellow box. You don't trust the yellow box because it's an ad.

Yeah, interesting. So essentially, Google Ads is kind of the cash cow, as I understand it, for Google. It's like how Google makes most of their money and it shows up in different places. Search is the one we're most familiar with, but there's also some other places and you actually kind of mentioned those. Can you talk about the other places where an ad from Google might show up? Is it websites you had mentioned YouTube? Where are some other places where Google Ads exist on the web?

So, of course, search is huge and that's where most people are obviously aware of it, because they go to google.com and then they see an ad, so they know that's a Google Ad. But beyond that is what we advertisers refer to as the display network. The display network is not just websites, it goes beyond that. Nowadays, mobile traffic makes up a significant part of traffic on the Internet. For pretty much any industry you're going after, you're going to see sometimes 60, 40 between mobile desktop, so it makes a big difference. And so on mobile phones. The display network now encompasses mobile apps, which used to not even exist years ago. I mean, it was just what websites do you want to show on? Now you can show up on mobile phones and if you ever see your toddler, you know, clicking on something on your iPad, your phone, and suddenly you look and they're looking at a life insurance website and you wonder, how did you get there? That's because they had an ad that was on their free app and they tapped on it.

It sounds like you might be speaking from experience with that one.

Yes. It's something of a bit of annoyance that I see many of my clients spending money on things like toddler apps and coloring apps and things like that. And it happens. And this is. This is why I have a job, is because it's important to make sure that your clicks that you're spending money on are not from toddlers coloring digital pictures.

The conversion rate on insurance for toddlers coming from coloring sites, I would assume is very low. So you don't want to be spending money there. So interesting. So that. That's. You talked about the display network. I think a great example to visualize that for people is like one aspect of the display network would be retargeting. So if you. A website and you look. This happened with my father in law when he was. So we have a food blog, recipe blog, pinch of Yum. And he was on the site and he said, this is. There's a weird connection here because I was just looking at these basketball hoops, and now I can see you're running ads on your site for these basketball hoops. But what was actually happening was, I'm guessing there's lots of ad networks to do this, but the Google Display network was retargeting, meaning there's a pixel that was placed on his web browser. And so then now that company says, hey, anytime that somebody comes to my site and doesn't buy my basketball hoop, when they go somewhere else, if that site is running Google AdSense, then we want to put an ad there and retarget them. Which brings me to my next question. We've talked about Google Ads and AdWords, but then there's also this thing called AdSense. So what's the difference between AdWords and AdSense?

So AdWords is for advertisers like me, people who are trying to get ads out there. And AdSense is essentially the billboard that we try and get our ads on. So we have to pay Google Money. The advertiser pays Google money in order to get an ad shown on those digital billboards, the blogs, the websites, the mobile apps, all those things. So the difference when you are on the flip side of that is you just have a placeholder on your site and you are part of the AdSense network. So from an advertiser's point of view, we don't really think about how much you're getting paid. We think about how much we are paying Google to get placed on that website. And there are some websites that have higher demand. They will have a higher bid requirement in order to show up. So instead of paying just a few cents, we might have a higher requirement that shows. So the amount of availability for those ads might be less on some websites and more on others. And that all determines how much we have to pay to get listed on those.

Yeah, that's interesting. So, and a point of clarification for people that listen to this podcast, a lot of bloggers will potentially work with an ad network. So they might work with an ad network like AdThrive, which is the company we use, or Mediavine, which is a company a lot of other bloggers use. But it's important to know that those companies are working with a lot of other companies that are doing advertising. And. And they will work with Google to help run some of those ads. So even if you have a blog and it's running mediavine, it's running Ad Thrive underneath that, over the Ad Thrive umbrella or the mediavine umbrella or whatever ad network you are using, they will also be partnering with Google behind the scenes. So chances are if you have a blog, you are also using AdSense and you're on your site, you have some of this stuff happening for the Google Display network. So a follow up question on that would be you had talked about kind of the window and so my guess is that different types of content is more valuable and we talk a lot about food blogs and recipe blogs and people creating content around that. But there's also all types of other blogs, there's finance blogs, there's people who blog about travel. Are there industries where you had kind of referenced this that it's more expensive or less expensive? And do you have some examples of what those might be in terms of you as the person that's running ads, trying to get clicks? You know, hey, this is going to be an industry that's really, really expensive. And the cost per click, how much it costs for somebody to click on that ad is going to be high. And not that you have to, you know, paint the picture with every category, but I think it's helpful for people to understand kind of the value of content as it relates to advertising.

$ yes, absolutely. As an advertiser, it's not necessarily a relation to always wanting to be on one in particular site. It's more about the way that we show ads to people based on the targeting. So if I am a, I was just working with a company just earlier today that was trying to reach dentists and they are a B2B company that provides a service to dentists. And so therefore it would be great to show up on pages that dentists might be reading. It might be about dental equipment, it might be about the dentist business, all kinds of different ways that relate to the business of dentistry. So this would be more expensive because this would represent a much smaller targeted network of content. And so I would probably pay more. But if I was working with a client that had a car and was trying to reach people that might be interested in buying a new car, my goodness, there's a lot of opportunity there. And just auto everywhere, whether it's automobiles, new used, repairing and, you know, modifications, there's all kinds of ways that we can reach content related to that. So that might not be quite as expensive because of the amount of demand out there. So it's especially valuable to find. For me, I Work with a lot of B2B companies, businesses reaching other businesses for those services. So it's important to reach industry specific pages. And that unique content can be very valuable to advertisers like me because the people coming to that page are valuable to my client. They're valuable to sell that service. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily a, you know, any certain websites that somebody will pay more for. It's more about how unique is that content? How valuable is that content to a certain industry?

Got it. I think it's helpful to provide that on both sides of the story because a lot of people that are producing content and running ads against it don't have a really clear understanding of what's happening behind the scenes. And there's lots and lots of layers to ads and advertising, but this is one of them. It's people going in and saying, hey, there's content out there. I want to run my ads against that content. So even if people don't use Google Ads for their business, it's helpful to know a little bit about what's happening on the other side so you can have some understanding of what that looks like on your site when you do see those ads show up. But I do want to ask about when should people consider using Google Ads as part of their business strategy? One of the questions that we often get is, hey, I have a blog. I want to figure out ways to get more traffic to my site. Maybe I should be using things like Google Ads or Facebook ads or whatever ads it would be to pay to get people to show up to my site. So is that something that people should be considering? At what point should they consider that? How do you know if you are a business that should be using Google Ads or not?

Yeah, I would say that the, the mathematics just don't really work out very well if you want to use an advertising platform to send paid traffic to a site that you're then running AdSense on. Because here's how it might work. You could bring people to your site for. There might be a way to work out to bring people to your site from the display Network for $0.01 per click. You could get very cheap traffic. Okay, I'm gonna go back to the beginning of what we were talking about. You're gonna be getting traffic from little miss toddler coloring on her phone.

Sure.

You're going to get traffic that is not warranted to be very valuable. There is gobs and gobs of impressions out there and clicks that can be gathered up. But most of it, I'd say 99% of it is going to be junk traffic that will immediately bounce. They won't engage with your site and they're not useful for really anybody because there's no value for the person coming. So it's unlikely that that person will read the content. They probably don't even mean to be there. They might be clicked. There's a lot of apps out there that will trick you into clicking an ad. A lot of websites that'll trick you into clicking an ad. And that's the cheap stuff that you're gonna end up getting. And if you say, okay, well, I want something more valuable, now you're getting into something where you might need to pay 35 cents, 50 cents, a dollar for this traffic, and now it just becomes a bucket you're throwing money into because you're not gonna be able to get the adsense value from Something that's costing 50 cents per click, right?

And some people might be playing the math game a little bit and saying, hey, so if it's $0.01 per click and I can get a thousand clicks and that's, you know, $10 that I pay for it, and in a really good month, maybe my blog is making it. There's a lot of. It depends with this $15 RPM. So that means that I could do kind of an arbitrage play and just get a bunch of people to click and come over. But I think the important thing to point out is what you, hey, that's not valuable traffic. Those people are coming and leaving. And the RPM or the amount that you get paid per 1,000 page views or impressions or, you know, 1,000 visits to your site, there's a lot of different ways that you'd say it, but we'll say page views, 1000 page views to your site. That's probably pretty valuable traffic, especially if it's organic, because people are going to be searching for something online. They're going to be clicking and they're going to be thinking, hey, is this right for me? They're going to be reading, they're going to be scrolling through it. If you have a recipe, they're going to be going down and reading through it. All of that is engagement, which doesn't exist with just a pure click from a coloring ad by a toddler, right? So, you know, they might be temporarily interested and especially if it's like a cupcake recipe or something like that, but they're not going to be actually spending time engaging with the content in a way that somebody would from organic search. So if not a smart play for content, who is it a smart play for? Who are the online business owners that should be thinking strategically and thinking about implementing Google Ads for their business?

When there is a clear call to action that has some type of financial benefit for what you're doing, whether you are generating leads or you're selling a product, or maybe you're just trying to garner email signups to something or white paper downloads, there's some type of value to getting that out there, maybe branding, something like that, then it would probably make sense to try it. But when it comes, I mean, you said the magic word click arbitrage. I mean there's, there's a reason, there's a word for that. It just, you're trying to wag the dog rather than the way that the system is supposed to work. It's not going to work by forcing traffic, useless traffic into your system. So if you have some type of purpose to driving that traffic and that traffic is targeted in some kind of significant way, at least you're making decisions about the content that they're viewing and then they see your ad that's somewhat related to that, that and they click on it, then okay, you've, you've provided relevant content to a real person, they click on it. And the problem is that it will cost money. The days of getting traffic for fractions of a cent, at least on AdWords, I don't think is a real thing anymore because nowadays there's, there's just too many people out there, too many opportunities to, to get clicks at super cheap. And it just doesn't mean anything. There's no real value for that.

Yeah, it's kind of that classic economics of supply and demand. And at one point there was a lot of supply with Google Ads and not a lot of demand. And so it was really cheap. But that changes as it becomes people are like, hey, this is super cheap. And then people are like, you know, the herd of people coming over because they're like, hey, we can buy really good traffic really cheap. And, and then it's not cheap anymore because there's more demand for it and the supply maybe doesn't change and so it gets more expensive and you have to be more strategic about it. So that's where somebody like you comes into play, where you understand the intricacies of how you target and how you get really specific and how you can make those decisions. So you are sure spending money, but spending money in a way where you are getting money in return and that's when ads really work out. It's interesting. The more and more I learn about startups, the more I'm starting to see and these are like, you know, not necessarily even bootstrap startups, but venture backed startups, which they have money from investors and, you know, they're trying to figure out ways to grow really quickly. One of the most important elements is that they're thinking about how do we integrate ads to our growth strategy. And if we pay $100 to get a user and we know the they call it the LTV, the lifetime value of that customer is $300, then over time it makes sense for us to do that. So would you say at its core, if you're trying to decide if you should be running Google Ads or not, one of the early filters you should pass that through is like if you are selling an actual product that you are charging for, is that a good kind of qualifier for Google Ads?

I would say yes. There needs to be, like you said, some type of value derived from the money spent. And it's typically going to be because you have some type of financial requirement for the person to acquire what you're selling. It needs to be something. I think the filter that a lot of people could put on it is if you're measuring success of your AdWords campaign based on clicks, then you're probably doing it wrong. You won't find a successful AdWords campaign that only derives success based on the click number or the number of impressions that you're getting. Because there is really no value in traffic itself. There is value in focused, qualified traffic because that represents real people. But just traffic for the sake of traffic is completely without value.

Yeah. And it's a little bit of a mindset shift. I think for a lot of people that are used to content based businesses where it's like, hey, traffic goes up and income goes up because that traffic is attached to advertising dollars. But the switch happens when you start to think not about traffic, but about revenue or ROI. So return on investment. So if you invest $100, what's the return on that? If you invest $100 and get 200 back, that's a new dial that you can dial up in order to increase growth. Because hey, I would exchange one penny for two pennies all day long. And that's essentially what ads are when they are effective is you're exchanging, you have this dollar, you give a dollar and you get $2. And you say, okay, now that we found this, let's ramp this up and do this as effective as possible. A good example would be so for Pinch of Yum, which is the food and recipe blog that we have, we aren't running ads and we probably never will run any type of Google Ads. Except there are some areas where we could maybe think about running ads. And an example would be we have an ebook on food photography and we could experiment and say, hey, if we start to pinpoint some really targeted keywords and some phrases, maybe we can get people who are searching to improve their food photography to come to the page and not everybody's going to purchase, but maybe a select few of those people will purchase and we could maybe get the numbers to work where we are paying less than we're making from running those ads. So if somebody's in that position and they're starting to say, hey, I maybe have a product that I could promote on Google Ads, or maybe my business is product based and not advertising based, what are the first steps in getting up and running with Google Ads? Like you said at the beginning of the podcast, there's so many different components of it. You get in and it's kind of overwhelming. And you know, that's why you have a thriving business, is because you help people navigate that. But let's say if somebody was just starting out and kind of experimenting with that, what are the first steps that they should take and what are the different areas they need to be paying attention to? And I totally understand that's a very big question with lots of, lots of different potential ways to tackle it.

Right? So if you're looking to generate leads or sell a product, I think the very first place that I consider is Google search. That's often the best place to get the most ROI return on investment out of a campaign. Because as I said before, people are very intentional and intentional about what they're doing. They are searching for something. You have a keyword that is based on what those people might be searching. And when they search that term, they see your ad and they click on it and they could be interested. So that's probably one of the best ways to first consider getting traffic. Now, if you are running into issues where maybe you can't really come up with keywords, people aren't necessarily searching for something that you're, that you're selling. It's some kind of product that doesn't have a whole lot of volume to it. And if you go outside of the boundaries of that focused type of search, you don't really find a lot of qualified traffic. It's just a Lot of traffic that doesn't convert, then it's a possibility that you might want to try displaying. So display is going to be much cheaper. To give an idea, you might, you know, if I'm going to be advertising a, you know, home remodeling service, I might pay 5, 6, $7 per click, which is significant. We're talking, you know, thousands of dollars or, you know, a couple hundred dollars, depending on how much you want to spend to get the right amount of traffic on search. But on display, I might only pay $0.60, $0.70, $0.80, depending on how aggressive I want to be for the display network. Now, home remodeling has plenty of search behind it, so it would probably be a better investment to go into search. But if you wanted to try and reach people that were looking at content, have, as we call in the Google Ads side, an affinity for a specific type of thing. So there's ways to target a person's affinity or interest or search history based on what they've been searching for. We can target those people, individuals, and it might be worth reaching out to them before they do a search for home remodeling. And so that's a, that's another avenue to go in. And then probably if you are in the business of reaching people, that takes a little bit longer to sell them on something. If it's not an emergency type of service like a plumber or you know, some ac repair that needs someone right now and as soon as the problem solved, they don't need to see you again, then remarketing is a great avenue to go to, which is on the display network. Again, it happens on the display network. And you, like you mentioned before, it shows to people who've been to your site before. So if you're trying to sell an ebook, if you're trying to sell a service or a product, remarketing is a phenomenal way. And it's typically very cheap. Because it's on the display network, it's going to be very cheap per click. And also you're only advertising to a few thousand people rather than a few million people. So the expense is going to be very small.

Yeah, that's great. And it's one of the things that I often hear about with people in your circle is just how smart it is to set up remarketing, or I had to call it retargeting earlier, both with Facebook and Google, because you know right away that these are people that have come to your site and in some way have been interested in what you're doing. And you can set that up in a way where you only are showing them ads if they haven't purchased. Now, it's important to point out again that we're talking about this in regards to some type of product or service or offering. And maybe a good way to paint that picture is to talk about the businesses that we run and that we're in the process of getting up and running with Google Ads. So we have WP Tasty, which is a WordPress plugin site, and we're working to get remarketing and then also search set up for that. And what we found is, hey, we have a lot of traction with these plugins. We have three plugins, Tasty Recipes, Tasty Pins and Tasty Links. People are using those, they're buying those, they're liking them, or they're sticking around. They have a super low churn rate. So we said, hey, it makes sense for us to invest in reaching additional people because we've proven these products. It's not a super high traffic site. It's not like Pinch of Yum where there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that are coming. It's low traffic, but it's really targeted and we know that we can set up ads and be really strategic about that. Food Blogger Pro, the membership site would be another example of a site where we could start to set up some of these strategic advertising campaigns around because there's a really specific product around it. But Pinch of Yum, we're never going to set up remarketing for people that came to look at a chocolate chip cookie recipe to try and get them to come back to that chocolate chip cookie recipe. Because the ROI on that, the return on that just isn't worth it. It doesn't make sense. So for you that are listening to the podcast, think strategically about what are the things on your site that might be service or product related and how can you then start to think about not just organic? So often we think about just organic traffic. But how can you be strategic in starting to play around with and experiment with paid acquisition? So you're instead of trying to figure out Google and showing up at the top, you're actually just paying to show up at the top for really specific keywords. And then if those people come and purchase from you, it's because not your organic rank, but because you paid to show up at the top. So maybe a couple examples there to help things out. The last area that I would be interested to hear your thoughts on would be YouTube. So YouTube is owned by Google. And there's a lot of ads that are shown on YouTube. We all know, you know that ad that will show up before we watch a video and you can a lot of times skip to go to the next ad. But is that something if somebody has a product or service that they should be considering and how do those ads work on you? YouTube.

YouTube. I think right now my favorite type of YouTube strategy is remarketing. I think using YouTube as a remarketing system is great because the cost per view is very small. We're talking just a few cents. You know, even compared to the display network, you can get views on YouTube for even cheaper. So I'd say it's in its infancy compared to what the display network used to be. It's a little bit more expensive on the display network to get some targeted traffic, but it absolutely is a great branding and remarketing platform. I don't often assign YouTube to a lead generation or sales system because again, people don't necessarily go there as specifically as what they do on Google. They don't expect to find an ad shown to them that has a solution that's a product pitch or a sales pitch. It's not this weird space between a search engine and a social network. You know, it's, it's entertainment, but it's also informative, informing, so it's really interesting. So I've yet to find it to be a true lead generation source, but there's plenty of adwords managers out there that probably could prove me wrong. But in just my experience, I think it's phenomenal for, you know, if you have a local campaign, you know, we talked about advertising cars. If you have a, you know, a local car dealership, I mean you probably see plenty of those ads. I mean, you know, probably name off very quickly the ads that you see on Google and they're, they're usually a specific type of thing. They're very focused. You know, they're either big brands or maybe local companies, things like that. And I think it works. It's, it's definitely worth the price, but not necessarily for lead gen. Sure, that's great.

And so idea with that would be you go to a site, you check it out, maybe they have a service, they have a product, not interested, you don't purchase, you go over to YouTube and then you suddenly see an ad for it and what they're doing is they're remarketing to you. They say, hey, we knew you were on our site before, you didn't buy. But we Want to have another touch point here to talk a little bit more about that thing that you were looking at and potentially purchasing that. And you can get really targeted and who that is and could be based on location and it could be based on, you know, how many, how long they're on the site, things like that, where you can get really specific and retargeting or remarketing to those people.

Yeah. And what's really cool about YouTube ads is you can craft your own message in any way that you want. A display ad that shows on a blog or website is very flat. It doesn't have any audio, it has no personality other than, you know, some stock images and flat numbers. It's all kind of annoying and you've seen it a million times. But you can use creativity to come up with a YouTube ad that could really grab someone's attention in a lot of different ways. So, I mean, there's a whole lot more of a creative platform to use YouTube to grab for branding purposes or for, you know, remarketing and trying to pitch that thing again to someone. Come back to our site for this purpose. And there's, there's a lot of different ways to use ads. Whether they are the quick non skippable ads, which are just six seconds long, and then there's the skippable ads which not only lead to a, to a, an impression that you don't have to pay anything for if the person skips it. If the person skips the ad, you don't have to pay for it. But if they don't skip the ad, you've now garnered a view. That's when the person has watched it beyond that skippable time. And now you have, you know, potentially generated some interest. They might watch your 5 minute video and you've engaged them for just a few pennies. There's a lot of messaging that can be done in a good YouTube video.

That's great. So a lot of things that we covered here, I think people that have a product or have a service will have some ideas on how they could implement that. And what I want to wrap up with is speaking to those people and letting them know how they could potentially work with you, but wrapping that into actually your story. And usually we start off the podcast with talking about people's story and how they got started. But one of the things that I think is interesting and I'm always in, I'm always trying to broaden the perspective of what it could look like to have an online business. And that's what you have. So you are using podcasts, you are using media, you have a website, you are doing lead generation and you are working out of your home in Texas and you have an online business. So that's a lot of the people that listen to this are interested in doing that, in kind of gathering and gaining freedom in choosing their own path or working on something they love. And you are doing that. And I think it's interesting and helpful to have conversations around how people got to where they are in their online business. So could you share kind of an overview of how you got started with this and what it's like for you to run your agency of helping people with search and understand Google Ads?

Yeah, it was something that I kind of stumbled into back in the early days of AdWords. I'm going to use the old term AdWords as it used to be called. Back in 2003, I helped my dad's company set up his Google Ads campaign. I didn't really know much about it, but I played with it and kind of learned it and then found out, oh, that's interesting. I can get hired in house for a company that wants someone to do it full time. So I got a job there, still very new. And then I learned more and more and then I found out others, entire agencies that work with a bunch of clients. I could do that as a big time account manager and got a job there. And then after my second job, it was really a corporate gig, which I found out pretty quick. I didn't like. I didn't like wearing those expensive clothes and dressing nice and saying hello to people that I didn't really want to say hello to. And so I ended up starting my own gig and just started with a few clients on my own. And what really drove the business for me is because I specialized. What I sometimes refer to doesn't sound very professional, but I refer to myself as a freelancer. I mean, it doesn't sound like someone who has 15 years of experience, but I do and I like to choose who I work with and the types of companies I work with and, and I don't have employees. I don't have anyone that works with me. I have some people that I send work to, but I'm a freelancer and a specialist in Google Ads. That's all I do. And I think that's what really drove the value for a lot of people is I don't want to hire an agency because agencies are expensive and I don't want them to manage my SEO. I don't Want them to, you know, pitch me in all these services. And I have an account manager I have to talk to, but I can't talk to the actual guy that does the work and all this kinds of stuff. The price is a whole lot more expensive because they have a whole lot more overhead. That's what really drove the business forward for me is the uniqueness of being a specialist, being a freelancer in one thing. And found out that locally in my area, I can't really sell my service very far.

Right.

I mean, as an AdWords manager, there's only so many mom and pop shops that I can sell it to. But when I went and started creating a name nationally and now with our podcast that I do internationally, I can suddenly take something that is available, very small, specialty, and scale it across, you know, millions, billions of people. And there's going to be someone out there that just needs that one little thing and I can sell it and do that, you know, for lots of people. And suddenly a small price service can be something that I can, you know, live on, something that I can do on a small scale multiple times and, and make a very good living with.

Yeah, I think there's two things specifically that are so helpful within that. One is specializing. And we talk about how important that is, especially with content early on to have a real specific thing that you're focusing on. What is your specialization? A great example of on the content side of things is this podcast. It's the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Like, it's a very specific type of blog. And it's not just blogging in general, which is also relatively specific, but it's food blogging. And that's what our site is all about as well. And the other thing that I think is so great that you talked about is this specialization plus access to the global market. And that's the only reason why Food Blogger Pro can exist is because, you know, if we only allowed or had access to people in Minnesota, we'd have some people, but you know, it wouldn't be thousands of people. And same with you is, you know, you are, like you said, there's your community and there's some people that need Google Ads, but it's the global access to that that allows you to do that. And one of the things that you had mentioned was your podcast and that, you know, we were chatting a little bit before we hit record and had talked about that being a valuable lead generation thing for you. So can you talk about what that is? If people are interested in following along with that? Podcast, tell them how they can check that out and then also if people have a product, if they have a service, if they, if they are thinking about using Google Ads for their business, how can they reach out to you and potentially work together?

Yeah, thanks for I'm as a marketer, I'm a horrible marketer of my own services so thank you for reminding me. Yeah, yeah, I do have a website and I am hirable but I just don't mention it much. But yeah. Paid search podcast paid searchpodcast.com is the podcast that I co host with my buddy Jason who also works in Google Ads and works out of Oklahoma. We have literally never met in person, but we talk every week about Google Ads and he's one of my great friends who I hope to meet someday. It's pretty crazy but we do that and we as Jason says so wonderfully, we get naked on the Internet, we talk about stuff that most people charge for, stuff that seemed ridiculous when we started it because we started sharing things that we kind of held close to our chest and we realized that by sharing this stuff it really brought the veil down and it really helped people to see, okay, I can see how this would work. The creativity starts to go when they start to see how the system works, what it's like behind the scenes and how they can apply it to their business. And I have plenty of people around the world that have contacted us and said you completely changed my life because I was wasting money on Google Ads and now we're doing it efficiently and it's wonderful to have such a cool resource to be able to help people in that way. But on the more financial side, my day to day business is chrishaefer.com that's C H R I S S C H A E F F E R Not a great website but it's I'm self branded and I am what I am and so yeah, if you hire me, you get my services and that's what it's all about. But, but that I offer management services, training services, you know, if you want to just do it yourself. I have a kind of a system where I can train you to do it over a period of time or I can just manage it for you. But it's a blast. It's fun. I enjoy doing it and you know, as anyone who works at home knows, it can be fun when you're able to have the freedom to do something that is, that even is semi interesting to do it on a regular basis the way you want to do it.

Yeah that's awesome. We'll be sure to link to your site in the show notes and really appreciate you coming on the podcast, Chris. Like I had talked about before, just want to do what we can to offer perspective on all of the different ways that we can be thinking strategically about how we build our own business or in the case of your story, what it looks like to be running all sorts of different businesses. And the work that you've done in creating your own business and helping other businesses is a great example of that. So thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate it and looking forward to staying connected.

And that is that, my friend. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. If you enjoyed the episode or if the Food Blogger Pro podcast is just a positive part of your week, we would so appreciate your review on itunes. Leaving a review is really easy. All you have to do is go to iTunes, search the FoodBlockerPro podcast, click our show logo, click over to Ratings and Reviews, and then click Write a Review. And be sure to add your name and blog URL in the review so that we can share it in an upcoming episode of the podcast. We'll see you next time, friend. But until then and make it a great week.