Mike Rhodes — How To Scale Your Business Using Google Ads

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Hey, you're listening to Hustle and Flowchart.

Bam.

With Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Yes, you are. Today's a good day. You're gonna learn all about this up and coming platform, this ad platform. It's called Google Ads. Have you heard of it?

I've heard of AdWords.

No, it's called Google Ads now.

Oh, they rebranded.

They. They did.

Now it's just confusing.

You didn't know where I was going, huh?

No, I didn't.

Thought you were going to talk about Bing or something like that. No. Maybe.

No, we didn't.

We're not Google Ads. Yeah. So today we have the one and only Mike Rhodes with a special co host. Okay.

Yeah.

Dan Ryan as well.

So I just want to say. So Dan Ryan was essentially our mentor when it comes to Google Ads. So a lot of the Google Ads strategies that we use and the Google Ads that we run right now was stuff that Dan taught us. And so when we wanted to get Mike Rhodes, today's guest on. We thought it would be great to pull in Dan, the guy who taught us about Google Ads, to help us ask some questions and clarify some things. By Mike Rhodes, who literally wrote the.

Book on Google Ads along with Perry Marshall.

But yes.

Yeah. So he is a definite OG in the ad space here and he's absolutely amazing. So in this thing, I mean, I don't think we even need to get into it. It's like literally just get prepared to take some notes and open your mind. If you haven't tried Google Ads yet, you definitely should. He gives you a game plan of how to quick start and get your feet wet. But also he talks about auditing in an account and gave us a lot of different questions you can ask yourself and different ways of thinking of stuff that you might be totally losing a bunch of money or maybe you're not trying the correct type of ad to bring in qualified folks to.

This is essentially a masterclass on Google Ads. So you know, this, this will be a new resource that we point people to when they say, hey, I'm thinking about getting to Google Ads. Where do I start this episode? Listen to Mike Rhodes. Listen to Dan Ryan. These two dudes know their shit when it comes to Google.

Yeah.

Now if you want somebody to help you do your Google Ads, if you want to teach people some of these strategies, tell me and let them go and take it over for you. We have a great service recommendation. Who dad it's called genm. G, G, E, N, M. Nailed it. And if you go to evergreenprofits.com genm, you're actually gonna get a little bit of a discount because they're our sponsor. And what they're gonna do is they're going to introduce you to essentially, interns or apprentices who can come and work in your business. They're already trained in a whole bunch of marketing skills, and they're doing this essentially for free to learn marketing from you. And you pay Gen M for helping make that connection with the intern. It'll all make sense if you go to evergreenprofits.com but we have three of them helping run our business right now, and it is one of the most valuable resources on the Internet right now. So go there.

Go get some help. We all need it. God knows Matt does.

I definitely need help, but not in marketing. No.

Wow.

No, I'm just. I'm good. I'm better than everybody else anyway. Eco man, anyway.

All right, let's cut to it.

We'll talk to Mike Rhodes and also Dan Ryan's here. Hey, Mike. Thanks so much for joining us. How you doing?

I'm great.

How are you?

I'm doing good. We've also got. We've got our sort of AdWords mentor on the call as well. I don't know if Dan would call himself our AdWords mentor, but he's pretty much the one who's taught us everything we know about AdWords. So we've got Mike on the call, who is our sort of AdWords guru that we've been following around AdWords. And then we've got Dan, who's the guy who's allowed us to sort of look over his shoulder at ads. So it should be a real fun conversation around Google Ads.

Podcast bomber. I'm now taking that term.

It's starting to become a thing. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you very much.

Maybe one of these days we'll do a full episode where we actually interview Dan Ryan. No, no, that's not going to happen.

No, that was you.

Cool. All right, Mike, so real quick, can you sort of give us a little bit of a backstory and how you got into doing Google Ads, and what's the story of how you got to where you are now?

Yeah.

So I'd always loved the business of business. I've always known that I was going to have my own business, even when I was a little kid. I started my first business last century because that's how old I am when I Was traveling around New Zealand, got to Sydney in 2001. I thought I was semi retired. What an idiot. Kicking around on the northern beaches which happens to be where I am now, just visiting. I live in Melbourne these days. And all the way back in 2004 there was a now infamous conference that a guy called Simon Chan put on here in Australia called X10 seminar and Perry Marshall was speaking at it. So this is, I think it was September 2004 and Perry talked about Google AdWords and I'd been coaching small businesses for a while up to this point, doing a lot of consulting and I was just, my head was blown like this is it, this is what they want and they need. They're wasting money on letterbox drops and yellow pages and radio ads and this is the future of small business. So I stopped what I was doing basically and started the agency, met Gab and moved to Melbourne in 2006. We've been just celebrated our 10 year anniversary last week. So that worked well. That was a good decision. And started the agency way back when at the kitchen table, just me down in Melbourne. That was 12 years ago and we've been very, very lucky I guess in the right place at the right time. Rode that way from the 5 cent click days. Met Perry again 2010, went to an event that he ran in Maui and showed him some of the stuff that we'd been working on. He quite liked it. So we started working together. And so I've been running all of the training for his group. Co wrote the book with him and now just because I've discovered I'm a teacher at heart. So I've been teaching AdWords for actually probably longer than the agency. I've actually been teaching it since 2005 and we have an amazing team who do epic, epic work. They are absolute legends and I get to wander around, talk about what I love and help a lot of businesses. That's the short version, I guess so Cool.

So with the book that you did with Perry, how did that process work? Was that mostly.

I know like Glazer, Ken, like Bill Glaser and Dan Kennedy used to do this thing where they would basically let other people write the book for them and then put their name on it. I'm curious. I doubt that's how it went with Perry, but you know with the book how much of it is you and how much of it is Perry?

It's about half. Half. So Perry wrote the philosophical bits, the juicy copy parts, the story stuff and then my job was all of the technical Side. But let me let you into a little secret here. Just because this. What? There's Dan and a couple of people listening. It doesn't matter if this gets out.

I made the distinction between authoring and writing, which I think is an important one if anybody listening wants to write a book. So I authored all of the technical stuff, but I didn't actually sit down and hit the keys on the keyboard and write it, because I tried that for three months, and then I got within three weeks of my deadline, and I barely had a page written. I'm like, okay, something needs to change. So I discovered. Have you ever heard of the Colby test? K O L D E. We've taken it.

Yeah.

The first time I took it was in the room with Kathy Colby here in Sydney, and she told me I was a researcher, and I railed against that. I'm like, I'm not a researcher, I'm a creator. And I didn't want to be labeled a researcher. But she was right. I do love to go and see what's working in the world. I like to steal ideas from elsewhere and play with them and turn them into something else. So I turned the book into a research project. I basically mind mapped all of my chapters, dumped out what I knew onto a page, and where there was a little gap, or I thought, oh, I haven't actually dug into that corner of AdWords for six months. Let me go find some stuff, improve the mind map, and then sat there for half an hour recording. So each chapter was its own mind map. Half an hour of recording that, walking through the mind map, send it off to an amazing writer who then sort of just turned that into the words on the page and fleshed it out and said, I need another case study here. I need a better metaphor for this bit. Can you give. And just within two days, each chapter would come back. Every two days, I'd get a new chapter. We knocked off the whole thing in three weeks. It was amazing.

So cool.

Just out of curiosity, what was your Colby score? Because Joe and I actually did that.

Oh, it's something along the lines of. Now which one's the first one? Fact find. So it's about a seven. Fact find, then about a four for that. No. What's that one? Follow through. That's maybe probably about a three or a two, actually, then eight or a nine for quick start. And then I never. I never understood the last one.

Implementation was the last one.

Yeah, I never understood that. That was about a 4. Ish. So something like a 7. 2, 9 4.

Yeah, that last one. They say entrepreneurs tend to have a lower number for the last one.

It tends tech based.

Yeah, it tends to be the people that have the higher number of people that tend to work with their hands more. Like surgeons and construction workers and people that just really like to work with their hands a lot. That was how it was described to us.

But anyway, fascinating though.

But there's a big part of that. Me, I used to build models as a kid. I love, like building with my hands. But I also love. I mean, I think what I've been doing for the last 12 years is crawling inside the machine, figuring out how it works and then coming back out and using that. So it's a mental model of playing with your hands. I don't know. So I get confused by that one.

But I'm curious about the book. What year did you write it?

I was in New Zealand. It was 2013 was the first one. So Perry had, let me be real clear here, he'd sold like 70, 80,000 copies before I came along. It's his book, really. I'm just adding a little bit on the end. And so the fourth edition came out. I was actually in Chicago, it was October 1st, 2014, and we just released the 5th edition a little while back.

Nice. Okay, that was going to be my question. I didn't know if there were updates like how do you keep the tactical so relevant? Because I know stuff changes just a lot.

I wrote a book called WordPress revealed like 10 years ago or something. And I don't recommend anybody buy that book now.

I actually did make a 2017 updated version to it, which is a little bit better, but I think even that one's out of date now.

Oh yeah, yeah, it literally goes out of date before it's published. We submitted to the publisher. And then literally two days later, Google did the big change away from, if you remember, converted clicks versus conversions. They scrapped converted clicks. And we're like, oh shit, okay, Mike, rewrite that chapter. Which meant rewrites to about three other chapters. And then quickly turned that around and resubmitted it about a week later. But even then, obviously from between there and when the book finally came out, there were a bunch of other changes. That's why I started Agency Xavi, because I just wanted there to be a place to go where you got the most up to date training possible. Because I knew the book was always going to be a little out of date. I mean, we tried to make it sort of fairly evergreen and as strategic as possible. And certainly Perry's parts are much more strategic, so there's still gold in there, particularly if you're brand new to ads. His bits are really, really good. My bits are the bits that go out of date.

Oh, go ahead.

No, I was going to go ahead and segue into talking about Google Ads. Unless you had something else on this topic.

I was just thinking, Dan, when was the time that you started getting to know Mike or devouring his content there?

First off, my colby score is 666.

There's another number.

Not sure what that means, but it's Kathy is not.

I don't know.

I came across Mike's stuff. So I've been doing AdWords since it was AdWords. Hey, now it's Google Ads, right? I mean, I was doing AdWords when it was created. That was when I started doing it. So first I did whatever was a go to and then it was Overture. Those are like the first PPCs. So I came across Mike's stuff probably.

Four or five years ago maybe.

Mm.

And.

He'S literally the only person that I've ever seen do stuff similar to the way that I did.

And I would never encounter that. Like, you know, I'm sure he's had the same experience. Like, I've never logged into someone's AdWords account and haven't ever even been close to remotely. Okay.

Yeah, we get all the time from Dan.

Like, I was on the phone, it was probably a year ago, and this guy called me up and, oh, yeah, we're crushing it on AdWords. I'm like, right, okay. And I told him, I'll know. Like, I'll know if Google built your AdWords account by just logging in and.

Looking at it, Right?

So I log in and I'm not really paying attention. And I'm talking to him on the phone and we're. I think we're zooming. And no bullshit, the name of the main campaign is campaign by Google. We don't really need to go any further. I'm like, your stuff is not that great. So anyway, I came across Mike stuff and I buy people's courses all the time just because you don't know what you don't know. And I logged in and I went through some of his stuff and I was like, man, this guy literally gets it from my perspective, right? Because I'd hired agencies before and fire them because I'm always trying to like, oh, level up or whatever. And I still don't have an agency. But yeah, I started going through stuff and I was like, this dude gets it and he's literally the only person I ever recommend to people is like, you want to learn it? Go through his course. It's going to give you the best foundation, period, in my view. So nice. Go ahead and drop that referral check when you get a chance.

We can do that.

He's going to invoice you later.

My affiliate link is 666.

Nice. Well, let's actually get into the nuts and bolts of Google Ads. I'm not totally sure where to start. We actually haven't done an episode yet about Google Ads. We focused on a lot of episodes around traffic. The closest we've come was we've had a couple episodes around YouTube ads, but we've never dove into Google search ads or display network or, you know, any of the other platforms outside of YouTube. So I guess from your two perspectives, where do you think the best place to start in on this subject is?

So let's start with the big overview of how it sort of breaks down just at a high sort of conceptual level. So you've got the search side and the display side. I think all of your listeners will be very, very familiar with the search side. And then on search, that breaks down into two. You've got your search ad, text ads at the top of the page and shopping ads, the square ads with the price and the title. Awesome, by the way. Awesome return. If you're an E comm business, you absolutely must be running Google shopping ads. I meet so many people, particularly in the States, that are only on YouTube or maybe they've heard something by Belcher or Tom Breeze and Now they're on YouTube a little bit. But it's a bit of a pain to set up potentially. Google are trying to make that easier. But you must be running shopping ads. The return is fantastic there.

Now can I. Real quick, I want to jump in real quick with the shopping ads. Is there value in doing that if you have, let's say an info business or a service business, or is that purely an E comm play?

Not really. We've got one client.

Okay.

We're going to argue early.

There's massive value from this guy that does it.

That's not your day.

And you got to set.

Mike's right. Like the feed. It's getting the feed set up that's a real pain in the butt.

Got it.

And then there's certain things like we got a SaaS client at the moment that we're trying to convince Google that we should let them have their. It's a. It's a subscription box model. I won't say what it contains because that'll kind of give it away who they are. But we're trying to convince Google that we should be able to run that as a pla. A shopping ad. Excuse me. But yeah, harder to get through. Not, not, not the first thing you're going to do if it's your first time at the road.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, so if you want to continue down the path of this sort of hierarchy of ads.

Okay. And then on the display side, see, Google's display network is a network of two million plus sites, a million plus apps. Stay away from the apps generally on which you can show your ads. It used to be the case that you'd have to load up all of these different ads at set sizes. Now Google's going to try and build those ads for you. You give it a few assets, few headlines, few images and so on, and it'll mix and match all of those. Build your ads for you, trying to make life easier for you. We can talk about pros and cons of that. And then within that display network you've got a couple of big, big sites. Many Google ones like YouTube and Gmail, they're all part of this display network. So all of the YouTube stuff actually lives inside the same Google Ad account. Some people don't realize that and many, many people still have not used or played with the display network. Maybe they've done a little bit of remarketing. So if you're running remarketing ads they're showing on sites that are part of this Google display network. So that's sort of how it breaks down. You've got search and shopping on that side and then sort of regular display if you like, and Gmail and YouTube on the display side. And there's a tool I created, I think this is my talk at Traffic and Conversion two years ago. But if you go to the display grid.

That'Ll redirect you to a Google sheet that shows visually how that, that GDN breaks down. So all of the different types of targeting that you can use, all of the different types of ads, and there's a couple of videos at the bottom that explain how to use that free tool. I don't cookie you, I won't remarket to you, it's totally free. But if you want to dig into display, rather than take up your listeners time today on here, digging really deep into that, that's probably the best resource I can give for that.

Cool. Yeah, we'll make sure to share that in the show notes. When it comes to display, we've pretty much only ever used it for remarketing. So it's only been. If you've been to our site once, then you'll start to see our ads. Is that kind of how you recommend most people do it or is there like some really good cold strategies that you've used with GDN stuff?

So remarketing is a fantastic place to get started. I mean, that's where you're going to do the least damage and it's probably going to get you the high return. But we're going to talk about AI and machine learning at some point during this. We might as well start now. Google knows an awful lot about all of us. They've got Chrome, they've got Android, they've got YouTube, they've got Gmail, they've got Google Analytics. They are all data machines. So Google know pretty much more about you than your wife does. They know if you're sitting on the princess bed in that. No, we won't go there, Dan. I.

Just try to get a nice, nice audio. Yeah, so they know. And so they use the power of that AI to determine what we want, what we need, what we're shopping for currently to try and serve us the most relevant ads. So we're moving away from ads being targeted based on the content of the stuff that you are reading, which is how it was always done in the past. Because you're on a site that talks about basketball, you're probably more interested in basketball stuff. And so we'll put the basketball ads there. Now what they're shifting to is you've just been searching for this stuff. You don't normally search for this stuff you've been browsing. So you've just started searching for Audis and the new Audi and you've been to some Audi sites, a couple of dealer sites, and you've just started searching for this. You don't normally do that. We've noticed it just started doing it over the past week or two. So you're probably in the market for a new Audi. So we're going to allow advertisers to show you ads based on that. And now you're going to see ads that are ultimately more useful to you. And that's the direction Google want to take. This more and more is to show more and more useful ads that convert better.

Now, is that what the rsla. I always get the acronym mixed up. Rslas. Is that what that is? Where you go and you basically Search a keyword, and then just because they searched it, they're now in an audience that you can target.

Not quite so. Okay, so RLSA remarketing lists for search ads is a way of combining the power of search with remarketing, or actually with shopping and remarketing. So think of a little Venn diagram. Two circles. On the left, we've got people that are searching for a particular keyword. And let's just stick down the basketball theme, and it's basketball jersey, let's say. And then on the right, we've got your remarketing list. And to keep things easy, this is everybody that's been to your website in the last 30 days. And there's a little bit of overlap with those two circles the middle of our Venn diagram. So what RLSA means, if you set it up properly, is the circle on the left keeps showing ads to everybody that is searching for basketball jersey. But for those people in the middle, I want to bid a little bit more or maybe a lot more, because they are searching and they have just been to my site. The assumption therefore being verify this with data, because Google gives you the data. Once you set this up, we think that those people that are searching and have been to my site are more likely to spend money with me, and so I want to spend more money with those people. So it's a way of layering, if you like, layering the remarketing audience over the top of your search campaign or over the top of your shopping campaign.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, that does make sense. So it's basically you're segmenting your audience based off of their actions, putting different ads in front of them depending on where they're at and depending on their actions at that time.

And that's on the search side. Search and shopping. Now, over on the display side, we can start to get a bit more powerful. So there is a display targeting option called in market. So basically think of this as people that are in the market for, and that's based on that recent abnormal search behavior. You normally do this, but you've just suddenly started doing this. Now you must be in the market for. And there's a list of about 500 in market audiences. And if you go to the displaygrid.com you'll find a tab across the bottom of that sheet that lists those 500. So you can scroll through there and see if something matches what you sell. And if there isn't anything there, now you get the option of building your own using a targeting thing. That should be called custom in market, but it's not. It's called custom intent. And this I think is the future of Google display. So this is where you get to say, okay, people that are searching for stuff like this and this and this and this, give it half a dozen keywords and a couple of URLs. People that maybe have gone to this site and this site over here, people like that Google, go find me then, go find me. People that have just been searching for this stuff, just been browsing sites like this and put my ads in front of them. So that's ridiculously powerful as a cold strategy. In particular, who's just been looking at my competitor sites, who's just been searching for my competitors. Get me in front of them, please. Google. It's as close as you could get to being able to put your remarketing pixel on your competitors websites. It is not that, but it's as close as you can get to that.

Got it.

Super powerful.

No, that makes a lot of sense. Now when you do that kind of thing, does that tend to be more expensive than peer retargeting just because. Or is it less expensive because it's a little more cold and you're going to a wider audience?

Ultimately we pretty much try and target most of our ads based on results. So I don't tend to look at.

Excuse me, or even think about say CPCs. So I'm probably going to bid more for my remarketing audience because I think those people are more likely to convert. And so my conversion rate is going to be higher, but I'm going to sort of tweak that up and down until I get to a profitable level. So with my cold stuff, yeah, I'm probably going to bid less, almost certainly because it's probably going to convert less. But ultimately I want that return on investment to be round about the same depending on the business model. I mean there are cases where you might do that a bit differently. It depends on the business model, the frequency of purchase and all that sort of stuff. But generally that traffic is going to be cheaper. But we all know that cheap traffic ain't necessarily good traffic. We want quality traffic, we want buyers. And so we're going to base that on results, whatever that means to your business, whether you're doing CPA stuff, return on ad spend. And obviously depending on your business model, if you sell fast fashion and your typical buyer buys from you six times a year, that's very different than if you're selling coffins, which tend to just sell Once.

Yeah, good point.

Not a lot of return customers there.

I would do.

What sort of advice do you give somebody that's just a complete beginner? They've got something for sale. Maybe they've got a course or an E Comm product or they've got something. What's sort of their first thing that you tell people to go do? Just who never even logged into Google.

First thing. Like Dan said before, don't go to Google for advice.

Step one.

But, but get educated. Find some stuff and there's plenty out there. You mentioned John Belcher before. He and JB have some fantastic staff over at Adskills. We've got a bunch of courses at Agency Savvy as well. There's tons of stuff on YouTube. There's a great course on Udemy. Isaac has put out about an 18 hour course for 15 bucks or something ridiculous. So get educated first campaign. You probably just go after your own brand. It's the easiest thing to set up. That's your name, your business name, your product's name. You can't do much damage there. It's cheap traffic that's going to convert. That's the best way to cut your teeth and get started. And then second campaign remarketing. You're probably leaving money on the table if you don't have a remarketing campaign now you can start to play with some colder display or some YouTube or some non brand search but get your feet wet first with either a brand search campaign or a remarketing campaign. And maybe shopping if you're ecom again, I think the returns are well worth it. But maybe if you're brand new, have somebody else set it up for you, get you off the ground and then you can take over after they've been, maybe they do a setup and build, run it for a couple of weeks, knock off the rough edges and then hand it back to you with a bit of training. That's a really, really good way to start a new campaign.

That makes sense. Yeah. And you mentioned E Comm and we have a traffic kind of community and we talk all about all sorts of stuff but there's a lot of folks in E Comm that we can't really give them the best answers at all times when it comes to Google. So are there any specifics that for E. Com businesses typically profit margins aren't as much. Are there some rules that they should follow when doing this?

Oh gosh.

Well, so I want to, I want to add on to it. Like I feel like there's a lot of people. There's this trend nowadays of people going and setting up Shopify stores, going and finding stuff on Aliexpress and just listing it on their Shopify store and then running ads to the stuff on their Shopify store and going, why can't I be profitable? And you know, they'll be buying five dollar widgets on AliExpress and selling them for ten dollars. So you have five dollars to work with and profit before ad spend and it leaves very little to get a return on ad spend.

Yeah.

Those people are probably not going to succeed, are they, Steve?

It's crazy because it's a trend and so many people are asking this. We wanted to address it.

Everybody wants the magic easy button. I was chatting to Ken McCarthy about this last year about why are there so many bloody Facebook gurus out there? Everybody in their granny seems to be a social media guru these days. And there's insta courses popping up and all of this stuff. Why is it so hard to find good stuff? When we started doing more and more ecom probably about three, four years ago, there was very, very little out there. No good courses that you could find books. I basically went and cherry picked, called in some favors and, and got my guys trained with some people that I knew that were just very quietly going about their stuff and doing it to say, like, how the hell do you do you do this thing? Because there isn't much. First thing. Yeah, like.

This isn't a set rule, but you probably want that sort of average order size to be north of 50 bucks to give yourself a little bit of wiggle room to work with. I think setting realistic expectations is huge. We had a client who is no longer a client. So I think this is probably a couple of years ago they came to us and their roas was about, I'm gonna say somewhere about three and a half. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but the goal was set at 6 to 1. If you can get a 6 to 1, then we're profitable. We are happy campers. Katie and Vic and the team are amazing. They got them up to about an 8 to 1 return within weeks. Weeks. Like they just blew it out the water. Client then turns around at that point and says, oh well, if you can get 8 to 1, then the target is 13 to 1. Now why do you not like making money? Because they just didn't understand that. So picture the archery target. The entire archery target is possible. And you're saying, no, no, no, you only get to play if you can shoot arrows into the bullseye. Well, that's a bit harder to do. And it's a lot less space now. There's a lot less traffic that you can get at 13 to 1. Yes, we were able to get it, but obviously overall profit drops dramatically because now you're just getting so few sales. Very profitable sales, but a lot less of them. So setting realistic expectations and aiming to just break even, I'd say for the first three months is probably a good place to start. A sensible expectation to set.

Yeah, that's smart. I like that. And you can give it kind of some basic benchmarks there. I think that we can spread the word to our customers.

I think just understanding your numbers, I mean, just realistically sitting down with a pen and paper before you even turn on the computer and going, what would my return on ad spend? What would my roas need to be to break even? Is that 3 to 1, 4 to 1, 5 to 1? Understanding your numbers. Dan sort of mentioned it before. You log into an ads account. I'm slowly getting used to not calling it AdWords. You log into a Google Ads account and there's probably one in, well, maybe these days, maybe we get to talk to some smarter advertisers. So maybe these days it's more like 1 in 5. I was going to say like 1 in 20. People running an account that you'll talk to and you'll say, what's your break even? They know what the target is. They know that we need CPA at $30. But then you dig in and say, well, why is that? What's your break even? What's your strategy here? Are you trying to maximize profit? Are you trying to grow fast and run at break even? And most people don't know the answer to that question. So the biggest thing you can do to differentiate yourself early on is know your damn numbers. Yeah. Know why you're trying to hit the number that you're trying to hit? Because if you're trying to hit 13 to 1, not only is that unrealistic, it's just plain daft.

Start with the break even. Sounds like. Like you said, start with break even. And then learn to scale slowly.

It sounds like, well and even then where do you want to end up on the profit curve? I'm finding that I've got to put a piece out on this because no one really talks about the profit curve. It's really, really hard to maximize profit. But that may not be the best thing to do.

It's much, much faster if you can run a Break even again, it comes down to business model. Right. But if you can run at break even, you more sales in through the door. Yes. Okay. Your AdWords account isn't wildly profitable on the first sale, but if you're set up for repeat sales, if you're really good at improving that over time, if you're really good at sending stuff out in the box that gets them to come back or refer a friend or make repeat purchases, then you're going to get tons more traffic in. If you're doing split testing on your site, you can split test so much faster now because you got so much more traffic coming through the site. If you're testing and improving your email, that all happens faster because you've got more volume going through. So it depends on the model, depends what you want to achieve.

Yeah, that makes sense. Now, before we hit record, you mentioned you wanted to talk a little bit about how to audit an AdWords account. And I was going to also ask about scale. Once you've got the sort of basic ad stuff set up, what sort of things do you do to scale up? You mentioned going after your brand name and doing some remarketing with maybe display network and things like that.

So what's the process of auditing an AdWords account? And then how do you actually start to scale what you're doing?

Yeah, okay, I'll try and connect those two big dots.

They don't have to be connected. They were connected in my brain, but they don't necessarily. They could be two different questions.

Well, they kind of are. It's just. Yeah, they really kind of are. I mean, it's an ongoing process of optimization. Right. You're continually testing, experimenting, and that's a, that's a mindset that you need to adopt. I think all of your listeners already have that mindset that sometimes clients don't. You know, like, why is it taking so long? Well, because it's a test. If we knew the answer to the test, it wouldn't be called a test and we would just do it.

Little things like that. So, okay, yeah, I know you guys love systems and process, so I thought probably the most useful one that we use is to walk you through my audit process so that then you can go back and look at. If you're running Google Ads and listening to this, you can sort of go back and look at it through fresh eyes, look out for warning signs like campaign by Google and then sort of know the 8020 of where to go in there and what you might start to look at to improve it.

Yeah, sounds good. Cool.

Okay, so we start with just looking at the date and just eyeballing the chart and trying to figure out the date range for this audit. Are we going to look at the last three months of data? The last six? I want that data to be recent and consistent. So you're looking for basically charting your conversions over time. Is there a big drop off? Have we just had Black Friday and that's this weird traffic that we don't want to consider. So recent and consistent. Tweaking the date range to get a sort of reasonably flat line so that I've got some sensible data to audit. And then the most important thing at the beginning here is to understand the game that we're playing. What are we tracking in terms of conversions? Having a look at that conversions tab and understanding what on earth is going on in this account. Now if it's your account, you're probably going to know that. You probably think I don't need to look at that, but go and have a look at it anyway through fresh eyes. Think about the stuff that you're asking Google to track. I'll give you a cheat sheet for this as well so that you can put that in the show notes. Nice. Perfect. We will like 130 plus questions that you can go ask of your ads account.

Good.

This is good because I know you like giveaways and stuff like that. That's okay. So yeah, understanding that, understanding if you're tracking value, understanding what the, what the big goals are that you're tracking, which might be sales or somebody filling out that lead gen form. But are you tracking the little stuff as well? How many pages someone's looked at time on site, did they view that particular video or download that particular PDF? All of that stuff like we talked about before, what's the goal, what's the target? And also what's my breakeven point? Because I really want to understand the difference between that. If you're currently running at $20 CPA and the breakeven is 22, then the stuff that we're going to go do next is going to be very different than if you're running at 20 bucks, but the break even is at 20. So just understanding where the wiggle room is and how much wiggle room I've got is pretty important. Then I'm going to look at the overall structure of the account, get a handle on which types of campaigns are being used. Again, we've talked about search and shopping. Two types of search, brand and non brand. And then display YouTube and Gmail on the display side. So which types are being used, are experiments being run? And really just what's the 80, 20 of that? Generally, if we're auditing an account for someone, we do a bunch of audits for, I guess the account owner, the business owner, the marketing manager. But we also do a bunch for agencies too that don't tend to want to let anybody know that they're auditing a client account. But it gives them a bit of a cheat sheet. They've just inherited this big new, they don't really know what to do with it. So they'll come to us, pay us for an audit and then they've got their to do list for the next three months sorted and they'll probably get a better result. And then we're going to look through the settings, have a look at that overall setup, how it's being run. Are they using some sort of automation? We might talk about Google scripts a little bit later on. Are they using some smarts in there? Like are they using a data feed to do customized ads? Are they using lists? Just digging into a bit of the nitty gritty. And then I'm going to start to look at data. So the first part is just really all structural. Looking at settings, getting a feel for how this is being run and looking for some quick wins there. Then we're going to dig into data, starting fairly high level. So looking at what's the potential of this account? By potential, I'm looking for stuff like impression share. I'm looking at.

Could this campaign just be running more? It's rare you see it these days, but you'll still see stuff that campaigns are being limited by budget. Which is Google's way of saying, I want to run these ads twice as much as you're letting me run these ads. They're profitable. Just give me more money and I'll show more ads. Instant win. You don't see that as much these days because most people tend to understand that one. But.

Are ads being limited some other way? If you could make little tweaks to the ads, would Google want to show them more often? Or are your ads all being shown at the bottom of the page and by bidding just a little bit more, we could show ads at the top of the page where they're going to get 10 times the clicks for a little bit more spend. Then I'm going to start to segment my data. Avanash Kaushik is Google's. What's his official title? I think it's Digital Evangelist or something like that. I had the great pleasure of speaking on the stages him earlier this year in Moscow of all places. Got a nice photo with him in the green room before we went on. And if you ever get the chance to see him speak, he is the most entertaining, lovely, lovely speaker. An awesome parent too. He writes about like the stuff he does with his kids. I just think he's just an epic, epic all round guy. Cool, very, very cool analyst, but he's just way more than a data analyst. His blog is Occam's razor for the show notes. Awesome guy, great quote. I quote him often. But all data in aggregate is crap. So looking at people will say, oh, so what's the click through rate of your Google Ads account? It doesn't matter. It's a meaningless number. It's an average of an average of an average. So we must segment that data and start to slice and dice. So the first way is to do that. You might segment by network. We've talked about all of the different places that you can go run your ads on understanding the difference in those traffic. So this is kind of embarrassing that I have taken 14 some years to understand what I'm doing when I'm looking at this data. And I figured this out earlier this year. I don't know if I can do this without a whiteboard to draw this on, but I'll give it a crack. I don't think I've ever mentioned this before other than with my team and on a webinar just the other day, but I had pictures for this one. So what I've realized I'm doing is I'm comparing investment versus outcome. So picture two lines. I don't care if they're horizontal lines or vertical lines, but two lines, they could be fancy and call them bar charts if you want, but basically two lines and on the first line I'm trying to draw little lines across that. I'm trying to understand how this breaks down. So for example, what was the one I had on my slide? I had search and shopping and display and it was like 44 grand on search, 41 grand on shopping and 9 grand on display, something like that. In my head I'm drawing little marks on that and turning that line into those three chunks roughly in proportion. I'm picturing the rough proportion. Okay, a little bit less than 50% is going over here, about 40% is going over here and there's this little bit over here. And then on the second line I'm drawing the outcome. Maybe I'll Send a picture of this.

For the show notes, actually sketching it as you talk on the whiteboard.

So on the second line then I'm writing my numbers and let's say, let's keep this to outcome. So I've got conversions, I've got 3200 coming from search, I've got 800 coming from whatever it was in the middle shopping. And then I've got, I don't know how many, there's 200 coming from display. And so I'm drawing little lines across my big main line here. I'm sort of picturing, okay, so I spend this much over here and it gets me that so now and oh, and then the CPA from each of those, whatever that is. So like you know, $15, $50, $40 for those three buckets. And then I'm also thinking about the percentage. So in my head I've got 50 odd percent of my traffic coming from search, but it's generating whatever the hell that number was that I threw up before. I don't know, 75% of my conversions. So I'm starting to see the relationship between investment versus outcome. Once you get good at doing that, you'll do it sort of pretty intuitively. One day I'll create some awesome Google sheet or data studio report or something to do all of these segments for me one day. But I'm just trying to get that clear in my of digging into all of these different things. It might be by device, I might segment by device. So I've got desktop, tablet, mobile, and I'm drawing that little picture again in my head of investment versus outcome. I want to know how much I'm spending on which is the investment line. I want to know what I'm getting for that, which might be conversions or it might be, I might be looking at roas number of sales, whatever it might be. And then I'm looking at the percentages to give me some context. Context is everything.

Because now it gives me clues as to how to dive deeper into that which is then the next part which is the 80, 20. So maybe the first segment I do is just by all of my search campaigns I line up. Maybe I've got 17 search campaigns running visually. I want to know what the top one or two are, what am I spending, what am I getting? So I'm looking for the 8020 of that and I'm looking for outliers, I'm looking for where's the weird stuff, the really really good stuff and the really really bad stuff. And then I Just keep doing that 8020 process. So I might dive into my top couple of campaigns. What's the 8020 on ad groups? Maybe there's a couple of hundred ad groups in there. What are the five ones that I really need to look at and what are the weird ones? What are the outliers? Oh, I've got these three over here that are way more expensive. Let's dig into that and see why that's happening. Dig into those ad groups. Then I'm going to look at my keywords, my ads, maybe my ad extensions, maybe dig into negs. Maybe negs come a bit later. But I'm just digging and digging and digging, segmenting, segmenting, looking for the weird stuff and looking at just spending all of my time on the most important, which is usually follow the money. Where am I spending the most money? But sometimes it might be where am I getting loads and loads of impressions? But I haven't spent any money. So there's an outlier.

It might be where am I getting loads of clicks? But it's not converting. There's an outlier. So segmenting an 80 20, if you take away two things from this entire episode and I've just confused the bejesus out of you. Segmenting an 80 20.

No, this makes perfect sense. And I think the visuals.

If you make those, it would be great. Yeah, but I could see you are lying.

You are lying.

You're like, send that screenshot over.

Well, no, but I'm basically.

I will message it to you in about half an hour.

I was trying to write on the whiteboard, but I kind of sort of lost track.

Well, we have these lines and we did try to follow along. And the thing that made sense the most to me is actually digging into figuring out. You said the outliers. So it's a great way to probably scale up what's working and cut the stuff that's. You're probably bleeding money and you never knew unless you actually dove in.

Well, so just on the topic of scaling, that's one of the areas with our Google Ads account that we've struggled with a little bit because we find some keywords that work really well and we get a lot of impressions and good clicks and good sales and we're profitable on. But we sort of. Those specific keywords, they only have so much search volume, so I can't just throw more money at it. To scale what sort of things? If you found some of these outliers of, ooh, this one's really working. What are some ways that you can scale that.

I picture this as a little bit like breathing. Maybe it's because I'm getting old and I'm starting to do a little bit of yoga every now and again. But I picture this as you expand, you test more stuff, you try some new keywords, or over on gdn, you try some new targeting options and then you're chopping it back. So you're throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall, seeing what sticks, getting rid of everything that doesn't, and then repeat the process, repeat the process. So you're trying a few more things, chopping back the stuff that doesn't, and a go again. And some people find that incredibly tedious. But that's the game. That's who wins, is the people that do that week after week, month after month.

Thinking, unfortunately, again, no magic easy button. If these are my keywords, what else might people be searching for? What other keyword universes could I go after? What else could I test? What targeting options haven't I tried yet? Have I tried custom intent? Is my remarketing as good as it could be? What have I tried from a messaging point of view? Recently, Trevor on our team, he heads up Facebook and strategy at Web Savvy and had a client recently where one little tweak, he changed, essentially just changed their ad, changed the way they talked about their product. And this is a business that's been going for, I don't know, 30 years or something. We deal with the Australian master franchise. It's a product out of the States. One little tweak, 5x increase in everything in conversions, a massive decrease in CPA. This is something that head office in the States had never thought of. Just a different way of explaining what the product did. And people suddenly went, oh, is that it? Oh, well, I need one of those.

Right?

And it's just tweaking that message. So it was nothing to do with the targeting, was nothing to do with the bidding. It was just. How do you describe that to people? I find that people, and this is probably especially true of GDN with Google Display, where you're trying to get in front of a colder audience. People that don't yet know you is they tend to spend all of their time tweaking bids and maybe trying a little bit of new targeting. But they never test the offer. They never say, oh, what if I put Leadshook? If you haven't interviewed nick from leadshook.com, you absolutely should. He is probably the smartest guy you'll ever talk to. The guy's a genius. I'm actually having dinner with him and Schremco tonight, so I'll mention that to him. He has a tool. He has a cool leadshook, which is quizzes on steroids. They're decision trees technically, but quizzes on steroids, if you can send GDN traffic into a really good quiz scorecard, leads hook, decision tree, funky thing. You're going to learn a ton about your audience and then maybe there's a whole new way to get in front of a new group of people that you never knew about.

I love it. Now, one of the things that you talked about on Sramko's podcast, since we just mentioned him, was your sort of three groups that you like to advertise towards. Can you touch on that real quick and just kind of describe those three groups that you.

So it was more like three sort of levels of looking at a Google Ads account with reference to AI. So if you picture a little pyramid with three layers, bidding is the fundamentals of the foundational layer. Targeting in the middle and messaging at the top. The reason I've drawn it that way is because I think robots and the AI and all of that, it's coming from the bottom up. So the first thing that the robots are getting very, very good at and are already fantastic at is bidding. So at this point, heading into 2019, if you're still spending three days a week tweaking bids in your Google Ad account, excuse me, you probably shouldn't be. Some people will rail against this. Dan and I and others in agencies have had some pretty interesting discussions in the Facebook group about how much to lean into this.

Yeah, I was actually going to see what Dan's opinion on that was because I know when Dan's helped us with some of our ads, a lot of what we have set up is a lot of manual bidding stuff. So I'm kind of curious what your perspective is.

I literally never do it.

Just because the numbers that I focus on are like the roas or whatever. And if that's. If I'm hitting that, I don't. I tend to not mess with going to switching it to CPA or whatever. Before, you used to have to like duplicate the campaign and then switch it to cpa, but now you can kind.

Of just switch it.

But I don't. I just don't do it. I mean, that's just like that in the scripts. I'm like, yeah, you lost me. But only because.

Like, I'm hitting the numbers that I want. So I don't really need to tweak and twist and do that makes sense.

So it's like, it's not broke, so don't fix it kind of scenario for your business.

Yeah.

And then there's no point in like, you know, if I can shave a buck or two, like in the big picture, it's not worth it because how much time did I spend to shave the dollar or two that I could have maybe gotten, you know, gone more top of the funnel or maybe gone gotten something that gets me more conversions as opposed to a cheaper conversion?

80 20. There's always an 8020 of time. And you absolutely have to consider that on the search side. There's a great tool, used to be shit, it's now pretty good, called drafts and experiments. So you can test.

Something new against your existing way of doing it. So if you're running, say you've got a lead gen site and you've got a campaign, you need a bit of volume of conversions before you start playing with Google stuff. If you're running an account and spending a thousand bucks a month, I probably wouldn't go near it for now. But if you're getting sort of around about sort of 100 conversions a month or up, preferably at a campaign level, then you might run a test and say, google, let's try your Target CPA model against what I'm currently doing and see. Because, you know, I tried it six months ago and it was awful. I tried it 12 months ago and it was really awful. But show me what you can do because I think you'll be amazed at just how, how quickly it's improving. You know, we are linear beings. We remember the past as being just like today, but a little bit worse. We think five years into the future will be just like today, but a little bit better. We can't remember what life was like before the iPhone. We're in an exponential world. Yeah, it ain't linear anymore, but we have a really hard time getting our heads around that. And I would really encourage, if you are playing with Google Ads, I'd really encourage your listeners to play with drafts and experiments because right now it is not an option that's available for shopping, but it will be in 2019. We're told it is coming. And when you have the ability to start running tests over on shopping campaigns and you're one of the first users of that, that will be a huge advantage to have. Because right now you can't test bidding models on shopping. You have to, like Dan says, you have to just switch it over and cross your fingers and hope for the best and watch it like a haw. But soon we'll have that option. But we found on shopping that Target Roas campaigns in the last three to six months are doing really, really well. So we've got some big wins. Katie on the team. Kaitlyn, sorry, I should say on the team has scaled a big US client of ours from a fantastic referrer who we love Gadeba. Back from about, I think it was around 30 grand a month to 150 grand a month. Leaning into a lot of this AI, letting the machine take over that bottom layer of the pyramid, taking over the bidding so that she can then focus on the more important stuff, which is then moving up a level to targeting. I'm not ready to let the machine do my targeting for me yet. I'm not ready to use a lot of Google's automated stuff there, like smart display campaigns, universal app campaigns. It just, we don't see the benefits there yet. But there are other areas where the AI is being used. We talked about it before in market campaigns using all of Google's data. Google knows who wants to buy what. So I'm not going to let them build my campaigns for me. But I am going to say, okay, you know who's in the market for this? Go show my ads to those people. Yeah, and they're very, very. Yeah, sorry.

I was going to say we had John Belcher and we had Tom Brees both on the show and they were, they were specifically talking about YouTube, but they were essentially saying now that as they'll put a conversion pixel on their success page and then they'll go and turn on ads and they'll just leave the targeting blank. They just, they won't even set anything for any of the targeting. They just know that they're gonna. Eventually enough volume is gonna go through that Google is going to have enough data built out on this pixel that Google's gonna know how to target it for you.

And I think knowing those guys pretty well, having seen inside a few of their campaigns, especially Tom, Tom and I worked together on a few clients.

They're dealing with pretty decent volume and they're only playing within that fairly defined box, which is YouTube. So I think for what they're doing, it makes complete sense for the average person listening to this who's maybe just starting out with Google Display. I wouldn't suggest heading down that road, especially not on the display side for YouTube maybe. But also you've got to, you've got to have some Pretty big cojones. And you've got to just say, all right, I am. I'm setting a budget here of 1000 bucks a day. I'm going to give this two weeks and we'll see what it can do. And Tom will regularly drop 20 grand because he knows he almost always gets it right and he'll turn that into a profitable campaign. But he's putting his money on the line too, with his business model. Yeah.

And I think they did disclaim that when they were on the show. I think they said, you know, this isn't their first campaign. They don't go in there and just do that. They get a lot of data on the pixel before they turn that kind of stuff on using targeting. But eventually there's enough data built into that pixel that they can do that. Yeah.

And Google's got this confusing way that it expands your targeting. They've got similar audiences, which is like Facebook's lookalike, which aren't really as good as Facebook's, but they also have this thing called conservative or aggressive targeting, which is kind of like similar, but not where Google will say, oh, you want stuff like this, I'll go get you stuff like that. And it will wander off. And sometimes that works phenomenally well and other times that works appallingly badly. There's still plenty of fraud on the Google display network, which Google Square black and blue there isn't. I've had many stand up arguments with some of the product managers on this, particularly on apps. I think a lot of the fraud is moving to apps. And so we've seen campaigns. I'm sure Dan has seen the same, where you dig into a display campaign and you find that 80% of the spend was basically caused by fat thumbs on apps that were designed to get clicks on ads. That is not leading towards conversions. I mean, occasionally you get the odd fluke or you get some fraudulent app that makes it look like that these are real conversions. We won't convert every click because 100% conversion rate would look dodgy. I think the fraudsters are getting smart. They're using AI, they're getting smart. But let's not go down that rabbit hole because we could spend another hour on that. I was going to say, I just don't.

I just had someone's account get hacked that was shut down the other day and in two days it spent 70 grand and it was all app traffic. I was like, holy crap. And of course I'm like, hey, your account got hacked.

It was insane.

All app traffic. $70,000 in like 48 hours.

It was out of control. And was that purely by sending the traffic to their own app so that they made money off the app sites, or were they sending money to their own URL? Did they change the ads to redirect them to their own URL?

Yeah, I think that's what they were doing.

It was weird.

I'd never seen anything like it. I didn't know you could actually get. I'd never seen an AdWords account get hacked before.

So let's segue into scripts, because I'll give you an example of a really good use case for scripts.

Scripts are basically little computer programs you can squirt into your Google Ads account and they sit there and run for you. So you take a small portion of the brain of some of the best adwords people on the planet and you go, oh, this is the way they do it. Computer, do that for me. And you can run these scripts hourly if you really want. We can run daily or weekly or whatever. And so one of the scripts that my amazing team wrote, again, Charlene and Heath are brilliant coders. I'm very lucky to have them on the team. But we made a conscious shift towards investing in this stuff about three, four, maybe five years ago.

To build more and more of these scripts. I wouldn't do that today. I don't think Google are going to go too much further down this rabbit hole of scripts. I think they're going to go more down the AI machine learning, leave it to us path. They keep taking control away from us. But right now scripts are a great way to get control over the data and to automate a lot of that. One of the scripts we wrote was to have a white list of URLs. So if an account got hacked, the first thing the hackers normally do is to redirect the ad. So they leave everything the same, but they just change the URL of the ad to send all of that traffic to their site. And then if that doesn't get detected, then they'll ramp up some bids and then the ramp up budgets and then you end up spending huge amounts of money in 48 hours. Ouch. With a script in place, you might have a whitelist to say, this is evergreenprofits.com is an allowable domain for this account. If anything ever happens, if any other ad, maybe it's a typo, maybe it's malicious, but if any other ad or site link or a keyword URL changes to anything other than whatever's on my White list, automatically pause the ad. And so, yes, worst case, they've got 59 minutes of running that traffic, but then it will get shut down automatically by having this little program that's sitting there watching for that stuff or another script you might have is to alert you when anything weird happens. When a campaign suddenly starts spending lots of money on mobile ads, and historically it's only spent 10 bucks a day on ads or on apps. Sorry. And now all of a sudden, it's up to a thousand per hour. Immediately send me an email or a text message or something, let me know, alert me to this thing. I'm a massive, massive fan of automated alerts. That's a really good place to get started. So not having a script make a change to an account for you, but letting you know about stuff, having that data brought to you, I think what Gerber would call management by exception. But having that brought to you and saying, oi, there's a big problem over here, Wave the red flag, come check me out.

Is that something that you can. So you said you develop scripts. Is that a marketplace that people can add?

It should be. It absolutely should be. There should be an app marketplace where we could lease all of the scripts that we've written to people and they could use them for a couple of cents a time. That doesn't exist, but there are some amazing people. Russ Savage is probably the best known for this. Freeadwordscripts.com but if you just did a Google search for best AdWords scripts, you'll find loads and loads of posts. There's a post, I can't remember who it was. Hammer something, Rankhammer I think it was, that did a post with about 120 scripts. Google's own dev site has got loads of free scripts. And this is all free because once it's out there, it's out there. We spend a lot of money writing our own.

But as soon as you give that away, then it's out there in the world and all it is.

Is code with those scripts. You mentioned that you use it a lot for alerts and to shut down ads if the wrong URL is there and things like that. But I'm assuming you can use these scripts to actually sort of watch for things in your ads and tweak things based on what it's seeing and sort of create your own AI to adjust ads for you as well, right?

Totally. And that's really what they were there for at the beginning. Most of the scripts you'll find in the wild are for bidding.

What Are some examples of those kinds of scripts?

Oh, gosh. Well, anything you can think of that's rule based. So if this, then that. So if an ad has spent more than $50 but not converted at all, then pause the ad. Or if my ad group has spent more than 100 bucks but not converted, then pause the ad group. Or if my campaign has spent more than 500 bucks and never converted, pause the campaign. So there's a really, really simple version of that built into Google which is called Auto rules. But auto rules are fairly limited in what they can do and they only get to run daily. It's a great place to start though. If you're totally new to automation. I'd suggest just do a Google search for common auto rules and go find, look through that, find some stuff in there. Scripts are sort of the more advanced big boys, big girls area where you can go play a lot more power, loads of them, freely available. But yeah, start with stuff that just either adds a label to a keyword or an ad group or a campaign. That's a really good place to start. And then once you see that it's doing what you want, the right stuff is being labeled. If this, then that. If this thing is spending too much money, if something weird is going on, if there's an anomaly, label this thing and tell me to come have a look. Once the labels are doing what you expect and what you thought it was going to do, then you can say, well, don't just label it. Actually now I want you to do this. I want you to move this keyword over here into this ad group. I want you to take this new search query that I've discovered in my shopping campaign and move it over to its own ad group. In a search campaign you can do all kinds of crazy stuff that makes sense. You can have it send beautifully formatted emails every day or every week straight to your clients if you want. So you can automate all of your reporting instantly.

Yeah, so one of the things that we do with our ads is we'll start by running our ads just to the U.S. and that's it. And then once we get a campaign that's working really well in the us, one of the ways we see scale is then we go and say, okay, let's test it in the uk, okay, it's working in the US and uk, let's add it to Australia and we start to add in other countries, but we duplicate the.

Campaign and all the ads. Everything that's in the campaign, we duplicate it identically into A different country. So I would imagine you could probably do something like that automatically with these scripts.

Absolutely. You could have a little Google sheet with a list of the countries in the order that you wanted them to go through. Uk, Australia, South Africa, Africa, New Zealand, Ireland, blah blah, blah, blah. And have it if this, then that. If we hit this particular threshold, then go create the next campaign or add that geo into our existing campaign, but put a bid mod over the top of it just to reduce the risk. So anything that you can think of essentially time saver. There's very few things. Yeah, it's a huge time saver.

So I want to be very respectful of time. I know we're kind of coming to the end here, but I did have one last little topic I wanted to touch on quickly, but before wrapping up and that is landing pages and where you can drive them to.

So I had a Google AdWords account shut down back in 2007, 2008, somewhere around there. And basically they said it was shut down because I was sending people to bridge pages where it was a page where there was only one option. You basically opt in or you leave. Right. That was the only options on the page. Now we originally, we eventually got our ads account turned back on, but I've heard that Google is sort of relaxed on that kind of stuff a little bit. So I'm kind of curious what sort of rules of thumbs you have about landing pages, what you can drive traffic to. And then as a sort of add on to that question, affiliate products. Is it okay to drive traffic to affiliate products from Google? Because I know a lot of people believe there's a bit of a gray area there.

I'll come at the second part first, which is to say I am not the best person to ask. I haven't played with affiliate stuff on Google since 2005. It was much easier back then. And then when the massive slap happened, 2007, I just stopped doing all of that. So I basically have a granny policy, which is we don't take on clients that my granny wouldn't approve of because that's basically what Google have. I think they basically have a granny policy. So we pretty much will maybe points them in the right direction. But there's plenty of stuff that we've turned down to say, nah, we're just not comfortable playing in that space. And that annoys some people. And that's usually when you find out that was a really good client to turn down when they just go on this huge rant. Why don't you take my Money and there's just some markets we just don't want to play. And it's not personal to them. People take it personally. But we've just decided what we are good at and what we're comfortable doing and what fits our values. We're very focused on what our values are. So I'm not the best person to talk to about this stuff because we don't push the envelope. We are dealing with very, very safe industries. As a general rule of thumb around the landing page, transparency is a big one. Adding value. The reason they don't like bridge pages is you're not adding any additional value. This is virtually the same as these other 14 bridge pages over here. And you're not giving the user any option. Like you say, it's either opt in or disappear. They want to see value being added when someone lands on that page. So good design matters because at some point you're going to get a human review and that human review is probably going to last about 20 seconds. They're going to have a quick glance at it. Does this smell suspicious? Is this a page I'd send my granny to? If it doesn't pass the sniff test then they're probably going to start to dig a bit deeper of clear and obvious what the, what the brand is. A little bit of navigation generally helps. We used to test should the nav be at the top or should be at bottom. Because from a conversion rate point of view that might make a big difference. These days we tend to say let's focus on the human first, what makes a good human experience and not worry about the machine so much because if it's good for the users then it's probably going to be okay. There are some guidelines that you can find the stuff that Google's quality guys are told to look for. You can Google that and find some of those big thick document that you can read through. But generally if you sort of do the pretty decent ethical job, if you're not pushing to try and find the edge of that line, then you're generally going to be okay in most markets. If you're in a market that Google doesn't like, then we won't be the best agency for you and you may run into to problems at which point then you've got to start dealing with the bureaucracy that is Google. And basically that can be a six month conversation of what is it specifically on my landing page that I need to change? Because they won't give you a list, they'll give you one at a time.

Right.

And they'll say it's this. If you're lucky, they'll say it's this ingredient. You've mentioned this particular thing here on this, on this other page on your site. Yeah, but that's not even on the landing page yet. But on your website you mentioned this ingredient, which is on our banned list. Okay, so now you've got to go change it. And for some people, they can't change that. They can't change the formulation of a supplement just to keep Google happy. But the really, really smart supplement companies know what Google like and what they don't like.

Or they compare someone like you guys. They know the rules inside and out.

I'm very lucky. I've got two ex Googlers in Hyderabad that are, amongst other things, particularly wonderful at policy. I've got an excuser in the office as well who's been with me the longest of anyone and they've been trained in that. And they just think like Google thinks it's a great resource to have. They are fantastic.

That's what it seems like. Just be human, lead with value, give good quality design and content and everything you can do. You're at least on your best foot forward when you're running ads to any platform, I would imagine. Yeah, let alone conversions will be better.

Should be.

So I know we ran a little over, but let's wrap it up. What's a good book or something you end up reading or recommending often to.

Folks after the AdWords code?

Yes.

I'm a massive fan of the near future, so that's what I love to do. How do I leverage the near future to help grow businesses? That's my sandbox. And if I spend the rest of my life playing in that little sandbox, I'll be a very, very happy camper. So I love looking ahead at what's the near future. So right now, obviously AI machine learning is a huge part of that, but slightly broader than that. I'd recommend books like thank youk For Being Late, Tom Friedman or the inevitable Kevin Kelly. Two wonderful, wonderful books. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is one I just read the other day. If you want to dig into AI a little bit more AI superpowers, which is scary as hell because basically China win this game. And what happens next when China do win? And how far away is that hint? Not very far. Prediction Machines is a great book on AI as well. Yeah, I could go for another hour.

Principles Ray Dalio. I love the first half of that book. The second half I realized the Guy's an absolute nut job. But hey, he's a multi, multi billionaire.

I actually didn't get that far. I got about half and I was like, this is really good.

Have you read Bold by, I think, Peter Diamantis?

Yeah, Peter Diamantis. Two books, Bold and Abundant. I'm part of his A360 digital community, which is a fantastic resource. I actually just did. The reason I was up in Sydney a couple of weeks ago was they brought Singularity University to Australia for the first time, which was an amazing conference. Brilliantly, brilliantly facilitated. Couple of amazing guys, Kyle and Mark and some of the SU faculty. So, yeah, we did some deep dives into AI and blockchain and big data and a bunch of other stuff. It was fantastic. Loved that.

I love it.

Thank you too.

Yeah, Bold was one of those books that I read that book and it just like instantly got me interested in futurism related topics. After reading that book, it just led me down some other rabbit holes. And he's got an email that, that sends every Friday. That's a free email called Abundance Insider, which is a really, really great email series to be on as well.

Awesome.

Yeah. And that will lead you down from there. You'll end up down the Ray Kurzweil rabbit hole and reading about the Singularity and how to create a mind. That was a wonderful book. Ray's a pretty interesting guy. He's now Google's Director of engineering. So we've come full circle.

There you go.

Cool.

AIs everywhere in China too. Like you said, lots of things happening.

Cool.

Dan, anything you would input on the book question. Might as well add you in there.

The Walking Dead.

Oh, wait, jeez.

Okay, we're cutting you off.

It's a great graphic novel series.

Harry Potter.

Love it. He's glancing around the room he's in, thinking My Little Pony.

I don't think the listeners know where he's sitting.

I don't know if you're familiar with.

That one, but.

Are you sorry you asked yet? Joe, Are you sorry you asked?

I'm sorry I asked. All right, back to mute.

All right, man. Mike, where should folks go and learn more from you? I know we're going to give a lot of stuff in our show, notes that people can check out.

Yeah, we'll do a bit of a special offer for your listeners too. If they're thinking about wanting to get an account audited, we'll do a special deal for you. If they've made it all the way to the end, then I think that's that's only fair. So agencysavvy.com hustle. There will be something on there whenever, by the time this goes live. So, yeah, agencysavvy.com. that's where I do all of my teaching. That's where all of my courses are. And if you get a slash hustle, then get a little bit of bonus. Sweet.

Super cool, Mike. Thank you. And, yeah, we'll link everything in the show notes and make it obvious, even for folks that might not have lasted this long.

You're good deep, boys. You really are.

I think we'll be doing around two, because I think there's, like, half of the list we didn't even touch yet.

Yeah, I'm looking at our whiteboard, and there's so much we didn't even get around to.

So I'll come back. Yeah, you were super flexible with me. I had to move this around because some stuff happened the other day. So thank you for that, but I'm flexible. I'll come back for round two if you're happy.

That's all that's good.

And jury's out there buying beers at Overtime traffic and conversion 2019. Because Mike will be there.

I'll be there.

Yes.

I'll do a podcast there.

Set up a little booth in the bar.

Yeah, we'll go in the back.

The drunken version. That'll be great.

That would be kind of cool.

That would be cool.

You could do, like, four episodes a night from there and just. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah.

Love it.

All right, we're gonna call that tentatively happening. All right, Dan. Thank you, guys. Have a good one.

Thanks, Matt.

Thanks, Jeff.

Thanks, Dan. See ya.

All right. Thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now, right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook. And go say that you love their episode and maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing, is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training and a whole bunch of other cool free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com. so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.