Keywords Research For Ads

Does advertising work? Does it still work? What do we know about and what do we need to know about advertising? We have Amit Khabra here today to talk about this because she's been at this for like 13 years, right? So she knows a thing or two about advertising and probably all the changes that have happened over those 13 years. It'd be really interesting to know your thoughts on that, right? In terms of the changes that have happened. I mean, even more recently, we just started seeing, or at least I'm hearing anecdotally, a lot of people are talking about how advertising just doesn't seem to work the way that it, that it used to. So what is it that we're really seeing, Amit, before we get into the keyword research for ads?

I think a lot of people are seeing this ongoing conversation about cost per click going up, about our cost in just advertising going up. Um, but they're not considering the fact that as advertising becomes more easily accessible to people, um, naturally it's gonna go up when there's a demand for it. Naturally, the supply— there's only so much supply, so the price will start to go up. Um, and everybody sees that as a negative thing, and I mean, of course it is. Obviously I want to pay the least amount of money as possible, but at the same time, if it's still generating revenue for me, I'd rather take that than nothing. And there's some advertisers or business owners out there like, we've left, the cost per click is too high. But when they were to look at their actual numbers, they're still in the red— or not in the red, sorry, in the black. Um, I was gonna say green and then I got tripped up a little bit, but, um, in the black. And then they don't— they, they turn off ads and then they see this decline in their revenue and they don't know how to account for it. And it's because they've turned off advertising. Um, so I, I Advertising still works is basically the long, like the, the long story short. Advertising still works. It's just a matter of figuring out what platform your users are on and actually speaking to them versus going, hey, buy my thing. Well, you kind of have to explain that a little bit more. Why? What's the benefit for them to give you your email address or their email address? What's the benefit of them giving you money for that bag? What's the benefit of any of it? So if you have that really clearly laid out, you can find quite a bit of success in advertising still to this day that isn't gonna put you in the poorhouse really at this point, which is I think a notion that everybody has now.

Yeah. I mean, there certainly are stories of people saying that things have changed radically. However, you've painted a positive picture that there still is potential to be successful with advertising, which leads us into today's topic, which is how do we, I wouldn't say guarantee that success, but how do we set ourselves up for more potential to be successful with ads? And then we're going to talk about this through the perspective of keyword research. And so let's just start with, has keyword research evolved in terms of the tools that are available to people to be able to figure out what are the keywords that I want to be going for?

Yeah, there's so many more now. When I first started, I think there was two and it was all US data and I'm Canadian, so Uh, it served me no good really at this point. So now we have so much out there and my favorite is called KeywordTool, I believe it's .io. Um, and it literally actually just scrapes Google and you just go through and go, what are people searching? How frequently are they searching? And are those keywords that I wanna actually bid for? Um, and then you go back into Google Keywords Planner and then take a look at whether or not how it's gonna cost you a ton of money or if it's gonna be relatively low competition. Um, but with the addition of new tools now, we have so much information in front of us that we can actually find keywords that our competitors might've never even realized were even in existence really at this point. So as, as we, if you're willing to mine through endless amount of data, you can find some really great gems that could work for quite some time and you can kind of eke out in front of your competitor that way, which is one of my favorite things to do.

I love it. Okay, so, um, again, I'm an organic girl, so forgive me if I'm asking questions that you're like, uh, yeah, of course. Um, but long-tail keyword versus keywords, like, so as an— as someone who's going to be maybe doing some advertising, do I need to be looking at long-tail keywords, or can I be looking at keywords that are perhaps a delineation of the thing that I do where there is more competition for, let's say, a more popular keyword?

I would do a mix of both, actually. Um, with the long-tail keywords, you want to make sure that your ad copy is actually speaking to the problem that that person is actually having, because long-tail tends to be like a question, right? How do I make a resume? How do I ace that interview? And then you want to answer that question within your ad copy, because the chances are that person, uh, who sees that answer is going to click through and likely is going to be a bit better of a qualified lead for you at that point. Um, if you just sit there and be like, hey, we, uh, here's a white paper on interview questions, that might get you some clicks and some conversions at that point, but I don't think it's going to be as successful. Really answering that question for them is going to be a really great, uh, thing to do. And I do understand that that can be a bit of more work, which a lot of people don't want to do. Um, so it's just a matter of kind of getting creative with it, but also just Answering that question and just kind of getting right in front of those people and, and, um, and, uh, just being exactly what they're looking for. Because I think a lot of advertising now has just gotten a little generic. And then they're also— and then we hear that CPC or that cost per click argument all over again where it's like, cost per click has gone up. And I'm like, well, yeah, but your ads kind of suck. So what am I supposed to do here?

Right? Okay, you know, that's a great point because the creative, and that's what we call the, the creative, is the, the your ad sucks part, right? Um, so what do you advise people to do from a creative perspective that might work better if they do the keyword research and to make their ads more effective? Is it better to have a talking head? Is it better to have an animation? Is it better to have an explainer or, you know, a TikTok style type of thing with emoji emojis? Is there any kind of parameter there that you can share with us of what works?

Well, when we're looking at Instagram and Facebook, really at this point, we know that Instagram is trying to push, uh, video content more and more. Video content makes sense, and they're saying that, you know, users, uh, want more video content, and they do. But that doesn't mean that static images have lost their way in all of this. They still perform really, really well. And if you don't have the ability to create video content, then you don't have the ability to create video content. At the very least, put in those static images. Um, and then on the Facebook side of things, they have this really great ads library that I feel like not a lot of, or not enough people know about it. So you basically just put in Google or no Facebook ads library into Google. Um, whatever comes up, click through and then you can actually put in your competitors and you can see what they've been running. And that's what we, that's a common practice that everybody actually really does in the industry. We take a look at what our competitors are doing. Um, it'll tell you how long the ad's been running for. It'll also tell you how much they've been spending, which is a great way to figure out your own budget if you don't know.

Oh, I didn't know, I didn't know that you could see how much they're spending.

Yeah, it'll tell you historically how much has been spent. I don't remember if it's by ad, but it'll give you an idea of like, this is when they started spending, or this is when they started, um, advertising, this is how much money they've spent. Um, it's not for every single advertiser. It'll, it varies depending on what information that they actually want to give to you. Um, but I was running a political campaign last year and we basically used that to figure out what our competition was spending so that way we could kind of be a little bit higher than them every single time. And it was a great resource. And then we were able to see what they were doing and then kind of go, does this make sense for us to replicate or does it make sense for us to just go our own direction? And for that campaign, it made more sense for us to keep our own direction. But oftentimes what we'll see is there's ads that have been running for 2 years, and that literally tells me that it's a good ad that's been converting really well. So let's try to replicate it. Why reinvent the wheel when we don't need to? Someone's already done all the hard work for us. We might as well just ride on their coattails, really, at that point. Yeah, really. Um, so because the name of the game is to make— it's not to be the new creative person, it's to generate more revenue for you, right?

So the Ads Library, I, I haven't— I certainly have done that. I've seen that, and I don't know if it's still accessible through Facebook Pages, where you can dig a little bit deeper into the settings and you can figure out what that particular person, what kind of ads that they're running. Now, we wouldn't necessarily see all the intricate analytics of how that's converting or how much money they're necessarily making. But we can make some assumptions based on, like you said, the duration of that ad campaign. If it's been running for 2 years, no one's gonna run an ad campaign for 2 years that's not working. At least we would hope. And then from a creative perspective, you can see what your competition is doing and then maybe get ideas, or you do something completely opposite on the creative side But then coming back to keywords, does it also then help to inform or give you some sense of what type of keywords to do research on?

Uh, to a certain degree. So when we're talking about keywords, it's more or less, uh, or more so on the Google side of things. So, um, if we're talking Google Search, then images don't play a large factor in— we do have image extensions now which, um, appear in Google Ads, but they're not consistent. Like every time you search, let's say, Hopscot Media, you're not going to see an image of my face or somebody on staff. But you might. There's, there's certainly— it's when Google deems it necessary, really, at that point. So when we're talking about creative, it doesn't necessarily work on that front. But what I really like to do, or something that we used to like to do quite a bit, was using Facebook and Google together. So what we would do is create the awareness on the Facebook side of things and then use Google to kind of close it out. And that's something that a lot of companies have started or had been doing, uh, in the past where they would literally just write like a really weird headline in a sense, but that was relevant to their business. And then people would remember that headline and then eventually go to Google and search for it. So then it was another keyword that your competitors weren't bidding, but it's very easy and accessible for the user to come and find you. So then they would Google to close everything and Facebook to essentially just open that door for them. So that's always like a little nifty little trick to, to do if you want, if you have the budget for it, is kind of get really, really creative with Facebook and then kind of close them out on the Google side of things.

Very interesting strategy. I never knew that. Um, okay, so I want to just kind of go into some of these terms because I'm, again, I'm organic girl over here, right? So Tell, tell me, what is, what is broad match? What is a, what is broad match keyword research, I guess?

So broad, so essentially, uh, Google has given us in technicality 3, but it's 4, and we'll be talking about the 4th one next anyways. Um, so the 3 match types that we have are broad, phrase, and exact. Um, and they kind of sound like how they're, they, they are. So broad match is essentially us saying, hey, no parameters around this keyword, it's like kind of like throwing out a net and catching whatever you can possibly get. With phrase, uh, we can put, um, let's just say Hop Skip Media. Um, if I were to put quotations around Hop Skip Media, what that tells Google is that you can put anything before or after that phrase, but that phrase needs to be in that order. Other— like, if somebody put hop media skip, it would not show up. Um, but if they did Hop Skip Media, it would. And if they did hop skip again, it would not show up. And then for exact match, the theory is that it would only be when somebody searches Hop Skip Media and that's it, nothing before, nothing afterwards. Um, but there's something called close variants, which is essentially Google's way of saying if we think it's close enough to what like the term is to what the person is searching for, we're going to show your ad anyway. Um, so then there's those three. So broad match, um, is the reason why I wanted to bring up broad match during this session is, uh, because it, it's one that you shouldn't be using, especially if you're not somebody who's been in the industry for a long time. Because essentially what ends up happening is a lot of people will use broad match because Google suggests that you do that. Um, but Google's only suggesting it because they can make the most money off of that. They're literally finding you anything. So at one point I was doing work with an agency in Edmonton and they had broad match for everything and they showed up for Edmonton cheese. They were web developers, so it's nothing to do, nothing to do with it, right? And they end up paying for that click because somebody went ahead and clicked through and thought maybe this is relevant to what I'm looking for. Um, and that was just wasted money on their end and that's because they use broad match. So if you're somebody who's constantly in the account or if you're somebody who's spending like maybe about $500 or so, like a, a tiny amount in the grand scheme of what a lot of advertisers spend, um, then it might work for you because then at the very least there's not a lot of wasted spend there. Um, but if you're spending thousands of dollars, I highly suggest either you're in the account every quite frequently, not every single day, but quite frequently looking at the keywords that you're actually showing up for, or you have a professional on staff or hired out as a contractor who's going to go through all of that to make sure that you're not wasting money on Edmonton cheese when you're a web developer.

When you're a web developer. No, it makes a lot of sense. So I love that they don't— the broad match is not what you want. You want to be going for the more specific other examples of that. Um, you also have negative keywords. Tell us what that is.

Yeah, so that's number 4. It's not technically a keyword, but also it is. So negative keywords are essentially us telling Google, hey, we don't want to show up for this. So a lot of marketers will have their own little seed list. I call it my universal list. Um, and it usually goes over like cheap, free, uh, adult terms that we don't necessarily want to show up for. And then if you're a massage therapist, you can only really kind of imagine what that could turn into. Um, and, uh, so that's what we'll sit there and I'll start with that seed list. Uh, and Google will sit there and be like, okay, so if somebody puts Hopscot Media cheap, it, they're not going to show up, um, or we're not going to show up. Sorry, uh, if somebody puts in, um, Hop Skip Media teaching job or something, again, won't show up because I believe teaching is one of the keywords that I have in that universal list. So it's another great way to sit there and say, hey, we're gonna save our money as much as we possibly can. It gives us a bit more control. And then Going back to the broad match side of things, this is where you could combat the, uh, the keywords that you don't really want to show up for when you're using broad match. But again, having somebody who actually knows what they're doing would be super beneficial on that side of things, because then at the very least they can go through the list and be like, these aren't the keywords that we want to show up for, Google. Please save us the money and don't charge us for Edmonton cheese, please. I love it.

Okay, so then, um, conversion tracking is another concept that I'd love for you to share with us that relates to keyword research for ads.

Yes, so key— or conversion tracking is probably my favorite thing in the entire world, and it's literally us tracking the action somebody needs to take to get in contact with you on the website, or whatever you deem to be a conversion. So sometimes for some businesses, it's somebody downloading a white paper, uh, sometimes, uh, it's downloading or giving your email address so you can get that coupon code for that, that bag store. Um, and then sometimes, or more often than not for a lot of our clients, is completing a form fill, sending an email, or, um, phoning them, uh, directly. So, uh, on Google side of things, it's a smidge harder to get all that information. So we use something called Google Tag Manager, which is essentially just code. We set up our little triggers and then we test them. And as people click through, we're able to track that. Um, but we're able to track it for all of the website, for all of, uh, all of the traffic, and not just specifically for Google Ads. So it's a great practice to have as soon as you start your website, uh, or launch your website really at this point. And then on the Facebook end of side of things, it's a smidge easier, which I really, really enjoy. So it's called Event Manager. Um, all you do is you put in your website and then you literally just kind of click around and be like this form fill is a contact, this form fill is a complete registration, this person form fill is a newsletter or something along those lines. And then for e-commerce, it's really great because it'll actually let you go through all the steps of somebody adding to the cart, going to checkout, actually putting in their information, and then like actually checking out. So then you can kind of watch where people drop off in your funnel as well in Facebook. And then you can actually identify if there's an issue in that funnel as well. A lot of people are on Shopify now, so there's not like a whole lot of, um, customization that you can do on the— that end of things. But it's still really fascinating to look through, especially if you're on a different platform, to sit there and be like, okay, you know what, people are going to the submit information page but they don't check out. And then you might be able to discover some kind of issue. Maybe, um, they're putting in a discount code that's not working that should be. Maybe there's too many questions and they don't want to be answering that many. It could be a number of things and it's a really great way to figure that out versus sitting there running these ads and then be like, they're not working. Well, yes, I mean, they're not working, but there's an issue that you have to fix before they actually do start working.

Yeah, which, which it's really about optimization of the ads at that point, but you're, you're gathering data from their behaviors through the event manager. And, and just to clarify, The events are behaviors. They're actions that people are taking. They're described as events in Facebook. So if the person does this thing, then we can glean something from that. So then you're able to go in and really optimize better and understand, okay, well, people are getting to this point, but then they don't take the next action. Maybe there's something that can be done there. Maybe it's the copy on the landing page or whatever stage that might be. So No, it all makes a lot of sense. I would love for you to share how people can get in touch with you if they're interested in pay-per-click, CDC, then where did they go?

Yeah. So you could fill in a form on our website. So hopscotmedia.com, there's a couple, you can do a contact form and I believe there's an intake form on the services page as well in regards to just getting as much information from you as possible. The next steps would be just booking a call with our director of sales and marketing, Idris. He's got like, I don't even know, he's been in the game way longer than I have. He comes from copywriting, so he's got experience in literally everything, and I think he's such a great resource just to talk to in general. So yeah, you get a half an hour call with him, talk to him about all your needs, and then we kind of come back and try to figure out what the best method of attack is for you. If you're looking to learn more about just advertising in general and just want to fill in that gap in your education, I think selfishly, I think my Instagram page is probably one of the better ones out there, uh, and that's AdWords Girl. And we post content a couple times a week, and it, it hopefully— I'm hoping that it answers the questions that a lot of people are having in regards to advertising.

I love that. And, uh, the last thing I want to ask you, Amit, is, um, what is it And it may be related to ads or not, but what is a tip, a tool, a tactic, or a technique that's helping you to market yourself and your company today?

Oh gosh. I honestly believe in network and relationships more than anything in the world. Um, it's essentially how I stumbled into becoming an agency owner at this point. I just would show up to places that I honestly really wasn't supposed to be at, but we're still digital marketing spaces. Um, cause not a lot of people did PPC at that when I had started, there was a pretty unknown. Skill at that point. So I would show up to UI/UX or web dev or social media SEO type of meetups and everybody would look at me really strangely and be like, what are you doing here? And then eventually I would just start, sit there and just ask questions. I'm like, I wanna learn more about what you guys do. Like, this is fascinating to me. And then eventually at one point, if I didn't show up, it became like this whole thing of where did she go? Why isn't she here? And then years later when everybody left their agency jobs to go pursue something, much bigger and better, whether it be with like a bigger company or starting their own agencies, um, they ended up coming back to me and saying, you were there when we had these random questions that nobody really wanted to answer. Um, so I unknowingly invested a lot of time in my network and that's been paying off. So, uh, if, yeah, if there's anything that I would advise anybody who's starting, or even if you're like been in the business for a really long time, it's just really investing in that network. It'll It's like SEO, it'll continue paying off years and years and years down the line.

Agreed, agreed. This has been really fun to talk about keyword research for ads. Uh, thank you so much for being on Cash In On Camera, and I'm looking forward to staying connected.

Thank you so much for having me.