So now let's talk about, once you've set up a campaign what Google is doing in the background to provide those results. So our same example here where the person is searching for a record club. Google has built an incredible TAC, just really lightning-fast how good that user experiences that they're able to take that term that you're searched for and find now all of the advertisers within their hundreds of thousands of campaigns across the world to see which one meet those targeting requirements have the match type set up and which of those ad groups within all there millions of ad groups are relevant to the user for this search. We take it for granted, but it's nothing short of magic as the amount of data there processing lightning-fast. So as a marketer, you should assume that you've got competitors who are looking for the same keywords unless you are brilliant to have figuring out keywords that people are searching for your product that no one else has figured out. You should assume that you're always going to be competing against folks. So in this example, there's me and two other folks who are all vying for that record club search or traffic, and we have all set bits behind each of those keywords. We'll talk a lot about the bidding. In the old days, we used to spend just hours and hours of time optimizing, testing, and changing bids. I know recently Google has really pushed hard on their automation there. Yeah. They've got a lot of intelligence happening in the background and try to find that right bid price for you for your most relevant top-performing terms. They're looking at a lot of data, but it can be a struggle for smaller businesses with smaller budgets because their whole business intelligence that underpins that bidding relies on having processed enough data. So if you're only getting 10 or 20 clicks a day and your campaign is set up around somebody joining said record club, if you're only getting maybe one person to do that a day, it's not a lot of information for Google the process. So well it's grown leaps and bounds. There are some scenarios where a human will make some inferences that are probably stronger than Google's business intelligence logic depending on how much data you're pushing through which is really a function of budget. Yeah. As a professional who's focused on search campaigns all day and you're able to invest the time you can get, you can fine-tune those bids to the place that makes a lot of sense. I'm a small business owner. I may not have that time to be able to pay attention to it. Yeah. I mean, how great to have Google doing some of that heavy-lifting as you're still managing your business. You're wearing 10 different hats and you can't get in there, roll up your sleeves five times a week to tweak the dials. Totally. I mean, it does feel like there's a little bit of conflict of interest for Google where they have an incentive to jack up the bids and charge as much is. Why would you let the company decide to set up a price? Yeah, it is. It is a reason why a lot of small businesses once they get to a certain level of spend, they seek to employ or contract somebody just to make sure they're getting the most value out of it. You can get expensive in a hurry. It does provide great returns, but there's ways to add efficiency to the campaign. Yeah. In general, you don't think that Google's going to put their $100 billion market position at risk to try get $0.10 extra from everyone. Exactly. Well, what are the other functions? Because it's not just price that drives the position. Right. So quality. So I think probably in the old days I don't know maybe in 1999, the bidding was the pure dominant thing that determined position and who's going to get shown, but again that focus and that maniacal insistence that their results have to be relevant and the good user experience for the searcher has led them to introduce more and more into this kind of quality. Yeah. I mean from inception. '98, '99 through about 2006, it was a straight Dutch auction logic set. Then they introduced this quality component that it was your price plus a quality ranking. So really things started to shift quite a bit 2006 to 2008. I imagine there were some scammers or something. There was. Cat and mouse. Google tries to always make sure it's the most relevant. People are always trying to figure out a way to abuse that so that they can pay less and get better results. Sell their fake Viagra. So quality is a pretty qualitative nebulous concept, but we'll talk about some of the things that go into that in a little bit. But for now, suffice it to say Google is factoring both of these two things, the bid, how much the marketer is willing to pay for that click, and how good, how relevant those results are and provide the best stuff to the user. So in this example, even though my bid was a little bit lower than the second guy, because of my high quality, I might outrank him when Google's determining which ad to put first. Yeah. So let's talk about those two components because those are the things that are partially to some extent in the advertisers' control to work on to get their ad into the top position where they can actually get some traffic. We talked about their Dutch auction and their process of getting folks bids. One of the genius things, the beauties of Google's business model is that this causes the market to self-correct and get to a place where the price for that click is directly proportional to how profitable that searcher is as a potential customer. So the cliche search here is this mesothelioma thing which is what like an asbestos. It is. Yes there are big class action lawsuits and as a legal firm, you would be possibly bringing $100 million lawsuit against. You're willing to pay a lot. So you're willing to pay $319 for a visitor to visit your site once because if they even know how to spell mesothelioma. I can't even say it. Then they're probably a good candidate and somebody you want to talk to. Right. So how precise, how likely that search term is that you're going to turn into a customer drives up click costs. How profitable that potential customer is drives up click costs. That's really competition. You ended up having who's probably only somewhere between 10 and 20 law firms that specialize MS, but they only knew it was so valuable and they each just trying to outbid each other, and all of a sudden, that click costs gets inflated to hundreds of dollars. But even software, and degrees, and lawyer, there's a bunch of different industries. So the click costs that you're going to have to pay is going to vary a lot depending on where you are So let's say I am a lawyer and I'm trying to drive traffic to my site, but I get a little bit of sticker shock when I think about paying $42 for the keyword lawyer. Is there anything I can do as an advertiser to not pay $42, or should I just go ahead? This is where you may even want to get a little more clever with your keywords, and typically longer phrases are cheaper. They get searched less often. It's really easy for somebody to go into Google and just type in lawyer and see what pops up. But if somebody's looking for a specific family attorney Denver, Colorado, instead of paying $42, that phrase might be five or six dollars. It's potentially a better customer if you're in Denver, Colorado doing family law. But the universe of people that type it is much lower. So maybe tens of thousands of people are searching lawyer, and 10 people are searching family practice law Denver, Colorado. This is a building, I always wanted to have a business where like Google where when my customers are lazy, I make more money. Exactly. But if you do the work and get invest in building- Yeah. Out your keyword less smartly, you can save a lot of money. Smart keyword research, relevant ad copy writing, and a good website, at least in Google's parlance, are great ways to bring those costs down. Right, and I think that's pretty universal that these one word key words tend to be more expensive. Absolutely. [inaudible] terms just tend to be more expensive. All right. So then the quality piece, that one is a lot more nebulous, right? Yeah. Google's gives a lot of guidance on what are the components of quality but not. They don't give you full transparency, they're not showing you the exact way they calculate quality, but they'll give you a lot of helpful information along the way. So click-through rate has always been a big component and we'll talk a little bit more about what that means. The ad relevance again that mission of Google to make sure those less things, those results that they provide are always as relevant as possible so that factors in here, but then also the landing page. So where does that click actually take you and how good that landing page is also factors in, and then other stuff. Google's, I mean, they're so sophisticated, but it's also there's some ways to think about it that simplify this. When they talk about relevancy, the way they're really doing that is they're looking at the search query, that thing that was typed in the search box. Yeah. You as an advertiser said, "We want to show our ad for this, it's one of your keywords." Does that appear in the ad copy itself? So if I'm looking for a Fuji X-T3, the ad better have that exact product in it, right? Right. Then when I go to the landing page, it's not a bunch of magic, they're just looking on that page, does it reference that same products? So do you have consistency from the search query, to the ad, to the landing page, and then as far as the other stuff goes, one of the things that's been a huge factor for Google in the last few years and we talked early on about their mobile dominance is page load speed. So a lot of times, with small businesses especially, maybe you couldn't afford as much to build a super fancy website. If those pages load really slowly, you've got huge images on and there's lots of things that factor into load speed, Google actually penalize that and say that that's a poor landing page experience because you're on a mobile device and maybe you got the great network coverage where you are, that page can be really painful to load. If the user abandons that search before the page loads, Google doesn't charge the advertiser. So it's in Google's best interests, it's the best experience for the user, and it's the best for you as an advertiser to make sure that if they click on your ad, the page loads quickly and it's relevant to them. Cool. So let's get into a little bit about the different components of quality. So the click-through rate was the first component of quality. I like this one that is a math guy because this is the users telling Google historically what works for them and so it's the most objective measure for Google to be able to say in the past, readers, searchers have found this ad relevant and so they've clicked on it. So it's sort of an equivocal, yes this ad is relevant. So even though as an advertiser, you're not paying for it to show searchers your ad even if they're not clicking on it, you are ultimately paying for it because if they see your ad but they don't click on it, it's going to hurt your click-through rate. We'll talk later about the writing and compelling ad, right? It has to be relevant but it has to have a call to action so has to engage that user. Those ads that they do all those things, they drive a higher click-through rate which can help lower your costs. Then the ad quality, again, a little bit more nebulous, but we can be sure that if a keyword, the search term that the user has entered appears, those exact words appear in your ad, that's going to be viewed by Google as being a better quality which means you have to pay less to show your ad. Now, some marketers can specifically go against that and try to show their ads to folks who are not typing in their keyword and a big piece of that is this conquest in campaigns where the folks are using their competitor's keywords to show their ads to those folks and try to switch them over, which can be okay but can also be probably fail. It can be really costly and Google doesn't outright support that they penalize you in terms of how much you're going to have to pay on a cost-per-click. Somebody search for an iPhone S, they don't necessarily want to see content about a Galaxy S6, right? Those are different devices. I'm already an Apple guy, you're not going to convince me. Right. So Google shows that as less relevant, doesn't mean you can't get your way in there, but you're going to pay more. Now, could Samsung put in iPhone as success in their copy of their ad to make it seem like they are relevant? No. So Google polices that by enforcing trademarks any advertiser can submit for some trademark protection which says, I don't even want to see any ads show up for my trademarked product. So iPhone is obviously a trademarked product. Depending on how Apple want to do that, they could keep anyone from advertising on it. In this case, they haven't gone that far, but Google will voluntarily police that you can't have an unrelated thing in the ad or trademarked name in the ad. So you talked a little bit about the landing page experience. Google's been explicit about a few of the components. Remember the bounce rate was a big one for us awhile back. Bounce rate just so we don't get too jargony, that's the percent of people that visit the landing page that happens when you click. If people leave that site right away after only visiting that page, they don't view any other pages, that's considered a bounce, right. So that's an indication to Google that the user didn't find what they wanted on that first page and they had to keep looking which is a big no-no for Google. They're trying to get you what you want with one click, take you right to the information you're looking for, and so that'll hurt you, and then you mentioned the page speed. Yeah. Page speed, on-page content, bounce rate are all big parts of that landing page experience. Yeah. So when you're building a campaign having a [inaudible] , I know this was tough for us as an agency just managing the search campaign, as a marketer having your search and your website content on the landing page. Yeah. Super helpful. Yeah. I mean, you can do everything right to get the exact right user to the site, there at that perfect point and the funnel where they're showing in 10, you've put a great ad in front of them. If the landing page isn't connecting with that customer, it's going to hurt you both in terms of your AdWords performance or your Google ads performance. But also, you're going to be wasting money as a company. So you really want make sure you're looking at both sides of the equation. A lot of companies will say we're going to make sure we have good landing pages before we go spend our first dollar because otherwise, that money could just be wasted. Great. So I think the next step is for everyone to go in and actually go through Google's own training material, that's the certification exam that they have. Google's have a great job of this, they refresh it all the time. It is hyper current and it will give you a lot of information. Yeah. Couple of beefs that I have with that, well, I like bashing on Google, they're good, but a couple of things to be aware of this it does get a little bit salesy. It is Google talking about how great they are and so you just have to roll with that. I'll get to $100 billion annual revenue without [inaudible] and I guess- So and I found this frustrating that they don't actually include screenshots and practical, like here's where you click to do this instructions in some of the certification material. So we'll come back and go through some of that in the next section. I also just have a personal beef about this question in the bottom right here because I got this wrong when I've hit the certification recently because all of the above answer was the first thing and I didn't say, well, it's not above so I check in, they should have had a radio button, not a check button, but whatever. So I got that question wrong. So the right answer is all of the above. All of the above. All right. So we'll break here and my folks go off and do that certification exam, it should be about Google puts times here. So it should be about two and a half hours. I found the exam was a lot less time but then some of the studying material particularly if you're trying to reference the actual campaign screens at the same time which I was trying to do ended up taking me a little bit longer but still two and a half hours should be plenty for it. We have spend the time on the study site and then you'll breeze through the exam. Totally. All right. So we'll see you back here and try to implement some of those concepts in practical terms. Good luck.
