033: Daryl Mander – How to Use Google Adwords for More Photography Bookings

033: Daryl Mander – How to Use Google Adwords for More Photography Bookings

Andrew Hellmich: Alrighty, I'm really excited to welcome today's guest, Darrell Mander, is an online Advertising Consultant specializing in Pay Per Click advertising, retargeting and online display advertising. He's originally from the UK, but Daryl is now based in Southeast Asia and building his own online digital marketing agency. He's worked with some major clients like Panasonic, 20th Century Fox, and The Royal Mint, but he's now focusing on helping small and medium businesses find success through marketing on the internet. Now, on today's episode, he's going to be demystifying Google AdWords for us, and I'm hoping teach us how to use AdWords effectively, and whether or not we should even be using Pay Per Click advertising as photographers. Daryl, welcome to the show, mate.

Daryl Mander: Hi Andrew, and thank you very much for having me here.

Andrew Hellmich: Oh, mate, it's an absolute pleasure. I've been so looking forward to getting you into the show and finding out a little bit more about Google AdWords. Before we get into all that, do you want to give us a little bit of a background history on sort of where you're based and what sort of work you do exactly?

Daryl Mander: Yeah, sure. So, as you mentioned just now, I am an online advertising consultant. So I started out my career working for marketing agencies eight years ago, shortly after I graduated from university in the UK and I started working for some digital marketing agencies, some startup digital marketing agencies over there, primarily in paid traffic, PPC, display advertising, Facebook advertising, retargeting and a bit of affiliate marketing as well. And I started out with quite a broad remit, operating across a number of different marketing channels, and then, as the years went by, slowly narrowed my focus down to the point where I was focusing solely on display advertising and pay per click advertising, primarily through Google and Facebook.

Andrew Hellmich: What's display advertising?

Daryl Mander: Display advertising would be online advertising that uses banners and buttons and the visual form of advertising. So for example, if you go to your favorite newspaper publisher website, you'll likely see some banners at the top or on the side that have a visual ad that's hoping to get you to click through to a completely different website. It's called display because it's literally displaying an ad in front of you when you're browsing some other website.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, perfect. And now you're, so you're currently based in Southeast Asia. Is that right?

Daryl Mander: That's right, yeah. So I worked for digital marketing agencies in the UK for eight years, and then decided that I wanted to strike out on my own and form my own agency, and it would be an online only agency. All my clients would be, I would gain online and just communicate with them online. And the great thing about that is I can then base myself wherever I want in the world. And where I want to be based in the world right now is Southeast Asia. So that's, that's where I came to start my business and start working with clients directly on the PPC side of things.

Andrew Hellmich: Well, so you're, you really are living the dream. You can go anywhere in the world and have a business up and running.

Daryl Mander: Well, I'm working, working my way towards the dream, they said. The business is slowly getting up and running, and I'm much more mobile than I used to be, but I've still got a few more years left I think before I, before I'm really got there.

Andrew Hellmich: It sounds great anyway. So Google AdWords, first of all, maybe you can give us a little bit of an idea for people that don't know exactly what they are, and whether or not we should be using them as photographers.

Daryl Mander: Sure, and I've just realized that I've been using the term PPC here a lot as well. And some, some of your listeners might not be as familiar with that term as I am. When I say PPC, I mean "Pay Per Click", and that's usually referring to Google AdWords. The reason being is that Google AdWords is a form of online advertising, where to buy that advertising you pay every time someone clicks on the ad. So what the ad looks like is if you as a user go into Google and you type in a search term. Say, you want to look for a new tripod for your latest DSLR, and you type in your search term, hit enter, you'll see two sets of results on the Google search results page, one set of results on the left hand side and one set of results on the right hand side. And the stuff on the left hand side is the stuff that Google has determined is relevant to your search term. And the stuff on the right hand side is also stuff that Google is determined relevant to your search term, but it's also adverts, people have paid to put that message there. And that is the Google AdWords side of things. So, if you want to buy ad in that space, and I say right hand side and left hand side to make it more easily distinguishable. But in actual fact, quite often you'll see AdWords ads at the top of your search results on the left hand side as well. It's usually in a shaded box, so you can differentiate it from the natural listings underneath. But all, all that stuff at the very top and on the right hand side is Google AdWords, and it's paid ads where advertisers, such as your listeners, for example, might have paid to have ads pop-up there.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so with those ads, you said that Google determines that they think the viewer is looking for that particular ad or it's relevant to them. So is it Google that determines that, or is it me the advertiser that thinks the viewer should be looking at my ad?

Daryl Mander: It's a bit of both. It's very much you the advertiser, but Google tries, by using a clever price incentive structure. Google will shape the results so that only relevant things show up. So for example, say you're advertising, you're someone who sells photography equipment, and you are advertising all your equipment that you sell on your online store. Say, for some strange reason, you wanted to appear or you wanted to show your ad to people searching for laptops. If you really wanted to, you could show up for that search, but Google is going to recognize the fact that the word laptop is not very relevant to the content on your photography website. And what they'll do is they'll penalize you for showing up on laptop related searches. Because it's, because it's quite irrelevant, you'll have to pay a much higher price for your ads than someone who has a genuine laptop store. That's why it's a bit of both. Like you can choose where you want to advertise, but Google is going to try and be selective as well by giving you better prices when you are more relevant to the searches that a user is making.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. So for my listener, he would, or she would be targeting, say, a local area looking to, to come up in the search term for, say, portrait or wedding photography. So that's what, I guess that's what the focus will be on that for them. So they wouldn't, it'll be silly for them to try and target different keywords, wouldn't it?

Daryl Mander: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you could get those keywords for free or virtually nothing, then hey, why not? You might as well appear on those keywords. But if you're, if you're going to try and appear on those keywords and pay Google for them, Google is going to charge a very, very high rate, and you'll end up losing money appearing for those irrelevant keywords. So with all AdWords advertisers, photographers and non-photographers alike, your best course of action is always to really be very selective and only choose the most relevant keywords for your business to appear on.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, now I accidentally introduced that term keywords there. So do you just want to explain what keywords are?

Daryl Mander: Keywords are anything that you type into Google to find the information you're looking for. So you go into Google, you type in wedding photography, that, that phrase that you just typed in wedding photography, that's what we would refer to as a keyword. Can also be referred to as a search term, but commonly in the AdWords world, you'll see it referred to as a keyword.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, perfect. Okay, so just taking it back a little bit Daryl, so who, who should be using Google Adwords? Or should photographers be using Google Adwords?

Daryl Mander: Absolutely. Anyone who has something to sell, anyone who has a product or a service to sell that is often researched for or looked for on the internet can use Google AdWords to successfully drive business to their website. So if people are out there looking for your product or service. If there are people in your area typing in 'wedding photographer' to look for a wedding photographer, then it just makes sense to appear in front of that person at the right time, at the right place, when they're researching for someone to fulfill that service for them. So it's just great for anyone who really who's selling stuff online or looking for leads online.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so what about if I was, let's take my business for example. So if I'm already ranking on the first page of Google for my targeted keywords, say, 'Central Coast Wedding Photographer', would it still be in my interest to advertise with Google AdWords?

Daryl Mander: Yes, oftentimes it will be, sometimes it won't be. It depends on how many keywords there are that's relevant to your business. So you're already ranking very highly for this one keywords that I assume is driving you traffic every month and bringing you in business. But there might be other keywords that you're not yet ranking for that could do the same. Now, if you were to, if you wanted to rank for them naturally in Google, you would have to write content, put it on your website, promote that content, and wait for Google to index, index that content, and hope that your promotion of that content is strong enough that Google ranks it highly in their search algorithm. That's, that's a really long-winded process, and there's no guarantee that Google is going to rank your content very highly. So a shortcut to test out a new keyword is just to pay to see if that keywords can bring in new business for you.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so, so instead of me writing long-winded blog posts and trying to rank for a keyword, I can just test it first with Google AdWords.

Daryl Mander: Right. It's a much quicker way of doing it, and oftentimes it will inform your decisions on what blog posts to write or what keywords to go, go after on the SEO side of things. So you could do, for example, a one week or a two week test on Google AdWords first, and maybe try 100 different keywords in that time. And from that test, you might narrow that, narrow it down to one or two really, really good, profitable keywords for you. And after that, you could go away and work on the SEO side of things, and get some blog posts on your website ranked for that keyword so you continue to bring in traffic.

Andrew Hellmich: I like it. Okay, that's a totally different way of looking at it, to the way I have in the past, that's for sure. Okay, so what's, what's the best way to start with Google AdWords, if you've never tried it.

Daryl Mander: If you've never tried it before, the best way to start is, first of all, do your homework. Don't just go in guns blazing and think that you're going to be able to easily set up a profitable campaign. The, there's a lot of conspiracy theorists out there that say, and I think a lot of them are at least partially true. "They say that all of Google's default settings in AdWords are designed to tax stupid people who don't know how to use AdWords into paying Google more money." So a good example of this is the default keywords match type when you launch a new AdWords campaign. There are three match types, what are called match types of keywords in Google AdWords, and they are broad phrase and exact. Now let's take a keyword, let's use wedding photography again. If you use broad match, you, um, that keyword will not only target people who type in wedding photography. It will target everyone who types anything similar to wedding photography. So it will also target people who type bridal photography, or it might target people who type in photographs of the groom. And it, Google goes really, really crazy with figuring out what keywords are similar to your keyword for the broad match type of keywords, and then you've got phrase match and exact match. And phrase match will target any keywords that contains wedding photography. So if you use phrase match, you would target people who type in wedding photography and also people who type in wedding photography in the UK, because that phrase contains wedding photography. So that's a bit better than broad match. You're not going to get things like photos of the groom. And then the best, most targeted way you can do it is exact match, where you will only type in the, you will only target people who type in exactly wedding photography. You won't, if someone types in wedding photographs or wedding photography in the UK, you won't get those people. You will only get the exact thing that you're targeting.

Andrew Hellmich: Wouldn't I be better off than having the broad match keywords so that I get more people looking at my ad and more people clicking on it?

Daryl Mander: Yes, but you want to bid a lot less on your broad match keywords, because you're going to get a lot of untargeted things, and you're going to get a lot of things that are semi-targeted but don't really work all that well. So generally, exact match is the highest performing type of keyword, then phrase match, then broad match

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Daryl Mander: And I was talking before about the sort of inbuilt AdWords stupidity tax, as it's often called. The default setting in Google is to use broad match, which often doesn't perform that well and will often lose a lot of advertisers money because it targets so many different keywords. Like, I think the examples I've given you don't really express how random, broad match targeting can be. But I've seen things where you might be targeting a particular brand of phone, for example, iPhone 5 cases, and then it will give you, you'll start appearing on keywords such as Vodafone deals, which is kind of related. It's to do with phones, but it's not at all what you're targeting. So you end up losing a lot of money, and Google will default to this, lose a lot of money setting, instead of the much more profitable exact match setting. Broad match is great if you know what you're doing, but you kind of have to be a bit experienced with AdWords to use broad match properly.

Andrew Hellmich: This is why you're saying it's safer to do your homework and then go in and use exact match keywords.

Daryl Mander: Yeah, and I mean, that's just one example of something that you're going to learn once you've done your homework, compared to someone who just goes in all guns blazing and tries to figure it out as they go along. So yeah, the, I mean, in the broadest sense of the word, the most important thing you can do is do your homework and figure out all the little tips like that so you don't make any mistakes when you're setting up your AdWords. Because every mistake you make when you're setting up AdWords potentially could lose you money.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so let's say we've gone in, we've set up our Google AdWords account, and we've picked out a few search terms or keywords or keyword phrases that we want to target, and we've selected exact match keywords. What's, what's the next step for us?

Daryl Mander: So once you've selected your keywords, you'll want to create your ads. Well, you want to create your ads and your campaign and ad group structure. So your keywords sit in your account, in your Google AdWords account, but there's a sort of folder or hierarchy structure within the account. So, at the very top level, you've got your whole AdWords account, and that has all the information for your Google AdWords advertising. And then underneath the account level, you've got multiple campaigns, and each campaign can have multiple ad groups, and each ad group can have multiple keywords.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Daryl Mander: What you want to do is then put all your keywords into a structure, and you want to make that structure make sense for the keywords that you have. So for example, if you've got a lot of different services, you do wedding photography, you do portrait photography, you do landscape photography, and you've got, you might have five different services. What, what you want to do is organize it. So I'd probably say each service would be a different campaign. And then underneath each campaign you have, let's say, for example, you have 100 keywords in each campaign. You want to split those up into different ad groups that are all, that all have very similar keywords. So you might then split it up into 10 ad groups, and each ad group has 10 keywords in it. So that's the next step is creating your account structure.

Andrew Hellmich: For the very beginner, for someone trying this for the first time, could they have one campaign? Let's target one group of keywords and just go with that to start with one structure?

Daryl Mander: Yeah, you could. But if you want to do that, you should start with a very small amount of keywords.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Daryl Mander: So if you're just gonna, you could, yeah, the easiest thing is to have one campaign, and you can have multiple ad groups in that campaign. And if you own, if you only want to have one ad group, I would say only stick to five to 10 keywords, which isn't going to get you much traffic, but maybe you just want to do a very small test to test a few keywords. You've got to make sure that all those keywords are very similar, because if they're all in the same ad group, the reason it's called an ad group is because every keyword in that ad group will be shown the same ad. So if you have a keyword for wedding photography and the keyword for landscape photography in the same ads group, well you're going to have to choose one ad to show on both those keywords, but you'd probably want to write a different ads for each of those keywords.

Andrew Hellmich: Let's simplify it right down. Let's say it's a wedding photographer in a particular area looking to just target potential wedding photography clients.

Daryl Mander: So yeah, then if it's just one service that you're advertising in one area and you just want to target a few keywords then, yeah, the easiest thing to do would be to drop the most relevant keywords to your business in an ad group and campaign and start advertising on there.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so let's say we've gone that route for now, and we've set up our single campaign. We're now with our single ad group. We've got a bunch of keywords in there, and we're ready to go, what next?

Daryl Mander: Writing ads. This is really, really important, because the, you only get two lines of text and one line of headline, and it seems like a very small amount of text to play with, but just very, very small deviations in the advertising copy that you use, which is the text in the ad. Very small changes in that can lead to big differences in the amount of people clicking on your ad. And the more people that click on your ads, the cheaper rates you'll get from Google. So once again, Google tries to incentivize really, really good ads by giving you cheaper rates, if your ads get a lot of people clicking on it.

Andrew Hellmich: Is that because it's in their interest, because they're getting paid more?

Daryl Mander: Correct, yeah. So Google gets paid every time you, every time a user clicks on an ad. So if you write an ad that gets a lot of users to click on it, Google is going to be able to charge you more money, so they favor ads that get a lot of clicks, because it makes them more money as well.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. And when you said, small deviations make a big difference, how much of a difference? Like how, how good does the ad have to be?

Daryl Mander: It has to be better than your competitors.

Andrew Hellmich: Good answer.

Daryl Mander: I, that's, that's another thing to consider with Google AdWords, is that every time you show up, you're effectively competing with everything else on that page. So when you do a search on Google, you'll typically see 10 results on the left hand side and 10 results on the right hand side. Your ad has to be more attractive than the other 19 results on the page.

Andrew Hellmich: Or could you bid more or pay more for the ad to rank higher in the ad hierarchy?

Daryl Mander: Yes, you can. But once again, Google's going to incentivize you based on how good your ad is. So if your ad gets a really great click through rate, i.e. lots of people are clicking on it, then you might only have to bid $2 to get to the very, very top listing of Google. But if your ad is horrible and not very many people are clicking on it compared to the other ads on the page, well then you might have to bid $10 to get to the top. So, yeah, you can force it. You can force more people to click on your ads by bidding really high and going to the top of the search results. But once again, you're going to be paying through the noose if the ad you've written isn't very good quality, if it's, if it's not getting a great click through rate.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Daryl Mander: So one of the things you can do to improve your ad writing skills is just to start paying attention to what you see in Google every time you search. So next time you search in Google, have a look on the right hand side, see which ads stand out and see which ads don't stand out. And you'll start getting, getting an idea of what people put into their ads and what they write to attract more clicks. Because any ads that can successfully stay in Google AdWords for a long period of time has generally figured out some sort of formula for ad writing that seems to be getting clicks and seems to be working.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay. So should we be looking at other photographers and other photography search terms to find those best ads. Or should we be looking outside that, that whole search area?

Daryl Mander: I would say, look in both areas. So look at what other photographers are doing. But also, don't just limit it to that. Look at what other people are doing as well. Because some, some of the best ads are going to be in some of the more competitive industries online.

Andrew Hellmich: So computers, laptops, mobile phones.

Daryl Mander: Yeah, and also anything to do with finance, credit cards, loans, payday loans or insurance. Those are really, really competitive spaces. So those guys, really, the guys who appear top constantly there really know their stuff about writing great ads.

Andrew Hellmich: Is there, is there any particular things we should or shouldn't do when we're writing these ads to go well with them?

Daryl Mander: One big thing you can do is to include the keywords that you're targeting in the copy of the ad. So you're targeting wedding photography, put the words wedding photography in your ad. In fact, put it as your headline. That's one really big thing you can do that helps a lot is if someone sees the keywords that they're searching for in the very top line of your ad, that will get a bigger click through rate. And also you can put it into the URL for your website. So say, so you've got the enviable, you are domain photography.com, you could in your AdWords ad, you can't change the fact that your domain is photography.com you have to keep that in your AdWords ads, but what you can do is you can say that your URL is photography.com/wedding-photography. So you could, you can put a slash on the end of your domain and put whatever words you want after that. And it doesn't, it doesn't matter if it directly matches the URL you're sending it to, as long as it matches the same domain. So if you use the URL photography.com/wedding-photography, you have to send that user who clicks on that ad, you have to send them somewhere on photography.com. But it doesn't have to be, they don't have to be sent to photography.com/wedding-photography. So that's a really useful place where you can stuff in your keyword, and the keyword will get bolded, it will be highlighted on the search result page, and it will lead to more people clicking on your ads.

Andrew Hellmich: Nice one. That's great. Okay, so let's say, I mean, really, do we just have to write just one ad to start with, or do we have to have five ads ready to go?

Daryl Mander: I usually do two ads per ads group. So if you, if you're just going to start off with your starter package of one ad group, then just write two ads in that ad group and let Google rotate those ads evenly. So this is another one where the default setting from Google isn't, isn't is profitable or as useful as some of the other settings. When you set up your ad groups and you set up multiple ads in that ad group, Google is going to try and decide which of those ads gets the best click through rate and it will show that ad the most. But Google isn't always right, and what you actually generally want to do is give every ad you write a fair test. So give it the same amount of clicks, and then you can see which ads genuinely gets the better click through rate. And when you see that, then you know you can start drawing some conclusions about what type of ads gets a better response from your customers. And once you've had enough clicks to determine that, and I usually wait until both ads have had at least 15 clicks, there'll be two ads in the ads group, 15 clicks each, so 30 clicks in the ad group, and then you have an idea of which ad is getting more people clicking on it. At that point, you can pause the ad that's getting less people clicking on it and write a new ad to test against your current winner. And I will, for my AdWords clients, I'll repeat that process pretty much ad infinitum. You carry on testing and keep on doing it, and even, and the more you do it, the better your ads will get. But it's very hard to get to that point where they're perfect, so you just keep on doing it. So start with two ads, but then once they've had enough clicks, then start testing other ads and other ideas and seeing what works better. And that's the sort of the secret sauce, the recipe to getting really high clicking ads.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, that's great. Okay, so this is like, so it's almost like split testing. You keep split testing, split testing until you get the best ad.

Daryl Mander: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. You're doing a continuous AB split test.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, perfect. Okay. So, now I know that, you know listeners will be thinking, "I do not want to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on this." So when, when does the money side of things come into play? Is it once we've written the ad?

Daryl Mander: The money side of things, you can, you can set up your credit card in Google, and Google will deduct money from your credit card only when you've clicked the big launch button on the campaign. You don't, you can choose when to input your credit card details, but obviously Google isn't going to let you launch your campaign until those credit card details are in there. But you can do all this stuff. You can either set up your credit cards at the start of the campaign, if you're super keen, or you can do everything first. You can launch your Google AdWords account, you can write your ads, you can research your keywords and set up your campaign and ads group. You can do all that, and you can be right at the point where you're ready to click the big green launch button, and that's when you can put in your credit card. So it's really up to you, but as long as you stick it in there before the campaign launches.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, and what about setting budgets so that we don't get these massive credit card bills? When do we do that? And when do we bid for the keywords?

Daryl Mander: So if you don't want to rack up massive credit card bills, the easiest way to do it will be to, to prepay your Google AdWords account. So say, you want to test out an AdWords campaign using 500 bucks over the course of one month while, instead of letting Google take money directly from your credit card, you just pay Google $500 so that there's 500 bucks sitting in your account. And that way, when the 500 bucks is used up, Google can't take any more money from your credit card. Your, your risk is limited to that $500.

Andrew Hellmich: Can I, can I try even less than that to start with Daryl? Or do I have to start with 500?

Daryl Mander: If you're, if you're going to do one ad group and one set of keywords with just a couple of ads, yeah, you can certainly start with less than 500 bucks. In fact, you can normally get vouchers from Google that will give you 50 bucks or 100 bucks of free credit. So, if you, these are often supplied in marketing magazines or marketing publications, like in the UK, we have marketing week, and we have one called New Media Age, but, and a lot of small business focused publications as well. Google often gives out free vouchers for free credit in AdWords. So actually, the cheapest way to start is to get a hold of one of those vouchers. Maybe go and raid your local magazine store and see if there's any marketing publications in there that has a free voucher. Or, often, if you do a bit of searching or hunting around online, you can, you can find a few vouchers floating about, and then you can test the waters effectively for free, without having to risk any of your own cash.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, great. And what about we talked a little bit, or you mentioned about bidding for keywords you can pay, you know, $1 or $2 up to all the way up to 10 or $20 for your ad to show. So when, when does that come into play? When do we choose how much we're going to be paying for our ad to show?

Daryl Mander: That comes into play when you're setting up the account structure. So, you'll have researched your keywords and figured out which keywords you want to bid on, and when you're putting those keywords into your, into your ad group and campaign, you'll need to select a, an amount to bid, and Google will come up with some suggestions. You can use, for example, you can use the estimated amount to appear at the top of the first page, which will obviously be the highest estimate that Google will give you. And then there's Google can give you another estimate, which is just the estimate for how much you need to bid just to appear somewhere on the first page. So the minimum you need to bid to appear on the first page, and that's usually the sort of minimum bids, the lowest estimate, because you don't really want to appear any lower than the first page, because people tend to just look at the first page results and pick something from there. So you've got those two estimates to work with, and you can either bid at the bottom or at the top or somewhere in the middle.

Andrew Hellmich: Are we at a stage now where we've sort of covered everything that we need to before we hit that launch button?

Daryl Mander: There's another important thing to set up, which is conversion tracking.

Andrew Hellmich: I want to know all about. Is this a bit to do with measuring the effectiveness of the ads?

Daryl Mander: Right, yeah. So there's, one of the great things about online advertising is that it's so very measurable. Now, if you don't set up this conversion tracking, what you'll effectively be doing is sending traffic to your site with a very vague idea of whether it's working or not. If you set up conversion tracking, then you'll be able to track every time a website visitor has turned into a customer. So when that happens, we call it a conversion. And if you're tracking that in Google AdWords, then you can see which keywords actually resulted in new customers for you.

Andrew Hellmich: If someone has an existing account. So I'm talking about me here, and I haven't set up conversion tracking. Can I go back and do that?

Daryl Mander: Yep, absolutely. You can set up conversion tracking at any point. And of course, if you want to, you can launch an account without conversion tracking, but it's highly recommended to implement conversion tracking so that you know the return on investment you're getting from every single keyword that you're advertising on.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so and what, what's classified as a, as a successful hit? Is it just if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your website, or do we need to measure something else to show whether it was a success or not.

Daryl Mander: For most advertisers, it's, it's a success when someone has clicked on your ads, gone to your website and then performed some sort of action on your website. That, it doesn't always have to be an action on your website. For a lot of people, it could be a phone call. But it's usually some sort of action after the person hits your website. So, as a business owner, you don't necessarily just want people coming to your website. You want them to do something when they get there. You want them to pick up the phone and give you a call and hopefully turn into a customer, or maybe you want them to fill out an inquiry form on your website and send you an inquiry and hopefully become a customer later down the line. There's usually this some form of action that you want to track or that you want to get more of, and that's what we're referring to with conversion tracking, where we're referring to tracking that action that you want to get more of, whether it's phone calls or inquiry form fill-outs or purchasing something on your website. Whatever it is you want to track, it can be tracked using the Google AdWords platform.

Andrew Hellmich: I guess how can I track a phone call that comes via Google AdWords to my website?

Daryl Mander: That one's a bit more tricky, because, unless you have a Google phone number, the functionality isn't built into AdWords. But what you can do is you can use a third party company that will create dynamic phone numbers on your website according to where the website traffic came from. So they, they will give you maybe 10 different phone numbers. And if someone comes to your website from a Google AdWords ad, they will show the phone number on the website that corresponds to Google AdWords. And if the person then calls that number, it will then go through that number and be tracked as a Google AdWords phone call. Whereas, if someone came to your website from a Facebook post that you did on your Facebook page, a different phone number would be shown to them. And if they then picked up the phone, we'd know that they called the phone number that corresponds to your Facebook posts.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, well, that's very cool. That's great.

Daryl Mander: Yeah.

Andrew Hellmich: So I guess for most small businesses, if they're not going that route, it will be easy to have something like a form, to download an eBook or something, and have some code in there so that we know that they came via AdWords?

Daryl Mander: Correct, yeah. So if you, if the action that you want to track is on your website, it doesn't involve a phone call, then yeah, you can put a piece of code on the thank you page for that action. So for example, someone signs up to your email list and they click the Sign up button, they then go to the thank you page where it says, "Thank you for signing up to our email list. Please check your email inbox." On that page, you put the tracking code, that tracks the conversion, and that way, you know when someone's hit the sign-up button and gone to that page, it's tracked back to the keyword that drove that person into your site in the first place.

Andrew Hellmich: I do want to be conscious of your time, Daryl, and I know that I want to pick your brains a little bit more for Premium members about keywords. But can I just fire a quick couple of questions at you before we get into finding about where people can find you?

Daryl Mander: Yeah, sure, absolutely.

Andrew Hellmich: So I've heard this term negative keywords and using them with Google AdWords. Can you tell me what that means?

Daryl Mander: So normally, when you put the keyword into your Google AdWords campaign, what you're doing is you're telling Google, "Hey, I want to appear for people searching this keyword in Google." But that's not the only type of keyword you can put in. You can also put in negative keywords. So say, for example, we use our wedding photography example again. You'll type into Google, "I want to appear on people typing in wedding photography in Sydney", but you don't want to appear for people typing in wedding photography in Perth, because you only operate in Sydney. What you would do is you'd use a negative keyword, and you'd put in Perth, and what that negative keyword does is says you do, "I will not show any ads for anyone typing anything in to do with Perth." It's really useful when you're using broad match keywords, because with broad match you're going to show up on so many random things that are just not necessarily relevant to your business. So especially in broad match, and also in phrase match as well, you want to also add a lot of negative keywords to make sure you're not showing up for really irrelevant stuff.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so let me just clarify. Then, if I have exact matched keywords chosen, and I have the keyword Central Coast Wedding Photography, and someone types in just wedding photography, does my ad come up? Or do they have to type in Central Coast Wedding Photography?

Daryl Mander: So, did you say you've got the exact match?

Andrew Hellmich: Yes.

Daryl Mander: In that case, your ad wouldn't come up. You'd have to have, if you just wanted to use, to use exact match, you'd have to use a lot of keywords to make sure you're covering all the possible different keyword combinations that could come up.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay.

Daryl Mander: And that's tricky. So that's why, if you're, if you know what you're doing with AdWords, what you do is you'd use a combination of all three match types. So you'd have the exact match keywords to and you'd bid the most for that, because that's the most targeted stuff. But then you'd also have, you might also have the phrase match wedding photography or and the broad match wedding photography, which will get you a lot more traffic, but it will also get you a lot more irrelevant traffic. So that's why you've got to be really careful with those.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, that's great, I understand that. What's to stop my competitors from clicking on my ad over and over and over again, so that they use up my budget and my ad disappears.

Daryl Mander: Google's aware of that potential problem, and they are really, really clever with discounting what's called Click Fraud. So for example, if you were to do that, Google wouldn't, Google can recognize the fact that all those clicks are coming in a very short space of time from one IP address, your IP address being the, the address of your computer or, or modem on the internet. And it's a, it's a singular address that's specific to your computer or modem. So Google can see, "Hey, 100 clicks just came from this one IP address. This is obviously click fraud. We're only going to charge them for one click." And in it, in fact, Google is making these adjustments all the time. So if you check your Google AdWords account one day and then check the same day, but a week later, you'll often see there's a slight difference in the figure. Actually, it's harder to see on a day by day basis, but if you look at a whole month's worth of advertising, at the end of the month, it might be one figure, but then you might wait a little while, and a week or two later, Google's revised the figure, and it's a little bit lower. You're going to be charged a little bit less. That's because Google is always working to get rid of click fraud, and there's other problems as well, such as spiders and bots clicking. Clicking your ad where there's no real person at all clicking the ad, it's actually just another computer or a spider or a website crawler going through the ads. And basically you, you're very, very rarely have any money wasted on these, because Google's so smart at figuring out what is real and what isn't, and getting rid of the fake stuff.

Andrew Hellmich: That's awesome. All right, let me ask you one last one. Let's say that I'm in a small country town, smaller town, smaller town or small suburb, and there's one photographer that is super popular. They're getting all the business. Can I use their business name as one of my keywords?

Daryl Mander: Absolutely, yeah. And it's something I do with all my clients. For a few years ago, this was not allowed in Google, but they've since opened this up so that you're allowed to bid on your competitors brand name as a keyword. The only area you have to be careful in, is using your competitors brand name in your ad text. Basically just don't do it. You don't want to mislead viewers into thinking that you are your competitor, because then what will happen is they might just click your ads, see that you're someone else, get disappointed, and then click away, which would be a wasted click view. But what you can do is in your ad copy, highlight how you are different or better than your competitor. So maybe you have better rates, or maybe you are, have better availability, whatever it is you think that distinguishes you from your competitor. Or highlighting, highlight that in the ads, and that way, you're not trying to trick people into clicking on you instead of your competitor, but what you are doing is you're offering them another option and quite that often works to get clicks away from your competitor. But do be very careful with this strategy, because, as I mentioned earlier, Google has an inbuilt relevance mechanism, and they will be able to sense the fact. They'll be able to tell that your ad isn't as relevant to that keyword as your competitor's ad. And because of that, you'll have to pay more to appear on those search results. So it's not always profitable bidding on your competitors, but it's always, it's generally worth a shot, budget to try it out with, try it with a small budget. Watch it very, very closely for a few days or a week, and if it looks like that's going to be a profitable strategy for you and carry on doing it, but if not, shut it down and try something else instead.

Andrew Hellmich: It sounds like a whole new world out there with these Google ads, these AdWords strategies that a.. I mean should we, should we be dabbling in this, or is it safer to get someone else to do it for us? It might be a biased question to you. What's your view on that?

Daryl Mander: You're either going to have to invest your money or your time. So, it, I mean, as a business owner, it's basically just down to whichever one you want to invest. But if you, if you're going to do it yourself, you definitely should invest your time in learning Google AdWords and learning the basics. You know, maybe grab a course, an online course. There's a bunch of them available online, and that way it will, it will be less of your money that you're risking. A great shortcut to that is just hiring someone who already has expertise in the field and getting them to set it up and operate it for you.

Andrew Hellmich: Okay, so let's we, that's where you come in. So I imagine that listeners could contact you if they're interested in having you manage their Google AdWords.

Daryl Mander: Absolutely, I'd be very happy to do that. And yeah, I'm operating as a, as a sort of solo consultant at the moment, but I'm in in the process of upgrading myself to an agency. So yeah, I am, I am available for consultations. And if people want to go the sort of full management route, then I'm happy to sort of take that a bit further and do some AdWords management and generally helping out with any of your listeners who might need that service.

Andrew Hellmich: Perfect. So how, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you Daryl?

Daryl Mander: Best way to get in touch with me is on email. And my email address is [email protected], that's [email protected] and also my I'm usually online on Skype, and my Skype name is just DarylMander, throughout the same way, all one word.

Andrew Hellmich: Fantastic, and you've got you're also on Twitter, which is where I found you, which was very cool.

Daryl Mander: Yeah. I'm also on Twitter, same handle as my Skype handle @DarylMander. So yeah, if anyone wants to add me there and get in touch with me there, I'm pretty, I'm a pretty avid Twitter user, so I can normally be found skulking about Twitter most days of the week.

Andrew Hellmich: Daryl, it has been an absolute pleasure, and I'm so glad that we connected and you've just shared an absolute ton. I really appreciate it. So, thank you.

Daryl Mander: No worries at all. It's been my pleasure. Always love helping out small businesses with their AdWords and paid traffic. So really, no worries at all. It's been great for me too.

Andrew Hellmich: Great. Thanks, Daryl.

Daryl Mander: Thanks, Andrew.

 
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