Getting Started with Google Ads: Tips and Strategies for Business Owners

Larry Roberts [00:00:09]:

What is happening, everybody? I'm Larry Roberts.

Sara Lohse [00:00:11]:

And I'm Sara Lohse. And this is Branded. Your comprehensive guide to creative branding.

Larry Roberts [00:00:15]:

And on this amazing episode of the podcast, we have someone that I'm super excited to talk to because, man, we dial it back maybe 10 years ago, and I founded a business. It was a swimming pool company, and I built it from the ground up using Google Ads. So we have someone here today with us that is going to help us understand how to leverage Google Ads and get the most out of that platform as we move forward. His name is John Horn, and he's a digital advertising expert with a proven track record of helping businesses harness the power of Google Ads and YouTube ads to drive measurable growth. With a deep understanding of connecting strategy with results, which we all love, John is here to share actionable insights that can transform how you approach online advertising. So, John, welcome to the show.

John Horn [00:01:06]:

Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Larry Roberts [00:01:08]:

It's great to have you here, man.

Sara Lohse [00:01:09]:

Appreciate you coming with Google Ads. So this is something that I used to play with a lot, and I haven't really touched in years. And every time I go in, I'm like, this is completely different. It changes so much. If there was a few things that you would want people to know, like when they're just getting started with ads, like, what would that be?

John Horn [00:01:30]:

Yeah. So when you're just getting started, the first thing I think you should be thinking through is, what are you trying to accomplish with Google Ads? Because a lot of businesses, they'll just have the idea of, oh, let's try Google Ads, and let's throw some money at it and see what happens. But they don't really have a plan for, okay, what is it we're trying to do with these ads? What actions do we want people to take on our website? And how are we going to measure that and know whether or not the money we're throwing at the wall is actually, you know, helping the bottom line and which parts of it are working and which aren't. So I'd say, first of all, what is it we're looking to accomplish? And then structuring the campaigns and the landing pages, which is also a very important aspect of things to accomplish that. So, you know, taking the swimming pool company from way back in the day as an example, we'd want to think through how do people kind of enter our funnel? Is it. Are we trying to get them on a sales call right away of, hey, they need, they need. They want a pool built, they want to call, or is it more higher funnel. Is it? Hey, people are thinking, should I get a pool installed? And maybe we have a lead magnet.

John Horn [00:02:31]:

You know, five things to think about before you install a pool or how much does it cost? You know, here's a calculator. What does it cost? Things like that. And so think through where are you reaching people in the funnel, what are you trying to accomplish with those ads and then work your way from there.

Larry Roberts [00:02:45]:

Yeah, I think it's evolved so much since back in the day when I was using it to build pristine pool and spa service that it's a little confusing. You know, what's that?

Sara Lohse [00:02:57]:

Is that a little outdated plug?

Larry Roberts [00:02:59]:

A little outdated plug? Yeah. I don't even think the company's still around. I sold it. But they may still be out there, I don't know. But if you're in North Texas and you need your pool cleaned, look for pristine pool and spa service. Had no idea we were going down that route. But anyways, my point is, is that I've gone back in there and I've looked at Google Ads, you know, in recently and it's evolved so much. You know, what are some of the basics, John, that, that people need to understand because even back then, you know, it was the mid early 2000s, 2005, 2006, something like that, and cost per click campaigns were pretty easy to set up.

Larry Roberts [00:03:40]:

At least it felt pretty easy back then. But today when I go in there, man, there's just so much to weed through. So how do people just establish a basic foundation in using Google Ads?

John Horn [00:03:53]:

There are a lot of options and because of that there's also a lot of places to get confused and to wander off on rabbit trails like you're saying. Yeah, so yeah, let's talk basics. First thing is let's talk about where you want your ads to serve. Because often when people think of Google, they just think of you. Type something into the Google search engine and an ad pops up, which has always been the bread and butter of Google Ads campaigns. But as you'll quickly see when you're in the interface looking at options, there's a lot of other options available now as well. So if you are trying to do that, you know, show text ads to people who are searching on Google, generally you're going to create a search campaign which is specific type of campaign. However, there are a lot of other options as well.

John Horn [00:04:36]:

So YouTube for example, we mentioned that YouTube is owned by Google and there are multiple different campaign types within Google that push ads to YouTube. So if you're Trying to run video ads, especially if you're thinking maybe a little, little bit higher funnel or maybe even remarketing to people who've been to your website already. You, you can think of the YouTube route. There are also Google display campaigns. So this is Google's display network is millions of websites and apps that serve Google Ads on their websites and in their apps. And these are usually image ads or video ads, could be text ads, but this is, you know, not people searching on Google and then seeing your ad. It's you're reading, you know, you're playing in your app or you're reading weather.com or whatever and seeing a Google Ad. And so you could go down that route, that road.

John Horn [00:05:20]:

If you're trying to kind of push your message in front of people. And then you have the road that Google is probably going to push you towards, which is called performance max. And performance max is a campaign type. It's been around for a couple years now, but it's not technically the newest campaign type from Google that would be demand gen, but it's still newer than most other campaign types. And this is kind of a combination of multiple of Google's channels. So if you run a performance max campaign, you can run those text ads on search, you can have those display ads running, you can have YouTube ads running, you can have ads on Gmail and Google's discovery app and so forth. And Google's going to try and push you towards this. And for some businesses that can be a really good fit.

John Horn [00:05:59]:

But for a lot of businesses, I'm not going to start them on performance max because some of those channels aren't where you should start necessarily and you have less control over how Google is showing those ads. And so for a lot of businesses, especially outside of E commerce, we're going to start with search campaigns and then work our way up from there.

Larry Roberts [00:06:20]:

Gotcha. I've never heard of performance max before, so that's kind of a new term for me. Help us understand exactly what that means and what is that type of ad campaign?

John Horn [00:06:30]:

Yeah, so the way Google describes it, they talk about the funnel and they talk about it being still relatively low in the funnel, so very performance oriented. One step above that would be what they call demand gen campaigns, which would in theory generate demand that then performance max campaigns might maximize. And so with performance max campaigns, there's a lot of automation. You are not selecting things like what keywords you're targeting, you are writing your ads. But there's also a lot of different kind of ways your ads can appear and you don't have control over which channels your ads are going to serve on. So you can't say, okay, Google, I only want to show up on search or only want to show up on YouTube, et cetera. What Google's doing is they're basically saying, hey, we have all of this data about how people are using not just Google search but all Google properties. And so we're going to try and find the right people and serve your ads to them at the right time, regardless of where they're at, whether that's watching a YouTube video, doing a search on Google, et cetera.

John Horn [00:07:26]:

And so conceptually makes a lot of sense. It's really, it's audience based and you try and give Google as many signals as possible about the types of things that are relevant to your campaign, the types of audience you want to target, things like that. But then it's heavily reliant upon machine learning to go out and make the decisions for you about where to serve the ads and how much to bid for them and things like that. And sometimes it works well, especially in the commerce space. That's where we see most of the success with performance max campaigns for companies selling products through their websites. In the lead gen space it can work, but it's a lot harder to work. We see a lot of issues with spam leads and just poor quality leads coming from that campaign type in lead gen. Gotcha for.

Sara Lohse [00:08:11]:

So if I'm like just starting out as a business, I know there's a lot of people who kind of start the marketing and advertising process too soon and they end up kind of shooting themselves in the foot because they've thrown this budget when they weren't ready. What would you say for people that are kind of at the early process of building their brand, building their business, when is a good time to really get started on something like an ad campaign?

John Horn [00:08:38]:

That's a great question. I'll answer it in a couple of different ways. So first I'll say there's two categories of people kind of in that, in that early stage. There are the businesses who like you said, are just, they're too early, they don't have the right processes and things figured out and so they're wasting money. Then you also have the businesses that are very intentionally using advertising to kind of prove concept and see, hey, are people interested in this? What you know, help us refine our process by just getting leads into the process so we can figure things out on the go, things like that. And so that, that is a viable Strategy, but it should be a strategy. It should be, hey, we know that we're not ready yet. You know, we don't have our processes dialed in, et cetera, but we're going to use this ad spend to invest into getting the leads to do that and dial in and understand that that ad spend is not going to be very efficiently spent.

John Horn [00:09:30]:

It's just, you know, proving concept, that kind of thing. I would say for most businesses, there's probably, there's two rules of thumb. I would say first of all, in terms of whether to start advertising for most businesses, you should already have kind of a good engine going outside of advertising. So you should know when leads are coming in, you have processes in place to get back to those leads quickly to understand what their pain points are, to have product market fit, where you are actually selling something that people want and are interested in and that is competitively priced and framed in the marketplace and things like that. And so you want to try and have those things in process, in place so that then when you come to the advertising side of things, you're pouring fuel in that fire. You're taking what's working and you're getting more exposure, you're getting in front of more people, more people into your pipeline, et cetera. That's the ideal scenario. And then in addition to that, you need to have the budget, obviously for advertising.

John Horn [00:10:28]:

And you shouldn't be in a situation where this is make and break it for your company, where you're like, okay, if the ads don't work this month, then I'm broke. That's more pressure than should be placed on advertising. Obviously, sometimes people do it and it works out, and that's their story, their cool story to share a decade later. But most of the time it doesn't work out and it's not a good place. Desperation is not a good place to be in when it comes to ad buying. So I would look at how much money are we making, what budget can we afford to spend on advertising, knowing that it's a risk that obviously hopefully we're going to see return, but it might not be day one, and that we have to be prepared for that reality and have patience. And that number is going to look different for different businesses. But a general rule of thumb I give for the majority of businesses is that you should have at least $2,000 per month in ad spend that you can pay without breaking the bank before you want to get into a channel like Google Ads.

John Horn [00:11:25]:

And that's just based upon, you know, how much data you're going to need to be collecting to really give it a shot and see is it working, is it not working, which parts are working? And then how can I, you know, cut the waste and scale? What's, what's working?

Larry Roberts [00:11:38]:

Well, I love that because that was my next question. You know, what is the baseline budget that you would say for businesses to have in order to start participating in Google Ads? So you, you land that foundation was really, really cool. You know, we're seeing a lot of, of positive feedback from using YouTube ads for a lot of our clients and their podcasts. How would you differentiate or how would you determine whether or not to go with like a Google AdWords cost per click campaign or upgrade? I would say upgrading. I don't even know if it is an upgrade or going with a YouTube ad.

John Horn [00:12:15]:

Yeah, YouTube can be, can be very, very effective. Like you mentioned, we see a lot of good things from YouTube as well. A couple, maybe a framework for how I think about it is first of all, think about how people are finding what you sell. So if you are a plumber, mostly you're going to want to be on Google search when someone says, my sink is leaking, I need to fix it right now. You're going to be there unless you want to try and go after the DIY crowd and you're like, hey, people are searching YouTube for DIY. How do I fix this myself? And maybe if I've got ads showing up there, you know, taking the approach of, hey, don't, you know, don't, don't make it worse than it is, we can help that kind of thing, that, that could be a good fit. And so you want to think through kind of who you're targeting and how they search or how they are thinking about what you sell. There are some types of businesses that are very, very much oriented towards content.

John Horn [00:13:07]:

Anything where you need to really kind of create a relationship. So for example, if you're a coach of some type, you're coaching people, maybe you're a business coach. Well, you can target people searching business coach on Google and maybe that's a good fit, maybe not. But realistically, you're going to need to create a relationship with people over time where they start to get to know you, they start seeing your content, seeing, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about. Oh, cool. He's offering this free guide. Great, let me download that. That type of thing.

John Horn [00:13:40]:

And YouTube can be very, very effective for that because you're just getting helpful content out there, hopefully getting people then subscribe to your channel so that they keep getting more of that content. And then you can, you know, every now and then you could even use ads to be a little more salesy, Be like, hey, all my subscribers, here's a. I want to make sure I hit them all. And here's a very specific offer. Download the free ebook or get a free consultation with me or whatever it is, and then you can convert some of that into actual leads. So, yeah, I say it depends too much probably because there's so much nuance. But those are some of the ways that I think about YouTube versus, you know, Google search.

Sara Lohse [00:14:14]:

Spoken like a lawyer.

John Horn [00:14:16]:

My dad was a lawyer. So, you know, kind of, kind of earned it naturally.

Larry Roberts [00:14:19]:

Spot on. Spot on.

Sara Lohse [00:14:21]:

It works. You had said before with get it when you're getting started having a landing page. And landing pages are, I know they're really common and a lot of people are using them, but I don't know if a lot of people are doing them well. Have you seen anything that is like best practices for setting up a landing page or worst practices for setting up a landing page?

John Horn [00:14:45]:

Absolutely. And I love talking about this. Let's jump in. Because a lot of businesses just don't have this mindset of thinking about really, where are they sending the traffic to on their website. They're focused on their ads. We gotta have the best ads possible. They're focused on cost per click and stuff like that, which is all important stuff. But then they send people to just a garbage experience on their website and they wonder why people aren't reaching out.

John Horn [00:15:07]:

And so it's not rocket science to build a good landing page, but there are definitely, definitely some effort that needs to be put into it. So first thing, just from a technical standpoint, it's got to load quickly. People do not have patience. So if you're sending people to a page, it doesn't load right away, but it's going to click back and go somewhere else. And you've wasted your money, you waste your opportunity. So it just has to load quickly from a kind of a visual and design perspective. You need to be orienting everything towards what your call to action is. So a lot of people will either throw tons of call to action like, oh, click here for this ebook, or call us or do this or do that, and people get confused or they don't tell you anything about what you want them to do.

John Horn [00:15:48]:

They just be like, oh, we're a plumber. You're like, great, how do I contact you? And there's no call this number Right now to talk to Fred or whatever. And so it's really important to spell out exactly what you want people to do when they're on your page and to make that. And to make that clear and repeat that as you're scrolling through the page. Click this button to get your free appointment. Click this button to get free appointment. That kind of thing. So that's really important.

John Horn [00:16:15]:

Just being really clear about what you do is important as well. A lot of businesses, they know what they do, and so they write their content from their perspective and they don't realize or think about. This person has never heard of you before. They are going to make a decision within a couple of seconds of reaching your page. You've got to tell them what you are. Hey, I am a business coach for, you know, entrepreneurs out of Silicon Valley. If that's the case, great. That should be your headline.

John Horn [00:16:41]:

So people immediately know what you are when they get to the page. So that's really important. And then other things like credibility factors, so putting reviews from your customers on your page, video reviews, especially if you can get those, those are hugely impactful. You want other people in their word. You want your customers selling your service, because people pay way more attention to that than anything you say about your own business in your own words. And, you know, other things, you know, if you have awards, if you have, you know, better Business Bureau rating, things like that, just making you look as legitimate as possible so that people, you know, trust you. And they're like, okay, I got to a good place. These guys look legit.

John Horn [00:17:21]:

I know what they want me to do, I know what they are, and it matches what my need is right now. Great, I'll go ahead and convert. And so those are, I think, some of the. Some of the really important things to include on good landing pages.

Larry Roberts [00:17:32]:

No, I love the fact that you. You jump to the conclusion aspect of it because so many times we make that conclusion that people already know who we are and what we do. And I talk about this a lot from an AI perspective. And when we're talking to these AI platforms, make assumptions that the AI already knows the intricate details of what we do. But it's the exact same way when we're trying to talk to a potential customer. We assume they know what we bring to the table, but they don't necessarily have all of the answers there. And we need to provide that at every level possible. So I love the fact that you reinforce that.

Larry Roberts [00:18:12]:

Talk to me more about how do we determine which platform is better? Do we determine whether a Google AdWord is better on just a Google Ad. Or how do we determine if maybe YouTube is even better for us?

John Horn [00:18:25]:

Yeah, that's a great question. And we can kind of throw into that to platforms like, you know, meta. One of the most common questions we'll get from businesses is, hey, should I be on Google? Should I be on Facebook, Instagram, elsewhere, et cetera?

Larry Roberts [00:18:37]:

Sure.

John Horn [00:18:37]:

And the way I usually try and help them think through this is, first of all, thinking through, are we doing push or pull marketing? So what I would define as a push marketing is I need to, for lack of a better word, interrupt somebody to say, hey, this is what I do. Because maybe they're not searching for what I do right now. So if I'm a new clothing brand with really cool designs, Google search is probably not the right place to be because people aren't searching for me. I want to be on Instagram, I want to be on Facebook with a very visual ad targeted to the people I know, I think are interested in my product and making them aware of, hey, look at these cool, cool clothes. Just cool design. Oh, yeah, that looks really awesome. Let me click through that type of thing. Whereas again, going back to, you know, if, if you're a plumber, people who need a plumber aren't generally on Facebook watching cat videos and see your ad and like, oh, yeah, my link, my, my sink is, is leaking.

John Horn [00:19:31]:

Let me go fix it. Now they have a problem. They're searching right now to get that solved. And so a search engine like Google is, is the right place to be. And so for a lot of businesses, they have both, like, there's a segment of their audience that is searching for what they sell. And so often they'll start with Google search because those people are the most likely to convert. They have the highest intent. They're literally telling us, I need this solution.

John Horn [00:19:54]:

And so it'll be more expensive per click probably to get them to our website than for something like meta. But they're going to be much higher conversion rates from that traffic. But then ultimately you're going to work through or kind of max out just the number of people in that audience who are actively searching for what you do and that you can acquire in a profitable way. And so then a lot of clients will, then they'll keep doing that, obviously, but then they'll expand from that to a platform like YouTube or Facebook, Instagram, where they are going to identify people who aren't searching right now, but who are relevant to what they sell and start making them aware of the brand aware of the solution, maybe aware of the problem they didn't know they had. And that's how they're going to keep expanding their audience size and their revenue through that method.

Larry Roberts [00:20:42]:

So let me ask you this on average because I remember back in the day when, you know, I had my swimming pool company, I could get like top words and phrases for like, I don't know, a nickel. And this was way back when, when this stuff first kicked off. So what would be the, in your estimation, the average cost per click? And I know, I know it varies depending on industry and niche and that sort of thing. But what can fol expect to spend per click if they go with like a Google Adwords campaign?

John Horn [00:21:17]:

I wish we still had those 5 cent clicks from back in the day, dude.

Larry Roberts [00:21:20]:

I do too.

John Horn [00:21:20]:

Yeah. Yes. As the platform has matured and as advertisers, as everyone knows that's where they need to be. And as Google, you know, maximizes every dollar, they can make sure those have definitely increased. And like you said, it's incredibly dependent upon the industry you're in. So it could be anywhere from, you know, if, if you're maybe selling a low price point e commerce product, maybe, you know, maybe 50 cents a click, 25 cents a click if you're really, really good and lucky on the search side of things, it could be $10 a click, it could be $20 a click. For a local service company, it could be, you know, if you're a personal injury attorney, lawyer, they're notorious for some of the most expensive clicks. It can literally be a couple hundred dollars for one single click there per click.

Larry Roberts [00:22:04]:

And I want to reinforce that. That's per click. That is someone that goes to Google, they find your ad and they click on that ad. It's $200. It's, it's insane.

John Horn [00:22:14]:

It is.

Sara Lohse [00:22:14]:

Am I the only one that if I see an ad for a company that I do not like, I will click it just to charge them?

John Horn [00:22:23]:

You are definitely not the only one. And, and Google definitely understands too that in the competitive space a lot of competitors like doing that. They like just triggering their, their competitors ads as often as I never did that. So there's all sorts of liar clicked.

Larry Roberts [00:22:38]:

On competing swimming pool companies. Never, never did that. Never. Not once.

Sara Lohse [00:22:44]:

Oh my God. I do it all the time. Not for competitors, just for companies I don't like if I see them now.

John Horn [00:22:49]:

Ironically, the flip side of that too though is that the more clicks that an ad is getting, the more Google says, oh, people like this it has a high click through rate and so you're actually also improving their ad rank and making it more likely that other people are going to see. So there's kind of a double edged sword. You, they are paying out, but they're also now getting better placement.

Larry Roberts [00:23:09]:

Yeah, See Sara, you're helping them, you're helping those that you don't like.

Sara Lohse [00:23:14]:

Does bounce rate come into effect at all with when it comes to like ad performance?

John Horn [00:23:20]:

That's a great question. A little bit. And for those watching or listening who don't know what bounce rate is, that's just when you get to a website, the faster you then, you know, click the back button to go away from that, the higher your bounce percentage is or I guess better way to put it is. Technically bounce rate is if you go to a website and then you just come back and you don't go to other pages and things like that, that's a bounce. But Google is really focused on the timing of that. So if you go to a page and you spend five minutes on that page, you're not going to get penalized by Google because the assumption is, hey, it was relevant content, you got them to the right place. But if it's like, yeah, you click the ad and then Google sees you back on the search engine results page two seconds later, they are going to factor that into something they call landing page experience, which does impact your ad rank. So if you have lots of people very quickly bouncing, Google thinks it's not the right place, you're sending people to the wrong place or not relevant content.

John Horn [00:24:12]:

And that is going to hurt your ad rank.

Sara Lohse [00:24:14]:

Ha. See, not helping them because I also make their bounce rate bad.

Larry Roberts [00:24:22]:

So John, let me ask you this. What are some of the factors that the uneducated would not take into account when they're starting with Google Ads or YouTube ads?

John Horn [00:24:34]:

Yeah, I'd say some of the, some of the common perspectives I see. First thing is probably not enough patience. Honestly just this idea that hey, as soon as I start, you know, running ads, just leads are gonna pour in and everything's gonna be great.

Sara Lohse [00:24:46]:

If I build it, they will come mentality.

John Horn [00:24:48]:

Exactly. And it's not usually how it works. Now the beautiful thing is you do get fast feedback. So unlike SEO where you might do a bunch of work and then have to wait three, six, nine months to see if it's going to work with Google, you know, right away whether or not people are clicking on your ads. But that's, that's just the first thing great. People are clicking awesome. But are they converting into leads? If not, why is it, you know, the landing pages fall dead, we don't have the right offers on there. Is it that we're not getting in front of the right people? We need to change our targeting? Is it that our ad is not sharing the right messaging? Things like that.

John Horn [00:25:23]:

And so it takes time, and it takes collecting data and analyzing that data and also just inputting data for Google to work with as well for their own algorithms to really see what's working well and not working well. So not having patience, I'd say, is one common thing that people, you know, uneducated people experience when they first get into things.

Sara Lohse [00:25:43]:

I would say that's true across the board.

John Horn [00:25:45]:

Yes. That's. Yeah. Human. Human nature very much.

Sara Lohse [00:25:49]:

Especially like with podcasting people. Larry, what do you call it? The Joe Rogan Expectations of Grandeur?

Larry Roberts [00:25:56]:

Yeah, yeah.

Sara Lohse [00:25:57]:

Everyone expects, oh, I have a podcast. I'm going to be the most famous podcaster by tomorrow.

John Horn [00:26:01]:

And it's a good analogy, too, because both spaces are very crowded. Your podcast space is very crowded now. You've got to do something to stand out. And that's true of advertising. It's not. It's not like those swimming pool days where there were only so many people out there. You know, it's. It's a crowded marketplace.

Larry Roberts [00:26:16]:

Yeah. I mean, you could. You could run an ad back in 2005 that was garbage and still just make bank because people would find it. Nobody even really knew what AdWords was back then. They didn't even really understand that those, those top results on Google were ads. They weren't actual results. So back then it was super, super simple. But, I mean, you know, Sara and I, we've been in business now for a couple years together, and a couple years ago, I went back into Google AdWords and was like, ah, we're gonna.

Larry Roberts [00:26:42]:

We're gonna rock it again. And I was blown away at the level of complexity that has been introduced into the AdWords platform and, and how to structure the ads in some of the ways that you're talking about, you know, with the landing pages needing. Needing to be taken into consideration, with the verbiage needing to be taken into consideration. I mean, before it was super, super simple, but today, I think you have to educate yourself a little bit before you jump into the waters.

John Horn [00:27:08]:

Absolutely. And it's also very tricky because with all that complexity, Google has a lot of best practices for DIY people where they're trying to push you. We talked earlier in the conversation. They'll often push you towards performance max campaigns. There's all sorts of things where there's, you're automatically opted into this, you're being pushed towards this. And for most businesses who don't know what they're doing, they're like, well, Google says this is a good thing to do. Google should know, so I'll do it. And the reality is that what is best practice for some businesses is not best practice for every business.

John Horn [00:27:41]:

And so a lot of those settings and things that you might be automatically opted into or might be pushed to choose are actually not what you should be doing as a business. And so going back to your previous question, again, what uneducated people often do, they're like, well, I'm going to trust Google and Google doesn't really have your best interest at heart. Or maybe a better way to say that is they have to build a platform with best practices for every kind of business under the sun. And just inherently all businesses are different. So you know, you, you just can't, it's not a one size fits all. And so you got to be really careful of, of some of those platform recommendations that they, that they push towards the DIY crowd.

Sara Lohse [00:28:22]:

Larry, you keep saying AdWords. Is AdWords even a thing anymore? Didn't they get rid of that?

John Horn [00:28:27]:

They did a name change.

Larry Roberts [00:28:31]:

You're intentionally dating me. Sara, thank you. Thank you so much for my time.

Sara Lohse [00:28:35]:

I haven't heard AdWords in years.

John Horn [00:28:37]:

It is funny though, I, I do actually still hear it all the time.

Larry Roberts [00:28:40]:

People, There you go. Thank you.

John Horn [00:28:41]:

Got in their brain and yeah, it's still, it's, it's still very, very common. It's even funny sometimes, like with some of the legislation that's been going on, or court cases and whatnot, you'll talk, people talking about AdWords. It's like, Ah, that's not what it is. But I know what you, I know what you mean.

Larry Roberts [00:28:57]:

Thanks, John. I appreciate you getting my back. I have bad words to say to you, Sara. We'll talk about it offline. But anyway, bad adwords. Bad ad words. That's terrible. Holy shit, that's terrible.

Larry Roberts [00:29:12]:

But anyways, so, so John, before we start wrapping this thing up and what would be like one little shred of advice you would give to folks that are just jumping into the Google Ads.

John Horn [00:29:24]:

Not AdWords space, I'll give a very, very tactical thing. So if you're getting into Google Ads, if you are going to run a search campaign, which is what most people will start with, you're going to select what Google calls Keywords. And in theory, these are the words that you want to show your ads for if someone searches for them. But be very aware that the actual searches you show up for can be very different than the keywords you choose. This depends on something called match type. There's a couple different options you can select. But even if you select the most exact match type, Google still gives themselves a lot of flexibility to say, oh, well, that's a synonym, or that's the same intent, things like that. And so once you start running your campaigns, you need to spend time in what's called your search terms report, because that shows you actually what you're paying for.

John Horn [00:30:11]:

And you will almost definitely see things in there where it's like a good example. We had a client, their local tree service, and Google was matching people looking for dollar tree to their campaigns because tree. But we're like, well, that's not who we're going after. So you gotta exclude dollar as a negative keyword in your campaign. And now you're not wasting money searches. So spend time in the search terms report is my recommendation.

Larry Roberts [00:30:35]:

Dude, that's extremely cool. And I love the fact that you're. You're talking about data. You know, in my previous life, I was a data business intelligence analyst, so I was a data nerd. And most people overlook the value of data. You know, we talk about podcasting a lot, and the reason that we push most of our clients towards YouTube is because there's so much data there for the content consumers, and it allows us to understand exactly what's going on, who's consuming our content, when they're consuming the content, and what content's working and what content's not working. And it's the same thing here with ads. So I love the fact that you're reinforcing the fact that people need to look at their data and see exactly what's going on there.

Larry Roberts [00:31:13]:

So I think that's extremely valuable.

John Horn [00:31:17]:

Yeah, I. I could not say that better myself. Data is where. It's. Where it's at. Data is. Is king in the. Especially in the Google Ad space.

Larry Roberts [00:31:26]:

Right on, man. Well, hey, John, we really appreciate you coming in here this morning and, and spending some time with us, enlightening us to the fact that Google AdWords just Google Ads now. So that's. That's really awesome. That's what I got out of this episode.

John Horn [00:31:39]:

You got a good takeaway?

Larry Roberts [00:31:42]:

Hey, man, if somebody wants to work with you, where can they find you?

John Horn [00:31:45]:

Best place at our website, stubgroup.com. we've got some free content on. There is stillgroup.com free or go to YouTube search step group on there. We put out lots of free video content.

Larry Roberts [00:31:55]:

Very, very cool. Well, hey, everybody. I think you got some value out of this episode. I know I did. Sara put me in my place, which she loves to do. And I think you all love to hear when she does it. But with that, I'm Larry Roberts.

Sara Lohse [00:32:08]:

And I'm Sara Lohse. We'll talk to you next week.