---
title: Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood
date: 2019-02-12T06:00:00-05:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-6/ppc-101-pay-per-click/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)Guest Dan Wood
Dan Wood is the founder of Break Digital Inc, a search engine marketing consultancy specializing in solutions for IT companies.
Season 01 Episode 6 – Feb 12, 2019
58:32 [Show Notes](#show-notes)
## Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood
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Learn about the basics of PPC advertising from Dan Wood, a digital marketing expert. Discover how PPC works, what it costs, and how you can start driving traffic to your website today.
### Show Notes
Dan starts by explaining what PPC is and how it helps generate traffic including the difference between organic and paid traffic.
Search intent is very important. Google wants to show results to what the user is searching for. Relevance is more important than paying to get to the top of the results.
You have the ability to fine tune the target of where ads show including location and a radius around a pin on a map. It's also possible to exclude variables from results to more accurately target your ads.
Ads are checked by humans, no adult products or ads for products that alter the mind or body: pharmaceuticals, cannabis, alcohol, tobacco. Basically the Disney of advertising.
- YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
- Remarketing
- Bidding on the phrases that your target market uses to solve their problems (Speak the language your customer speaks)
- Customer lifetime value
- Speak the language your customer speaks
- How to choose someone to run your ads for you.
### Show Links
- [How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#9977ea366686)
- [Google Academy](https://landing.google.com/academyforads/#)
- [Udemy](https://udemy.com)
- [Adwords Express](https://www.google.ca/adwords/express/)
- [Google My Business](https://www.google.com/intl/en_ca/business/)
Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.
**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, and welcome to the website 101 Podcast. My name is Sean Smith, your host. And today I have special guest, Dan Wood, and we're going to be talking about PPC or Pay Per Quick. Dan, could you introduce yourself?
**\[00:17\]** **Dan:** Hi, Sean. Thanks. I'm Dan Wood, and I'm the founder of Break Digital, or Digital Marketing Consultancy in Toronto.
**\[00:26\]** **Sean:** What exactly does Break Digital do?
**\[00:30\]** **Dan:** Typically we work with a lot of B2B companies, although we do some e-commerce as well. And our goal is to help people get a return on their advertising spend.
**\[00:42\]** **Sean:** Okay. So I guess advertising spend you're focusing on PPC or Pay Per Click, because that's our topic for today. Is that typically in Google ads, or do you look at other things such as Facebook and
**\[00:59\]** **Dan:** other ad platforms? Usually Google ads is where it starts. We do a lot of Facebook advertising as well lately. And I work with other platforms as well, including LinkedIn, and even Amazon. It really depends on the business where it makes most sense to do their marketing. But I would say Google ads is the main focus of our business.
**\[01:28\]** **Sean:** I think that Google ads and Facebook are probably the two that most people would be familiar with with ads. Oh, yeah, definitely. So what exactly does Pay Per Click mean? And how is this calculated? The target listener of the audience is someone who owns a website, but may not be familiar with all the technology. So our goal here is to help educate everybody and help them make the best decisions. So can you kind of give a basic rundown of what PPC is?
**\[02:04\]** **Dan:** Sure. I mean, most businesses, when they're starting out with digital, they really come to it from the perspective of needing more web traffic. A lot of times people launch a new website and then expect that just because the website's there, it's going to start generating business. But unfortunately, that's not true. You need to build a better mouse trap and then find a way for all the mice to know that it's there and then give them a reason to come. That's, you know, people generally come to it and say, well, we need more traffic and there's sort of two ways to do that. There's organic search traffic and paid traffic.
**\[02:48\]** **Sean:** What is the difference between organic and paid traffic? So seems kind of obvious, but.
**\[02:55\]** **Dan:** Oh, okay, sure. So when your website gets indexed into Google's index of the web or their record of all of the web pages that are out there and someone searches for a keyword that Google thinks your one of your web pages is the right answer for. So people go to Google asking a question and Google tries to answer that question as best it can. If one of your pages appears to Google to be the answer to that question, then your web page will show in the Google search results. And so these are the organic listings or the non-paid listings. A lot of people think of this as the free traffic, but there really isn't such that. I like free. Well, yeah, but I don't think you build websites for free. And when you add it up, there's no such thing as free website traffic. Maybe accidental traffic that people are getting through keywords they didn't necessarily mean to target or searches they didn't know people were doing. But that's the organic side. And so it's easier to understand this from Google's perspective, what Google's business model is. The mission is to catalog the world's information and then make that information accessible to people. So you go to Google, you ask a question, Google tries to find you the web page or at least the top 10 pages that most likely answer your question. And the way Google actually makes money, even though they used to own Motorola and they have self-driving cars and Google's involved in all kinds of different endeavors, really the only place that they make money is from people clicking ads on their search engine. So before Google, 20 years ago, search engines were also monetizing their traffic by showing ads. And search engines were terrible because they would show 15 different banner ads, things flashing yellow and red all over the place.
**\[05:02\]** **Sean:** Oh, I remember the days of Alta Vista and other alternative search engines.
**\[05:08\]** **Dan:** All the web crawler. And a lot of those search engines made a lot of money for a brief period of time just because there wasn't a better alternative. And we won't go into Google's algorithm or whatever. That's probably the subject of another podcast. But the reason Google was so successful is because they really tried to answer the question rather than showing things that made money. So one of the things that set them apart from early search engines was that they separated organic listings from paid listings. Previous search engines would allow advertisers to sponsor their links. But the user couldn't really tell which was an ad and which was a legitimate response. So the way you would use a search engine 20 years ago would be to type something in, click every link on the first page to see if that answered your question, then go back and type something else in. And the card catalog at the library was probably more effective in 1996 than any search engine at the time. So Google separated the organic listings which are generated by their algorithm from the paid listings, which are generated by sponsors. And one of the important distinctions was that they put the same standard for relevance on the ads as they have on organic. So whether you click an organic listing or a paid listing today, Google is doing its hardest to answer your question properly.
**\[06:47\]** **Sean:** Okay, so the paid listings also match your search terms as best as possible?
**\[06:54\]** **Dan:** Yes, sometimes they won't, but that advertiser will have to pay even sometimes five or ten times more per click than someone who's trying really hard to answer your question
**\[07:05\]** **Sean:** that you're actually asking. Oh, all right. So if I'm running ads, my ads cost money, but if I'm trying to break into something that's a little bit outside of what the actual target of my ad is, it costs me even more money.
**\[07:23\]** **Dan:** Yeah, a lot of people will have a campaign targeting their competitors because it's, you know, most businesses know who their competitors are and the reasoning is, if we can just take some of my competitors' traffic, people who are looking for my competitor by name, if I can just get them to come to my website instead, then, you know, that's probably a good customer for me. But from Google's perspective, if someone's looking for ABC Motor Company and they actually type in ABC Motor Company, Google wants to show them what they're looking for. So if you're XYZ Motor Company or in the States XYZ, you're co-opting Google's purpose a little bit. Like the person might find what they're looking for if they're just looking for like a new set of tires or something, but really they typed, they asked Google for ABC Motor Company and to show them something that isn't that is, I guess, an interruption in that person's use of Google to a certain extent.
**\[08:27\]** **Sean:** Well, it's not exactly what they're looking for, at least on the surface. So it's going to make it, for myself, I'm going to be less inclined to use Google if I can get better results elsewhere.
**\[08:41\]** **Dan:** Yeah. I mean, I guess on the surface that sounds like Google's trying to take advantage of you and make more money because you're targeting your competition. But again, from Google's perspective, their job is to help people find the answer to the question that they're asking as easily as possible. And we don't owe Google anything. We don't pay a monthly subscription. We only use Google out of habit and because it works so well. And Google makes, I don't know what the latest figures are, but a billion dollars a week or a billion dollars every few days. That money, there's a lot of other companies being, for example, who would love to have that revenue. So there's all kinds of competition in the search space because it's a multi-billion-dollar business. And the only thing that's holding someone to use Google is because it works. So as soon as Google stops answering your questions, you're off to Bing or any one of the other thousand search engines out there. Google loses you as a customer because they're making money off of the ads that you click. And that would be the end of Google simply. So the ads are ranked, I mean, it gets a little bit technical, but the ads are ranked based on their relevance to the search.
**\[09:53\]** **Sean:** So.
**\[09:54\]** **Dan:** Okay. And it's a factor between what you're willing to bid for that click, how much you're willing to pay for that click, combined with the relevance of that term. So if you're a B.C. motor company and you're running an ad for A, B.C. motor company and the ad says A, B, C. motor company and the URL takes them to A, B, C. motor company.com, then the relevance score for your ad will be really high, meaning with a low bid, you can still outrank a competitor who is not what Google is looking for even though they've bid more. So because your ad is better in terms of its relevance to the question the person is asking, you will rank outrank other ads even if they're willing to pay more than you are.
**\[10:41\]** **Sean:** That's very interesting. I thought you could just buy your way to the top of the search results.
**\[10:46\]** **Dan:** At a certain point, if your ad isn't, if your ad is actually a really bad match, it won't even run. So A, B, C. motor company and you're trying to run ads for hotel vacations in Thailand and it's totally irrelevant has nothing to do with it. You won't even be able to get your ad to show even if you had the highest click possible just because that would break Google search engine. That would make using Google awful because every time you go there looking for new tennis shoes, someone would be trying to sell you home insurance.
**\[11:21\]** **Sean:** Okay, yeah, that totally makes sense. So a little while ago, you said for a business just starting out, they're going to be wanting to use pay per click because they're not going to get this organic search results. They haven't really been indexed. They don't have a lot of external links pointing at their website. They need to get themselves knowing how can a new business use pay per click to generate traffic. For example, this podcast hasn't been released yet. We could use this as a test case or we could come up with a theoretical example of maybe a flower shop in my neighborhood that has a new website and they want to generate some traffic because they're doing deliveries. How can I use pay per click advertising with Google to help me build up that traffic?
**\[12:19\]** **Dan:** All right, so this goes back to that where we started. You're a business, you've launched a website and now you need more traffic. That's generally where we pick up new clients who are just starting out of digital. So the organic part will leave to another podcast, but for the paid side, you have a service that someone's offering. For example, if you have a massage therapy clinic, you could run an ad campaign locally around your clinic because someone's not going to come all the way from a different city for a massage because there are clinics in every neighborhood.
**\[12:56\]** **Sean:** Right, so we want to restrict by geographic area so we could restrict it to Toronto or Winnipeg or Chicago or even a neighborhood within this city.
**\[13:07\]** **Dan:** Yep, you can target by city name, country province, city. You can target by postal code or zip code in the US and you can even target by radius around a pin. You can drop a pin on the map where your business is and then advertise a radius even as small
**\[13:25\]** **Sean:** as one kilometer. That is really, really fine-tuning it, narrowing down your focus.
**\[13:33\]** **Dan:** Yeah, it's great for small business. I've done a lot of marketing for dentists, for example. There's a dentist on every street corner. There's no point in them advertising outside of their radius. So that tends to be much more effective. You actually want to exclude everything else so you can have geographic targets and geographic exclusions to refine where your ads show. And actually one of the optimization tips for any campaign is to look at the advanced location settings. By default, Google targets a location you've targeted and people who are showing interest in that location. You want to set that to only people who are in the target location. So if we targeted that clinic and said we care about everyone who's in Liberty Village in Toronto, people who seem to be interested in Liberty Village from elsewhere will see your ad as well. So if you look at your actual geographic report, you're going to see a couple of clicks from Greece and a couple clicks from India and all over the place. And that's a quick optimization tip for anyone who has an adwards account running. Look at your geographic report, locations report by user location and you'll probably see, I mean, 1%, 10%, maybe even 30% of your clicks outside of the area that you think you're targeting.
**\[15:01\]** **Sean:** Well, we definitely want to restrict that because it's going to save me money. I'm not going to get clicks or that are, I'm not paying for clicks that are not helpful. They're not generating me business.
**\[15:12\]** **Dan:** Yeah, that's right. In some companies, if you're a national insurance company or a national lending company, then targeting all of Canada is fine, but you still need to exclude people who are outside of your location and appear to Google to be interested in the location. Google is looking at someone's search history over the last 30 minutes to try and figure out what they're really looking for and it's augmenting these search results in real time. I think that there's a Google ranking that there's like a list somewhere that you could pull up and say, if someone types unicorn, what are the search results? And there's a list there. But it's actually calculated in real time based on your IP address, your location, whether you're on mobile or desktop. It's looking at your recent search history in Google. Even if you're not logged into Google, it still can match the device and the IP address to determine.
**\[16:11\]** **Sean:** Plus, they have cookies and other things like that to track your IP.
**\[16:15\]** **Dan:** So every time somebody looks at search results page in Google, they're actually seeing a customized page just for them. That page will never exist again anywhere else because it's calculated in real time.
**\[16:29\]** **Sean:** Oh, that's very interesting. Looking at how is it possible to find out how I rank for terms that I'm interested in? Can I just open an incognito browser or go to a coffee shop that I haven't been to to ensure I have a different IP address and do the same search terms? Whereas there's something in the Google AdWords control panel that lets me find this how I'm ranking for certain terms and things like that.
**\[17:00\]** **Dan:** Yes. So if you're right, you can open an incognito tab and do a search and get a pretty good idea of what's out there. I mean, the pages aren't that radically different and maybe two people will see the same search results. I find this sometimes with clients if we're looking at they're doing a search at their office, I'm doing a search at my office, and we're comparing results and mostly seeing the same things. But to get even more reliable data, if you've connected your website to Google search console, then there are analytics in there that show you not only the clicks that you've received, but also impressions you've received for keywords. So there might be a keyword that you keep coming up for, but you're on page seven of the results and no one's ever clicked it because no one ever goes to page two. But you can still see that 60 times last month that you've shown up for some query that may be relevant. And that's for your SEO podcast, that's a great way to mine keywords that you can add to your site to help improve and get yourself off page seven up to page one.
**\[18:04\]** **Sean:** Right, actually, I've already recorded the SEO podcast, but I'm probably going to, yeah, I'm going to, the first season one is more about a really broad overview of each of the topics. And then season two and later I'm going to narrow down and focus on tighter aspects of it. So I'm definitely going to be coming back to SEO. I'm going to be coming back to advertising and paper clicks. So hopefully we can have you back as a repeat guest. So this is really interesting. And before we started recording, we talked about how Google AdWords had recently rebranded as Google ads. Could you explain about that and what has changed?
**\[18:51\]** **Dan:** Sure, well, the kind of paper click advertising we've been talking about so far is search engine marketing or search engine advertising. So ads that appear specifically on Google's, on google.com to google.ca. And that's where Google started with ads in the early 2000s. I think it was. Might have been earlier than that even. Google ads on their site, but the Google Display Network allows you to target the rest of the web more or less, except Facebook, I suppose. But they claim to be able to target.
**\[19:27\]** **Sean:** Facebook has their own internal advertising.
**\[19:29\]** **Dan:** Yeah, the claim Google claims to be able to target 90% of the world's internet users through their display network. And they do that by running banner ads on pretty much anywhere. So I think it was 2004 that Google launched AdSense, which was a little bit of code that you could put on your blog or your discussion forum or whatever your baseball fan site or something like that. And it would run Google ads for you and you could use that to make money on your website. And it was an easy way. At that time, banner ads were brokered through media buyers at agencies and big companies could run banner ads as part of their campaign. But smaller advertisers that didn't have IT resources or the kinds of budgets that fortune 1000 companies would have for advertising could now with AdSense start making money, smaller amounts of money by putting in the AdSense code on their site. And then Google would take care of matching the web page and the advertising together. So it would be contextual ads.
**\[20:41\]** **Sean:** It would be insured of having some sort of relevant ad that shows up on your site.
**\[20:45\]** **Dan:** Right. So if you had a discussion forum and one thread is all about burger restaurants, then Google might show banner ads there for food related stuff. And then another part of your site has pages about how to fix your car and there would be ads there for auto mechanics if they were running ads on AdSense. So really it was a supply demand side. And when they acquired the paper click, I think it was, I mean, to get this wrong, someone will correct this in the threads. I think it was the double click network. So when Google bought the display network, then they were able to offer that to the advertisers as well. So then Google was a search engine marketing based on keywords and text ads as well as the Google display network, which is a banner advertising based on, they've actually just changed the way Google display targets. So it used to be that you could pick keywords or, or area, you know, topic, area topics of relevance and have your ads show. So you could say, you know, I want to show my ad to people who are interested in beach travel and airfare and stuff like that. They've changed it. There's so much data right now being tracked on everyone and pretty much everything that they do. You know, we've got voice search coming in. There's just so much more information based, you know, initially it was just targeted based on the website where the ad was going to show and the keywords that appear in that page, which is targeting that. So someone's interested in for worries. We're going to pick for worries a keyword and our ad is going to show where on pages that talk about for worries. But now we can target custom intent. So you can actually target people who are actively trying to book a beach holiday. You can target people who are actively interested or actively researching travel to Chicago.
**\[22:51\]** **Sean:** This is actually what was Luke in the SEO recording was talking about his search intent. Yeah. But you're talking about the same thing here, right?
**\[23:01\]** **Dan:** That's right. And if you're able to see someone's search history, you can figure out a lot of things. You could figure out if they, you know, if you can figure out if if if it's a woman who suspects that she's pregnant based on the kinds of things she's been googling over the past half hour, right?
**\[23:24\]** **Sean:** As a I remember a viral thread about this woman who got something in the mail congratulating her on being pregnant, but she was middle, this middle aged woman who wasn't pregnant. It turned out to be her teenage daughter.
**\[23:39\]** **Dan:** That's right. And there's always, yeah, there's always going to be errors like that. But yeah. And so that's when people are researching all kinds of things. People are, there's a custom intent audience for people who are looking at new cars or leave and luxury cars as a subset of that. It just goes on and on. And in addition to the Google display network, we have Google shopping. So if you search for a specific thing, if you look for like PS4, I'm researching PS4 now because my kids won't want for Christmas. I think I, I think I want my Christmas too.
**\[24:15\]** **Sean:** I just saw an article about the PS5 is targeted for early 2020. So you might want to hold off of that PS4.
**\[24:22\]** **Dan:** Yeah.
**\[24:23\]** **Sean:** Slightly off topic. But save yourself $400 and just wait for another year and a half to get the latest version.
**\[24:33\]** **Dan:** I mentioned Google shopping network.
**\[24:36\]** **Sean:** So that's product-based.
**\[24:38\]** **Dan:** So if you have, for example, a Shopify store, you can connect Shopify with Google ads through Google Merchant Center, you know, a bunch of technical segues there. But you can connect ad words to your store and have your product data feed. So it takes the product photo, the price, and the name, and shows those as ads on Google search when people are shopping.
**\[25:00\]** **Sean:** That sounds really easy to monetize your site in a way like that.
**\[25:06\]** **Dan:** Yeah, it can be highly effective, depending on competition and pricing. But yeah, I've seen that work really well. There's also Google, or people don't realize that YouTube is the second largest search
**\[25:19\]** **Sean:** engine in the world. That's news to me. And I'm obviously deeply involved in the web. I build websites. I didn't know YouTube was number two.
**\[25:30\]** **Dan:** That's how you remember the movie, The Matrix, where they're like, hey, I need to know how to fly a whatever class three military helicopter. And then they just download the program and he knows how to fly. Well, that's YouTube. That's what you're like.
**\[25:44\]** **Sean:** Yeah, actually, it is. I use YouTube for tutorials on everything.
**\[25:48\]** **Dan:** Yeah. How do I replace the tail light on whatever car you have? There will be instructional videos there on exactly how to do it.
**\[25:55\]** **Sean:** How do I build the fence around my property? How do I drill, make a post hole?
**\[26:01\]** **Dan:** Yeah, I don't have an up to date stat on how much video there is in YouTube. But something like 24, there's like 100 hours of video uploaded every second or something like that. It's hard to understand how big YouTube is.
**\[26:18\]** **Sean:** It's crazy. So you keep bringing up all these different aspects or segments or maybe it's subdivisions of Google that can impact the way you search. I think we could probably, each of those, spend an entire episode dedicated to that. I am going to have to bring you back. But I want to segue a little bit into something else. You mentioned search intent and customer intent. It sounds to me that when I go and I look at, let's say I'm looking for a new cell phone, and then I back on Facebook later and I see advertisements for that cell phone or accessories for that cell phone that it's somehow related. Is this what remarketing is?
**\[27:19\]** **Dan:** Yes. Yes, so could you talk about that a little bit? So you can, you add a bit of code or update the code that is your Google Analytics. So that's the report that tells you where your search traffic is coming from and the keywords are using. The way Google Analytics works is that when I land on your website and you're running Google Analytics and there are other analytics programs that work in similar ways, marking automation and CRM tools that can track visitors too. But Google Analytics is the most common tool in the world.
**\[27:54\]** **Sean:** It's the de facto standard.
**\[27:57\]** **Dan:** Yeah. And it's free because Google makes money when people use the internet. So if we can make the internet easier to use by making the websites more user friendly than that was the argument there, I suppose.
**\[28:10\]** **Sean:** But it sounds like that.
**\[28:12\]** **Dan:** When I go to your website, Google Analytics writes a cookie in my browser, which is basically like a little serial number that it stores in my browser's temporary folder. And when I'm then go check the weather, weather network looks to see if I have that Google Analytics cookie. And it basically tells weather network that I've been to your website. I mean, it doesn't, there's nowhere you can see that Dan Woods been to. Caffingcreations.ca on this and that date. It's all like there's no personal data there and it's all just a bunch of serial numbers
**\[28:48\]** **Sean:** that connect your computer has been to that site. Or your, yourself has been to the site?
**\[28:54\]** **Dan:** Yeah, it's not me, it's actually that device, the device because of where the cookies are written in that browser. But what that means is when I go to weather network, you can show me an ad from your site based on the fact that I've been to your website or a specific page on your site. So this allows us to set up some really cool funnels. I can advertise to, like if you're an e-commerce store, I can advertise to people who have been to your shopping cart page but not been to your checkout. If it's an e-commerce store, I can actually dynamically feed the products that you've been looking at into a banner ad and show you what you were just shopping for and the
**\[29:34\]** **Sean:** price. I see that all the time after I'm browsing Amazon.
**\[29:40\]** **Dan:** Yeah, and this is one of the tricks if you're shopping online, get to the checkout page enough that you've maybe put in your email address and everything short of paying and then go away for a day. A lot of companies will then send you a coupon.
**\[29:55\]** **Sean:** Send you a coupon?
**\[29:56\]** **Dan:** Yeah. So you can get $50 off your ND mattress if you do that. At least you could a couple of years ago when I bought one.
**\[30:06\]** **Sean:** Yeah, I've noticed that I've gotten a couple of emails or afterwards or even just targeted ads giving me a discount that didn't exist before because I walked away. And it might have been that I wasn't actually ready to order at that time. I was just researching or it might have been like, I found something else I liked but they were still wanting me to come back. Yeah. It sounds really, really helpful for businesses to take care of abandoned carts and get more
**\[30:37\]** **Dan:** conversions. Yeah. And sometimes the marketer doesn't know if that person's left because they realized, hang on, I haven't checked Amazon or, you know, I'm not ready to buy yet because I'm still doing research. I just wanted to check what the shipping cost was going to be before I go punch it in elsewhere. Or maybe...
**\[30:55\]** **Sean:** Or I'm just waiting for my credit card to roll over to the next month, which is what I do a lot.
**\[31:00\]** **Dan:** Yeah. Or the phone rang or got onto something else or it was time to run off to a meeting. There's a million reasons why people abandoned a cart and it's hard for marketers to know what happened. So it's worth running ads to everybody because a good portion of them who are comparative shopping elsewhere might come back. And if you're doing something, if you're looking for like an insurance quote or a roofing contractor or something like that, you will do your due diligence to get multiple quotes. And by the time you've been on five different roofing websites, you won't remember names or logos and all that stuff. The first three, you probably wouldn't even remember that they existed two weeks from now. But if you can see, if you can see their logo, start showing up a couple times a day and reinforce that brand recognition, you're more likely to follow up with that quote.
**\[31:49\]** **Sean:** Yeah, that sounds mixed remarketing. Sounds very, very, very beneficial for small businesses. So let's say I've got a campaign running and I've hired you or I've hired another professional who's familiar with my industry or local to me or whatever. How long until I start seeing results from my campaign? Like more conversions, more clicks. Is there a hard and fast rule or is it more of a depends situation?
**\[32:25\]** **Dan:** Well in terms of how quickly the ads start running, if I were to sit down and write an ad right now, every ad believe they're not is reviewed manually by Google and they review them pretty quickly.
**\[32:40\]** **Sean:** Manually, it's not reviewed by an algorithm. How can they review the millions of ads they get a day?
**\[32:46\]** **Dan:** I think they batch process them or something because I've seen ads squeak through and run that were not in compliance with their editorial policy or whatever.
**\[32:56\]** **Sean:** And then six months later they got shut down.
**\[33:01\]** **Dan:** And I think some of the stuff like punctuation, you can't have a bunch of astrocsis or block capital letters. It can't look like spam. That's why there's a consistent look to ads that have limited punctuation and you don't imagine if the kinds of ads people would write like five exclamation points and stars. It would look like a chat form or just some kind of rubbish spam site.
**\[33:31\]** **Sean:** It would look like geocities from the 19 years.
**\[33:34\]** **Dan:** That's right. Click here. Click here. Flashing right away.
**\[33:38\]** **Sean:** Okay. How long is the life start to see results?
**\[33:42\]** **Dan:** Ads usually start to run within an hour or faster display ads because the images are reviewed more closely. We'll take 24 hours and sometimes they can take up to a week.
**\[33:53\]** **Sean:** Just recently I've had to display ads or the ads that display on other people's websites. That's not Google search.
**\[34:00\]** **Dan:** That's right. So text ads are they go through really fast but display the banner ads take longer to review because they have a text component and a visual component. Those are showing on third party sites. Google's running ads and you have some kind of inappropriate image that you've put in. It's going to show up on a third party site. Google's going to get in trouble from.
**\[34:29\]** **Sean:** We don't want to have some sort of adult advertisement on a kid's website.
**\[34:36\]** **Dan:** Right. Well, Google, I guess they're, you know, they've, their policy excludes anything that would be more than like PG rated, I suppose.
**\[34:50\]** **Sean:** Okay. I didn't know that. It's not like I'm running adult advertisements. No, but Google doesn't allow that.
**\[34:56\]** **Dan:** They also don't allow anything to do with pharmaceuticals or medical terms. You can't advertise anything as a policy go. Anything that alters the mind or body. So you can't advertise alcohol, cannabis, tobacco. You can't advertise gambling. So it's sort of like the family friendly kind of idea.
**\[35:18\]** **Sean:** It's the Disney of advertising.
**\[35:21\]** **Dan:** More or less.
**\[35:22\]** **Sean:** Yeah. That's, that's interesting. I had no idea about that.
**\[35:27\]** **Dan:** So yeah, back to your question. Ads can start running as soon as within hour and then they'll get clicked whenever they get clicked, which means someone has searched for a keyword you're bidding on and found your ad to be relevant and clicked on it. So you can start generating traffic on day one with, um, with paid search.
**\[35:46\]** **Sean:** And so based on what I see in my reports, I can adjust my ads or I can adjust my bid or the keywords that I'm searching for.
**\[35:57\]** **Dan:** Right. So when we, when you're starting to do digital advertising, you want to work back from your, like on the financial side, what your customer lifetime value is. So if you're, um, whatever, you're booking customers and they're worth $100 each. And they have like to say it's a, like a magazine subscription. So a sale is a hundred bucks and you have a 75% renewal rate. So let's say a person's worth by the time you run that calculus to that, that math. Say they're worth $180. So you can take that customer lifetime value and then look at your marketing and say anytime we're paying more than $180, we're actually losing money. And if you apply that measurement across your marketing, you can make smart decisions, um, you know, is, is print advertising doing it for us is radio working and there's different ways of tracking sales through those, through those media because ultimately you need to find the most effective marketing strategy and adwords, um, or Google ads online advertising isn't necessarily the thing that's going to work for, for, for a business, right? It really depends on who your target customer is and, and how they, you know, how does your product or service fit into their life? What's going to make them interested in giving you their money? Um, and then, you know, where, where are they? Where do they hang out? And how do we meet them there and become part of their life?
**\[37:29\]** **Sean:** So that sounds like, yeah, sounds like you really need to learn a lot about your customers to make effective ads.
**\[37:35\]** **Dan:** Yes, I mean, on the surface of it, it's pretty simple. If you sell, um, I'm not trying to make sense. You sell pizza, you want to run an ad for people who are searching for pizza locally? Um, you know, like dentists is a pretty simple thing, like I said before, you said a geographic radius and then you pick all of the ways people are looking for, um, dentists near me, pediatric dentists, orthodontist, um, you know, all the different kinds of things that dentists offer that people know to search by name. Those are keywords you can bid on because those are things people are typing into Google. And when your ad shows up, that's what they were looking for. And the rest, the rest is all about the landing page and the website conversion, which is like the really, really, really important topic that people often overlook. But that first part, just simply setting, what is it that people are searching for to find me? That what's the search intent and putting yourself there is pretty straightforward. Then we want to measure like, is this, is this really an effective ROI? And the thing that, um, a lot of people don't realize is that there's, uh, like, there's sort of two topics here. One is, if you're, if you're web, if your products and services are not something that people know to search for by name. So if it's a new kind of, a new kind of service, a new kind of product, a new technology, something that people aren't searching for because it's, um, just not a term that people know yet. Or if you are, um, offering a more complex thing. Look, I have a client that, um, they're an IT reseller. So they sell hardware and software, like corporate security and a prize IT type stuff. And they, it's a challenge for them to figure out their keywords because they've done so much branding that they've invented their own terms. They've been, you know, the way that they refer to the, the stuff that they do are, are not the way that people search for it because they're sort of they have their own in-house lingo. Um, and they've, all of their services, they've branded them with catchy names, but people don't know what those names are. They're just looking for, um, a generic word.
**\[40:02\]** **Sean:** Right. So they, they need to do some sort of advertising that uses the layman's terms to pull them into what they've named with their internal jargon.
**\[40:13\]** **Dan:** Yeah, you want to be bidding on the phrases that your target market actually uses to solve their problems. So, um, yeah, I mean, I want to think of an example off the top of my head, but you want to be speaking the language that your customers speak because that's the way they're going to talk to Google.
**\[40:38\]** **Sean:** Speaking of the language, your customers speak, okay, that, that's, that sounds like a good key takeaway. Let's tweet that. Um, we're, we're, we're going a little bit long, but I have two or three more questions that I'd really like to get into before we call it a day. Uh, so if I'm a do it yourself, I've got my own website or I've, I've already had it built, um, I want to run the ads myself for whatever reason. Maybe I don't have the budget to pay somebody to do it as well as pay for the ads. So I'm a new business. Sure. Okay. Is it possible for me to get results and where would you recommend that I could learn the basics of this? Is there an online course or a website that I should take a look at and I can get the fundamentals and I will add anything that he says into the show notes.
**\[41:34\]** **Dan:** The, uh, man, the web is full of people offering outwards courses and I've Google it.
**\[41:40\]** **Sean:** How do I know which ones are good?
**\[41:42\]** **Dan:** I don't know. Um, they're probably all great. If you're just starting off knowing nothing, they're probably all great, but, uh, the best place to start is probably with Google Academy. They have their own training course that finishes with a multiple choice test that allows you to get a certification. So it's really, it's, I haven't done it in a couple of years, but it's a really great way to get introduced like from the horses, not as it were to the latest tools and concepts. And they have a, there's a general, I'd words one and then there's one based on video, one based on display that get more, uh, deeper into the each subject.
**\[42:23\]** **Sean:** And this is Google Academy.
**\[42:25\]** **Dan:** Ha, ha, after Google it, they just rebranded. Um, yeah.
**\[42:29\]** **Sean:** So just like Google ads and ad sense is rebranded. Uh, so Google Academy is rebranded. I will add it into the show notes. Sure. What about, um, other resources, maybe like a Udemy course or something like that? Do you recommend those? Do you have any tips on how I would choose a good one?
**\[42:50\]** **Dan:** Well, actually, I was considering putting a course together myself, but, um, there are, there's actually one I get every time.
**\[42:58\]** **Sean:** When you do put a course together, let's do a podcast.
**\[43:01\]** **Dan:** Sure. I'd love to. One on Udemy that I get advertised to a lot because according to my search history, I'm very much interested in digital marketing. So I get, I get to see these ads all the time on Google and Facebook. Um, and we should have a show about Facebook ads too because that's, uh, that's a whole other arena.
**\[43:20\]** **Sean:** It works a little bit differently and, um, consider it done season two or season three after I get this one out.
**\[43:27\]** **Dan:** Yeah. So there is a tool called AdWords Express. They rolled it out maybe five or six years ago and it's designed for small local businesses. Um, you have to set up a Google My Business account and connect that to your website and then you answer a few cool questions about what your business is. If you're like a hairstylist or an auto body shop, um, and Google basically suggests the ads and it's, you know, a couple clicks and you're running. It's a little more complicated than that, I suppose. But it's, it was built to be the self-serve, super fast, um, platform. And I think this is a lot of, if you have a, uh, an AdWords vendor that's offering to do something really cheap, like a few hundred bucks a month, they're probably just running AdWords Express because the setup is so fast. It's a, a pair down version of the, um, of the Google ads tool designed for small local businesses and it's, um, that's probably a good start.
**\[44:28\]** **Sean:** Is this something that you use with your clients or is it something that you think that maybe less ethically minded businesses are using or is it okay for somebody offering AdWords service to use that?
**\[44:45\]** **Dan:** Um, yeah, I don't use it for any of my clients. Just because, yeah, no, I mean, I like to be fully in control of what's happening and, and get, um, you know, have that granular control over, over how the money's being spent. But for, um, for, for, do it yourself or, um, you know, in any case, it comes back to tracking the ROI. So if you have a, I mean, it's one thing to send people to your website, but really what you want is them to buy something or fill out a form or click a phone number to call you. And when those things happen, yeah. So when those things happen, we actually have another kind of tracking code that we install out of Google ads that sends, um, that conversion back to Google ads. So Google knows, um, every, every click ever has a unique click ID. And then when your website says, hey, this guy, he came here from Google ads and he filled out a form that piece of code runs that says this form was filled successfully and the, um, the cookie connects that form fill action back to a click. So you can see in Google ads, which ads and which keywords are turning into leads or sales on your own.
**\[46:03\]** **Sean:** Very helpful.
**\[46:04\]** **Dan:** Yeah. And if you're not, if you're not measuring your, uh, conversions, then you're flying blind. You're all you will know is how many clicks you've had, how much money you've thrown at Google, but you won't be able to know what's happening and a lot of small businesses. They just sort of go by gut feel and they, and they're like, oh, it's really slow this week. Something's not working. And then they call their agency and say, hey, you guys need to run more ads. And then, you know, the next week's okay.
**\[46:29\]** **Sean:** And then, um, but, so does, does AdWords express show you the same information? Or is this something that you, you do need to go into the full featured AdWords control panel to understand?
**\[46:44\]** **Dan:** You know what? I, I don't know. You said AdWords express, but there must be, hey, that, that's a fair answer.
**\[46:50\]** **Sean:** I mean, I asked you about a tool that you're not using yourself, but that you recommended for do yourself for types. There must be, that's okay.
**\[46:58\]** **Dan:** There must be a way. There, there's going to be a set up thing. Um, there, there has to be a way to measure, uh, the effectiveness. Otherwise, you just, and this is a, this is a problem that every company and every marketer has is where are we getting the returns from? Because you're, you're throwing money in a bunch of different directions and then it's, it's busy or it's slow. But if you don't know why you, you can't know how to make it better or, you know, kind of cut my advertising budget by 30%. And then be still be as busy or busier than I am now. And that's why tracking that conversion through whatever kind of advertising you're doing is really important if you can do it.
**\[47:36\]** **Sean:** All right. So, uh, damn, last question. I've decided I don't want to do, do it myself or I've grown out of do it myself and I've found my budget. I want to hire someone to do my ads for me. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's somebody who's more familiar with my industry or whatever. How do I go about finding a company? Are there any red flags I should be aware of? Is it important to find somebody who's specialized in my field, whether it's automotive or providing online courses for somebody or doing home renovations?
**\[48:19\]** **Dan:** Um, I would probably tend to towards finding someone who's specialized except if they're also running, if they're doing marketing for my local competition, how can they help me? Like who are they going to put first? That's sort of a conflict of conflict of interest there, perhaps, depending on the business. Uh, and then you get what you pay for. So if you, you know, look at what you're paying your agency and figure out how many hours of a professional's time will that money buy me?
**\[48:54\]** **Sean:** So how do I know how many hours I don't know how long it takes to do Google ads? It sounds like it's just a couple of clicks.
**\[49:00\]** **Dan:** Right. Well, it depends on, it depends on the complexity of your campaign. So like the simple example, then a small local business like a dentist who has, you know, 11 teen services and that's, you know, 11 teen different ad groups. That's pretty straightforward. Usually agencies will charge a set up fee because there's a lot of upfront work in,
**\[49:23\]** **Sean:** okay.
**\[49:24\]** **Dan:** You know, if the right the ads, we have to set up the tracking code. We have to build out the campaign itself with the keyword groups and the bids and everything else.
**\[49:32\]** **Sean:** And then so the, the initial work is a little bit more expensive than the ongoing work.
**\[49:37\]** **Dan:** Yeah. Well, and it depends if everything's working fine, then we are just wandering the budget. We're split testing ads. We're looking at the actual searches that people have done to exclude ones that are relevant so that we're always improving performance over time. Um, and then looking for opportunities for new, new keywords and if, you know, maybe a business is adding new services or new products, we want to incorporate that into AdWords so that we'll be a little bit of build additional things over time. And there's always like the company's credit card is hit a maximum. So payment decline. So the ads stop running that day. And if you're not monitoring the account. Um, and I've seen, I've taken over ad accounts from agencies where they literally built it and never logged in again for a year.
**\[50:24\]** **Sean:** And if the accounts built really well, that does not sound like a good business relationship.
**\[50:30\]** **Dan:** No, it doesn't sound. I mean, well, this is why they came to a new agency because they're planning anything out of it. And sometimes, uh, some agencies won't charge a set up fee because they look at that as an initial investment to getting. They'll charge up a monthly fee all year long. And then by the end of the month, they've recouped the, the, the time that they've spent in setting it.
**\[50:54\]** **Sean:** Right. It's, it's like getting your cell phone for free, but you pay out higher monthly on your cell phone contract.
**\[51:01\]** **Dan:** The way agencies are structured has a place of factor to because, um, generally, when you meet with an agency, you're going to talk to, um, a salesperson who's really, uh, slick and charismatic and knows enough about advertising to convince you that they're going to take care of you. Or you're talking to a senior member of the agency who really understands big picture. And then, but those aren't the people who are going to work on your account. Those aren't the people who are going to write your ads.
**\[51:36\]** **Sean:** Right. They're, they're the specialist that they've hired either in house or maybe they're contracting as a freelancer. Yeah.
**\[51:44\]** **Dan:** And, and this is of the way a lot of businesses work. So in architecture, the lead architect will oversee the project and come up with the initial design concepts. And then it goes to the drafts people who build out the plans under some mid-level managers who know how it's done and know how to do it, right? But if the senior architect isn't overseeing it properly, you know, the building's going to fall down. And in architecture, that tends to not happen very much because when buildings fall down, everyone can see that there's a big, big problem. But in marketing, right. Sometimes, you know, sometimes marketing campaigns fail because of factors outside of everyone's control because a new product comes on the market or because the economy crashes or there's all kinds of reasons why marketing doesn't work sometimes. But sometimes it just doesn't work because of incompetence because the agencies just not they've they've handed the account off to a junior person who doesn't have enough information about the business that they're marketing to write the ads properly.
**\[52:47\]** **Sean:** Well, is there any way for someone like myself who's or a small business owner to find red flags that would let me know that my ads are not running correctly or that this particular ad agency is a little bit dodgy or shady.
**\[53:09\]** **Dan:** You want to make sure that you're when you're sitting down with an agency that they really take the time to understand your business and your customers. If they're not asking questions about your target market, your buyer customer buyer personas, your customer lifetime value. If they're not digging you for that kind of information and then how can they possibly run a successful ad campaign unless you're just a totally off the shelf. You know business just like. But that's not a really great way to start with your marketing to say we're just trying to you need to specialize.
**\[53:45\]** **Sean:** Yeah, it's all about it's all about the niche.
**\[53:48\]** **Dan:** Yeah, so if your marketing agency is going to be your your spokesperson essentially they're going out to the world and conveying your message to your target market. So if you don't have a sense that they really get your customers and understand your business, then I don't know how they would succeed and the other thing is measuring measuring success. So they if they if they don't ask for access to your website so that they can set up tracking code, then they're not going to be measuring conversions and the report that you're going to get is just going to show a bunch of impressions and clicks. And they're going to say hey look we sent 500 people to your website this month wasn't that great and you're going to say well how many of them turned into customers and. They're either going to try to blow smoke up your ass or just say I don't know.
**\[54:40\]** **Sean:** They're going to just shrug it well.
**\[54:42\]** **Dan:** Wow they would say get more sales this month some some industries you know in automotive industry for example. The there's it's really difficult to track someone's website activity to their their purchase because at least today cars are not bought through websites people research. I think the latest status they they they do 17 different website visits across different sites to do the research then they walk into a dealership and ask for a test drive. So it's exactly what I did a year and a half ago when I bought my new car industry standard so it's really hard in that market for people to understand the success of their ad spend. But most businesses have some kind of like I said there's a there's a purchase there's a phone call there's a there's an inquiry a lead form. You know downloading a sample starting a free trial there's there's most businesses have some kind of way that they can measure success.
**\[55:45\]** **Sean:** All right well done this has been really really informative and we clearly have a lot more that we could talk about a whole other episodes. Very happy to have you out do you have any final thoughts or resources you would like to share links that you find useful or anything you'd like to add.
**\[56:09\]** **Dan:** I'm so in it in the weeds every day that I I'm not sure I'd be happy to answer the truth and have an answer specific questions but for someone who's who's looking to learn more about it the Google course is probably a great way to start because it's free. It's a major on pace multimedia thing and it's at least going to help you understand some of the definitions and tools that are available and yeah it's a good place to start.
**\[56:37\]** **Sean:** Excellent so down. Until I get a course.
**\[56:40\]** **Dan:** Where can it till I start running out.
**\[56:42\]** **Sean:** I want to see your course so the last thing before we go where can people find you online your social media your website things like that.
**\[56:50\]** **Dan:** Oh man I have an awful website at breakdigital.com. I have an email form there that collects spam. You could find me perhaps I can help you with that website. Yeah I don't know well I mean most of my business comes through referral so that's the best company business.
**\[57:15\]** **Sean:** So we've got your website we've got your LinkedIn. Thank you for coming out it was a really really great conversation.
**\[57:22\]** **Dan:** Yeah I wasn't sure we'd come up with enough to say but obviously we filled our time and open some new topics.
**\[57:27\]** **Sean:** We're well over time. Okay. Thank you so much.
**\[57:31\]** **Dan:** Yeah thanks everybody for listening and thanks a lot for the opportunity to be on your show Sean.
**\[57:35\]** **Sean:** Thank you for listening be sure to subscribe and share our website 101 podcast with friends and colleagues. You can find me at website 101 podcast.com on Twitter. These are named at website 101 pod. Do you have a question you want to ask a topic suggestion or a guest host recommendation? Send me an email Sean S.E.A.N. at caffeine creations dot C.A. Or visit website 101 podcast.com slash contact and fill in the form. You can find me personally online at my company website caffeine creations dot C.A. C.A.F.E.I.N.E. C.R.E.A.T.I.O.N.S dot C.A. On LinkedIn with username caffeine creations. Hope you enjoyed this episode. See you next time.
Close Transcript
Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).
[](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly93ZWJzaXRlMTAxcG9kY2FzdC5jb20vZmVlZC5yc3M%3D)[](https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/website-101-podcast/id1449510012)[](https://open.spotify.com/show/3rmSM1R9t6q1U8DmYWJRSO?si=NrYPMgDaRV6Dd56PjEaPow)### Season 01
- 1 [ Introduction to Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-1/introduction-to-website-101-podcast/)
- 2 [ Planning, Structure, Goals](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-2/planning-structure-goals/)
- 3 [ Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-3/web-design-shortcuts-you-should-never-take/)
- 4 [ Websites Benefit from Continual Development](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-4/websites-benefit-from-continual-development/)
- 5 [ SEO 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-5/seo-101/)
- 6 [ Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-6/ppc-101-pay-per-click/)
- 7 [ PR & Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-7/pr-marketing/)
- 8 [ Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-8/what-is-a-landing-page/)
- 9 [ Accessibility: Why Your Website Should Be Easy to Use for All](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-9/accessibility-why-its-important/)
- 10 [ DIY Vs Bespoke](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-10/diy-vs-bespoke/)
- 11 [ Season 1 Wrap Up](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-11/season-1-wrap-up/)
### All Seasons
- [Season 01](https://website101podcast.com/season/01/)
- [Season 02](https://website101podcast.com/season/02/)
- [Season 03](https://website101podcast.com/season/03/)
- [Season 04](https://website101podcast.com/season/04/)
- [Season 05](https://website101podcast.com/season/05/)
- [Season 06](https://website101podcast.com/season/06/)
- [Season 07](https://website101podcast.com/season/07/)
- [Season 08](https://website101podcast.com/season/08/)
- [Season 09](https://website101podcast.com/season/09/)
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