Google Ads for local businesses

[00:00:05] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there. Welcome to the No Script Show. This episode is going to be all about Google Ads and is for those new to pay per click advertising, particularly small businesses, for example, vets, accountants, therapists, electricians, et cetera.

From our experience helping these businesses build websites, many don't have the time to learn the differences between traditional marketing, so for example, advertising in newspapers, local radio, buying sports kits for local teams, et cetera, and digital marketing to which Google. Ads belongs as this is key to spending marketing budgets.

Well, we're going to go over what to consider before launching a Google Ads campaign. You can find the transcript, the show notes, and the presentation slides. They're gonna be at the website. No script show. Forward slash 26. So the numbers two, six, and if you're watching on YouTube, the link will be in the first comment just below the subscribe and like buttons, which you incidentally should press.

Should you wish to get more content from us in the future. As always. I'm joined by David Wamsley. Hi there, David. Hey

[00:01:12] David Waumsley: thanks Nathan. Oh, well, I'm hoping this episode might be of use to future clients of mine. That's really my intention behind it. Even though I kind of do a bit of marketing strategy when I'm building client sites.

'cause obviously I have to think about the users when I'm doing that. Rarely does this stick with them at all. So it's fairly common. A few years later when things had gone quiet on the website for me to get a request to add a Google tracking script or when with a WordPress site to give access to a Google ad campaign manager.

And recently, and this is what prompted me to want to talk about this, a client forwarded a. Appointment with a Google technician, support team member. Right. And the, there was no information. So there was an expectation that I would attend this meeting and but I wasn't sure, so I thought it was a phishing email or something because Right.

Google. Google are huge. They've got, 300 billion in ad revenue, so they've never been interested in handholding small businesses before. But it seems looking this up that it's just one of several defensive actions that Google's been taking since a recent decline in their search dominance.

Okay. Experienced advertisers are starting to report that they're getting poorer ad performance. So I think they're acting accordingly and looking to beginners who previously wouldn't have spent anything because they couldn't get beyond that sort of setting up of the campaign and the Google Tag Manager, the way of being able to analyze the results.

So that's really what's brought this on for me. Maybe this is a good thing that Google are doing, but there's a bit of me, the cynic in me that's thinking, well, this. Did this complexity mean that it was stopping people from who shouldn't have been doing it, doing this? Should you be flying a plane really if you don't know how to take off?

So I think, right, good point. Probably, yeah, give some advice on this. So we'll move on to our slides probably and talk a little bit about what Google and Google ads are.

[00:03:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So that's a, I guess that's a good place to begin. So just cribbing from the slide here a little bit. Google's search is really pretty dominant.

I mean, I don't know exactly what the numbers are, but it has become like a universal verb to say to Google things. We definitely used to say search, but now we say Google. And then of course it's got a massive suite of products behind it. I mean, there's four listed here, but there's way more than this Gmail maps, calendar docs.

Pretty much everything in my life is embedded in those. We, for example, share docs in Google Docs for this show, and I use Google Maps and I'm a Gmail user. It's pretty much everything. If Google went down, I'm in big trouble. It is the world's largest advertising platform, which is kind of strange to know through Google Search, for example, YouTube as well.

And it's got its ad display network and Google's economic impact report puts advertisers average return. At 800%. That seems like an eye watering figure, but okay. There it is. 800%.

[00:04:21] David Waumsley: Wow. Yeah. Yeah, I know. And well, I did a bit of research onto this one and I should probably mention as well that for those who don't know, Google Display Network, it.

It's really this collection of over 2 million external sites and apps, often blogs and games that make money from displaying ads. So, they put their ads on their site. If somebody clicks on it, they make money from Google. There are other creditable reports that suggest that the number, the return on investment might be more like.

200 to 400. And then I think typically as an industry, it seems that most people will say that the average return on an ad spend is for every. For every $1 spent, you'll get $2 in revenue, but it's still pretty good, isn't it? And you can see why. Well,

[00:05:07] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. I mean, so long as it's more than $1 for $1, it's probably a good business decision to start using things like that.

I'm staggered that it. Is as high as that. In all honesty. I kind of thought the days of that were all over. But anyway, so there's more in the about section. So for example this whole ad thing is a subsidiary of the profit focused Alphabet. So Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

That I don't know. Quite why they did that move a few years ago. But they did. And alphabet itself, gosh, really $3 trillion is apparently the worth of alphabet, which is pretty amazing. Google supplies free tools because the data supports its primary business. Yeah. They're not giving it to you for No Yeah.

Reason at all. And Google Ads won't give suckers an even break. What did you mean by that exactly?

[00:05:56] David Waumsley: Well, I.

[00:05:57] Nathan Wrigley: They, they're

[00:05:58] David Waumsley: a business and their ads are set up. If you go in with no skill or no knowledge and you go with their defaults, they're not going to necessarily work in your interest but work.

Yeah. In their business interests. And I think we'll see that as we go through. I mean, really this slide is just to, because I think many of us will see Google through rose tinted spectacles that you know Yeah. But they are one of the magnificent seven out there, apple, Microsoft, gosh, Amazon, no script show.

No script show. Satan I dunno who the others are. But and we, I think particularly I talk to clients all the time because I, people who came in on that wave of. The digital revolution saw Google as this wonderful people who just did things right, who had a really good culture.

Yeah. People wanted to work for them, but I think, we have to realize that their ethics has kind of been watered down over the years. They are big corporate business. There don't be evil motto has long gone. And more recently, the longstanding commitment to avoid AI in weapons development that's gone.

Google's face multiple. Privacy violations and probably in terms of that, just taking the most tinted spectacles off. One thing that if you're going into this, that you need to be aware of, 'cause. They won't make your way off because of GDPR. If you are sending any data, which you will do through Google Tag Manager, you actually need the consent to be able to do that before someone's data is taken over there.

Right. And of course, like most businesses who are set up to trade in data like Google. They're only really going to advertise where they meet GDPR. They're not likely to advertise to somebody who's setting up Google Tag Manager that you need to add this. Quite intrusive off putting privacy pop up to your website which you will need to do if you get into Google Ads.

So I'll move

[00:07:52] Nathan Wrigley: on to another slide. Okay, so I guess this is our final about slide. So there's some more information about Google and whatnot. So an average return on investment cannot, can't be expected as there's no normal distribution. The success is gonna vary across industries and depending on skill.

I I'm just gonna dwell on that point. I think that skill bit is the crucial bit and probably what we're doing here, in all honesty, setting it up properly. Like the defaults are probably not gonna get you anywhere. And it's a bit like something like Google Analytics. The devil is in the detail, which is in a menu, buried in a menu, buried in a menu, buried in a menu.

And also a familiarity with the interface and the ability to adapt as that interface changes over time, which inevitably will. And the final point in our about section is Neil Patel. Claims that eight outta 10 businesses lose money on Google ads, which is about everything you need to know about that.

Really? Yeah. If the ROI is claimed to be 800%, but eight out of 10 businesses seem to lose money on it, you, there's definitely something going wrong for those 80%, and yet the 20% seem to be making all the headway from the platform.

[00:09:00] David Waumsley: Yeah, I mean, Neil Patel, I mean, he is a prominent digital marketer.

For those who don't know Nathan, and I know his work, he's authored books and he creates a lot of SEO content and I think he still owns a keyword research tool as well, but it's not really backed up. But I will say in this, with my limited number of clients that I know of, maybe there's about seven or eight of them who I know of who have spent money on Google ads.

None of 'em are particularly knowledgeable about this. Actually, they all lost money on it, basically. So, what Neil Patel's saying is probably likely a lot of people go in not really knowing what they need to know.

[00:09:39] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay, so we're gonna drive the conversation forwards a little bit and we've got a number of different slides to promote that conversation.

So here we go. The first bit we're gonna tackle is traditional. Whatever that means versus digital marketing. So we've got this strap line here of more traffic won't make a bad offer. Good. It kind of stands the reason, doesn't it? Yeah. If you if you've got a bad thing, it doesn't matter how much you spend on the advertising, nobody is gonna buy it, but you've got some more data to back this up.

[00:10:06] David Waumsley: Yeah I'm just gonna concentrate on this a bit 'cause I think this is the crucial thing about anyone getting into this, because traditional advertising, I think most of us know of moving to digital, it's hard to get your head around that. So traditional advertising through old media. Was fairly intrusive and blunt.

You would've to advertise to everybody. So where you and I might have enjoyed the body form TV ads or something, you and I as gents wouldn't have been interested in the sanitary towel product because apparently according to Jimmy Carr, it's not a proper gift. Oh, okay. Right. Okay. But and I think similarly when we go into the first wave of digital marketing, a lot of people carried that mentality around just get more traffic.

So people were gaming Google we keyword stuff in all the stuff that you knew about in the two thousands and 10 Google. Kind of got their act together and punish people who were gaming the algorithm. 'cause it wasn't in their business interest. And a lot of people kind of went out that time.

And that's saw, I mean, it was always there in the first place and offline. But there was a concentration in our way to think about conversion. The idea of using sales psychology to present an offer in a targeted way. Which you can do. That's the beauty I think of Google Ads.

Unlike any other sort of search engine work that you might do it allows you to kind of really finely tune who you're going to Yeah. Have come to your site and. I mean, I'm gonna go on a little bit on this, but I, we, I think we just instinctively know this in the real world. So if for my example here, if I was setting up, I'm not going to do this a shop, and it, this shop only has one product.

It sells classic black dresses. We'd know instinctively that value of that dress would depend on the person coming through how they would value it. So if a young teenager came through. I'm probably going to guess when they come through that they're not gonna be interested in stuff that I might have worried about.

The fabric that it's durability, that it's easy, washable, that's probably not gonna be their primary concern, whether it's called who's wearing it now might be their thing. If it's an older person, they might be like me, they change their weight all the time and they want to know that it can adjust to that.

If it's a man coming into the shop or something. Assuming that they're not like me and they'd like to go by the name Susan at the weekend. I'm joking there. By the way. It's Jenny. I prefer, sorry. No, really? If they come in, they're probably looking for a gift so they won't reassurances.

That this might be the gift for the right kind of person, and you might sell the fact that it's easy returnable, that sizes don't matter too much. It's quite forgiving and that you gift wrap. So if you see what I mean. Yeah. One product Yep. Can be sold. And the highlighting and that I think is the key thing about where Google Ads come in is because it allows you, with pay-per-click, you can target who's coming into your shop so you can greet them.

With the best story, if you like, to be able to convert them. So, I will move on. Sorry, we'll move on to this side.

[00:13:09] Nathan Wrigley: Well, no, it's okay. I've just got a couple of things to add to that, and that is to add to that. And that is that, that sort of hyper targeting whilst yeah. Whilst it's like the unicorn, it's what everybody wants.

There's also a boatload of work in there, isn't there? Because each time that you identify this, let's go for avatar, that word, this persona if you like. Yeah. You've gotta tweak the message for that eventuality and then tweak it for this other possible eventuality. And so, in the same way that putting a shop op.

You're gonna have expenses in terms of, rent, electricity, gas, staffing, and all of that. This isn't a quick fix. You're probably just gonna have to divest some of those resources into other ways. You won't have the gas to pay for, you won't have the electricity to pay for, but you still have to pay for stuff to make this work because time will be the thing and expertise will be the thing.

So it's not like you just move everything and it's instantly rainbows. Yeah. There'll still be an awful lot of work to do to figure out how these people, who these people are and figure out the language to correctly sell to them. And yeah. So, sorry, that brings us to the next slide, which is the yeah, the irascible Bob Smith, who is a gardener.

[00:14:20] David Waumsley: Yeah. So I'm just gonna use him as an example of this. Yeah. I mean, most websites, the homepage. Do things that you would never do in a shop. So, somebody entered your shop, you wouldn't say, welcome to my black dress Emporium. We were established in blah blah year. Yes. And we are passionate about, you would move straight into it.

And that's the problem with homepage. So if we imagine we are Bob Smith and we're a landscape gardener in the uk, in the county of Lincolnshire, which we. Both hail from. Yeah. And let's imagine that he gets lots of work from his website, but it's general gardening work. He doesn't get the stuff that he would ideally like to be doing, the hard landscaping, making patios, walls, driveways, and past that kind of thing.

So he's told, he's got his website. It's doing its job, it's not giving him the work that he wants. He is told he can target people via Google ads, so he sets up campaigns for them. But the problem is that he. Sends all of this traffic to his generic homepage where there's kind of very limited message match.

And I'll let you read

[00:15:21] Nathan Wrigley: out these main points. Yeah. Okay. So I guess this is like the golden goose, isn't it, of the internet, the ability to target things. So for example, in the case of Bob Smith he's gonna be paying more per click because this page has a low quality score. So in other words, the people that are arriving at that page.

The intuitions are not quite aligned to what it is that they're looking for. He's at the top of Google search, but attracting those with least patience to search. His site, which is kind of curious, isn't it? That's a weird juxtaposition of information. The idea that people who are quickly searching around on Google might be the people who are the least likely to dwell and stick around.

And then also there's a dis, there's distraction and no specific call to action as well. Yeah. If we, you can just about see the picture. Yeah. Under David, there, there's, it's very generic. There's nothing particularly leading you to the next step.

[00:16:14] David Waumsley: And I think that quality score is an important thing, but it's about relevancy.

I mean, if you are going to cheat your way to the top by paying Google to surface on the top, the less relevant your page is. And that's gonna be about keywords. So in a typical website like Bob's, he's probably gonna have a section that goes into hard landscaping, but on his page, he's probably got no mention of patios, the thing that he's advertising.

Right? Right. So when somebody goes there, they land on a generic page with a generic. Call to action to get an estimate and no mention of the thing that sent 'em there in the first place. And given that those people are probably clicking on the first thing that they see, they're probably least likely to go search and they expect it to be handed to them.

[00:16:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. So, oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really interesting intuition. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:56] David Waumsley: Yeah. So I think that's the thing. I mean, quality score, I should just probably emphasize is a little bit more than just having the words in there because Google use this as a way of predicting how likely your ads.

Likely to be clicked on the sort of relevance to what you're talking about and your site and you know how closely your ad copy, which is quite important if you're setting up the schemes to get that right. Match the user search intent. So Bob really, like most people, would have no time. To work on a landing page that was specific for each of the people he was sending.

He'd be too busy to do keyword research to know, which is the sort of low hanging fruit to pay the least. And he's probably unlikely to set up lots of variations of the copy of the ad to see which one performs best as a quality score on all of this. So you end up, and I'm sure this is the case with a lot of people that.

They're willing to pay to bring more the people that they want to see, but in that they are ignoring. The key thing that Google Ads does is that it allow you to get a specific type of user, and it's the user and how you accommodate them that ultimately makes it possible for him to get the work that he wants.

[00:18:10] Nathan Wrigley: The other thing for Bob, sorry, can we just, if we just stay with Bob for a minute, is Oh yes. That, given that Bob is a gardener Yeah. Like he's just doing this whole gardening thing and the internet is probably not his thing. Maybe it's his thing, but probably not. And so that whole intuition of, okay, you need a page for this and it needs to be configured in this way to attract these kind of people.

That's not. Bob's thing. That's kind of your thing. My thing. You've got a background in psychology, which always bleeds into these conversations. You probably don't even notice it, but there's always some psychological driver in what you say, and I think that's really interesting. What are the intuitions?

What are the incentives that people arrive at that page on? Yeah. Is gonna be really important. The other thing is that Bob is failing. I'm assuming a bit about Bob, but I'm imagining Bob is watching the pennies and every single thing that he spends on a Google ad, it could feel like a complete black hole of money, yeah. I've just spent 200 pounds and I don't have any intuition as to what happened to it, whereas the ad that I put in the local paper, I got a phone call. And I know that gave me something back and it's so much less obvious. Yeah. It's easy to say 800% ROI on Google ads. It's, but it's harder to know.

Where that 800% is coming from, because the internet just doesn't give you that information. Well, it doesn't out of the box, obviously. We'll maybe get into that in a future episode. Anyway, that's me finished about Bob. Sorry. Yeah,

[00:19:41] David Waumsley: no, that's fine. I mean, I, what I've done is, and I'm gonna have to talk on a bit there, I've contrasted it with Bob's wife, who's Mary, who runs a marketing business.

So she knows this stuff and she has a web designer, she has somebody who does the Google ads managing for, but they coordinate the two sides of this. Through her strategy. So one of her clients wants to promote a summer music festival a year ahead of the event. So what she would do as somebody with a kind of marketing mindset or digital marketing mindset, she'd set up a landing page for that.

Early on to try and get listed on search as soon as possible, and then via social media and blog posts in particular, she'll create links into it to hope that it'll get promoted in organic search and not have to pay for anything. Right. So she's likely to do keyword research for the blog, so you know, she'll be.

Doing that sort of psychology, thinking about who are the people who might be interested in this are the potential customers that might be holiday makers coming to Lincolnshire in the summer. There'll be regular music lovers, concert goers. There'll be fans of the performers that might be on that show, and she can write blog posts on all of these and create this kind of hub and try and get free traffic.

And that's the ideal, she would start with that a year ahead, hope to sell all the tickets, but she would also know, and this is where Google Ads could be useful, is that on something time sensitive where she doesn't have the time for this to rank higher in, in organic search. Right, right. We use Google Ads to boost, what does less well organically, and she's already done the keyword research for a blog post anyway, so that's gonna give her, when she's doing that, she's going to note what the cost per click is, what she's doing that. So she's already set up, if you like to be ready for Google ads. So. She is well, conversion focused.

Conversion focused.

[00:21:27] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Okay. So the skinny on conversion being conversion focused is a tweaked landing page for each ad type. So we kind of alluded to that with Bob. So rather than just generically dropping in on the homepage, there's a place. Where each of the ads will end up, and hopefully it's fine tuned to what the ad message was saying.

Builds in urgency with a bit of fomo. So the fear of missing out, I guess that's in the case of a concert, that's nice and easy to achieve, isn't it? Because there's a deadline in terms of the calendar, but there's also a finite amount of tickets may be more difficult for Bob Special offers, things like that.

Who knows? But also includes a lower risk of, sorry, includes a lower risk conversion option. As well.

[00:22:09] David Waumsley: Yeah. Sorry, I put this in the notes there. But yeah, so with her, she could do the fomo ad can stand out 'cause she can say this is the last chance to get your 20% off this concert. To try and increase the urgency.

And then of course, what she's going to do with her landing page says it's built and it's gonna have lots of different imagery. She can change that imagery. So she's attracting families. She'll have more family stuff with kids in it, on images of the stuff. And she can change all the headlines to match what's going in.

So. Some of those ads will be set up to see if the money is gonna help 'em convert. But also I think what she'll know, and this is something that Neil Patel and people like that would allude to as a digital marketer, is that most of them will know and we know. That over 70% of the people who will visit a website will leave.

They'll get distracted and they'll never return again. They'll just completely forget about it. Life takes over. And so what you would generally do, if there's a possibility you would add in a lower risk conversion option to go in that. So for Mary, there were a lot of options that she could do that would build into what she would do.

So if she's trying to attract the tourist or something coming into Lincoln she might add into the bottom of that. For the, in exchange for an email that there's a guide that they can download here. To find out about other events for music lovers, similar music events for bargain hunters where there are discounted events in the area.

All that kind of stuff is a way of just getting an email of somebody so you could follow them up later at some point and just say, here it is. And encourage 'em to go again. So your cost for your click, you've got another chance to reuse that, so, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's, I mean. Obviously there's so much more we can go into about the sales psychology and the conversion side, but I mean, anybody who's new to this, hopefully that sort of gives you a flavor for the different type of mindset that Mayri might have compared to Bob.

Yeah. When looking

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: at this. Yeah. So it kind of feels like everything that we've done so far is a bit of the why. Yeah. And now it feels like we're moving into the how the practicalities of doing things. So here's our, here are some examples of making mistakes whilst setting up the ads. This is basically where I would always fall down.

There was always things that I think. That I didn't do correctly. I didn't understand the tool and what have you. So, so just a few, three to begin with, not using negative words. Wrong location targeting. Ooh. Yeah. And also no conversion tracking, so you're not following that through and figuring out when people did a certain action.

So yeah. Over to you, David.

[00:24:39] David Waumsley: Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, negative keywords, I mean, I looked this up myself. There were people giving various estimates about how much that might loot waste in your budget. It went from 30 to 80% of your budget. Wow. So it's that example of, well, even you, I mean, we can't get into all the details, but you get an option of basically a broad match for your search terms.

So you can bring in people that are. Words that are very similar to what you've put in your ads or what the keywords you're working for. Or you can have an exact match, but even with an exact match. And this is where you need to keep up with Google 'cause it changes the rules on you. So, there's a lot of work in that, but even with an exact match, you need negative keywords.

So Bob, obviously he wants to maybe promote his patios that he's doing, but of course he wants to get rid of the people who are searching for DIY patio. And as he is at the top, he doesn't wanna get. People who are just gonna click on it 'cause they think that's what they search for. DIY. And he came up so they've clicked on him.

So you wanna get all these negative keywords, words that people could type that are similar to what you are doing. If you were a carpenter, you might wanna remove the word canon 'cause you don't want people searching for music by the carpenters or whatever.

[00:25:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:25:45] David Waumsley: So there's that.

And then. Wrong location targeting. There's a little, this is what was mentioned in before about Google, kind of set it up for their interest, not necessarily yours. They set it up so it says presence and interest in an area where most people will want to change that to just presence. They are actually coming from the area.

Yeah, itself. Now, in Bob's case that would be the case because, I might need a landscape gardener actually for this house that we've got in India. But, and I've got an interest in Lincoln's share. So if he left it at the default, I would see his ads and think he's for me. Yeah. So where Mary might want to.

For a particular campaign where she wants the holiday makers from out the area, she might want to leave it on the default for that particular campaign. So yeah. You can really make a mistake by advertising to the wrong people. I think this is gets much more complex these days, particularly with the sort of new digital acts and everything and people move into VPNs.

You're not quite sure where anybody really is these days. But anyway, that's just one of the challenges. Yes, it's, yeah. Yeah, and the other thing to just let that's the targeted, the conversion tracking, obviously this is the thing that Google are helping people with by now. Setting that up, I think it has to be noted that when you've got somebody like Bob, he's got, he's going in and it's very simple, I think for Google to give in a little bit of time to say, okay, we can just, we can track.

Who's coming through your contact form or maybe your clickable telephone number. Whereas Mary, I don't, I, I dunno if Google would spend all the time that they would need to do to set up something with Mary where she's got lots of different calls to actions and buttons going on for different pages, lots of different funnels that people can go through to take up the secondary option.

So I'm not sure if Google would be helping the professional in that way. Okay. That's interesting.

[00:27:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. So the other thing to think about shall, about, shall I take this or do you wanna go with it? Yeah, please. Yeah. Okay. So, okay, thank you. The next one time and money. Probably the secondly word anyway at least is why we're doing this.

Google Ads is not a case of set it and forget it. Oh, I wish it was a case of set it and forget it. Everything's gonna change, isn't it? Your offers are gonna change, your pricing is gonna change, but also there you are is probably gonna change. So you need to stay familiar with that.

Most campaigns, this is fairly amazing. Most campaigns need two to three months of testing, gosh. And optimization before. Hitting a profitable ROI. That's the bit that Google definitely won't be alerting you to out of the gate. I wouldn't have thought. And you need to be responsive and have a budget, so able to change and able to spend and adjust your spending as things ramp up, time of year, whatever it may be.

[00:28:29] David Waumsley: Yeah, well I used a bit of AI to try and pull together what other people were saying about the sort of time that's required for this. And they came out with a sort of minimum of an initial setup, four to eight hours. Yep. Monitoring one to two hours and a monthly optimization of two to four hours. But I think in truth, 'cause it's a changing platform, you, there's always something new to learn and to set up.

And you're really going to, you need to have an analytical mind. I mean, to get the best value you need to do a bit of. Keyword research anyway on this.

[00:29:00] Nathan Wrigley: And it's not nothing though. That is it, that's quite a considerable amount of time, in, in a busy working week that's already ramp packed with things.

Especially Bob, the idea of one to two hours a week, where's that coming from? A monthly additional two to four hours to optimize things and tweak things. It's just that's tough. That's a difficult justification when there's gardens to be landscaped,

[00:29:23] David Waumsley: yeah, and I think, they're saying, I mean, putting this into pounds, that you generally need to be thinking that you're going to be spending 400 quid per month for at least a couple of months without expecting anything to come back.

And that, in my experience with people I know have done it, they've pulled out after a couple of months, after months. That's brutal, isn't it? Months, yeah. Yeah. Of investing to be able to get some return. 'cause you need to test all these different variations. So a lot of people are just not into that kind of thing.

So. And also, unless you know what you're doing, you want to avoid. And now I don't think it's a default at the moment, but there was a point where it led you to put yourself on the display network, which means that you can end up on all of these blog posts or you can end up on these games. And of course, these people are making money to people clicking on their.

So they're gonna put them quite near to some control. So you accidentally click so you can really burn through money. So you definitely, if you did do that, you need to set a max, spend off Google or just take all the money that you've got and make sure, so it's quite a minefield, but you can set this.

But you know, the problem is this balance, people don't allow enough time or loss to come with it. And then. They might burn it up in the wrong way for that. So,

[00:30:31] Nathan Wrigley: well, like the example that you gave of 400 pounds over two months, so 800 pounds in that case. Yeah. It's, that's a, if you're just starting out or you've, you're struggling that, that's a healthy amount of money to lose.

Yeah. With, at the end of two months, no expectation that you won't be at 1200 pounds by the end of month three. At sort of 1600 by the end of month four. In other words, it just seems like a ca a chasm of money. And of course, the intuition there is to pull out because I've lost quite a lot of money that I can't afford to lose the next month and the next month.

But counterintuitively, if you give it some time. Then the results hopefully will come. But that's a diff, that is a difficult psychological bridge to get across, I think.

[00:31:18] David Waumsley: Yeah. I think you need to go in knowing that you're gonna lose some money in there. The last person I know, the client who told me what happened, very good client, smart person as well, but he'd spent in two months, 4,000 pounds, and you got one lead out of that.

And that's it. He pulled out, then we did something else. So that was quite a big hit. It's more than what he spent on the stuff that we've done together. So yeah, that was a lot of money. So yeah, I made the point actually on the slides that you read out that you need to be more responsive. So I think generally there's a view that if you are in.

Advertising people know that you are advertising your stuff or even if they don't and you are on the top, so you are selecting out the least patient people. You need to be quicker with your responses than you might be with your normal website. So you probably want to adjust your campaign so they're not displaying when you are not around, you want to be replying within an hour or two generally.

I think that's what people say if you're getting. Click through from those ads.

[00:32:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, of course. At this point, the you are kind of thinking to yourself, okay, this is all. Lots of money to be lost here. Lots of difficulty. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna hire somebody to take all of this burden away from me, and they'll be brilliant because they've got lots of badges on their website saying how great they are at this kind of stuff.

But David has some, I guess, red flags or some things to be mindful of here. Let's just read them out. One red flag. Is someone approaching you offering to get you more traffic? I think you are gonna go into that in just a moment and explain. Maybe there's a, there's something different there. Don't place too much faith in badges.

So I'm guessing, this accreditation thing that they have on their website. Maybe not. And also look for transparency in someone who can show you example, like real, actual. Examples of clients, which are basically, I guess, similar to the business that you are running. So three things there, which you are gonna develop some more.

[00:33:09] David Waumsley: Yeah, I think so. I I never really know with clients whether they've been approached by somebody or whether they've decided to employ. And I think with some of them they have, just been approached for this. And I think it comes that sort of, we'll get you traffic and get you to the top of Google thing, which you hear a lot of the spams people saying.

And that sounds good to somebody who doesn't really know. But it's quite. Because that's what Google adss offer. You give them money and that's what you get more traffic and you get to the top. So that's an easy thing to do. If they're not talking about conversion or the quality of score, that's probably a really worrying sign, particularly the way that most will charge for their time.

So there's a range of how campaign managers who are experienced do this. Some will go on a retainer and or an hourly amount, some will even do it on performance. But generally only if it's a big. Ad spender what most local businesses are likely to be offered, which is the most common thing, which is to charge by percentage of the spend.

So if that is their promise only to get you traffic and get you on the top of Google and not. Quality and conversions, then they're incentivized to burn through as much of the old money as possible and as quickly as possible. Yeah.

[00:34:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. That's a really interesting in intuition. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted.

Yeah,

[00:34:26] David Waumsley: No, that's fine. And I think the badges is the other thing about the you've got Google Partners and you've got Google certified agents, and they have to be certified once a year on this one, and it can be reassuring and it can be a sign of something good, but also, again, in this case.

Google can be gamed because I mean, you can pass this certification every year by just googling your answers and putting them in. And mostly your search partners are people who are spending $10,000 over a 90 day period as, and that's the primary driver. And unlike with this type of gaming Google, it's in Google's interest because they earn money from the people who are.

Generating this money for them. It's not like the search where that's being gained, where it, ruins their reputation. So, so I think, from that point of view, it can be a good sign and at least it means that people have made that effort to do that. But I think you've also gotta look beyond that, which is why.

Probably you need somebody who can show you examples of similar help they've given conversions that they've given for industries similar to yours. That would be the best

[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: sign. Yeah, and I feel that, well, certainly my inbox, my email inbox is definitely from time to time full up with people promising a lot with this kind of work.

It seems to be almost the most spammy thing you can. Possibly imagine, I'm cold calling you with a, or cold emailing you demonstrating my credibility. And it is, as you say, it really is often just about, I'm gonna get you to the top of Google. And of course that's great if you've got an infinite amount of money.

But exactly as you said, really what you want is, I wanna make it so that you are getting loads of conversions. Okay? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And I don't really have anything to add here, so I think you should just crack on with your checklist, so, yep.

[00:36:01] David Waumsley: Yeah, it's the last thing that we're covering here.

So just really the main things I, there's so much we could talk about on this one, but I think the main question you need to ask yourself if you'll move into Google Ads is. Firstly have you optimize your Google business profile, even if you have one. Now, I'm always encouraging people to do this and set this up because it's free traffic for you.

You are, you have your business account on there. They've called it different things over the time, but you set it up, it's for free. And then if somebody's in your local area asking for your service, you can show up on the map. Now you've got all your competitors there, but if you optimize this, get lots of reviews on it, lots of good reviews, send people to it.

People just don't do this. And you fill in all of the stuff that they want you to tell them, like your opening times and all of this, and put in all the images. You've got a really good chance of getting a lot of free traffic and people move straight to Google ads before even setting this up as local business.

So I think that's a key one. There's also something which I didn't know about until I started researching this. Shame on me. I think it's only been around since. 2020 mostly started in the US but they have a thing called Google's local service ads, and this is a pay by lead. Thing. So basically you pay more than you might do for your clicks to appear at the top with a call to action directly in that, to either call you or to email you from that.

And they will charge as that event happens. But you do have the option to say to Google, no, sorry, that was a spam thing. Don't charge me for that, and they'll refund. So, okay. That's interesting. I didn't know about that. So they No I didn't as well. And it, if you're in the uk, the I would check in their site and the, for a lot of the clients that I was checking out that it wasn't available for their industry in their area.

Okay. But it's wanted to check out. Okay. Because it might be the way to go if you really do need to. It might be more expensive, but at least you know it. You skip out all of that. Yeah, there's a lot of

[00:37:56] Nathan Wrigley: qualification litigation going on there, isn't there? Yeah. There's a lot of, and you skip

[00:37:58] David Waumsley: out of sticking all that nonsense on your scripts on your website as well.

You just go directly to Google, sends you the traffic for your lead. That's it's much more simpler thing. Yeah. And then finally, and I think this is my plea as somebody who always feels, like I should say something to clients that have you optimized your, on your onsite SEO now? Generally when I'm building a site for people it's not always what everybody wants, but it's what I try and build into it.

I'll try and build in landing pages, if you like, for the different things that they do, and I'll try to do more, but I usually always feel that I want, even if they I will go as far as making. Content for them for blog posts or something if they give me a clue. But often I don't get to see this through and in all my experience of working with the clients who have gone to Google ads and then we've worked together to increase their blog posts and to focus on something in every case.

And it's just due to the nature of the fact that they've got so much low hanging fruit. I my, what they pay for me really outstrips anything that Google ads. Yeah. Interesting. So far it's not that I don't think Google ads are good, it's just that I think the missing, the low hanging fruit. Yeah. With this first, so that's really been my experience.

I often think. It's always one of these difficult things I think in the industry, I've talked about this before, is the fact that so many clients, when they come to a website, they come with the solution. They want this, they want a website. They don't come with a business problem. They want a slider, they want a bookings form, but they gen generally don't come with a problem and that the person provide the solution.

So I think anybody who's looking into that, they might wanna see if they know somebody who's working in some sort of marketing digitally and ask them, come with your problem. To them. Yeah, and they might say Google ads because that might be the perfect thing for you, but they might say, you've got other things you can do First.

[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: There we go. I think did I just ran then? No. That made perfect sense. And I agree. It's kind of curious that the very last bullet point kind of, upends the entire conversation we had, but at the same time, that's the bit you've gotta get, right? There's no point in having an online presence without getting the free benefits of.

Just having a good online presence. If the entire purpose of your online presence is to spend money on Google ads maybe you've missed the point. And there's lots of low hanging SEO through, especially in the long game. If you're in this for the long haul, you can definitely tweak that over time and make it work for you.

So there was. The no script show, episode number 26. You can find it at no script show slash 26. So the numerals two, six, what's gonna be the follow up to this? David, what are we doing after this one?

[00:40:41] David Waumsley: I have absolutely no idea. Well, I could talk

[00:40:43] Nathan Wrigley: about this. Well, we shall find out is all that I'm gonna say when we.

When we're joined for episode number 27, is there anything you wanna add before we knock it on the head?

[00:40:54] David Waumsley: No, that was great. Well, I enjoyed doing it through these presentations. It's a little bit awkward really for doing this for the first time, but it was a slight change

[00:41:02] Nathan Wrigley: in. Do things normally. We're not driven by slides, but this time you had created these slides, which kind of drove us forward.

I liked it. I thought it was a really good way, and no doubt we'll we'll get slightly better at the the machinations of doing it in a slide driven way. Okay. That's it. We'll call that a day and I'll see you on the next one. Yeah, thanks Nathan. Bye bye.