Dave Granfield
Hey guys. Welcome back to another podcast. Another Google ads session with Dean.
Dean Barker
Talking about the Googlè
Dave Granfield
So we all know Dean loves to talk about Google. His product knowledge is immense and today we’re going to do, what are we talking about?
Dean Barker
We’re getting down and dirty with the very basics of good.
Dave Granfield
All right. So promise me something today. If we’re talking about the basics, keep it really simple for me. Okay.
Dean Barker
How Simple?
Dave Granfield
Someone who’s never run advertising before. Let’s keep it that basic.
Dean Barker
No jargon, fancy words, like… “Ad”
Dave Granfield
“Impression share”. How are we doing this today? Have you got dot points for me?
Dean Barker
Dot points in my head and there as well. Basically, I’m going to rave on about intent today. If there’s one thing I want the listeners haunted by it’s the word intent. If, there’s one thing you take away from this…
Dave Granfield
Intent. All right. So what I’m going to do, I have a feeling you’re going to say intent a lot. So Brofie, can you, let’s have a little counter going where every time Dean says intent, let’s do like a little ding and a counter, the ding for the podcast listeners, and the counter for the YouTube Watchers. Brofie. Can you do that for us? Awesome.
Dean Barker
Oh, right. I’ll try and steer clear of intent puns because Oh my God. Okay. All right. So…
Dave Granfield
What do you mean by intent when we’re talking Google ads?
Dean Barker
Well, Google is intent-based right? People come to Google because they have an intent to find something.
Dave Granfield
In Google search. Someone goes to Google and types in Ralph Lauren polo.
Dean Barker
They go there with an intent.
Dave Granfield
Basics 101. There we go. We’ve simplified the word. What was, what was the word intent. I’m so sorry.
Dean Barker
Oh, well thank you. , I think, understanding your, or even paying attention to your ideal customer’s intent is something that people completely forget about when they’re creating their very first Google ads. When you’re very new to Google ads and you’re creating your first campaign, you overlook all the different intents that your ideal customer might find you. Right?
Dave Granfield
So give me, give me an example of what a Google newbie would do wrong.
Dean Barker
Well, I’ll tell you exactly what I did and what most people do.
Dave Granfield
Just before he worked at Bidpixel, by the way. Way before.
Dean Barker
Now, this is like 10 years ago more, so you get all caught up in how to create your first Google ads.
You’re understanding the keywords, understanding the ins and outs of the platform. Google is very good at, you know, saying, okay, you need to create keywords. You need to create an ad. They’re very good at telling you that.
So, and guiding you through that, which is cool, what they are not good at reminding you of is, to segment your ideal users. People will come to you with a very wide range, you know, a different range of intent. You know, no matter what business you are, no one approaches you with exactly the same intent. Do they?
Dave Granfield
Hey, comment below before the end of the video, like and comment. Now I’m going to timestamp this. How many times do you reckon he’s going to say…
Dean Barker
Intent? We’re on.
Dave Granfield
It’s like a thousand times already, all right. So Google’s really good at saying, just give us keywords, right? And for example, let’s say I’ve got a fishing store. What, what would the newbie do on Google with keywords?
Dean Barker
Let’s say you own a fishing store. People are gonna search for rods, rods as a keyword, maybe Shimano rods, maybe those little rubber pants, things that fishermen’s wear.
Dave Ganfield
Waders.
Dean Barker
Can you pee in them? Sure. Okay. Well, “Can I pee in Waders?” might be an intent for people?
Dave Granfield
Now, are we talking like a broad match, modify, any of that stuff? We’re talking just keywords, right? Like…
Dean Barker
Probably aren’t even thinking what type of keyword, they’re just doing all broad-match for this and they’re asking themselves in their head, what might people be searching for?
Dave Granfield
Well, fishing rod, fishing lure, fishing line. So they’ll show you all these keywords right now.
Dean Barker
In an ad group, Google will say, good job. You’ve done your keywords. Now write some ads. There’ll be like, Oh, okay. Uh, “Dave’s fishing. We’ve got all, everything you need. But down in Paradise-point, come visit us”. Create it and Google will say, create another ad. You are like, oh, I just created an ad. Okay.
“We sell crab pots at Dave’s fishing”.
Dave Granfield
Maybe, “Dave’s got crabs”.
Dean Barker
Oh, dear, no comment. So that might, okay, just to simplify it. Let’s use a little illustration. So let’s say you start a bricks and mortar store. Most bricks and mortar stores have the rod section. They have the rubber pants, which I just learned are called Waders, section. I have, I know all the different sections. So if someone walks into the store goes, oh, rods.
That’s what I was after over there I go. I’m checking all your keywords in Google, how we just described before and having a few ads attached to that is probably the equivalent of let’s say…
Dave Granfield
Can I finish this analogy for you? Cause I just thought he told me what he was going to say before we went on and I’ve just had the light bulb moment… I’m going to improve on your magic. I’ve got an intent to improve on it.
Dave Granfield
So like you’d walk into BCF or a camping fishing store and everything’s got its place and everything’s got its section. I have a feeling what you’re going to say is like walking into the centre Isle of ALDI. Done. You don’t know where anything is, right. It’s a lucky dip. It’s a pot. You’ve got to walk around. There’s no, you can’t show intent and go to the section that you need to go to. It’s like whatever goods are in the centre.
Dean Barker
Yeah, yeah. Roughly. Oh, my analogy was more like a big box and you reach your hand in blindly and whatever you pull out.
Dave Granfield
That’s pretty much it.
Dean Barker
Yeah, so obviously an ad account set up like that is not considering the intent people are approaching you. If you’re considering people’s intent, let’s go from this angle. You’d be like, okay. Some people are gonna want fishing lines. Let’s put fishing rods. Let’s put all our fishing rod keywords in this ad group here. And we can write two or three ads that are attached to them.
Dave Granfield
Because you’re telling us the right way to be doing it. All right. So the first way was, let’s just bunch everything into a campaign, everything into an ad group, all the keywords or everything, right. There are ads and keywords for fishing, rods and fishing reels and Waders. And Dave’s got crabs and everything’s in one ad group. Right? So that’s a no, no don’t do. Right. So the better way of doing that is…
Dean Barker
Yeah, considering the intent and segmenting that way. Now I’m assuming that you understand your ideal customer’s intent so you should be doing, you know, the basic minimum market research should be doing is taking note of the common questions that you commonly get asked.
Dave Granfield
So what are you getting asked in store? What are you, when you search “fishing rod”, scroll to the bottom of Google and what are people asking?
Dean Barker
The main rod people are looking for is that good old Shimano PX30. Sure. Was that a rod? I’d be amazed if it was.
Dave Granfield
Probably is, to be honest. You can get down into ad groups with more of an intent, based on what people are searching,
Dean Barker
Do that because it answers people. People’s exact question. They might type in the old way. The first way we talked about people would type in a fishing rod, they’d see an ad for “Dave’s Fishing Store”, “We’ve got lots of stuff, come and visit us at Paradise-point.
If I type in a fishing rod, the second way, they’ll get an ad. Even if they’ve typed in, you know, I’ll pop your model number and you happen to know that that’s what everyone’s looking for.
Let’s say an ad comes up with that fishing rod or even the word fishing rod, or, you know, ideally, the model number thereafter as the first line in the ad. That’s what they’re going to click on an average.
Dave Granfield
All right. So you’ve, you’ve split out your keywords with a little bit more intent. So there is an ad group for fishing rods, an ad group for waders, there’s an ad group for crabbing gear. Right?
But then the ads are actually written to show that, share that intent as well. Right? So the fishing rod keywords have fishing rod related ads in the copywriting. And are you going to say, you’re going as far as the landing page, obviously then you, you might be on a product page or you go into a collection or category page that’s about fishing rods or waders as well. Right? Cool.
So are you having more of an intent to take someone through a user experience or a journey? What does that mean to you when you do that, as the advertiser.
Dean Barker
As advertised, that means more people are going to click through, more people are going to land on the landing page that you want them to land on.
Dave Granfield
Is Google going to reward you for the time that you’ve taken to show that intent in your ad group?
Dean Barker
Yeah. So you get, well, you’ll get higher click-through rates, which is part of what Google uses to determine your quality score.
Dave Granfield
Your quality score is going to be better if your ad copy relates to the keyword that they typed in or the key phrase they typed to you in, and it also then transcends to a landing page. That’s also related to that as well.
So if I searched Shimano PX90 or whatever, i’ve landed on “Davo’s Tackle” – Davo’s tackle is actually a really famous tackle store, by the way. I don’t know if your name’s Dave, but Hi, I’ve got one of your shirts.
So I search for this particular fishing rod. It came up on “Davos Tackle”. We have 20,000 products in the store. And then you click through and it ends up on the contact us page, that’s not a good user experience. And that quality score is not going to be as good as Shimano PX90 ad copy version, Shimano PX90 landing page takes me to the Shimano PX90 directly.
Dean Barker
Yeah because that user experience wasn’t good and the ad copy doesn’t match the keyword and the landing page doesn’t match the ad copy. That would have been really expensive, like the person bidding on that ad would have had to pay probably two or three times as much as someone who set up the ads with matching keywords and matching landing pages and matching words on those landing pages.
Dave Granfield
No, no, we’re not going to talk about broad match keywords and modifying keywords to get better intent or a better sort of user experience in search, but you can like, there’s, you can supersize this, right?
Like that’s for the next conversation.
But we did an audit on a Google ads account. It was a dental surgery down in Melbourne, right? And I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast before.
A dentist surgery in Melbourne and they had one of the keywords, it was just a completely broad open “dental office”. And they were getting people to click through an exorbitant amount of money searching for office works.
So their ad was coming up for office works because they used the word office and they didn’t show the right intent. And they were wasting clicks and money if people were looking for bloody office works, right. To be honest, like that’s a newbie mistake. If I’ve ever seen one, I’d say classic, all right, is it.
Dean Barker
That’s what we need to talk about? That’s basically it, like just, I hope we’ve said intent at least 60 times. You know, the intention was there, when you do it, if you’re new to Google ads, if you’re doing your first one, if you know, you’re trying to get the hang of it, the platform is easy enough, creating your keywords is easy enough. Google will lead you through that. Google will lead you through the ad groups and campaigns and writing your ads.
What you need to think about is intent. What questions are my ideal customers asking? And how do I answer that? How do I give them the best possible answer to their question with this user experience through to the ad through the landing page? And that’s up to you to segment that into different ad groups, you know, different keywords ad groups.
Dave Granfield
Does this open a can of worms? I think that could be fishing as well. Right?
So I have, how much time did they spend here? If it’s “Dave O’s Tackle”. Do I have like 300 ad groups with every single kind of product category? How many ads, like it sounds time consuming. What’s the best practice, what’s the minimal viable product to do this well?
Dean Barker
Whoah, that’s case by case.
Dave Granfield
Can I, can I maybe ask, is it a plumber or a tradie? Is it pick your main three services? Right. So I might be blocked drains , renovation fit-outs and commercial work. That would be three ad groups that you have, and then you have your ad, your keywords and your ads based on those three groups.
Dean Barker
Yeah, and then there’s, quite often for tradies, we do a cost, uh, price intent or quotes, you know..
Dave Granfield
Because we don’t want those customers. Right? Or we do want that.
Dean Barker
We want people who are ringing for quotes. And if they’re good at, closing, they close the people, hearing the quotes.
Dave Granfield
All right. And then e-commerce wise because there are potentially hundreds of thousands of SKUs. Why did maybe you focus on the top 20% of the products you sell first?
Dean Barker
Yeah. Or what, what each person thinks their top sellers are or wants them.
Dave Granfield
So do your research, answer the people is it answer, the people, or answer the public. We will put the URL here somewhere. Thanks, Brofie.
Answer the public is a really good way to see what people are searching for on the internet now, like typing in something in Google and scrolling to the bottom and getting the recommended searches.
Jumping into any of the keyword tools and research and like Google’s own keyword tool in ads manager and finding how many impressions and how many and what the intent. Yeah.
Dean Barker
That would be a whole podcast in itself. But yeah, if you’ve got time to jump in and spend an hour or two playing with that.
Dave Granfield
So I spend the time building out these intent-based ad groups with your keywords in your ads and your landing pages based on what the services sell the most or the services that maybe are the most profitable or the stuff that has, is it like the stuff that has the highest intent to search, maybe will cost you more?
So you need to do it really well because there’s more competition. Maybe you can go one peg below that. And one rung below that and start searching for maybe the longer keyword stuff or the long tail stuff that might still be profitable for you, but you’re not competing with someone else for a higher value kind of keyword.
So like “Gold Coast Plumber” might be not cost-effective to run as a keyword campaign or an ad group, but you might do, uh, after I was toilet blockage or roots in sewage system or things like that, which they might not be as high as search intent, but like you can be captain of the B team and get some good results based on when people do search. Is that, is that right?
Dean Barker
Hey strategy, just A-strategy.
Dave Granfield
I feel like I’m getting in trouble. Right? You kept it basic, awesome work mate. You’ve got a little point there that says, keep the algorithm happy.
Dean Barker
Oh, that was just in if we run out of time, that’s not really any intent subject. Well, we can talk about that in another podcast. I just think I said before, getting your sorting out your intent is probably 70% of creating a good Google account that has all the little technical tricks and everything else we know is probably the remaining 30%.
And that’s why you pay us, right? Yeah. All because you can’t be bothered doing yourself, but, if you are a really quick hack to get that other 30% sorted is to just follow Google’s recommendations apart from budget. Oh man. I don’t know what they’re talking about with some of those budgets they want you to do though. They want you to give them more money.
Dave Granfield
Google is a business, right? Like they’d make money off people paying for ads, make sense for them to mislead someone or they’re not going to misguide or mislead someone, but there are, they’re going to have an intent to make money, right? Yeah.
Dean Barker
Yeah. So the Google recommendations tab is great for learning how to learn the ins and outs, not to spend your money. Yeah. Maybe.
Dave Granfield
You build an ad account successfully just following every recommendation to Google tells you on the recommendation step?
Dean Barker
Could you build one successfully? Yes. Would it be a successful ad account? Probably not.
Some of those keywords they want you to do, uh, pretty far from the user experience or the intent. Yeah. Like going back to the old days, fishing store Davo’s tackle
It would probably say, you know, Google says people who search fishing tackle also search this, or, yeah. So it might, it might say tackle is a good keyword to use when in reality everyone’s searching tackle might be footy players looking for the latest, there’s just a really bad example.
Dave Granfield
The newbie might be going to add “tackle”, “tackling”, then suddenly they’re getting hits to their website or clicks or impressions shared based on someone searching the keyword “tackled”, which Kiwi and the Australian people.
Dean Barker
Yeah. That’s just a really bad example, but yeah. That’s how they suggest
Dave Granfield
Or office works for dentist surgery, right?
Dean Barker
So you say, yeah, when you go in through the suggestions that keyword, the keyword suggestions that Google brings up, you really need to understand your rights.
Dave Granfield
Your intent. Yeah. Awesome, man. Briefly, how many times did we get intent?
Dean Barker
Oh really? I don’t think we did enough. One more intent to more Confucius says women who take man camping has one intent on that night. Hmm.
Dave Granfield
Hey guys, thanks for another podcast episode. If you like the content, if you want Dean back for more,comment below. He’s tamed himself down for this episode. Uh, he is a funny, funny man in the office.
If you want to know more information comment below and we can answer your questions, reach out to us on the website. We’re happy to have a quick chat with you. James, who’s my right hand, man. Uh, with all the sales calls that we have, he has this amazing, amazing knowledge of Google.
He and Dean combined could give you more information that would help you successfully build out these campaigns with an intent-based purpose, right. And how to save money instead of just wasting it for going off with the fairies and Google’s recommendations.
Dean, thanks very much, mate always appreciate it. I couldn’t even speak then. I always appreciate your time, mate. We actually didn’t argue or disagree about
Dean Barker
Anything today. Dang, it.
Dave Granfield
You wanted me to disagree so that we would like to get some, get some action on the set. Right. But I agree with everything you said, there are definitely a lot of layers in Google advertising that you can peel back, but to start off with what is that intent that your prospects are actually going to be searching for is the foundation of Google.
Dean Barker
Hmm. Awesome, man. It’s all useless. If you don’t have that intent in order to start with. Thanks.
Dave Granfield
Love Your work. Talk to you one day soon next time.
Dean Barker
Thanks mate.
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