Crushing it on Google AdWords - The Journey

27/09/2018

I read in the Fanatical prospecting book the magical impact the word "because" can have on the behavious of people, check out this great video; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gc0joXZDSYo. Haven't been aware of any examples of this in the world of ads, but more than likely these tricks are being used! I like you to watch the following video because you will see how it works ;)

When someone asks us for a favor and provides a valid reason, we are more inclined to help. But in some situations it is already sufficient to present a quit...

27/09/2018

Wow, another milestone :) We decided to pause the campaigns for verticals for website templates (triggered by the one for "restaurant website templates"), simply because it was attracting mainly people in countries with ultra low wages which resulted in no conversions and lots of fake clicks (India, Pakistan, ...). We concluded this is not our ideal audience (in general having a campaign targetting all countries in the world is probably a red flag, which kind of makes sense now looking back :)). More details in the previous live stream we did. Next up we will create a new broad campaign targetting just people in the US for the seed term "website templates" (GJ) and another one for "wordpress themes" (Johan); we will again use the fishing approach and apply all the other things we learned over the past months since we've been into this. So we won't start of with hundred of unmanageable campaigns; instead we will use the bottom up approach. We will be fishing for search terms, and only create new campaigns when its justified. When there's only very few impressions we will start of with creating site links, and once the impressions and relevance is high enough, only then we will be creating a new campaign for it (and exclude it on the level of fishing). We need to figure out what needs people have (=what market exist) for the people in the US. Its tempting to also do the same campaign and approach for the Dutch market, but for now we can probably learn most from the US market as its way bigger (we need data!).

19/09/2018

Today I added some ad extensions to get some more screen real estate for our ads, and therefore hopefully some more clicks. Creating these ad extensions really reminded me of the facets I identified. For example i created a "Styles" structured ad extension and filled that one with the search terms like "single page", which we caught while fishing. Also the "Types" structured ad extension was easy to fill with the terms "Chinese", "Italian" and more since we collected search terms for it. The "Brands" one we filled with "WordPress" and two more, which surprisingly were also approved.

17/09/2018

chilling outside reading my book, gosh the weather is great... read in a post that 45% of all days this yr its been above 20 degrees celcius in the netherlands

14/09/2018

Even though we collected large numbers of distinct search terms, only very few (4 to be precise) appear to have large numbers of impressions. In our case those appear to be "website templates restaurant", "website templates restaurant responsive", "website templates restaurant download", and "website template restaurant wordpress". All 99% other ones has only like 0 impressions according to the adwords interface. At the same time we have a "below avg" quality score for the broad term (the one that -has- lots of impressions). So thats a challenge, right? Either make more specific campaigns for more long tail searchphrases, which will have 0 impressions, or keep using the generic ones, which (so far) have 0 conversions and a "below avg" quality score. While doing the latest feedback look from AdWords to our tool I thought of the #1 spot Google returned on the broad term, and then I recalled that site not only showed a list of tiles of the themes (which is what the next landing page will have too I am building now), but also that that page had facetted search (I think thats how you call it). Facetted search is the filter control on the left site you see on many webshops, where you can drill down (hide/show) products based upon filter criteria using checkboxes and dropdown lists. Exactly this could apply be the missing part here; would it be helpful for website visitors who type in the broad keyphrase "restaurant website templates", to have all different filter criteria, to find the one they are looking for? I think the answer is: "of course!".

14/09/2018

A whopping 36 new searchterms were collected in our fishing campaign since the previous time we did the feedback loop. I just imported them in the tool and tried to classify them. Its so funny (and logical) to see the patterns become visible. Some people are looking for different types of complexity ("simple restaurant website templates"), or other search for ones for specific types of kitchen ("chinese restaurant website templates", "indian website templates"), and others search for technical aspects (like "bootstrap").

12/09/2018

Landing page tips;

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06/09/2018

ha!

02/09/2018

Had a meeting last week with Steven; one of the things Steven shared with me was a nice video from Ash Maurya of Leanstack (perhaps the name sounds familiair; he also created the LeanCanvas). In this video (you can find it on this page https://leanstack.com/app/innovators-gift ) Ash shares the importance of knowing how to position yourself; why would people buy from you, and when is the right moment to "touch" them; basically how does a customer journey "works". Its also about muting yourself; its about asking prospects and (if you have them) existing buyers on what they are about and what their needs are. This so much aligned with the book of fanatical prospecting I am reading, and also aligns perfectly with the ad campaign i am working on now, and even aligns with some new opportunities i am working on right now with our 9-5 theme business and it also reflects perfectly on some talks I had with Sabine van Erp on how to grow a business and focusing on things that matter. Its about understanding "the market"., What are their needs? Instead of thinking what you think the market wants, its working the other way around. Its about not placing yourself centric in the world, but its about putting the client first. And its about overcoming fears and finding excuses to NOT do things (https://www.facebook.com/297369967472116/photos/a.304206236788489/356118518263927/?type=3).

02/09/2018

The book I am reading now (Fanatical Prospecting) was a tip which I got from Ed Stapleton Ed Stapleton this video I watched 3 weeks ago, thought it would be nice to credit him; check out his great video here; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV_NB9KKsEg.

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02/09/2018

Sharing some insights here; I shared the issue with the fake clicks in the Google AdWords Mastery Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/933796670130168/permalink/1127046617471838/ and got some interesting feedback; one suggestion was to perhaps block these 3rd world countries to avoid fake clicks from there. If we would do that, according to what we currently see, we would have 0 clicks left based upon the insights. But then i did some more thinking; its still quite amazing to see that we had truly 0 clicks from western world countries. Why is that? Is it that indeed western world countries truly don't search for the terms we have? Then i got another great feedback/question from the mastery group; the question is whether we actually sell to those 3rd world countries? And the interesting topic is that we don't. I cannot recall having sold anything to someone from India (and/or any other 3rd world country). There's 2 possible explanations for this I can think of; in most cases the person wanting a website i think is from a western world. They outsource the making of websites to 3rd world countries as they are cheap there. The 3rd world country does the work; they find a bunch of website templates they think is good, propose that back to the western world business owner, and then the western world business owner buys the product (that could explain why we do have people searching from India but no sales from there). Another possible explanation why we don't see any people reaching our Ad landing pages from western world countries, is perhaps caused by the fact that those clicks perhaps are (way more) expensive. Perhaps people in western world countries do search for themes (I would have expected at least some). So because we currently have setup our campaign to be targetting the whole world, we can only have one budget and max cpc for the campaign. But perhaps there other people doing PPC on just the western world countries (US), and perhaps those clicks therefore are way more expensive to target people in the US. If thats true, then even though people search there, our search impression share would be low. Its just a though, but an interesting one. Based upon what i read in the book of "Fanatical Prospecting" and based upon another video I got probably the insight is to pro actively call people who buy our themes. How did the people there decide to pick our themes. We currently don't know 100% sure. What we should do, is pro actively reach out to those people, and ask :) More on that in another post coming up ...

01/09/2018

Continued with the analysis on what the IP addresses do that actually end up on our server requesting a URL that is unique for the landing pages used in our ads. 10 out of 22 IP's requested only the landing page and did not pull in any other resource (like an image, css or js), and didn't do any other requests. Cannot think of any other conclusion to make then those are bots...