Joel McDonald

One of the most common things I hear when talking to adwords advertisers is that they are concerned their account manager isn’t doing a good enough job managing their account.  Considering the average monthly check they write, I can’t say I blame them.

If you’re wondering if your account manager is doing a good enough job for you, here are 5 quick & easy tips you can quickly use to evaluate their performance.

1. Are they regularly monitoring your account? If your account manager is claiming to monitor your account daily, a quick way to make sure they’re doing so is to use the “check changes” log. Google monitors every change that is made to your account and logs it.  To verify that that is actually happening, simply log into your AdWords account, and visit the “view change history” link.  If there isn’t a long list of changes to the account, and your account manager is telling you he is working on your account day in and day out, he may be misrepresenting the job he’s doing for you.  
2. Are they actually tracking conversions? One of the most powerful features of driving online traffic is that every sale, call, or lead can be tracked. Any advertiser who isn’t tracking the effectiveness of every dollar they spend online is losing out. Not only could she be spending 5x to 10x as much as necessary on the wrong keywords, but she’s also missing out on the right keywords.  I’ve seen accounts get 15x more out of their advertising dollar by simply using the tracking tools that are available for free through Google AdWords, and then turning up the profitable traffic, and turning down the less profitable traffic.
3. Are they targeting the right keywords, or just running Google on auto-pilot? Google has a few settings that, when enabled, give Google the ability to substitute terms that they think might be relevant when they’re actually terrible keywords.  More often than not, it means drastically increasing your spend on worthless traffic. To see if your account manager is bidding on keywords you actually want, don’t look at the terms they are bidding on; Look at the terms Google is actually delivering traffic for. To do this, log into your account, then go to “Keywords” > “Search Terms” and sort by cost.  If some of your most expensive terms aren’t even being bid on (and aren’t bringing in conversons), but are being accidentally delivered by simply putting Google on auto-pilot, you may want to look for an account manager who does a little more than run your account on auto-pilot.
4. Are they blindly advertising on sites other than Google?  Google uses something called “The Display Network”, which can deliver anywhere from 10x to 1000x as much traffic as traffic from the Google search engine itself.  That traffic is often 20% to 50% cheaper than search engine traffic too. Unfortunately, it’s rare that it converts anywhere near as well as search engine traffic (even at a lower cost). Anyone who is blindly advertising on the display network without knowing exactly how well those advertising dollars are being spent is losing serious money. Sometimes, they’re losing as much as 90 or 95 cents on the dollar. To check out how much of your budget is being spent on the display network, log into your account, go to the “Campaigns” tab > “Segment” > “Network (with Search Partners)” > Scroll to the bottom of the page & click “Total: All Campaigns.” Check & see how much is being spent on the Display Network. If you’re measuring conversions, compare how well it’s converting. If you’re not measuring conversions, I’d be willing to bet turning that traffic off will reduce your budget without dropping sales at all. Here is a video example of an account where we cut expenses by 90% with no drop in sales whatsoever doing nothing but cutting out the display network.
5. Are they treating computer, tablet & mobile phone traffic equally?  In some markets, computer traffic is a gold mine and mobile/tablet traffic is worthless. In other markets, it’s the reverse. One thing is for sure: No matter what the industry, all types of traffic convert differently and should be adjusted for accordingly.

If your account manager is doing 4 or 5 of the above best practices, you’re probably doing just fine.  If they’re only doing 2 or 3 of them, it may be worth interviewing a couple other account managers to see what they can do for you.  If they’re not doing any of the above (or just one), run as fast as you can. You’ll be better off managing the account on your own. (Heck, read a couple chapters of “Google AdWords for Dummies” & you’ll be way better off.)

If you’d like a free review of your adwords account, let me know. I can be reached via email or phone: joel(at)2020ppc.com or 303-906-8790

PS – If your account manager won’t let you see  your account, you should contact Google. If you are the one paying the bill, Google terms of service state that you are entitled to be able to see that account. (The only exception is if you are buying leads instead of paying for traffic.)

Google just made a recent change for the better. After 5 years of forcing us to advertise on tablets, they’ve finally given us back the ability to separate computer traffic from tablet traffic (or opt-out of it entirely). Although this might not seem like a big deal, it’s huge.

Why is this subtle change so powerful? Quite simply, tablet traffic sucks.  Of all of the campaigns I’ve managed, I don’t recall a single one where tablet traffic wasn’t at least 20% more expensive per conversion than computer traffic. (Sometimes as much as 50% more expensive!)  By not being able to separate that traffic, you are losing out on more profitable computer traffic because of being forced to over-bid on tablet traffic.

The solution is a simple one: Bid differently for computer and tablet traffic. (And while you’re at it, adjust bids for mobile phone traffic too.)  In the example below, notice that tablet traffic is nearly 30% more expensive than computer traffic per conversion.  Imagine how much more profitable I’d be if I could get more leads that are only costing me $28, and eliminating the traffic that is costing me $36! Now that you’re finally able to separate tablets from computers, you can easily do that.

So how do you know how much you should adjust bids?  Again, it’s simple.

1. Take a look at 3 to 6 months of conversions.
2. Look for the “Segment” tab
3. Segment by Device
4. Scroll to the bottom of all campaigns & click on the “+” sign to see a breakdown of computers vs phones vs tablets.
5. One thing is guaranteed: Computer traffic, mobile traffic, and tablet traffic will be different.  Depending on how different, you’ll know how to adjust accordingly. If your tablet traffic is 30% more expensive than computer traffic, simply go to your campaign settings and drop tablet bids by 20% or 30%, or pause that traffic entirely.

However, if you know me, you know I prefer to have more control than that… My personal preference for accounts I manage is to dedicate one campaign to computers (by reducing mobile & tablet bids by 100%), another to mobile devices (by dropping computer & tablet bids by 100%), and another to tablets (by dropping computer & mobile bids by 100%). That way, I can easily see at all times how each traffic type is performing, which makes bid management is a piece of cake.

If you’d ever like help getting more out of your online traffic, feel free to email me or give me a call. My direct line is 303-906-8790.  

Google still hasn’t made an official announcement about this change, but if you’ve seen a difference in Google AdWords performance this past week, it’s because they’ve made a major change to how they show their ads on desktop computers.

Is this change worth freaking out about? Probably not.  As long as some of your keywords are in the top 4 spots, you’ll probably be fine.  The right column only represents about 15% of all paid search traffic. If your numbers fall off a cliff it’s because most of your keywords are lower than the #4 spot.  Raise bids slowly & methodically & you’ll find that traffic again.

What does this mean for you? It depends.

• If you primarily advertised in the top 3 spots (what I call “the jetstream), you probably won’t see a much of a change.  It might cause a spike in your cost-per-click while the 85% of advertisers fighting over the 15% of affordable traffic in the 8 ads in the right column are now fighting for the newly coveted #4 spot. Keep on managing bids as you normally have been doing & you’ll be fine.
• If you were bidding in the #5 to #10 spots (the right column) for all of your keywords, you’ve probably noticed a massive drop in traffic.  The good news is that if you can eek your way up to the #4 spot (whether with better ads, better quality scores, or higher bids) you’ll get more traffic. A lot more because keywords in the top spots get 2x to 20x as much traffic as ads in the right column.  Don’t do this for all of your terms! Just your best ones. (Keep reading. 😉
• Your ads in the #4 spot are probably what were impacted most, but in a good way.  Why? Because ads in the jetstream get 2 to 20 times as much traffic as ads in (what used to be) the right column… So your ad that used to get a 1% clickthrough rate at the top of the right column will now get a 2% to 20% clickthrough rate by now being in the jetstream of Google traffic.
• Bonus: If you’re using an arbitrage strategy such as only advertising on mobile phones or small segments of the display network, this recent change won’t impact you at all.

The biggest thing to keep in mind is that those 4 spots are going to be a LOT more competitive now. Here are a few tips to make the adjustment as smooth as possible:

• If you haven’t been split-testing ads, start. Clickthrough rates are going to be more important than ever while fighting for those top spots.
• If you haven’t been advertising on mobile phones, give it a try. Mobile search layouts haven’t changed at all and given how much more competitive desktop traffic is going to get, there will be better opportunities available from mobile traffic.
• Do you have optimized headlines for every single keyword? How about display urls? Landing pages? All of these directly impact quality score, and quality score is now going to be more important than ever.
• Don’t get hung up on Cost per click.  Less competition means conversion rates will probably to go up.  The $1 click that got a 10% conversion rate buried among 8 competitors in the right column might now have a 15% conversion rate when in the top 4. Raising bids to $1.25 might feel uncomfortable, but if your conversions jump from 10% to 15%, you’ll actually get more traffic from the same number of searches, more sales, AND more profit per visitor!

If you’d like help with your online business, let’s talk.

I was at the grocery store this afternoon and I overheard from someone in the 50 yard long line to get Powerball tickets actually say the words “At $1.5 billion, what better investment is there than Powerball?”

The media hype and people’s excitement about this 1.5 billion dollar Powerball cracks me up.  According to statisticians, no matter how small or big Powerball gets, the average person will “win” roughly one dollar for every two dollars spent. 

In other words, over our lifetimes – we will lose $.50 for every dollar we spend on Powerball tickets (and that’s counting the winners!).  Not too big a deal if we drop a few bucks here & there just for fun. But using the Lottery as an investment plan is never a good idea – no matter how big the prize gets.

That got me thinking though… Are there any OTHER investments that would be wise to lose fifty cents for every dollar spent?

• Tax write-offs? Not really.
• Stock market? Been there. Nope.
• Real Estate? Been there too, and DEFINITELY NOT!

What if you lost 50% on Advertising?

What if you’ve got a business, and I told you that if you spent $100 advertising online, you were guaranteed to get $50 in sales back within a month?  Would you do it?

Although your instinct might be to say no, let’s think about the one thing that’s different with losing 50% of your money in advertising: The ability to learn from your sales. (Even if those sales resulted in a loss.)

What if that hundred dollars spent got you 5 customers “worth” $10 each, and you learned that 4 out of 5 of them came from your “Buy One Get One” ad vs your “50% off sale” ad? 

Next time you advertise with your new-found knowledge, you might get $75 back for your $100.  Wait a minute! You’re still losing money! How is that a good idea?  Patience Grasshopper. We’re getting there.

Ok, so you’re $200 invested, and you’ve only generated $125 in sales. Time for round three.

Maybe this time, you learn that you can up-sell 33% of your customers a product that doubles their value… Hmmm… If $100 gets you 7.5 customers worth $10, and 2.5% of those customers buy ANOTHER $10 in product, you’re suddenly breaking even, and you’ve only spent $300.

OK, so no one can survive in a business that only breaks even, but you should keep two things in mind:

1. That few hundred dollars you spent is WAY cheaper than if you paid thousands of dollars in R&D, and you’ll probably have learned more about your target market than any other form of R&D out there.
2. To steal a phrase coined by Malcom Gladwell, this is what we call the “Tipping point” and THIS is where the magic happens!

The Tipping Point: For every dollar you  spend, you can now reliably count on breaking even.  Now is the time to ramp things up so you can learn even more about your customers at a faster rate and guess what; As soon as you learn something that bumps you consistently into the black, you ramp things up. 

Let’s say you only get profitability to 120% (Meaning for every $100 you spend, you generate $120 in profits.)  NOW is the time to start advertising as heavily as you can.

Once you get to this point, you’re not worried about ad budgets. You’ll want to spend as much as you possibly can.

When I started advertising online, I did exactly that: I spent $500 on AOL banners. I did even worse than a 50% loss though. I only got 3  or 4 leads worth about $50 each. However, I continued to tweak my ads. I kept adjusting my website. 

Years later, I built the company to the point that I was spending between $80,000 & $150,000 per month on nothing but traffic for our 70 person Denver company. I wished I could find more traffic because for every $1,000 I put in, we were reliably generating $4000 to $7000 in gross commissions… Eventually, I sold that company to RE/MAX.

How profitable would your business be if you were spending that much money and getting a 120%, 150%, or even a 300% ROI.

With all that said, “you can’t win if you don’t play.” Did I buy any tickets that I can expect to lose fifty cents on the dollar? Sure. I spent ten bucks.  However, I prefer to invest most of my money in places where my odds of positive ROI are better than .000000003%  – no matter how big the prize.

A couple years ago, a friend sent me a picture of us over Memorial day weekend at the pool. I have to say – I was disgusted… She looked great in her bikini, but me??? Not so much. In fact, I was disgusted at how much I had let myself go.  All I could think to myself was “Man, you got fat!”

By the next day, I got a workout routine from my cousin Dean who is an amazing personal trainer and I got started. His #1 tip? It wasn’t about working out, or even what I should eat. It was to measure everything.  How long I work out. How much weight I lift. My beginning weight. My body measurements… Everything.

“Why do I have to measure everything?” I thought. “Can’t I just start working out?”  So I skipped that step.  By the end of the week, I quit because I worked my butt off, I was tired, and I GAINED weight!

By the following week, I figured “fine”. I’ll start measuring… I bought a scale, I measured my waist, my thighs, my arms, and kept track of all of my workouts (none of which I could actually complete for the first 3 weeks).  However, because I was measuring – I was able to celebrate each success along the way. Better yet, improving upon those small successes continued to get easier and easier!

When I was discouraged because I hadn’t lost weight, I could celebrate that I was dropping in waist size.  When I hadn’t lost waist size, I could celebrate that I had gone from being able to do 5 pushups – to 50 – to 500!  Amazing things can happen when you’re measuring your successes.

What does that mean for you as a business owner? The same thing…

If you’re not measuring how effectively your advertising dollars are being spent – you have no way to improve.  For 90% of advertisers – that means you stagnate or worse — you quit.

Here are 7 things you should ALWAYS be measuring (and tracking) when advertising on Google AdWords. Measure those 5 things, and I guarantee there are at least a dozen ways you can improve to get more sales, while spending less.)

1. Phone calls from website (And there is no excuse for not doing this now that Google helps you do so for free.)
2. Opt-ins/Leads/Sales
3. Actual value of each purchase
4. Conversion rate of mobile phone visitors vs computers (You’d be shocked at how different these metrics can be & until you know that difference – you’re missing out.)
5. Which sitelinks & call extensions are working best.
6. Result of ad split tests.
7. Return rate of visitors (via remarketing)

What if I gave you a magic penny that doubled every day for a month if you polished it for 8 hours each day?  Would you put the work in to make that happen?

What if you could skip the 8 hours of work per day & just pay someone $5000? Would you do that?

If your answer is anything but “How soon can I get started?”, all I can think of is Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman: “Big mistake… HUGE!”

When I tell people what I do, the most common response is something along the lines of “I tried AdWords once. Couldn’t make it work though.” 

The reason Adwords didn’t work is simple: They didn’t find the right formula to generate enough profit to justify the expense.  Why? Could be anything: Wrong keywords, wrong settings, wrong channels, wrong audience…

Once you find the right combination, however, there’s no holding you back. You hit a tipping point where there is no longer such thing as an advertising budget. You then want all the traffic you can possibly get.  Unfortunately, most people give up finding that “sweet spot” just before they would have hit the jackpot.

I had a limited budget mentality myself when I started advertising online in 1995. I cringed with every $500 charge that got put on my credit card (which was only once a month at the time.) However, as soon as I passed the tipping point, I couldn’t buy the traffic fast enough. I gladly added $15,000 to $20,000 to my annual advertising budgets for each and every agent I recruited. Not long after we passed the billion dollar mark in sales – I sold my company to RE/MAX.

It’s kinda like the magical penny that will turn into over $5 million dollars if you double it every day for a month. ($10,737,418.24 if it’s a 31 day month.) Most people would quit after a week, maybe two.  That’s where the magic really starts to happen, but ONLY if you put in the work to get it right first!

If you are currently generating sales online (even if just a handful of sales a month), I guarantee there are things you can do to get more sales (probably for less money.) Much like the magical penny after a couple weeks, after you hit a certain point of efficiency – revenues don’t just incrementally increase…

They multiply.

Exponentially.

The key is making sure you’re working with the most efficient model possible.

Although I don’t have a magical penny worth $10.7 million dollars, I do have this:

• 20 years of profitable online marketing experience and dozens of happy past clients.
• The ability to give you an AdWords account that IMMEDIATELY becomes more profitable for you (no matter how “unfinished” your website is.)
• A price that is less than what Google paid me to write books for them.
• A no questions asked money back guarantee backed by Paypal. (Which, by the way – no client has ever asked for.)

There are about 36 hours left to sign up:
http://www.2020ppc.com/done4u/now-open

I’ve shared a lot of stories about how advertising has worked, but a lot of success comes from failure. I wouldn’t be sharing the whole truth if I didn’t share a few of those failures myself. (And I’ve got plenty!)

Ok, so I’ve never lived in a van down by the river but in 2009 I had to move from a 7000 square foot custom waterfront home into my parents’ basement after losing everything. Considering I was the sole income earner for my family of 4, emotionally – I may as well have been in a van down by the river.

4 years prior: It was 2005, real estate was going well. Really well… My company was 70 agents strong and we had sold over a billion dollars in homes. I was generating the majority of their sales from AdWords advertising & the phone rang off the hook.

I was 33 years old and had already doubled a financial goal I had set to hit in my 40’s. Although we could have paid off the house we were living in 10 times over and retire, we started building our dream home instead. It was in one of the most prestigious neighborhoods of Colorado.

You could fit about 4 of our old homes in our new one & man – did we have plans for that place… The front spiral staircase was designed with our daughter’s future prom pictures in mind, the back staircase was for our son’s prom. It had everything & was supposed to be the last house we’d ever buy.

When we moved in, a herd of over 70 elk greeted us right behind our house. My son caught his first fish in the pond behind our house. We threw the most amazing parties, & life was grand.

Fast forward to 2008. I had sold my company to RE/MAX – so monthly income shrunk. Our home’s value had dropped by nearly half. Our mortgage payment was way more than I was earning & since I had the brilliant idea of leaving our money in the stock market instead of paying cash for the home, things started looking ugly when both the real estate market AND stock market crashed. Really ugly.

Long story short: We were under water and we were screwed. Not long after spending the last of our life savings to get out of our house, “we” became “I” and I lost my marriage too.

I felt like those people who win the lottery and end up bankrupt 2 years later. I was demoralized and struggling – not knowing what to do.

Then, through some miracle, 3 key mentors stepped into my life. Between the 3 of them, I learned that my talents weren’t in selling homes. They were in finding high-paying customers with minimal advertising expenses.

Within a year of losing everything, I was better off than I ever had been before.

Is successful advertising was what miraculously saved me? No.
What saved me was being good at one thing, and knowing more about that one thing than 99% of the people who need my help.

STILL NEEDS WORK: The funny thing is, you don’t have to be better than 99% of people at what you do to make a good living. 50% or 60% will be just fine. If your expertise or the product you’re selling happens to be above the 60th percentile in your particular market, you owe it to your future customers to advertise from the highest mountains so they get to benefit from you vs falling to the mercy of the inferior product your competitors have.

Are you better at what you do than 75% of people who need your services? Are your products better than your competition?

If the answer is “yes” – hopefully you’re not only making a good living, but you’re also doing only the activities you like doing, and delegating the rest to bring in as much new business as possible.

If you’d like to delegate AdWords to someone else to help you get more customers, my “done for you” offer remains open for another 48 hours. I have a couple spots left before I close the doors at this price.
http://www.2020ppc.com/done4u/now-open

As an entrepreneur, “David vs. Goliath” is one of my most inspiring tales.  However, an even more inspiring one from real life is one I call “Jason vs. Sylvan Learning Center”. Jason is a private tutor who works from home (he is also my younger brother).  He has an “Increase your SAT Score” website for high school students looking to improve their SAT test scores.

Although his website is about as basic as it gets cosmetically – he gets plenty of organic traffic from Google because he has uploaded hundreds of helpful free videos that drive traffic to the site.

We were brainstorming a while back about capitalizing on the traffic to his site and I suggested an AdWords Remarketing campaign. He objected, saying “I don’t want to pay for traffic. I get tons of free traffic already.”  I said “Let’s spend $20 a month on remarketing & see what happens.”

The funny thing is – we struggled to even spend $20 a month. Most months only cost him $5 or $10. Nothing really happened for a couple months. No big deal though. He was only out $10 or $20 – tops in the two months we had been trying.  By the third or fourth month, something funny happened.

He got a call from a Mom & Dad who were trying to help their high school junior get into an Ivy League school…

Jason’s course is $1500, so it often involves a phone call. On that call, he is used to getting grilled with all sorts of qualifying questions before they decide to buy. You know the types of questions: “What are your qualifications?” “So and so has a cheaper program.” “How are you different from XYZ program?” Etc.  In this case, however, he was pleasantly surprised. The conversation went something like this:

Jason: “Hi, this is Jason – How can I help you?”

Parents: “Hi, we’re trying to help our child improve their SAT scores & we were going to go with Sylvan Learning Center, but we came across your videos, and you guys are everywhere!  We see that you ship physical DVDs, but we want to get started ASAP. If we gave you a credit card number over the phone, do you have the first DVD online so we could get started before they arrive in the mail?”

Although Jason was used to running through a whole list of questions, he didn’t have to answer any. He just needed to get to his computer so he could run their credit card ASAP.

• Easiest $1500 sale he had ever received.
• Sylvan is a nationwide company. Jason is a 1-man shop with a free wordpress site.
• Sylvan’s marketing budget is… ummm… big. Jason’s marketing budget at the time: $7 a month.
• Despite Sylvan’s who-knows-how-big marketing budget that involved TV, Radio, print publications, and who knows what else, they chose Jason.

How did Jason get the business over a multi-million dollar nationwide company? Having hundreds of helpful videos online certainly helped, but if that was the case, these folks would have bought a lot earlier when they visited his site in the first place.  What pushed these people over the edge was Jason’s $7 per month remarketing campaigns that continued for weeks after they first found his website.  They never opted in for any additional emails. They didn’t call him when they first found his site. They simply found the site, and left.

But… over the next few weeks:

• When they visited the Wall Street Journal – he was advertising there.
• When they read a blog post about study habits, a link to a helpful study video was there.
• When they read USA Today online, they saw a testimonial from other parents who had taken guess-who’s course…

The best part is that Jason didn’t even pay for them to see all of those remarketing ads. He only paid on the rare occasion that they actually clicked on the ads. Even though he only paid for clicks,  every time they saw one of his ads, a subconscious seed was planted – telling them “this guy must be legit if he can afford to advertise in all of these places“.  By the time they had drawn that conclusion for themselves, the need to ask all sorts of other questions just went away. They were ready to buy.

Pretty cool, eh?

Whether or not you are using paid traffic on Facebook, AdWords, or anywhere else – Remarketing is an extremely powerful tool that will increase your conversion rate – no matter how many visitors you already have coming to your site.

Here’s how you can implement Remarketing for your website:

1. Log into your AdWords Account
2. In the left column, go to “Shared Library” > “Audiences”
3. If you haven’t set up a Remarketing Campaign, Google will have a couple steps for you to create an “All Visitors” remarketing script.  Follow them & proceed to step 4.
4. After setting up remarketing, click on the “tag” details button.
5. Grab the script you created in step 3 & place on every page of your site.
6. Wait for the magic to happen.
7. Send Joel an email & share when you get your first “Man, you guys are everywhere!” comment from one of your paying customers.

Of course, there are a lot more sophisticated ways to use remarketing, but this basic use of remarketing is extremely powerful.

Have fun with it!

A subscriber asked a great question about a recent video I published about tracking values in addition to actual conversions.

Great question Despina! You could certainly assign a zero value by changing the number from “1” to “0”.  However, the idea in the video was to assign different values for different types of leads.  For example, I might assign a value of $1 to people who opt-in for a newsletter, or sign up for some sort of contest. However someone who fills out an inquiry form asking to be contacted might have a much higher value (say $10, or even $100).

What value you assign depends on your estimate of what percentage of leads convert into sales.

For example, if you sell a $100 product/service, and half a percent of people who sign up for a contest, you can assign a value of $.50.  However, someone who fills out a contact form asking to be contacted about your product/service might buy 20% of the time – resulting in a $20 value per lead.

I hope that helps. Feel free to comment below with any other questions.