Ep.39 – Pay Per Click, or PPC, Advertising with Matt Ramsey

Chris Bruno 0:00
This week’s episode is brought to you by campaign refinery, an amazing new email marketing automation tool. Look, in the world of digital marketing, there’s a lot to keep track of. We all know this. As much as we’re in love with social media and the power of social conversation here at Social INK and on the all about digital marketing podcast, we are well aware of just how powerful email marketing can be. Email Marketing is not dead. In fact, it’s never been more important to help you leverage your presence everywhere else into the one channel that you’ll own regardless of what changes Facebook, Twitter, or any other platform makes in the future. I’ve known the founder Travis Ketchum for years, and he’s been a past guest on the podcast, Episode 15. If you want to listen to it, I’ve personally used his other products before and they’ve been fantastic. The amount of thought that he’s put into each and every one of what he’s created has been incredible. I’d highly encourage you to try that free form. day trial at Campaignrefinery.com to see what world-class email marketing automation can do for you and your business. massive thank you to Travis and campaign refinery for their support of the all about Digital Marketing Show.

Welcome to the All About Digital Marketing podcast, the show all about digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, digital marketing, brought to you by social ink digital marketing agency specialising in social media and content marketing for brave brands and forward-thinking SMEs. I’m your host, Chris Bruno. And as always, we’re here to bring you the most actionable tips, tricks, tools and insights to help you achieve more when it comes to your digital marketing. Subscribe to the show. And be sure to share with a friend if you found something useful or interesting. You can find all the show notes and more information on christopherb121.sg-host.com

Chris Bruno  2:05 

Matt, thank you so much for joining me today.

Matt Ramsay  2:10  

It’s a pleasure. Thanks very much for having me.

Chris Bruno  2:13  

So, Matt, you are a senior client manager at PPC geeks. And I get the feeling that today we’re going to both get to geek out a little bit in terms of everything to do with pay per click advertising. But for everybody out there who doesn’t really know yourself or that doesn’t really know what PPC is about or doesn’t really know, PPC geeks. Can you give us a little bit of the elevator pitch in the intro?

Matt Ramsay  2:36  

Yeah, sure. So about about the agency. As it says on the tin. We are a team of PVC geeks. And what we try and provide is a service that aims to go above and beyond what is expected from a client perspective. So most agencies will aim to do that and we’re we’re the ones that put it in practice. Whatever challenge that we’re faced with. So we’re a remote work team. And we’re all what what is our common themes that we’re all highly qualified, I wouldn’t use the word experts. It’s a bit cheesy, but we’ve got a lot of experience and our particular field so as I focus on strategy and more account management and communication, my colleagues will focus on the technical side of the account and the day to day work within either Google ads or Microsoft, Microsoft ads. My experience as a whole is across the whole range of digital marketing really, I’ve started in e commerce and developing kind of web solutions with their breaks food service. So that was a that feels like a lifetime ago and I’ve moved through the digital marketing chain, being a kind of generalist marketer before specialising in, in the mix of content marketing and SEO, and then taking a Bro, as you know, jumped to the present day with PPC geek. So I’m lucky enough to work with a whole range of clients across a load of different industries, which is the beauty of working in an agency side model. I guess in addition, to try and keep my head in the game, I do work on as a freelance, and through the Fiverr platform, which I know has a bit of a bad rap. But I do a lot of social media management and social ads as well. So yeah, I like to keep my interest open. And there’s many disciplines as possible, but majority of my work at the moment is like you said, PPC, and yeah, we could spend a whole day talking about it.

Chris Bruno  4:42  

Well, I think there’s one thing I’m going to pick up on there. And I love the fact that you said you know, I’m not going to call myself the expert, but I’m going to say that I have a lot of experience. And I think that’s so important when it comes to digital when it comes to social when it comes to PPC The game is changing so fast. That it’s not Like the olden days, or talking about history, or whatever it is where things are defined that you are or you aren’t an expert, but it is very much of you know, being involved in it day in day out, gives you that exposure, which allows you to adapt to evolve to move with the times and to be able to keep up to date. So I just wanted to pick up on that because I genuinely I love that response. And and the way that you sort of said it, and I think that’s so important as well, you know, anyone that’s saying, I am the V expert in this particular thing, if it’s to do with digital, for me, that starts to raise flags or red flags, I should say. And okay, cool. So let’s get into the crux of it. So, PPC, we’re talking about when people spend money advertising and you’re paying for visitors or potential leads, whatever it might be to clean Yeah. Now, obviously, there’s a huge amount of platforms. We try to focus on the small to mid size businesses, but can you help us sort of understand the the couple of different platforms that you guys use the most or that you’d recommend the most for small to mid sized businesses. unexplained a little bit about the differences of how those adverts actually work.

Matt Ramsay  6:04  

Yeah, sure. So the term pay per click, like you said, is really, really broad, and it can stem into search engines, social media, and then it’s any element where you can pay for people to come to your site. So for businesses that are on the smaller side, and maybe have a more limited budget, it’s a case of looking at where your customers are or what platforms that you’re using. at most. Yeah, I’d say nine times out of 10. I’m always saying, Okay, look at search engines and look at social media, because we’re when Google, you know, depends what market you look at. But Google, at least in the UK have 95% market share. And instead of searching something people Google it, and, again, social media, you’ve got a handful of main platforms. Yeah, we’ll know them but I’ll state them out. Your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, I guess they all come on the pay per click. Although as typically people assume Pay Per Click comm is just search advertising. But when you can advertise on so many other platforms, it’s becoming broader and broader. And then you don’t even have to click, you can tap, you can swipe, you can you can pay for so many different actions, but it’s important not to get swept away with the excitement of the range of options. So it’s understanding like I said, where your target client is so and I take an example for business. So if I was approached by a hospitality client, and which Yeah, I’ve got a lot of experience being based in the Lake District. So a lot of hotels here looking for pay per click and digital marketing. So it’s understanding Okay, how does a small hotel get visibility to As the target customers, where are they searching? Okay, most likely Google. But can there be advertising on other platforms like booking.com, or other online travel agents again, that can come on the pay per click umbrella. The hospitality again is all about the experience so that you can understand, okay, people are looking on social media to try and gain an understanding of how their potential travel experience is going to look. So then you can start saying, Okay, if you’ve got the budget, then you can look at how effective will advertising on Instagram be. If you get a collection of your best photography assets, put some test budget behind it, then you can start to understand how people react and the key theme in that is the word test because if you’re a small business, then it’s there’s a chance that you may not have done advertising in the past. So I can give you as much advice as possible. But also Really, if you only understand the key results of your advertising, once you start paying some money towards it says a little bit. Yeah, let’s let’s hit and hope. But there’s always an understanding of, we’re doing it with the best possible knowledge behind us. If I’m talking as an agency marketer, now, we work with our best possible knowledge with years of experience. So we know that our initial test is more likely going to produce results, but it is in itself still a test.

Chris Bruno  9:34  

It’s so there’s a couple of things that you said that I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. And I think, you know, the audience gets to hear it from so many other different people now, not just myself, but I think that’s great because I can bang the drum as much as they want. But if everyone else is saying the same thing, I mean, that’s really important. But the two things I mean, when you’re starting any project online or anything else, you know, identifying who your audience is, and then figuring out where they hang out. I mean, that is the absolute crux of how to get started for from my point of view. And then the second thing that you said there is, you know, it’s testing. So, and I’m sure you’ve seen these as well. But when you when I see these adverts of people promising a funnel for a bid for any business, and saying that with this funnel, you’ll make $100,000 in sales or whatever it is. And I get really frustrated, because I know for a fact that in my experience, and I’m pretty sure 99% sure that in your experience, you’ve had this happen as well, even with you know, I’ve been running this agency social link now for 11 years, even in 11 years of experience, having worked in various different industries and everything else. Not only is everything still a test, but I’m still shocked sometimes by the results. And the things that I thought were going to do well haven’t done as well and things that I thought wouldn’t do well at all have actually shocked and surprised me and done really well. I think that’s something that’s so important. Because most people don’t talk about that they don’t. They try and over promise and they’ll give everyone these hopes and dreams that everything’s going to be magnificent. You pay me and I’m going to get you thousands and sales. And the reality is we’re all testing No matter how much experience obviously we’re testing with that knowledge base and with the most experience that we can bring to the table, but we are still testing as well.

Matt Ramsay  11:21  

Yeah, exactly. I mean, being in digital marketing you I guess your web browser behaviour starts to lay with us being interested in certain things. So purely by looking at loads of digital marketing resources and trying to continually learn I get bombarded with those adverts that say literally just give up your job and invest in Click Funnels and it’s it’s it’s Yeah, that you said is real frustrating because I’m, I try and pay myself as a bit of a goodie marketer and as well as most people do, but When you’ve got someone with a load of budget and they see this potential golden opportunity of Yeah, you can you can work a week this full of Sundays because you’ll be making money in your sleep because of the magic of Click Funnels. If you don’t know anything about digital marketing then probably rightly say you give it a bash because you think great, yeah, well, what’s what have I got to lose? But then what’s worked for someone else in a totally different business model isn’t necessarily going to work for your, your business, no matter how small, medium large you are. If there’s a key difference, yeah, that same model might just work moderately well or not well at all. And then you’ll be thinking, you know, I’m still working a seven day a week. My My dream is any closer and I’ve just invested in someone else’s model say, and it says a funnier world is digital marketing. Yeah, I know. Pay to click is a very big part of that but my Tywin in SEO as well as is a real funny one because and I see both sides of it say there’s there’s corporate businesses that have real understanding of what they’re investing and what they want and how they want to go about a strategy and then my my freelance work through outside of my my main job, I see the people who have hundred pounds to invest, and they think that’s going to get them at you top five position within a couple of weeks. And being the marks I want to say that’s not going to happen, but there’s going to be for every one of me or a marketer like me, there’s going to be a whole handful of people that say, Oh, yeah, you know, you’ll be top of Google easily with 100 pounds in a couple of weeks. As an industry it’s is a real funny one, as to how we start sell off services. And there’s, I guess there’s the ethical side of it. And then there’s the we’re gonna, you try making money, but it most likely won’t happen. So see, I’ve made on my label that is a bit of a rant. But I mean, I’d rather be dead honest with you on. You’re absolutely fine experiences,

Chris Bruno  14:20  

but I agree with you completely. And I think it was with Travis Ketchum that we interviewed and I got to have a chat. And I’ve known Travis now since 2013. I think we met in the US at a conference. And he’s built two successful platforms. They’ve done very, very well. And when we were talking on the podcast, and I asked him, How many sales pages landing pages, squeeze pages, upsells down cells, anything, how many pages Do you think you’ve built and tested in the space of like the seven years that I’ve known you since you started the first, the first company and he said, if you’re including the squeeze pages and the upsells, and everything else, he goes, I’ve created it today. The thousands, like, I think you’d know, everything has been tested. I’ve tried everything you can imagine changing text imagery, layout format, everything is a test. So when I see the exactly the same as you, when you see those kind of with this funnel, you’ll be making money in your sleep and you’re sat there going, water load of absolute crap. Come on, guys. Like this isn’t the way it’s gonna work. So I think that’s the really important from, from what you’ve said there. Again, you know, the testing side of it, it’s always about testing, you’re always trying. And again, you know, we can do everything within our power, whether it be for SEO for social media for pay per click, we can do everything in our power to try and get it right to try and understand the audience to identify who they are. But ultimately, you know, bottom line is, sometimes you don’t get it right. Sometimes you get it spot on first time. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts. And it is very hard when you hear it’s, I’ve had several conversations where people have sort of said to me, You know, that’s very expensive for your digital Thing packages and one thing other. And we’ve said, Well, you know, what are you paying currently? And they’ll say, Oh, we know we pay 250 pounds for our social media. And we’ll say, Okay, great. So what sort of results you’re getting? And then like that what you mean? Right that? Well, you know, 250 pound invested what comes out? That I got nothing, right? There’s no engagement. There’s no comments. There’s barely any likes with drives very little traffic, and you go, Okay, cool. So if you’re happy spending 250 and getting nothing back for it, then carry on? Like, I I don’t really, like I’m okay with the fact that, you know, we’re not the right solution for everybody. And but again, we try and put out as much content as we can to try and help people understand. And since end of last year, you know, we’re really pushing hard our campaign is put social back into social media. And the idea of it is is you know, talk to people don’t talk at them. You wouldn’t do that. If you’re a networking event, but talk to people reach out to people say hi to people get involved in a conversation. There’s so many ways that you could be Different from the pack without having necessarily to pay a fortune to an agency or anybody else. And I think that’s something that’s really important. But again, testing is is such an imperative part. And I think that’s so, so good that you’re saying as well again, we’ll keep banging that drum on this show. I’m pretty sure till it till we till we die, but we’re okay. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So I was going to ask them. So if we talk a little bit about search, and this is something that I’ve worked with a couple of specialists, you and I haven’t worked together we’ve met recently because of the podcast, but there is something that I’ve always kind of tried to explain to people that and it is an issue of to a certain extent, budgets. And I wanted to ask you about this because when we are talking to businesses that do have a very small budget, obviously people are hoping to get massive returns very quickly, you know if they can 10 x their money, and I’m sure there’s somebody out there promising them that they will but if they can tenex their investment then obviously it’s a fantastic opportunity. But the reality is when you are working with a variable More budget. How do you guys try and get the most out of a pay per click campaign? If we’re talking about search, we’ll talk about Google rather than anything else. Like you mentioned 95% of search traffic. But what sort of things do you do? And what sort of ways do you work with with smaller budgets to try and get those best results?

Matt Ramsay  18:18  

Yeah, it’s an interesting question. So I’ll I’ll try not to get too dense on it. I mean, it’s something that usually takes a big old strategy korins to work out the best approach. So I guess in a condensed format, the first thing to do is totally disregards Google ads and just say, okay, from a math perspective, what what happens in your business, so, if you’re selling a 299 bottles of source or you know, food stuff, for example, there’s a fast moving consumer goods, he got a very quick moving product that sells You sell a lot of it, but your margins might be quite small, or you’re selling kitchen work tops, just selling s piece of software that an individual package could go into the the 10s of thousands. And it says understanding what your end product is and how a customer gets there. And how many people get there as well. So you look at the numbers you look at from your other channels, again, excluding Google ads, how many people do need to see your material whether it’s organic search or social media or any other channel, Tony people do you need to get one lead? And then how many leads Do you need to get a sale? So looking at conversion rate and click through rate and then you understand Okay, out of those are one sale, what’s the average profit, so if I’m selling something for 100 pounds, and I make 50 pound profit, then yeah, I’m doing real simple numbers here that understands that. That profit, I don’t want to eat into that too much. So if I’m paying a fee for that 100 pound sale, if I’m paying 51 pounds for it, then it’s not going to be worth it. So I need to understand, work that all the way back through to understand, okay, if you don’t have a budget in mind, how can those numbers help? But if someone does have a budget in mind, then I would say, Okay, let’s start from a position where you’re happy in terms of business that you can afford that element because again, going back to testing, if we test something with your budget, and nothing works, then you’re totally a likely event. But if that happens, then you’ve got to be in a position that your business can still run. Because if you invest so much into advertising, and it does doesn’t work for you, then. Yeah, there’s there’s a lot of analysis to be done. But if you don’t have a business at the end of that, then it’s a pretty critical issue. So once you’ve agreed on a budget, and then from a search perspective is understanding, again, where your customers going to be in terms of that decision point, because search is, ultimately it’s a way to find an answer to a question or a need. There’s, I forget which the name of the different types of pipes of intense there is a modal out there. And it looks at why people use that one want to find that answer. They want to satisfy their curiosity. They want to be thrilled or they want to be informed or they want to potentially be sold to if they’re looking for an e commerce product, to look at where your customer sits in one of those brackets, and then determine how they’re going to be searching. So again, if they If your business is hospitality based they’re going to be looking for hotels or breaks in your specific area. And then you look at the kind of property that you are so are you are you offering budget stays, you are offering a luxury experience. Do you have a Michelin star restaurant? Do you have a spar on the side so those are going to be key searches within someone’s it was held within someone’s mind that you’ve got to try and preempt and advertise something that you can offer. It’s all about giving them a choice given a search or choice before they’ve even realised that they want your product. So in most cases, someone’s going to be using that search budget to advertise to someone who has never heard of their product or service before. You know, excluding those branded searches. your small business is going to be competing with 10s or hundreds of Brothers, and a search for something generic. Again, hospitality focus your hotel in the Lake District is going to bring up so many different options and is likely that your specific hotel is going to be one that the searcher has never heard of, or has heard very little. Say you’ve got to use whatever budget you have to either sell your big, biggest and best features or be as relevant as possible to the searchers intent. So my last point now on relevance is a really, really key area. So we would work with any kind to understand how we can be as relevant to someone’s search. So again, thinking of a different industry, and up top, my head is on selling. Yeah, healthy food. That’s something I get remarketed to loads on and people are understanding that they have a need for help. healthier diet. And then you’ve got to advertise satisfy that need. So if you’ve got a small budget, it’s working out, okay, that math section to start with, you know, how many people do I need to make a sale? How many leads do I need? How many people do I need to get a specific leads, and then understanding from those leads, what quality Am I going to get based on different search terms. So you can see this kind of goes down a bit of a rabbit hole. And you know, no matter how small your business, there’s always going to be so much potential within search. And that’s that’s just looking at keywords. And you can expand that to other areas of Google ads, like display advertising, video marketing, and then there’s the whole area around remarketing to past customers as well. So for a minute, if a business came up to me today, my approach would be to go through that process and It’s important to understand. For me anyway, it’s important to understand the nature and purpose of the business before you even start looking at search as a platform. Because if if you don’t understand as a marketer or business what you want to achieve, and what that would mean for your business, then there’s no point looking at how to advertise if you don’t know, the very root of your needs in the first place. Oh, that will make sense.

Chris Bruno  25:28  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s this huge, so anyone who’s just listened to that piece, you’re probably gonna want to go back and listen again, or check out the website with a transcript. So you can figure out all of those little steps that you need to start calculating for yourself, but I’m amazed that how many I use inverted commas here when I say agencies, for social media or for whatever else, begin by creating content for somebody. And I’m always shocked and a little appalled because our first two three hours of communications With our clients and from them signing on to the first piece of content going out, takes about three weeks. But our first few hours of contact is nothing but asking questions to try and break down exactly what you’ve just talked about. Yeah, you know, let’s talk about who we are actually targeting. Who is your audience? Actually, you know, because once you start doing that, it’s a whole different approach. Like you mentioned, you can’t use the same funnel to sell a two pound 99 protein shake or whatever it is that you should drink every morning, as you would if you’re someone selling a 5000 pound consultancy to a school. Like it’s just not the same. It’s not going to be the same content. It’s not the same audience the the sizes of the audience changes as well. You know, so identifying some real demographics and then understanding what is that value? What is the price range, what is the actual profit margins and your lifetime value of a customer? What does that really represent to the business and I am always amazed that I More people don’t dig into that kind of stuff and before they start challenging the you know, right let’s do some ads and let’s use your competitors name as one of our keywords and you’re like that Jesus please don’t waste so much money

Matt Ramsay  27:17  

it’s it’s really easy to just get well in so all the options and I appreciate you as an agency you want to come across as really productive. But yeah, if there’s a small business, you might have a small budget that means an agency is out of the question. So is understanding it in my might be silly to ask a business owner, you do know your business, say I’ll probably get a few funny looks if I walked up to someone and saying, you know, how well do you know this this shop, for example, the customers that come into it, but you start asking questions, and it’s a case of Oh, I assume you will have to come back to you and get the data on that one is it does Yes. When you know you’re really getting into the areas that matter when you’re asking questions that maybe the owner or business doesn’t even know about their own business. And it’s, it’s really, really key that any kind of advertising, not just search that you know exactly who to target is, there’s always a bit of guesswork and understanding where someone’s going to be at any particular time. But the more intelligence you have about who’s bought your product in the past and who’s interested in your product or service, then the more you can eliminate wasted spend, and that’s really important. If you have a budget of a few hundred or 1000 pounds a month, then fee for your business. That might be a really significant amount for a lot of agencies. That’s, I guess, a smaller budget. So it’s understanding how exactly to best use that spend. And then when Watch out because Google Search might not be the best option, even though it’s got a massive reach across a region, country and globally, it doesn’t mean that it’s the best channel for what you’re offering. Because the more people that you have to market to the more margin for error errors, say might be the fact that something like LinkedIn might be a better place to pull your resources, say, another podcast, I’m sure but

Chris Bruno  29:30  

yeah, it’s but it is always interesting though, because and there’s another part to this as well, that we haven’t really touched on. And I don’t know whether or not it’s something that you guys do from PPC geek side of things. But we had this conversation quite a lot of depth with a client fairly recently. And they wanted to spend money they found a fantastic agency to create some phenomenal creative and like really good quality really well filmed really well made. And then basically plan was to try LinkedIn at first For the first time ever, and they had a decent sized budget to do it and everything else, and we were saying, okay, cool, let’s get involved. But again, everything was done very modularly. So they created these awesome ads that for me felt very consumer centric, let’s say, as opposed to the actual target audience centric, if that makes sense.

Matt Ramsay  30:21  

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Bruno  30:22  

And then the second part of it was, I was trying to sort of push for which was, you need to test your landing pages. You know, for me, this is something that is really big. And I’m not sure about how you feel about this, and I’ll be interested to hear but from my side of things, when I’m talking to a client, and I find out that they’re spending money on ads, any ads and they are pushing people to their homepage, or to the generic product page or whatever it might be a literally, I have a very, very small stroke and part of me dies inside. And but I have to kind of sit there and say like, Guys, please don’t do this. You know, they’re nice. To be a page dedicated to what it is that you’re trying to get people to take the action for. Because exactly what you were saying earlier, you need to figure out what stage your customer is in, in that journey. So whether he’s still educating himself as to what the options are in the marketplace, whether he’s ready to buy, whether he’s, but whatever that is, but if you send him to your generic homepage, which doesn’t really talk about what the advert spoke about directly, and that it’s a little bit more of a, you know, pissing around basically to try and find that product information, then the chances are you’ve lost someone who was interested at some stage in that customer journey, but actually hasn’t been able to find that. So what’s your take on that? And how do you guys approach that?

Matt Ramsay  31:42  

Yeah, so I guess it’s if you move on from the conversation about budget and where your customer is, once you’ve got the customer to your website, and I kind of use an analogy of a bricks and mortar store, because often it We easier to kind of get your head around that. If you go to a shop, and everything’s disorganised and you don’t have a clear guide of where you want to go, then it’s a bit like a landing page where you’ve got loads of different options, you’re not clear what you’re meant to do next. Again, if your landing page is, is good, but it’s really, really slow, then it’s like going into a shop and having it being really busy all the time, but only one person on the tail with you takes ages you’d get served. So you put it in terms like that, and it often kind of drops a lot quicker than talking about a theoretical landing page because you know, people are used to experiencing good or not so good customer service in a shop than they are maybe relating to a landing page. So the two frustrations are fairly well intertwined despite one being on your high street and one being on you. on your phone or laptop, so we always say, when you first start advertising understand how your website is going to work for people with different intense. So whether it’s someone looking to discover a new product for someone looking to buy, you’ve got to almost involve your website to serve multiple channels at once. And we often say, your homepage is is great for general purpose, but most advertising should go to specific areas because they are a lot more likely to be more relevant to your specific search done. So we’ll look at design, we’ll look at PageSpeed we’ll look at the intent. The landing page is trying to get across in the messaging as well. So yeah, we focus a lot on strategy and managing a Google Ads account but there’s also the creativity of particular landing page. So the creativity of copywriting the quality of the imagery, the trustworthiness as well, because you can push me with a landing page that sells the world. But if you don’t have any reviews or detail on that, then people aren’t going to trust it.

Chris Bruno  34:13  

I agree completely. And that’s, again, I’m just happy that you’re reaffirming these, these points for everyone’s listening. And especially if you do have a small budget, don’t waste it by pushing people to your homepage, please, you know, really think about that customer journey. And Okay, so, Matt, in terms of and again, obviously, we’re always focused on the small to midsize businesses because that’s who we want this podcast to really help. But what sort of resources or websites or tools or whatever areas but what sort of resources would you recommend for people who are looking to try and get this started that maybe have a small budget, and but something that can really help them to to identify whether it’s search terms or opportunities or a way to be able to optimise.

Matt Ramsay  34:56  

So tools are really useful. In the grand scheme of things, but I think they they cut down on maybe expensive resources. So you know, if you need landing pages developed, you don’t need a developer you can just use a tool such as unbounce to create custom landing pages that they then can connect into your website. So in terms of the the creation or the working on a Google Ads account, the most important knowledge is what’s already there within a business owners head or the next strategy because that can always be used to craft the campaign is just because someone’s on a search engine doesn’t mean they’re any different kind of customer. It’s just that you can interact and have a conversation with them off the bat when they’ve just walked into your, your store for example. And in terms of other digital tools, Google’s keyword planner is nothing really fancy But it can give you an understanding of how many people search for a specific keyword, how much it’s going to cost for an average click. And then, based on other metrics like conversion rate, you can, you can use Google’s performance planner to understand what you’re going to get for your budget. So again, all of this is estimates and tests. And you won’t really know until you’ve run a specific campaign, but you can at least get an understanding of if you’ve set up a few campaigns within your Google Ads account, then you can I guess, run those estimates to get a real understanding of what the potential is. So you know, even if it’s down to how many people are going to see your ads, how many people are going to click on them. There’s always elements that are going to be unknown, and, but it’s best to arm yourself with as much data as possible to yet before you start start running these campaigns and then and in terms of understanding other people are in the marketplace. And you can use tools like sem rush or sem rush as other people call it as well to kind of run a quick profile. So you can put in a domain name. And then even on the free account, you get some kind of snippet that will show you what kind of keywords they’re running ads for. So it’s not totally comprehensive, but you can start to see the kind of averages and the average number of clicks are getting the number of keywords as well. And it’s, again, it’s all based off estimated data. This is taking data from Google, and a lot of what a lot of people do is they just put in a keyword into the search term bar, and then say, Okay, these people are advertising these people privatising, but that’s just one search. It’s important whenever you’re getting data To order data from tools is to get averages and aggregates to make sure that you’re getting as reliable as possible image so that you’re not basing your opinion off maybe one or two searches. If you’re stuck for keywords ideas, then there’s so many platforms that can help you with keyword research. I know, word stream is has their own kind of keyword research platform, there’s a tool called Ask the public as well. And I mean, I’m sure so we detailed in the transcripts. I’ll go through this quite quickly but ask the public is, it’s a way you can you can put in a general subject area and it will spit out hundreds of search phrases and questions that are related to that. So if I put in our example earlier protein shakes, it will come out with searches around that. So protein, shake flavours, protein shake types, and then benefits of protein shakes and then questions of what’s the best protein shake me will compare a comparison of protein shakes, and prices, reviews and so on. And then you start to open up a world of possibilities. So just you, as a business owner or a marketer, even your understanding of your business might not align to someone who’s never heard of you before. So it’s important to target someone’s product area or service area understanding before talking about your business, because if you can sell if you can meet need of someone, then regardless of what your business is, most times if you can meet a need or desire, then you’ve done most of the hard work.

Chris Bruno  39:44  

Now, I think that’s awesome. And actually, there’s I know there’s somebody that’s going to be very happy with the list that you’ve just given but, and that will be Olga, who we talked to a couple of weeks ago, for from sem rush. She’s the Global Head of Marketing there. I’m pretty sure she’ll be chuffed to bits here. You’re you added that. And don’t worry if you’re listening, check out the show notes on our website. And I’ll make sure that I list all of those platforms that that Matt has mentioned there. And, Matt, one last brief question just before we round up, what’s your favourite social media channel for you personally? And why? I’m always intrigued by this. So I get to ask the question.

Matt Ramsay  40:26  

That’s a tricky one. So for like, my personal profile is You mean, yeah, that would be LinkedIn. And it’s a funny one, because what other environment and can you literally just have a conversation with someone who is got stacks of experience so you can Yeah, I saw this, the the advertising of this podcast through a combination of LinkedIn and Facebook. And without that, I wouldn’t have been able to share my knowledge as such. But also there’s other areas that have opened up to me through LinkedIn. That would have otherwise been possible. And it’s both a great personal channel and a great sales channel as well. I mean, I hate getting pitched on LinkedIn, but you can have sales conversations in a fair amount of security and comfort without feeling too weird about it. And, and it’s great for industry insights as well. Even if you don’t use it post, you can set up a network of like minded individuals, and you almost absorb relevant information without knowing it. So you can just go through and there’s there’s always certain names within any industry that are quite vocal about the learning, development, sharing knowledge. It’s a great platform for that. I mean, it does come with its negatives, and there’s, there’s a lot of people that will sell to you give them the chance, but yeah, I don’t really use Facebook. Instagrams Instagrams, a great profile. But again, it’s, it’s not something I use too much. And it’s, I’ve never actually used Twitter ever apart from through helping clients with it. And because I don’t think if I created a Twitter profile, people would really care what I have to say because I’ve just been on about marketing and stuff. But LinkedIn, at least there’s a mark of the audience for that. And people, at least semi care what I have to say about stuff.

Chris Bruno  42:30  

But thank you so much. And again, for anyone listening we can add as many links as possible, which I will make sure as well that we add the link to. So you can find Matt on LinkedIn as well. And but thank you so much for sharing, I think you know, PPC is a very deep rabbit hole, as you mentioned, and I do love the rabbit hole. And we could probably do a few hours talking about the the in depth parts of it, if not a few days. But thank you again for coming on the show and for sharing with everybody and yeah Everyone, there you have it some some insights from from Matt. About PPC.

Matt Ramsay  43:06  

Yeah. pleasure. Thanks very much for having me. And yeah, there’s always more that can be shared. Yeah. More than happy if you listening wants to contact me on LinkedIn. And yeah, it’s always good to have a conversation about what you know, the best way of doing things are because difficult thing is that there’s never any one one strict answer. But yeah, yes. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s other guests that come on and talk about paid search. But there’s, there’s, if you’re just starting out with loads of resources, if you’re a business owner, and you want to get started then yeah, it’s all about knowing your business, being careful making the right decisions. So yeah, always a pleasure. And thanks for having me on. 

Chris Bruno  43:45  

Thanks, Matt.

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai