Module 4 - Creating a strategy that is scalable

Why does the temptation to get going ruin most campaigns?

Because putting ads up before the planning is done is what causes most people to fail. If you are at the very start of your journey, the first thing you are going to want to do is get going. Everybody wants to get going. We are all in a place where we want results.

A lot of people have been shown, or taught, that there is a silver bullet out there. Go back on Facebook four or five years and it was amazing. You could stick a bunch of ads up and get results straight away.

That is not to say you get nothing if you skip the planning. You will still get results. They will not be as good as they could be, you will not be able to scale properly, and you will not understand why your campaigns are not allowing you to scale.

What order should you build a scalable strategy in?

You have to do it in this order, or at least we think you need to do it in this order, and if someone comes up with a better way of doing it, let me know. This is a blueprint for success that we have used for over two years now to scale campaigns for people.

Anytime you decide to skip one of these steps, think snakes and ladders. You fall back to the start and you go back into that green box in the top left that says temptation to get going.

The research and planning means researching your competitors, researching your keywords, building your audiences, understanding the offer inside and out, and looking at all of the different channels where you could be placing your ads. That is what gives you the ability to set your KPIs.

How do you set KPIs and a budget you can actually live with?

Set your targets at the outset and work backwards from them. All the way through this course I will be hammering home the fact that you need to write this down. You need a set of KPIs that you have set in stone and that you are trying to hit.

That might be, we are trying to sell x number of products, or get x number of enquiries, or x number of people onto our offer, or x number of registrations. Once that is written down, you can work out your budget, which is how much money am I prepared to risk over what period to achieve the results I have just written down in step two.

Do not be unrealistic. Do not sit there and say I am going to spend one pound and get one sale for a thousand pounds and happy days. That does not happen. If you do not know, ask advice in some of the forums, ask in our forum, email me and I will gladly help you out with setting your KPIs.

There are minimum budgets you need for testing, but if you have five bucks a day you can set KPIs in line with that. It will just take you longer to achieve results. If you have a thousand dollars a day, I would suggest you do not start with that. Work your way through, build up to the point where you have some decent conversion numbers, and then you can scale.

Why does note taking matter so much?

Because Google records what you changed, but only you can record why. Ongoing note taking is everything. You must take notes at every stage.

I am guilty of it myself. I like to sit and think I know pretty much everything that is going on inside a campaign, and in reality I probably do. But if I see an anomaly, or some great results coming through, I want to check back on the changes I made on a particular date and understand what happened. It might have been the changes I made a week before those new results came through, because Google took time to learn and serve new placements.

You may have hundreds and hundreds of different changes going on inside an account. You will only be able to put the pieces of that jigsaw together if you have taken notes. Just do it on a spreadsheet, it is fine.

I have been running a client account today where he is getting very few impressions, so I have upped the bid by 20 percent. I am going to see if that works and check back in a couple of days. From other campaigns and other ad groups I have learned what that effect looks like in that particular niche. Another example is that over the last two weeks my notes show Google consistently charging over and above what they normally do for cost per click on the display network in certain placements, which helps me decide whether I want to continue with those placements in certain client accounts.

Why must every campaign have conversion tracking and remarketing?

Because without conversion tracking you are never going to be able to consistently scale. That is fundamental to what we are doing in this course.

Build all of the different conversion events. Do not just have conversions such as sale or enquiry. We want to know what else people do when they land on our site, and what they are doing where they are watching our videos.

Then set up remarketing. There is a whole remarketing video in this course and several mentions of it all the way through. If you are not going to set up remarketing you will still have success, but you will have a fraction of the success you would have had with proper remarketing loops.

How often should you look at your campaigns?

Set a schedule and review at the same time every day, so you have a consistent benchmark. Say to yourself, I am going to review that particular campaign every day at 4pm.

If you are on a really small budget you might only need to look every three or four days. Do not get obsessed and look every hour, as some people I have seen do. Let the campaigns learn, and trust the fact that we have set our budgets, we understand where we are going and we know why we made certain decisions.

Every wrong decision we make is an opportunity to learn inside Google, and we will not make those mistakes again, providing we have learned, made the notes and know why something happened.

How should you structure campaigns before moving to target CPA?

Build the campaign structure from the ground up, from basic to expanded and then to target CPA. If you do not do that and you just guess, it is finger in the air time.

I see this all the time from pretty much anyone who comes to us and says can we help with YouTube ads. We see all sorts of different structures people have just had a go at. I am using Maximise Conversions, I am doing lead forms, I have got a target CPA, all these different structures at once.

Building properly means you are tracking your conversions, learning what is working and optimising continually. You can see which structures are working, which ad groups are working in which campaigns, and why. Name your campaigns correctly with a structure and it is easy to have eyes on what is working and what is not.

A lot of what we do within this can be gut feel, and the gut feel then leads us to new assumptions, setting new KPIs and going back into those notes and improving. It is test, learn, reiterate, improve, all the time. It is when people get lazy and think they have got a winning campaign that it goes wrong. Yes, you can duplicate it, but ask whether there is enough headroom in it, whether there are enough impressions available, and whether the budget will fit.

You will also see patterns, two or three week rolling patterns where the performance of a campaign suddenly falls off. Ask why. Sometimes it is a case of having to refresh the campaign by duplicating it, letting it learn again and letting it scale.

Why is target CPA from day one a mistake?

Because Google is offering you a target based on other advertisers' data, not yours. The argument I have with Google a lot of the time is that they will offer you this from day one, and that is fundamentally wrong. Google is basically saying, look, other advertisers in your niche are able to achieve a target cost of acquisition of x.

If you run a target CPA campaign from day one, good luck. I cannot see them very often driving enough impressions or conversions unless you have a really big budget.

What we would rather you do is follow this process and take your notes. You will learn so much more this way than if you just let Google use smart bidding to attempt to achieve a cost per acquisition for you without any data. You want to be leading Google by the hand, not allowing Google to open your wallet, take as much as it likes and give you back, I do not know, might be success, might not.

You do not want to be sat there at the end of two or three months having spent a boatload of money, not having achieved, and just sitting there with massive amounts of disappointment. There is a difference between disappointment and having learned. When people come to us for the done for you service that we offer, we are often saying to them there is a testing period and we need a certain budget to actually learn.

Why is the quality of a conversion more important than the number of conversions?

Because it is not always about a conversion, and that might sound daft. It is about the quality of the conversion.

A client came to us recently who gets thousands of conversions on their website. The conversion event they were using is arrive at landing page and spend 30 seconds, which is okay, but they have been spending thousands and thousands of pounds a month and not taking it to the next level. They are a flights business and they take enquiries for holidays, so with us they will now be optimising for inbound calls and form fills on the website, because landing people on a page tells you nothing about how good the enquiry is.

What we have done is link their CRM back into Google Ads. We are now able to see from their sales people whether a call is a good quality call and which campaign it came from, so you can attribute this is a really good lead straight back to the campaign that produced it.

That may just be basket value, but a lot of the people watching this course will be coaches, and for them it will just be an enquiry. I deal with lots of coaches. One coach in particular runs Facebook himself and we run his YouTube ads. He gets hundreds and hundreds of enquiries from Facebook, and his cost per acquisition on YouTube is far higher. So people are thinking, hang on a minute, why would I be doing YouTube? The quality of enquiry from YouTube is 10 times better than that of Facebook, because the Facebook campaign is very general and the audience is wide. Yes, there are lots of enquiries, but it is costing him a lot of time to deal with them and a lot of time speaking to people who simply cannot afford the service.

How do you take a working campaign to the next level?

Go back through the process and set a next level KPI, instead of sitting on your laurels. I see this again and again. People get to a really decent cost of acquisition and then do not take it further.

At some point there will be more competitors coming to the market and somebody else bidding on the placements you are having success from. So you need to find more placements as you go along, and you need to understand which channels and types of channels your best conversions live in.

Even if you are happy with your results, go back through this process. Add more conversion events, add the quality of conversion, set some new targets. Results can always be better and they can always be a lot worse.

I know I have been on a bit of a rant there about note taking, budgets, how to track conversions and the quality of conversions, but it is so important, and there is so much past just a plain old conversion. It is a science. It is like a game of poker, but if you have got all the answers in your book you know where to go next. If you are just going off gut feel and you do not use a process, you will get a level of results, but you are not going to scale as you could and should.