Google does what is right.. for Google.

Exciting times as I’ve settled on early April for my book launch. Further details to follow. Do you know how much you are spending on Google and why you’re spending it? Nope? Not many do. We’re big believers in spending money on ads, but we expect a certain return for that investment. Being a Google Premier Partner means we expect a little autonomy. Unfortunately Google often likes to interfere.

What I learned

• Why you should understand your Google spend
• SEO traffic isn’t free
• Our % target for ad spend
• Why Google doesn’t always have your best interests at heart

Transcript

Hey, welcome back Rankers and retailers. It`s already 2020. We`re back in the midst of it. Back in, going hard. Thank you for all the responses last week about the book. Launch will be early April. Ooh, exciting! More details on the venue and the exact date. But this date is before Easter.

I want to talk to you a little bit today about understanding what you are spending with Google, and why you`re spending that money. Now we`ve talked before about SEO costs and those sorts of things. And how SEO traffic is not free, and all that sort of stuff.

But ads are great, right? And we do a lot of ads. And we`re very big believers in ads for generating revenue. It`s great, right? And we do them in a certain way, and we look to get a certain return. And we`re a Premier Partner, certified Premier Partner, with Google. So we seem to know a little bit about what we`re doing. And with most of our clients, we`re aiming for at least a thousand percent return on ad spend. Every client is looking for that sort of metric. But typically with us, that`s what we look to do.

We have one client in particular that we`re looking after at the moment. We`ve been working on their ads, trying to get their ads back up to speed. And these things can take time, especially with the AI components associated with some of those ad products. It has to have a certain amount of learning. So you`ve got to know when to tinker, and when not to tinker, and all these sorts of things.

Unfortunately, sometimes Google gets in the way. And one such case happened last week. So this client, we`re only just back into the year, and the Google Help Desk is ringing around our client`s, well not all our clients, one client. And pretty sure that`s not meant to happen if you`re a Premier Partner.

And so someone from Google rings one of our clients. And we`ve seen it happen before where they`re ringing our clients directly. And then they`ve given them all this advice over the phone about what`s wrong with their ad campaign, how they could improve it. And the client`s gone, `Oh, what`s StewArt Media doing then? What? Geez! Well, we`ll go and do all these changes.” So the client thought they were doing the right thing. And the client went and implemented all those changes recommended by this Google person.

Now, this is what happened. Costs went through the roof, as you can see here on this one campaign, across all campaigns that they`ve tinkered with. Costs went through the roof, and you can see there, we got no extra money. So that`s just throwing money away into Google`s pocket, right?

And the people who ring you up from Google, who do you think they work for? They work for Google, right? Now you might say, this isn`t a conspiracy theory. But you need to understand what you should be spending, and what your own returns should be on Google. And treat it like a marketplace. Treat it like eBay. Treat it like Amazon. Understand how much you`re going to spend to get a return.

And when you reach that budget, you might decide, though, `All right, we`re here. We`re spending this much per month. Now we`re going to try to get a better return for that same spin, rather than throwing more money at it.`

Hopefully that`s helpful. Be very, very careful of recommendations from Google. Sometimes they can be really good. Other times they can be like this. Hopefully, that`s helpful. See you next week, bye.

Jim

Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.