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Transcript

[0:00]

I'm gonna show you the most efficient strategy for launching Google Ads that work for your start up without wasting money unnecessarily. Because let's face it, Google Ads and every other ad platform for that matter does have a tendency to waste our money unless we're very careful about it. So I'm gonna show you a really simple approach that will get you more results faster with less money spent on ads. So first, who is this video for? I want to be really clear about that.

[0:22]

1st and foremost, this is a video for startups or marketers at startups who've already decided they're gonna run Google Ads, and now they're just figuring out how to proceed. Key point there. You've already decided that Google Ads are right for you, and you're ready to go. I'm not trying in this video to convince anyone whether or not they should do Google Ads. Please don't jump into this unless you have done your own research and you've determined that Google Ads is something you're ready for.

[0:54]

Furthermore, I think the strategy that I'll be sharing here will be even more applicable and your odds of success will be even higher if some of the following is true as well. You have healthy conversion volume. So whether you're optimizing your campaigns or you plan to towards sign ups or trial starts or purchases, whatever that may be, you should have healthy conversion volume. You know, Google asks that you come to the table with at least enough budget to drive 50 or 60, even 90 or a 100 of those conversions per month. So you should have a healthy baseline of conversion volume already coming into this.

[01:26]

And then lastly, you should have, you know, a few 1,000 site visitors per month. Maybe an exception there if you're, like, b to b or enterprise SaaS, and you just have a lower visitor volume overall. But you should have a baseline of website visitors and conversions for this to apply to you.

[01:44]

So first, as a refresher, how are we taught to launch Google Ads? Well, what we're taught by online course creators, Google Ads themselves through all of their help center documentation and and resources, basically, the whole industry is that we do the following.

It's to use some combination of your own brainstorming, so empathizing with your customer through things like persona docs and other design thinking approaches, and combining that or using that to research keywords using Google Ads Keyword Planner, Kind of piecing those two parts together to use Google Ads keyword planner and come up with a list of keywords that fit your appetite and that you're going to target with your first campaigns. So brainstorming plus keyword planner. That's what we're taught. This approach is fine. It's just riskier than it needs to be, in my opinion, as you'll see from the strategy that I lay out.

[02:42]

If you're a younger start up, maybe you're seed or series a, and you haven't dabbled in Google Ads yet, and you're just using this as an experiment, it's a channel experiment, this approach may have a bit more risk and waste involved than the one that I will propose. I believe there is a cheat code or a couple different cheat codes for choosing which keywords to launch your account with that doesn't involve treating yourself or your ads account like a guinea pig.

[03:12]

Before I lay out the strategy, you have to understand that it's based on the following premise, and that is that on Google Ads, keyword relevancy is everything, in my humble opinion. Keyword relevancy, meaning how close is the match between the keywords you've chosen and the product or service you're selling and who you're selling them to? How close and compatible are those two sides?

[03:32]

There are dozens of factors that determine your success or failure on Google Ads. But the four factors I always think about first and foremost, mainly because these are the ones that we actually have the most control over as advertisers, are the following. It's the keywords you choose, the ad copy that you run on those keywords, the landing page experience you provide, and then how much you bid and the bidding strategies that you leverage. Those are the four factors that I think of front and center.

[04:02]

And based on what I've seen firsthand multiple times, if your Google Ads fail, it will most likely be because you chose the wrong keywords to advertise on. It'll be a matter of keyword relevancy, more so than any of the other factors. In other words, it's better for you to have extremely relevant keywords that you're advertising on and average or mediocre ad copy, average or mediocre landing page experience, and then average bids than it is to have poor or mediocre keyword relevancy paired with a stellar, you know, stellar ad copy, a stellar landing page experience, and then extremely competitive bids. The former is a better place to be in than the latter. It's better to prioritize keyword relevancy above the rest of these factors.

[04:50]

So with that premise in mind, the strategy we're gonna run is we're going to find the keywords that are already working for you organically. And I'll show you how to do this. As well as the keywords that are already working for your competitors, We're gonna gather those all up, and then we're gonna use Google Ads keyword planner to refine those keywords and narrow down our list. We're gonna use Google Search Console, Semrush, and then use Google Ads keyword planner. Let's dive into how to do this.

[05:18]

So step 1, we're gonna use Google Search Console to find the keywords that are already working for your site organically. Now, this is why I said it's good to have at least a few 1000 visitors a month to your site, because if you do, you probably have some people already finding your site through organic search. So all you need to do is go to search.google.com/searchconsole, and you'll pull this up. Open up Google Search Console, and you can actually use the search results report. Just click on it in the left side navigation. The search results report will show you the keywords people are already using to find your site.

[05:53]

And most importantly, you can even filter out the results, and you'll wanna do this. Filter out any queries that contain your brand name. So that'll that'll give you a full list of just non brand keywords that you can then take over to Google Ads. So look at the top queries that your site is currently ranking for organically, and what that tells you is that Google has deemed your site as an authority for those queries in those topics. And if you're ranking well for these organically, you're gonna have high ad relevancy as well. So you know you can take these keywords over to Google Ads and find success there.

[06:30]

Now that you've found the keywords that you're already performing for organically, now we're gonna look at your competitors, and we're gonna use Semrush to do this. Now no matter what niche you're in, unless it's, like, the most cutting edge newest category, you most likely have at least one competitor who's been running Google Ads for a while.

[06:50]

So now we're gonna use Semrush to find out the keywords your competitors are bidding on and which ones they've had success with. So go to Semrush. They have a very generous free trial, and go to their advertising research feature. And this is crazy. It's crazy that this data is there for us to look at. Here, you can look up each of your competitors to see if they're running search ads. And for the ones that are running search ads, you can see all this data on how they've been doing it.

[07:15]

You can see the keywords that they advertise on and what position they're typically in for each of those keywords. You can see their landing pages. You can see the volume for the different keywords that they've been spotted on. And most importantly, for each keyword that they've been spotted on, you can see how long they've been advertising on that keyword. So what you're gonna wanna do is find keywords where they've been advertising for at least, like, 3 months straight, because what that tells you is they found success with that keyword.

[07:43]

In my experience, if they're a good advertiser, they'll cut a keyword if it's not working pretty fast. So if you find any that they've been advertising on for months at a time, you know that that's a winner, and you know that it makes sense for you to take a try at it as well. So find any keywords they've been advertising on consistently for at least a little while and add those all to your list.

[08:04]

And just to address the elephant in the room, you know, you might be thinking, well, isn't it better to find keywords that no one's advertising on and know, find a blue ocean for yourself in search ads? Yes and no. It's much better to start out in the right areas, even if there's competition. You don't want to go and try to find keywords that no one else is bidding on, And in reality, the reason no one else is bidding on them is because they're stinkers, and they're not actually gonna drive results. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. You want to copy what's been proven to work to establish a baseline for yourself. And then later on, slowly but surely, you can expand outward and expand your exposure on Google Ads. But you want to start where there's proven to be results to be had, even if that means you'll have a little bit of competition along the way.

[08:50]

Now last step. Take all the keywords you gathered up, the ones that are working for you organically, the ones that your competitors find to be working, compile them all together, and bring them into Google Ads keyword planner to refine the list. So you're not using keyword planner to do 0 to 1 keyword research. You're using it to verify and refine the keywords that you've already found from other places.

[09:13]

You want to verify that competition is acceptable. So keyword planner will tell you, like, low, medium, high for the level of competition it's seeing for each of those. Make sure that's in check. You're also gonna wanna check that the, the average cost per click bid is within your range. You can afford each of the keywords that you found.

[09:31]

So you can kind of make sure that all of those factors are acceptable in aggregate for your keyword list, and make sure to cross out any keywords that just fail all three of those.

[09:40]

Lastly, this step is really important as well because you can actually use this step to kind of look for patterns and similarities in some of the keywords and actually look and see, okay, like, can you can you combine any of them into, phrase match? Are there any that really have a lot in common and maybe you can like back out a step and just go with a broad match keyword instead? Google Ads keyword planner is a really good tool for kind of deciding which match types you should use for some of these keywords, and to shed more light on that side of things.

[10:10]

There you have it. So now you have a keyword list that you know is gonna work on day 1. You're gonna be able to put money into it. That money is gonna be able to go to good use. There will be competition. You will not have the nastiest cost per acquisition in the game, not yet. But you're gonna start out, you're gonna get some very valuable data flowing into your account. You're gonna start to establish a baseline, and from there, you can land and expand. Start expanding out and finding more blue oceans in your search ads.

[10:41]

If you enjoyed this video, you want to see more start up friendly, growth strategies like this, make sure to subscribe to the channel, and, yeah. See you in the next one.