Product Startup Podcast Episode 136: Sell a Physical Product With Google Ads

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from an expert who manages $18 million per month in e-commerce ad spend on how to launch a new hardware product via Google advertising.

00:00:12 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors,

00:00:21 Narrator: product developers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from

00:00:29 Narrator: initial idea to getting your product on store shelves. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business.

00:00:39 Narrator: Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, on to the show.

00:00:49 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today I'm very excited to introduce Jem Bourouh to the show.

00:00:52 Kevin Mako: Gem is a partner at Accelerated, one of Europe's leading direct-to-consumer advertising agencies for e-commerce.

00:00:58 Kevin Mako: Gem has won many awards and has had seven products hit seven figures in sales in just the first third. days of their campaigns.

00:01:05 Kevin Mako: Today, Jem is going to share some valuable knowledge of her inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on the different types of Google advertising for a new hardware

00:01:12 Kevin Mako: product, the structure and tools needed to launch your first campaign and tips for maximizing

00:01:16 Kevin Mako: the success and growth of your Google Ads campaigns to sell directly to end consumers. Now, on the episode. Hey, Jim, welcome to the show. Hey, Kevin. Thanks for having me.

00:01:26 Kevin Mako: Super excited to be here. Well, excited to have you here talking about selling direct to customers on Google, which is

00:01:32 Kevin Mako: something that is easier than people think, at least to get started. Obviously, there's a lot that goes in behind it.

00:01:38 Kevin Mako: But it's another one of these channels for a hardware startup or for a new product that's launching to the market to sell direct to customers. And it's something that is not

00:01:47 Kevin Mako: always thought about as a first sales channel avenue, but something that can be done right at home from your very own desk.

00:01:52 Kevin Mako: So I wanted to talk to you about some of the best practices around this. You have a tremendous amount of experience in the space. But I'll let you share that.

00:01:58 Kevin Mako: Give us a

00:02:02 Jem Bourouh: of selling hardware products direct to customers on Google. Yeah, definitely.

00:02:07 Jem Bourouh: So for those of you who maybe do not know me, my name is Jim Borough. Born raised in Germany, actually emigrated to the UAE, the last year in September.

00:02:16 Jem Bourouh: Move to Bali, so I'm living in Bali right now. And like some things that I've done, we've had like several product launches scaled

00:02:22 Jem Bourouh: from zero to a million seven times already within a month, which is like crazy if you think about it right now.

00:02:27 Jem Bourouh: The adsman that we're managing within our Google Ads agency is around like 18 million euros. used to be 20 million U.S., but ever since the euro dropped,

00:02:36 Jem Bourouh: it's more like 18 million U.S. that we're managing right now, awarded by the two-coma award, two-coma club, by click

00:02:42 Jem Bourouh: funnels by making one million with one funnel, awarded by Zipify, by making one million in upsells with an upsell funnel.

00:02:51 Kevin Mako: So yeah, that's what I do. A tremendous amount of experience. So let's talk about Google, break it down. How do you sell

00:02:57 Kevin Mako: on Google? What is Google AdWords advertising and how does that apply to hardware startups trying to sell a first product via that channel directly to end

00:03:05 Jem Bourouh: customers and buyers to actually use that product. Yeah, it's a great question, Kevin. So generally speaking, when people think about

00:03:11 Jem Bourouh: advertising online, I think many times people are always overcomplicating it and, you know,

00:03:17 Jem Bourouh: having worries about nothing and just like overcomplicating it, it doesn't have to be that way

00:03:21 Jem Bourouh: because, of course, if you think about social media and all of these things, you're like, oh, I need a video and then I need a page and the setup might be super, super complicated,

00:03:29 Jem Bourouh: but it certainly is not complicated. So when we're talking about Google ads, it's like very, very simple. So let's say you want to buy shoes online.

00:03:37 Jem Bourouh: Where's the first place that you're going to look for on Google? There are like different types of ads that you can see.

00:03:41 Jem Bourouh: Let's say you are in need of a dentist apartment and you don't have a dentist in the city that you're living in.

00:03:48 Jem Bourouh: Naturally, the first thing that you're going to do is look up dentists in my area or something on Google.

00:03:53 Jem Bourouh: And then you're going to get these ads where it says sponsored ads, whatever, like the first few. and these are search ads. So basically what happens with these search ads

00:04:02 Jem Bourouh: is that people are bidding on certain keywords. So basically the phrases and the queries that user puts in and Google and they're bidding on the keywords.

00:04:10 Jem Bourouh: So they are always showing up for that respective keyword. There's also ads for like shopping. So whenever you're looking for Nike shoes, for example,

00:04:17 Jem Bourouh: you're getting these picture ads. This is what a shopping ad is. We have YouTube ads. So these annoying five seconds in front of every video that you can skip.

00:04:25 Jem Bourouh: You have display ads. Display ads is when people talk about oh i've talked about this and now it's haunting me or oh i've clicked on this website now i'm getting

00:04:32 Jem Bourouh: it over and over and over again because display is mainly used for retargeting which is basically

00:04:36 Jem Bourouh: you've had a first interaction somewhere on a website or a competitor's website or something and

00:04:41 Jem Bourouh: now you know you see it over and over and over again the frequency is super high and then you also have discovery which is basically if you're on your phone below the youtube

00:04:49 Jem Bourouh: videos or on your desktop basically on the side so this is basically what google ads is and the beauty of google ads is that

00:04:56 Jem Bourouh: as a consumer, it always makes things easier to find, whether it is a service or a product,

00:05:01 Jem Bourouh: but especially from a seller perspective and a business owner perspective, it's a great tool

00:05:05 Jem Bourouh: because at the end of the day, hopefully you know your customer avatar, you know exactly who's buying your respective product.

00:05:12 Jem Bourouh: And then you can basically just show up in front of these people who are trying to purchase your product, your service that is going to help them

00:05:19 Kevin Mako: solve something that they're struggling with or even make their life easier. That's amazing because one of the big keys,

00:05:26 Kevin Mako: of Google, first of all, is that there's a lot of different channels. And I love that you highlighted the different ones. There's the search ads that come up for services.

00:05:33 Kevin Mako: There's product ads, which are actually very much emerging and very high tech. Google has really put a lot of effort

00:05:38 Kevin Mako: into trying to compete with some of the other major players, like Amazon or other, the variety of places that you can buy product online.

00:05:45 Kevin Mako: Google is really trying to put a conscious effort into actually competing in that. And of course, Amazon is actually one of their main subscribers to product advertising.

00:05:52 Kevin Mako: So that in and itself is a big ticket item for hardware companies. And it's an emerging platform that's easier and easier to launch products on.

00:06:01 Kevin Mako: Then you've got other things like display, which is intent-based display on websites you're looking at.

00:06:05 Kevin Mako: If you're looking at a blog, talking about buying shoes online, it might be a little ad in the corner. All of these things come together to have intent-based advertising

00:06:14 Kevin Mako: in front of people looking to buy a product either yours or very similar to yours at the right time and at the right place.

00:06:21 Kevin Mako: And with all of these channels, it gives a tremendous opportunity to somebody who's creating a new product, especially most of the listeners on the show are creating something

00:06:29 Kevin Mako: innovative, something unique, something that's either solving a pain point or creating an opportunity for somebody. So if you can find on Google that avenue to

00:06:38 Kevin Mako: get your ad in front of those people who have those certain types of intent, there's a very high probability of that person or that

00:06:44 Kevin Mako: intent-based audience is going to convert into an actual sale.

00:06:47 Jem Bourouh: So, Jim, let's get into it. How does that work? It's a great question. How does it work? The question really is, like, where people want to get

00:06:54 Jem Bourouh: start on what the easiest avenue is, because this is like what many people are mostly asking

00:06:58 Jem Bourouh: themselves. It really depends on the service of the hardware, the product that you have at the end of

00:07:03 Jem Bourouh: the day. If it might be something that is super new, no one has seen it before right. You're in a super blue ocean.

00:07:09 Jem Bourouh: You probably want to target by just having keywords that are more targeted

00:07:13 Jem Bourouh: informational queries. It's not really a query where people would be looking for the exact product,

00:07:20 Jem Bourouh: but more like, you know, problems that they have and issues that they have and things that

00:07:24 Jem Bourouh: they are struggling with kind of like reverse engineering like this is my product no one is looking

00:07:29 Jem Bourouh: for it what is the avatar struggling with and this is like how you can come up with all of these

00:07:33 Jem Bourouh: informational queries and of course like it could be also easier depending on the product that

00:07:37 Jem Bourouh: you have but of course like you really have to separate the way that you are targeting so the way

00:07:43 Jem Bourouh: i personally structure my campaigns is i have one dedicated search campaign just for transactional keywords and by transaction what i mean is when people are really looking for

00:07:52 Jem Bourouh: the respective products or alternatives, then we have a navigational campaign. A navigational campaign is pretty much where you'll have all of the competitors' brand names.

00:08:02 Jem Bourouh: So let's say you're not in a blue ocean, but you might be in a red ocean or you're still in a

00:08:06 Jem Bourouh: blue ocean and you have people who are not selling the exact same thing, but something that still solves the same issue, but in a different way.

00:08:14 Jem Bourouh: So you put all of these competitors into the campaign and like all of the skews that they have, the names, the product types, basically, right?

00:08:22 Jem Bourouh: Because at the end of the day, this is what people are. also looking for and then of course we have another campaign which is informational so targeted towards

00:08:28 Jem Bourouh: these alternative ideas or issues that people are struggling with this is basically how you can get set up and

00:08:34 Jem Bourouh: going this is like why it's so incredibly powerful and we've had this in the beginning people always tend

00:08:38 Jem Bourouh: to overcomplicate things where it doesn't have to be really complicated right as long as you know who your

00:08:43 Jem Bourouh: avatar is and in my opinion this should be a given if you're launching a product because launching a product

00:08:48 Jem Bourouh: developing and everything you know like of course you're not developing something if you don't know what

00:08:53 Jem Bourouh: the end result of the product is going to be or with the issues it's going to solve, right?

00:08:57 Kevin Mako: It kind of goes hand in hand with the product that you have and the research that you are trying to conduct here. I like the mention of avatar.

00:09:05 Kevin Mako: Break that down a bit for somebody who's developing a new product. What is an avatar? And how do they use that to then create the actual target keywords for their advertising

00:09:14 Jem Bourouh: campaign on Google? Avatar is really, really wide, right? We could pin it down to who is going to be the target market. First things first, you're trying to pin it down like,

00:09:23 Jem Bourouh: top bottom. Something that I want to mention here is like a super interesting example from the dad of a friend of mine who's a headhunter.

00:09:29 Jem Bourouh: And the way he asks questions to prospects is he's not really trying to get to the underlying issue, but it's more like seeing the thought process that

00:09:38 Jem Bourouh: people have. So an example would be how many people in Japan are buying razors? And you know, this is like where the entire thought process starts.

00:09:46 Jem Bourouh: Okay, how many people are living in Japan, who was shaving? Is it only men? Is it women? Do people have razors that they can use multiple

00:09:53 Jem Bourouh: times, you know, can you have an upsell for that? Basically, just thinking about how many times people shave and hair growth is going to be different.

00:09:59 Jem Bourouh: So it's from simple thinking to more dedicated thinking. And it's the same thing with the avatar. It starts like very basic. And then it goes down, who's struggling with this?

00:10:07 Jem Bourouh: What are the ages? What about the population? Who do we want to target? What country are they living in? And then it goes down to things such as age, how old is the

00:10:14 Jem Bourouh: person, then what job are they working? So it's kind of like thinking about not only gender and age,

00:10:21 Jem Bourouh: but also like hobbies, what the people do, what they're struggling with, how they spent

00:10:25 Kevin Mako: their free time. The easiest way I like to think of an avatar is imagine your customer, visually imagine that customer, name them.

00:10:34 Kevin Mako: A lot of companies will actually have a physical form of their not necessarily ideal customer, but they're most likely customer.

00:10:41 Kevin Mako: And they're trying to actually figure out what does that person do? What's their sex? What's their age? What are they doing? Where are they living?

00:10:48 Kevin Mako: What is their lifestyle habits, etc. etc. And you can generally for most physical consumer products, especially if you have a niche

00:10:54 Kevin Mako: invention or something that's solving a very specific pain point or creating a very specific

00:10:58 Kevin Mako: opportunity, you could usually drill that down to a very specific type of person. That's your avatar. That's your customer.

00:11:05 Kevin Mako: Obviously, there's going to be different customers, but that's kind of a base point. And that allows you really easily to understand, okay, here is the person

00:11:11 Kevin Mako: that I'm trying to target. Now, how do I create keywords to attract that very person to my product? And that comes into the next step.

00:11:19 Kevin Mako: So first is Avatar, once we understand what the customer is, we have a very clearly defined picture of what our buyer is like. What is their intent?

00:11:27 Kevin Mako: Now we try and match a keywords to it. So, Jim, tactically speaking here, if we have no website, no Google AdWords account,

00:11:34 Kevin Mako: anything like that, how do you set this stuff up so that somebody can actually create an ad for their product, have somebody go through to a website and actually purchase

00:11:42 Jem Bourouh: a product from them? What are some of the tactical basics of it? Very, very good question.

00:11:46 Jem Bourouh: Because first of all, as you've already mentioned, you need to think about the status quo. So where are you ad right now? And how does the entire workflow of Google ads work?

00:11:55 Jem Bourouh: So not only like workflow about like, how do I set up ads in a technical way, but like, what is the customer journey? So someone looks for the ad. They click the ad.

00:12:03 Jem Bourouh: If they click the ad, they're going to be sent to a website. You know, this is like the first requirement. You need a website.

00:12:08 Jem Bourouh: If you don't have a website, very simple to get one going. You can have simple HTML code with a Shopify buy button, for example, and integration. You can also just send them.

00:12:17 Jem Bourouh: If you're on Kickstarter, you can also send them to Kickstarter. It's super simple. So you don't have to make a website, putting the tracking code, super simple.

00:12:24 Jem Bourouh: Basically, all of the information that's, let's go with an example of Kickstarter, actually.

00:12:28 Jem Bourouh: So whenever you have people who are going to your Kickstarter, they know about your product,

00:12:33 Jem Bourouh: they know about the vision, they know about the money you're trying to raise, they know about what exactly they're going to get.

00:12:38 Jem Bourouh: If it's like a greeting card for a dollar, you know, or like a mention for five or like an actual product for 50 or whatever, the price point might be.

00:12:46 Jem Bourouh: This is pretty much the entire customer journey for we're talking about Kickstarter. So they click the ad, they go to your Kickstarter and then they're able to see all of the

00:12:54 Jem Bourouh: information. Let's say you don't have a Kickstarter where you can just do is simulate something like a Kickstarter. There are like many, many websites that you can emulate here.

00:13:02 Jem Bourouh: The easiest way to do it is probably just look at your competitors and see what they're doing. If you don't know what the website

00:13:08 Jem Bourouh: of your competitor is, the easiest thing and this goes a bit more into the technical side of things is, and it's not hard because we can use tools.

00:13:15 Jem Bourouh: A tool that I really love to use is SEM Rush, because what SEMRush allows us to do is we can just put in hypothetical keywords. I could just type in the keyword,

00:13:24 Jem Bourouh: and then it's going to give me advertisers who are bidding on that respective keyword, and what this allows me to do is, of course, see their website,

00:13:31 Jem Bourouh: and then, like, get some more insights on how much they're spending, what the traffic looks like, how many people are looking for the keyword in a month.

00:13:37 Jem Bourouh: And not all of this data is 100% accurate, But what you're trying to do is to see what the websites of the competitors look like.

00:13:46 Jem Bourouh: And I'm not saying that you should copy this one to one, but it's just for you to get a feeling

00:13:50 Jem Bourouh: and understanding of how they're communicating all of their USPs, the value propositions and everything and what they're offering, the price points.

00:13:58 Jem Bourouh: This is like basically how you can conduct this entire competitor research and market research with SEM Rush.

00:14:03 Jem Bourouh: Once you have that set up, things you can use to set up a website if you just want to set up a super, super basic website. Shopify, of course, you can do anything.

00:14:11 Jem Bourouh: If everything of you is hosted on Webflow, go with Webflow. If it's on WordPress, go with WordPress. Once you've set up

00:14:16 Jem Bourouh: your website, you know, you need to implement the tracking code, but there are also like apps they can install. You know, it takes you five minutes, boom.

00:14:23 Jem Bourouh: You have the tracking code set up because if you're bidding on keywords and everything, you need to know what keyword actually brought

00:14:28 Jem Bourouh: the sale. It's impossible to increase the budget and everything if you do not know where the actual purchases are coming from.

00:14:34 Jem Bourouh: Of course, like with the recent data policy, private changes from Apple and iOS back in May 2021, for those of you who do not know, there's been a change that Apple

00:14:43 Jem Bourouh: basically updated iOS and pretty much removed a lot of the tracking options. So something that I like to

00:14:50 Jem Bourouh: use for the tracking that goes hand in hand with Shopify is a tool called Triple Whale, which just allows you to do the attribution better. An attribution is the purchase is being

00:14:59 Jem Bourouh: attributed to their respective campaigns or keywords or whatever it is.

00:15:03 Kevin Mako: This is basically the entire workflow, like starting from website and everything. To break it down, first foremost, you have to have some sort of a website or a platform

00:15:11 Kevin Mako: or an area where somebody can actually look at your product, see what it does, and click the purchase button.

00:15:17 Kevin Mako: So that's essentially your purchase asset, your website, whatever else. Relatively easy to set up.

00:15:21 Kevin Mako: You can hire an agency to do that or you can set it up on many platforms that are out there,

00:15:24 Kevin Mako: but you need somewhere to land to showcase your product, essentially your store online and have somebody buy it. Next step is you have to obviously set up your campaign.

00:15:33 Kevin Mako: figure out what your intent is based on the original avatar and get people actually coming to that site.

00:15:38 Kevin Mako: And I love that you mentioned Jem 2, something that a first time Google AdWords advertiser might not think about, but how important tracking is.

00:15:45 Kevin Mako: Everything must be tracked because what you want to do over time is figure out what is working, what is not working.

00:15:51 Kevin Mako: And I think that makes it very simple for somebody to start a Google campaign because you don't need to perfect it out of the gate.

00:15:58 Kevin Mako: You just need to get the basic information out there. think about the basic intent-based keywords, and then start the campaign.

00:16:05 Kevin Mako: From there, you can actually analyze and review what's happening in real time based on who's

00:16:10 Kevin Mako: actually purchasing it, based on the intent that you theorized would attract that potential customer. So you start small, like everything, start with your MVP and work your way up.

00:16:20 Kevin Mako: So, Jen, let's jump over to that side of setting up an actual Google campaign.

00:16:25 Kevin Mako: What is kind of the easier starter campaign if you just wanted to get the ball rolling? Let's assume you have your website.

00:16:31 Kevin Mako: you've got any little explainer on it that tells the person what the product is and has a purchase button. Now they want to actually advertise on Google.

00:16:38 Kevin Mako: What's the easiest way to set it up? And what of the various channels that we talked about before? What do you think is the easiest one to get

00:16:43 Jem Bourouh: started on to just start test advertising to see what some of those keyword intents are and how well they're actually tracking? Great question.

00:16:51 Jem Bourouh: So let's say everything is set up. With Google, there's a lot

00:16:55 Kevin Mako: of reverse engineering and reverse thinking and just like connecting the dots. So like this is why I love it so much. Overall, explain it to the audience.

00:17:02 Kevin Mako: What is the starting step? If I just want to sell my widget, let's look at one of macro designs past products, underwater fishing camera.

00:17:09 Kevin Mako: What campaign would you set up to advertise to that group on Google? And how do you actually go about setting it up to drive those folks over to the landing page,

00:17:18 Jem Bourouh: the website, the Kickstarter campaign, or whatever actual digital asset used to try and sell and allow a customer to purchase that product?

00:17:25 Jem Bourouh: We know that people are going to be looking for underwater fishing camera. Take the keyword, put it in an SEM rush, or put in the keyword tool of Google,

00:17:33 Jem Bourouh: and then you're going to get recommendations. So you're not only stuck with underwatering fishing camera, but you're going to see other different keywords

00:17:39 Jem Bourouh: that are similar, but not the same. It's the same, but it's not the same. Basically, what are you going to do, create a campaign, choose manual CPC.

00:17:46 Jem Bourouh: So basically, a bidding strategy where it says, I want to bid X amount per click to make it very simple. You want to put a starting bit of 70 cents.

00:17:54 Jem Bourouh: You want to use the keywords that you have, underwatering fishing camera. and within a campaign, there's something called an ad group.

00:18:01 Jem Bourouh: And within an ad group, you have two things, keywords and ads. Keywords are the words, the keywords that we've talked about, underwater fishing camera.

00:18:08 Jem Bourouh: And then you need to start to write your ad. So this is where you can really do the objection handling and the selling and showing all the USPs and everything.

00:18:16 Jem Bourouh: So you can be like, this is the number one underwater fishing camera. This helps you to see underwater. This helps you to take pictures underwater.

00:18:23 Jem Bourouh: It's better than XYZ because ABC, you know, like money backer. guarantee, 24-7 customer support, basically all of that stuff, everything that is differentiating

00:18:32 Jem Bourouh: you from your competitors.

00:18:34 Jem Bourouh: You can do this in the headline. Then you can also explain the product within the description. So you can talk about your product, you know, again, USPs and

00:18:42 Kevin Mako: everything. And then you just want to launch the campaign at what, $50 a day, $100 a day, and then just let it spend.

00:18:49 Kevin Mako: The whole idea there is you want to put these things out there, try your initial theories essentially. And these are your ideas, like what are those keywords? The easiest one

00:18:57 Kevin Mako: is just, we'll describe your product. That's the starting theory, right? As opposed to thinking of all

00:19:01 Kevin Mako: these different intent-based audiences and supplementary industries, et cetera, just start with the core. What is your product?

00:19:08 Kevin Mako: What does it do? Use those keywords and then write ads that are similar to those keywords. And ideally, your landing page, your website, your crowdfunding campaign, your Shopify,

00:19:17 Kevin Mako: whatever it is that you're using to actually display your product, ideally that somewhat matches the ads that you're describing.

00:19:24 Kevin Mako: And therefore, somebody who has the intent to buy an underwater water fishing camera, clicks on that ad because they saw it that you are selling exactly that.

00:19:32 Kevin Mako: They land on a page selling exactly that thing. And then you've got all these great things you tell

00:19:36 Kevin Mako: them about it. And at the end, somewhere or somewhere in that page, they hit the button that says purchase now and they actually whip out their credit card.

00:19:42 Kevin Mako: And this is where the whole system begins. And it could be that simple to start. And through this, you can start to analyze based on what

00:19:48 Kevin Mako: Jen was talking about in terms of tracking. You can start to track to see of the various keyword combinations that you used and the various advertising messages that you used,

00:19:58 Kevin Mako: possibly even the various landing pages on your website that you tried, which ones of those are actually converting at the highest

00:20:04 Kevin Mako: ratio, which is for every dollar of advertising you spend, what's your return on ad spend? So did that make you $5, $10, or maybe no dollars?

00:20:13 Kevin Mako: And you can start to analyze, okay, you're going to cut out the campaigns that aren't making money, and then you can start to increase the campaigns that are making money.

00:20:20 Kevin Mako: In conjunction, you can start adding new campaigns into test against the old ones. And that essentially is the basics of digital advertising altogether,

00:20:28 Kevin Mako: but it's especially effective on Google because so much of this could be tracked through and so much buyer intent is happening directly on the Google platform.

00:20:35 Kevin Mako: Couldn't have said it better.

00:20:37 Kevin Mako: So, Jim, let's jump into some of the details about this. You mentioned the tool. I love SEM Rush. That helps you put in your keywords.

00:20:45 Kevin Mako: So let's use the underwater fishing camera example. And it'll actually show you not just how much activity is happening with that keyword,

00:20:53 Kevin Mako: but it'll show you alternative keywords, how competitive they are and a bunch of other data sets that allow you to start to decide how to become more efficient with your ad spend.

00:21:03 Jem Bourouh: Are there any other tips or tricks that you find are effective for not just launching the campaign, but launching and then scaling and capturing more audience? Yeah, definitely.

00:21:13 Jem Bourouh: So we've talked about tracking before and whether it is personal finance, or whatever, doing your books, bookkeeping, anything,

00:21:20 Jem Bourouh: you always need to make sure that you have an outlook on your KPI's, right? You can't be profitable if you're not measuring. And it's the same with Google and everything with life.

00:21:28 Jem Bourouh: You can't sleep good if you're not tracking your sleep. You know, you can say, okay, I've slept eight hours, but like how good did he actually sleep?

00:21:34 Jem Bourouh: You know, quantifying, qualifying, and same thing with Google. You should always make sure that you should set some certain KPIs

00:21:42 Jem Bourouh: and rules in order to kill respective keywords, right? Yeah, and KPIs, for those, don't know, what's key performance indicators. Maybe first things first.

00:21:50 Jem Bourouh: There's something within Google ads, which is called Quality Score. Quality Score consists of three different things. First of all, we have ad relevance.

00:21:58 Jem Bourouh: So, ad relevance is how much does the ad query relate to the user's intent? So if you bid on underwater fishing camera and you send them to a landing page,

00:22:08 Jem Bourouh: which has an underwater fishing camera, good ad relevance. If you're bidding on underwater fishing camera and you're sending them to a dentist website, bad ad relevance.

00:22:17 Jem Bourouh: Basic example. You also have landing page experience.

00:22:20 Jem Bourouh: So is the user finding everything on their website that they're trying to find? How about the bounce rate? Like how long I'm staying on the website?

00:22:26 Jem Bourouh: Are they clicking through the website? How many pages? On average, does a visitor go through? What about the loading speed and everything? And then we also have

00:22:34 Jem Bourouh: expected click-through rate. So expected CTR means based on the copy, so the headlines and the

00:22:40 Jem Bourouh: descriptions and the ads that you're writing on Google, Google basically says good, bad. If it's good, the copy is deemed to be good.

00:22:47 Jem Bourouh: Then you're getting a good expected CTR. If it's a bad copy, you're going to be getting a bad expected CTR. All of these three factors are going to go

00:22:55 Jem Bourouh: into something which is called quality score. And then the quality score is multiplied with your CPC or the bid that you have, which at the end gives you an ad rank.

00:23:04 Jem Bourouh: So let's say you have a quality score of 10, Kevin, you're bidding 10 cents. I have a quality score of five and I'm bidding 20.

00:23:12 Jem Bourouh: Even though my bid is almost double, you're still going to rank above me because your quality score is higher and your ad rank is going to be higher at the end of the day.

00:23:20 Jem Bourouh: Taking that into account, you should always set rules. So let's say, just because the KPIs are bad, so the cost per conversion,

00:23:28 Jem Bourouh: so the cost per sale that you have, you know, always, always take a look at what other things are going on. So take a look at your quality score.

00:23:36 Jem Bourouh: a look at the amount that you have spent. Take a look at the CTR. Take a look at all these things, right? Take a look at your conversion rate.

00:23:42 Jem Bourouh: Because if a keyword might not work, it might not be because of the Google ads. It might just be because of your landing page. That it's not selling

00:23:48 Jem Bourouh: enough, that there's something broken. You don't have the respective payment processor. Maybe you're not offering PayPal or after pay or whatever it is.

00:23:56 Jem Bourouh: Always try to look at the bigger picture. This is like the biggest tip that I can give. Always look at the bigger picture and try and

00:24:02 Jem Bourouh: troubleshoot if there is any issues as best as you can look at everything else that is going on don't

00:24:08 Jem Bourouh: only look straight but also look left and right because even if it doesn't have to do anything with google ads it might you know have an impact on google ads just

00:24:17 Jem Bourouh: because of the nature of the business just because you're bidding on a keyword it doesn't mean that people are going to buy you know

00:24:22 Jem Bourouh: the entire funnel has to be super super good and this is why i recommend starting off with all of these

00:24:27 Jem Bourouh: hot things it's kind of like you can imagine a funnel that you have and the basic media of buying funnel is you have top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

00:24:34 Jem Bourouh: And it's kind of like getting from cold, warm, to hot. Now you twist the funnel around and it starts with bottom, middle, top

00:24:40 Jem Bourouh: of funnel. So you should try and gather the obvious queries, the

00:24:45 Kevin Mako: obvious searches that the users have and then start going to the things that might be a bit more difficult because that way you can

00:24:51 Kevin Mako: harvest all of these very, very obvious keywords and make sales as soon as possible. I love that you mentioned that because that is the whole concept of low-hanging fruit.

00:25:01 Kevin Mako: And what people don't realize is when you have a global market, a massive, almost 8 billion people,

00:25:07 Kevin Mako: there's a lot of people that are going to be looking for a very specific keyword intent, the very thing exactly to the T that you are selling.

00:25:16 Kevin Mako: That's the easiest place to start because, of course, your quality is going to be the highest.

00:25:20 Kevin Mako: The conversion rate is going to be the highest because as somebody's typing in that very specific, that very niche thing, your exact match is coming up.

00:25:28 Kevin Mako: And of course, that yields generally to a better click-through rate, which yields to a better conversion rate on your website.

00:25:33 Kevin Mako: If you're describing it well and there's no problems on your site, like Jim mentioned, everything goes through somewhat seamlessly.

00:25:39 Kevin Mako: That is the easiest place to start.

00:25:41 Kevin Mako: And really, you don't need to be migrating down to middle, even middle funnel until you truly feel like you've saturated that top of funnel, which arguably takes a long time

00:25:50 Kevin Mako: for a lot of companies because of how big the internet is. It's the easiest, cheapest advertising that you're going to have.

00:25:56 Kevin Mako: But of course, all of this could be tested against real data, which is the beauty of Google AdWords, it's so different than traditional marketing, which used to be throw an ad on

00:26:04 Kevin Mako: the radio and hope it works. It's kind of hard to tell whether or not the buyers are coming from the radio or some other source.

00:26:11 Kevin Mako: You try and somehow peg it with maybe a mention on there that gives you a coupon so you can somewhat track it, but it's very loose. Here, it's extremely accurate.

00:26:19 Kevin Mako: You know precisely who is converting and where they converted from. So it allows you to take all these theories that you have, practice them, and then tweak and refine them.

00:26:28 Kevin Mako: The magic of all this at the end of the day is if you can find a set of keywords and an advertising campaign and a landing page,

00:26:35 Kevin Mako: those three key combinations, if you can find a set of three of those that works, that's really creating profit on every dollar that you put into it, $10 in revenues coming out.

00:26:45 Kevin Mako: Once you crack that, you can simply scale and grow that to quite a level until you hitch that saturation point.

00:26:51 Jem Bourouh: So it's a really magical moment for a company to try these things, find that return on ad spend,

00:26:57 Jem Bourouh: and then just start selling on the internet more and more and more simply by the click of a button to expand that campaign that you've tested. Definitely.

00:27:04 Jem Bourouh: All right, what else would you like to jump into before I let you go as we're coming to the top of the hour here?

00:27:09 Jem Bourouh: We can talk about some more advanced stuff for the viewers, listeners that might have some experience with Google ads, so it's going to get a bit nerdy. Yeah, let's go for it.

00:27:17 Jem Bourouh: Jump into a few of those actionable tips and then we'll let you go soon after that. A few things that happened in the past few months is that Google is always steering towards

00:27:27 Jem Bourouh: like more steering towards more machine learning, AI and everything, right? Why? Because at the end of the day,

00:27:33 Jem Bourouh: Google wants to make as much money as possible and they want to enable everyone to make advertising as easy as possible. Because this is like the core business of Google.

00:27:41 Jem Bourouh: They're making their money with ads being served. Something that has happened because of that is smart display campaigns

00:27:47 Jem Bourouh: have been removed, smart shopping campaigns have been removed. And you campaign type in January has been introduced, which is called Performance Max.

00:27:53 Jem Bourouh: Performance Max is like pretty much everything combined soul search shopping display discovery youtube but just in one campaign type where you just have to

00:28:00 Jem Bourouh: provide all of the assets you you let us spend some data on either it works or it doesn't google is always

00:28:04 Jem Bourouh: getting better and better and better at these things i had to say and in the beginning i was a bit scared

00:28:09 Jem Bourouh: because i'm the type of guy who's like very very nerdy and who's looking at the data and who loves to do as many things as manual as you know you can whether it is for ego

00:28:18 Jem Bourouh: or or just safety you know whatever you want to call it but google is actually doing a great job at that not only with performance max, but also with the keyword match types.

00:28:26 Jem Bourouh: There's another keyword match type, which was called BroadMatch Modified. It's like the plus for some of you who might not know, the match type.

00:28:34 Jem Bourouh: And what Google does is they removed it and they're basically telling people that they should use BroadMatch.

00:28:41 Jem Bourouh: So basically, BroadMatch is what everyone hates because they're so scared of it because it can bring so much money.

00:28:47 Jem Bourouh: And like there are so many unrelated queries that basically could come up if you're using broadmatch, right?

00:28:53 Jem Bourouh: extreme example broad match underwater camera you might be served for a query such as mermaid's tail

00:29:00 Jem Bourouh: to maybe similar things because it's both in the ocean but it's like okay does it really have

00:29:05 Jem Bourouh: anything to do with each other and actually google is getting very very very good at that not only with broadmatch but also with smart bidding so machine learning so target cpa

00:29:14 Jem Bourouh: target role as maximize conversions because they're investing a lot a lot of money to just make these features better another

00:29:20 Jem Bourouh: tip that i can give don't be afraid to try and use these tools but be encouraged to use them, because if you're going to be able to nail them and going to be

00:29:28 Jem Bourouh: super good at them, you definitely have a competitive advantage because barely anyone that I know besides from all of the geeks, they're using broadmatch.

00:29:36 Jem Bourouh: However, that doesn't mean you should create a campaign with like thousands of dollars and just start spending, get educated,

00:29:43 Jem Bourouh: you know, start reading about that a bit, see how it actually works and then try and dip your toes really, really slow.

00:29:49 Jem Bourouh: Start with a super low budget and then just see what happens. Go very

00:29:53 Kevin Mako: heavy with a negative keywords. So basically things that you do not want to show up for and then you're going to be able to see what happens.

00:30:00 Kevin Mako: I've seen it personally on our own accounts that we're

00:30:02 Jem Bourouh: managing. The results are amazing, whether it is broad match or target ROAS or maximize conversions.

00:30:09 Jem Bourouh: It's crazy. Jim, if somebody wants to offload a lot of the work of managing and scaling these campaigns, explain what your agency does and how someone can get in touch.

00:30:19 Jem Bourouh: Definitely. So as we've already mentioned the beginning, I am running a Google Ads agency. Right now we're spending 18 million

00:30:25 Jem Bourouh: euros a month, which is like quite a lot of money for mainly e-commerce businesses, which hardware also counts to. Basically, what we're doing is it done for you service.

00:30:35 Jem Bourouh: So we're taking care of all of the work and we're providing you with detailed reports. We're telling your action plan, what we're doing,

00:30:41 Jem Bourouh: the results, reporting, pretty much everything, right? So you're giving us access to the account and we're

00:30:47 Jem Bourouh: doing everything, whether it is research for the keywords, market, competitor, writing the ads,

00:30:52 Jem Bourouh: writing the copy, doing the conversion pixel, so the tracking, doing the reporting, doing the scaling, the launching, everything.

00:30:59 Jem Bourouh: So done for you service, you don't have to worry about anything, and you're just giving us access. Yeah, that's it. Jim, much appreciated for your words of wisdom

00:31:07 Jem Bourouh: today. And thanks again. Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. Pleasure. Great on. Take care then.

00:31:11 Narrator: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a

00:31:21 Narrator: big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading

00:31:28 Narrator: firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients.

00:31:38 Narrator: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako -design.com. That's M-A-K-O Design dot com.

00:31:47 Narrator: for a free consultation from one of Mako Design's Ford Design Studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening and see you next time.