How To Setup & Optimize Google Ads Like An Expert with Mark Meyerson

Andy Splichal 0:00

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is how to set up and optimize Google ads like an expert. Today's guest has over 13 years of experience in the marketing industry specializes in paid search and analytics, currently works as the director and the head of search marketing at One Egg Digital. A big welcome to Mark Meyerson. Hi, Mark.

Mark Meyerson 0:28

Hey, Andy, great to be here. Thank you for having me on the podcast.

Andy Splichal 0:32

You know, we're happy to have you because it's one of my favorite subjects. So, you know, many people, they will say that advertising on Google, it's, it's oversaturated. It's too expensive. First off, how would you address this state?

Mark Meyerson 0:51

Yeah, so I've also heard this before. And so we speak to clients all the time, and potential customers. And, look, I think there is merit in it. It's definitely very competitive. I wouldn't say that it's oversaturated. I would say that Google ads, today's is very competitive. But it's very highly dependent on the industry that you're in, as well. So I mean, look, there's going to be some industries, where CPCs are going to be very high. And then there's going to be industries where there's a lot of opportunity. So we've worked with clients in ultra competitive industries, like the legal space and the insurance space. And if you use the right strategies, it's still very much possible to get good results from Google ads.

Andy Splichal 1:40

When it comes to running a business, how would you rank the importance of running a properly set up and optimize Google ads to getting traffic?

Mark Meyerson 1:52

Yeah. So that's also a great question. And I assume you mean, we're talking about a business that has already made the decision to run Google ads? And how important is it to make sure that's run properly? So look, I think I think that that is absolutely critical. So we, we do audits all the time for new customers and old customers. And it's just you'd be amazed at how many accounts we review that just haven't been set up properly. And there's so much wasted budget in there. And not only that, it actually, it actually can be damaging for your brand. So not only are you losing money, if you don't set up accounts properly, you can actually do things that are detrimental to your brand by appearing on the wrong keywords and in the wrong industries and things like that.

Andy Splichal 2:46

Yeah, you know, I mean, that's a great point, it seems. And I've had the same experience when I'm auditing accounts, that the people that lead with that first question that believe that Google is oversaturated. Typically are those that that have Google not set up properly or not properly optimized?

Mark Meyerson 3:06

That's right. Absolutely.

Andy Splichal 3:08

Now, we had mentioned, you know, some of the ways, and that what are some of the key mistakes that you see people make when they're running Google ads? And how can they avoid those?

Mark Meyerson 3:19

Yeah. So look, I'm a big believer that the Google Ads account has to be set up, not just technically well, but also conceptually, well, which, which kind of means that even before you start a Google Ads account, you need to really think about the business itself, and how you're going to use the account. And I think that's, that's one of the biggest mistakes I see. I see people just jumping into Google ads, and straightaway starting to set up their campaigns and just just building it out as they go. So I think you need to really think about how how you're going to use Google ads for the business to different different branches of the business, where you know, where it makes the most sense to start with Google ads. So really thinking about it from a conceptual space, who your target persona is, and how you want to position your business and then translating that into Google ads. And then I think so that's on a conceptual level, that's probably the biggest mistake we see. And then on a technical level, there's, you know, there's a lot of little things here and there that we often see, one of the big ones I would say is location based targeting. So, you know, we see people setting up Google Ads accounts, trying to target certain places and ending up targeting people in different places just because they visited a certain place at one at one time in the year. So there's all these little mistakes here and there that people make all the time.

Andy Splichal 4:50

Yeah, no, that's a good one. You know, one that I see all the time is not changing bids on mobile devices are getting the same across All Devices, do you? Do you find that a lot when you're when you're auditing accounts?

Mark Meyerson 5:04

Yeah, absolutely. So we see that all the time people, people don't even look at the different results that they get from mobile versus desktop. And so just reviewing that makes a lot of sense, and then bidding differently if the results are different for those two device types.

Andy Splichal 5:23

Now, we recently launched your course Google ads to complete training agency within Make Each Click Count University. For listeners, what does this course include? And what would somebody gain from taking this course?

Mark Meyerson 5:38

Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll give you some background. So when I, the first course that I launched was a, an advanced Google Ads course. And that was, it did quite well. And so I thought, you know, that's been great. Let's make a more comprehensive course. And so that's really the background of this course, it tries to be a lot more comprehensive than most courses. So as I mentioned earlier, we start from really a conceptual background, trying to understand what's the business strategy and how can you translate that into Google ads, because at the end of the day, Google ads is, is a tactic, it's not a strategy. You know, we see a lot of people saying, Google ads is my marketing strategy. And that's just not correct. Google ads is a tactic or a channel, whereas your marketing strategy is comprised of other things. So the course starts from that point, it says, let's, understand your strategy. And then let's recognize that Google ads is a tactic to, to use that strategy or to implement that strategy. And then we go through and we start from a very beginner level, where we explain all the different concepts how the auction works, what the different metrics means, we move into more of an intermediate space into how you know, what's the best way to set up your campaigns, and what's the best way to structure and then we also have an advanced section in the course, where we look at some of the more advanced strategies, you know, things like setting up experiments and how to properly structure your remarketing campaigns. So the goal really, is to be very comprehensive. And for someone, it works for someone just getting started in AdWords, in Google ads, sorry, all the way up to somebody who has a few years experience under their belt, and wants to take their knowledge to the next level.

Andy Splichal 7:34

You know, that's what's gonna be my next question is who should take it? And so, it it sounds like it is from beginner to intermediate.

Mark Meyerson 7:43

Yeah, so really anybody, like I've had all kinds of people take the course. And many, many people just say, you know, they've got quite a lot out of it, no matter what their level is, because it approaches it differently to most courses. And I think that conceptual pieces is pretty cool. And, and a lot of us we get into digital marketing, with not enough marketing experience, like understanding core marketing principles. So that's the goal there. And I think anyone who has some digital marketing background and needs a bit more conceptual marketing experience, and also benefit from the course.

Andy Splichal 8:25

Now Google has really gone into training and, and they will show people how to use the Google Ads interface, and then they have free trainings on it. What is the advantage of taking a paid course like this, versus trying to educate yourself through the free Google videos?

Mark Meyerson 8:45

You know, look, I think it's a good idea to start with the free Google videos, because they're, they're pretty good, but they're very basic, you'll quickly see that they're quite limited. So Google has a certain framework that they use for their courses. And it's, it's more just about explaining the concepts in Google ads, and the technicalities behind them. Whereas when you use a third party course, like mine, somebody doesn't work for Google, they're gonna bring a an agency experience, or somebody who's worked with Google, and he's worked with clients. And I think that's also key difference that I didn't mention that. It's the course is really hands on practical experience, working with clients and working with, you know, businesses that actually run Google ads and all the issues and problems that come with that, and all the challenges that we have to overcome. So you're not going to get a lot of that in the Google courses. You're not going to get that hands on experience. You're just going to get more an understanding of the platform itself, but not the way a business can use the platform.

Andy Splichal 9:57

Now if I'm a business owner, and I play had to hire somebody to run my ads like Google ads or, or even outsource an agency like you yours or mine. Why is it still important? Do you think for them to know how Google Ads work?

Mark Meyerson: 10:13

Yeah, I think it's very, very important. So we have, we have different client types that we work with as well, some clients, you know, they'll just say to us, listen, we want to run Google ads, do it for us, send us a report at the end of the month. And then we have other clients that say to, you know, they want to be really involved in it. So they want to have constant meetings, weekly meetings, understand what we're doing, what changes we're making. And invariably, the, the clients that are more involved, do better. I mean, I see it as a collaboration. So working with the client is really a collaboration, making it count, the more input the client gives us, the better it's gonna be because the client knows their business best, and will never know the business as well as the client knows they're in business. So working together with them is critical. And I think as the business itself, understanding what's happening in Google ads, for many, many businesses, it's going to be a main marketing channel, it's going to be a very critical tactic where a lot of the budget goes, and you really want to understand what's happening, because your input is going to help the way your agency runs your Google Ads account. So being able to talk to them on their level and understand things even as granular as keywords or ads. It's all it's, it's only going to help and everyone's going to get a better result.

Andy Splichal: 11:36

you know, a same variation of the question. Google has really last few years, pushed more and more of their automated biddings to, to even automatic keywords. And in some instances, what are some of the dangers out there to letting Google Optimize your account?

Mark Meyerson: 11:58

Yeah, so a great question. And something I think about a lot is that Google has, I think Google has different incentives to your incentives as a business owner. So Google incentives and their account managers incentives can be aligned with yours. But in many cases, they're out there, they want to maximize the revenue that they make from your business. So they want you to spend as much money on Google ads as possible. And of course, I mean, they want you to have a good result on Google ads, because that will end up in you spending more money with them. But at the end of the day, their incentive is to get you to spend more money. Okay. So if you let Google run your whole account, or optimize your account, then the issue is that they're not aligned with your incentives all the time. So they're going to try and maximize how much money they can make. Whereas if you're running your account, or your agency's running your account with you, the idea is to maximize your return on investment. And so sometimes these can misaligned. And you can actually see this, if you look at the Google Ads recommendation. So the recommendations are often derived around trying to get you to spend more money, and that's on the recommendations tab in Google ads, and many of them are not are not relevant and should not be implemented. And that's another issue that Google actually has a default setting that the recommendations are going to be automatically applied after 14 days. And so I always tell clients, we need we should turn this off straightaway. Because you don't want all these recommendations to be auto applied. Like for example, you know, there's there's recommendations in there on running your you might have a campaign, that is a search campaign. And Google's recommending you expand it to search and display. And that's a bad recommendation, in many ways, because you want to split out those campaigns, but it's in Google's interest to keep them together. And have you spending as much as possible within the campaign.

Andy Splichal: 14:10

Yeah, no, that's a great example. How much credence do you give to the Google recommendations? And the cover that in the course?

Mark Meyerson: 14:22

Yeah, we do. We have a look at the recommendations. That the the problem with the recommendations, it's quite hard to cover them because they're always changing. So I didn't want to cover something, the course and then a couple months later, it's going to be completely different. The recommendations are really important to review. And it's really important, as I said, to take it off that default setting that it's going to auto apply. But they're very important to review and have a look at them. I mean, there's some great ideas in there. But there's, there's many things that you should not apply as well. So it just depends. It depends on on what's being recommended.

Andy Splichal: 14:59

You You know, speaking of updating, when is the last time you updated the course? It's pretty recent, isn't it?

Mark Meyerson: 15:05

Yeah. So I think we did a full update about three or four months ago. And yeah, and there's there's constant little updates going on. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty much up to date.

Andy Splichal: 15:19

Yeah, as much as it changes. That's, that's great. Now, let me ask you, if you had a magic eight ball, where do you see Google Ads going in the next 12 - 18 months?

Mark Meyerson: 15:32

Yeah, so I think there's going to be, you know, we've seen it already, over the last two years, that the automation aspect is going to continue to develop. So we're already seeing automated bidding, and with our clients, we've tested all the automated bidding, and we find that it works really, really well. So I think we're gonna see a lot more of that, and the bidding mechanisms are gonna get even better. All the machine learning stuff within Google ads is just gonna get better. I think, I think the ad testing, and all the data around that we're just gonna see a lot less input from, you know, us and agencies, in terms of choosing keywords, and, and, and, and all that kind of thing, I think there's going to be the agencies are going to be a lot more involved in the creative side. But all the the, you know, the data classification and, and data analysis is going to be more and more automated by Google. So I think the automation side is really where it's going. There's a lot of other things as well, you know, I think there's going to be some, some more issues with privacy that Google is going to have to deal with. And so that's going to be interesting to see how they continue to collect data and make the ads relevant. So I'm not sure what's going to happen there. But I'm sure there's going to be some developments on that side, too.

Andy Splichal: 17:02

Now, what advice would you give someone just starting a business looking to drive traffic through Google ads, as opposed to somebody who's more established, sane, doing 2 million a year?

Mark Meyerson: 17:14

Yeah, I think the big thing is, is, as I said before, to have your strategy really nailed down, before you get into into Google ads, or whichever channel you get into. I mean, I'm an E commerce, business owner as well. So I've thought about this a lot. I think one of the big things that I see is businesses, new businesses, whether the E commerce or we're not ecommerce, getting into a channel like Google ads, and just not giving it the right amount of respect in terms of budget. So you know, if you really have a product, and you believe in the product, you need to give it the right amount of respect. So you need to give it the right amount of budget, and you need to run that budget for, you know, the right length of time. You can't really, and obviously, it depends on on the CPCs and how competitive your industry is. But if you're going to run a campaign for we have client centers, let's let's try run this. Let's try run this product for $500 a month in ad spend. And I just think it's not even worth it. You need to really be confident in what you're doing and have a budget and test it out properly.

Andy Splichal: 18:29

Yeah, that's good advice. Now, what about the person who's already doing, say, 2 million a year, and they're running a Google Ads account? What would you tell them to look for inside their account?

Mark Meyerson: 18:42

Inside the Google Ads account? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think when it comes to, to that stage, I'm actually surprised to see a lot of accounts at this level. And they're not making use of the experimentation feature within Google ads. And I think this is one of the best features for more mature accounts that are already doing quite well. So the way should I talk a little bit about the rotation? Yeah, that'd be great. So it's actually surprising how how few people know about this or even use it. What it is a feature within Google ads that actually allows you to take a campaign that's that's running and run an experiment on it on that. So what that does, takes the campaign, it creates a split of the campaign. You can make your changes in the in split or the experiment version of the campaign, which is an exact copy, except for the change you make and it's recommended that you make just one small change not to make too many so if you want to test let's say you want to test changing the bids on some keywords or you want to check test, removing certain keywords or you want to test running Some new ad types in there, or maybe you want to restructure it. So it doesn't matter what you want to do, but you do one kind of change to it. And then after you've done that, you you tell Google what split you want to do between the original campaign versus the experiment campaign. So that could be a 50/50 traffic split, or it could be a 60/40, whatever you want, have, however confident, you want to test the new experiment. And then what happens is you run that for whatever time period. So usually, I'd say two to three months minimum, and Google produces the results for you. And it tells you if there's artistically significant, so you need to kind of decide what you want to test for whether that's going to be you want to see if the click through rates in the experiment are significantly better, or the ROI significantly better, or the cost per lead or whatever it might be. But you can monitor that ongoing. And then the beauty is when you get to the end of your time period, you can very easily say to Google, the experiments done really well, that's awesome. I want to update the whole campaign based on changes. So let's have like a one button, click and boom, your campaign is now changed to the experiment version. Or if you're not happy, and it didn't work, well, you can simply roll it back. And it just deletes the experiment, and it puts all the budget back into the original campaign. So that's a really, really cool way of incrementally improving your campaign with very, very little risk, because you're not making huge changes to your whole account. You're just like testing little bits. And you can even do like 20% split, and see how it goes and then roll it back if it's not working. So that's really good for a large business that's already doing quite well and just wants to incrementally improve their results.

Andy Splichal: 21:54

Now, you had mentioned that you have an E commerce company as well. And that's that's most of our listeners out here. How important are the different pieces of Google ads, whether it's search, shopping or display to ecommerce?

Mark Meyerson: 22:11

Yeah, I mean, I think that they're really, really important. So the first thing, it's really important to separate out your campaign types, and never combine them. Google kind of pushes you to combine search and display together, which is never a good idea. And it's important to test the different channels out within sorry, they call them networks, the different networks that are within Google ads, and and see how each one performs. But it's absolutely critical if you're an E-commerce business to set up Google Shopping campaigns.

Andy Splichal: 22:50

Now this your course that we brought in deals mostly with search.

Mark Meyerson: 22:55

Yep.

Andy Splichal: 22:56

And a little bit of display?

Mark Meyerson: 22:59

Oh, yeah, we there's a lot of display. So search and display, there's not. There's actually a little bit about shopping as well. But there's quite a bit of display, and we talk a lot about remarketing. So yeah, we do cover that.

Andy Splichal: 23:15

Now, let's go on to you get off the course a little bit. But your journey as an entrepreneur, have there been any books that you can attribute to your success?

Mark Meyerson: 23:27

Um, yeah, I mean, I read a lot of business books, the best, the best ones, and the ones that I think, inspired me the most were all the books around Warren Buffett. So I've read all of his biographies. And I just, you know, just the way he thinks about businesses, and how he understands businesses, I thought that really inspired me a lot of made me think a lot about how I run my businesses and how, you know, how he allocates his funds between different businesses, and also how he, how he views, managers of businesses. And also how he talks about staying in your lane and doing what you do really well, and not to try and do too much. So there's just so much advice in those books that is timeless and, and those things really inspired me. At the moment, I'm reading a book called Traction, which is part of the EOS framework, which has been really

Andy Splichal: 24:34

Jean Whitman, correct?

Mark Meyerson: 24:35

Yeah, Jean Whitman. And so I'm actually currently reading now, just among the last chapter, and that's also been really interesting for me as a business owner, the ideas around setting goals, and having, you know, three months, six months frameworks, and that's, that's been quite, quite interesting to how we run our businesses to

Andy Splichal: 24:56

Now what inspired you to start creating courses, Mark?

Mark Meyerson: 25:04

Yeah. So we, we were already, as we were running agency, we were already doing a lot of SOPs, and video SOPs and just recording our knowledge already within our own wiki. So we looked at it and we thought, you know, there's a lot of knowledge here. Let's think about how to share this also with the wider community. And so I kind of locked myself in a room for a couple of weeks and just wrote out all the courses, and then thought, you know, be pretty cool to record them. And that's really how that happened. So just we had the knowledge internally, and we thought it'd be great to share this with others.

Andy Splichal: 25:44

Now, besides this course, what else is occupying your time?

Mark Meyerson: 25:52

Two things so well, we've got the I ran an agency, which is keeps me busy. But if you take the course, you'll also see, we've started a marketplace called By Marketers, that's bymarketers.co. And a lot of the resources in the course, are hosted on by marketers. And so if you do the course, you will get access to those resources for free. So that's a marketplace for digital marketers, and business owners to share and use templates and resources. So you'll see them there. And we've actually, we launched that about, I think that two years ago. And it's it's been really popular and people, it's really great to see how people come together in the community, and just share things with each other. And, yeah, I mean, because you know, you make you make templates on Lucas studio, or Excel or Google Sheets. And there's so many others out there that can use those templates rather than recreating them from scratch.

Andy Splichal: 26:57

Yeah, that sounds like a great resource. Now, run an agency, I'm sure you've seen a lot of businesses, which puts you in a great spot to answer this next question. But what do you feel is the most important factor for a company growing their business?

Mark Meyerson: 27:17

I think there's a lot of different things. And it depends on the business. But I think if I had to nail it down to one thing, I think it's, it's providing value to your customer. So and that could be in so many different formats. And there's so much that you have to think about just to get to that point. But if there's one important factor, you shouldn't be sitting there every day thinking about how do I make more money? Or, you know, how do I grow this part of the business, you should be thinking about:How do I provide more value to my customer? How do I make my business more useful to the people that I serve? So that's the way I would think about that part.

Andy Splichal: 28:01

That's some great advice. Now, how can an interested listener find out more about you?

Mark Meyerson: 28:09

Yeah, you can find me so I don't. I mean, I'm on Twitter. I don't really use that much. I'm on LinkedIn mostly. So you can, you can look me up there, Mark Meyerson, and companies for one egg digital. So you can see me on LinkedIn. Feel free to send me a message I answer every message. Check out by marketers as well. You can contact me there as well. But yeah, any questions I'm glad to help out if I can't.

Andy Splichal: 28:41

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Mark Meyerson: 28:45

Not really. Just it's it's nice to work with you. And I think you're doing a great job.

Andy Splichal: 28:50

Great. Well, thank you. Well, thanks for joining us too, Mark.

Mark Meyerson: 28:54

Pleasure.

Andy Splichal: 28:55

For listeners. Remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information regarding connecting with Mark, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you are interested in becoming certified and Google Ads through his course Google Ads the complete training A to Z you will find information on that course and all other courses at www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our all new podcasts Resource Center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topics include each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I will talk to you in the next episode.