SF Digital Studios

Where is the location? I chose a goal for one, I think it was brand awareness. So it's not giving me the option to select my location. That's another thing that you need to keep an eye on as to where you want to be... If you don't want your ads to show internationally, then choosing that campaign type is not the right strategy. You just need to go without the goal guidance and then you'll be able to select your location...This is important because you might waste a lot of money…you can absolutely select the location of your videos as to where you want to target . Now you want to do the demographics. If your audience is just male or females, then you can check this, and check which age range and parental status. I don't worry too much about it. Now the household income, because I'm not sure how accurate the data is over here. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Google Display Network: 4 Ways to Reduce Spend Google Display Network Targetin...

Then you've got the targeting options. So you've got: audiences, keywords, topics, and placements. These are the four ways you can target your video ads and this is the key to targeting your audiences. Now, if I go on to audiences and I want to target in-market audiences, those in-market audiences are those people who have searched for those keywords related to SEO and search engine marketing services on Google and when they come to YouTube you can target them. So that's a very powerful way of targeting very engaged and interested audiences for your campaign, and I can select which ones I want. I have lots of options available over here, but we're going to keep things very simple for this video, all we do is we go on to the keywords. Now you enter your website or your product or your service. If I want to target people who are interested or who may be interested in digital marketing, I'm going to select all of them over here and just go through any keywords w...

Don't let YouTube choose your companion banner by auto-generating because this is where this is real estate that you want to utilize. Even after somebody has skipped my ad, that banner will stay there for a little while. So I want to put up my branding on my banner. So the banner is 300 by 60 pixels. You can create one in Photoshop or Canva or whatever image editing software you are using. I already uploaded one before, select that, now you see how prominent it is, it really stands out! The other thing which I try not to do is put a lot of text on it because it becomes so small, especially on the mobile, on the mobile it doesn't show anyway. But on a screen, you don't want the text to be too small. You just want your branding to stand out as much as possible, as big as possible as well. I would recommend that you just put in your logo and you've got the call to action and your headline underneath. You put your ad name and all you do is create your campaign, and t...

Well, it’s been just over two months since our very first YouTube Live sessions began and it’s been an absolute blast so far! We always like to try out the latest technology and of course, being such big advocates for the use of video for  online marketing , how could we not take up the challenge ourselves?! Some of our sessions have been structured as tutorials, where we share our screen and show you step-by-step just how to un-tap the power of Google Ads. We’ve also answered dozens of questions from our viewers, as they come in live, making it a truly interactive experience and helping people with their queries. You can watch the video here: In this video, we answer some of the following questions: Which platforms provide PPC ads other than Google ads? How do I promote Fiverr gigs –  on Google Ads or Google Adwords? Can I target Google display ads to a single page only? How do I generate leads using Facebook ads? What is the difference between th...

Is it a good strategy to use skip buttons on video ads? So, Mark, you're saying, ‘that explains what somebody said in the video, if you don't want to discover how to do this, please press skip now. Is that a good strategy?’ Okay. Yeah. So some advertisers will say in their video, if you're not interested in making money, skip the button now. So what they are doing is they are pre-qualifying their audience because if you continue to view that video, then you are interested in making money or getting fit or whatever your ad is all about, but you've got 30 seconds. So even if they continue to watch it, I personally don't like that strategy and you won't find me saying those words in my videos or in my video ads, but it's each to their own. If you find you can test it and try it and see what happens. If you find that you are getting a lot of skip ads, then you don't want to say that. But having said that, then only those people who are interested i...

The campaign in total. If you have a campaign total of 100, 200, 500, or whatever the amount is, you put it here or if you want to keep it running, you have a daily budget of let's say $2 or £5 or whatever it is. I'm going to keep it at five. Start date. You can put in an end date. So if it's for a special event like Christmas, Valentines, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and you want that ad to finish before the event finishes, then you put the end date over here. We are going to show our ads on YouTube obviously, and then on video partners on the display network, and this is where you can go outside of YouTube and all over the internet video. So if somebody has embedded a video and is allowing Google to place video ads on it, it could be on Huffington Post, CNN, BBC, ESPN, then potentially your video ad can show up on those video partner channels as well. It's a great way to absolutely have a wide coverage for your video ads! Languages, you can either choo...

Now, this is where a lot of people skip this very important option because this should not be optional. This should be absolutely compulsory because this is the call to action I want to put up.  So you’ve got to put in fields, call to action, I can put in learn more, you've only got 10 characters for this. If you're selling something you can put in buy now or you can put in sign up or whatever that call to action may be... It's a very low hanging fruit. I'm not asking them for a commitment, all I'm saying is, you know, I don't want to sell anything right now and the headline, so I can put in Google ads training. Now if you go over this it’s going to turn red. That means you can't have that.  I can put something like Google ads or video ads or whatever I want my headings to be. In fact, if I can put in...learn videos, that's a good call to action headline, and I've got my character limit used up as well. If you enjoyed this article, you may a...

Maximum cost per view because that's what I set up the bidding as. I'm going to keep it at 10p, although it is quite aggressive, it does not mean that Google is going to charge me 10p. Usually, I will get charged 4p or 3p or something like that. But I want to be aggressive in my bids and once the impressions start to run and the ads start to show, I can slowly bring it down. Some people do it the opposite way, they'll start at a lower bid. When they don't get any impressions, then they slowly build it up, but that wastes quite a bit of time because you'll have to wait for the next day and see what's happening like this. Once my ads are approved, I'm going to get my ads shown. Okay, I've set everything up. Now you create your video ad, so you need to have your video set up on your YouTube channel to start with.  I'm going to copy a URL from one of my videos from my channel, as soon as I paste it, I get that video over here and I'm looking at ...

Here at SF Digital, we are really passionate about helping people get the most out of Google, and all it has to offer. This blog gives you a quick checklist on how to create a ‘ Gmail ad campaign ’. Using Gmail ad campaigns is a great way of targeting audiences that are already in their email inbox, instead of waiting to reach them on the internet! There are two  main methods for ad creation: Upload the text, image, and video assets. Google then gets creative with the content!  You can also use  HTML coding  or manually upload your content if you prefer.  All ads are reviewed before they go live and seen by your customers.  Google verifies them to make sure they comply with their  advertising policies . This normally takes 2 working business days for approval and then your ad will be live! Steps to creating your Gmail ad: Begin with signing in to your Google Ads account.  Go to ‘Display campaigns’ in the navigation tool...

The bidding strategy is maximum CPV, which is the cost per view. How much are you prepared to pay for a view or the target CPM?... Set up your campaign name, then you have your bidding strategy, maximum cost per view, which you are prepared to pay, and a target CPM. A maximum cost per view is when somebody continues to view your video ad for a minimum of 30 seconds or until the end of the video, whichever is the sooner. So if your video is 15 minutes, 15 seconds long and they view to the end, then obviously you will get charged. If your video is two minutes long and somebody's viewed for 25 seconds and then press the skip ad button, you will get free advertising for that duration. It's a great way to get a lot of branding for free! Even if somebody skips your video after five seconds, you will not get charged, but you've been in front of somebody for five seconds and for free as well.  Now the cost per view depends on where you're advertising.  In the US, UK, Eur...

From your campaign , you click on new campaigns and you've got all these various options. If I were to click on the brand and brand awareness and reach, which is what we are trying to do, to make our brand or take our brand in front of others, I go to video, I've got five campaign types over here. If I were to select the product and brand and go here, only three. So these campaign types give a fair amount of confusion for a lot of people. If I were to choose the one without goal guidance, I have all the options available. So if you are not sure and you can't find what campaign subtype you want over here, it's because you have selected one of these campaign types and it is not possible to use that. So what I would do is I would just go with the last option, which is a campaign goal.  Create a campaign without the goals guidance. Now we have lots of options over here, custom video campaign, non-skippable. So these are non-skippable as the name of these ads, but ...

Video ads for YouTube are run through Google ads, so it's through the same account. It's not through a YouTube account at all. You need to set up a Google ads account if you haven't got one. Once you're in your interface, you go to your campaigns, and then just like you would set up a new campaign, click the plus button, new campaign, now you've got all these various options available. You can easily get started without campaign goal guidance, but that does not mean that you are not setting up conversion tracking before you reach here. I would highly recommend that you go and set up your conversion. Now a conversion could be anything. It could be a view page or view of an important page. It could be an email subscriber, it could be somebody who signs up for your lead magnet or anyone who makes a purchase on your website. So just make sure that you have set up your conversion tracking and another important thing is that you go to your tools and settings, and...

In today's YouTube live I'm going to be setting up a YouTube campaign for a video ad campaign. It's fairly straightforward and easy to set up, doesn't take a lot of time, usually about 15 minutes or so... Now whether it's ahead video or you may have shot a video using your smartphone or it could have been an animated video... It could be any kind of video that you can use as a video ad, but why would you want to use video as an ad? I just want to give a very quick and brief introduction as to how I got started with video ads, which was about two years ago. Well in fact a lot earlier, but two years ago I became pretty serious about video as a marketing channel and I started putting up videos on my YouTube channel. After that, lots of our clients wanted to get started as well and we've been running campaigns for them as well. Video is one of the best ways to build trust. People buy from people, that's the bottom line. How do you build trust in automatio...

As many of you will know our business started in 2002 as a photography business and we’ve done hundreds, if not thousands, of weddings and family portrait sessions. As our business evolved over the years into the  digital marketing  business that it is today, we no longer offer our services as social photographers, but we certainly understand the wedding photography niche extremely well and always try to still support the wedding photography industry with our marketing expertise. In this video you will learn  how to set up a Google Ads campaign,  using the wedding photography niche to show how to create and search hundreds of relevant keywords within minutes: Creating A Google Ads Campaign A  campaign  is a set of related ad groups that you can use to organize the products and services you offer into relevant categories. Every campaign is focused on a specific goal that matches what you would like to achieve from your campaigns, such as emai...

How to set up a video campaign Here at SF Digital, we are really passionate about video marketing and in this blog, you’ll get an intro into how to create a ‘video campaign’ and how to set up video ads. Video ads are a great way of reaching your audience and engaging with them in a more human way and are really powerful on YouTube and all social media. To manage and create campaigns you can use Google Ads and use the campaign called ‘Video’. How to start Before you start to build your video campaign and create ads, there are few things to think about first… All your videos need to be YouTube hosted in order to make your video ad. You will be using the ‘Video’ campaign type to create all of your Ads and Ad Groups. There are different types of video ad formats and bidding strategies to suit the goal that you have selected for your campaign. There are a variety of reports at your disposal to support your video campaigns, video ads, and ad groups, some of which give...

Have you measured your time spent on each channel in comparison with the return on that investment for each channel? Yes. I can see how much impressions I'm getting, clicks, conversions, and so on. So yeah, absolutely we can and that's the beauty of these. These ads you can track each and every click, every conversion, every video view, and so on. Without tracking, you should never run your ads and everything is tracked. So we know that it is either working or not working. Okay, yes Mark,  Quora is an amazing place. You can even go and just put in replies to your questions and another tip which I will give to all of you is I've answered 10 questions over here. I can then go to Quora search for questions like these and I can put in my video in that question and I get even more views from there because most people on Quora are typing in and putting in a reply using a text. Whereas when I go in there, I reply using video, and with the video, I have my branding, my head...

What is the best screen resolution and ratio for YouTube videos? 16:9 is the normal ratio. But you can upload, I upload vertical as well as horizontal because on the mobile, when you click on that vertical video, it literally fills up the whole screen and it looks really, really good. So we make two versions and we upload both of them. And YouTube allows you to do that even though it's the same video. They never said it's duplicate content. The best resolution, well 1080p, I mean, you can go higher. I think that’s overkill for what we are doing. We're not creating a Hollywood blockbuster! If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: How To Create YouTube Remarketing Lists In AdWords Thank You! 10k YouTube Subscribers Google Display Network: Responsive Ads YouTube Video Ads Tutorial Join in YouTube Live stream every weekday at 1700 hrs. Set your reminder  here

What is the difference between landing page and homepage? What's the main difference? The main difference is on the homepage of a website, you've got a lot of call to actions. You've got the navigation bar at the top, you may have different descriptions of different services and lots going on. A landing page is just purely for one offer or one product. That's it. You don't have any navigation at the top to confuse or leak away from the visitors and they might start clicking here, there and everywhere and then they forget why did they come to you in the first place?! You want to cage in your audience on that landing page and so that they just focus on that one call to action only, be it sign up, buy now or watch the video or whatever it may be. So tomorrow I'm going to go into a lot more detail on it. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: AdWords Landing Page Optimization Tutorial Case Study How To Split Test Your Landing Page Google Ads Q...

Can you tell us about the start of your agency? How did you market yourself and how did you acquire new customers to grow?  We've been in business since 2002, so almost 18 years now. It has evolved quite a bit from being traditional photographers and as the internet came along, our business evolved and you've got to change with the times. You can't just, you know, standstill. So from photography, then the video started to come along. People started to say can you do videos, product shots for eCommerce websites? Those kinds of things, and business headshots. We used to do a lot. Now on a website, the two most important things you have - images and videos. Then the client would say, well, you're doing our photos and the videos, why can't you do our website? So I thought, well, we can try. So we started building up and we started doing websites, and then when you do have a website, then you need traffic and in 2008, when the last big recession happened we... al...

How do you target your competitors customers? You can't target customers of your competitor, but you can target their lookalike website visitors. So what we do is we set this on the Google display network. It is called the custom affinity audience or custom intent audience, where Google knows the type of people who visit your competitors' website and they are not, from what I understand, lots of different people saying different things. From what I understand and what I've heard from the Google apps is it's a lookalike, but it's a pretty good audience. We've got, if I say to Google, look, I want to show my ads to those types of people who go to such and such website, then they are going to show my ads in front of those people, and you will find that they work really well and you get some really good results. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Custom Affinity Audience Google Ads Combined Audience 11 Google Ads Audiences Google Ads Rema...

‘What's a good PPC account structure?’ There are so many. It really depends on what kind of ads you are running. Are you talking about search ads, video display, remarketing, shopping? So many, I couldn't answer that just on the basis of what you’ve put in. The thing is with search campaigns, as I said before, you've got to try it yourself. Experiment, try putting some budget. I never call it a waste. You are buying intelligence from Google because even if you don't get any conversions, you know what is not working and then you tweak your campaigns, tweak your offer or whatever it may be, or tweak your campaigns, account structure or campaign structure, then you carry on running. So you keep on improving as you go along and you'll find that you will get good results. But if you're talking about search campaigns, try to keep the group of keywords extremely tight because you don't want too many keywords that are not relevant to each other. So have a ...

‘How do I generate leads using Facebook ads for my marketing agency?’  The thing is you’ve got to have an offer, have a sales funnel, all these traffic channels, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn. They will send you an unlimited amount of traffic if you want. How much traffic do you want? The problem is converting. If you don't have your sales funnel, you are leaking away all your leads, your traffic putting in all these resources, energy, and money into driving traffic to your website. What is the offer? You know, I've often heard that ‘Oh, Facebook ads are a scam... Google is just ripping everybody off... Linkedin is too expensive…’ Well, it really depends on what you are doing to convert. How good is your offer? How much trust have you built with your audience? If they come to your website and they don't buy or sign up, that means they don't like what they see or they don't trust you. These are the two options. Or if you're selling something, it might be t...

‘How do LinkedIn ads compare to Google Ads and Facebook ads?’ They're completely different! I would say when you have a problem and you need a solution, you will go to Google. You will not go to LinkedIn, you will not go to Facebook. So Google is where the intent is. The search is where LinkedIn is different. You can target companies, you can target professionals by job titles. So if I want to target all the marketing directors in a location or worldwide, I can run ads on LinkedIn and target those people. If I want to target all the employees of a company where they are working, I can do that. So LinkedIn has got some amazing features which you can do on Google or Facebook and the same thing. Facebook has got some features, amazing targeting, which you can't do on LinkedIn or Google ads. This is what I said earlier on, you've got to be in all these places because your targeting is different and then you can see which one is performing the best. But don't stop ru...

‘Can I target Google display ads to a single page only?’ Yes, you can, but unless that page or that website has got a lot of traffic, I would not recommend that this is going to be a good strategy long term. Because if that pays, let's say something new came out today on CNN or Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and all these, the latest news will obviously get that highest amount of traffic on that website, but then tomorrow it's going to decrease, the day after tomorrow is going to be even less and so on and after about a few weeks, it won't have my traffic unless it is organically coming through. Google web, people are still searching for that product or service or the solution. So there will still be a little bit of traffic but won't be a huge amount. So I would not recommend it. But yes, surely you can go to your placements tab and then just put in that URL or multiple URLs where you want to display your ads on those websites or pages. If you enjoyed t...

‘How do I promote Fiverr gigs, on Google ads or Google AdWords?’ Good question. I guess you are selling something on Fiverr. The best way I would say is to showcase your expertise on YouTube and create videos, and then you have your link along the bottom of the video wherein the comments, the first comment, pin it so that you can say something like, ‘if you would like to get my Fiverr gig for $5 or something, click here’, and then it's going to take you straight to Fiverr or Upwork or wherever you are working, and that way you can really differentiate yourself from competitors because I haven't seen many freelancers using this strategy of putting yourself out. Now a lot of people say, well, why should I show them how to do Photoshop or how to create content or how to do video marketing or Google ads? The more you are going to teach and show people, the more they are going to come back to you for more. It's just like all these master chefs, they show us the whole rec...

‘Which platform provides PPC ads other than Google ads?’ Pretty much every channel or social media has got ads on it - Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn. We have campaigns running on all these channels. I've got obviously Google, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, I think these are the six places where I'm running ads and then we can dive into each one of these channels and see what the results are like... on Instagram as well. Obviously Facebook and Instagram. So pretty much every platform where you can run your campaigns and ads. The thing is, you can focus on just one. But what I want to do is to be kind of like an octopus, wherever my audience goes, I want to catch them. So it's kind of like a multi-touch, omnichannel marketing campaign and you don't need big budgets. You know, you can have $5 on each one of these and get your name out there regularly in front of these people. So wherever somebody goes from LinkedIn to Facebook or Facebook to ...

The good bits are that it has created a need for us to create more content, and now we have got a system in such a way that we can scale. We are creating these live videos and then we chop them into mini videos and create more content out of it. By just doing the work once we have got more content to upload which has forced us to create even better systems and processes that are scalable, and the team is in place. I believe we've got about six people now working behind the scenes where once I finish these lives, they take over and start working on editing, creating other mini videos and uploading to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all of these places. So there's a lot more work, which is done after these 20, 30 minutes, but it's worth every penny because especially on YouTube, it gets indexed and YouTube is the second-largest engine in the world after Google and Google own YouTube! So the amount of traffic we can generate from here is absolutely amazing. W...

So hope you're keeping safe and well and thank you for joining me in today's YouTube session and in today's session I've got quite a few interesting questions which I'll answer... The first thing I would like to say is a big thank you to everyone who has been joining in the sessions for the last month. It's been just over 30 days now since I started these YouTube lives and it's just been absolutely amazing. I couldn't believe how exciting this is and it has really given us a new dimension to our online marketing. The way our brand is growing, the community which has been built over here, although the numbers are small, that's fine because we start small and we keep building up and growing... I'm highly encouraged by everybody's comments and the love they're been sending through YouTube and also by email that they really enjoy these sessions and I should continue to do these... The challenge with going live with YouTube is, first o...

‘What tool are you using for keyword research?’  This is a spreadsheet that I created for myself and our business, which we use for ourselves. I will put up a link in a few days where you can download it for free and get started with setting up your campaigns like this. ‘On an upcoming life, can you go in more depth on the step prior to this, how to do the keyword research?’ What I do is I just go in here and download the keyword ideas so you don't need to make things extremely complicated. You've got the whole list here. I've got 400 keywords. You know people don't even use 30, 40, let alone 400 and I'm sorting out these 400 because I'm not doing all the heavy lifting. The spreadsheet is doing it for me and I can easily sort out my keywords. So what I'll do in tomorrow's session is this number of ad groups and write ads in front of you. And you will see all of these will be utilized and ads will be extremely targeted. I'm not going to wr...

If you set up a campaign like this, I can guarantee you that you are going to get the best quality score and your click-through rates are going to improve. Your CPC is going to go down, your ads are going to look really good in comparison to your competitors. Now you see how many of these wedding photoshoots have popped up in here? Wedding photoshoot. Now when I create an ad for the photoshoot, it is super relevant...Pre-wedding drone, that's a new one I've seen! let's try drone wedding... Drone wedding photography. Now we've got this in both of these ad groups. They may compete against each other. So what I will do is I'll go through this list and see if there is an overlap. Then I will delete it either from here or from there, in this instance, the drone wedding should stay with the drone wedding and not at the wedding cost. So I would potentially take this one out from here. Okay, let's try something else. Natural wedding Scottish packages are good. So ...

Now you can see wedding photography prices are completely different from Asian wedding photographers. I can't have the same ad for these two keywords... I want to group them together. The way I do that is I will, first of all, pick up a keyword. Let's say an Asian wedding. So what I'm telling Google sheet is to scan through this column A whichever keyword has got these two words, put them over here. Now, this ad group for my Asian wedding photographer has got four keywords: Asian wedding photography Asian wedding photographer, best Asian wedding photographers, Asian wedding photography prices. That's good. Now when I have my headline one, I mean I would always put this keyword as in headline one, looking for an Asian wedding photographer or Asian best wedding, Asian wedding photographer, etc. It's going to be extremely relevant. Now we are going to look at, let's say, wedding photographer. Now most of these, this list will have that keyword in there so i...

Today I'm going to create a campaign for wedding photography or photographers. I know for a fact a lot of wedding photographers struggle really badly with regards to organizing and setting up their campaigns the right way. So what I've done is, or what I do always go to my keyword planner, put in my keyword and download the whole list, with whatever it gives me, and then you can either use Google Excel spreadsheet or Google sheets, whichever one you work with...Import them in here with file import and all your keywords will come in. So I've deleted all the other columns. I don't need them, all I'm worried about is that keyword and the average monthly searches. So I've got a long list of keywords. Let's see how many there are... it's about 406 keywords. The majority of the time what happens is people or advertisers are only going to pick up a handful of keywords, throw them in the campaign, and get started. But what about the other keywords, which ...