SF Digital Studios

We get lots of questions about  Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)  and how to get the best conversions from your campaigns. Here’s a video all about this topic which may just help you get to get to grips with ROAS: What Is Target ROAS Bidding? There are two main types of target ROAS, ‘standard strategy’ which is used alongside a single campaign or ‘portfolio strategy’ which is used for multiple campaigns. This topic is important because you need to know what type of strategy is right for your business. If you need more information before delving into how to set things up, we recommend accessing:  About automated bidding  as a starting point. Targeting ROAS allows you to base your bids on a selected target Return On Ad Spend. ‘ Google Ads smart bidding strategy ’ can help you to get more conversions or revenue, at the level of your ROAS which you have set yourself. This means that your bids will be optimized automatically when it comes to the time of the auct...

This is the interface of Unbounce, all you do is you click on the create a new button on the top right-hand corner. They have got some great templates, you can also buy them off of third party websites as well. These make it super easy and simple for us to create these landing pages. I'm just going to select one, let's see, let's show you a few examples. So you've got a nice hero image in the background, heading the logo call to action, the email sign up form and the call to action button, a bit of a description about a chef, social proof, and you'll find most of these, the team and the layout are the same. You can customize these to your heart's content. You've got your headline there, you know, hero shot in the background. I liked this form the way they have overlaid it with a tint of green on it. This looks really cool, see how the orange button stands out over this light green background, I really like this. Then they have got a little bit of tex...

So let's start with a blank one, so you can see how we can construct a landing page. So here's the basic page, I can make these a little bit wider, and then each time you need to put something in you need to drag a section. So now I can put an image over here in that section. If I want to upload a logo let's say this one, I'm just picking up randomly. I’ll reduce that, I can put that in the middle like that and then in here I can put another section and I can bring in the headline here ‘on the best’, let's say ‘Google ads course’, or something along those lines, make it nice and big and bold it up, align it centrally or however you want to do it. And you just keep on dragging more sections underneath. You can either put in an image or a video. Let's say if I want to put a video, I've got these in here, all these icons: box, text image, button, lightboxes, when a lightbox pops up on your screen, a form, embed video or custom HTML. If I want to put in a ...

So this is shot with my iPhone, this video. And you can see how good the quality is. All you need is a bit of lighting, a softbox, which you can buy from Amazon for £15 or something like that and that's about it. So let me go into my filters. So you've got the options of filters, you can change that, whatever look, you like black. I quite like the black and white. Actually, this is really dramatic, I'm going to keep it simple for now. Then you have the text over here and you go on the text, you can type in whatever text you want like that. Then you have your drawing tool as well. I haven't used this much, but you can see you've got all these various pens and pencils at the top. You can scribble anything on over here.  Now, this is where the fun begins. You have got these three buttons if I click on the video one first. I can choose any of my videos, but what it will give me now is that you cannot use it all of the time. It says ‘you can come back after four d...

Can you attribute any paying customers to this strategy? Yes. Literally hundreds, if not thousands, I've got more clients all over the world. And in fact, WSI priority media is one of them; he's just outside of Los Angeles. Hi Richard. Hope you are keeping well.  So it does work. We're doing marketing. That's where and in fact, Richard, I'm very impressed with him. He has started his video marketing journey and we were talking one day and he was struggling with the time, he has got the discipline and he wants to succeed because he's seen me getting all these results. He literally wakes up at half-past four, five o'clock in the morning to get his videos done. So there's no excuse. You know, that 15 seconds is, it's not even peanuts. It's literally you shoot, you hold your phone up. You, how about if you have a thought in your mind, record it, upload it. And you can do that while you are watching TV or whatever. And that's what you want t...

Today I've got a very interesting little session on how to get started with video marketing by creating 15-second videos using your smartphone. So, what you're going to do is be able to obviously shoot the video on your smartphone. You don't need to do any editing, but you can add a few things to it with regards to putting up a bit of music, some emojis, icons, and some graphics on it and uploading it to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or wherever you wish to upload. What you want to do is create a little schedule or a list of videos that you want to shoot, and then you can shoot them literally, within a matter of minutes, you don't need hours on end. And if you don't have 15 seconds to promote and market your business, then you shouldn't be in your business right now! And the other thing is right now, obviously, you can't promote your business by going to meetings or networking. The only way out is through online marketing, and video is where ...

In this blog, we thought we would help you understand a little bit more about  Google Analytics  and why it’s so vital you use this tool on your website and with Google Ads. Google Analytics is a hugely underutilized tool, but when set up and used correctly Google Analytics can help you target the right customer for your business and needs. By linking your  Google Ads  with Google Analytics you can start to work smarter and spend less time chasing customers. In this video, you will learn how Google Analytics can be used and what to track and analyze. Getting Started With Google Analytics The starting point is to collect basic data from your website; to do this you need to have a Google Analytics account.  Follow these simple steps to begin: Go to  google.com/analytics  to create an account.  Click ‘start for free’. If you already have an account click on ‘sign in to analytics’. You need to set up a ‘property’ within the ...

Welcome to another blog, where we do our best to share our knowledge and expertise to help you in your business. We want to help everyone learn about the huge potential of using  video marketing  to really boost your online presence, engagement, and ultimately, conversions! YouTube has so many benefits and allows you to reach a huge audience when you publish content consistently. You don’t have to spend hours on creating lengthy videos for your channel, you can opt for smaller ones that can be posted just as regularly., which is exactly what we do to help engage with our clients and ultimately bring us more leads! This blog gives you some tips on how to create and upload short videos from your smartphone straight onto your YouTube channel. You don’t have to be perfect the first time, keep going and enjoy your YouTube journey! On your phone you will need to  download the YouTube App , you can create a new video or upload a video that already exists on your...

Keep your search and display network campaigns separately, although the default when you're setting up the campaign is for both, you uncheck those because they're two completely different metrics. Search is always going to be high intent where somebody has gone to Google and put in a search term because they have a problem and they're looking for a solution. The display network is completely different where you stumble upon an ad, just like you are reading a magazine, you are flicking through the pages and ads pop up, you don't know which one it will be, but on the district display network, you can target them through audience targeting or through keywords. There are lots of other targeting options as well, but the metrics are not the same, obviously, the cost per click is completely different, the click-through rate would be different. It's not going to muddy those metrics, or when you have both of them together, keep them separate in separate campaigns, keep...

I've mentioned this many times, and I do mention it all the time that you have got to set up conversion tracking, otherwise, it will be impossible for Google to get you the conversions which you are looking for, especially when you go on automated bidding. Once you've had 15, 20, 30 conversions and you are running your campaigns manually, switch it over to your target CPA or target ROAS or any other kind of automated smart bidding.  Google will know exactly what you are looking for and it is going to try it’s best to get you those conversions at that price point or below. It doesn't matter how small the conversion is, whether it's an email sign up or somebody has viewed your pricing page, somebody made a call, made a purchase, any kind of conversion which you want, it will help you with your optimizations. With brand campaigns, I would go a bit broad because you are targeting the top of the funnel traffic. What I tend to do when I'm setting up my conversion tr...

Mark, you are saying Google analytics is a minefield, yes it is!  There is too much data in there that you don't know what to look at, most people don't bother about Google analytics.  It's kind of like opening up the bonnet of your car, we don't know what we need. All I need to know is that dashboard. What we do is we create these dashboards for our clients, don't worry about what's under the bonnet. What is important to you and that's all you need to worry about. So we set these up, all these goals, event tracking, conversions, audiences, and so on and you're pretty much good to go, because most of the websites especially for small business owners, they're not massive and they're not big, so you don't need to look at all the things which Google analytics offer, you don't need to worry too much about that either. So this is why I would say we create a little dashboard, which only has the data, which you need to worry about. Okay,...

Okay, the next one is the use of negative keywords. I see a lot of accounts that don't have negative keywords. To stop any wastage you've got to set up your negative keyword list and use them properly on a very regular basis. It's not just a case of putting your list of negative keywords in your campaign and forgetting about it. What you need to do is to regularly go into your search credit report and see which keywords triggered your ads. If you find any irrelevant keywords in that, pop them across as negative keywords. This is kind of like your weekly or monthly check, I won't say monthly, but at least once a week, you need to look there again, it's dependent on how small or big the account is. If your account is fairly small, what I mean by smaller is, let's say you're spending £10 a day, then it's fairly small compared to if he was spending thousands of pounds a day, you will have a lot more data in there, then perhaps you may need to look at ...

In today's session, I'm going to go through some very costly Google ads mistakes, which many people make when running the campaigns. The first biggest mistake is, these are not in any particular order, these are the 10 which I come across, which came to my mind as some of the worst or the costliest mistakes people make. When they start running Google ads campaigns, they don't link the analytics or the Google Analytics account to the Google Ads account. They have got to, both of them need to be linked in because the data will flow from Google Analytics into Google ads. You can get a tremendous amount of information, which you can't get in Google Ads. To give you a little bit of an analogy - when you sit in the car to drive to your destination, the first thing you look at is the dashboard, whilst we are driving continuously, we keep an eye on the dashboard as to what speed we are going, how much fuel is left in the car? Are there any red lights or warning lights p...

We are really passionate about helping people get the most out of Google and YouTube. YouTube has so many benefits and allows you to reach a huge audience when you publish content consistently. This blog gives you some tips on  how to set up your YouTube channel . You don’t have to be perfect the first time, keep going and enjoy your YouTube journey!  Creating a new YouTube Channel When you create your Google Account you have the opportunity to watch videos, ‘like’ other videos, as well as the capability to subscribe to more channels. If you do not have your own YouTube channel you will not have an online or public presence on YouTube. Once you create your Google Account you are still required to create your own YouTube channel to upload your own videos, comments and make your own playlists. All you need to create a YouTube channel is a computer or mobile device with a good internet connection. Creating your own personal channel There are just a few steps to creat...

This is the heart of everything, the workflow. In Asana...you can use something like Trello, Basecamp, or whatever project management tool you wish... But now we've got a lot more people involved, so it's a lot easier and it (Asana) can manage.  It's more powerful I believe than some of the other tools out there. ...This is our marketing calendar,  you can see that we schedule these jobs which have got a number, the video number in front of it, and allocated to whoever is doing that. We just keep on uploading content over here. Then we have a card for each job or a card has got a card on itself. So we've got that same number on there and I'll just go and open up a template.  We've got to repeat all of these things for each and every video we create.  We create a Google folder, then we transcribe it using Temi. The video editor starts working on it, what needs to be done. Then we go into Canva, we check them off. So this is a long checklist of about, I t...

Once you have got your ideas, you need to organize and keep things super organized. Otherwise, you are going to get into a right mess when you scale your content marketing.  Because if you are just yourself, you will know where you save everything, but when you get other people to help you out, you need to have a system, without that system, you just cannot operate. You'll waste more time trying to find things than to just get the job done. Initially, when I started ...Google sheets, a couple of tools, Canva, and Asana for our workflow.  Everything starts from a Google sheet, so each video or job has got a number, right, a numeric number. And you will see that we've got literally loads over here, right? And we have the YouTube URL, the headline, the blog URL, and so on in here. So everything starts from here. And then each job or video has got a folder with the same number as on the Google sheet. We keep all the assets over here, be it the images, the video files, raw vi...

...Today I'm going to be talking about our video marketing system, how we create content, how we get the ideas for the content, how we manage the content, the workflow, pretty much everything... Now, the biggest problem and challenge is how to get ideas for your content. After a few days, you might find that, Oh, I don't have anything to talk about. There are so many ideas you can get from the internet. So we don't want to reinvent the wheel and wrack our brain. Why not create content for what people are asking about? So my favorite and the best place to go is Quora. Quora is the internet's hidden jewel where you can find lots of questions that people are asking. So if I go to Google ads, I will find all these questions being asked by people. You will see replies by other influencers or other people who want to put themselves out there as an expert in their niche…... There's so much content over here on every topic. You can imagine there is everything here. I...

Does using negative words improve our ad rank ? Yes, absolutely it will because you are going to improve your whole performance of your campaign. Your CTR will be more relevant as well, as well as high. So it is just a good practice to keep your negative keywords on a regular basis. I would highly recommend that you don't use broad match keywords because that is sometimes the biggest problem where Google will go on a tangent and will show your ads for all sorts of keywords. Because even if you are targeting exact match keywords, nowadays exact match is not an exact match in Google. You will find other systems which are showing your ad, the best way to check is once you start running the ad, before you start running the edge, you have a list, you sort out your negative keywords on this spreadsheet, put these up. And then as you keep getting your search term report and if you find any which are not relevant to you or your business, then you keep adding them into your negative...

Will negative keywords work on a cost per click? ... It is on Google ads, so yes, absolutely this will stop your clicks and that's the whole idea of creating a big list of negative keywords, so your campaign when you start it you put them in place and it doesn't show your ads for these kinds of items. I'm just going to have a look at some other terms and see if I can find any different ones... Over a period of time, these negative keywords are going to save you a fortune and not only save you money on your clicks, but it will also decrease your cost per conversion, increase your conversions and your ROI. Because if you are getting really good clicks from relevant people, then they are more likely to convert than someone who is looking for a car locksmith and they click on your ad, they call you and people will call you, even if you put in the ad, “we are not a car locksmith”, they will still click your ad and call you! And then they're going to speak to you, you...

Okay, Business name headlines, I've made an ad to promote my YouTube live, right  “YouTube live every day learn Google ads, video ads, digital marketing, ask any questions”, that's my final URL and I put up some videos which I want to promote, so you can see that this one is 29 minutes, 32 minutes and so on and then you can change the videos after a little while depending on whether they are performing or not performing. The subject line, so the custom teaser “YouTube live each weekday”, that is what you see in your Gmail, so you must put that in because - why not? Why wouldn't you utilize this real estate? And then the teaser description, well, I've seen a lot of companies, even some big companies when they advertise on Gmail, they don't have this and I'm thinking they're missing a trick. Put in a teaser, you have got 90 characters. So putting your message in here and at the front end what you want to make sure that you put in the most important bit...

You have got the preview on the right-hand side, you can see how your ads will look on the phone or the computer. You fill in your business name, your headline business name, up to 20 characters, headline up to 25 characters, description up to 90 characters, put in your final URL where you wish to take your visitor to your website and then you put in your ad assets. So you need to have some images, and the beautiful thing is the videos as well. So your YouTube video, so your video must be on your YouTube channel and somebody can play that video within that Gmail ad - that is the beauty of these ads, which I absolutely love! And then you've got options for catalog images, I personally haven't used these, but it's fairly straightforward. All you do is upload your images and then they will come up as a catalog. You create the images over here. Now I have created an ad, which I will show you in a second so you can see how the ads look. The reason why I'm getting a lit...

If Google Ads are expensive but they're converting and Facebook Ads are cheaper and not converting then in my opinion, Facebook Ads are expensive because it's costing you money. It really doesn't matter about the cost, this is what I tell everybody, don't focus on the cost or I need to lower my costs. You try to focus on increasing the profitability of your campaigns, even if Google is charging you £100 a click and you are profitable, you shouldn't care really because you are getting more work and you are making money. It's not coming out of your pocket or out of your budget because whatever you are making, you then reinvest back into your campaigns and you keep on going and keep on scaling. This is how these campaigns work and that's the beauty of these ads. What I do is video ads because very few people are doing and running video ads. I run them on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and where else? Quora? No, not Quora. Quora is the only image....

If you go to the playlist for the YouTube lives, there is a very detailed explanation as to how we go about creating remarketing audiences. I would highly recommend that you, the first campaign you need to start is obviously the brand campaign and then the next one is remarketing because remarketing is, you are leaking away from your visitors to your website. They've already been to your website and you're letting them go without trying to get them back. So remarketing, you can do ads, run ads on search, video, display, Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, pretty much everywhere. So you’ve got to grab them whenever you can, once you have got an audience, but you can't remarket if you only have got a very small audience, you need to have a sizeable size, usually a few hundred for display and YouTube and for Google search you need to have a minimum of a thousand visitors to your website. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Google Ads Remarketing Lists ...

With regards to the budget estimation, it really is how long is a piece of string? Is it a local, national, or international campaign? Is it a search campaign, display video? And if you are targeting all these three channels, then you need to have separate budgets for that. Because of the search campaign, the cost per click is obviously going to be the most expensive. So with a budget and as I said earlier on in today's session, start small, test, see what's working, and then scale than you don't need to worry about it, but you need to have a starting point. You can have no budget at all. So you go sit down with your client and explain to them, okay, how many clicks do they want or how many people do they want, per day on the website. So let's say if a click costs one pound or $1 per click and they want a hundred, then they need a hundred dollars a day budget. But if they only want 10, then it could be 10. So you do your keyword research and especially for the sea...

If your ads don't get any impression, that means your bid is too low. And this question is asked many times “What should be my bid or the starting bid?” Well, it really depends obviously on your local currency, but as I'm in the UK, we have British pounds, so I'm going to keep it at 10p,  and then I will see that potentially I can get weekly estimates for 1.1 million impressions based on your targeting settings, a daily budget of five pounds and a bid of 10p, 590 to almost 1200 clicks, average CPC, 3 pence to 6p. You cannot get this anywhere else, it is so low. And here's why video ads, Gmail ads, GDN as well have got so much traffic that you've got to utilize and leverage this and don't need to have a big budget. So I'm good with that. Okay and then we go into creating our ads. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Google Shopping Ads For Gmail, YouTube & Discover Google Ads Smart Bidding Google Ads Target CPA Bidding Google Ads B...

Then we come to creating your ad group, you name your ad group.  I tend to name the ad groups as per the targeting, so if it's an ad group for let's say keyword targeting, I'll call it ‘keyword’, or if I am running in-market targeting and in-market audience, then I'll call it  ‘in-market’, it depends on how you have your naming convention. Keep it consistent so that they are the same for all your Gmail video GDN search campaigns. Now you have the important bit, this is where you can make or break your campaign. What I would do is keep one ad group for keywords, one for the audience, and then run it and see which one is performing better, it's not very complicated here, you don't have a lot of options. All you do is go in here and you can either get keyword ideas from your website or product or service. Now here's something where you can hit your competitors. Google or Gmail knows the content of that email. So, if a person has sent an email to their f...

Ad rotation, I prefer not to optimize because if I've got multiple ads running, I want all the ads to get an equal amount of traffic and see which one is working and which one is not working. But it's entirely up to you whether you want to optimize or don't want to optimize. Ad schedule, I do, I usually leave it all day long unless you've got a business where you only want to show or run your ads during the opening times of office. You can either put in your weekdays or separate times for your weekends or individual days over here. These are very straightforward and standard settings. Set up your start and end date, I tend not to set up an end date because I just let it run. But if it's for a special event like Christmas, New Year, Valentine's and Mother's Day, Father's Day, and so on, then you can select the date so you don't overrun your campaign after the event has finished. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: 11 Google Ads A...