SF Digital Studios

Why do we need to set up all these goals? The time on site, a number of pages visited video views, those kinds of micro-goals, those little touchpoints where visitors haven't converted yet, but they are interested in you and your message or your product or services. This is where these discovery campaigns on Google Ads come into place. These are aimed at, just like the name suggests, is for people to discover you. The only way you'll be able to sell to somebody is if somebody, first of all, knows you, likes you and then trusts you...Discovery campaigns, video ads, display ads, these are all types of ads, which will take you out to the world. So, the first thing we do is we set up these campaigns and what you need to do, how you want to do it,  we'll do this in Google Ads….So let's go into our account...Now I've got various campaigns running at the moment. What I've done is I've gone in and put in the last six months' worth of data, so it's not a ...

  Okay. Mark, you are saying, “I thought Google frowned on using other companies’ trading names and ads?”  Yes, that's right. I did say that you cannot use trademarks or even competitor names. If they are not trademarked, then I personally don't like it. Some people do, but you can certainly bid, absolutely,100%, there's no frowning by Google on that.  “How do you find out if they are trademarked?”  Google will disapprove your ad, that's how you will find out! But if you are a reseller, let's say you are a reseller for Canon or iPhone, they will give you a link where you apply for your name, or you're asked to be whitelisted, and you'll be able to do that. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Google Ads Approval Time Google Ads: The Most Advanced Google Display Network Tutorial Ever Learn Google Ads Live Google Ads Negative Keywords Join in YouTube Live stream every weekday at 1700 hrs. Set your reminder  here

Okay, Mark, you're asking, “Do you have a recommendation for an easy to use free video editing software?” Now there are lots of different types of videos where you need to add it. I'm not sure which ones you are talking about? I can edit a video entirely on my phone, I use Adobe Premier rush. Adobe premier rush is $10, it's not free, $10 per month I believe. This is an amazing piece of software and an app, which you can use. Imovie is free if you have got an iPhone for screencasting.  When I show you tutorials and stuff like that, I use ScreenFlow for the Mac and Camtasia, which is for PC and for Mac. Video editing really sucks out your time, it is the worst thing you can do. I would highly recommend that you get a virtual assistant or a freelancer to edit your videos, give it to them because you will not do it.  I can promise you I've done it, I've been there, now I don't do my video editing. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: How To S...

Another you're asking, “Can you talk about Google shopping?” What would you like to know? If you were running an e-commerce website, then the ads are the best ones. Now they've got these new product listings out for shopping ads by Google, I'll be making a new video on that. Shopping ads work really well if you have set them up properly. What I tend to do is to have one product, by ad group, and split them out because not every product has the same profitability. On the low margin products, we bid low, on the high margin products and we bid more aggressively or more on those who are more profitable, we bid accordingly. If you enjoyed this article, you may also like: Google Shopping Ads For Gmail, YouTube & Discover Google Product Ads: Availability Mark Up How To Set Up Negative Keywords In Your Google Ad Campaign Understanding Google Ads Discovery Campaigns Join in YouTube Live stream every weekday at 1700 hrs. Set your reminder  here

I'm running Google ads only three days back, I am not getting any impressions and the quality score is zero”.  Well, the quality score will be zero because Google hasn't got any data and the system hasn't adjusted as to what's happening! So I wouldn’t worry too much about the quality score. The lack of impression means that your bids are too low. You need to keep bidding up, at least if you want to get started very quickly, whatever you are bidding right now, you multiply it by three. I know you might freak out and say, “Oh, I don't want to spend too much”, but then you will have this frustration of not getting any. So let's say you are spending your bidding $5 right now, I would go to $15 and see what happens. Even if I don't get any impressions, I'll go to $25 and so on until the impressions happen, even if you go $30 or $40, for call ads, it's quite normal. They are the most expensive clicks, but the most converting ones as well. It does not ...

I am often told why should I bid on my brand? Why should I waste my money and clicks on my brand campaign? Because, If somebody searches my company name at the top of Google page one. Well, your competitors will always be above you. If they are bidding on your name or your brand, you can do the same thing to your competitors. If you have got local or direct competitors, you can absolutely bid on their name because if they are not running a brand campaign, then your name or your ad will be above theirs because the organic rankings are way down the page. You know, you got your four ads then the Google maps, and then the organic comes up, especially on the mobile, it is way down, nobody scrolls down to the bottom, all they do is look at the top and they see, or don't see, and they'll click whichever.  If they see something different or attractive, then they're going to click and come, competitive campaigns are sometimes extremely profitable because you have legally stolen...

  I cannot stress how important it is, especially the remarketing. You are spending all this money, resources, and energy on ads, you're writing blogs, putting up videos, and trying to drive traffic to your website, then you let them go. If they don't convert, you have to set up a remarketing list and try and get a percentage of those people back, even if they don't come back, they will see you on the internet because they may not be ready right now to buy from you. But when they do want to buy, you should be the first name in their head because they keep seeing your ads.  You probably see my ads and content because I keep putting up regularly, now I have really upped my game because, in these challenging times, I need to work double if not more than before to be able to get more clients. When we come out of the situation, I'm 100% ready because now the whole world has changed and the business has changed. Those who did not pay much attention online, they realize how im...

I covered this in a couple of previous sessions where most people or advertisers are calculating the first time order value and not taking into account how many times a potential client can come back to you.  For example, let's say, Mark, in your case, you have a client and they come to you for business cards. They may come to you for a letter, as they may come for you too for Christmas cards, they may come back for someone else who joins the company, they need more business cards, so that account is not just a one-off transaction unless you've got a product where you only get a one time sale. Most businesses will have recurring or repeating customers. That's what you want to do, the customer lifetime value is not until when the customer dies, take a 12 month or 24 month period and see from past data if you have been running your business for a long time, how often do they come back to you?  If they come back to you on average, you know you spent a hundred dollars and they ...

The next one is I see in many ad groups that there is only one ad written or one video or one image ad.  Make a variation of these ads, make multiple ads, write it down, think about what you want to put in that message using different headlines, different descriptions, and then test them to see which one is getting the most click-throughs. If you don't test it, you will not know how much cash you are leaving on the table for your competitors to take away.  The same thing with the videos, if you are creating videos put a different message maybe.  I mean simple things like changing your top or your shirt and seeing which one  - a white shirt compared to a black shirt, which one is getting the most clicks or conversions. The hook which you have, what is your offer? Change the way you say it, shoot one video indoors, another one outdoors. I mean, with your smartphone, you can do this very quickly and easily at pretty much zero cost. So why wouldn't you split test the...

Giving up too easily and too quickly, now, I was having a conversation with somebody where we run a campaign for about two weeks or so, it's a brand new account, a brand new website, pretty much everything is new, we don't have any data and we had a handful of conversions, but not that much to really scale up the campaigns.  What is your expectation? When you are starting a campaign, I know you want conversions, you want leads, you want sales, but you need to be realistic because it's like setting up a brand new business, you're going out from day one cold calling or knocking on doors and getting new businesses. It won't happen just like that, you go to business, networking events, you go on and on and on. Why? Because if you do, if you go to these events consistently and show your face, you are going to get the work. But if you go once a week or once a month and then you think, well, I did not get any work from an event I'm going to stop going. Then, obviou...

Avoid broad match keywords, never use them. It is pretty much going to eat up your budget extremely quickly unless you have got a big brand that you are working for, or you have a big brand and all you want is exposure. Then obviously you can run it, but if you are giving a really specific call to action, then you don't want to be running on the broad match keywords. This is something that very few people use. The use of ad extensions. Why wouldn't you use them? Because it just takes a little bit more work to set them up and it literally doubles up the ad on Google or sometimes even bigger! So you are taking up even more real estate on the top of the Google page, your ads are going to look even bigger than your competitors and the likelihood of you getting that click increases quite a bit. Your ads have got more information, so you can have, you know; locations, callouts, call extensions, structured snippets. What else? You can have some types of offers on the price extens...

  Today we're going to do something a little bit different and touch on a little bit about Google Analytics, which I would say 95% of business owners don't pay any attention to.….The majority of the websites do have analytics setup, but I believe only 18% of websites or website owners use analytics in the right way. Analytics is a minefield, this is why people don't use it because they don't know what to look at. There's so much data, it's data overload, and then you don't use it. But if you get the right metrics, which are relevant for you and your business, then you are going to make data-driven decisions. That is extremely important because you don't want to go by your gut feeling that ‘I think this is going to work’, or ‘I think that's going to work’.  You want the data in black and white, and then you decide whether it is working or not working.  Okay, so let's move on to the goals…..we are looking at micro goals and macro goals. Mi...

  Google loves websites where the audiences are interacting and engaging, they're spending more time. So if your competitors on your competitor's website are staying on average, let's say 10 seconds, but on your website, they're staying for 40 seconds. Guess what, who's going to get higher rankings?  Because Google wants to give the best quality content to somebody they know that on this website, whenever somebody comes, they are staying there because they like what they see. The person who owns this website is working hard to create good quality content, regular, fresh content, and updating, updating the website very regularly compared to somebody who's just left it alone for years and months and hasn't updated anything.  This is what you want to do, attract these bots, the search engines, to keep coming into your website and getting your pages indexed, because you are updating your website very quickly. What we do is once this video, this live stream ...

  Now, if someone stayed on my site for 10 seconds, that does not convert into a dollar value or a pound value that they haven't purchased anything from me, but they are valuable to me because I need to make sure that, they, I can attribute or target those audiences again, those who are the most engaged.  How do I find that? By putting a value for each of these actions which a visitor takes on my website. So for example, if somebody stays on my site for 10 seconds, I give them a one value point, this is not a currency value, it is just a point scoring system so that I can see which one is better. Another one comes in and stays for 30 seconds, I give it to 60 seconds or more, I give it a four value point. You can do your scoring system, do whatever you like, but I tend to do it like this. Pages per session, two or more pages, 1 point, 3 or more, two points, four or more for four points. Video view, the same one, two, and four. You can do the same thing with a scroll. If so...

Mac, “Which simple software do you use to write text on the image easily?” Canva. In fact, I'll show you, you're in luck! So this is in Canva, you have the free version, as well as the paid version. I have the paid version. It's worth $10 a month because if I want to resize this one for Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever it has now resized my graphic, all I need to do is to just move these around a bit. And my graphic is pretty much changed. I'll go into my homepage. Signed out for some reason. Okay, there you go. So these are our images, which we have designed over here to put up as the custom image on the front of each video. So you can see that we are putting in different tacks, logos, headshots, so Canva is pretty easy. Or you can use Photoshop. “Can the landing page be in two languages or do you think each language has to be in separate?”  Yes. We have a few campaigns where we are running an English page, as well as an Arabic or an English Spanish page. So the ...

What I also do when somebody fills in this form is I will send an email to myself. I can't show you that right now because a couple of people have already signed up, so to protect their privacy, and as this is a live video, so I can’t go into that section. It's fairly straightforward. You then set up, so you get an email as soon as somebody fills in that form, and it just keeps you in the loop that this page is working fine and there's not a problem, because if I usually have these form submits on a regular basis, pretty much every few hours, somebody will sign up. If it stops for any number of reasons, I can go in here and check if something has broken or changed or not working. So it's a good way to just ping yourself an email that somebody has signed up. I also then have this form linked to my active campaign email automation. So you would go into my email list. It's all automated. So I don't need to manually, or somebody has to do it manually every time ...

To set up your conversion tracking, all you need to do is to go into your Java script, I always use Google tag manager. So you can do that quite easily. You can have two types of tags for the tag manager. One goes in the head and one goes in the body. So you save it and then do the same thing again…. So when somebody fills in over here, the form, they go to the thank you page. Let's start with this one first. At the moment I have not split tested it yet because I've just set it up. Once I know that everything is working fine, then you can see, then I can see that I don't need to make the changes on both of the pages. So I let it run for a few visitors. Now, three visitors have already been here, two have converted. And then it will show you a conversion rate. Obviously, it's very high right now, so that will drop down over a period of time, but you want to keep that conversion rate as high as possible, obviously. So I want to go into the edit button, Okay. So no...

So if you want to build from the background, you need to have some kind of an idea as to what you want to do. I'm going to color this light grey or whatever color you like. Then I'm going to drag a little form on there, then you have got all of your custom fields or your predefined, I want to do first name and email, this is a required field so I check that box. I can make it optional or required, both of them are fine.  Make it a little bit wider and I can also make that form a bit nice and to the width of the field so it looks neat and clean. I can then change the button color to whatever you want. If you want green, you can put in green, if you want to change the text buttons or let's say, get started. Now, I want a little headline over here, I'll drag the text box, the font is too big so I'll change that, it is fairly easy and straightforward, this is what I love about Unbounce, it is simple to use…unbounce has got a lot of images and royalty-free images i...