127. Make Massive Profits with Google Ads: From an Ex-Google Employee

0:00Hey, Upflippers. If you're looking for the next wave of growth for your company and you're thinking that Google Ads is the way to go, we have the episode for you. This is Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Up Flip podcast, where we uncover how great businesses are built, how they're run behind the scenes, and how you can replicate their success. Today, we are welcoming Jill Saskin-Gales to the show, who notes all things about Google Ads. She's a coach, a consultant, and an expert who's going to drop a ton of advice for us on how to get started with Google Ads for your company. Jill, welcome to the show.

0:32Thanks for having me. It's going to be a great conversation. A lot of our listeners, entrepreneurs, small business owners, or those wanting to get started. A big question that always comes up is how can I grow this? And Google Ads is a great way to do that. And you're going to help us with that. All right. But before we do that, let's lay that groundwork for how you got into digital marketing and why you specifically chose Google Ads as your specialization. Sure. The way I got into digital marketing was actually by getting a job at Google. I had been working in New York after my MBA, and then I was moving back to Toronto where my family was.

1:01And I didn't know what I wanted to do next. And I saw Google was hiring and I thought working at Google, that would probably be cool. Why don't I just apply there, probably get rejected, and then I'll figure out what's next. And then I actually got the job, which was great. And so I had run a bit of Google ads before for a side hustle I had at the time doing MBA admissions consulting. So I had a bit of familiarity with the product, but the rest I learned on the job over my six years at Google got really deep into the digital marketing industry. And now I love sharing that knowledge with other entrepreneurs.

1:28Yes, I'm super excited for that. But let's talk about that Google Ads piece a little bit more. Like, when did you start to like learn Google Ads and why did you start to learn Google Ads? I started to learn Google Ads in 2014 because I was running this side business doing MBA admissions consulting. So helping people apply to business school. And I had gotten my first couple of customers organically by guest writing blogs, commenting in forums, things like that. And then I decided to test what was then called AdWords to see if I could drive people to my business when they were going to Google and searching for MBA application help or MBA consulting help.

2:04And I got mediocre results, I can admit now. When I went in for my interview at Google and they asked me about that, my interviewer gave me a few tips right then and there. And I thought, OK, I've got a lot to learn here. So then once I started working at Google and learned a lot more about how the Google Ads platform worked, I was then able to take what I learned, apply it to my Google Ads account for my own business and get great results then for my own business. And so it was this really nice back and forth because in my day job at Google, I worked with the kind of businesses that spend millions a year on ads.

2:33And I was able to take those learnings and apply them in my business. But also in my conversations with these large advertisers, if I was pitching them on a certain product as part of my job, I can say, look, I spend my own money on this and I've seen these kind of results in my business. So it really worked well both ways. Yeah, I think that's really cool. And Google Ads is especially being able to speak to actual clients about like, here's my experience with it, I think is like an awesome way for your own like career journey and actually climbing that corporate ladder. But you didn't really climb that corporate ladder because you did your own thing.

3:01Can you talk to us about working this as a side hustle and then like really leaving Google to like have your side hustles be like full time? Absolutely. So I kept the MBA admissions consulting side hustle while I was at Google because I liked it. It was fun. I earned some extra money in U.S. dollars, which was nice because I live in Canada. But I ran my side hustle in U.S. dollars. And I actually, you know, I really admire entrepreneurs. I am one now, but I didn't think I would be one. I was not brave enough to leave Google to be an entrepreneur. I actually left Google for another job opportunity.

3:31And unfortunately, that job opportunity didn't work out after about two weeks. So I found myself having just resigned from Google being like, I'm going on to this great job, fell flat on my face. And I felt like, oh, gosh, I need to make money. Like yesterday, what am I going to do? And I thought, well, my most monetizable skill is Google Ads. And so that's how I started my business. I just thought I have to get out there and somehow find clients who will pay me for my Google Ad skills. And I grew it from there. Oh my gosh. Well, let's talk about that then. So two weeks, you fall kind of flat on your face.

4:01Your words, not mine. I will always steer you on. But how did you get that first client thing? Because Google ads is a very monetizable skill. People think about what are high income skills that you can work anywhere. Google ads just is one of those. But a lot of people are like, how do I get my first client? So how did you get your first client with Google ads? I got my first client for Google ads by posting on TikTok. Funnily enough, This was back in 2021 and I had consumed a lot of TikTok and a video came across my feed of someone who's not a Google Ads expert sharing a little Google Ads tip.

4:31And I saw that that video had 10 ,000 views and I was like, what? That many people care about Google Ads on TikTok? And so I waited till my husband went out because I was embarrassed and I sat at my dining table. This is when we were all still at home during COVID and I recorded my first couple of TikTok videos about Google Ads and kept it up. And I was very fortunate that after about 10 days, I had a video go viral. My inbox was flooded with people who wanted to hire me. And that's how I got my first clients. A lot of people who reached out were not the right fit, but some of them were. I'm still friends to this day with some of those initial clients and it really snowballed from there.

5:04So within six months of leaving Google, I had replicated my Google salary through my own business, managing Google ads. That is such a cool story. I think within six months as well, because if you're working at Google, you're probably north of six figures, at least doing very well. Yeah, it was 300K a year at Google. Wow. And so by September that year, I had hit 25K a month. But I will say full cat, like I was exhausted and burned out. So I did it. I proved to myself that I could do it. But then I also was like, OK, this is not sustainable to earn this money this way. I need to shift my business into a way that's more manageable.

5:35And that's why I started to get more into consulting and coaching and teaching, not just the ads management. Yeah, I think that is really cool. And it comes from TikTok. What were in these first few videos? Like to get your first client in 10 days just by posting on TikTok, that sounds like a dream for anyone. So if someone wants to replicate that success, what would you advise for them to create early on? What they should create early on is content that shares value. And I know we hear people say that a lot, but like unique information that they can't find elsewhere. I'm not going to say I was the only person talking about Google ads, but at the time I was one of the only ex-Googlers doing it.

6:11And I was one of the only ones who could explain it in the clear and simple way that I do. So my very, very first video, which still gets views on TikTok to this day, is explaining the difference between SEO and SEM, search engine optimization and search engine marketing, which is Google ads. And my first video that went viral was a video about a tool that actually doesn't exist anymore. But it was a free tool called Find My Audience that helped you get some audience insights from Google. I was shocked that was the one that went viral because it wasn't even about Google ads. But in the video I mentioned, I used to work at Google and that video got to half a million views within a couple of days.

6:46And I got, yeah, tons of clients from it. I love that. I think that is an amazing story. That's actually one of the most unique stories I've heard interviewing a lot of entrepreneurs that you got it from TikTok. But let's kind of pivot now to Google Ads specifically. Small business owners, entrepreneurs, people are listening to this saying, OK, I'm ready to do Google Ads for my own company. For an entrepreneur that is like just starting out, what are like those first steps they should take when setting up a Google Ads campaign? So the first step they should take actually before even setting up the Google Ads campaign is first making sure you have a website that converts.

7:18And by that, I mean, like if you're an e-commerce entrepreneur, you have a website, people are coming to it and they're buying your stuff. Or if you're a service based business, you know, people are coming to your website and contacting you in some way. You want to make sure there is some match between your target audience and what you're offering them before you run your Google Ads account. So assuming you have that in place, then when setting up your Google Ads account, there are actually nearly a dozen different kinds of campaigns you can run in Google Ads. And for the vast majority of businesses, I recommend starting with a search campaign, a Google search campaign.

7:48OK, what is this Google search campaign? We're going to pretend people are very basic knowledge here. Like, what would be a Google search campaign? A Google search campaign means you want to show ads to people when they are searching for stuff on Google. And a lot of the times you may think, isn't that the only thing you can do with Google Ads? But with Google ads, you can also run ads on YouTube, ads on Maps, ads in Gmail, hotel ads, things to do ads, shopping ads. There's a lot of different kinds of ads you can run. There's a lot of fancy bells and whistles, and it can be tempting to jump straight to the fancy stuff.

8:17But for most businesses, you're going to want to start with a basic search campaign where you pick a few keywords, the kinds of things that people might be searching for when they're looking for your business, and then run ads when people are searching for those things. So, for example, let's say you sell yoga pants. You might have a few keywords like yoga pants for women or locally made yoga pants or best yoga pants. To start, you only need three to five keywords. You don't need hundreds, just three to five keywords. A budget of maybe 20 to 30 bucks a day. Write a really nice ad and just start from there.

8:48And from there, you can learn, see what works and optimize and eventually get into all the fancy stuff. When you talk about identifying keywords, because one thing that we're going to space our visual is like we want to start running Google ads. We want to start going after clients, but we don't want like too broad of search terms here. So what criteria do you look for like when identifying those keywords to go after? A really great place to start is a free tool in Google Ads called Keyword Planner. And with Keyword Planner, you can start with a few keywords if you have a general idea of what you want.

9:17Or you can actually just type in your website and have Google look at your website and tell you these are some of the keywords related to your business. And when you're looking at that, Keyword Planner will tell you if keywords are very competitive, meaning a lot of different companies want to advertise. So they're going to be more expensive or they're not very competitive, which means not a lot of other companies want it. So they'll be less expensive. And it'll also tell you, is this the kind of keyword that gets like 10 searches a month or gets like 10 ,000 searches a month? Now, if it gets 10 ,000 searches a month, there's plenty of opportunity.

9:45That could be a good keyword for you. If it's only 10 searches a month, but it's exactly what you offer, that could also be good for you. So I don't like to use the volume as a guide. It's more helpful to look at that competition and keyword planner will tell you what you might expect to pay per click and use that as a guide from there. One of the most common mistakes I see people make is they'll pick 20 keywords and then they'll have a small budget, which just doesn't make sense. So just start with the three to five most relevant keywords. So, for example, instead of just yoga pants, maybe it's yoga pants for women or ethically made yoga pants or flared yoga pants, like something to make it a bit more specific to you so that the person searching for that more specific thing is one likely to convert.

10:24Okay, I like that. A question I have as well, I was listening to like a growth summit in February or so, and they said one of their best growth hacks, as we throw around more terms, one of their best growth hacks for 2024 is to run Google ads on your competitor's search terms. I'm like branded competitors. Okay, you're kind of giving some head nods here. What do you think of that? And can you kind of explain what that would mean as well? Sure, so first of all, this is not a hack, but when you are running ads on Google, you can pick anything as your keywords, including the name of your competitors.

10:54So let's say that you're Nike. Wouldn't it be nice to have that ad budget? You can run ads on people searching for Adidas. So they type Adidas into Google and your Nike ad comes up. There's a few important things to note here. First of all, you can't actually use Adidas's name or your competitor's name in the text of your ad. It's against policy. So while you can advertise on the keyword, you can't actually put their name in your ad. So because of that, not as many people are going to click on your ad. You're going to have what we call a pretty low click-through rate. And the lower your click-through rate, the lower the quality of your ads, the more you're going to have to pay per click.

11:29So if you're trying to advertise to people searching for your competitors, those clicks are going to be very expensive for you. And they may or may not convert well for you. Maybe they will convert well, so it's worth it to you. But maybe not because those people weren't looking for you. They were looking for a competitor. So this is a thing you can do in Google Ads, but it's not something I recommend for beginners. And there are actually much more effective ways, more creative ways to target your competitors' traffic than just going after their keywords. For example, there's something in Google Ads called a custom segment.

11:59And you can show ads to people who have searched for your competitors recently, but just not at the moment they're searching. So, for example, you can show a YouTube ad to someone who has recently been searching for a competitor. Or you could show a display ad to someone who has one of your competitors' apps installed on their phone. And I find that to be much better because you're not trying to intercept them right at that search moment where they're blatantly not looking for you. But, you know, they have been looking for your competitor or they have interacted with your competitor and you can advertise to them in other ways that tends to be much more affordable.

12:29Yeah, it just like blows my mind at like how like nitty gritty you can actually get with Google ads. Like I had no idea about like these custom segment things. It's a little bit like overwhelming on how much you can actually do with Google ads. And I'm sure you walk through that with clients as well. It really can. Even me, like I live and read this stuff every day. I worked at Google. My whole business is based around Google. And still, I'm learning new things every day. I actually just started a personal project this week where I'm going through the entire Google Ads Help Center. Google maintains this very large library of articles, all the documentation of Google Ads, because I'm learning new stuff every day when I do that.

13:04And so that can make it intimidating, sure. But it also creates so much opportunity and creates so much opportunity for creativity, which is pretty cool. That is really cool. There is a lot of opportunity for creativity. So we talked about the keywords. You hone down your keywords. Someone's just getting started. Okay, I have my keywords. What should they be thinking about next? Is that the budget or what would be the next step once you identify those keywords? Next step is to think about your ad. And this is the part that is the afterthought for so many business owners I'd be with. They focus so much on the keywords and the bidding and the budget.

13:35And the last step in the ad creation process is actually writing the ad. But that's the only thing the end user is actually going to see. So it shouldn't be an afterthought. So you want to make sure that your ad has a specific call to action, highlights the features or benefits of working with you, maybe has some social proof. This is something where a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini can be really helpful in helping you draft those headlines and descriptions for Google ads. But don't leave that as a last second afterthought. That's the most important part, in my opinion, because that's the only part the user sees that helps them determine whether or not they actually want to click on your ad.

14:09So I'm hearing like the most important part, you need to include that CTA, highlight, the social proof. This all needs to be within that search. And that's what people need to include when they're actually running these search ads. Exactly. So with the search ad, we've all seen them on Google before. There's kind of the blue headline, it's called. That's the link the person can actually click on. And there's the black text below, which is called the description, where you have a bit more space. And there's all kind of other bells and whistles you can add on to. But that is basic. There's headlines and descriptions.

14:34And even though the end user will only see two or three headlines and one or two descriptions in the ad. When you're actually creating the ad, you can create up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions. And then Google Ads will use its AI algorithm to mix and match all those different combinations to create the right combinations for the right user at the right time, depending what they're searching for. Yes, you want to give it a lot of that variety so that both you and Google Ads can learn what resonates the most with your target audience. I don't want to get too technical here, but we're going to get kind of technical.

15:04What are the elements that go into creating like a great headline on Google ads? Ooh, what are the elements that go into creating a great headline? Well, there's a few that Google would tell you, which I agree with. So you want to make sure that your keywords are included in some of your headlines. So if someone is searching for yoga pants for women, you want to make sure the headline says yoga pants for women and not just yoga pants. So that creates a good, relevant experience. When you're creating great headlines, you want to make sure that they're very unique. So you don't want it to be yoga pants, yoga pants for women, black yoga pants, best yoga pants, try our yoga pants, but that's not enough variety.

15:38So, you know, creating unique ones. One to two of the headlines should be some kind of call to action or drive to action, like shop our best sellers, see our new arrivals, try them on now, and then highlighting what makes you different. You know, how many customers love you or super amazing fabric or whatever it is that makes you special and unique. And you can take up, you know, four, five, six of those different headline slots with those different features or benefits of your products. And then once your ads start to run, you'll see which ones are showing up the most and which ones are resonating the most.

16:09And you can go from there. So Google will tell you that including your keywords, having variety is important. And then what I would add to that is the importance of some calls to action and highlighting some of the features and benefits of what makes you unique. And if you ever need inspiration, by the way, there is something, it's not called the Google Ads Library, but it is the Google Ads Library. It's actually called the Ads Transparency Center. And so you can go to the Ads Transparency Center on Google and look up any company in the world that's running Google Ads and see what their ads look like and use that to get inspiration if you're feeling stuck.

16:40And so let's kind of move along this journey a little bit more. So we've got like identifying the search terms, like those key elements with the headline CTA budget as well. What sort of budget, if someone's just getting started with Google Ads, like would you recommend that they start with? Yeah, so this is actually covered in the Google Ads for Beginners course, but I'll share that with you here as well. A little sneak peek. Please. Two pieces of guidance I have. The first piece of guidance is that as a bare, bare minimum, you should be prepared to spend at least$20 a day for at least a month.

17:09So that means at least$600 in a month. And that's assuming you have like one specific niche product in one location, you know, three to five keywords, that's it. So that's one way to think like if you can't spend at least that and potentially see no return because Google Ads may not be profitable from day one, can't spend that may not be the right fit for you. The other piece of guidance I give is you want to make sure you're spending enough to get at least 10 clicks per day on your ads. Because if you're not going to get at least 10 clicks a day, at least 10 people visiting your virtual storefront, in my experience, it's not worth all the time and effort you're putting into this Google Ads Management if you're not getting at least 10 people a day coming to your website from it.

17:48And that's kind of the basis of where my$20 a day guidance comes from. $2 cost per click is probably the lowest you could reasonably expect to spend. And sometimes your cost per click could be$5 per click or$10 per click, depending on the industry, in which case you need a much bigger budget. So kind of$600 a month or however much it takes to get at least 10 clicks per day. And if you can't spend that, then you may want to take the money you do have and invest in other kinds of marketing first. You talked about a course with like the Google course, but you also have a course with Uplit Academy.

18:18Can you kind of cover what's in there? I know some of this is in there, but can you kind of cover that a little bit? Yes, I'm really excited to have my Google Ads for Beginners course on Upflip Academy. In this course, I'm going to walk you through in about 40 short digestible lessons, just the basic foundations you need to know to be ready to run Google Ads. So we'll go into a bit more detail about some of the things we spoke about here, like keywords and creating an ad and how much you should spend and keyword planner is demonstrated there. But then other things we haven't spoken about yet here, like all the other different kinds of campaigns you run on Google Ads, the different kinds of bid strategies you can use to determine how much you pay, all the topics you need to get ready to run your first Google Ads campaign.

18:56Yes. And that course is packed with insight. This podcast has already been packed with insight. And I want to keep chugging along here. Everyone, please go check out that course. It's also in the show notes below or it's on upflip.com slash academy. me. So let's talk about we got that budget. We got that budget honed in. We're ready to go. You know what? This campaign is actually doing pretty well. Like this is actually bringing in some good leads for us. How do you keep optimizing that campaign to ensure you're driving the best results for your campaign? Sure. So key ways to optimize. I mean, there's infinite, but the ways that I usually like to focus on when I'm just getting started is by looking at your search terms.

19:28So, so far, we've been using the word keyword a lot. What keywords do you want? What keywords do you want to advertise on? But there's actually a difference between a keyword, a search term, and a query. So I just want to break that down for you because it's really important when you're optimizing your campaign. Keyword is what you as an advertiser put in your account to tell Google the kind of searches you want to show on, like yoga pants. A query is what a user actually types into Google. So they might type in yoga pants near me. They may misspell yoga pants as Y-O-A-G pants, right? They could type in lots of different things.

19:59And so when there's a match between your keyword and the user's query, that's called a search term. And you can see it show up in your Google Ads account as a search term. So you pick your keywords and then you see what search terms you actually get from the wide public out there. And sometimes the search terms that come in will be highly relevant to your keywords, which is great. But sometimes you can get search terms come in that are not so relevant. Like Google might decide, you know what, your keyword is yoga pants, but that's really similar to running pants or Pilates pants or exercise pants.

20:29So we're gonna show your ads on those queries. And you would see that in your search terms report. And maybe that is relevant for you and it's converting, in which case, great. You might check your search terms and say, actually, that's not so relevant for me. I don't want that. And so you may need to adjust your keywords or add something called negative keywords to fix that going forward. So usually in your first few weeks of running a search campaign, one of the key ways you're going to optimize to get better results is to check your search terms report and then adjust your keywords or adjust your negative keywords to make sure you're showing up on the searches you want to.