Interview with Brad Geddes, Google Partner: Online Marketing Tips for Building a Successful Business

Interview with Brad Geddes, Google Partner: Online Marketing Tips for Building a Successful Business brad geddesgoogle adwordsenhanced campaignsseo campaignscampanii adwordsonline marketing

Brad Geddes works directly with Google, organizing various Advanced Google AdWords trainings, and he is one of the most successful online marketing specialists in the world. Having over 10 years of experience, he has provided consultancy services for conversion optimization, product/website development, product positioning/launching and much more. He has successfully managed SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing campaigns for himself and other businesses.
At the same time, Brad Geddes is the author of Advanced Google AdWords, the most complex book ever written on this increasingly popular topic. He attended the SEMDays even held in Romania, where Fokus Digital Services was also present.

The following is an exclusive interview provided by Brad Geddes for Fokus Digital Services and IdeiDeAfaceri :

1. What were the reasons that led you to specialize in internet marketing?

Back in 1998, I was looking for a new career and I discovered affiliate marketing. I had never done any type of marketing before, and really enjoyed creating websites, marketing them, testing everything, and having full control over my own income and lifestyle. I started with SEO, then soon afterwards Overture, the first PPC search engine that started to get noticed.

Consequently, I quickly adopted a PPC plus SEO plus testing mentality and it served me very well in the early days. In time, my career morphed in order to include many other forms of marketing, as I find the entire process fascinating. My background is in Personality Theory Psychology, so I've always been fascinated with how people make decisions and how various forms of messages appeal to different types of people. That background in testing fits well with marketing and I've never looked for another career since.

2. What are the chances of survival for a small or large business without a solid online presence?

The chances are very slim. As more and more users are turning to the web as their initial form of business discovery, a business will have problems surviving without an internet presence. We're still in the transition process for initial discovery and review, so a business without a great online presence can still succeed with traditional offline forms of marketing and little web presence right now. However, that period will be short lived and, within a few years, if you're not online, you'll have a very difficult time succeeding or growing in any type of business.

3. The investments in online marketing have increased in the last few years, for both small and multinational companies. Which type of campaign do customers request more often: Adwords or SEO?

Overall, SEO is still requested more often than PPC for small companies. I think that this is due to a misconception that SEO means free traffic. With SEO, you are paying for time, website development, content development, and much more. Many small companies still haven't realized everything that goes into an SEO campaign, and they also haven’t realized that once you rank, you still need to keep paying, in many cases due to algorithm changes. Larger companies often request more PPC help or even more developed services, such as testing and analytics. The difference in services is often directly related to the maturity of the company's online presence and to what its leaders wish to do next.

4. What are your recommendations for our readers when it comes to choosing an agency for managing Adwords campaigns?

First of all, businesses should understand the basic principles of paid search. They don't need to be experts, but they must know the basics well. Only by knowing the basic principles of online campaigns can businesses properly interview an agency and ask the proper questions to see how the agency can help them. There are very good and very bad agencies online. The bad agencies still get clients, and that is often because most businesses don't know what they should be looking for in an agency. Since every business is a bit different, it is difficult to provide a list of questions that every business should ask. However, understanding how the agency tests ads, how it creates (or doesn't create) landing pages, how it uses conversion tracking, analytics, or other software and techniques, is crucial to understanding what you are actually paying for.

5. There are many mistakes that can easily come up in Adwords campaigns. What are the most common mistakes that can significantly impact the project’s outcome?

There are five common mistakes that can easily make a campaign unsuccessful:

1. Not setting campaign goals. You need to know your target CPA (Cost Per Action), ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending), and other goals before starting.
2. Not tracking results properly. If you can't tell which data points are leading to conversions, you can't optimize anything.
3. Using broad match keywords excessively. Broad match keywords show for so many unrelated queries, that using this function can mean your ads will be showing for services or products that are completely unrelated to what you actually do.
4. Sending all your traffic to a single landing page or only to your homepage. Each query is different and your pages should reflect the differences in what the user is actually trying to find online.
5. Mixing the display and search networks in the same campaign, or not understanding the display network. By default, AdWords campaigns show to both networks. Very few new companies do well on display, yet you can be quite average and do well with search. This means that new companies should focus on search first and only after understanding how AdWords works move to using the display network. 6.

6. Why is it so important to advertise your business using the Google Display network?

The Google Display Network is vastly larger than the Search network, so there are more potential customers on display than on search. In addition, display advertising can be a substitute for TV or newspaper advertising, where your goals are both awareness and sales. It is difficult to promote brand new products and services via search. However, display is great for generating business awareness. I'm a huge fan of using the display network throughout the buying funnel, and changing your tactics based on your goals, as it can help you in each stage of the buying funnel, if done correctly. However, display is not as predictable as search, so it is best for new advertisers to start with search and then only move to display once they are comfortable with the AdWords system and have learned how to use display correctly.

7. How can Google Display remarketing improve your conversion rate?

Remarketing allows you to show ads to users based on their behavior on your website. Therefore, you can show one set of ads to someone who abandoned your shopping cart, another set to those who filled out a contact form, and yet another set to those who simply viewed specific products. Due to the ads being shown based on website behavior, you can tailor the message the user sees depending on the next action you wish them to take on your website. These users already know your brand and your site, so they aren't cold calls, they are warm leads in terms of marketing.

Because of this, remarketing campaigns are often the highest converting campaigns you can run in AdWords. If no one visits your website, then you can never build a remarketing list, because such lists are based on website behavior. This means that you need to couple search or display ads with remarketing, so that you first have users visiting your site - and hopefully some will convert right away - then remarketing can capture some of those who abandoned your website, and bring them back to convert. Therefore, remarketing is best when used with another traffic-driving source.