If you use AdWords, then today’s email will be like solid gold.
Especially if you’re nervous about Google’s freaky new changes and are not sure what to do, where to turn or who to trust.
Anyway, here’s the scoop:
One of the marketers I have the privilege to “mastermind” with is a computer scientist and AdWords guru (not a goo-roo) named Jim Yaghi. A few years ago (while studying to get his PhD in computer science), Jim discovered a secret way of using Google AdWords to get all the traffic he could handle — and for just pennies per click (even in hyper competitive niches where PPC traffic is extremely expensive).
But here’s the thing:
Jim hardly ever teaches his AdWords strategies publicly.
They’re just too valuable.
And like most of the “for real” pros, Jim has found he makes far more moola by using his strategies for his own businesses than by teaching them to others (who then become his rivals).
But, he still sneaks in a training or two sometimes.
And below is an intense Q&A I did with him about all the recent Google changes going on — where even seasoned AdWords marketers are getting their heads handed to them and (in some cases) even being BANNED by Google forever.
Anyway, here goes…
BEN: Jim, you can’t swing a bat anymore without hitting yet another “PPC expert”. And most just teach the same tired stuff they heard from some other guru who heard it from some other guru, etc.
Tell us a little about how you got into PPC and your background.
What makes your take on this unique?
JIM YAGHI: I started my first Adwords account in October 2006.
Things were different back then, they were easier. After only a little learning curve I got the hang of it.
I knew I’d stumbled on a really effective way to advertise.
I could put up an offer and send traffic to it within 15 minutes flat. I would sit there and refresh my account to see where I was getting impressions and clicks. I could instantly test an ad and see whether it worked or not.
Eventually, I got to a point where I was single-handedly generating over 1,000 leads every day in a very competitive “home business opportunity” niche. When my friends discovered I was getting my leads at an average of $2.31 and making back over $4 in profit per lead, they were amazed. Keep in mind, people are spending at least $5 per lead in this market.
A few of them hired me and others had me train their people.
But over time, the Adwords platform got more difficult.
New advertisers kept coming; Google became stricter, and brought new challenges. Since traffic was my livelihood, I had to be in the trenches all the time, making discoveries and learning new things.
Being a scientist by training, I used science in PPC too.
I crunched numbers, ran statistical analyses, and created experiments to understand the challenges and to overcome them.
Until recently, that worked.
I never experienced the difficulties of quality score drops, slaps, and bans that my students were facing when using Google Adwords.
Then one day, my business–and income–came to a total stop.
Google refused to send me any more traffic.
My quality scores went from 10 all the way down to 1 overnight.
I was upset. This sorta thing happened to other people, not me.
But I figured it was a learning opportunity. And it would make me a better trainer–because I could finally understand my students’ frustration.
So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work.
I bought a new domain, changed my keywords, my ads, and my landing pages…and I got back on for a few weeks. Then just when I thought I was safe and traffic was rolling in again, my quality scores would plummet and I’d be back at square one.
This happened to me, over and over.
And it got really frustrating and somewhat embarrassing. Because my lead cost was becoming prohibitive. I tried everything…and when I thought things couldn’t get worse….
One of my most productive accounts was suspended and banned permanently. I’d spent nearly 200,000 dollars in that account alone.
Why would Google fire such a big spender as I was?
I was devastated.
Nothing in the world could be worse than being rejected by Google.
It was time for some drastic changes. I got in touch with my friend Cherie who is just as much of an analyst as I am. And discovered I wasn’t alone–we had similar troubles.
Over the past few years, she managed many accounts in the same niche as mine. And between all those accounts, she pulled a total of over 400,000 leads. But very recently, all of that came to a screeching halt as she realised many of the campaigns she managed were being slapped silly.
She was frustrated like I was.
We pooled our discoveries together, discussed the mistakes we’d made, and talked extensively about how we would address each problem. As it turns out, our biggest enemy was NOT Google.
It was us.
Yep, we were killing ourselves.
We had to come up with a formula that would save us being in this position again. It wasn’t enough to just get unbanned or “unslapped” if that meant we’d get banned again a few weeks later. We really had to change our entire approach and go to the heart of the problem.
The steps we came up with saved us.
They aren’t based on some guru’s theories. They’re ones we invented as a result of our methodical experiments. And what’s more is we’re applying them successfully right now.
You asked me what makes what I’m sharing special…two things:
1. It’s not a temporary solution that will get you unslapped today and banned tomorrow. That’s what most of the gurus are teaching; ways to game Google and get back on. It doesn’t work anymore because they’re smarter now and more brutal. Real human reviewers are going into our campaigns and putting a stop to bad behaviour.
2. This information is extremely current and comes direct from my trenches. We paid for this knowledge–with our money, our sweat, and our tears.
BEN: Google seems to be freaking a lot of people out right now. You said you are zeroing in on 6 specific “land mines” in your own campaigns. What are they?
JIM YAGHI: Alright. I know that most Adwords advertisers are making at least 4 of these 6 mistakes. And they’re a little surprising and might upset people because the mistakes are things we used to think were good behavior.
So here it is, without censorship:
Mistake #1: Using public tools to choose keywords
Mistake #2: Bidding for lower positions to qualify traffic
Mistake #3: Split-testing ad copy to improve CTR (this is screwing their quality score)
Mistake #4: Listening to the gurus about landing page “guidelines” for Quality Score (their advice is based on theory alone, and it’s getting people banned)
Mistake #5: Over-confidence in Google PPC
Mistake #6: Relying exclusively on Google for traffic
BEN: Let’s start with choosing keywords with public tools. What’s a public tool and why is using it bad?
JIM YAGHI: A public keyword research tool is any tool that you use to get keyword suggestions and the suggestions are publicly accessible to everyone.
Examples are Wordtracker, the Google Sandbox, and so on.
Back in the old days, that’s how I used to discover keyword opportunities. I’d just whip up my favourite tool, type a general keyword, submit…and then I’d get back a bunch of derivative suggestions with some stats about how many people search for that phrase and how competitive it is.
The trouble is that more and more advertisers have access to the same tools. And the suggestions given by that tool to YOU are also going to be given to anyone else who has a similar business.
When you use public tools to find new keyword opportunities, you’re always going into an adspace already full of competition. And in time, more competition will pursue you.
The reason it used to work before was far fewer advertisers used Adwords. But as more people came in, the competition for the same keywords became more intense.
We’re all trying to find the most frequently searched keywords with the least competition. But I’m sure we’ve all noticed how even the lower frequency keywords are still prohibitively costly.
Many badly behaved advertisers with poor quality ads are taking over. And the increase in competition pushes prices up…but that isn’t enough to deter those bad guys. I think there’s lots of money in scamming people, so they could afford to spend a bit more than the average advertiser.
Google started to police any overly-demanded terms.
Ads were disapproved, campaigns were slapped, and accounts were eventually banned. It got to a point you didn’t have to be a “scammer” to get policed…just being in those ad territories put Google’s eye on you.
When we realised that our keywords choices were sitting us right in front of the muzzle of Google’s gun…we knew we had to slide over.
We tried to run creative keyword ideas, but even those came from suspect categories.
Our keyword intelligence had to evolve to private sources. Those keywords from our private data are only accessible to us and no one else. Only by doing that were we able to ensure that no one would ever target all the same keywords as ours.
And by stepping away from public data, we created our own adspace, almost immune to competition.
BEN: What about qualifying traffic by using a lower bid. How is that a problem? Don’t you want to have better quality traffic, especially if you’re paying for it?
JIM YAGHI: Of course you want quality traffic.
But most people aren’t really bidding for lower positions because of quality. It’s really about fear.
Fear of spending.
Like us, for example, we were just nervous about paying for expensive clicks we couldn’t convert. That’s why we didn’t want to be at the top.
Look, people figured out a while back that the closer to the top your ad is, the more “impulse” clicks you get. While lower down the page, you’ll get less clicks–but they’ll be better quality people whose click is a conscious decision.
We used to bid low and aim for the #6 position.
That cost a fraction of what position #1 did. It got less traffic, but it converted more. Our bad assumption was that Google would recognize we had a really good ad and reward us by moving us up in rank without spending more. So in reality, we wanted the top positions because they got more traffic, but we didn’t want to spend the money to be there. When Cherie and I compared notes on this, we found that we’d NEVER got that reduction in price or increase in position.
If anything, our position dropped over time!
Our reduced click-thru-rate actually made it impossible to move up or get better quality score.
That silly “trick” doesn’t work anymore.
Searchers today are very impatient.
They want to see a relevant answer to their query right at the top, preferably without having to scroll.
And if your ad isn’t where it’s going to be seen, then the searcher will either click someone else’s relevant ad that appears before yours–or they’ll see the top couple of results aren’t what they’re looking for and requery.
Yeah, that means they prefer to update their search and run it again than to scroll down and look for you five positions down.
So what happens is that even if your ad is really relevant and it’s underneath irrelevant ads, it will accumulate impressions without being seen. And that lowers click-thru. Reducing perceived relevance not only to Google, but the user too.
It’s guilt by association.
If you’re lower down, the user assumes you cannot possibly be relevant. They trust Google’s choice.That creates a domino effect, and Google assumes you irrelevant. They drop your ad position and ultimately slap your campaign.
But you don’t want to go bidding some ridiculous amount for the #1 spot and expect it to work just because you bid more.
Because you’re likely to end up accumulating the cost of impulse clicks without converting those clicks. And that’s why we were scared. We suspected our higher bid wouldn’t allow us to recover the expensive cost of the extra clicks we got.
After we discovered how to convert the higher position’s clicks into sales, we had nothing to worry about. We could bid confidently for top spots, prove to Google we deserved the position, and we’d enjoy much more traffic.
BEN: You mentioned split-testing adcopy was a mistake. Why’s that? Isn’t split-testing a pillar of good advertising?
JIM YAGHI: Yes, you should always split-test–with the right goal.
Here’s what I mean.
We used to want to create adcopy that attracted clicks. Especially since we were bidding in lower positions, we needed to make our ads more attractive to the fewer people who scrolled down.
So our split-testing goal was to maximize the attractiveness of our ad. That way, it would be clicked more frequently. And CTR would increase.
But we were fighting a losing battle.
Our frustration was that no matter what we did with our copy, the test ads either got very few clicks to test with, or they’d have plenty of clicks that didn’t convert.
Either way, that dropped our quality score.
But now that we were bidding for a higher position, the problem changed. We had a lot of expensive clicks and many wouldn’t convert. So while this point may seem counter-intuitive, we actually had to split-test ads to repel clicks from unqualified searchers. And that was our split-testing goal–to lower CTR and hide our ads.
Doing this actually improved our quality score.
Because we pulled out of all the searches we didn’t really belong in, instead of waiting for Google to kick us off. And we saved money because we repelled the clicks that would’ve never made us sales.
BEN: The 4th “pitfall”, you said is listening to the gurus about quality score guidelines. I know a lot of heavy PPC users put a lot of stock in those new guidelines…so tell us why that’s wrong.
JIM YAGHI: Ben, I actually got really angry about this one.
Because every time I would go out and buy a new domain, I’d spend weeks building the site, copy over my campaigns, and start improving my quality scores. Then out of the blue, as soon as I got my impressions back to normal, manual reviewers would strike my account again.
I bought all kinds of products from people who claimed to know how to get good quality scores.
I followed their advice religiously…
I substituted my shallow squeeze page sites for blogs. I added more relevant content. I played with my meta-tags. I added images. I placed navigation links on the page. Hell, I even gave up on converting my traffic. Google’s quality score was my only concern. My lead-cost would escalate to $20, $30, even $50 a lead. And after thousands of dollars spent on testing all these theories, I’d get slapped and have to start over.
Honestly, I became very pessimistic about anyone who claimed to know how to improve quality score. All their tricks did was to give me a temporary score and it wouldn’t last.
I started to suspect that Google was doing more than reviewing my landing page. At the very least, they were crawling my entire site. And that was disturbing. Then my suspicions were confirmed by Cherie who had insider information from her ad rep that their human reviewers were conducting extremely invasive reviews.
They were reading my testimonials, reading my sales letters, watching my autoresponder messages, and verifying my testimonials. Any claims they found to be exaggerated and not-representative of the common perception of reality were flagged.
Being aware of the extent of Google’s watchfulness, I knew what to do.
It wasn’t about just creating unique offers.
I had to regain my customer’s trust.
I couldn’t just game an adbot any more.
Everything we do now is subject to scrutiny by humans. People who can see through all the tricks the gurus are teaching. You have to really create trustworthy content that creates happy buyers.
That’s it.
BEN: How is being too confident in Adwords hurting advertisers? Is Google the enemy? Do they just have a grudge against certain industries or is it something else?
JIM YAGHI: Well, when marketers started having great results with PPC, they put all their faith in it. Like I said earlier, we are all a little overwhelmed by how much instant traffic we’re able to generate with such little work.
It’s enough to make anyone get a big head if they know how to get results with Google.
And I think that was our downfall.
We trusted Google so much as a traffic source that we overlooked the fact that only 20% of searchers are even looking over at the sponsored links.
On the left side of the page, where organic search results show up is where most people are looking. And by not being listed there, we were missing out on about 5 times as much traffic as we had before.
The reason we didn’t care about SEO before, though, is that it seemed so much more difficult. With Adwords we could just pay our way to the top and enjoy enough traffic to be profitable.
It was hard to accept that Google would never be the same again.
It’s now increasingly difficult to squeeze as much traffic as before from relevant terms alone. The new quality guidelines were wrecking us.
That’s why we had to diversify our traffic to include the left side of the page too. It would give us authority in the eyes of both the searcher and Google if they see us frequently on both sides of the page.
Now I don’t claim to be some kind of SEO expert.
But we discovered a strategy using PPC data that would have us almost immediately ranked for otherwise very competitive terms. By adding SEO to our strategy, we dominated the entire page of Google results and had access to 5 times the traffic using only basic knowledge of SEO.
And most of it was free.
BEN: Let me ask you about relying just on Google for traffic. What’s the deal there? Google has billions of searchers, isn’t that enough?
JIM YAGHI: Once we got to thinking about diversification, we knew Google wasn’t going to be enough. The adspace there is only going to get more competitive and expensive.
But it’s not like we didn’t try advertising on Yahoo and Bing before.
In fact, we tried a lot of different engines with very similar PPC programs. And we found out the traffic there was far too little to be worth the effort.
What little we got rarely converted.
For example, my own Yahoo campaign until a few months ago was only generating 20 leads a week for over $6 each.
Only occasionally did those leads turn into customers.
Here’s the thing that I came to realise–many of those search engines have been around for a long time. They make billions in profit. So clearly, the traffic has always been there.
I just didn’t know how to get it.
That’s why most advertisers who move from Google to Yahoo or Bing aren’t able to get much traffic. We wrongly assume that all searchers behave alike.
But that’s not true–we just use those PPC programs wrongly.
Interestingly enough, someone who use Yahoo to search doesn’t use Google. And that person is inaccessible to us if we use Adwords exclusively.
So Cherie and I conducted a study to see who uses each search engine. When we had this information, we were able to target searchers properly and enjoy traffic from multiple engines.
Not only did that give me access to searchers I couldn’t reach before, but it also was far less competitive, cheaper, and easier to advertise profitably. And though I can tell you, I didn’t stop my Google traffic, because I’m absolutely in love with Google.
It’s just that now I can sleep easy at night in the knowledge that the next time Google makes a drastic update to their policies, I know my businesses wouldn’t starve for traffic.
And I can simply let go if necessary.
BEN: Tell us about the free training you are doing covering these 6 Google bombshells, and what are you going to teach on it?
JIM YAGHI: Alright. On December 8th, we received a disturbing news bulletin from Google saying that they were out for the blood of “make money from home” advertisers. The FTC had a choke-hold on them, and they had to take drastic measures to clean up the ad space.
Unlike in the past, if you misbehave on Adwords, you’re looking at more dire consequences than a little account ban.
You could be defending yourself in front of a jury in a criminal courtroom!
At first, because of the nature of our information, we wanted to hold it close to our chests. We had worked so hard to find a way to eliminate competition and pull out of all the dirty dog-fights work from home advertisers were engaging in.
But our students came to us in a panic and asked for help.
I hope you don’t mind my honesty here…because our reason for sharing is a little selfish.
Both Cherie and I have a reputation for solving Google mysteries and sharing our results. So if we didn’t say something on such a huge matter it would make our expertise suspect in front of potential clients.
In fact, one of my own clients was in a panic until I told him some of what I was doing to protect his business.
Only then would he relax.
So it’s really a matter of our own survival.
Our 6-step formula is both valuable and powerful.
We asked ourselves, can we share this information and ensure our own safety for the long-run? After much debate back and forth, we decided to release our discoveries to a handful of people on a webinar.
300 to be exact.
That’s all the seats our virtual-classroom can take for the moment.
We are confident that our technique is so effective at eliminating the chaos created by bad competition–that we can afford to do this.
So if you’d like to attend, you can register at:
BEN: Is it just going to be a thinly disguised sales pitch, or are people going to find real solutions if they take the time to listen?
JIM YAGHI: If you’re asking if we will be selling something on the preview webinar, then the answer is yes. This information is too valuable to our own business to give away for free.
In fact, we’re taking a huge risk sharing it.
But we’ll first give everyone who attends the webinar at www.jimyaghi.com a proper understanding of the reasons they’re struggling with Adwords.
You can certainly go out and use the information presented…even in this interview…to save your business from the wrath of Google. I’ve actually given away a lot of hints and at the very least you’ll know what activities you’re engaging in that are quickly leading you to your own suicide on Adwords.
If you want detailed step-by-step instructions of what we’ve been doing and save your business, you’ll want to buy the full training when it goes live in early January.
BEN: Do you have anything else you want to add?
JIM YAGHI: I just want to say thank you for your patience listening to me. I know you’re sharing this information with your subscribers without a financial agenda.
And I hope they’ll appreciate that.
Whew!
That was an intense interview, wasn’t it?
And if you want to get even more training like this, here is the link to the free PPC training one more time:
Ben Settle
P.S. Also, just to be obnoxiously clear — I have NO affiliate or joint venture connection to this. However, I suspect this free call will have more “for real” AdWords info on it than most paid courses.
There’s my 2010 prediction for ya.
