Date: May 14, 2020 Time: 2 PM ET | 11 AM PT Duration: 50 mins

Webinar Description:

B2B small businesses often experience the challenges of cost-effectively building their brand’s visibility and their revenue—and this has become even more true for many since the onset of current events involving COVID-19.

This is why Hive Digital’s own former Googler, Jay Patel, believes the time is now for jumping into YouTube and Google’s Display Network (GDN).

Join team members Jay and Sheffield for this 50 minute webinar, where you will learn why B2B SMBs should be using these channels and a 3-Step process for testing and implementing initiatives.

In this webinar, you will learn:

How Google’s targeting has changed the game for B2B small businesses
Details on targeting, ad formats/creatives, and measurement
A 3-Step process for testing and implementing efforts

See Additional Resources
Access Presentation Slides (PDF)

Jay Patel:
If you have any questions, you can put them into the chat and either Sheffield or myself will spot it. All right, looks like a few more people jumping on in. All right, well we’ll just go ahead and get started while we’re waiting for a few more people to jump on. They can catch up with us. Sheffield, do you want to kick things off?

Sheffield Pulley:
Absolutely bud. I want to thank you all for Joining us first of all. We’re excited about this webinar, excited specifically to have Jay here with us. Jay is one of our newer team members and ex-Googler as you can see here. I’m going to let him tell you a little bit more about himself but as he mentioned, we are going to take questions. We’ll probably save those until the end. If you’ll drop them in chat or if you want to write them down and save them till the end, Jay and myself will be able to answer those for you. Otherwise, I’ll pass it over to Jay. Looking forward to it buddy. Thanks for doing this.

Jay Patel:
Absolutely. Thanks everybody. Really excited for today. I’m going to do … What we’re probably going to do is go through everything in hopefully about 40 minutes, which should be able to leave some time for Q&A at the very end. If you have any questions, drop it into the chat and we’ll be sure to answer them. As we mentioned, today the live training, we’re going to be talking about YouTube.

Jay Patel:
We’re going to talk a little bit about how it specifically relates to SM specifically in the business to business segment, which has definitely been a segment that’s close to my heart as ill talk about. And, also a segment that typically has not figured out how to work well in brand advertising in my experience. But I think there are some things that are opening up today and with the whole COVID situation, there are some new opportunities opening up for these businesses to survive.

Jay Patel:
So, what we’re going to learn today. There’s three things. First off, how Google’s new targeting has changed the game for B2B SMBs and really, what are some ways to really think about that? We’ll go into some details around targeting ad formats and measurements, although it’s really going to be more of a high level overview than something really in-depth just so you have an idea of what’s out there. And third, a roadmap in order to test and implement.

Jay Patel:
So, some fun notes for today. First off, put your phones away. We’re going to be giving a lot of content at you and I talk really fast, so I promise that we’ll get through this as quickly as possible so that you can get all the information as quickly as possible. Third, this will be recorded so if you have to drop off early or if you’re joining late, totally fine. We’ll send out the recording as well as some resources after. Fourth, I’m going to use a lot of metaphors. Apologies in advance if you don’t like them, but I think that hopefully there’s one that you will find helpful for you.

Jay Patel:
Fifth, this is a roadmap, not a manual. This isn’t going to be designed … You’re not going to be a total expert coming out of this, and that is okay. What’s most important here is that you leave with a mental framework around all these things. Just remember certain components and considerations to keep in mind. You can always come back to this later, you can always talk to us after if you have more specific details around actual implementation. And lastly, we’re going to have a Q&A at the very end.

Jay Patel:
With that said, I’ll jump into, who am I? Why should you even be listening to me? First off, I worked at Google for five years on the Small and Media Business Advertising team. I individually have worked with over 1,000 advertisers across those five years. And in my last three years at Google, I worked on the Agency team, so I was working with some of the best and biggest search engine marketing agencies in the country on how they can help their clients improve. I’m also a social entrepreneur.

Jay Patel:
I left Google in 2015 and moved to Uganda where I ended up becoming a co-founder on two different startups, and thus myself coming into the shoes of my former clients, trying to run digital marketing as an entrepreneur. And lastly, since moving back to the US in 2019, in addition to the work that I continue to do in East Africa, I’ve also joined the Hive Digital team as the in-house Google Ads expert. So I continue to work with Hive Digital clients today on how we can utilize Google and YouTube, and Google Display in order to hit advertising objectives.

Jay Patel:
So, growing up, I would watch TV as most people do and I remember I used to watch The Simpsons. I remember one episode really stood out to me about Mr. Plow, which was a snow plow business that Homer Simpson started and filmed a little mini ad for it. My dad is a small business entrepreneur himself. He’s had a small company for over 25 years. He’s an engineer by training and they do a lot of radio communications work for the government, military, other things, so very small, very niche.

Jay Patel:
I always wondered like, “When would I see my dad’s company on TV?” The answer was, never. There was never going to be a point in which he was going to have an ad on TV because his market was not B2C and there was no TV channel at the time that was targeted enough for his audience. So, brand advertising was something that he just ignored. What I’m here to tell you today is that this has shifted. This has now shifted to the point whereas a small business owner, you can actually start to open up small business targeting.

Jay Patel:
Sorry, targeting by small businesses to customers, even if you’re in a very, very niche vertical. It really means a lot to me, because COVID, especially in these times, small businesses are taking the brunt of the damage right now. Digital marketing is a way that we can get beyond this and make sure that we can keep the economy going even with social distancing. This was the biggest reason why I wanted to run this webinar and why I’m so passionate about what I’m about to tell you about today.

Jay Patel:
So, my story. How did I get to the point that I even am talking to you today? While I was at Google, I started pitching something called remarketing, which many of you have heard about, remarketing and retargeting. It’s the ads that follow you around after you visit a website. So apologies, I was actually somebody at Google that helped actually get this adopted by a lot of advertisers. I just started doing it on my own and got approval to run a pilot to see whether remarketing would be a good fit for the small and medium business network. This was like 2010, 2011. We saw it was successful, and really started to scale so for the first time, we saw small businesses going into the Display Network and beyond just Google Search.

Jay Patel:
But the problem was that after remarketing, they just stopped advertising because they weren’t seeing the results from banner ads, through other forms of targeting and they weren’t seeing conversions. And as you know, most small businesses are really, really performance oriented. They’re not going to do a lot of brand advertising. So, I started work with some of my more open minded clients on like, “Okay, what are some ways that we can get beyond this?” Because we all know brand marketing works in terms of building brand awareness and upstream …

Jay Patel:
We’ll come back to upstream versus downstream in a moment, but brand awareness drives downstream sales. Because if they’ve heard of your business before they come across you, they’ve heard of you before, they’re just more likely to convert. There’s a whole $500 billion industry predicated on this. So, how can we do a better job of linking those two in a way that can help small businesses make investment decisions about how to invest in things that are going to help their business? So we ran some pilots that we’ll talk about later, and then before that was really able to take off, I hit the road and became an entrepreneur myself.

Jay Patel:
Now back with Hive as I mentioned before, things have now changed, and we’re going to talk about it starting right now. So to set the stage, first of the metaphors. Let’s talk about the story of the boomerang. Now, I don’t know if you know this, but have you ever thought about how a boomerang which was used by Aboriginals for hunting, how it actually worked? Now, there are many different ways that you can use a boomerang to hunt. One is just to chuck them at the animal. But the way that boomerangs worked in terms of catching birds was a little bit more complicated.

Jay Patel:
What would happen is that they would … Say you had a flock of birds on the ground and you wanted to capture those birds. What they would do is they would fly the boomerang over these cute birds, and basically the birds would think it’s a hawk and start flying in a certain direction. And if you were smart about how you do it, those birds would fly straight into a net. That’s how they hunted. Now, what does this have to do with digital advertising?

Jay Patel:
Well, let’s say that these birds are your customers. What would the net be? The net is what we would think of as the traditional things that you need to do online. You need to have a website, Google Maps, social media platforms. Just the basic things so the people that are looking for you can find you, and that includes search ads. Search ads are part of your net because essentially, people are already searching for you or your product or service, and you just got to be there to catch them.

Jay Patel:
What does the boomerang represent? Well, for a B2B business like my father’s, and many of yours, a lot of this actually happens offline. Trade shows, referral partners, PR, cold sales outreach. And for a lot of businesses up until now, that’s worked, or that’s been good enough. It’s like, “As long as we have a good website, we have some search ads, we’ll take care of the rest.” However, that is now changing with COVID. All of these things are no longer possible. So, what are businesses to do when they don’t have this?

Jay Patel:
Well, that’s where digital marketing has to come in. Social media, Facebook, YouTube, Display, LinkedIn, Quora. There’s all sorts of websites out there, and really going out to grab that traffic and push it towards your website, or at least push it towards a Google Search for you. The thing that we’re really going to focus on right now is YouTube and GDN. Mostly YouTube, but we’ll talk a little bit about GDN as well.

Jay Patel:
So, what’s the relevance? YouTube, when we think about search engines, we all know that Google is number one in the world. Market share is over 90%. But, the second biggest search engine in the world is actually YouTube and it is a big place where businesses post videos. I think number one is Vimeo because Vimeo does a lot of internal business stuff, but YouTube has a big repository of B2B video content.

Jay Patel:
And with most of the world’s been reached through YouTube, or at least most of the developed world, more than half them visit the site every day. You’ve probably been on YouTube in the last couple of days if you’re sitting at home. If you think about it, YouTube users are not just searching for funny videos, but they’re also searching for how to do things. And that not only includes things like how to fix your backyard, but also B2B. How do I use Excel to do this thing? So, it’s a place where people are really searching for robust content in the corporate environment, and businesses are recognizing that.

Jay Patel:
There’s a State of Paid Social report that was released by Hanapin Marketing. You can look it up, totally free to access, and two things stood out to me. The first is that YouTube is already the third most popular place for businesses to invest in. But what really shocking to me, was to see how many businesses were planning to invest more in YouTube. If you look at the number, the blue represents the number of people willing to … Number of marketers planning to increase their budget, and red is decrease. That ratio, 51 to 5% is the biggest ratio out of all the things on this list. It’s really showing that video is the future and businesses are responding to this, and this is the opportunity that now SMBs can get involved in.

Jay Patel:
When we talk about the boomerang, we say, “Okay, this sounds great.” But, how do you actually implement it in the process of digital marketing? You might’ve seen this before. This is the customer marketing funnel. It’s taught in a lot of business courses. It’s pretty much gospel for any digital marketer. But the idea is that at the top funnel, you have awareness. Let’s say you get 10,000 people in order to be aware that your business or product exists. Out of that 10,000, you’re just going to say maybe 10% of those, 1,000 will be actually considering your product versus other products.

Jay Patel:
Then you move them to the purchase where maybe out of that 1,000 people, maybe 300 end up purchasing. And then out of those 300, maybe you could get half of them to end up repurchasing. That’s when we talk about the funnel. And when we think about digital marketing, whether it’s search ads versus social media, when we think about, “How can we move people from the top of the funnel, all the way to the bottom of the funnel?”

Jay Patel:
If we start up here and we think about, “Okay, the boomerang is really going to exist more at the top of the funnel,” and it’s like, how do you get people pushing downstream? Then the net is going to be the things at the bottom of the funnel. When we translate that to the advertising platform, top of the funnel is going to be YouTube. It can also go into consideration, but it is going to be largely more brand awareness. GDN straddles the middle of it. Google Search is going to be towards the bottom, but also in consideration. And then lastly, your website and everything that happens after they visit your website. That’s really going to be the bottom of your net.

Jay Patel:
So, let’s talk about how a user might interact. Right now as you may know if you’ve ever run Google Ads, its last click conversion, meaning that when we think about a conversion, i.e an action on your site like a sale or a lead generation, we’re only thinking about Google Search. Or actually, if we think about that being the last place where someone goes before coming to your website. So, we’re not doing a good job in our current metrics of figuring out, what are the other steps before that, that might’ve influenced whether that person makes a sale?

Jay Patel:
I’ll give an example. I don’t have a graphic here, but let’s take a proposal. Let’s say just for this example, a man and woman, and they end up going through this entire courtship process, and then they end up getting married. Now let’s say along that line, they had a first date. Maybe he got her roses one day, maybe they went on a vacation together, there’s a proposal. And right now in terms of … All those steps mattered in order to getting to whether they got married. But if you take the roses out of it, would they still have gotten married? Or if you take the proposal out of it? Because right now, what might only be counted is that they actually walked down the aisle, or something like that.

Jay Patel:
When we think about multi-funnel conversions, we try to think about, okay, what were the paths that people took? Did they go from a banner ad to then search for you? Did they go straight to your website? Did they see you on Facebook, then go to Google, then go to your website, and then go back to social media, and then finally convert? So, we’re now figuring … Now Google, and even Facebook has implemented ways to help you start tracking that. Now, if you implement an integrated funnel strategy that involves both YouTube, Google and Search, you can actually start to measure out some of these differences, although there’s still a lot of work that’s being done there in order to make these models more relevant and more useful.

Jay Patel:
We can go back to this rule of seven, which is using marketing and politics, that you have to see someone’s ads seven times before their brand awareness really sinks in. Does it all have to be on YouTube? Could it be a combination different factors? That’s what multi-channel things are doing. That’s really a lot of how the metrics and measurements, and the direction of the industry is moving on that regard.

Jay Patel:
Now, in terms of, okay, how have things changed for small business in terms of finding the customer that’s relevant? Generally when we think about advertising on YouTube or on Display Network, it comprises two buckets. The first is content based marketing. So, what is the content of that website or that page? Generally the targeting is falling into topics, which are really broad areas like gardening or home décor. Then there is keyword contextual, which is actually the first Google product around online advertising on Google Display Network and that’s where you …

Jay Patel:
These keywords are not searched keywords. Instead, they’re keywords used to target certain content on websites. And that’s still around, but that’s really decreased importance. The reason for that is the rise of audience based targeting. Audience based targeting has really evolved a lot, even in the five years since I’ve left Google, and there are a few different ways that you can do audience based targeting. Essentially, it is cookie tracking off the website. But it goes much more specific in that.

Jay Patel:
What they will do is, they’ll say for example … They’ll do in-depth surveys of people’s behavior beyond just the cookie. They might take cookie data and they say, “Okay …” Just like a Nielsen rating might do, they’ll go out and survey a subset of those users and say like, “It seems like you’re a homeowner. Can you confirm this for us?” So based on that data, they’re able to … It’s surprising how much they can infer from the cookie data, that can help target whether you fall into one advertising bucket or another to the point that they can … There’s now segments for, what is your household income? Or, are you a renter versus a homeowner? Or, are you in this niche industry?

Jay Patel:
There are still a lot of concerns around user data but at least from an advertiser’s perspective, there’s a lot of wealth of things that you can use to advertise. That’s how they’re able to then say, “Oh, okay. We may not have surveyed you, but you look like this person we’ve surveyed, so we’re going to put you into a bucket.” You can actually go to google.com/adpreferences, I think, or just Google Ad preferences and you can actually see for you personally, who does Google think you are, and what buckets of these you fall into.

Jay Patel:
Now, the game changer here is custom intent. This is a new one actually, it’s only come out in the last couple years. One of the things it’s able to do, is that you’re able to create a customized list of keywords on Google Search, and then target the users who search those keywords. To give an example, if you’re trying to target, say, somebody with a particular engineering certification, you can actually create a list of keywords related to that certification like ISO, something, something, something, and then create a user list of all the people who have searched for those keywords, and then advertise to them on YouTube. That to me is the game changer because that means that no matter how niche your industry, as long as you have at least, I’d say a few hundred people in the country that would be relevant to you to target, you can create a custom audience and then put an ad to them around that. And that really opens up things in a very, very big way.

Jay Patel:
Before we move on, I’ve heard a lot of objections over why B2B doesn’t work with this. First is that, “It’s just not effective, it’s not trackable, it’s not … It’s just too expensive for us to test. We don’t have a creative.” That’s a huge one. And that, “Well, we’d love to get into this, but our website isn’t working,” or “We don’t have Google Ads at all.” Well, in terms of effectiveness as I mentioned, now the targeting is getting better, and better, and better so that is not as much of a barrier as it is before. The tracking is getting better as we’ve discussed.

Jay Patel:
COVID is actually a great time to be testing right now because the CPCs and the CPPs, which we’ll get into, the costs are much, much lower across a variety of verticals. So, now is the perfect time to test. Then with the creative, it’s become cheaper than ever. It’s now easier than ever to hire freelancers, and honestly right now there’s a lot of videographers out of work that could really use some help right now. But even just using your own smartphone, we can create some decent looking ads, which we’ll talk about. And then with the leaky net, we’ll get back to that, but there are a lot of ways we can fix that.

Jay Patel:
To give you a little case study, this is a client of ours. What they do is, they have designed … If you’re an organization that uses Salesforce, you probably have to manage hundreds of thousands if not millions of client contexts, and a lot of them are duplicates. This company has designed a tool that’s much better than the Salesforce default tool for identifying and removing their duplicates.

Jay Patel:
So, their target audience is not even just people using Salesforce, it’s only Salesforce administrators, so it’s a very, very, very niche segment. There’s not a magazine targeting those people, so up until now there hasn’t been a way to specifically target them. But using custom intent and some of this audience based and topic targeting, we’ve been able to run it. I’m going to play this for you now just so you have an idea of the ads that they’ve been using. Hopefully you can hear.

Sheffield Pulley:
Don’t think we can hear, buddy. I don’t know if we can hear it.

Jay Patel:
Oh, Sheffield, you’re unable to hear it?

Sheffield Pulley:
I’m not, and I don’t think there are as well.

Jay Patel:
Oh, okay, all right. Well, we’ll send out this recording after it and you can Google them later. But you can see the visuals, and that’s what really matters. It’s a very simple ad. It’s just literally is a scan of their computer, and then just some scanning shots of their actual user interface. So nothing fancy, no real actors, very, very simple. And using this ad, we’ve managed to get actual conversions, mostly from the Display ads. But from the YouTube ads, we’ve gotten well over 100 clicks to the website in the last month, and increased Google Search rates as well for Cloudingo. So, we’re seeing a lot, a lot of success for not a lot of money using this creative.

Jay Patel:
Okay, jumping next into YouTube. So, step zero before you move on, fix your net. When we talk about the network, these are the five basic areas. The first is your website. Is your website set up well? Does it work well on mobile? Do you have SEO, search engine optimization done for it so they can appear on Google Search results? The next would be search ads. When we think about it, we divide it into branded, which is Google searches for your actual trademark term, which is relevant for a few reasons, which could be a topic of another webinar. Non-branded, which is generic keywords, and then you can also target competitor terms as well.

Jay Patel:
Remarketing. Making sure that people who visited your website are added to a remarketing list so you can show them ads. Still the most effective way that you can get conversions for a lot of businesses is going to be through having remarketing ads. Customer engagement, so what happens after they submit a lead form on your website? And then finally, metric tracking. Not only are you set up for lead forms, but are you set up so that you can close those conversions? There’s also now ways that you can actually take sales that happen offline and upload them back to the server, so that it can count as a sale that’s tracked online. So, you can actually track an offline sale back to the original ad that they clicked on, which is really, really cool.

Jay Patel:
Once you have all that figured out, step one is test with Google Display ads. Banner ads are not sexy, but they still are reaching most of the world’s customers, and the ads are a lot better and a lot easier to create. Gone are the really spammy flash ads we used to see 10 years ago, that might give you epilepsy from looking at them for too long. Now it’s super easy to create ads just with a couple of images, and some text, and a link to your website. It’ll pop it in, and it’ll automatically do all the ad formats and automatically size it to mobile, versus tablet, versus computer. Really the reason why it’s so great to test with this is not only can you get conversions, but it’s just you don’t have to create anything fancy, and you can set this up in five minutes.

Jay Patel:
So, some ways to set this up. Again, this is not meant to be a complete how-to manual. There are a few micro steps in there, but broadly, how you’re going to do that is if you choose the audience and topic types as we mentioned … And you can actually create your own audience that’s customized for your particular business or product. Then you can set up a couple of different campaigns, so one for topics, one for audiences. And then you’re going to have one audience per ad group. So, let’s say if you have three, or four, or five different segments that are relevant, put each of them in their own ad group.

Jay Patel:
There’s something here I want to talk about called targeting expansion, which is where Google will basically go beyond your targeting to target what they consider similar users. That can really blow up your spend a lot so when you’re setting that up, just look out for that targeting expansion and make sure to turn that off. And then use the existing pictures and descriptions that match your website. That’s really important, because you don’t want there to be some cognitive dissonance if the creative is off. Then run the ads for two to three weeks, and then gauge the results. You may have to tweak the ads, you may have to increase or decrease the bids, but don’t make any radical changes until you have an idea of what exactly is happening.

Jay Patel:
Just to give you an example of what we did for Cloudingo. We set up a group that was specifically data cleanse. We actually were able to put in keywords like Salesforce data cleanup, Salesforce data cleanse, Salesforce data cleansing tools. The very, very specific keywords, and these are the ones that have actually been converting. Not just in terms of website clicks, but actually people submitting their lead form, and I know the client’s really happy with that.

Jay Patel:
YouTube expansion. Okay, let’s say you’ve tried it on Display Network, you’re seeing some positive results, now you want to broaden the reach with YouTube. Just to go into it, how do you pay for YouTube advertising? Because, you don’t always click on an ad so it’s not CPCs, the way that display ads or search ads are. One is that you can pay per impression. This is what a lot of brand advertisers use, and it will be a cost for 1,000 impressions. An impression would be if they see your ad on YouTube, if they watch it for at least two seconds, that counts as an impression, or one second if they see your ad on Google Display Network.

Jay Patel:
The second way, and the way that we’re going to be focused on is CPV, cost per view. If they watch the full ad because as you know, ads are skippable, then that counts as a pay per view. If they don’t watch the full ad, or if they don’t watch at least 30 seconds of it if the ad’s longer than 30 seconds, then it won’t count. Or, if they click … There are certain YouTube ad formats that involve them clicking to watch the ad or clicking on a link from the ad, and then that will count as a view.

Jay Patel:
And the third area which Google’s rolling out, is that you can actually do a pay per acquisition. So you set a target amount you’re willing to pay, say $50 per lead, and it’ll try to get as many leads possible. This is very similar to what they do on Facebook, but there are some restrictions on this and you pretty much already have to be converting on YouTube in order to access this. So, this is not something that’s going to apply for most of you.

Jay Patel:
So, what are the ad formats? The three basic ones is in-stream, which as you know are those ads that you have to skip. Then as you can see here, there’s banners as you can load. They can appear off to the left and to the right, where they can click on it to go to your website. This is what we call TrueView in-stream. The second one is what we call TrueView in-display. Now, there is also … Now it’s actually changed to in-discovery rather in-display. I need to update this, which is different than another ad format called discovery ads, which is really confusing.

Jay Patel:
But basically, this ad format is akin to a Google search, but on YouTube. Instead of it starting to play already and then you decide if you want to keep watching, this is where the person actually chooses to watch your ads. On the left you can see if you type in best CRM, you see a few ads show up and if you click on them, you’re going to pay a cost per click on that. And then on the right side if you’re already watching a video, you can see an ad and if you click on that, then it will take you to that video, and then it will charge you as well.

Jay Patel:
And then the third ad is something called bumper ads. These are six second ads, non-skippable. These are only on a CPM basis, and largely on mobile. This is probably the cheapest way that you can get broad awareness. However, I wouldn’t recommend running these on their own. It’s really more of something that you can do on top of your existing advertising campaigns as a way to continue to build the brand awareness. But this is a really, really cheap and effective way to do so.

Jay Patel:
So, in terms of if you wanted to create an asset for these, there’s essentially three ways to go. The first is, hire an agency. YouTube has its own list of, I think at least 16 partners that you can choose from. There’s all sorts of advertising agencies across the country varying in price and if you want something truly professional, you can go with that. But now with the rise of websites like Thumbtack, you can find a videographer that’s close to you that even specializes in commercial and promotional video.

Jay Patel:
This is something I just took literally the other day, and you can actually … When you go and look for video production, you can actually choose commercial and promotion and you can choose your budget, and you can see who’s in your area and all the reviews. This is fantastic and I highly recommend this as a route you look at. Also, given the number of videographers that are currently out of work, I’m sure a lot of them are just keen to get something going, so this is something that you can consider.

Jay Patel:
Then the third thing is, if you just want to do it yourself, your smartphone is good enough to be able to create a decent ad, and this is a rig. This is actually a picture of what’s on my desk right now. You can buy a little tripod, a little holder to hold your smartphone in, and then a mic. And the entire cost of this, is about $65, of which $45 was the microphone. The microphone is definitely recommended because when you look at YouTube creatives, and there’s all sorts of websites out there, the audio actually matters more than the visual. So, having a good microphone that can pick it up … And we’ll send out a link to the one that I had. You can buy that, and then that way you can record yourself just standing in front of a background, and that can be very, very compelling.

Jay Patel:
In terms of tips of how to actually create that, Google has something called Skillshop. It’s a completely free certification. And if you go into the Google Video Certification, you’ll actually have an entire module purely around designing and creating effective ads. You can go through it and they’ll show you lots of examples, and it’s way more effective than anything I could tell you. That’s something to explore as well when you’re actually thinking about how to create effective ads and effective content.

Jay Patel:
In terms of, okay, let’s say you have your ad. How would you set up such a campaign? First off, get a video created. Second off, create three campaigns. If you wanted to do in-stream and the TrueView discovery ads, which again, are those Google Search-looking ads, you want to have them in separate campaigns. But you can use the same targeting as GDN, the exact same targeting so I’m not going to go into that setup process. But you also want to create a remarketing campaign. You can actually create a remarketing campaign of people who have watched a previous ad, so that way, that you can actually tell a story.

Jay Patel:
For example, if you have two or three different ads, you can have the first ad run when they’ve never seen you before and have the second and third ad run only when they’ve seen the first video. That’s a really effective way that you can build a story and get to those seven impressions, while not boring them. Even with remarketing, you probably if you want to do an in-stream and discovery, they have to be in separate ad groups. And again, run the ad for two to three weeks and see the results.

Jay Patel:
Here is just a screenshot of what it looks like when you’re setting up a campaign. Note that you should be picking … Even for the discovery ad group, pick the video ad, not the discovery ad format, that’s at the bottom. That’s a completely different ad format that just came out a couple months ago. That’s something we could run in a separate webinar, if that’s of interest.

Jay Patel:
I was going to show you examples of an upper funnel, middle funnel or a lower funnel video ad looks like, and this is one of our clients. This guy runs an accounting practice academy that helps CPAs who have their own business master the business aspects of running an accounting business. You can look this guy up later, and you can actually listen and see the things for yourself. But on the left side what we call upper funnel, he’s talking a lot about his story, and why he had the insights that he did and so you can learn about his journey.

Jay Patel:
The middle one talks a lot more about what the academy actually does, and the bottom one is very direct actions-oriented. He says, “This May the 4th, sign up for my academy. Here’s a special offer.” So, you can actually layer these so that they watch the first video first and then through a remarketing campaign, they can see the second and third. And this one is really just him talking in a boardroom. I’m not even sure he hired a professional videographer. He might’ve just set up a smartphone rig that works with two cameras, and that works totally fine. So, this is something that you could create without spending hardly any money.

Jay Patel:
But, we haven’t actually run those YouTube ads yet. Instead, what we focused on is running just banner ads. So you have ads at the bottom that lead to this landing page right here, and we’ve seen some amazing results so far. I mean, we’ve gotten so many signups from this. And it’s again, through understanding who he’s trying to target and focusing on those segments, people who are likely to be accountants.

Jay Patel:
Now, step three is geo-targeting. This is the next level. What this is, is … Actually, I’m going to go through this one first and come back to the other one. When we look at … We can look at all the metrics and all this conversion, tracking and modeling, but sometimes going old school is best. To give you an example, if Starbucks was trying to figure out whether a banner ad campaign or a TV campaign was working, they could do something like simply run the TV ads in one market, say Seattle, but don’t run them in San Francisco, and see if they can measure the uplift in in-store sales. That is a concept you can apply to digital ads.

Jay Patel:
The advantage of this versus traditional AB testing, which you can do to Google Optimized and the forms, is that it’s able to be fully holistic because you can not only track conversions, but you can track website visits, you can track social media mentions, you can track people searching for you in a very holistic, real time way that’s very clean and very easy to see. This is a way that you can tell that, “Okay, we ran YouTube ads. We’re not getting the conversions we wanted, but we are seeing website traffic go up a lot in this particular state.” That’s a way that you can link that upper funnel to the lower funnel results in a very simple way, and one that you’re in full control of with no spend minimums.

Jay Patel:
The idea would be that you pick several metros, whether it’s a state versus the city, and split them into a test versus control, and we’ll go into a couple of examples. Then you run them in the test markets across your specific targeting that you want to run it across for, say, three to four weeks. Then you measure the uplift against a variety of online and offline metrics, which could include store visits if you have your own store, or in terms of leads that come in. That’s how you do the test.

Jay Patel:
Now, this is … Weirdly enough, there have been a couple of Google produced articles on this, but there isn’t actually a lot that’s there. I found this case study about an airline booking site called lastminute.com that was able to use geo-targeting, and they have a lot of graphs. But honestly when I was at Google in 2014, we just did it, very simple. We had a luxury handbag retailer and what we did is, we chose a few different mid tier cities with about 1 million people, because it’s really expensive to try to advertise in, say, LA or New York.

Jay Patel:
But, we chose like Greensboro, North Carolina, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and we split them into control versus test. Then we ran the Google Display Network for several weeks before the holidays. Now in this particular example, we didn’t see meaningful difference, which could come down to a lot of factors. We ran it for a very short period of time, right before the holidays. It was only measuring sales, not really anything more upper funnel such as like newsletter signups. They have a lot of existing brand advertising, and also it’s a high-priced luxury product. It’s not something where if somebody sees a Rolex ad, they’re suddenly going to go out and buy something if they haven’t heard of it before. It takes time in the luxury market space to build a brand. So, those are some of the reasons we hypothesized of why that particular example didn’t work.

Jay Patel:
But, in the other example, we worked with a car insurance website that compared auto quotes. What we did is we chose three cities in the Dallas Metro, Plano, Irving, Arlington, and three cities in Fresno, in California and we flipped those into a control versus test. I think the control had two cities in Dallas and one city in California, and the test was the other way around. We ran the ads in the test, and none in the control. The reason we chose to different states was a way to make the test a little bit more robust because if we saw that same uplift in both Texas and California, that cancels out some of the more localized effects, like maybe there was a parade that week, or something like that.

Jay Patel:
We ran it for on Google Display Network and YouTube for one month, I think we spend maybe like $10,000, and we saw a big difference in the leads and branded searches that were coming in. I can’t remember the exact amount now because this was a few years ago, but it was significant enough that the client was considering expanding this for the next year. But then I ended up leaving Google so I didn’t get a chance to implement it with them, but I hope they did. But this is something that’s really next level and something that frankly, hardly anyone else out there is really talking about right now. I haven’t come across anyone else besides this case study that I saw, even within Google who has been seriously looking at this, but it’s something that I think it could be very effective.

Jay Patel:
So, two things that I think … Tools that can help you in this process. Search trends report, easy, free, you don’t even have to log in. For Cloudingo, we saw that once we started running the ads in the beginning of March, the number of website searches for Cloudingo are actually going up with a big focus in California. That told us that the brand awareness was starting to pick up. The second is the Reach Planner. Google doesn’t have great targeting costing tools anymore. They had one that was deprecated and they’ve learned something called a Reach Planner which is still in beta, so you have to basically call Google to request it.

Jay Patel:
But if you have access to this, and we have this for a potential clients, you can actually get some ideas of how much you could spend. Here it shows bumper ads and TrueView in-stream. These are actually in pesos, but it’s something that you can use. But at the end of the day, to be honest with you, it is a little bit of trial and error to figure out how much you could actually spend among some of these things because there are so many assumptions built in even to a model like this.

Jay Patel:
But on the advanced side, if you really want to take things to the next level through Google, they do have something called a Brand Lift test, which is essentially a more traditional AB test where they’ll split your traffic into expose versus control. Some people will see your ad, some people won’t, and then later they’ll ask both of them a survey about, “Well, do you recall this brand?” This is something they can use to measure ad recall, which is something that matters to a lot of marketers. Unfortunately, there’s a high spend threshold for this. I think you have to spend several thousand dollars a month already in YouTube advertising to qualify, so this is not something that I would recommend you jump right into until you’re already pretty sure that YouTube is something that’s working for you.

Jay Patel:
Do’s and don’ts. Don’t reuse past corporate videos like these five minute corporate branding things. We have a client that’s going to be filming this weekend and they were asking … Oh, we were going to do one video that’s like three or four minutes long that cuts across three or four themes and I told them, “No. Actually, don’t do that.” Cut these themes talking about the story of the business, talking about the product that they’re selling and the work they’re doing in the community. Make these three separate storyboards and make a minute out of each of them, that should then come to a 30 second video. So, really slice and dice because people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

Jay Patel:
Don’t create a video without researching best practices. Skillshop is a great starting point. There’s some other stuff out there, including some links I can send out after. Do not assume you know what will work. Even experienced marketers always test, test, test. And don’t set it and forget it. Even after you’re running it, make sure you keep tweaking and monitoring, especially in the early days to ensure that you’re not blowing through your spend requirements or spending too much money.

Jay Patel:
Dos. Again, test before you invest. Before you run into spending $5,000 on a professional YouTube ad, try out and make sure Google Display Network is working. Try it out at $10 a day before you go to 50. So, really test and see what’s going to work. Make the messaging and design consistent with the website. Tell a compelling story. At the end of the day, even if you are in the most dry industry ever, people really connect to a story. And you can make really effective ads just by having the owner, or founder, or president talk in front of the camera, talking about what it means for them to be working on what they’re working on.

Jay Patel:
Do create customer profiles and avatars. Let’s say for example, you’re selling coffee. There’s college students, and there are seniors, they both buy coffee. But there’s also, these are the guys who love the taste of coffee and they’re connoisseurs, and they taste-test, and there are people who only care about the caffeine kick. Understanding the differences and targeting specific content, specifically for those which you can do through YouTube, will help you to ensure that the right message is reaching the right audience. And lastly, give it a few weeks. Don’t expect immediate results within one or two days. But after two to three weeks, you have a pretty good idea of what’s working and what isn’t. Overall, don’t be scared. It’s a new world but one you can master, or one that you at least can get to a level of confidence around, and do ask for help when you need it because it is a lot to learn, and it may not be worth your time to do it alone.

Jay Patel:
So, how are we here to help at Hive Digital? Our team is about 15 people. We’re based in North Carolina, but we have people across the country. We’ve been around since 2002, so we’ve been working for almost 20 years in the space. We do web analytics, we do search engine optimization and we do paid advertising, and social media marketing. Wrapping up, what you can do to take action. If you’re somebody who wants to learn more, I’m offering, and this is the first time I’ve ever done this actually, is offering free consultations. If you just want to hop on a call, chat for 30 minutes, completely complimentary.

Jay Patel:
I’m doing this simply because I really do want to help every business succeed and really get to this economy, so sign up. We’ll send out the link after. Talk to us. If you feel like you want to work with us and talk with us more, then that’s great. If not, that’s totally fine, too. We hope you just get a lot of value out of this that you can apply to your own business, no matter what route you decide to go. We have some free follow up resources that I’ll send out in an email after. And lastly, we just have some Q&A.

Sheffield Pulley:
Excellent. Fantastic, buddy. Thank you so much. Really, really great stuff. I dropped that link in the chat to where they can sign up for the consultations with you. And we do actually do have a few questions in the Q&A section, so I’ll start at the top. Do you recommend we approach setting an initial budget for testing, or how do you recommend we approach setting an initial budget for testing?

Jay Patel:
Depends on which stages you’re trying to test. If we’re starting with Google Display Network, I think for most businesses because the traffic’s pretty cheap, I think if we were able to spend at least, I would say 500 to $1,000, that’s going to give you at least enough data that you can get at least some indication. A lot of it also depends on how many groups you’re testing for. If you only have one audience segment and it’s very niche, then you might be able to get away with only spending a few hundred dollars in order to get results. That’s the great thing about Google interface, is that you can scale up or scale down.

Jay Patel:
I know for certainly with some of our clients that we’ve done this with, we’ve started campaigns to say $10 a day, and then we’ve doubled the budget just as the results have started to come in. So, definitely I do believe that the minimum spend requirement for display is going to be significantly less than what you’re probably spending on Google Search. Because CPCs in Google Search in some of these industries, I mean, I’ve seen CPCs 10, 20, $30. If you’re a law firm, defense law in say Los Angeles, you’re going to be paying $30 a click. So, this is definitely a way that you can test out for much cheaper than that.

Sheffield Pulley:
Excellent, excellent. All right, the second one here … Are you able to see these Jay, the Q&As?

Jay Patel:
Just read them out to me. That would be helpful.

Sheffield Pulley:
Okay, great. After the first two weeks, where would you like to optimize first? Would it be bids, devices, and/or locations? Looking for a starting point for adjustments, since we’re not used to working on this platform as much.

Jay Patel:
When you are looking to optimize, the first thing is, are you getting the right traffic? For example, in the first couple days … And this is the optimization you should do in the first two days. Did I set my targeting correctly? Maybe you’re still only getting a lot of clicks from India, but you only sell in the United States. So, making sure that at least there isn’t any red flags there.

Jay Patel:
I would also recommend that mobile, you turn that off. You can set a negative 100% bid modifier they call to turn off mobile, if you’re a very old school B2B business. Because the truth is, is that at least in the business side, most of you are going to be searching through your website. I’ve seen a lot of spend get drained by mobile, and tablets, and TV. So, really making sure that you’re only targeting computers. So, first making sure that at least you’re not wasting money.

Jay Patel:
But then after the first couple of weeks, you should start to see some data. If you haven’t gotten any conversions, then we’ll look at, “Okay, well let’s go into Google Analytics and let’s see, how much time are they spending on the website?” And you can actually import that data. There’s a whole segment around how you can optimize the ads further, and a lot of free online resources. And of course, that is something that if you have specific questions about, we can use a free consultation to talk about that.

Sheffield Pulley:
Great, thank you. I have another one here. Recognizing we might not get a lot of conversions for our first test, especially direct conversions, what other metrics can we use that might indicate some promise with this approach?

Jay Patel:
Just repeat the question one more time. I think-

Sheffield Pulley:
Yeah, no worries. Recognizing we might not get a lot of conversions from our first test, especially direct conversions, what other metrics can we use that might indicate some promise with this approach?

Jay Patel:
Some of the metrics, and again if you go back to the recording, you’ll see that I’ve listed it in I think maybe on the geo-test. Well things that I look at, especially with YouTube is how many people are clicking through to your website, because that’s also an indicator of interest. And also, the percentage of people who keep watching your ad. Those are some very high level ones. Going to meatier ones, thinking about, “How much time did they spend on the website?” You can actually import that data and view that at the campaign level, and even more deeply as well so you can understand that, “Okay, are they going to the website and leaving in five seconds, or are they spending two minutes?”

Jay Patel:
Also, thinking that, are there other actions you can take on the website besides signing up for a lead that could be indicator of interest? Such as, do you have a product video on your website and do they watch that video? Do they look at the Contact Us page? Is that an indicator? And then you can start asking yourself, “Okay, why are they going to the Contact Us page, but then they’re not actually submitting the lead form?” That’s where website optimization can end up happening. But I have seen that a lot of more B2C websites use newsletters. It’s like that micro-conversion that’s like, “Okay, it’s a little bit more advanced. It’s not as big of a step as actually making a personal website, but it’s a way that we could continue to follow up with them.”

Sheffield Pulley:
Got it. A couple other questions. Can you manage YouTube Ads through Google Ads platform?

Jay Patel:
Yes.

Sheffield Pulley:
Okay.

Jay Patel:
Wait, sorry which ads?

Sheffield Pulley:
YouTube Ads through your Google Ads platform?

Jay Patel:
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m sorry, I just wanted to make sure I heard correctly. Everything is done through the Google Ads interface. You may not see the video ad section if you’ve never created a video campaign before, but if you click on new campaign and you select video or you select Display, it’s actually going to create a separate section in your Google Ads platform so you can see all that data all together.

Sheffield Pulley:
Got it. Excellent. And last question, what types of information can we expect from meeting with Jay? What are you going to give them?

Jay Patel:
What am I going to give them? You know, I am … We’re going to talk. We’ll talk about your business. Again, I’ve done … When I was at Google, I had individual calls with, again, over 1,000 advertisers and it always started with just understanding your business. Where are you today? What’s working for you? What’s your challenge? What’s your business? Because at the end of the day, the goal here isn’t really to get … I mean, if you want to talk about the details about the ads, that’s fine, I’m happy to do so.

Jay Patel:
But the more important thing is understanding, where does digital marketing fit into your business strategy? What’s your goal here? What are the challenges that you’re having? Because for some businesses, YouTube may be step three. Maybe step one is actually your website needs to be revamped first, or your product marketing isn’t selling. If you’re say, a restaurant right now and you’re not doing a lot of takeout orders, then maybe this isn’t the right thing for you right now. So, helping them to sort through whatever challenges there are. I’m really more here to help in however way I can.

Sheffield Pulley:
Awesome, awesome. I’m they’ll be incredibly valuable if I know you. Excellent, excellent. As I said, I dropped that link to sign up for a consultation with Jay in the chat. I am launching a poll right now. We’d would appreciate it if each of you could take a moment just to fill that out. It’s just three or four questions that shouldn’t take long to fill out just giving us a little bit of feedback from the webinar. Our next webinar will be on June 11th at 2:00 pm, again at 2:00 pm Eastern. Matthew Kay, another one of our newer members to the team is going to be talking about how to identify and leverage the most effective digital marketing channels in order to meet your audience where they are online.

Sheffield Pulley:
Looking forward to that for sure. I know this is something he’s been working on for quite a while, so I’m sure it’s going to be fantastic. And as Jay mentioned, we’ll be sending out a link after the webinar with a link to the recording, a link to Jay’s page to sign up for the consultation and any other additional resources Jay may want to send your way. Otherwise, that’s a wrap. Thank you all for being here. Jay again, thank you so much for doing this. I hope everyone has a fantastic afternoon, evening, morning depending on where you’re at.

Jay Patel:
Absolutely. Thanks Sheffield, and thanks everyone for joining. Have a great rest of the day, and stay safe out there.

Sheffield Pulley:
Thanks buddy, you too.

Webinar Hosts

Jay Patel
Google Ads Expert at Hive Digital, ex-Googler and Social Entrepreneur

From 2010-2015 Jay worked at Google in various roles on the Small and Medium Business team, during which he directly worked with over 1,000 advertisers and supported several dozen of the top SEM agencies on their clients. Jay is a 2018 Comcast NBCUniversal Leadership Awardee and graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Economics and Political Science.Sheffield Pulley
Hive Digital Client Advocate

Sheffield joined Hive Digital in 2017. Sheffield is a proven professional excelling in the promotion of personal and team accomplishments with extensive, results-oriented sales management, marketing and business development experience.

Follow-up Resources:
Google Skillshop: Google Ads Video
Last Minute Case Study
YouTube Advertising Guide
2020 Definitive Video Marketing Guide
The Ultimate Guide to Google’s Custom Intent Audiences

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