Okay, Ryan, what is your guilty pleasure snack? I can't get over like mint chocolates, you know, the chocolate balls that you want to wrap? You know, you get yourself a variety pack of that, right? And then you just close your eyes and you reach your hand in and you pull out and you just get excited about all the colors that you see.
Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks. I'm Steph Krenyola and I'm here with Ryan Lestro, senior performance marketing manager for Refine Labs and we are talking about running a paid search audit. We've talked about how, we've talked about why, we've talked about when and who and what to do with those results. So now we're going to talk about the strategy itself for paid search.
So you're ready to get into the last one, Ryan? I love it, let's rock. So what creative approaches do you use to stand out in a crowded paid search landscape? You've talked a lot about Google wanting you to go broad, but if everyone's going broad, how do you make sure your clients stand out?
So I think what we have to realize is that search, you only have a few seconds to get someone's attention, right? People want an answer to their query and they're going to click on that thing that, you know, tricks the trigger that they feel like is going to answer that or it could be beyond kind of what they were thinking, but they have to kind of really see that value right away. The big thing we got to do is one, you have to make sure that what you write in your ad copy matches the query and it possible do a couple other things as well. So search for sales software, if my asset sales software, it matches the query so it increases the relevance, right?
If it said, you know, revenue software, it's close, close, but not quite there. If it said pipeline, you say, mmm, close, not quite there. If it says sales software, they're like, okay, it matches one to one. A lot of paid search specialists will recommend a technical dynamic keyword insertion, which is where in your Google ad, it'll pull in whatever someone's searched and put it into a headline for you.
I generally go a little bit broader and I do three things. One, always have the brand name in there. If you build brand equity in other places, but being on podcasts, news, like paid social, you're on forums, you're on dark social channels, you are getting PR, you want your name to read, bring a bell and have them say, oh, okay, they do that. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
I think I do that. So always painting the brand names that people understand who you are and you can leverage your brand equity. Two, it's just the only that keyword. Three, you can kind of do the use a couple things.
So one, you can put in a social proof. So that is something like I wrote one recently that was, we helped sell two hundred plus thousand parts a day. It's like, oh, okay, these people are legit. Like that's a lot.
Right? Trust if I tap four to five hundred companies. Right? You're like, okay, a little soft, but I get what you're saying.
If you have awards that don't have these crazy titles to it, you could put those in there. You could put reviews in there that's really popular B2C or if 20,000 five star reviews, so you go with that angle and that can help you stand out because that really plays into this idea of loss aversion and this idea of the crowd is right. This has to be good. How do they get all this?
I also write kind of these positive negative headlines as well to try to stand out very basically people run away from paying their funds towards pleasure. Right? So if you do a sales software and the problem you solve is your sales reps are not tracking their activity. You can kind of bifurcate that right?
The kind of negative positive. So the negative would tell people that they can stop doing these things. Right? So stop manually tracking your calls.
Like, oh, sweet, you know, stop manually tracking your activity. Man, that's going to save me some time. So you can kind of say how you could play that dynamic kind of back and forth. You only need a couple of those.
You could have max 15 headlines. I usually do about 10 to 12. Get some social proof. Get some good cop back up in there.
Get some keywords. I usually like to do one more variation of the grade I search in on. So if it's a sales software, I usually try to use a second headline. Sometimes what I do as well is try to qualify the traffic.
So this is very important for enterprise big companies that only want big companies because if someone's searching for sales software, I could be one dude. Right? Just one person just like, yeah, I need some sales software. Like, no, we don't.
But okay, how you can do that is you can do something like software for enterprise sales teams, software for distributed sales teams, like, you know, talk about like how they're expansive, which should be a wide enterprise, large orgs, enterprise orgs. You can say corporate too because corporate applies. It's, you know, there's a company and then there's a corporation. Like there's levels to this, right?
So if you use that kind of language, people say, oh, I work at a corporation, you know, I don't work at a company. I work at it or, right? Google gives you a lot of other little assets you can add on to them and I recommend you add them when they're appropriate and on your business logo that can appear sometimes in a little circle and on your business name. Just kind of rounded out and make sure you look like a private company.
The site links are by far the most effective there. I almost always put a direct link to request in the demo. Google is also pushing images inside of these search results. So it would be good to have just like a couple.
Try not to have a be super stock imaging. But I mean, you got to do what you got to do. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. But I would say, I feel like that's your job, right?
You're trying to tell us how to live our paid life. So you can tell us. All right. If you want to live your best paid search life, which we should all be striving to do, Google is going to ping you if you have a lot of text on it.
Google just doesn't want you to put it. Please buy myself in an image and slap it up there, right? They want images. So grabbing photos from like events would be a really good call.
Pictures of you, you are, you are, you are, you are a really great idea. So putting some images like that and then it could possibly not guarantee it. And if Google are overlord C-Fit, they'll bless us with this image in our SERP ads. So might as well take every advantage you can get.
That's great. Those are a lot of really specific and really clever pieces of advice. And I feel like we should all be paying a lot of money to watch this video. I'm just excited I'm getting it for free.
But speaking of money, how do you make sure that your paid search budget is effectively spread between different campaigns and initiatives? One thing that I find with accounts is that people, when they go abroad, they're actually not able to get in as many options as they should be. If you're only showing up one in 20 times for a search term and that's a profitable search term, you're probably not going to even realize it's unprofitable, right? So think about it this way.
You click the rates going to be between two and five percent, right? So out of 100 searches, you're going to get maybe two or five, two to five from it, right? If that burns through your budget, you know, if there's 10,000 searches, like you're still only going to get that two to five, that'll give you the rule. My role is you got to be in at least 30% of these options, one out of three.
That's enough for you to understand one. How much search volume is that? What is this even on this? Like if this turns out great for me, can I just jack out my budget and actually make a run at this?
I mean, you're able to kind of get clicks throughout the day from many different types of people. So for example, the issue with having a low budget is you got to click at 8am, 12pm and 5pm, okay? But there was like a million searches. So you kind of like, can I just get the bad ones?
Did I get the window shoppers? If you got the same clicks, but there was actually only a total of like 25 that day, then it's like, okay, I feel a little bit more confident that like I didn't just get the window shoppers that this is an accurate representation of people searching for this term. So I always like to make sure I have at least 30% in my search impression share. There's a mention called search impression share.
Make sure you have 30% of it. I do find that Google ads accounts are overbuilt and they have 10 campaigns running and they're not funny any of them effectively. Really making sure you're in a campaign and really testing it is crucial. You don't have to go crazy and say, I want every single search in there, right?
You know, that's for later. If you're just testing it, just try to hit like 30% at least. Awesome. And then my very last question, which I feel like you've touched on quite a bit through these last couple episodes is how you integrate paid search with other marketing channels for a cohesive strategy.
So I've heard you talk a lot about partnering this with paid social, with creating a podcast or a newsletter or something that builds brand trust and gets the education part out there for your brand. Is there anything else that you would recommend to make this a whole big beautiful picture? One, you could be talking to these audiences across other channels. If you want to stand someone searching for sales software, you're going to want to know about that because they're going to click on your ad maybe 5% of the time.
They're going to convert on anyone's website, maybe 1% of the time. That means the other 98, 97% didn't convert. They were just learning, right? You need to go back to them and really kind of keep establishing yourself as a person who can solve that problem.
Now it's easier said than done. Most people are like, why not? It's always re-targeting, right? Most companies will work with some multiple products, the multiple personas.
And they don't have the content to show up in front of them to say a compelling message. That is something we work with companies on all the time. People come to this site, we're going to re-target them, we're going to tighten up the demographics and now we better qualify them. And then we're going to continue to have a conversation with them about the value that we give.
You can do this on LinkedIn, you can do this on Facebook, you can do this on TikTok if you want it. If you send it up correctly with the correct structure, finding the people with intent, which is then convert, maybe visit left, visit left, visit left, didn't convert anywhere else. They were just creating their initial list of possible vendors. Now you're able to get back in front of them on a paid social channel and say, hey, here's the testimonial from someone from my relevant industry, relative company size.
Retargeting is the number one, right? The pay search is really there to capture the demand that exists at category level or capability level. And then retargeting off that is like the natural next step on these other channels. And then using your brand campaign to fight all competitors and to collect everyone searching for your brand.
Because if you're starting to ask people, if you're starting to get paid, competitors are going to recognize this. Competitor campaigns can be lucrative, not always, but sometimes. And so you will find people bidding on your brand name and you may need to defend them off by bidding on yours so that people don't just kind of get sidestepped so that all the stuff you do not make a Facebook or a podcast doesn't get kind of usurped at the last second by someone saying they're better than you. For paid search, we really keep it really tight in the bucket and just really focusing on what it's good at, which is finding people who are like, okay, I'm ready.
I need the sales offer. I tried everything else. I tried the coaching and I tried the Excel sheet, you know, I'm not an Excel wizard. I'm no better.
I need this thing. And I'm willing to justify it to my superiors and to create committees and by groups and all that, what have you. I'm really speaking. We think about it in a pretty narrow way and that's probably good.
I love it. Ryan, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us. It's been super informative and I'm really excited to see everything differently as I'm searching Google as I pull up my ask cheaves and I ask him a question. I'm really excited to see what pops up.
Where can everyone find and follow your work? You can follow my work. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active.
I like to post it a couple of times a week. That's what I talk about marketing. That's where they talk to me about these things. I'll give you my candid and unbiased advice.
Perfect. That's exactly what we all need. Thank you so much Ryan for being here. I'm everyone for watching and we will see y'all next time.
Bit of blast. Thank you, Stephanie.