Paid search expert (and copywriter club member) Amy Hebdon joins Kira and Rob for the 55th episode of the podcast to talk about search marketing, the tools and skills you need to do it right, best practices for testing and messaging, and whether copywriters can drive quality leads for their own businesses with paid search. Here’s what we cover:
• how Amy went from inexperienced copywriter to web designer to paid search consultant
• what paid search is and the various places you can participate in it
• why copywriters need to know about paid search, keywords, ads and landing pages
• how writing for search is different from typical ad writing
• when you should write for Google and when you should write for people (you can do both)
• why you should work backwards from your landing page before writing your ads
• why traffic and clicks are a terrible metric in paid search
• best practices for testing ads so you get better insights, and
• the tools Amy uses to monitor her accounts and ads
We also talked about what copywriters can do to attract clients who understand search (and want to work with a paid search specialist), how copywriters might use paid search to drive traffic to their own sites, and where the opportunities are for paid search today. Don’t miss Amy’s straight-forward perspective on the future of paid search and why there needs to be more collaboration than ever in this area in 2018. To hear hear it all, click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript.
The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:
Sponsor: AirStory
Amy Hebdon, Paid Search Magic
Find Amy on Twitter
AdWords
Adsense
Joanna Wiebe
Unbounce
Leadpages
Supermetrics
DuckDuckGo
Indeed
Upwork
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
Intro: Content (for now)
Outro: Gravity
Full Transcript:
The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club.
Kira: What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes, and their habits, then steal and idea or two to inspire your own work? That’s what Rob and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast.
Rob: You’re invited to join the Club for episode 55 as we talk with paid search expert Amy Hebdon about search marketing, the tools and skills you need to do it right, best practices for testing and messaging, and whether copywriters can drive quality leads for their own businesses with paid search.
Kira: Amy, welcome.
Amy: Hi! Good to be on here.
Kira: Yeah, thanks for hanging out with us today. I think a great place for us to start is with your story and how you got into paid search.
Amy: Sure! So, I am one of those people who always wanted to work in advertising. It’s been my dream career, basically, since I was seven, and I majored in marketing communications in school and I spent the next several years temping, trying to find jobs.
At the time, I was living in the Bay area and it was right around the time of the dot com bust, so I wasn’t able to find anyone who wanted to hire a brand new copywriter with no experience. I ended up a few years later... I got a job in New York as a web designer, so I was going to work every day basically hoping that wasn’t the day that I got fired because really, my web design skills were not that great.
I was not that good at coding and I had all these design challenges that I had no idea how to solve. Looking back, I don’t think they actually would’ve fired me, like I think it was fine for what their clients needed, but it was really stressful for me to not know what I was doing and not really know how to do a good job with that. Working in this little design agency... it was a really cramped office space and the woman who sat behind me - there was no space between our chairs.
So, every time she even stood up, she would bump me and it was really uncomfortable. She was doing adwords and digital marketing and one day, she had gone to this conference, about web marketing, I think. And she had come back and management had asked her to give a report on what she had learned and during her presentation, they asked her what click through rate was, and she wasn’t able to explain it. She didn’t know what it was. Which, it’s pretty essential if you’re doing digital marketing to even have a basic understanding of click through rate... so they fired her immediately after that and they offered me her job.
I was kind of in heaven because I was discovering adwords, which it turned out I really loved, and I was able to move in my chair because there wasn’t someone sitting behind me. I think I would’ve liked anything that got me out of doing web design... but I really took to paid search and to adwords, just with how much accountability there was.
At the time, Google didn’t even own an analytics tool yet. There was really no good way to test and measure different kinds of optimizations but here was this platform that we could really test everything we wanted and learn what changes we were making that were able to influence the growth of this account and really accomplish what I’m trying to. So, I was really drawn to that and I’ve been really drawn to it ever since. Doing adwords now for 13 years.
Rob: So Amy, I wanna be sort of dumb, like that person who was fired and get really, really basic on this. Tell us what is paid search, what does it include, what are all of the moving parts of paid search?
Amy: So, paid search has really evolved I would say from those days. Basically, the idea of paid search is it’s a way to show up on the search engines or search engine results pages in a sponsor listing, as opposed to you know, an organic listing or Google just find you.
You’re paying to participate and show up in the top of the listings. Now, what a search engine is and does has definitely evolved. So, instead of just having google proper that you go to, well, Google owns YouTube, and so YouTube basically is its own search engine as well, so video ads is a way to participate in paid search.
Google owns Gmail, so Gmail sponsored promotions, Gmail ads are another way to participate in paid search. Google offers app ads, they have quite a few apps that you’re able to market on as well as the display network, which is over two million websites that are involved somehow with Google, with adsense, or whatever, that you’re able to run ads on. It really has grown pretty far beyond just the search engine listings and results pages to really help your company get found anywhere on the internet, for the most part.
Kira: Okay, let’s say I’m a copywriter who has been doing my thing, has not dived into paid search at all—why is it important? Why do I need to know about it, even if I’m not in a role where I’m an expert? Why is it really important for all copywriters today to know about?
Amy: I think that if you’re a copywriter who’s involved in landing pages at all, the overlap between ads and landing pages is really significant. Like, I could create the best campaign in the world, but if it’s going to a 404 page, it’s not going to convert. Or if it’s going to a home page that doesn’t have a compelling offer on it, I’m not going to get those conversions. So, it’s not gonna work in terms of the paid traffic that we’re driving, and on the flipside, being a copywriter or being involved in that page can really affect how everything works together.
So, everything from the page speed load time can affect the quality score of your adwords campaign, which can affect how much you’re paying and essentially how much traffic you’re able to drive to whether the landing page includes the keywords that we’re bidding on. If there’s a high degree of relevancy, the page is going to do better and convert better, but if you’re not aware of what keywords are being used or how people are finding the page, then the page can’t perform as well.
As a copywriter, it really behooves you to understand how the traffic is getting there so you can really speak to those people who are finding you and make sure that they get the best experience possible. Then you’re able to improve conversion rates and frankly, up your pricing and up your game and your performance that you’re able to provide.
Rob: So, let’s say that I’m working on a paid campaign, or I’ve been assigned a paid campaign, and I haven’t really done one before. What are some of the basic things that I need to be starting to think through, knowing that I might be working with someone like you who’s going to be managing the ad buy or managing the placements of the different ads. As a copywriter, what do I need to know?
Amy: As a copywriter, I think it’s really important to understand the relationship between the keyword, the ad, and the landing page. I think copywriters don’t always think about this, and if you’re a copywriter that does SEO, this probably doesn’t pertain as much to you, but if you’re not SEO, and you’re used to being able to go in and write a headline that’s just designed to capture attention, the importance of including a keyword in that headline and making sure it’s really relevant to the keyword that we’re bidding on for the campaign—it’s gonna make a big difference.
You can’t just have a headline that says, they laughed and sat down at the piano, it has to really speak to the query that had someone go to a search engine in the first place and ask a question, then find an ad that looks like it’s going to answer that, and then get on a page that matches that expectation set by the ad. So,
