Show Notes:

The Google AdWords Display Network (formerly the Content Network) is a massive opportunity for online marketers to get quality traffic at a lower price than the search network – if you do it right.

In this episode we discuss with Shelley Ellis various tips tricks and general advice on getting the Display Network working for you. It’s a cracker of an episode.

Here is the link we mention for the YouTube Keyword Tool.

If you were to ask around who were the best experts in display advertising or content advertising, invariably you’re going to come up with the name of Shelly Ellis.  She’s spoken at more conferences than you can poke a stick at, PubCon, she’s shared the stage with Dan Kennedy; she’s been on the PPC Rock Star Show – she’s everywhere.

What she may be really well known for actually is her partnership with Perry Marshall.  I’ve been digging around – and I hear she’s actually the brains behind a lot of Perry Marshall’s content network stuff.  I think Perry was, up until maybe three or so years ago, advising people to not use the content network or the display network.

Shelly’s been advocating a content network for a long time and I think there was a big turning point, shift in Perry Marshall’s thinking about the benefits of content marketing and it was a call that he had with Shelly.

So thanks very much joining us Shelly all the way from Dallas in Texas.

Shelley:        Thank you, I’m excited to be here talking to you.

Philip:            Did I miss anything out in your introduction?

Shelley:        No, it’s totally true.  It was December of 2008 when Perry and I had the first call ever that introduced – of course at the time it was called the content network, and we introduced that to his audience.  It was the first time ever that he had introduced that to his audience.  It definitely was a changing point and not just in Perry, but I think actually that was changing point in everybody’s mind set at that point in time.

Philip:            Right, that’s fascinating.  We’re going to get into a lot of detail around what is a content network and how it can work and all that.  What I find interesting doing my research on you, I believe you can actually bench press your own body weight.

Shelley:        Little over…

Philip:            That can’t be true, surely?

Shelley:        A little over my body weight, my last bench press was – I believe it was 32.  Is what it was, so…

Philip:            Wow.  That’s 132 pounds which is 60 something kilograms.

Shelley:        Yeah, I’ll have to let you convert that.

Philip:            That’s quite impressive and the other little known fact about you is you used to be an informant for the US government.

Shelley:        I was, I was.

Philip:            As you’d expect from a content network expert.

Shelley:        Yeah, I mean it was a very interesting adventure.  I used to do internet online research for them.  They would actually give me these little assignments and I would go in and find things for them and we would meet in the bottom of a little building.  I’d get a little envelope with this cash – it was a really interesting time in my life.

Philip:            Wow.  So you must have mixed with some interesting people.

Shelley:        I did, I did.

Philip:            Okay, well, the message from me is to not disagree with anything you say on this interview.  Let’s get stuck in.  So, as we just talked about, you were an advocate of content network a long time before – well, at a time when most online marketers were saying stay away.  I think that’s really interesting.  Can you talk a little bit about that?  Why did you have this feeling that it was actually an awesome opportunity for online marketers?

Shelley:        When I first saw it, I just saw the potential and I was very much aware of all the chatter that was going around.  I was very much aware of the fact that most of the experts and people who use adwords and SEO experts that were telling people to stay away from it, but I sort of got pushed into it.

I had a client who was extremely happy with how his adwords account was going and he was just begging me for more.  He wanted more, like “What can we do?  How can we expand this?  What else can we do?”  And so I told him, “Well there’s an opportunity with the content network that I have to be honest with you.  Most people will tell you to stay away from it, it’s kind of clunky and there’s some issues with it.”  But he got really excited about it.

I went on ahead and I created some campaigns for him and what we discovered over the course of the next several weeks was that we were actually getting more conversions at a lower cost and of course, I was really concerned about the quality of those conversions but they were high quality conversions and of course we both got really excited at that point and over the course of next several weeks and several months, we started pushing some of his paid search budget over into the content network.

Over the course, I just continued to keep pushing clients that direction.  I had the opportunity to work for a major digital company and have some wonderful clients – Mary Kay, Ritz Carlton, Coca Cola – and I got the opportunity at that point in time to start moving those clients over into the display network.

To be perfectly honest, it was at a time where when I first started with that company, they actually had a policy against setting up content network campaigns.  That’s how strong the opinion was overall in the industry about the content network from a negative standpoint.  But there were a few of us – David Szetela and Brad Geddes – there were a few of us who really were being successful with it.  We had success and we knew there was a lot of potential there and so we just continued to push that particular type of advertising to its limits.

Philip:            Wow, okay.  Can we just get clear what is the display network or the content network?  Is that the same thing versus how does it differ to the search network?  Can we just get clear on that?

Shelly:           Sure.  Originally Google called it the content network so that’s where we get the word content network from and Google called it that for years and years.  They just recently changed the name to display network and that’s sort of now an industry standard for a terminology behind what’s called contextual advertising.

What that means is the ads are served based on the content of the website.  So if you are in the industry for soccer, then your ads would potentially be shown on pages that are relevant to sports, athletics, soccer, soccer equipment, soccer games, soccer events.  That’s the content that is on those pages.  So you could potentially have a display ad, a text ad, a video ad.  Your ad would be displayed on these pages based on that content.

Philip:            Right.  So this content network is very different to the search network or any of the search engines?  The ads can be triggered in a multitude of ways but it’s really matching the ads or the keywords within the campaign settings or the adgroup settings to the actually content on that page.

Shelley:        True.  It’s been a while since I’ve looked up the statistics but the last statistic I saw was something about how people spent about 5 per cent of their time in search engines and when they are in a search engine they type in a specific keyword and then they get an ad that is relevant to that keyword.

In the display network, you are covering the rest of the pretty much 95 per cent of where people spend their time online.  So everywhere, it could be checking their email, reading the news.  They’ve got their favorite blogs that they go to every day, every week.  They check Facebook or My Space or Linkedin, whatever their social platforms are.

Maybe they are trying to find a recipe, maybe it’s guys, that go to Ask Man and they are looking for this year’s top ten list of the most beautiful women.  There’s all these reasons that people are online.  Maybe they are looking for equipment, they are researching a new vehicle or some new equipment for the restaurant.

So that 95 per cent of the time that they are out there on the internet doing all of these different things and the display network just offers the opportunity to advertisers to connect with those people when they are basically in a mindset.

So if I’m in the restaurant industry and I’m looking for restaurant equipment, then what a perfect opportunity for somebody who sells restaurant equipment to put their ads directly in front of me.

Philip:            Right, and is this not just banner advertising which gives people cold shivers?  No one clicks on a banner ad.  How does it differ?

Shelley:        It is different because there is banner ads.  There’s video ads, You Tube, mobile ads also falls under the display advertising umbrella, online radio ads.

Philip:            Text ads.  So you can still have your same text ads running?

Shelley:        Text ads.  Text ads definitely fall under that.  So yeah, I mean the great thing, especially about the Google ad network is that it’s a smorgus board for different ad types.  You can pretty much use just about anything that’s available.

Philip:            And now – one of the beauties of the search network is that with a search term, there’s a relatively high degree of buyer intent.  Let’s say you’re a plumber in Melbourne, some one types in plumber Melbourne, your ad comes up, they are looking for a plumber in Melbourne and the ad is about it, they click on it and hopefully they call.  The display network is very different to that.  Can you say why?

Shelley:        The display network is very different but a lot of that depends on your strategy.  If you are trying to brand, if your whole goal around the display network is just doing a branding campaign, then you would want your ads pretty much everywhere that your consumer is.  So if you are checking the weather or the news or their email, you want your ads to show up.

Now there are ways to tap into the display network into much more targeted areas where the buying mindset is much stronger and even beyond that there’s even certain websites even in those categories that they are stronger.

For instance, review websites.  Somebody is looking at a review of cameras, they are obviously in the buying mode.  So that’s a really good website to have your ad shown on.  But there’s really a lot of ways within the display network to refine and do what’s called micro targeting so that you are really getting in front of people when they are thinking about what you have to offer.  So you’re still in that buying funnel and then now we have re-targeting.

So if somebody clicks on your ad or somebody goes to your website, you can use the display network now to get your ad in front of them even when they are doing just normal, ordinary things and they are still – obviously they had an interest in you or they wouldn’t have been on your website or they wouldn’t have clicked on your shopping cart or they wouldn’t have opened your email.  So there are other opportunities and ways to still get in front of people when they are in that buying mind set.

Philip:            Right.  And I think the word branding has a lot of negative implications for small businesses.  I think branding means to a lot of businesses, spend money, put it out there, try it, just raise an awareness but not necessarily get a return but it’s quite different within the display network right?  You can actually – you may be getting your brand out there but you can measure the returns just as well as adwords or the search network.

Shelley:        You can.  You can measure the returns just like you can on the search network and one of the things that I like about the Google network is that they do have statistics that are integrated into their reporting that show you how your display ads actually influence your search ads.

So there has been study after study that has shown that people who use display advertising actually boost their conversions on the search engines when they are doing paid search.

Philip:            So how would a business owner know that?

Shelley:        There are just a number of reports that you can pull within the Google network that actually show the funnel of where somebody actually originally saw your ad and maybe they even did a keyword search and then they came back and maybe a week later they did another keyword search.  There’s a lot of really great new reports that Google’s put out over the last 12 to 18 months that track that whole funnel.

Philip:            Okay.  We find for our clients that we had – for some clients we’ve got a lower cost per conversion using the display network, for some clients we’ve got a higher cost per conversion or we’ve got a lower cost per conversion using the search network and it sort of seems to vary client by client.  When would you recommend – I imagine you would say most businesses should start with a search network and get that working at least so that you are getting profitable leads?  At what point would you recommend looking at or moving into the display network?

Shelley:        The display network is really good in a lot of different ways, and it depends a lot on your strategy.  So if you just launched your product or you just launched your company and nobody has ever heard of you and they are not going to be necessarily searching on your brand or your product names or your executives in the search engines, then a good way to get introduced is to go ahead and start with the display network versus the paid search.

So that’s one way of using ads.  Another way would be for instance, if you were a company that offered telecommunication equipment.  Well, the people on the search engines side may be doing specific searches around equipment or reviews or specific information on certain types of products, that type of thing.  But there are opportunities on the display network side that may not work for you on the search side.

For instance you may be able to tag telecommunication blogs where they talk about all the latest equipment and the reviews and the latest information that’s coming out in that industry.  Maybe there are conventions, maybe there are trade shows or there’s continuing education, those types of things that where you may not necessarily do well on the search side but when you get your ads in front of them on the display side, you can actually do really well.

Philip:            Okay, can we look at an example.  Let’s take a business that operates across a couple of different states or provinces, maybe a family lawyer and just talk through the high level process of how you would go about setting up a display network?  I know that we  can obviously talk about this for weeks but maybe just a couple of the main steps that you would go through.

Shelley:        For any type of localized business like family lawyer is specific to a particular region or state, then what’s really amazing or wonderful about the Google content network and display network is that you do have the option to do geographic settings and we actually have a number of options.

We can literally draw a big circle around it and say, “Okay, this distance from my office, these are where my customers are.”  You can draw a little map around it, maybe your territory just covers like this highway and this river and this edge of the country or the state.  So geographically there are some great options.  And then from there, essentially what we would do from a family lawyer’s standpoint is figure out what it is that people are doing online, where are those conversations happening that have to do with the clients that I’m trying to reach.

In family law, we’re probably talking about divorce, we’re probably talking about child custody.  In certain places you’re going to be talking about alimony, maybe wills and estates and those types of things.  So what happens on the display network is there’s all sorts of conversations going on.  People are on discussion forums and they are asking questions.  There are experts out there that have blogs and they are talking about tips and all of these things.  There are news articles that come out that say – just relevant to whatever that topic is.  Maybe the laws are changed around child custody.

And so as a family attorney, what they could do is set up their display network using keywords, using mange placements specifically telling Google, “I want to be on this specific site.”  And they set it up and then they have their ads specific to each one of those topics.  So if I’m trying to reach an audience talking about divorce, I would have ads that are relevant to divorce and I would be – my campaign would be set up specifically around that particular topic.

Philip:            Would you go for the “Call Us Now” type approach where the buyer intent is very high and you just want the phone to ring or would you go for something a little bit more further away from their buying intent which is offering some sort of free information or white paper or something like that?  Or would you try both?

Shelley:        You know what, it depends on how sophisticated your campaign is.  If you have analyzed your reports and you know that the majority of your phone calls and the majority of your conversions are coming from xyz website, then you could actually separate that out and create a specific offer or advertising for that.  Maybe those people are ready to call you and your ad can say, “Hey, call now.”  We know that they are ready to call you.

But for the people who may not be – maybe there’s this credibility issue, this trust issue – we still haven’t established that with them.  The only thing they know about us is that they’ve seen an ad.  Well, then for those people who are probably going to try to get to capture them in some sort of a lead form, maybe we do the free report or free information or free consultation.  There’s different ways of sort of getting introduced to those people, and people respond to that.

Philip:            Yeah, that’s a great point.  So the nature of the site you actually choose is really important and needs to be tied into the message that you are offering.

Shelley:        Yeah, you can get that sophisticated.  You usually don’t start out that sophisticated but as you optimize your campaign and as you optimize your strategies and you learn about where your new clients or your buyers are coming from, then you can start segregating your campaigns and everything so that your ads and your creatives are actually  geared towards that audience.

Philip:            Yeah, we found interesting also the other day – we were doing the display network and we had ads showing a very generic but very well known news site which gets lots of visitors but people are not that advanced on the buying cycle and we had some ads showing on a product review site which was having much less visitors and we found fantastic cost per conversions on that review site which was not nearly as well known but really niched, people were very close to buying, because they were comparing product A versus product B.

Shelley:        Yeah, one of the things that a lot of people do when they jump into the display network is that they get all excited about it, is they use what I call the flat line approach. They use one ad and they use that one ad across every single category and keyword and site that they are trying to target in the display network.

Unfortunately, that strategy doesn’t really work well because people aren’t going to relate to you if it’s a sort of a generic message.  The more segregated it is and you don’t have to do like a hundred different landing pages but you might have 3 or 4 or 6 or 7 buckets of topics and you have specific campaigns set up around those topics and then your ads are very relevant to those topics and your landing pages.  You follow through from one all the way to the other.

Philip:            Yeah I find – I know we were talking about this with the previous shows with Brad Geddes.  One of the hardest things for a business managing their own campaigns or with its search or display is you can get so specific which is just so awesome.  You can write such specific ads on such a specific website but obviously it takes a lot of time so it’s a constant trade off I think.   A lot of businesses don’t know where to draw the line as to how much time they should focus managing their campaigns and setting up something so granular versus setting something up a little bit less granular but which takes less time but then the results change.

I think that’s probably the single biggest challenge I see clients facing.

Shelley:        Yeah and it’s usually one extreme or the other.  Either they’ve got one message that they are trying to put across all their categories or they’re trying to create that hundred landing pages and the ads that are specific for every single ad group, kind of like we do for paid search.

And either one of those extremes is going to be disappointing.  It’s really better to just sort of start with a just a few buckets, a few categories and then from there what you’re going to do is you’re going to pay a lot of attention to your reporting and you’re going to learn from your audience and you’re going to continue to do your research and you’ll expand your strategies from there.

Philip:            Yeah, when you start your campaign in the display network, one of the first things that you’re sort of faced with is choosing between letting Google put your ads on all the sites that it deems relevant to your ad groups or choosing your own websites.  So that’s termed the automatic placement versus the managed placement.  Can you talk a little bit about the differences, what should business owners do?

Shelley:        Managed placement is a really good starting point for people who are a little uncomfortable with the whole concept of the display network because it does give you a lot of control over where your ads are going to show.

Now you may not have the amount of traffic coming through that you would for the other option which is using keywords and what’s called automatic placements.  On the keyword side, basically what you’re doing is you’re setting up an ad group that has just a few keywords in it and those keywords actually tell Google where to go out on the network to show your ads.  That’s what you’re doing with automatic placements and keyword themes.

In the past a lot of times, Google didn’t do a really good job of understanding what you were trying to target but what I’ve seen in the last 12 months or so is that Google’s really improved their whole system and they’re methodology for actually taking that keyword theme, going out and finding relevant pages.

So it’s really unusual for me now or less common for me to see real problems and issues across and entire account as opposed to just an ad group here and ad group there that has a problem.  For the most part Google is doing a really good job.  So the advantage to using keywords is that you have a lot of opportunities to have your ad shown on websites that Google sees relevant or maybe they didn’t for whatever reason, they didn’t show up in ad planner.  You don’t know about them.  Maybe they just launched three weeks ago or whatever.  So there are opportunities to be shown on those sites through keyword targeting.

You can also use keyword targeting in a way that it’s like a lower priority account or campaigns so that you use keyword targeting but you’re using it to basically harvest urls that you are going to turn around and you are going to create a manage placement account and you’re going to use those urls now in the manage placement.  You are going to use the keywords and figure out what’s going on in the content network and where the great places are to show your ad and then you use manage placements to refine that strategy a little more.

Philip:            Right, okay.  So maybe I can just recap and then maybe offer my view.  If a business owner is listening to the show and wants to experiment with the display network, they don’t have a massive budget, would you encourage them to start with the manage placements and then go about just making sure they get the right offer, getting familiar with all the different ways the display network works.

Enable various websites, there are a couple of ways that you can actually choose those websites and we’ll go through that.  Get the offer right, start getting some positive results and then move to the automatic campaign and start increasing the spend.  Would you recommend that approach or start in with the automatic placements?

Shelley:        If you have a very small budget, starting with manage placements is a good way to start, yeah.  Another thing that I do with a smaller budget is something called category targeting and basically what you do is you tell Google specifically what category that you want your ads to be shown on.

So instead of giving Google keywords or telling them to go out on the entire network with these keywords and find the website that’s for you, then you’re telling Google again, maybe it’s cameras.  So you’re telling Google, “I want to be under the cameras equipment type of category or maybe it’s music and entertainment.  So that’s another way to give Google a little more range so you’re not telling them specifically the exact websites that you want to be shown on but you’re not telling Google to go out on the entire display network either and show your ad.  You’re refining it to just a category.

Philip:            Right.  And is this category, this topic, you can choose your own website if you want to.  So let’s say you wanted to only show your ads on the Daily Telegraph or any specific website – you can actually get down to that level can’t you?

Shelley:        Yes.  And there’s strategies around hitting really high traffic websites and there’s strategies for hitting really small niche websites.  So if you are targeting a really high traffic website, let’s say like a Wallstreet Journal or a Daily Mail, where you’ve got a lot of news but there’s a lot of different topics going on.  So many conversations and you don’t want to be a part of every single conversation.  Then you can with those high traffic sites, you can use keywords to tell Google, “Okay well, I want to be shown on this very high traffic site but based on these keywords, I only want to be shown when these conversations are happening on that site.”

Philip:            Right.  And the site exclusion tool is really important isn’t it to start?  If you’re telling Google to show your ads on a whole lot of websites that they deem relevant matches and they’re not working for you, you make sure you use the site exclusion tool to exclude them.

Shelley:        Site exclusion is extremely important, categories and exclusions are very important if you’re doing a branded campaign.  You’re probably not going to want to be shown on gross and bizarre or politically or maybe sexually oriented sites.  So if you’re doing a branded campaign it would be very important to exclude those types of categories, and then as you’re refining your website, there may be certain sites that you don’t want to be shown on at all. My Space has always been one that – it used to be just gobble up impressions and clicks and create all sorts of chaos in display network accounts.  So a lot of people would go in and they would use exclusions to exclude My Space so that their ads were not shown on My Space specifically.

Philip:            I find Gmail a bit like that too.

Shelley:        Gmail can either be great or it can be very frustrating.  Yeah, it’s usually one or the other.  So what a lot of people will do is they will separate out their Gmail targeting so that it’s in a campaign all by itself and they’ll exclude it in their other campaigns.

Philip:            Alright, let’s move on to the bidding because the bidding can be a little bit different to search.  You get the cost per click and you also get the pay per impression.  Can you fill us in on that?

Shelley:        Sure.  Google’s actually got a lot of really wonderful bidding options right now.  Cost per click is when you pay according to just every time someone clicks on your ad, then you pay whatever the auction bid price is or accepted.  That would be cost per click.

CPM is based on a per impression.  So if you’re willing to spend $10 for a 1000 impressions or whatever that price is for you and people who are familiar with media buying are probably more familiar with the CPM model.

I don’t use CPM a lot on the display network unless I’m using it for certain – I may use it for a branded campaign, I may use it to actually kick off a campaign and to sort of kick start a campaign and get it rolling.  If I do use CPM, I usually only use it for display ads, I never use it for text ads.

Philip:            Right, and is that due to the recall factor?  You want to get your brand out there, you want it to be remembered but text ads have a very little recall.

Shelley:        Well, and the thing about it is that you can be shown with five other text ads.  There’s all sorts of issues with text ads.  Yeah, so I specifically don’t use CPM with text ads.  But there’s other bidding options too.  You have the CPA option, where you can do a cost per acquisition, you’ve got automatic bidding which is a little more complicated but kind of let’s Google take the reins a little more and I won’t get into that.  But anyway, there’s lots of options for bidding with Google and it really just sort of depends on what you’re goals are as far as what options works best for you.

Philip:            Yeah, I think with CPM’s seems to cater more for the large end of town.  You said people who are familiar with the media buys and probably have really large budgets.  I’d say for most small businesses that CPC is where they should be starting.

Shelley:        Yes.

Philip:            And match types.  So match types are absolutely critical in the search networks.  How important are match types?

Shelley:        They are not important in the content network at this time.  I will say that I have experimented a little bit with different match types and it can make a difference on where your ads are showing in the display network but there’s so many other things that are more important than match types that it’s really easier to just go ahead and use broad match across the board and focus on other strategies other than trying to worry about your match types.

Philip:            So any match type that is important is negative which is – and that’s really important isn’t it?

Shelley:        Negative keywords are important but I will put a disclaimer here.  It is very important that you do not copy your negatives from your paid search campaign because in the display network whereas – in the search network we might have a hundred negatives.  In the display network we may only have two or three negatives.

So a negative would be something that is absolutely, positively detrimental to the audience that we’re trying to reach.  Let me give you an example.  In the search network if I was selling new cars, then I would use a negative for the word use because I don’t want my ads to be shown on anywhere where somebody does a search for used cars.

In the display network, how many times in conversations do we use the word “used”.  I just used and I used it again.  So in a display network, that word would be something we would actually read in the content of a number of different websites even when it’s talking about new cars.  So we wouldn’t want to use the word “used” as a negative.

Philip:            Gotcha.  Thanks.  Yeah, makes perfect sense.  So I mean the main message coming through here is that content is extremely different to the search network and one of the things that irritates me about Google is the fact when you set up a new account, it automatically turns your campaigns on for search and content or display, and I really wish they wouldn’t.  I’m sure it makes them a lot of money but setting that as the default – but they really are so different and hopefully by now, listeners will realize every step of the process, they work very, very differently.

Shelley:        They do.  They’re very different – very different mind sets when you are creating your ad copy, even your text ads.  Very different concepts for how Google looks at your text ads and your landing pages and other things.

Most people don’t realize that when they create a very simple campaign with keywords, a text ad and a landing page, that Google actually takes all three of those elements into account when they go out on the content network to find relevant landing pages for you.

An example of that is I had a client that was very adamant about using the word single mom even though it wasn’t relevant to the keywords that we were targeting and it wasn’t relevant to her website.  It was just relevant to – she was trying to get across single mom is successful, that kind of thing.  And what happened is that even though her website wasn’t about single moms and her keywords weren’t about single moms, Google picked up on that in her text ad and what we saw in our placement reports was that she was being shown on mommy sites for baby names and mommy products, mommy advice and that kind of thing just because single mom was in her text ad.  So there’s definitely a lot of differences between the way Google looks at your overall campaign and your strategies in the display network versus how they look at it in the paid search site.

Philip:            Absolutely, couldn’t agree more.  There’s a lot of different strategies you need to follow.  What are the good resources that are available Shelley for people to start investigating further?

Shelley:        Well before I even get into my resources, let me just tell you about some of the really great free resources just from Google.  Google has a wonderful keyword tool.  They also have a new tool that’s called the placement tool.  So if you are interested in testing out managed placements where you actually can tell Google I want to be on these specific websites, they have a tool where you can type in some keywords or you can put in a website and Google will give you recommendations.  That’s a great tool.

They have another tool called Ad Planner.  Essentially it’s a media planning tool but it’s even more than that.  It’s really wonderful for looking up information on specific websites that you might be interested in targeting.  It’s wonderful for finding categories that you might want to target.  It’s great for actually coming up with entire lists of websites that you might want to create a managed campaign.  I use Ad Planner for all sorts of things.  It’s a free tool from Google.

Philip:            Yeah that’s from the double click acquisition I think.  I was looking at it yesterday and for example for the Sunday Morning Herald website here in Australia, you can look at number of visitors, pages viewed, the age demographic split, their users, charts all the time unique visitors, education levels, gender, household income, all that sort of stuff.  It’s a pretty awesome tool.  It’s incredible actually, all that information is available for free.

Shelley:        Yeah and even on the You Tube site – You Tube and Google Adwords are sort of married.  You Tube – if you create a You Tube promoted video account.  Your You Tube promoted video account actually integrates in with your Google Adwords interface. So you can set up your account and manage your accounts and everything from within your Adwords Account.

You Tube also has some great free tools, they have a great free keyword tool so you can look at just the searches that are going on in You Tube and they also have what’s they called their video targeting tool.  So it’s very specific just to You Tube, gives you some great ideas for targeting specifically in You Tube.

Philip:            Where do you find those tools in You Tube?

Shelley:        You can just do a Google search, one is the video targeting tool and then the other one you would just type in the You Tube keyword search tool.

Philip:            Okay excellent.  I will include links to those in the show notes.  Now can we just expand a little bit on You Tube.  I know you are very passionate about it and have achieved some fantastic results just using You Tube.  Some people know now it’s the second largest search engine.  Can you talk us through a little bit about your experiences with You Tube?

Shelley:        Yeah, You Tube has been a bit challenging because in spite of the fact that they are the number two search engine and also they are number two on the double click top 1000 list of traffic overall worldwide, what’s been interesting is that the clients that have worked with them in my own experience, I was really struggling with getting traffic on You Tube.  So sort of accidently, I discovered that there is a way to, for lack of a better term, kick start your You Tube campaign.

Another way of putting this would be like if you were at a casino.  If you are playing the nickel machines, you’re not exactly considered a big player.  And so, in the You Tube system, Google wants to make sure that you are sort of a player and so what I did was I discovered this method to kick start my You Tube campaigns and once I did that, then the traffic started flowing and I could refine that traffic to specific categories, to keyword targeting, to specific channels, those types of things.  I just have to – there was sort of this initial process to just sort of get it up and running.  But yes, there’s a lot of really wonderful things that you can do with You Tube right now and some really interesting things as far as specific targeting that you can do.

Philip:            Sounds awesome.  It’s something that I want to start experimenting a little bit more with.  We haven’t done too much You Tube stuff but I’ve been reading some of your newsletters, I know how much you love it.

Shelley:        Yeah.

Philip:            So Shelley, just before we wrap up, I wondered if there is anything we sort of missed, any common mistakes that you see that we haven’t touched on or any top tips perhaps to close with?

Shelley:        We’ve actually covered a lot of the common mistakes and the category exclusions, the keyword exclusions.  Actually category exclusions is something that I teach in my training materials too.  The thing about categories with me is if you follow me, you’ll hear me talk about that a lot.  You’ll hear me talk about it with the display network, you’ll hear me talk about it with You Tube and the thing about category targeting is that very, very few people know that you can even use that strategy in Google.  As a matter of fact, if you try to find it in any of their material, you’re not going to find it.  But it’s one of my sort of secret strategies and not only do I target with categories but I also exclude with categories too.

So for instance if I have – let me think here – if I have a specific education sort of product, then maybe there’s a certain audience that keeps coming – let me give you an example.  So, cheating – let’s say I have a relationship product and it’s about like cheating husbands or cheating wives.  Well, if my ad copy is about that, where do you think my ads could potentially show on the display network if I use the word cheating.

It could be cheating on your taxes, it could be cheating on sports, it could be cheating on gambling, there’s a lot of different things that you could use for the word cheating.  So you can use category exclusions to actually tell Google, “No, no, no, I don’t want to be shown on anything that’s related to those, anything that would fall under that category.”  It’s a lot more powerful than just a negative keyword.

Philip:            Okay.  Right.  Nice, we were talking about tools and very keen for you to share your tools because I use them.  Where can people find you on the web and what sort of tools do you have to offer?

Shelley:        The first place to find me is my free newsletter and that is contentnetworkpulse.com.  It’s just a free newsletter, it’s kind of like what’s going on in the display network, kind of the latest, greatest tips and tricks and what’s happening, tools that are coming out, maybe the latest information from Google or being specifically – it also will talk about me specifically, where I’m talking at events, what products I have out and I have this really wonderful resource content resource guide and a content network tool guide that I give for free for anybody that signs up through my free newsletter.

I have two products that are out.  The first one is called youradseverywhere.com and basically there is a beginner, immediate and advance class just on an overview of the display network and all the strategies from keywords, themes, those automatic placements to managed placements.  It even goes on into mobile and audio and You Tube and then my latest product is called yourclickseverywhere.com and that one is about just generating huge amounts of traffic and there’s a reason that my first two modules – one is about You Tube, one is about the top 1000 and we use those techniques to funnel in to building lists for retargeting which is the third module.

So very heavy emphasis on retargeting and how you can generate very large lists using traffic on the display network.

Philip:            Right.  I would strongly recommend – thanks to you – those are some awesome tools, I haven’t bought any of those products myself but I’ve got your free tools and they are just awesome.  There’s some great stuff there, I haven’t been through them all yet but there’s some great things on there.  It’s an absolute no brainer.  I strongly encourage everybody to go get them.

Shelley where are you speaking next?  Are you on the conference circuit?  What’s the next year looking like?

Shelley:        As of right now the first thing that I have is the Perry Marshall seminar that is in Maui and I may have a link to that on my website.  If I don’t it’s something that I need to update.  I’ve been really crazy.  I just got back from the Glacier Kennedy and another Perry event in November and then this product that we’ve had coming out.  Unfortunately my website may not be completely updated but I will be putting out information on that newsletter about the upcoming Maui seminar and I do have plans to speak at some other events in 2011, just haven’t got everything lined up on the calendar yet.

Philip:            And when are you coming to Australia?

Shelley:        I don’t know but I would love to.  You are definitely on my list.  I would really love to come to Australia.  We almost – my husband’s a Dallas fire fighter and in 2000 we were in France for the World Fire Fighter Olympics and the next Olympics were supposed to be in Australia and unfortunately, after 2000, we had the 9/11 incident and it sort of kind of messed up the whole Fire Fighter Olympics and all of that stuff.  So I didn’t get to go but we had made plans to go.  So we’ll have to figure out a way to get down there.

Philip:            Yeah, there’s a couple of good search marketing conferences.  There’s the SMX one, the search engine land conference which is in Sydney in March I think it is.  So there’s a couple of really good ones.  We get a lot of international speakers.  So it will be great to see you over here one day.

Shelley:        Great, I have to look into those.

Philip:            Well thanks so much Shelley.  I know how busy you are and really thankful how you’ve given so freely of all the information and we look forward to catching up for a drink or two one day when you visit Australia.

Shelley:        Thank you, I can’t wait.

Philip:            Thanks Shelley, bye.

Shelley:        Bye.

By Philip Shaw