Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Welcome to her Empire Builder Show. If you have ever looked at Google Ads and thought, oh, like that looks way too complicated for me, today's episode is going to change everything you thought you knew about Google paid traffic ads or that you don't know. So for me, I have never actually placed a Google Ad, and so a lot of the questions that I am asking our guests today are kind of selfish in a way of going, all right, I know nothing. Tell me everything that I need to know about Google Ads. It's technical, it's informative, and it's fabulous. So I am joined by Aaron Young, who is the founder of the Define Digital Academy, who's made it his mission to make Google Ads simple, effective, and, believe it or not, actually fun. Through his practical, no jargon approach, Aaron helps course creators get their programs in front of the right people and at the right time without having to dance on Instagram every day or rely on Facebook ads that keep shifting the goal posts. So in this episode, we're going to dive into how Google Ads can quietly and powerfully fuel your launches and your evergreen funnels what you need in place before you spend a single cent so that you can make sure you're giving your ads the best chance of success and the exact strategies that Aaron recommends for course creators who want to scale with smart, intentional advertising.

 

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:01:24]:
So whether you are completely new to Google Ads or looking to level up, this episode is packed with clarity, calm, and real strategy. Let's get into it. Aaron Young, welcome to her Empire Builder show.

Aaron Young [00:01:38]:
Thank you so much for having me, Tina.

Tina Tower [00:01:41]:
So it's always really tricky when I do this because I'm like, I want to ask you all about Google Ads, which is what you're great at, but you're also built the most exceptional YouTube channel. You've built an incredible online business in the last couple of years. So I could ask you about 50, gazillion things, but we're going to focus on the Google Ads because, selfishly, I have never placed a Google Ad.

Aaron Young [00:02:03]:
Well, let's, you know, we can, we can fix that hopefully by the end of today. I know.

Tina Tower [00:02:07]:
I have a feeling we might. So to give us a little bit of foundation, what drew you into the wonderful world of Google Ads and how come out of all of the different things that you have done, this is the thing that you have made your mission to teach others?

Aaron Young [00:02:21]:
Yeah, so. So, I mean, I didn't intentionally get into Google Ads, which I think sometimes is probably the best discovery. So we started our own business in 2010 we hired a, what we thought was a good digital agency and we got zero leads up to three months. I would have been happy for spammy leads, but we just got like zero leads.

Tina Tower [00:02:39]:
Wow.

Aaron Young [00:02:40]:
Yeah. But because it was our money, our initial capital and we had like just without getting too technical, we basically had a year to, you know, generate enough sales to, to improve the proof of concept. But there was a risk there. So I thought, well, if we've got money on the line, I need to take control of this and I need to take ownership of it. And a friend told me about Google Ads because this Google Ads, paid ads only started in like 2006. So this was really, really early.

Tina Tower [00:03:03]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:03:04]:
And then, yeah, as they say, the rest is history. I it we, you know, obviously got enough leads to build that business. At that time we're living overseas in Bali and I ended up finding out these weird things that our Google Ads platform, sorry, our campaign was outperforming like big industry leaders in the space. So then started getting some consulting clients.

Tina Tower [00:03:24]:
You were like, what am I doing that's so good? I didn't know.

Aaron Young [00:03:26]:
Yeah, exactly. And it was kind of one of those unknown, like unknown things that I discovered this thing that I was good at and I put a lot of effort into it. Obviously, when you're building a business, we had two, we had three young kids at that stage. So it was, you know, early mornings, late nights. And at that stage there wasn't really as many YouTube channels about it. It was all reading into blogs, just looking at their own data. And then from 2015, we still have that original business, but I'm out of the day to day, we sort of just would like an ownership stake in that now. And we then started consulting to different digital agencies as the head of digital and just went into the world of Google Ads.

Aaron Young [00:04:06]:
And then as I'm sure we'll get to soon, we then switched over and made a pivot to teaching other people business. Google Ads.

Tina Tower [00:04:12]:
Yeah. So I know like a lot of people that I work with especially are overwhelmed by paid ads or exactly as you said, really fearful of the, you know, I'm going to put all this money in and not get the return back. And I hear it, especially with Google Ads, it seems a little bit more mystical than meta ads, for example. Why do you think that is and how do you help people move past the fear in that?

Aaron Young [00:04:34]:
Yeah, I think one of the biggest misconceptions with Google Ads and I get where it comes from because, you know, I could set up a Google Ads campaign for you now. And you know, within three or four hours you would start seeing your ads and people would go, well, I can see what they're searching, they're clicking on my ad, they're going to the website. Why? No, why no sales? Yeah. Whereas I think with meta, people kind of understand that there's going to be time, like you need to do some testing. And that's. That is still true for Google. So the thing that I really communicate to people is that for a successful Google Ads campaign, you actually need three core elements. You need your.

Aaron Young [00:05:07]:
You need a good Google Ads campaign, like a knock on a die. You need the right settings, you need the right ad copy, you need those things happening, but you also need a landing page that converts and you also need an offer that converts. And one of the biggest things that I try to communicate to people is that Google Ads only magnifies what you're currently seeing in your business.

Tina Tower [00:05:26]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:05:27]:
So I kind of give people the picture of it's you throwing petrol on a fire. You know, if you could think about like the timber or the wood, that's your services, your products, the flame is your sales and your systems. So then if you start bringing that back, you throw fuel on, you know, wood with no flame, you've just got wood with petrol on it. Any little spark, you put the spark out. But if you've got like a consistent fire going and you put petrol on it, that's, that's where.

Tina Tower [00:05:54]:
That's the same with any advertiser. Exactly. Right. Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:05:57]:
And for some reason, I think it's because Google is more specific and it's, you've got a whole nother realm of data reporting. People go, I can see the keywords. So that they're typing in the right keywords, it looks relevant, but then it's not converting. Yeah, but so people understand, you still need. So we would generally say when you're starting Google Ads, you know, after the first 30 days, if you can be just getting one or two conversions, you're doing great. Potentially not even profitable, you know, by week six or six, seven or eight, if we can start, you know, breaking even. Great. And then after that 90 day mark, we look to go, yeah, we've got a really good, solid platform now.

Aaron Young [00:06:33]:
We can start to scale and now we can start to really invest. But a lot of people don't have that patience for the first three months.

Tina Tower [00:06:39]:
Yeah. Okay. What do you think is one of the myths or misconceptions about Google Ads? That. That course creators need to let go of to get started running Google Ad campaigns.

Aaron Young [00:06:49]:
Yeah, probably one of the biggest and this is probably moving into a bit more of a strategy is strategy. Yeah, yeah. Thinking that they have to go for the kill straight away like and really going well if they're search, let's just pick any niche.

Tina Tower [00:07:05]:
By that you mean going straight for the sale rather than building the reputation.

Aaron Young [00:07:09]:
Yeah, yeah. And especially in the realm of course creators like you know, if you're going to go shopping online for so let's just say a new I'm just looking at my iPhone like a new iPhone case. Fundamentally we know what that is, we know what we're going to be getting and so there's a lot more confidence there. But when we're especially dealing with course creators and knowledge, people are a little bit more skeptical because there's just nothing they can touch and they can feel. So especially if they picked up like the first time they've heard of you from a paid ad is the introduction may be there but they may want to see some proof of work. So you know, that's where things like your social media posts, you know, educational content on YouTube comes into play. So with course creators it does throw in another layer of if you're reaching these people like completely cold, you've got to like warm them up. So a lot of people go straight for the kill.

Aaron Young [00:07:59]:
So that's probably one of the things that I would say why course creators don't see success with Google Ads.

Tina Tower [00:08:05]:
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean it's, it's tempting. Like I know whenever I've started ads like you always want a result straight away. But if you go in like knowing the long game and going these are the expectations that we can set, I think that's a lot, a lot easier.

Aaron Young [00:08:20]:
Also too technically things people got to remember too just with the attribution now I'm trying not to get too technical too early but one thing you do need to remember that's different for Google Ads to say like a meta style campaign is if someone clicks on their ad on your ad today, but then they don't convert for 45 days from now, some of that attribution still goes back to the first click. So. So your, your Google Ads campaign can actually look better after time. So generally when I'm saying when you're going into your Google Ads dashboard, I really don't put any importance on the data over the last 14 days.

Tina Tower [00:08:55]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:08:55]:
So it's more like. So sometimes I say just wait because what's looking bad now a month from now might actually look really, really good.

Tina Tower [00:09:03]:
Yeah. Okay. And so you bought in some meta there some Facebook and Instagram. So they're definitely like, they're the most common. They're the common ones that I hear nearly every course creator going. Yep, we do meta ads.

Aaron Young [00:09:15]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:09:15]:
Where does Google Ads differ? Like do you think you should have both of them in your product mix? Does it get a different sort result? Like talk to us about the difference between.

Aaron Young [00:09:25]:
So really upfront, I'm not dogmatic about any type of platform. You kind of get the people who are like, I'm all, I'm all the only way. Like, so I'm, I, you know, I believe that for a, it makes sense for a course creator to maybe focus in one area to start.

Tina Tower [00:09:41]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:09:42]:
But then eventually if they want to scale, they're going to have to branch out. So the, So a couple of things I would say with Google Ads is that especially when you're talking about your more traditional style of campaigns, which is like your search campaigns, they are like, that's going to be a lot more expensive than a meta style ad because if you're, if someone's like searching in like, you know, course for, I don't know, got a blank of course for YouTube production or whatever. Yeah, that's going to be a really, really super high intent keyword. So it's going to be potentially, you could be paying 20, 25, $30 for that click. So especially if you've got a small budget, you can see your budget gets eaten up really, really quickly. So generally what I would say for course creators is that in a lot of niches, that's not the keyword you want to be going for. You want to basically be treating it a little bit more like what you do in a meta style campaign is it's more warming up the audience, educating. You can definitely allocate some keyword budgets for high intent keywords.

Aaron Young [00:10:47]:
But the thing I do like with Google now is that this is really, really rapidly changing. There's actually a new campaign type called demand gen, which is probably, which is closer to a metastyle campaign than it is to a Google Ads campaign. So there's no keyword targeting in doesn't even appear on the search network. It only appears out on YouTube, the Display Network and Gmail. So it's all image and video based.

Tina Tower [00:11:14]:
And especially they find that based on audience over keywords.

Aaron Young [00:11:18]:
Yeah, yeah. So the great thing is, is that what you can do here inside your Google Ads account is you can even as a course creator, you could download your paying customers, upload that list into Google Ads and create that as your seed list.

Tina Tower [00:11:31]:
Right. And it finds people like that.

Aaron Young [00:11:33]:
Exactly. Right.

Tina Tower [00:11:34]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:11:34]:
Yeah. So, so then what I say, especially for course creators, is a strategy that we're doing ourselves now since this has come out, is that we are running a search campaign underneath that. So we're saying we only want the search campaign to target people who have specifically seen one of my YouTube videos or one of my display video ads. And I think that's a really cool difference with Google Ads is that you can actually really block it in and you can say, especially with your search campaigns, you've got to, you've got to be, you've got to go onto my website for your, for your ad to trigger your Google search.

Tina Tower [00:12:10]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:12:11]:
Or you could do the reverse and go, I don't want people who have been to a website to see this ad.

Tina Tower [00:12:16]:
Okay. Is it as complex as it sounds?

Aaron Young [00:12:19]:
No, I would say. Okay. So I would say in terms of usability, I actually find the Google Ads dashboard a lot easier to use than Facebook. Than the Facebook.

Tina Tower [00:12:29]:
I find them both confusing.

Aaron Young [00:12:31]:
Yeah. Now the only thing I would say with that is now obviously I have to be. I've got a bias towards Google Ads because I've used that dashboard, you know.

Tina Tower [00:12:39]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:12:40]:
The last 15. 15 years. But even up until about 26. Yeah, there was about a five year period where I was like, I'm now fully only Google Ads, but there's about a five year period was between the two. And I always found Google Ads just a more easier platform to, to use.

Tina Tower [00:12:58]:
Yeah, beautiful.

Aaron Young [00:13:00]:
So I, you know, do like, I think you've got to understand kind of the platform and how it works, but I, I do definitely find that it's. And Google is making this a lot easier. The downside with it being easier is that they are opting you into a lot of settings which are probably not beneficial for you.

Tina Tower [00:13:17]:
Yeah. Okay. Now I know you have great funnels. When you talk about your funnels, I get excited with how you use those. Um, so for people, Aaron's using a combination of Kajabi and deadline funnels to run these. But what kind of funnel or website setup do you recommend people need before doing the Google Ads program and figuring out like how to actually get started with Google Ads? What do you, what do you need as the foundation?

Aaron Young [00:13:44]:
If you're, and I'm taking this in the context, especially if you're potentially only doing, you know, you might just be doing six figures or under six figures, like if you don't have a massive budget to throw Google Ads, let's look.

Tina Tower [00:13:55]:
When we look at statistics, most business owners are earning around that a hundred thousand dollar mark in Kajabi.

Aaron Young [00:14:01]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:14:01]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:14:02]:
So you'd be then looking back there going, potentially dipping their toe into Google Ads. It may even be under a thousand dollars a month in terms of actual ad spend, potentially a lot less than that. So in that case, what I'd be looking at is I'd be looking at not actually going for the sale, going for qualified leads. And this is what I did for the first, you know, once we knew that our funnel was working, our Google, our paid ads campaign was actually built around purely just getting people to sign up to my database because I had data offline that I know if I get people onto my database, we've got a really good chance of converting them. So we purely just went for ads going to a lead magnet.

Tina Tower [00:14:42]:
Yep.

Aaron Young [00:14:44]:
And then if you know your average cost per convert, so if you know your cost per conversion, you can then scale it from there. For us, just because of our price points and our conversion metrics, we knew that once we had a cost per lead of $15. Now that may seem higher for some people, but for our business, that's where it worked. Yeah, we knew that we could scale it and that's what we did. And that was giving us an extra, you know, 250 to 300 leads into a database a month. And we just, that's what we did for the first from. We didn't start Google Ads for the first six months because we're doing some testing. But then for the next sort of 12 to 18 months, we had no direct sales component.

Aaron Young [00:15:21]:
Now we did have some like, we took the funnel, we had some little funky like tripwires and those things in there. And purely for me, I was going, as long as Google Ads is even cost neutral, but it's giving us high quality leads. I'm happy to, you know, I'm happy to use that to scale my business.

Tina Tower [00:15:37]:
Yeah, nice. So when you have your Kajabi end set up, have you got any different with the lead magnet funnel for say meta ads to Google Ads?

Aaron Young [00:15:47]:
Yeah, so, so what we do is that we just simply just create a duplicate landing, like a duplicate opt in page with a duplicate form. So we actually have a form that.

Tina Tower [00:15:56]:
You can track it.

Aaron Young [00:15:57]:
Yeah, that's tagged Google Ads. So now I can go into my contacts list inside of Kajabi and just go, they filled out this form and that's the way that I track it and we've I think over time I actually did over the weekend it was something like 7 1/2 9,000 sorry 8, 8500 leads are coming from Google Ads and some of those clients have spent up.

Tina Tower [00:16:18]:
That's bigger than my entire database. Yeah, yeah, you got over the weekend.

Aaron Young [00:16:22]:
Oh no, it didn't happen over the weekend like of our. I checked the data.

Tina Tower [00:16:25]:
Yeah, right.

Aaron Young [00:16:26]:
Wish I was doing that. But no.

Tina Tower [00:16:27]:
Yeah, I was like what were you doing there?

Aaron Young [00:16:29]:
Yeah, but over time. So over a 18 month period we built up an extra database of 8,000 people and some of those people have spent like $20,000 in our coaching. Coaching. So but the first contact was Google Ads. Now the average is down at about 500 to $1,000. But that was an easy way for us to see without getting technical with the tracking going in Kajabi people have filled out this form. What's their lifetime value? And that's the way that we did it.

Tina Tower [00:16:55]:
So you mentioned before that they've got a new thing that's coming into YouTube. I'll try and get it right. You said YouTube. You said like other different places. Is that in answer to AI coming in? Because I have seen that a lot of people are searching less in the Google interface because they're searching on chat GPT for example. What are the adaptations that you're seeing coming in already and is it still growing?

Aaron Young [00:17:20]:
Yeah. So there has been some people who are out like going, you know this is going to be the end of Google search and those type of things. There's a lot happening in this space. I sort the Google has changed fundamentally how it does its keyword targeting. Historically it used to be like, you know, let's just say course, you know, course creation for women in Australia. Women in Australia, yeah. You could actually say it has to be that exact keyword in that order. Whereas now it actually targets the meaning of the keyword.

Tina Tower [00:17:57]:
Yeah, nice.

Aaron Young [00:17:58]:
So what that has meant is. And it also takes into account the landing page as well. So what that is, what that's really meant is search terms are a lot broader now than what they used to be. And this comes back to searches going more conversational right now as we sit data. Google released data last year that 15% of all searches that occur in Google are brand new in that they've never searched before. There's also another trend that search terms with over five words in them growing by. I think it was 150%.

Tina Tower [00:18:28]:
Really.

Aaron Young [00:18:29]:
Yeah. And this is all becoming too conversational. So Google is about to release Gemini. You're already seeing, you know, the, the AI generated responses in search that's going to be about, that's going to be supercharged to where it's effectively going to operate like a, like a chat GPT or whatever you want, you know, complexity, whichever tool you want to use. So your search terms, your search, your paid ads will be embedded into the conversation response.

Tina Tower [00:18:55]:
Yeah. Nice. And do you do YouTube ads as well?

Aaron Young [00:18:57]:
Yeah, yeah.

Tina Tower [00:18:58]:
And is that the Google Ads platform that goes into YouTube?

Aaron Young [00:19:01]:
And that's what people don't realize. Is that. So people are going, oh, Google search is going to die. It's just going to move across to YouTube.

Tina Tower [00:19:08]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:19:09]:
And what a lot of people don't, don't realize too when you look at like when we start playing the game of YouTube versus say the social media.

Tina Tower [00:19:16]:
Platforms, I mean, everything that I'm reading, YouTube is just kicking its butt.

Aaron Young [00:19:21]:
Oh, totally. So 90% of users say they discover new brands and products on YouTube. Users spend an average of 23 hours per month on YouTube. And, and the, the big brands are actually also, I would say too, for course creators at the moment, your cheapest traffic you're going to find is on YouTube because obviously CPCs are increasing in Instagram searches. But YouTube is at the moment, I think it's going to change over the next 18 months to 22 years. But there is a real opportunity to really go in and really test YouTube, get your creatives. Right. The great thing I find, especially at the moment with YouTube, is that when you look at ads on the shorts platform, your ad could effectively be our best performing ad.

Aaron Young [00:20:03]:
At the moment is a testimonial. So no editing. It's a testimonial from a client. I then did a clip of like 10 seconds after me of, you know, this is our offer. Really, really simple, natural content like user gen, user user testimonials are performing super, super well.

Tina Tower [00:20:19]:
And how much when you're doing YouTube ads, how much can you drill down into where you want that ad placed?

Aaron Young [00:20:26]:
Yeah. Okay, now this is a fine balance because the more targeting, the higher the expense. Yeah. But if you wanted to, I could set up a campaign and go, I want my ad, I want these ads to appear on your Tina's channel. Or I want these ads to appear on this video of Tina's.

Tina Tower [00:20:45]:
So you can even get specific videos. Someone else's video.

Aaron Young [00:20:49]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:20:50]:
So you could put like your promo on a competitor's video.

Aaron Young [00:20:53]:
Yes.

Tina Tower [00:20:53]:
Oh, that'd be cheeky.

Aaron Young [00:20:55]:
Yeah, it's going to be A lot more expensive.

Tina Tower [00:20:57]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:20:58]:
Because you're, you're specific saying it, but yes, you, that's, that's how granular you can get.

Tina Tower [00:21:02]:
Can you stop people from doing that? If someone put an ad is that.

Aaron Young [00:21:07]:
You could Turn your, your YouTube video off to turn it off for ads. Okay. But then you're demon. So you demonetizing your, your, your video. So that's kind of like, you know, it's creators, they want, if they've got a YouTube channel. One of the great things about a YouTube channel is obviously you can get monetized for your content.

Tina Tower [00:21:25]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:21:25]:
You turn that off, you're not getting the ads, people aren't targeting it, but then you're not getting them the payment for it.

Tina Tower [00:21:30]:
So I'm going to digress a little bit here on our topic. But because you're a superstar YouTube creator, also because you don't, because you want people buying your things, you don't necessarily want them buying other people's things. Do ads turned off in your videos? Because you don't.

Aaron Young [00:21:45]:
I turn on the, I turn on the monetization because fundamentally it's, it's. I turn it on. Sorry. I turn on the monetization because. Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:21:52]:
So people have ads at the start.

Aaron Young [00:21:54]:
Yeah. So. Because if you think about it from there as well, if they're coming to see my ad, see my, my video and they see, you know, see Tina's video, they're like, well, hang on, I came to see Aaron. So it's a. Yes. That's what I say. It's great that you can do that, but it's actually a hard sell.

Tina Tower [00:22:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, so I would think turn ads off on my videos so people just get straight into the video.

Aaron Young [00:22:19]:
I just think people are starting to. People are, yeah, people are accepting that if they go to YouTube, I mean YouTube, sponsored YouTube membership is actually growing as well. So people are now choosing just to, you know, pay the. I think it's 20amonth now for a year.

Tina Tower [00:22:32]:
There's a subscription for everything, and then.

Aaron Young [00:22:34]:
There'S no more ads. So. Okay, so it really does come into like, we've, as I said, we've never turned off monetization and we haven't seen any issue with, we haven't seen any issue at all with our YouTube growth.

Tina Tower [00:22:47]:
Yeah. Okay, so you touched on money a little bit earlier. But if we, if we were getting started, what's a realistic monthly ad spend for a course creator who just be starting out, say they're making 200,000 a year in their Business, what is the realistic ad spend and how long, like would you give it a three month Runway before you looked for results? Like what to set up people's realistic expectations for that?

Aaron Young [00:23:11]:
So definitely at least, I'd give it at least at three months. So you'd be looking at your investment lasting three months. And don't make any, don't make any decisions, you know, two weeks in or three weeks in, because I would say 80 to 90% of the time the results are not going to be pretty. So they're not going to be what you, what you want, but you're going.

Tina Tower [00:23:27]:
To have faith, play the long game.

Aaron Young [00:23:29]:
You do, you do. And I mean the great thing I look at with course converters is course creators as well. Is it generally, if we get like one or two sales, it can make that, it can make those previous six weeks look amazing. So, so that's the other thing where.

Tina Tower [00:23:44]:
You go, why is it a long lead time? Because, I mean, I will look at, say we do an Instagram ad, for example, I'll leave it 24 hours and if it's not like clicking through, I know it's crap and I'm going to take it off and I'm going to replace it with some better creative in there.

Aaron Young [00:24:00]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:24:01]:
What makes it like, why is that different?

Aaron Young [00:24:03]:
Yeah, So I think some, some of the difference does come down to, especially if you're doing a high intent audience. So when we look at like Facebook and meta, so you, yes, you are starting a new ad that's only 24 hours old, but you've already got ingrained an audience that the meta platform knows about.

Tina Tower [00:24:21]:
Yeah. Right.

Aaron Young [00:24:22]:
So it's looking at who's, who's already engaging with your content and I'm going to go out from there. Whereas if you're going with a search campaign, it's clearly like, it's just looking at who is doing these searches and then because those searches, they're like high converting, you've got other people bidding on those same search terms.

Tina Tower [00:24:39]:
So early indicators to figure out because I mean the worst thing would be to go three months and go, oh, you didn't come to fruition. I didn't know it was a crap funnel.

Aaron Young [00:24:47]:
Yeah. So. So the early indicators for me would be firstly time on the page, when now we're looking at like if you're going to run Google Ads, I would say make sure you've got Google Analytics running on your website. So that way you can go across. And I'm going, if people are coming from my paid Ad and they're not spending 30 seconds on my page. It's something, there's a misconnect with them when they're going across. You know, if you've got, you know, it depends on how technical you want to get your funnels. But like in Kajabi, I can see all of my emails, I can see the open rates for the different email.

Aaron Young [00:25:18]:
So then I'm going, this is the email which is not cutting it. So I need to change that. Yeah, so you need to go, go through it from that way. But getting back to what you ask in terms of budgets with Google Ads, I generally reverse engineer. What I mean by that is that you want to be getting at least 10 clicks. If you're running a search campaign, you want to be getting at least 10 clicks a day. So then that comes back to what's your average cpc? So and you can do that if you do a keyword research and you see that your average CPC is going to be a dollar, you then know that we need to be having a budget of at least $10 a day in order to make it, to make it work. If you're in a niche which has a really, really high CPC.

Aaron Young [00:25:59]:
So let's just say your CPC may be somewhere around the $20 and you go, I don't have $200 a day. What I would then do is I would actually not start the search and I would start with a video campaign and then a display, like an image based campaign to then retarget the people that have been on my website. And so, and you're going to get a much, much cheaper, high value. So with that I would go. Most course creators could get away with, you know, 20, 20 to $30 a day and I'd split it $10 YouTube, $10 display.

Tina Tower [00:26:32]:
Yeah. Nice. Okay, so everything that you just talked about there, I'm like that sounds great.

Aaron Young [00:26:37]:
Yeah.

Tina Tower [00:26:37]:
No idea how to do any of that. Yeah. So you made the switch two years ago, three years ago from agency into running courses and did one of the rare things in that most people in your position would teach other agencies how to run ads, but you've gone in to teach business owners, which I love because business owners for the win. Can you tell us about that transition, how you actually teach business owners like us?

Aaron Young [00:27:05]:
Yeah, so, so it really came from, so as I said, I started my own business into Google Ads and then I went into like I was head of digital for three different agencies at one stage. I was white labeling to them and this is running, you know, Massive campaigns for everything from, you know, Suzuki Australia to Swiss to Unisuper. So big, big budgets and big.

Tina Tower [00:27:25]:
What do you think you did at that stage that was different to what a lot of people were doing? Like why did you get so successful with it so quickly?

Aaron Young [00:27:32]:
Oh, I mean because with me I was then moving through with an agency so it was very much like I wasn't going out and getting those clients, it was the agency getting the clients. But I think I got.

Tina Tower [00:27:41]:
You were getting the results with the.

Aaron Young [00:27:42]:
Yeah, I think I got up to the position of head of digital so quickly because I was able to connect with the, I was able to connect with the agency owner as a business owner.

Tina Tower [00:27:53]:
Yeah, right.

Aaron Young [00:27:53]:
So I was able to Very, very chilly know. So when I looked at Google Ads, I've always looked through the prism of like if someone comes in from a marketing background or no real other background, they look at like you know, for you and me, when we do any types of Google Ads, sorry, any type of advertising, we're not really as concerned about the results in the ads advertising platform. We're more looking at what's happening at the business bottom line.

Tina Tower [00:28:16]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:28:17]:
So that's what I just communicated all the way through to and that's how, you know, even though I wasn't the initial one getting those clients, I was in the meetings, you know, getting them across the line and that's because I was able to have that connection. Anyway, we, we, we were just about to start our own full service agency and just followed that well trodden path and then the great thing happened in 2020, which we won't mention but you know, we all know what, what happened and we lost 70%. So we had, not only were we white labeling two different digital agencies, we also had a collection of about 25 direct clients. So we lost 70% of our direct clients and all of our agencies lost 70% of their direct clients. So it just made me look back and really, really think about and I had to look at, you know, I had a long time because I had nothing else to do where I was really thinking about. And then I just really looked fundamentally and going. I knew the digital agencies, their business model, I knew how much their staffing was, I knew how much their revenue was. And then I took a look at it and go with my 20 to 25 clients, I was actually earning more than the directors of the business but had a lot less expenses.

Aaron Young [00:29:25]:
And then also dug down further on it and I looked back at the clients that I enjoyed the most Weren't the big Swiss multivitamins and the Suzuki? Because ultimately I was dealing with marketing managers who. It's not their money. They don't, they don't really, really care. Not. They didn't care. But it wasn't the. There was the.

Tina Tower [00:29:43]:
It doesn't hit the same.

Aaron Young [00:29:44]:
Yeah, exactly Right. Some of my favorite clients were the, the, you know, the small local business. Like I remember, you know, as an example, I set up a business for a skip bin. Like not completely not sexy company, like they're picking up waste from people's. We started the campaign, they got four calls that afternoon. And just the joy in this young. He was a young guy, young family, starting his first business. Just the joy in that.

Aaron Young [00:30:06]:
This is making my dream come true. And then it made me rewind back to, you know, when I first started getting my first, you know, inquiries coming through. And then it led to a sale and I went, you know this, there's a real need in the market for this because digital agencies are great. So I don't want to sound like I'm giving them a bad rap, but just the mechanics of a digital agency. If you're a small, you know, course creator and you're, you, you're paying a digital agency management fee of a thousand dollars and they've got, you know, larger businesses that are paying management fees of 25 to $50,000 just in management fees, where's the priority going to be? Yeah, and, and that's where it came down to. And I just went. And it's also understanding that for success with Google Ads, you actually need to know two things. You need to know not only how Google Ads works, but you need to know how the business works.

Aaron Young [00:30:54]:
So I went, well, a business owner knows how the business works. If we can give him some knowledge on how Google Ads works. Because it's not. And especially for course creator, I would say as well, is that course creators are problem solvers in that, you know, they learned. Many of us didn't know how to set up a funnel before. We didn't know how to set up kajabi or whatever platform. So I, they intuitively Google Ads isn't as scary as it needs to be.

Tina Tower [00:31:18]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:31:19]:
We just walk them through the process of setting it up and so what.

Tina Tower [00:31:22]:
Does your office suite look like now from a business point of view? What have you built?

Aaron Young [00:31:26]:
Yeah. So in terms of actual courses and our model. Yeah, so. So we have a, we have like a little introductory course.

Tina Tower [00:31:33]:
I know that has nothing to do with Google Ads, but I love from A course creator.

Aaron Young [00:31:36]:
Yeah. So we have a little introductory course which is. Which isn't offered publicly. It's just a little tripwire product as part of our deadline Funnel, which is $49. And that's just a collection of. It works hand in hand with one of my checklists. So I've got a checklist which gives you everything you need to do to optimize your campaigns.

Tina Tower [00:31:54]:
We link to that in the.

Aaron Young [00:31:56]:
Yeah, we definitely, definitely can. We will. And then that takes them over to an option to buy a video, buy a course which has like so of all of those 50 different things you need to do, it's actually me doing a screen share of. This is how you complete task one. This is how you complete your task two. Then we've got a full course which is $899. And that's like 12 hours of teaching you real, real basics. I try not to get too in depth, but a core understanding of how the algorithm works, how to write ad copy.

Aaron Young [00:32:29]:
Then it takes you through all the different types of campaigns, how to set the campaigns, and then it goes all the way through to like these, the account structures that I use. And we can even. I've even got one coming up for course creators, like a structure that a course creator can use. And it even goes down into like, you need to start this campaign where you're getting this results and this. So it's really, really step by step. So that's the course suite. We've also got a paid community, which is a $99 a month that's got like, think of it like a. So there's.

Aaron Young [00:33:03]:
It's on Kajabi community. So it's got like a feedback. There's also a week.

Tina Tower [00:33:07]:
You liking Kajabi Communities?

Aaron Young [00:33:09]:
Yeah, it took me a little while to get used to. I do, I do like it. I think since the new update and it has been good.

Tina Tower [00:33:15]:
Do you find engagement you can get over there instead of.

Aaron Young [00:33:18]:
Yeah. So the one thing that really helped us with the engagement is we now run weekly live phone, weekly live calls.

Tina Tower [00:33:24]:
Through communities.

Aaron Young [00:33:25]:
Yeah, through communities. And that's really increased the engagement. I run two of them and then two of my other guys run them. Um, and then there's also like, I release Masterclass every month and then, then on top of that we've got a. An advanced coaching program which is at $5,000 a month. And that's really for businesses who are, you know, thinking of, rather than getting an agency, they want to do something in, in house. And really you'll be spending about 20 to 25k a month to make that worthwhile. Um, but everything that we've got between there has got, gives you all of the tools to get up to that stage.

Tina Tower [00:33:59]:
Nice. And so the question that I like to finish for everybody on is, as a course creator, what does success look like for you? Where are you heading with your business at the moment?

Aaron Young [00:34:12]:
Yeah, so for me, success is purely about, I mean, I really got, as I sort of mentioned to you before, we had the option of setting up our own digital agency or connecting with business owners and helping business owners. And for me, that's what success is. It's really just helping as many business owners as possible with their Google Ads. Now, obviously a layer below that, I'm a dad with three teenage daughters, so there's also that side of it as well, is that this is a real happy medium where I'm actually able to help more people than I ever was able to. But I'm actually more present and more available for my own family. We now unashamedly only work four days a week. You know, we take as many holidays as we can. And yeah, so that's, I guess probably the full.

Tina Tower [00:34:57]:
It's the greatest business model ever. It is, really is.

Aaron Young [00:35:02]:
I just wish I discovered this business model before I lost all of my hair.

Tina Tower [00:35:06]:
Why?

Aaron Young [00:35:08]:
Just the being a digital agency owner for a little while and working in. Yeah, because when I was working in agency setting, I was pushing, you know, really, really a lot of hours in the week. Look, I probably would have lost my hair anyway.

Tina Tower [00:35:21]:
But you know, I mean, they say it's if it's gonna go, it's gonna go.

Aaron Young [00:35:25]:
It is.

Tina Tower [00:35:26]:
And you've got the beard going on now, which, you know, a lot of men admire the man be it. I have learned.

Aaron Young [00:35:31]:
Yeah, yeah. I'm just working with the cards I was dealt with, Tina.

Tina Tower [00:35:37]:
That's all all any of us can do. And so on that topic, because you've built a lot of your brand through YouTube as well. Like you've done Google Ads, you've built YouTube. Is there. I know we're not talking about all of you. You know, we've got to, we've got to rough up eventually as well. But is there some pearl of wisdom that you could impart on people for the organic YouTube strategy in there as well?

Aaron Young [00:35:58]:
And, and I would say this regardless of what platform you're using, whether it's a paid or organic platform, so whether it's YouTube, whether it's Google Ads, whether it's organic social media, or whether it's paid social media is work out what the platform wants and then create content or create ads for that. So let me give you a perfect example for Google Ads. They want clicks. So what I went is if I can create campaigns that generate more clicks because that's where Google gets paid, I'm going to get an unfair advantage with the algorithm. And as long as my backup sales data is working, my funnels are working, I'm going to see success with YouTube. That's the same process. I looked at it, I said, what does YouTube want? YouTube wants time on the platform because that's how they get paid. They get paid by creating videos that keep people engaged for longer.

Aaron Young [00:36:46]:
So I really, if anyone's looking at getting started with YouTube, I go the, the three core measurements that you really want to be guided by is your click through ratio. So I'll explain it in a little is obviously how many people see your thumbnail versus how many people click on your video. That needs to be high, right? Generally I want that to be above 10% in the first 24 hours of releasing a video. So then it averages down to 5%. You also need a watch duration of about. You can pass with 35% but ideally you want 50% watch duration and you need a watch time of at least four minutes. So when you put these three things together, you go, what I'm looking for is when I create a video, I want a thumbnail that has a video of 10% in the first 24 hours. I want to watch time of four minutes and I want to get 50%.

Aaron Young [00:37:39]:
So that's why all my videos are between eight to 12 minutes.

Tina Tower [00:37:42]:
Yeah, right, good tip.

Aaron Young [00:37:43]:
So you start working backwards from there.

Tina Tower [00:37:45]:
Yeah, good tip. We might have to do another whole episode at a later date on YouTube strategy as well. I have just started putting the podcast on YouTube and getting into YouTube. So it's like selfish questions for me.

Aaron Young [00:37:59]:
Podcasting on YouTube is slightly, a little bit different because generally your podcasts are going to be longer. So you know what? So I would look then from there, but I would, I would. So you generally do think about your, your when you look at the structure of the video is what you do want to get is you do want to get. You want to, when people click on your video, you want to meet that expectation of why they're watching your video straight away. So um, that's why you see a lot of people when they do, you know, move a podcast across to YouTube, they get rid of the introduction.

Tina Tower [00:38:28]:
Yeah, we've just had to do that.

Aaron Young [00:38:29]:
Yeah. It's also why you see a lot, a lot of the times too is they'll put a clip, you know, the real spicy clip from the, from the, at the front. At the front.

Tina Tower [00:38:38]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:38:39]:
And then sometimes you may even get people who, who get on and actually do a quick introduction saying, you know, this is the problems that we're going to, we're going to, we're going to address. And so you kind of need to, and what you need to be thinking about is with YouTube is you want to be really giving people a reason to watch your video. So you want to give them the confidence in the first 10 seconds that they're at the right place. Which is why you don't do, you know, a video introduction.

Tina Tower [00:39:03]:
Yeah.

Aaron Young [00:39:04]:
You also want to let them know that once they've clicked on your video that you are, you know, you are going to deliver on those answers. So when I create a video, I'm always looking at this is the problem and this is the solution I'm going to give you. And then I do make sure that I really do give them the solution.

Tina Tower [00:39:20]:
Yeah. Nice. Well, everything that you have talked about we will link to in the show notes so that people can grab all the goods and get started with Google Ads. I, I'm curious, I want to get it and, and see if I can make it work and have a little play because there's always new, different things to unlock and I think especially if people aren't all gravitating there at one time, there's advantages to that as well.

Aaron Young [00:39:43]:
And the other thing I'd really say too for anyone who's doing current ads on Meta is Demand gen is like wherever we're just moving assets that people are using on Meta. So taking your best performing like videos and best performing ads and just moving that over to demand gen and seeing great results. Perfect to recreate.

Tina Tower [00:40:01]:
Nice. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us.

Aaron Young [00:40:04]:
Thanks for having me, Tina.