Google Ads

“For example, we don't run any Google ads. We have zero ads, right?”

“Google Ads, it was, it is still the main driver, just and it was surprising across literally everything, right? Non-branded search, Pmax, YouTube ads, everything prints there”

“So if you wanted your rating to show up on your Google Ads, gold stars next to your ads, you had to work with one of the Google Seller Ratings partners, and we were one of those partners. Now, originally, there was only about five partners.”

“One of our portfolio company's marketing lead accidentally ran an 8000 dollars of personal Google ads on the company card.”

“The error is gone, right? So now you can't do like, okay, I will actually bet on digital sales. I can able to sell as nine dollar per agent subscription. Those days are gone, right? So those should be rethought about how you wanted to build digital sales. The …”

“A lot of people, they will get trapped in like you'll see this where the ads do really well for the first like 14 days. And then suddenly they start getting all this cheap traffic from like the Philippines or India. And they're like, I don't even know how that…”

“Exact match isn't actually exact match though on Google anymore. It used to be in the past. I could be like, anytime somebody searches this keyword, show my ad, they now technically expand the audience and it's total bullshit. I hate it.”

“If I just turn on ads straight to payment, I'm going to have not enough conversion events for it to train into that payment action. And so I have to focus on the thing that's more up funnel and train it into that, because that is a leading indicator for this, …”

“With search being disrupted in the manner that it is, and people, let's assume, use Google a lot lesser, or any kind of search platform that is throwing up ads. And if anyone wants to build a brand, social media might exist in some form, but Google ads and the…”

“One of the leading players has like, they have like 200 recruiters. It's like unsustainable. There are like 200 people on LinkedIn sending individual messages to acquire these people because there's no brand, there's no trust. They spend, you know, they're spe…”

“I think it's easier to build an average product, give it away for free, collect a lot of leads and sell them into something else where people in that space also pay for. And then now you got a cheaper flywheel than spending money on Google ads or trying to do …”

“Cold outreach itself, though we think it's a very saturated space, it's still pretty new out there. A lot of businesses still don't use cold outreach because Using Google ads, using Facebook ads is pretty simple for SMB. Cold outreach still feels like rocket s…”

“In the last three months, we've spent a 105,000 dollars to make a 108,000 dollars. So a 102% ROAS on Google Ads.”

“It's around a third SEO, a third Google Ads, and a third word of mouth.”

“Google has the least incentive to bring out AI native search or agents right there on core Google homepage or Google apps. It can be hidden in a mode or like sometimes firing some for some queries, but it's never going to be the central piece of it.”

“I think a massive amount of purchasing decisions will be driven by these sort of AI assistants that deeply understand you and your taste and get to disinter, disintermediate, you know, basically Google ads and random searches.”

“He tested them at the time on Google Ads, and so he would just see which had the highest click through. And the four hour work week, I think had a two, two X over the second place highest.”

“And those three years, well, a lot of things happened that if I'm summarizing, we just scaled Google Ads from 5000 dollars a month to half a million a month, and it just brought traction and 30,000 non-profits.”

“I spent zero dollars on Google ads or, and maybe like a thousand bucks on LinkedIn ads last month. My average competitor spends rough between 10 to 50 times what I do on a monthly basis.”

“We spend around three K per month on ads. So we only do Google ads mostly because I don't know how to do anything else.”

“Unless you have unbelievably good SEO and you're spending, you know, good money and have good talent to get the Google ads to go towards your website, unless you have a lot of brand recognition, your website is not going to sell things for you necessarily.”

“So even Google for, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google's not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source and then give that out.”

“They were converting like insanely low cost per conversion, 10 dollars, 15 dollars, 20 dollars in the early days, and that allowed us to scale a ton.”

“More times than, I think it's a 12% increase in the number of impressions you can get if you increase from a below average to an above average for the data that's available here.”

“I'm a firm believer in that there's a An account level quality score, not just necessarily a keyword or an ad quality score. So just turning this one off and removing it from the account, this one ad could dramatically improve your performance.”

“Perfect example, I was working with ADT, you know, the security company we wrote The most perfect ad when Google ads only allowed a headline and two descriptions of 35 and 35, we got every single value prop in there. Somehow it was amazing. And the ad that it …”

“A lot of times competitors could be doing it on accident. And what I mean by accident is within Google, if you're bidding on keywords Google will do what's called a close variant.”

“If the brand is trademarked within Google, they cannot use your name within the ad copy. Google more times than not will disallow it, but they could misspell it.”

“The learning is, as of six months ago, that has changed, and it is working absolutely. It's making the job seamless. Like, the LLMs now, inside Google Ads, are making targeting better, ok? They're better at showing the right creative. They're better at showing…”

“And then like on Google ads, if I wanted to try to pull people in that were searching for electrician or welding or HVAC or something very difficult because Google will give you a bad quality score because they'll look at your webpage and say, you don't do any…”

“A lot of companies on their Google ads expenditures today would be lucky to get two to one. And we were getting 18 to one back in the day.”

“And I guarantee you, if you did a video a day for the next 200 days, you could easily be at 30 grand a month doing this. And like from all of the revenue streams that we just talked about right there.”

“None of this exists. This is all a farce. This is all made up to allow people to bill exorbitant consulting rates to tell you that maybe Google ads is not for you.”

“So our marketing budget for the first year of our launch for over 2008 was basically, you know, a few hundred dollars per month that we were spending You know, on, on some very experimental Google ads and otherwise free you know, just with this PR effort.”

“That arbitrage right there is like such a formula for a five, ten million dollar business that you can build By yourself working, you know, very, it's a very good lifestyle business. It's not hard work. You don't need a big team. You don't need a lot of fundin…”

“Don't go to me. Go to the person whose audience is, like, hyper engaged on a really tight subject, And even if you want to be even more creative, go to different languages. So we have people crushing it in Spanish, crushing it in Portuguese. And it's like when…”

“No. in my opinion, the math barely fits here for us.”

“So I had a friend who in the early days of Zipcar just set up a bunch of cheap Google ads that bid on Zipcar and then would redirect them straight to Zipcar and milk the referral scheme. And so he drove free Zipcars for a year and then got banned for life from…”

“And then at Airbnb this 92% number is You know, the highest failure rate that I've observed. Now I've quoted other sources that, you know, it's not that I worked at groups that were particularly bad booking Google ads, other companies published numbers. There …”

“We were able to basically understand, ok, we need to exclude India. We need to exclude the Philippines, ah, from our chat. So actually now when you're in those locations, our chat wouldn't even show up anymore. And we knew, ok, for our Google Ads, we need to m…”

“And at its peak, we were doing about a thousand plus dollars a day, just piling money into Google ads as well.”

“I think is pretty ripe for disruption is manual sales teams. Like for media companies, they go out and they sell an ad package to a company, and then it's like this fully manual process to get them integrated with the product. And it, in my opinion, it should …”

“So Support Ninja started just as a website. I didn't do any investment other than I built a website and I put in some Google ads and we got our first customer, which ended up being this customer called Cleanify, which was this cleaning agent service nationwide…”

“So I worked on the ads team at Google for a number of years, and there was this kind of unwritten kind of rule of thumb that, Hey, if it's not going to generate more than a hundred million dollars in revenue, it's not worth talking about it.”

“We actually didn't do Google ads at all. We didn't have the money at that point of time to spend on ads. So we just started building a lot of content led lead generation as an engine and in order to get leads.”

“We spend close to around around, around 1600 to get a customer from Google.”

“The impression share drops to 28%, and this is where we felt the pressure of funding. The competitors decided they want to buy market share, and they just jacked up the cost per click for things like call tracking. So before, it was eight dollars for the top s…”

“The problem with Google ads is it has intent, but not firm graphics. And so what happens is it's very difficult to scale while controlling your life cycle stages down funnel.”

“I spent around 500 dollars.”

“At any given time, it was between eight and 12 different businesses running, but a lot of them were these small websites that were effectively on autopilot until something happened to them. So a lot of them were based either on Google ads, display ads, or SEO,…”

“The month before we spent like 900 dollars on Google ads. It was about, so there's 500 dollars on Facebook and around the same on LinkedIn.”

“Well, they pulled it out, and it was, they give some bullsh**t excuse about it being privacy. First, it was only, it was like if, only if it was over SSL, and then they just rolled it out to everything. And what it did is it forced you to buy ads from them. Be…”

“I actually don't do a lot of tracking, but I do about three K and Google ads. So it's all those same keywords that I rank for SEO wise. I'm still, I'm doubling down on those and running ads on those too.”

“It's actually zero last month.”

“So a good median percentage that you can gauge is six percent, which if you compare it to social media, it's a lot higher or any ads, Google ads, it's like more than 10 times higher.”

“It's probably not a lot in the whole thing. It's probably 20 to 30 K a month.”