[WAMA] Corey Rabazinski - AdWords Expert and Teacher - Thursday 5th February 5pm EST

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This is Corey's best selling WSO, Google AdWords for Beginners.


Transcription of WAMA Event with Corey Razabinksi:

Welcome to today’s Warrior Ask Me Anything even where we bring to you the world’s best internet marketers and online entrepreneurs for you to interact with.

Today I’m very excited to be joined by Corey Rabazinski. He is a Google and Bing accredited digital marketer, and also the creator of Google Adwords for Beginners. He manages multimillion dollar campaigns for some top companies such as Holiday Inn, Tony Romas and Universal Studios. Currently Corey is the marketing director at Code school which was recently acquired by Pluralsight for over $30,000,000. Welcome to the event Corey.

[00:34]

Corey: Hey Alaister, nice to see you and glad to be on.

[00:39]

Alaister: Great. So before the call we kind of had a bit of a discussion in regards to the acquisition of Codeschool. I would love to hear a little bit more about what you do there, what the company does and how the acquisition sort of came about.

[00:57]

Corey: Yeah definitely. I have been there for a little over eighteen months now. It really grew quickly over those eighteen months. First I will give you a little bit of background about Codeschool. First it started out as kind of a side project similar to my course Google Adwords for Beginners. It was just one course called [01:15 Rails for Zombies.] And that was kind of created out of a need that our cofounder Greg Pollock found, that people hate installing rails on their local machine. So he decided to just create this course that makes it easy to learn how to use Ruby on Rails. He launched this course for free and it was widely praised and a lot of people started using it. And that has spawned into a bigger company. We started releasing more and more courses and from there it grew out of just a side project from consultancy into its own product.

I joined the company like I said about eighteen months ago. Within that eighteen months we’ve had over a million users and what I’m finally focusing on is the internet marketing side of things so anything from email marketing, adwords, affiliate marketing, things like that I kind of focus on and try to find ways to connect with the developer audience and I definitely have some things I can hopefully share along the way in this event.

[02:23]

Alaister: Yeah so I checked out Codeschool earlier and I know it is like a marketplace for courses. We understand the sort of problems with running a marketplace. Obviously running freelancer.com you have got a two sided marketplace so you have got to work on generating obviously the developers who are building the courses as well as students who are looking to take the courses. What are some of the strategies that you guys used in the initial stages to overcome this problem?

[02:48]

Corey: Yeah so we are actually lucky that we brought all of our content creators in house so we are only focused on bringing people into the marketplace to consume the content. We don’t really have to focus on getting people to create the content like the company that bought us Pluralsight does. They have a whole team that is dedicated just to getting new instructors in to create new courses.

But for the school really the thing that I found was to create unique voice and get that voice across all the channels we use. I think a lot of times what we saw with the competitors that we were monitoring was that they didn’t really connect with the developer audience. And I think what we did over the course of the eighteen months since I started there was create campaigns around that marketing strategy but kind of had to shy away from some of the things that many developers might nitpick at or people that are more internet savvy might be wary of. So that is more along the lines of what we were focused on but yeah we didn’t really have to focus on the two sided marketplace like you guys do fortunately.

[04:06]

Alaister: Yeah definitely. With Codeschool there is a lot of different players in that sort of space as you mentioned, they are all promoting different educational products in marketplaces themselves. What do you think set you guys apart? I mean you guys get a million users within 12 months and I think that is a huge feat. What were some of the strategies or some of the big wins you guys had early on that allowed you to set yourself up for this success?

[04:31]

Corey: Yeah I think one of the things that we did that was a huge driver of users for us was we had an entry level course that was free for each of our paths. So we break our course down into topics. And any time somebody comes into take that topic there is a free course that anybody can come and play, the only caveat is that they have to enter their email address. So with that email address then we begin to create lead nurturing campaigns through email, retargeting campaigns, and built an entire content ecosystem around converting those free subscribers into paid subscribers by recommending better content, recommending better courses, so without really knowing that they were doing it early on, this kind of great content plan evolved over the fact of just creating this first free course and then we carried that strategy over every time we introduced a new topic or introduced a category of topics.

So I would say that the big ones for us early on were providing value for free early one and as much as possible and then continuing to show what the value is if you do decide to subscribe and kind of making sure you are keeping that consistent communication through all the channels whether that is Facebook, adwords, email, everything along those lines, that is what we saw really moved the needle for us.

[06:00]

Alaister: That is really interesting, a lot of the member in our community they use our product Warrior Payments and they create entire sales funnels similar to what you mentioned and they kind of start off with maybe a free piece of content or a lower price product just to get them into their funnel and they go about lead nurturing as you mentioned.

So obviously with the nurturing of the lead that involves a lot of I suppose email marketing, retention strategies and thinks like that, what did you find worked the best to get the most lifetime value out of your leads?

[06:35]

Corey: Yeah so lifetime is value is something we struggle with and continue to struggle with because if you think about a content product it is not really, you can’t really compare it to a SAS. Like say Mailchimp for instance or an email service provider that once somebody comes onto that service it is going to be very hard, there is a very high switching cost for them to leave that email provider and go to another one. There is going to be a lot of consideration, a lot of back and forth internally. But for a product like Codeschool what we tried to compare it to was Netflix in the fact that if we weren’t continually showing value and that there is more content for them to take then people are going to churn and that lifetime value is going to shrink.

So from a marketing perspective what we are really focused on was building a recommendation engine. That recommendation engine drove up our lifetime value because as soon as somebody finished a course we pointed them directly to other recommended courses that they might like. We kind of stole a page out of Netflix’s playbook a little bit.

But then just keeping consistent communication with our users too. Our email and our adwords programs and our retargeting programs all paid off huge just because it is not something like I mentioned, not like a SAS where somebody is in that tool every day. If they are not getting use out of taking our courses they are probably going to see that charge on their credit card and unsubscribe. So that is the biggest challenge for us was just making sure that we are continually showing there is more content out there for them to consume and that there is a reason to keep paying Codeschool to teach them new technologies, new programming languages and things like that.

[08:16]

Alaister: Yeah I guess unlike SAS products or software there is not much lock in so up selling was a good strategy to employ to try to get users engaged with your content as much as possible.

So you mentioned Google adwords as a strategy you guys used that was hugely successful and obviously I can see there is a whole bunch of live questions coming in about paid per click and adwords. What were your main conversion goals for your adword campaigns? Were they the purchase of a course or was it signing up for a free course, or was it just submitting their email? What did you define as your conversion goal?

[08:57]

Corey: Yeah so most of the time we didn’t focus on driving free subscriptions we were lucky enough to work out some partnerships with some pretty big partners that drove those to our free courses. We have a partnership with Google for our angular course. We have a partnership with GitHub or our Git course, and jQuery we are on the jQuery homepage. So all those links drive a ton of traffic for us to the free courses.

Most of the adword strategy was focused around getting people into the paid courses. Tutorial people are always searching for tutorials but we had to make sure we were showing why we are a premium tutorial because people did obviously know that you can just go to You tube and look for people that are giving it away for free, but we had to show what made us different which was that we have a video and then there is an in browser coding challenge which obviously You Tube doesn’t offer. So you are in your browser, you don’t have to download any files. So that kind of language. And making sure you are showing that value ad was huge to us.

From a cost perspective what we were trying to do was drive those new subscriptions but keep our customer acquisition cost under $30 which was about a month, just a little bit over a month of revenue for us. So we had some flexibility there but that was kind of our initial goal getting off. We have since raised that acquisition cost target to about $40 or $45 and we are still making money, a pretty good amount of money there. But those were our initial goals. Getting people into the free courses, getting them into landing pages, making sure those landing pages were optimized and showing them the videos of the courses, what the levels what everything they are going to be learning and then just kind of comparing it to some of the main alternatives that immediately come to people’s minds, such as just You Tube or other free sources out there.

[10:56]

Alaister: Okay so you had a cost per conversion being $30, sorry cost per acquisition for your leads being $30 which equated to about a month of subscription. Obviously as you up sold them you were able to increase your cost per acquisition. How did you go about actually doing the research for the keywords that you wanted to bid for?

[11:20]

Corey: Carefully. It was a process that took a little while. I think a lot of it came down to testing. So we knew what courses for us for people out there listening would be products, converted the best, and we started with those and we built out a bunch of different ad groups for the two or three courses we knew converted consistently. And in each of those ad groups we built out collections of keywords in those ad groups that were themed together.

So say for instance say Ruby on Rails. We would have Ruby on Rails tutorials as an ad group. Ruby on Rails video course, Learn Ruby on Rails online, and all these different variations of keywords like that. And then we would start to monitor and build out the campaign based on which ones are converting most. What our lowest customer acquisition cost is. And there once we saw there are clear winners between those different categories then we started to build that out to our full course library. And that strategy really paid off for us because we were able to test with a smaller monthly budget and then roll it out once we were ready across our entire library.

[12:37]

Alaister: I have got a question here in regards to keyword research from Fran C. And she asks, “What specific tools did you use for doing your keyword research? Did you look at things like search volume, competition and metrics like that?”

[12:54]

Corey: Yeah definitely we were looking at our competition. Some of the keyword tools and research tools have evolved over the last few years. I mean I want to say maybe two or three years ago everybody was just using keyword tool, the keyword tool that adwords provides. Something that I wholeheartedly recommend is keywordtool.io. It is a great research tool for finding long tailed keywords which if you are not familiar, are the ones that are going to usually convert at a higher rate than just your general two or three word keyword phrases. So keywordtool.iae I definitely recommend.

Google webmaster tools is a great source for just seeing how people are finding you organically and seeing what that traffic converts too from an engagement standpoint so how many pages they are viewing and how long they are staying on your site. Those are both great tools that I use on a consistent basis. But there is a ton out there.

SEM Rush is another great tool for competitive analysis so those are the few that I recommend.

[14:00]

Alaister: Yeah great we will add all of those tools in the forum so we have got keywordtools.io, SEM Rush and obviously the Google adwords keyword tool.

So with the actual keywords that you targeted how did you go about the different matches? So exact match, phrase match and broad match and things like that?

I have got a question here from Sarah and she basically asks, “How do you structure your campaigns based on these different keyword match types?”

[14:31]

Corey: Yeah so that can kind of be a process that you will tear your hair out going back and forth and making sure that every keyword is using the exact match type but something that I have found that works in almost every campaign that I’ve used it since I started implementing this strategy is using broadmatch modifier, which basically you just put a plus sign in front of the keyword but make sure you are using it with at least three to four word phrases.

So something like the example I use in the course is running shoes, so something like a plus sign in each of the words in the phrase red Nike running shoes men, would be something that still might be a little broad but you kind of get the example. And what broad match modifier means is that all of those words have to be included but there can be other words included with it. If you are familiar with broad phrase and exact match there are some limitations to those and broad modifier seems to take the strength of each and kind of fold it into one without any of the weaknesses.

So I have had a lot of success using broad match modifier. And that is usually what I recommend for starting with in your campaigns. And then you can kind of adjust if you are getting too many impressions or too many clicks, or clicks for keywords that aren’t really related to what you are looking for, then you can start moving toward maybe exact match. Or if you aren’t giving the impressions that you want with that, then maybe opening up to broad match. But broad match modifier is definitely something that is good to start with.

[16:12]

Alaister: So I have got a lot of questions here from people who are just looking to start off with Google adwords and they might have small budgets. So would you recommend starting off your campaigns with the broadmatch modifier and then based on the sort of clicks you are receiving and the impressions, test and do AB tests on different matches for keywords? Is that the approach you would take?

[16:34]

Corey: Yes for somebody starting out with a campaign normally what I recommend is starting two campaigns first. The first one is going to be a banded campaign so using Freelancer for example, having adwords campaign or a campaign targeting freelancer keywords, so people already searching for your keywords even though that seems a little bit counterintuitive what you can do with that is send people to different landing pages, push them towards different promotions, test different adcopy and I can almost guarantee that campaign will pay off more than the money that you are putting into it. So definitely start out with the branded keyword campaign. Second of all go with the retargeting campaign, something like ad role, you can do that with obviously with the adwords you can too. But those two campaigns are great to start with.

And then for your third one once you have kind of proved those out because those almost always pay off from an ROI standpoint, then next one, I would try and pick a niche phrase, so this is something that as a business owner you are probably going to know more than I could recommend but something that is very targeted to your product. Again borrowing something from the course, something like red Nike cross training shoes for cross fit. Something that a very specific person is going to be searching for. Try a couple of campaigns like that first before you go after just red Nike shoes or red running shoes. Start off as specific as you can after the branded key word campaigns and the retargeting campaigns and then you can kind of build out your campaign from there as you become more comfortable with adwords.

[18:26]

Alaister: Yeah I think that is a great way to start with those three initial campaigns. So that is the first one being branded the second one being retargeting and then a specific niche one.

I have got a question here just in regards to retargeting. Kieran asks, he has had a lot of success with retargeting and remarketing but he wants to be careful not to annoy his uses by following them basically on the internet everywhere. What sort of rules or restrictions do you recommend applying to you retargeting remarketing campaigns?

[18:59]

Corey: Yeah there are a couple of things I have seen that work really well. First is making sure that you are only keeping people in your retargeting pool for, I usually err on the side of caution and say ten to fourteen days is usually where I like to fall. But that is based on conversion numbers and percentages of conversions that we know at Codeschool, like how often and how frequent people convert. Like if it is out of fourteen days and they haven’t visited the site since those fourteen days they are probably not going to become a subscriber. But that is probably something you can find in your analytics. But ten to fourteen days is a good starting point.

The second thing that I found that works that you can use in your campaigns is identifying high value pages, so for us it is something like the enrollment page. So if somebody has visited the enrolment page but hasn’t signed up that means they are definitely considering taking out a code school subscription more so than somebody that just went to the homepage and left. So we will set up a retargeting campaign for high potential customers that might keep them in that retargeting pool for a little bit longer or might increase the frequency caps, so showing them more ads throughout the day because we do feel like they have a higher tendency to convert because of the activity they have done on the site. So those are a couple of things that you can do that kind of cancel out some of the users that you don’t think are going to convert, and those are usually the ones, the ones that aren’t going to convert are usually the ones you do end up annoying.

So those things have both worked for us.

[20:42]

Alaister: Yeah, I suppose you are able to be more aggressive to certain buckets of people based on what they have done on your site already and less aggressive on people that are just browsing perhaps.

[20:53]

Corey: Yeah definitely and another thing I want to add too, if you can target and segment based on if you do have multiple products, making sure that they are personalized. So for us we segment our users based on courses they viewed too. So if somebody is only viewing JavaScript courses we are not going to show them our Ruby ads too. We are going to target them to only show a certain set of ads that obviously is personalized to thing they viewed. And that personalization also helps to move away from the annoying factor that some people find with retargeting.

[21:28]

Alaister: Yeah sure. I suppose that is the power of retargeting, being able to be contextual and being able to offer relevant information and products to the specific user.

Corey: Absolutely.

Alaister: So with that question we sort of went through and touched keyword research and obviously quality score is an extremely important component of any adwords campaign. I have got an interesting question here from Tim O. and he basically asks, “When looking to manage a campaign and optimize a campaign, how do you manage keywords or ads that have low quality score and when do you sort of decide that you want to can the ad or when do you decide to work on the ad? How do you go about managing and optimizing a campaign based on the quality score?”

[22:13]

Corey: Yeah so the thing I always tell students in my course is that if you are running ads the right way or running campaigns the right way you don’t have to think about quality score because the thing I consistently preach in the course and anytime I kind of tell anybody my strategies of adwords, it’s you try to be as specific as possible with your ad groups. And as long as those are tightly tied to each ad group and you don’t have like 1,000 keywords in each ad group you are not going to have that much of a problem with quality score because the ads are going to be relevant. The searches that are seeing those ads are going to be relevant which is going to make your click through rate higher and that kind of tends to let you stop thinking as much about driving up that quality score.

Obviously it is something you are going to want to look at and monitor and if you are seeing a really low quality score keyword in your campaign you might want to pause that or look for other places to put it, but if you focus on from the beginning when you are building out your campaigns and your ad groups to be as specific as possible with the ads that you are creating, with the keywords you are adding in those ad groups then you are not going to have to think as much about quality score which is obviously one of the biggest drivers of running a profitable campaign. But if you think about it from just making your ads and ad groups as specific as possible and as niche as possible then you will set yourself off on the right track.

[23:41]

Alaister: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. I think it is starting from the beginning and being able to build that foundation. I see it potentially being a problem for larger campaigns where they are trying to achieve scale across a whole bunch of different niches perhaps and different topics with different landing pages and things like that, and I suppose you could use dynamic keyword insertion for your ad to try to make it more relevant to the keywords. Do you have any other advice or any other strategies that you would recommend or suggest for people who are looking to get real scale from their campaigns?

[24:16]

Corey: Yeah if you are trying to get the scale which is kind of the point we are at now, try to think about templating your campaigns. So like I mentioned earlier when we were building out our first campaigns early on and we didn’t have that much money and didn’t have that big of a budget to experiment with, what we did is try to find those few keywords, those few ad groups that we could use and replicate across our entire course library. The same thing when you get to scale. You can create campaigns that you’re just replicating over and over because you have seen continual improvement.

And then once you do kind of get to the higher level you can start using tools to manage those bigger scale campaigns and there is a bunch or tools out there.

But yeah I think from a high level what you are really trying to do is just look for things you can replicate and build off success of smaller ones. You are not going to be able to go in and manage on a keyword level every day like you would if you were only running say five ad groups. But you are going to be using the same kind of mindset that you would if you were managing five ad groups.

So that is kind of the advice that I would use once you start to get to that place of scale.

[25:35]

Alaister: Yeah you mentioned that Codeschool is getting to the point where you are trying to achieve scale across different topics in the development niche, what sort of budget are we talking about? I mean obviously you would have started with a much lower budget when starting up with your campaign, but what kind of budget have you guys hit and do you guys expect to hit? And how do you sort of grow that budget and optimize?

[26:01]

Corey: Yeah so a little bit about the background. Like when we were getting started Codeschool was a product by developers for developers so marketing kind of fit in when we had time. Our budget when we started for the entire marketing team was $5,000. And this was a company that was growing quickly. So we had to every month prove out that we were at least making our money back. Lucky enough we did have some success early on that allowed us to kind of double our budget on a consistent basis. Now we are up to about I want to say $80,000 a month last month, but still having to continually show that we are having a solid return on that investment.

But I mean I think really adwords, the great thing about it, adwords advertizing in general, if you are making money with it, it doesn’t make sense to not increase your budget because you are basically say if you are getting a two to one ROI, you are paying $1 to get $2 back. So as long as you are seeing some sort of return, it is easy to justify increasing your budget pretty consistently.

[27:16]

Alaister: Yeah great. So obviously with managing those budgets, attribution becomes very important, being able to identify where the revenue is coming from, which campaigns and which ads. And attribution has always been a problem for online marketers, what sort of attribution models do you use and how do you use those results to justify either increasing or decreasing budget for your campaigns?

[27:42]

Corey: Yeah attribution is something we have talks on, on the marketing team and companywide on a consistent basis and what we have kind of landed on right now is giving the majority of the weight of each conversion to the first and last click and then splitting the middle ones kind of evenly. Some people have different thoughts on that. Obviously you don’t want to just give the entire weight of the conversion to the first click or the last click; that just doesn’t make sense. But something I have been thinking a lot about personally is clicks aren’t really, I mean they are a success metric but a lot of times it is just a proxy for success.

With retargeting campaigns for instance you can track view through conversions and there is a lot of value even in, say if you are running this is something we had a talk on a couple of days ago for an email campaign, so when we release a new course we send out an email to our entire list which is over 1,200,000 now. Sometimes people might not even open that email but they see that subject line on their iphone or even in their Gmail inbox and they know that we released a course. They don’t have to open the email. So how do you provide attribution for those types of marketing initiatives?

Or if somebody just sees a thread on Reddit but doesn’t necessarily click the link from it.

So there is a lot of things that I think attribution is hard and I think there is a lot of people having these same conversations, is just because something the last click resulted in a sale doesn’t necessarily mean that was the only thing that influenced it.

So, like I said the way we are doing is we attribute the majority of the weight of a conversion to the first and the last click and then divide the rest into the channels in between. And that seems to pay off and it gives us a general sense of where our conversions are coming from but again not the perfect Holy Grail metric that as internet marketers we are out there looking for yet.

[29:50]

Alaister: Yeah no definitely. It is an ongoing sort of debate always between marketers as to how to attribute conversions and it sort of changes the way campaigns are being managed.

I have got a question here which sort of carries on from one of our previous Warrior Ask Me Anything events. A couple of weeks ago we had Larry Kim the founder of Wordstream on for one of these events. And he was talking about the importance of, and challenging everyone basically suggesting having the call to action being a phone call after clicking on an ad instead of an actual action on a landing page. Have you had much experience with maybe one of the clients you have worked with in the past where their goal was to get a phone call from the campaign?

[30:39]

Corey: Yeah click to call is huge for a lot of companies. The thing that I saw that works the best with click to call is high need situations or high intent users. So an example I use in the book that I wrote was for somebody like an auto mechanic, somebody that has broken down on the side of the road or that needs a tow or something like that, they are going to search on their phone and they are probably not going to be perusing around for comparing every single website in their city to make sure that they are getting the best deal. They are probably broken down on the side of the road and need to make a decision right now. That link to call directly from the ad provides them that access point directly to the conversion.

So for local companies I know calls work really well. For enterprise level clients and things like that, I’ve seen it work well too. And it is all just about I think adwords at the end of the day it is a tool but you have to know as a business owner, how to think and be empathetic towards your customer. What situations are they? Where are they in the buying process? And understand that works well but yeah mobile click to call works well.

And then I have also seen it work well on desktop. Again it just depends where they are on the buying process. You don’t want to be paying for support calls and things like that and there are ways to move away from that. But if your people are close to purchasing and just need to get on the phone with a person that can be a great way to do that.

[32:19]

Alaister: Are there different strategies that you have found that work for campaigns where the goal is a purchase as opposed to a click to call goal?

Corey: Sorry you broke up a little bit there.

Alaister: The question was are there different strategies that you find work when optimizing a campaign with a goal for a purchase as opposed to a click to call goal?

[32:40]

Corey: Yeah I mean I think when you are trying to get a click to call you are trying to show value right away. Things like when somebody is in a high need situation like just using the auto repair shop again for an example, the one things they probably might look at before is reviews. So if you provide reviews through ad extensions along with a click to call or things like number one rated auto repair shop in Orlando, things like that, I think your ad text is mostly going to want to be confirming what that person wants to see.

When you are trying to get a purchase on the website most of the time you are providing details that want to drive a click back to the website and then to view more information which will hopefully result in a sale at the end of the day.

But if you are trying to get a click to call you are wanting to convince them right then and now that they want to call and that you are reputable enough to trust with a call and things like that from within the ad copy and the headline work really well.

[33:39]

Alaister: Yeah definitely. You mentioned earlier that you are also a Bing certified marketer. Do you find advertizing on Bing very different to advertizing on adwords? A lot of people achieve a lot more scale I suppose in adwords just because of the volume of people using Google. Have you had much success using Bing marketing?

[34:10]

Corey: Yeah recently there has been some talk that because Firefox has moved to Bing as the default search engine that the volume is going to be picking up. We have some campaigns running for Codeschool on Bing and they have been performing better since that announcement or since that has changed.

Again not even close to the scale that adwords is on a monthly basis but we are seeing it pick up. Even if you are seeing 25% of the impressions and 25% of the conversions that may still be a little bit high, maybe 15% it still can warrant running campaigns because with Bing you can import your settings directly from adwords and the management isn’t…because you are running similar campaigns, the management isn’t as time consuming as say running a completely different channel.

So I would definitely if I was to recommend something, I would say start a campaign. Don’t run your entire campaign library if you have a bunch of campaigns running on adwords. Start off with like one or two of your best performing and see if Bing is right for you because what I have found too which is kind of interesting is that it doesn’t work for every company. I think Bing has a certain audience and some of those audiences are just not the volume, or there just isn’t the amount of action that there is on adwords. So test with the small amount of adgroups or campaigns and then decide if you want to expand that a little bit further if those do prove to pan out.

[35:44]

Alaister: Yeah. I think it just comes down to testing really. Have you seen other platforms that are able to achieve larger amounts of scale in terms of advertizing? I mean Facebook obviously or some other social networks. Have you had success with advertizing on any of the other platforms?

[36:02]

Corey: Yeah for us Facebook and Twitter have both worked really well. One of the things that we try to do because if anybody out there is familiar with Codeschool we don’t have a huge content library like say maybe Udeme or Pluralsight or Lynda.com so when we do release a course it is a big deal to us and we try to treat it like a movie release where we are building up anticipation before the fact. And then on Twitter we will target out audience, we will do a retargeting campaign for people that aren’t subscribed with a different call to action. Then we will just do a general targeting campaign for people that are interested in that topic.

So Twitter is great for that. Facebook as well because, just because how precise you can target people and we have a good sense of our target personas and our demographics of people that do convert. So with Facebook we can do that very well. It doesn’t seem to convert as well but again that comes back to the attribution model, we see that they do influence conversions overall but not as much quantity of conversions. But we have seen success on both Twitter and Facebook.

And then from a content amplification standpoint I stumbled upon paid discovery and outbrain we have been experimenting with both of those on our blogs and we have seen some good results for finding new audience of people that haven’t really found out about Codeschool before. So those are both great for native advertizing.

[37:37]

Alaister: Do you find with a lot of those platforms such as stumble upon that it is more of a branding exercise rather than actual ROI positive campaign?

[37:48]

Corey: Definitely and one thing we use those for because our retargeting campaigns do have a great ROI is that we see with stumble upon we are finding new people and when they come to our site, we are dropping them into our retargeting pool which is great. And then it is a great branding exercise. It is getting people acquainted with Codeschool, showing them that we are reputable, that we do have great content and just people that haven’t found out about us. It is a great way to get in front of new people.

[38:20]

Alaister: Yeah that is really interesting that you are able to get new audience through something like stumble upon and then use a remarketing campaign on Google to actually convert the sale. So I suppose with attribution you are able to attribute that sale to I suppose that stumble upon ad as well as the Google remarketing campaign?

[38:39]

Corey: Yeah definitely and we can tie that all the way back to the beginning of their journey but the blog is something that we have been picking up with lately and it has been paying off. We have been getting some pretty well known writers and developers to come on and share their experience. So, and a lot of our posts are more career focused so it is a different audience, so getting them into our retargeting campaigns has definitely paid off.

[39:06]

Alaister: Excellent. I have got a really interesting question here from Martin H. and he runs quite a large campaign and he basically segments based on country and different niches and topics. How would you go about structuring a campaign where you are talking to different audiences? There may be different languages and things like that. Do you translate ads and things like that or do you have different landing pages?”

[39:38]

Corey: Yeah at Codeschool we have actually found something like very similar to that in the fact that we segment regions based on conversion rates and we’ve been experimenting with why that could be because say for instance like Brazil is a great example. So Brazil has a huge developer population and they convert at a really high rate but we just can’t find the quantity of users. But like in India we get a ton of traffic from them but not a ton of conversions. So what we try to do is we find these outliers and then try to build out campaigns specifically for them. Again, not across our entire ad library but finding out maybe it is the ad copy that doesn’t resonate with them, or the landing page isn’t working as well. So what we will do is just start testing out based on those regions.

And again I think a lot of it comes down to smaller tests. So test small and then expand big. And those strategies tend to work out. But yeah I would definitely say segment where you can and find out what it is about the campaigns that either are performing or aren’t.

[41:00]

Alaister: Yeah you mentioned a lot about the key word research and the optimizing of the campaign, obviously the next step is the landing page and where you are sending the traffic. What sort of strategies do you use for AB testing your landing pages? Do you send people, I mean on code school, do you send people to like a category page where they can see the different courses or do you actually send them to a specifically designed landing page for a specific course?

[41:30]

Corey: Well for us we are pretty lucky. We are able to send them directly into a course, so if somebody say is searching for Ruby on Rails tutorial we can drop them right into the first video of a course that kind of starts playing an shows them the challenges right away. So we found that works really well. We also tested sending them to a static page that is kind of like a course description page, or a category page; hasn’t worked as well. Getting them right into that immediate action for something they are looking for, to kind of mimic the action that would happen if they searched Ruby on Rails tutorial and went to You Tube, obviously they are going to expect a video to play.

So when they click on our ad and they see the video and ca play the course right away, and then after that first level can enter their email address, then that works really well for us.

We have tested it but that action has worked well.

For testing we use optimizely like a lot of people do, visual website optimizers is another good option, but for testing the copy, but from a structure standpoint getting them directly into that anticipated action works well.

[42:41]

Alaister: Yeah. In regards to landing page optimization I have got a question here from Stu, and he sort of says that he has read online and watched a lot of videos in regards to paid per click landing pages where people strip out the navigation and they try to leave one call to action on the landing page. Is this something you guys are doing? Is this something you would recommend?

[43:00]

Corey: It is not something that we do. I kind of have a problem with the people that pass off like the information like that as law because I mean it can work, has it worked for people in the past? Yeah 100% I am sure that it has or else people wouldn’t be sharing that information but it doesn’t necessarily work for everybody across the board. If you are going to try something as extreme as saying removing the navigation or having, putting in a lot of time and effort into a super long sales page with just one call to action at the bottom, I would highly recommend testing it against something you might say is more of a traditional landing page.

And really the rule of thumb is, like I mentioned earlier is to think like your customer, be empathetic. What are they looking for? What information are they looking for? What potential hesitations do they have because you are going to want to answer those? You are going to want to have reviews. But just think like a customer, put your thoughts if you were searching for your product, what would you want to see on that page? And I think that is a general rule of thumb instead of reading a blog post that says, this one guy says to strip out my navigation and have one call to action. I don’t think that always leads to the best results.

[44:25]

Alaister: Yeah I think it is obviously really dependent on the scenario and it is different for different businesses. A lot of testing I suppose is the most important thing when it comes down to trying to understand which landing pages convert. Perhaps they are looking for things that are in your navigation, whether it be pricing or a help sort of page or things like that. Or there may be other scenarios when you want to remove all distractions and have the call to action as the primary thing on the landing page.

[44:56]

Corey: Right. Yeah and kind of along those same lines and something that I didn’t touch on earlier when you asked the question about retargeting, but you can actually use retargeting ads and retargeting email campaigns to do some of that for you as well. Like if you know that people might have objections, use your ads for that sometimes.

Something that we are doing at Codeschool right now is we have a retargeting video campaign that is running on you tube for people that have been to certain pages but haven’t signed up and it is a getting started video. Does it have an immediate call to action? No. Does it lead back to the code school enroll page? Yes but what the main goal is, is to show people that we think might kind of fit a persona of a person that we think just doesn’t know where to get started. They don’t understand what course to get started with, how these technologies interact with each other and that video fits that purpose for that need. It doesn’t necessarily always have to be, buy, buy, buy now, discount 95%. It can be things that are informational once you do have a general sense on what is converting and what isn’t.

[46:06]

Alaister: Yeah definitely. With your campaigns as it grows you are obviously looking to scale it up and get new key words and target different key words based on the different courses that you have. Where do you go about finding your new keywords and what sources do you use to do that keyword research after you have built up a campaign?

[46:32]

Corey: Yeah after you build out the campaign like I mentioned a lot of it is about finding those longer tail keywords because those are the ones that are going to have the higher ROI but not the higher impression. So yeah you do have to go and look deeper for some of those keywords. But Google webmaster tools is a great source for that. Another great source is just looking at your keyword reports in adwords because if you are using something like Broadmatch modifier you are not going to be seeing what people are actually searching for. So if you are looking at the keyword report you can actually see the full search that people are finding your ads from and you can start piecing together ideas from that, but SEM Rush is another great example of a tool that you can use to see what your competitors are doing. Spyfu.com is another great competitive analysis tool that you can see what keywords your competitors are running keywords for.

So all of those things, it is all about just piecing together little bits of information that you can find to start adding into your campaign.

[47:39]

Alaister: You mentioned some of the tools like Spyfu that allows you to look at what your competitors are bidding on and what their ads are and things like that. Have you had any experience or seen any clever strategies where people have used and taken that information and really built a campaign that leverages that? I have seen a lot of people run campaigns where they are targeting other companies that aren’t competitors and saying things like, “Better than company name” and things like that or “That company sucks” sort of thing. Have you seen other uses where it has been really successful?

[48:14]

Corey: I actually saw today, we use slack at Codeschool and I put in our marketing chat room but I think it was for buffer, I was looking for buffer to log onto my account and I say that hootsuite was running an ad that said why hootsuite is better than buffer. And I clicked on it because I was interested to see just what kind of strategies they are using. And it was a comparison page showing the differences between the two.

The one thing I think the jury is still out on that is that it can seem a little bit combative and customers don’t always react that great to throwing another company under the bus. I guess if somebody is at the comparison page when they are looking at either subscribing to something like hootsuite for social media management or buffer that it could be useful. I have used it in the past to target competitor’s keywords but not necessarily in the ad copy. So I didn’t use it in the headline but I was working with a coffee company and we would use it to target Starbucks ads or Starbucks keywords. So it can work. I tend to shy away from being ultra combative about the conversation in the ad that you are showing but I know big companies do it so I’m going to guess that a company like hootsuite that has a ton of venture money and that is growing pretty quickly, that they proved that out and it is probably working for them. So I think it could work.

[49:43]

Alaister: Yeah sure. As I mentioned a lot of people and a lot of the questions that have come in are from people who are looking to start their campaigns. In your experience what are the top three biggest mistakes that people starting an initial campaign come across.

[50:01]

Corey: Yeah there is a lot that people think adwords is, but the main things you have to understand is campaign structure, how to set up your campaigns and ad groups and how they should be themed. Specificity, I think sometimes people read maybe one article and then launch an adwords campaign, put 1500 keywords in one ad group, quality scores are all one or two, they are getting a bunch of clicks, spending a bunch of money and getting no conversions and then they write off adwords as “This will never work for me.”

So campaign structure is really the biggest thing and making sure that it is as specific as possible.

And then targeting options, things like if you are a local company or if you are a product that only serves the United States for instance, you are going to make sure that you are only targeting those countries.

But smaller things along the lines and that is kind of why I created the course in general was to walk through within three or four hours that you could be comfortable enough to create your first campaign. And I think it really is just understand what tools are available because business owners almost always are savvy enough to run their own campaigns, it is just knowing what tools are available because you know your customers probably better than anybody. And then using adwords as a tool to target hem based on that knowledge that you have.

[51:32]

Alaister: Yeah. So let’s just quickly talk about the course that you run. So it is called Google Adwords for Beginners, and I know you have just hit over 7,000 students, is that right?

[51:42]

Corey: Yep just over 7,000 in the last month, so yeah it is going great.

[51:48]

Alaister: That is incredible. So basically in the course you teach people how to create hyper targeted ads to achieve ROI positive campaigns. I know the course sells usually for $199, however you have been kind enough to offer a really great deal for the Warriors and I know everyone is going to get a lot of value from this. So what is the deal that we have for the Warriors for your course Corey?

[52:14]

Corey: Yeah so for a little bit over $19 you are going to get access to the course which includes the video lessons where I walk through kind of the main fundamentals of adwords and I didn’t want to use that section to be boring, just to make sure you understand how adwords works and how you can use that knowledge to improve your campaigns. And then from there what I really think differentiates this course from other courses is its live screen cast and a live adwords account. I am setting up a campaign and walking through step by step the way that I set up campaigns if I’m running it for Codeschool or if I am running it for a client and things that have personally worked for me. I don’t just read something and pass it off as truth because somebody else said so. These are things that have actually worked for me that I use in these screen casts.

And then in addition to the screen casts and the video lessons I am also including a free copy of the book and if you haven’t used adwords before there is also an opportunity to get started with $100 adwords voucher. So it really is a great deal. There is a bunch of reviews on the course if you have time to check it out, I think a lot of times students that have taken it can speak better to the value than I can because they have gotten a lot out of it which is great. One of the best things to hear is somebody whose name is Caesar he took the course a couple of months ago. He started his own PPC agency and I have actually been referring people that contact me about somebody that if I know anybody that can run PPC campaigns, because he really is that good. I have checked on the campaigns, looked at what he is doing and he really is good. And he started with just taking the course.

So things like that are awesome to hear. I have heard from business owners they have been able to launch their first campaigns, and the first time they launched it before taking the course they got no results and now they are increasing their budget because of how well it is doing.

So if you have any questions about it, feel free to email me but I think the reviews can speak better to some of the value than I can. I’m not always that great at being self promotional but I think there is a lot of value in there and definitely for business owners.

[54:35]

Alaister: Yeah it is great. I personally have looked at the course and I can attest to how comprehensive it is, it is over 40 HD video tutorials, so it is a huge amount of content. And it is just over $19, I think it is $19.97. So we will put the link below here in the forum where you will be able to get access to it.

So the deal is for a limited time only and it is getting to be ending on February 13th. So make sure you get in and if you are interested in adwords purchase this course and I am sure you are going to get a lot of value from it.

So thanks very much Corey we really appreciate you doing the deal and offering it to our community. I know a lot of people are going to find a lot of use for it.

So just before we wrap up Corey do you have any last parting advice or comments that you wanted to give to the Warriors?

[55:29]

Corey: Yeah I think the one thing with adwords that I hear pretty consistently because I try to keep an open dialogue with a lot of my students and the one thing I have heard from them about why they haven’t started with adwords or the problems they had when setting up their campaigns, it really comes down to testing. And Google is not this black box of things that is super complex. All it comes down to is knowing what tools are at your disposal and using those tools to target the audience that you know best. You know your audience as well as anybody else and you are going to be the one that is going to be able to find new customers for them.

Once you know how to use adwords it is going to be one of the best tools that you have.

So that is kind of why I created the course. And I think at $19 it is more than a great value. But if you have any questions about it, feel free to email me. It is just coreyrab@gmail.com and I am happy to answer any questions about the course or about adwords in general. But really anybody can learn it. That is the last thing I want to hammer home. It is not just for people that are technically savvy; it is not just for people that have experience with online advertizing. It really is for anybody. The last review that I got that really struck a chord with me was like a 70 year old bakery shop owner that said she has never done anything online with advertizing before. She took the course and she is now seeing great results.

So things like that when I heard that I am even more confident in the fact that I know anybody can take the course. So yeah that is the last thing I will say about the course. But again if you have any questions feel free to email me or reach out to me on the Warrior Forum.

[57:25]

Alaister: Oh excellent that is very inspiring. For anyone that has just jumped on the event or if you missed the beginning of the event the entire recording will be placed in the war room so make sure you check out the rest of the event.

So next week we have got Perry Marshall who is an internet marketing superstar, so we are really looking forward to asking him all the questions you guys submit. So make sure you register early and preregister and submit your questions and we will have an amazing event with Perry Marshall next week.

So thanks very much Corey for your time, we really appreciate you giving up your time to our community as well as offering your amazing course at such a great deal. Thanks very much Corey.

Link to Corey's Google AdWords for Beginners WSO.

Corey: Thanks for having me.

[End Recording 58:05]

Looking forward to this! I forgot to ask my question in the registration form, so I'll ask it here. I'm interested in legal keywords, specifically DUI/DWI related terms. Those particular terms can get very expensive! Any tips along those lines would be great!! Thanks!

Hey Corey, I'm signing up.. I just don't know what to ask just yet i'm doing pretty well in the Video Marketing area...I love the Keyword searcher for Competition/Monthly searches in GoogleAd... its awesome.
I'm looking forward to just listening to all the Q&A and being a part of the event!..I'm currently motivating my wife to listen in as well. SSB's (64): Pikachu

Cya there!

Hey Corey,

Just registered.

I am working with local business owners and would like to offer to do Adwords campaigns for them.

What is the best way to structure that service and can you offer any advice on how to charge for that service?

Thanks

Excited and looking forward to this event.

Looking forward to this. I wonder how you would compare the current costs of Adwords to Facebook ads. Facebook is less targeted, but you can get more hits for your budget.

I'm looking forward to learning solid fundamentals in Adwords campaign setup. Thanks for taking the time to give back to the online community!

where will the answers be posted?

Hi, Corey. I just signed up for your presentation. I'd like to say thank you very much for doing this. I'm in the process of creating a custom software development business and Adwords is one of the advertising avenues I would like to learn about. I do have IM experience but my marketing has been pretty much done following the Bum Marketing approach - not because I'm a bum, I just don't have a lot of cash to spend on advertising at the moment.

I'm very much looking forward to this.

Love to learn more about PLA Campaigns from him.

Thanks Corey & Warrior Forum!

What are the best tools to research profitable keywords? How much do you spend on AdWords vs Bing vs Facebook ads?

I am also very exited to join your Webinar thanks for sharing with us...

Hi Corey,
I am just a beginner. Please give me some tips how to get started in ppc world however it is Google Adwords or. Any other media.

Hi Corey,
I've 10 years experience working with Adwords but this world is constantly changing so I want to ask some specific questions.
1) The best practice to advertise on low volume keywords (around 200-500 monthly impression volume)
2) I had very good results advertising on Youtube search but after Google made big changes 2 years ago I still can't succeed in it. Looks like Youtube search works now like a Display network and there is no strictly rules to bid on keywords. Do you have an experience with this stuff?

Looking forward to the meeting!

All my campaigns to drive traffic to my Amazon affiliate websites and campaigns to products I sell on Amazon were not approved by Google Adsense.

Is there any way to promote Amazon affiliate websites with Adwords?

Google seems to hate them................

I would like to see compliant landing pages. What to do and what not. I do have issues with this.

where to join the webinar?

Hi Corey, In addition to learning more about AdWords, I'd love some advice about marketing tactics for start-ups. For a start-up in the finance industry, what traffic sources would you recommend? Thanks, and can't wait for the webinar!

Hi Corey

I am an affiliate with a iframe on my website. I've heard lots of horror stories of how other affiliates loose everything after they make use of Adwords. Do you have any advice for iframe affiliates please, how can we successfully use Adwords?

Thank you

What's the best way to promote a supplement company?

I know Google can be sensitive with these types of offers.

What would you do to promote an Amazon product?

Also who is your favorite Street Fighter character?

Hi Corey...

Could you please talk about how to set up
adword campaign for real estate niche...
such as condos in downtown area of large city?

Thanks!!

Do you have a process or trick to being able to manage a very large number of ad groups, landing pages, and campaigns?

How do I join the webinar... can't find it??

Okay... if this is not a mistake, can someone send
me the recorded version of this webinar... never could
find a live link anywhere.

Thanks!

What is the most important tip that you could give a newbie trying to make it in such a minefield that is this business?

Maybe because it's over. Great interview!

Anyone get the deal link coupon or voucher

Brilliant -Thanks great interview

How do take advantage of your offer in the War room.

I had to leave for a meeting. Will there be a replay?

I would also love a replay too. I had some internet problems. My email is rilloandrea@gmail.com
Thank you in advance.

REALLY bad idea posting your email addresses in a public domain. Alaister has said it'll be uploaded to the War Room when it's ready. Guessing the link to the War Room thread will be posted here as well.

I've bought the course. But I did not see any recordings in the War Room...would appreciate if someone could point it to me?thanks

Hello !!

Can you please tell me best online site for google AdWords tutorial , i am online marketer but sound knowledge of google adwords .


Thank you

looking for bing tutorials. thanks