Tom Haslam - (Host):
Welcome to Marketing Blabs. This podcast is brought to you by Marketing Labs, an expert digital marketing agency based in Nottinghamshire. If you're a business owner or a marketing professional looking for straightforward, non-salesy tips and advice to help grow your business online, then this is the podcast for you. Strap in because we're about to reveal the things that other agencies would rather you didn't know.
Hello listeners and welcome back to another episode of Marketing Blabs. We hope you enjoyed the last blab where we talked about the key ingredients for building a beautiful and safe website. Don't forget to share and subscribe to our channel. It does mean a lot to us. I'm Tom, the creative director at Marketing Labs and the host of this podcast. In today's blab, we're going to discuss the important elements of Google Ads and common mistakes that people make and how you can utilise the amazing marketing channel to generate return on investment for your business. Joining me today, on today's blab is Matt Janaway, CEO. How are you doing, Matt?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Hi Tom. Yeah, I'm fine, thanks.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Looking really good in your new Marketing Blab gilet.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, I like this gilet, feels nice.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Nice material.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Very nice and soft.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Very.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
We've also got Nick Janaway, Head of Digital. How you doing?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Hello Thomas.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
You're good? Excited for the pod?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Also... Yeah, I am, but I'm also wearing the branded hoodie.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Brand... Just to add that in there. Branded hoodie. Yeah, they all look good, don't they?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yeah.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
And all the way from Sunny Ipswich is Rich Bloomfield, Paid Media Manager. How you doing, Rich?
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
I'm good, thanks.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Are you excited for your first pod?
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Very.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
That sounded really convincing. So I guess we can get started then. And speaking of starting, what about if we start with budgets in Google Ads. Who wants to kick off with what would make potentially a good starting budget if someone's just starting out with Google Ads?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
So I think first of all, if you are starting out on Google Ads, the first thing to consider is that Google very often have welcome intro offers. So at the moment I think it's, if you spend 400 pound in the first month, in month two they credit you 400 pounds. So you basically get your first month sort of provided to you back. So that's always a good way of testing the water, finding some data, checking how it works for you.
In terms of budgets though, so this is something that I don't really like the term budget. I know Google use it themselves in Google Ads, but I don't particularly like that term because for me that sort of shows that there's a fixed amount you should be spending and you need to be planning for that. And actually if Google Ads is being run in the right way and there's a return on investment, it's not a budget, it's an investment. If you are putting in a hundred pounds and it's generating 500 and you are comfortable with that, that works for your margins, then why wouldn't you put in 200 or 500 or a thousand? So using the term budget, I don't particularly like. You need to start somewhere obviously and you need to make sure it works for you, but it should always really be seen as an investment.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Do you normally recommend daily budgets just so people get an idea in terms of that or do you go on a month? How do you?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It's usually implemented based on daily budgets anyway, so you'd have by how many campaigns you'd get set up depending on your focus, what you want to spend on a daily basis and that usually will add up obviously to a monthly cost. And you can also put caps in place if you want to from a monthly point of view. But yeah, it is done based on what you want to spend on a daily basis, by default.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah, I guess it's about what you were talking about earlier, Rich actually in your team lab was understanding the business as well, what they want to achieve and obviously everyone's going to have a different starting budget. When you're initially speaking to a client, how do you sort of scope out what their starting budget would be if they've not told you?
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Well, it is useful to know what kind of profit margin people have and it may be different profit margins and different products. So if you have products with quite a high profit margin and they're quite expensive, then you can obviously allocate more money to that. But I think the key point is, it's looking at return on investment. So as Matt said, if you're spending a thousand pounds and you getting 10,000 back, why not spend 2000 get 20 back? But there is always going to be a diminishing return, otherwise you just spend millions. But that is the key principle really for me. Profit margins on products and what kind of target return on spend that the client wants.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
In terms of generating the ROI then, how and when do you find the sweet spot as it were, for within Google Ads? Is there a way of trying to scope that down?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yeah, I mean it differs by client really and by industry and by business and what you're selling. There are obviously things that you can do to account for that and obviously experience in the industry anyway can account for a lot of that. But if you new and you don't know really, I suppose the best advice is to try and focus on what you think is most relevant for your business. The products that... You might have an offline shop for example, you might know the XYZ products sell better than ABC products, so therefore it's likely that that will still kind of reflect and transfer to online as well.
So focus in your business to what you think is going to do well, test the water, look at the data and then widen the scope basically. So don't start out necessarily with everything because you'll probably spread your budget very thin and if you spread your budget too thin, you're not going to learn anything very quickly at all. So usually that's probably one of the big ways to waste budget actually in the early days, is to try and target everything and you're just far too broad with your approach. Try and do work within your remit but also try and focus on what you believe if you don't have any data to back this up, what you believe will do well and then test and learn based on that that approach.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
That in itself is so important, test. It's a small word, but it's powerful in our world because if you're not analysing everything and testing everything, you actually just don't know. There's a sweet spot often that you just stumble across. You have to try lots of things to stumble across them. So it's probably a little bit unfair to say stumble across a sweet spot, but you might try 10 things, could be 10 product range, it could be 10 campaigns, it could be lots of different things, occasionally, you'll just hit it right.
And that might be because there's fewer competitors. It might be because you've stumbled across an audience where it's larger and there's a low cost per click. There's lots of reasons why you might stumble across something, but often you'll find niche, it might be a specific product or a product range that actually just really works and at that point, that's when you double down and that's really how you start driving high return on investment because you do that once you've got your first one and you go exploring for your second one, you're continually looking for those opportunities and eventually you've got 5, 10, 20, 30, you keep going and each one of those niche opportunities is an area where you can generate higher return on advertising spend.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Is there a specific timeframe to it all? Because a lot of clients that we've had conversations with over time is that, "How long is it going to take before I start seeing that return?". Because you've obviously got a testing period, do you normally put any timeframes to it?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It can be immediate. You can have almost immediate success. It really depends on lots of factors and also external factors beyond just PPC. So the quality of your website, how fast your website is, how much competition there is in market, how much natural demand there is in market, the seasonality, there could be lots and lots of factors there that will aid or hinder you in terms of your approach. So bearing that in mind as well I think is important. Cost of products again, equally will be important as part of that kind of formula. So if you've got a really high end product that cost multiple thousands of pounds or beyond, is very likely that the customer's going to take a much longer time to consider and go through that kind of consideration phase before they purchase. Whereas if you've got maybe a cheaper product, let's say it's in the tens to a hundred, that might be more of an instant conversion.
They might like the idea of it, they'll see it straight away. It might be the first time they've come across your site or product. There might not be much of a consideration period there and they're more or less immediately ready it to convert. So it really does depend and it can be quite specific to lots of factors. So I think it's something that's really important just to bear that in mind as and when you're kind of developing your test plan. Try to understand as much as you can about what the consumer might be looking for and what information they might need, and then like Matt said, just test, but test within kind of a hypothesis that you are aware of and can control as much as possible.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I've got an interesting thought here as well. It's quite a common conversation you might have with people where they'll say, "How long? When can we come back and analyse if this is working? Let's make an adjustment to a campaign and let's revisit it at some point." People can naturally be quite impatient. I'm very impatient myself. But at the same point, it's really important to have enough data to make decisions on. And you might have a particular campaign where the collection of keywords, the search volume is only so high and you might need to run that for sometimes three months, four months before you actually realise how well that's working. But if you've got a campaign where there's much more volume and you know you can get clicks quicker, you'll learn quicker. So there's no real answer to how long that might take, certainly an awful lot quicker than SEO might be, but at the same point, it sort of is a little bit, how long's a piece of string.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
I would say to clients as well that they probably need to give at least the first three months a go. And although Nick mentioned about waste, if you have everything say in a Google shopping campaign, you put all your products into a Google shopping campaign with the same level of bid, that will actually provide you with quite good information. Obviously you've got tens of thousands of products and only a thousand pounds a month, it won't work. But if you've got a reasonable number of products, say a thousand products and your budget's a couple of thousand, in that first month you'll learn a lot about what is going to sell, but yet you'll waste a lot in the first couple of months as well. And another thing I find is that the kind of thing that clients want to sell, are not the same as what people want to buy.
And this will, by putting a very flat bid in everything Google shopping campaign, you tend to find out what people want to buy, not what the client wants to sell. The client usually wants to sell the high end stuff, with the big profit margin and quite often it's going to be a compromise between putting some of those high end products in their own group and putting a higher bid on and just accepting a lot of crumbs. Crumbs from the table, of things you don't really want to sell but people want to buy.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I'd highlight this as actually the first mistake that I see quite a lot is what Rich just said there. You can define it as the tail wagging the dog. Instead of using those insights on what your audience actually wants to buy, you're trying to dictate to them what you want them to buy. Actually, if you find that sweet spot, go with it because there's a big opportunity there to make a lot of money and if you are trying to dictate actually what you want to sell, it may well work, but it can sometimes be more difficult. Generally if there's higher margins and it's a high value item, you'll have lower conversion rates, higher cost per clicks and actually it might not work out any better for you anyway, if you hit that sweet spot, just make sure you go with it. You see that quite a lot.
And I'm not talking specifically actually client work, just generally conversations that you have around social media in various digital marketing groups, things like that. It's very common that once something starts working, sometimes I wouldn't quite say unwanted, but it's not quite as welcome as maybe, "Oh, can we not focus on a different area?" But actually you found that sweet spot.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
So moving on to actually people managing or finding the sweet spot, I understand, I mean I'm no Google Ads expert myself, I understand Google have a scoring system. Can anyone explain in simple terms how Google analyses the campaigns and scores them accordingly?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It's done mostly on what's considered as kind of relevance and relevancy. So how well can you answer somebody's question when they're searching for something that you want to serve an ad for? So obviously that's quite a broad response but obviously there are a huge amount of industries out there that would kind of cater to that differently. But basically if you serve an advert to somebody that's looking for something, how well can you answer their questions and that's what they consider ad rank. That goes into ad rank. So it's things like making sure that you utilise the same keywords or very similar keywords that mean the same thing. Improving click through rates and call to actions to make sure people click on your ads and you have a good response to whatever your advertisement is. And then also and equally importantly is their experience on your website or wherever you are landing that customer. That needs to be really relevant as well as targeted to whatever the intent is behind this search.
So if you can match those three things, generally speaking, you'll have a good ad rank and then that good ad rank also will in turn help you improve your efficiency across the account. So things like cost per clicks will reduce because you're providing a better experience versus your competitors for example and therefore you're more likely to earn I suppose that click versus other people in market and then therefore you're more likely to the more likely to click on the ad and therefore more likely to make Google some more money. So yeah, it kind of goes around into full circle basically. But a lot of that is defined by relevance to whatever the customer is looking for.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
An intent as well, just Nick mentioned intent there twice and actually that's so important because if you imagine you've got a broad keyword match and somebody searches for Adidas trainers, your advert might show for Adidas trainers reviews potentially, now the intent doesn't match. So if you come back to matching those keywords with the adverts themselves and then the adverts and the keywords with the landing pages, the intent is much more controlled and like Nick says, the impact that would have on quality scores and ad rank is actually pretty huge. You can reduce your cost per click massively.
And when I say massively a huge amount, you knows the difference between a high quality score and a low quality score. You can be paying five, 10 times as much per click. Can make a big difference. You've also got some similar signals to what you would have with OnPage SEO. Is the keyword mentioned on the page? Is the page sort of related to the keyword and the advert? It's quite important. So you might have it in the title, in the header for example, and the page needs to be about what somebody is searching for, otherwise you're going to get lower relevance.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
So if you've got an ad for a red chair, don't send them to a page where it's a blue chair.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah. And you know what, you see this a lot.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Or no chair.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Or just chairs.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah. Keep it as... Is it better to be specific?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Oh yeah, yeah. And actually so the longer tail you go, generally... Longer tail meaning sort of more combined keywords, more specific. The longer tail you go generally actually the higher conversion rates you'll have as well. Mostly because if you can match, if someone's searching for, so let's use Adidas trainers again as an example, instead of it just being Adidas trainers, what about if it was red Adidas trainers. It's more specific, if you show them red added as trainers, you're going to get a higher conversion rate. But if you take that to the next level and say red suede Adidas trainers, again it's more specific, it's more long tail and your conversion rate will be higher if you match that intent.
Could even go further size eight men's red suede Adidas trainers. You can keep classic... There's so many things you could add into there that are descriptive that would make it more specific. What you're doing is you're reducing the volume of people searching that will find you and your advert and your product, but actually you are catching them when the intent is much higher and the conversion is much more likely.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Using the example of red Adidas trainers, I think you said, what you can also do is in the site links, which are the little links below the advert, you could add your green and yellow and white trainers in there to suggest that you've obviously got more than just red Adidas trainer. You've got a whole range of them. I think that tends to improve the click through rate as well.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah, so just to throw a spanner in the mix, what if a client or a customer wants to use brand terms but they're terms that not necessarily people are searching for?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
I think the most important thing to remember is... Literally the most important thing to remember is you can only save an ad if someone's searching for it. So if you want to create a whole ream of ads based on keywords that you think are really suitable to your business, if nobody's searching for those keywords, you will literally get no impressions, or very few impressions depending on how Google decide to match. So it's a lot of wasted effort basically. There's kind of a trade off really between relevancy and volume. So your business might be suitable and how you define your business might be suitable to lots of different areas and different ways that people search for your business that you've not necessarily considered. So it's important to scope out that as well and don't just do what you believe your business is, but actually how other people might search or use different search terms to find what you offer.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
That's the most important thing, isn't it? It's matching those key words and the search terms that people are using to find what they're looking for in search engines, matching them with your product instead of the other way around. You're not matching your product to people, you are matching your website and your pages and your product or your service to what people are looking for. Also, so you could answer your question in two different ways and I would naturally answer it the same way Nick would answer it but just thinking about it from another angle, there are situations sometimes where you'll get somebody who wants their advert to be more brand involved let's say.
So somebody might search for red Adidas trainer, but they might, it's a bad example actually because Adidas is a brand, but they might want their brand name in the advert when actually it's not particularly always relevant to be in the advert. So there are situations actually where there's a lot of brands who will want their brand name to be the first bit of text in the advert and actually arguably, that doesn't really give people what they want unless it's a branded search term.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It depends as well, doesn't it? Because it's multifaceted as well with that. So if it's a huge brand for example, a really well known brand and an Adidas again is probably a good example of this because there's also a lot of trust within that brand. So if you're searching for something that's maybe not a brand term related to Adidas, but Adidas is in the title, sometimes the reverse of that's true as well. So having that recognition and that relevance and that trust there can also help click through rate, even if it's not relevant to the search terms. So there are a huge amount of factors that go into this. Broadly speaking what Matt said is right, it's make your ads as relevant as possible, but also take advantage of your own assets and if you've got a brand that people do trust, that can also be worth testing and learning about.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
This is why testing is so important. Well I'm sure as we go through this podcast there'll be many points where we'll say test and this is exactly why.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
So, obviously we've talked about relevancy, getting the quality scores right for Google itself. Would you say that Google shopping is a great way to help improve or increase the chance of getting a return on investment?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It can be. It can be a huge part of your campaign structure depending on what type of business you operate I suppose. So by default they're PMax campaigns now, unless you don't want the automation, in which case you can have a standard shopping campaign, but they can be hugely successful depending on the types of products you sell and how much competition was in market. So that can really maximise ROI in a really efficient way and also quite cheap from a cost per click point of view depending on again, your relevancy to the customer's search or the consumer's search. But there are some fundamentals really that you need to be aware of and maximise as part of Google shopping. So a lot of this is very data driven and attribute driven. So the more information you can put into your attributes, the more likely you are going to get your products in front of the right people who are searching with a similar intent for what your product offers or your business offers.
And that's critical, really. There isn't a substitute for that. The better quality of data you put into the system, the more output you'll get. So that's absolutely critical. And that goes to things like making the product unique as well. So, what a lot of clients or what a lot of businesses do typically is just use standard default template kind of product information. So they'll get images of the manufacturer, they'll just use five or six bullet points from the manufacturer that are all the same and all of their competitors typically will use as well. So really making that product bespoke and specific to how a customer might search for it and then really making the content unique, then taking your own photography for example is a good way of doing that. Really maximising the look and the feel of your site and how the product exists on your site.
The benefits of that using reviews lots and lots of different ways, but really making your product unique is a key thing and you can drive a huge amount of return just by going through that process and fine tuning and making it as clear as possible for the consumer as to what they're buying. And obviously a price comes into that as well depending on how closely priced you are versus your competitors. But the more specific and the more tailored you can make that to somebody's search intent, the more likely you are to get that booking or get that order at the end of the day.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
I've noticed quite a lot, manufacturers do not name things very well. They often have been developed by I guess a techie or scientist who'd have given it a very technical name. They're often American, so they'll use something like you'll call a... What we'd call a trolley, a truck and the number of people who just use the manufacturer's name don't do anything with it when quite clearly that the search volume in the UK will be on a different name, that's a huge advantage.
There's also an issue with sort of the user interface of the website in that a lot of people want the products to be called... Now if it's a similar type of product, they basically all have the same names, they might be a different colour, size, whatever, but if you can persuade people to change the title of the product slightly and tweak it, you'll then stand out a lot more in Google shopping because no one else will have bothered or a lot of the time people won't have bothered. So it's a real good way to appear more than once in Google shopping or to appear a number of basically the same product but several times. And also to appear on the common search term, not just what the manufacturer calls it.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Can we call this mistake number two? So I would label this uniformity and the reason I'd label it that, is I see E-commerce websites very frequently, clearly use product naming conventions that are uniform and when somebody's looking at a landing page, they almost look very similar and they... You need to make a decision. Do you want a pretty website or do you want to make some money? And if you want to make some money. And if you want to make some money...
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
I quite agree.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
You would like it. You'd like a website that looks nice.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Money please.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Exactly. You'd go with a website that looks nice but no one sees it.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
That's true. But at least it still looks nice, to me.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
One of the most common mistakes with producing a website is people spend all their money on the website and they just expect people to come and it just won't ever happen.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
No.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yep. And this is the point, isn't it? So using uniformity is a common mistake, actually if you come back to product naming conventions, forget about uniformity, match your product naming conventions with what people are searching for. The moment you do that, your audience is so much larger, but not only is it larger, chances are you'll be generating much cheaper clicks because people are searching for quite long tail terms and generally there'll be less competition. So you'll get cheaper clicks that are more intent driven, lower down the funnel so they're more likely to convert and it's a perpetual cycle of improvement.
And by the way, when that happens, your quality scores and ad ranks will increase because they're more relevant and they're performing better. So there are just so many benefits to doing that. Can I give an example as well? So it's okay just having this conversation and just providing words really, but a great example is we came across a product that was labelled necklace. I mean that's so broad. What does it even... What's somebody who's searching for that, what do they want to see? And you don't know, is the answer. They could be looking for a big gold chain like Allie G might wear, they could be looking for a really sort of, I don't know, delicate Tiffany necklace. The point is you could be looking for anything.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Do you have a gold chain? Just to jump in.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
I don't.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Do you Rich?
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
No I don't, but perhaps I'll buy one from this necklace company. I'd like to just highlight another major mistake. It's very simple one. Is call things what they are. So if you mean blue, don't call it aqua, because no one will search for aqua. If you mean yellow, don't call it sunshine, call it yellow and then you'll get the search volume. Again, so many people just think, "Oh we'll have a lovely name, we won't just go with the flow and call it what it is. We'll call it something else". No one's going to search for it.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Can I give a real life example as well? So a long, long time ago, this is going back some years, maybe even a decade, me and Rich were working on some specific products, cable protectors products. I know we've mentioned these in an earlier podcast, but this is so relevant for this podcast. The industry called those products cable protectors, which by and large a lot of people did call them that when they were searching. However there was opportunities for at least 10 other keywords. And when we started capitalising on that, all of a sudden the audience is huge, but competition declined. So you're paying less per click to get a bigger audience. And I think it's a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure we maybe increased revenue by 10, 15, 20 times something like that just by matching products to what people are searching for.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
The other mistake there was that the manufacturer calls them internal and external. Joe public calls them indoor and outdoor. It makes such a difference.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
It sounds like really simple stuff, doesn't it really? About making things relevant. I always think in my head from a brand perspective, I might call a... Come up with a really quirky funny name, not funny, but you know what I mean, a really quirky name for a product and the client will love that. Then when it comes round to the...
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
To marketing it.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
To the search, and marketing it, people aren't searching for it. So from my perspective I see I think, "Oh it's nice to come up with a nice brand term, but ideally..."
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
You can have both though. From your brand perspective you can call it something that's meaningful and relates well to your brand and position it in your brand in a strong and relevant way for your brand. I guess what we're suggesting is that actually from a search perspective, that doesn't really mean anything, until it's found and it won't be found as long as you're not matching it to the user search and their intent.
So there is a best of both worlds there with that, it's just a case of finding what that sweet spot is, making sure your brand's relevant still and your products are relevant to your brand but you market it in a way that actually people are searching for. So when they are searching and you position yourself in that search space, you can still retain your brand kind of essence if you want to call it that. But actually you're still matching the customer intent at the same time and that really is what you should be aiming to do. You want to make your brand stand out but you also want to find your audience and you can't really do either/or.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And also what is a brand? Do you even have a brand, if you don't have customers or many customers? The goal of any brand or most brands is performance and growth, customers. People won't see your brand if you're not being found and your brand is defined by your customers. So that evolves over time and if you are not being found and you're not generating new customers, your brand doesn't get the opportunity to be seen. So for me, brands are actually developed over a period of time. Like Coca-Cola, didn't just become Coca-Cola because someone branded them Coca-Cola.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
No.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It evolved over a long period of time based on what their audience needs were and they were providing their customers with what they needed. So actually it's very difficult to do it the other way around, because you don't know what your customer needs until you start generating those customers and evolving with them and figuring out how best to match their challenges with your products or services.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah, makes it some interesting stuff there, especially with the Google shopping side of things. I'd like to move on to tracking. What's the best way for customers to track their return on investment, their clicks, whatever it is that they need to track. What's the starting model? Who wants to start on that?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Well you need to have your conversions defined with an ad, you can do that in a few different ways. You can do it based on a pixel or you can do it based on links to other products, typically Google, but they don't have to be. Then effectively you want to go through and define all of your conversion events. Ultimately that will be a purchase for the vast majority of businesses at least, but you might also want to have micro conversion events in there. So you might want to say people who reached a checkout is a conversion event, which is smaller than a purchase, but it's still potentially valuable data. You might also want to have a search in there for example. So people have searched for a particular product or you might want to have a phone call or there'd be a variety of different things that you could define as an event.
That's a particular behaviour that a lot of your customers are performing that you want to optimise something towards. So having a really clear view of what that looks like for your site and what success looks like for your site and then optimising towards that and you can do lots and lots of things with that within ads and other kind of marketing channels. But it's really important that you do that specifically for your business because that's where you'll see the most results. Beyond that though, tracking actually is becoming much more difficult now mainly down to two things really, intelligent tracking prevention, which is where Apple, specifically Apple, but a lot of browsers are also adopting this now is where they don't allow you to be tracked intrusively on your devices, which was a problem to be fair, quite a few years ago. And the second thing is GDPR, so you have to accept cookies now for example, if you don't accept cookies, you can't track what the customers might be doing outside of one session at least.
So there's no real answer to that at the minute. That's not something that you can resolve. You have to accept that and that means that you will inevitably see some of the data start to disappear over a longer period of time. So unless you've got, I know we mentioned it earlier, but unless you've got a business or a product that is more of an immediate purchase, you are very likely to lose some understanding of how your customers reach your site and what their consideration process is before they eventually get to the point where they can make a purchase. So that's going to be very different from across lots of different industries but also lots of different businesses.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Can I add one thing about tracking? You are always going to miss a lot of tracking. Tracking is an underestimate. So when we talk about five times return, 10 times, that's an absolute minimum.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Worst case.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
And know worst case...
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Always worst case.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Probably won't call phone calls, it certainly won't incorporate lifetime value of a customer.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Whose fault is that though?
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Well no one can... Well you can't really track phone calls because somebody might have looked online and they may well call and there's no connect between the two, although there can be in some instances.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's not even a technology problem often, it's a physics problem. If you are on your phone and you're searching for something and then the day after you go on your computer at work and then call them, you've got three touch points there that can't talk to each other, so you can't track that. That's literally impossible to track, mostly impossible to track. There are ways of course.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
And there may also be buying departments within a company. So somebody finds a product, they email the buyer and say, can you get that? The person buying it has never searched for it.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
The only caveat to that is how complex the business CDP is, so their kind of data platform. In theory it could be possible to track those things, but you'd need to invest a huge, like enormous amount of money in order to get those systems in place and...
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And tiptoe around GDPR.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Potentially. But you would also need to make sure that the customers are always signed in for example. So if whenever your customer, as long as they're known to you obviously, and as long as they create an account on their first exposure to your business and then whenever they come back to your website or app or potentially even a phone call depending on what questions you ask during that call, there are ways of trying to connect those, that in theory as possible, you still won't get a hundred percent of everybody. You won't be able to identify a hundred percent of users across your site, but when they do log in and they are known to you in theory, you then can start to connect the dots over different exposure sequences if you like. So however many times they come to your site or your properties that's kind of in a non-linear fashion, so they might come across different months or different devices or whatever it might be.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And this is, so the technology is a problem here as well. So as Nick highlighted there, Apple have caused Google quite a lot of problems. GDPR has caused Google quite a lot of problems. There's other issues going on, but I want to talk about also time lag. This is really important for Google Ads. You pay for your click when that click happens, but you don't get paid by your customer until a conversion happens. Now for some lucky businesses where it might be impulse purchase, you might get that the same day. More often than not, that's not going to happen. And this is where I want to highlight a common mistake number three, because if you trust Google analytics time lag data, I think the vast majority of accounts might show that the first day click to purchase is most popular. Actually that's wrong in most cases.
The reason it's wrong is this is a technology issue, is because when a cookie is dropped on somebody's computer, chances are now that cookie might only last 24 hours. If they visit your website a couple of days later it'll look like a first click again. So it'll look like a click has happened and then a purchase has happened. So that's happening. You've then got... There's so many different sort of compounded tracking issues. So you're absolutely right. What Richard's saying is what you are seeing in the data is really is worst case scenario. And we've had this conversation many times actually, at various points with clients. We have clients who just approve internally to themselves that this is a real issue, have cut their advertising budget entirely and then realised just what kind of impact it has. Occasionally they might cut it by half, but actually their revenue from ads drops by much more than half and at that point they start realising actually yeah, there's something going on here where what we're seeing is clearly worst case scenario.
Just to put a few other things in the mix as well with the kind of things that might impact tracking. You've got ad blockers, you've got all sorts of things like click fraud, cookies being disabled, offline conversions, where you actually can't see the conversion as part of your website. That might be a phone call, might be a form inquiry, so you might see a soft conversion, but even outside of that, if somebody's got a shop for example, they might find you online, go to your website, look around your products, whatever it might be and then actually appear in your shop. And again, you can't physically track that very well.
Google tried a few years ago as a beta test and I think that's mostly expiring now. We've seen that dwindle a little bit, but yeah, trackings pretty challenging at the moment. GA four may help with that over time. Getting very close now, and this is maybe another thing actually because talking about Google's automations, and Rich and Nick will probably expand on this, but Google are trying to introduce machine learning into most of the campaign types in ads and they're pushing it very hard. That requires a huge amount of data and actually that data generally works best when you can give events through to Google Ads from GA four.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Just to point on that, just to expand on it slightly I think as well is absolutely critical that you try to source different sources of data as well. So not only should you just trust your Google analytics and Google Ads data in terms of what revenue it might be producing, but look at the holistic data that you have as well. So if you count how many people are coming to shops, has that increased? Has your footfall increased, for example. Your business centric data that you have. So generally speaking, has your revenue gone up across the business? How does that compare versus previous months? Does it generally speaking correlate roughly within a month or so of increased ad spend? There's lots of ways that you can look at data holistically that will provide much greater insights because there is an absence in direct tracking. So it's really important just to measure as much as you can and try and keep an open mind as to what the impact of marketing might be.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah, it's a bit of a whirlwind, isn't it, tracking?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It is.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It could be a podcast in itself.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah, maybe.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Wouldn't be too exciting though.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
No.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Don't think many people will find it too interesting.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
I'd listen to it.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
So moving on from tracking then. I've got a little bit of an understanding of what negative keywords are, but you guys will be able to obviously explain it a little bit more. Is that obviously another way people can increase the return on investment? What are negative keywords?
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
So essentially a negative keyword is something that's becoming more and more important as Google pushes this automation kind of agenda. Google's preference really is to move to a broad match model, which means they're quite loose with how they serve an ad against a keyword that somebody might be searching for. So the relevancy against that keyword might be quite low, but Google want to increase the number of ads that they're serving for each query.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
They want to make more money.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
They want to make more money basically because the more ads that you have essentially that are being served, the more likely someone is to click an ad and the more space that can take upon that real estate. And then kind of separate to that as well with the latest announcement over the last few days in terms of how Google's moving forward, I think you kind of get to see why they're starting to move down the automation road. We'll probably cover that separately and not now, but essentially a broad match which is a preferred Google kind of position now, it is very wide in terms of its scope and relevancy to what the customer's searching for.
So you have to control that with what we call negative keywords, which basically is a keyword that you feel is less relevant to either a product or a service or whatever it is that you are advertising that doesn't match your ad or the intent of your landing page. But Google believes it might be relevant to what the customer is searching for. So there'll be loads and loads and loads of different examples of this depending on what your business is. But effectively anything that you feel isn't relevant you should try to incorporate as a negative keyword because that will effectively fine tune who you do serve your ads to and therefore make that more relevant, improve the ad rank and quality scores and ultimately more likely to find some revenue from out.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
So there's a problem with these as well, by the way. So the first issue here is that generally you'll find these once you've had clicks, when you've had clicks, it's cost you money. So historically what you'd always try to recommend is as many exact match types as possible. So when you are putting in an exact keyword, generally your advert will only show for that maybe a little bit wider than that. Now they've changed the way that works a little bit. But the problem is if you are analysing your negative keywords based on clicks, you've already paid for clicks that weren't relevant. So this comes back to that learning phase again. So you've got a certain amount of time while you are optimising and while you are removing wastage, let's say with keywords that aren't relevant. And also can I highlight the next mistake here? Not managing negative keywords is the next mistake. If you imagine it, a classic example and an analogy, if your ads account is a bucket, if you are not doing your negative keywords very regularly, you're leaking, you've got lots of holes in the bucket.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
I was just about to say, is that a mistake that people make not putting the negatives in?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
All the time.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Yeah. How often do you see it?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
All the time. I'd say almost exclusively on every... I don't think there's ever an account you could say is perfectly tuned for negative keywords.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
It's a very important regular maintenance task. To go through your search campaign and look for the negatives. What should be a negative keyword where you're wasting money where Google hasn't quite understood the meaning of the search term matched into your products. Another thing is worth mentioning is tied in with negative keywords is if you use exact match, you don't have to bother with negative keywords because as Matt said, you're pretty much getting an exact. Now if you got a big budget or rather you've got a high percentage share of the searches, you can afford to let a bit slip. But if you are in the case of the necklace seller, there are millions of searches for jewellery and necklace, they're a relatively small company, you are far better off just having exact match long tail keywords where you're not going to get any waste. If you're a bigger company, you don't mind a bit of slippage and you can gradually filter that out. But if you are a small company, it's a big mistake to use broad match keywords.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Outside of a learning phase at least. There might be occasions where early on there might be a learning phase, you are almost using that data to do your keyword research to a certain degree. Outside of that phase, it is almost a mistake. Now obviously in that situation, imagine if that product name was nine carat, white gold, diamond, lady's necklace and that was not an exact match. Yes, the search volume is lower, but actually the intent is higher, they're much more likely to purchase. The cost per click is lower. So yeah, makes a big difference to return on advertising spend. The purpose of this podcast and early on we were talking about return on investment. That's one of the key ways of increasing return on investment, removing wastage.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It's worth saying though, that also depends on your approach to ads because you might actually want a very broad scope. If you are a big business for example, and you've got hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, you might want as much visibility as possible and therefore that approach with broad match keywords and you're not necessarily concerned about the relevancy because you've got a huge budget and you're going to shift a lot of product anyway, get that product in front of as many people as possible. Actually that can work. But obviously where we're talking about it now it's more so in the case of maximising your efficiency and ROI, but that's important to mention I think because there is a sliding scale there in terms of what you are willing to risk versus efficiency and if you do want to a broader scope and it absolutely can work for you as well.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
You'll get to a certain point where if you're maximising impression share and you are struggling to find new areas, we're talking here, this is an issue for massive businesses generally, but if you're maximising your audience, actually sometimes it makes sense to go broad because you're trying to capture more people and you're caring slightly less about the return on investment. And what you're trying to achieve really is if you still want to grow and you still want to try to gather more people, more eyes on your product or brand, sometimes it might make sense to go broad, but generally I think for the vast majority of businesses, certainly they need to be so attuned to their return on advertising spend that actually monitoring those negative keywords and being more exact with their keyword types is going to be more beneficial.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Nice. So there you have it from the experts, get your negative keywords in there. We've touched on briefly about Google automation. Does that mean that people are going to have less control over their ads? How's that going to affect things?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
So thinking about negative keywords, we were just talking about them and just to drop in here, this is certainly one for Rich and Nick to answer. However, one thing I will say is with most of Google's machine learning campaign types, actually you get much less control and part of that is in most situations actually you can't even give negative keywords. When you are allowing Google to control these, which you have to, to a certain degree now. Yeah, you need to give control fully.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Why is it that Google are taking control?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Money.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Is that what it always comes down to?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Well, if Google are in control, imagine Google are in control of one ad account, they can control increasing your cost per click higher and higher and higher. You might get to the point where that one advertiser says this is not worth it. But then imagine if they control every advertiser and they increase all of the cost per clicks, who benefits? And that's when you come to machine learning, you are handing over that control. It is a worry.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
And the people who benefit are the big players who've got the deepest pockets and can afford the smallest margins. That's the ultimate goal for Google. We have to say it. They want to maximise their profits. So they want to attract the people who are not, like Nick and myself are very careful about how we spend the budget they want the big players who've just sprayed the advertising spend around.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
One of the big things with automation as well isn't just controlling your budget within ads. So typically and traditionally ads was a text ad within search for example. You would have a bit of a display element to that, but now increasingly within ads, Google's kind of migrating a lot of their properties into one platform. So within ads specifically now you can have video ads on YouTube, you can have shopping ads across their shopping placements, also within search and image and then also got image ads on top of that. Then there's a whole kind of plethora of ads that you can now control within one account and within one campaign specifically, which is where Google want you to push your efforts into, which is PMax, which is fully automated.
So that's what Google's trying to do with PMax essentially is control and allocate all of your resources and control where that's served. But as Matt said, you imagine they're doing that for you, but they're also doing that for all of your competitors across all industries. So effectively they're creating this competition set where you are serving more ads to more spaces across all of their platforms, but also you are competing against all of your competitors that are also doing the same. So they're kind of inflating this level of competition across all of the owned assets.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And it doesn't go down, it goes up. That competition, all it causes is the cost per clicks to increase as they're chasing impression share and clicks and revenue. But they're all doing it and it's all going up and there's only one place it benefits and that is Google. But if you imagine it from Google's side, they've got to appease their shareholders. They're a massive corporation who's got to appease their shareholders and their shareholders put big pressure on them to continually increase the performance of how much money it makes them and the performance of the business. And they generally only have very short term plans, a year, two years, five years, something like that. This is potentially problematic because over time what will happen to appease those shareholders is Google will lose advertisers because then it's not working for them. We're nowhere near that yet in my opinion, but at the same point you can see it potentially happening longer term.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
A lot of clients complained over the last few years about the drop in return on investment that literally cannot be helped. And I think over time some of the small advertisers will pull out of Google Ads. As I say, it's kind of a drift towards the people with the biggest pockets.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And that might benefit Google for a few years, but eventually the bubble bursts and when you've got no advertisers...
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Someone else will pick up the bat. I mean there's a good example, we always talk about how great Google is on technology and AI, but there are lots and lots of settings in the display campaign and when you set them you think that's set up beautifully. Then you look at where they've actually put the traffic and 99% of it is really weak websites and now in PMax you don't get that control.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
You can take it to the next stage as well because those everybody will have seen when they log into an ads account that Google will provide them with recommendations. And generally those recommendations actually are quite damaging to performance. Often, not always. Some of them are logical and make a bit of sense, but by and large they're designed to make Google more money and a lot of them are based on, "Oh, you can get more clicks if you do this. You can get more..."
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Brand awareness.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
"... Brand awareness or more impression share". They'd never mention more revenue.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
No.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And never mentioned more return on advertising spend. There is a direct correlation between accounts that accept all of Google's recommendations and have a high optimization score, with performance. Generally performance is lower if you've got a high optimization score because you're just accepting Google saying, "Can you give me more money please".
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Yeah.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Sometimes when you've had everything group in Google shopping has an incredibly low optimization score, but it's a great ROI.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
If you imagine you've got 20,000 products and you're paying 10 pence a click, whatever it might be, you can get a lot more clicks than you would normally get because you're paying less and actually it means you can allow a lower conversion rate and you might only sell one of that product per year. But if you've got 10,000 products you only sell one of a year, that's generating a lot of money from that. So yeah, these catchall campaigns work extremely well. Long tail again.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
It's worthwhile saying that actually automation does have a place as well in some instances, when you can't control it to whatever level you can control, which we don't know what that will hold in the future, but at the minute, for example, if you want a P-Mac shopping campaign, you can just not add assets for the other stuff and only add your shopping feed. And actually doing that can be valuable still, depending on the quality of the data and the volume of data that you can provide, Google. If you get it right and you tick the boxes, it can work very, very well.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah. Let's not forget that.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
So it's not always a negative, it is broadly speaking, because I guess we like control of what we want to do, is a negative thing for us, but actually there are some positives as well.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Some campaigns, some PMax campaigns. It's if there's volume there and data and there's plenty to learn, at the end of the day, it's machine learning and AI. If there's enough data for it to learn on, they can actually work extremely well. There are some PMax campaigns that we manage where the return on investment is quite ludicrous, so they can work well, but they can also work badly if there's not enough data and not enough search volume.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
So there's lots to learn there from what we've discussed. A big talking point, I guess for this blab, would be to determine how utilising organic SEO techniques alongside Google Ads can really help. Should we do both? Should we do one or the other?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
It's probably one of the most common questions we get asked early on in conversations with people who inquire with us. Do I do SEO? Do I do ads? Do I do both? If you can afford it, absolutely do both, because this is a classic. Me and Richard have been talking about this for a long, long, long time, and maybe 10, 12 years ago, Richard coined the term one plus one equals three and it sounds ridiculous, but actually there's so much sense in it and I'll let Rich explain.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Yes, well, one plus one equals three. It's not my bad maths, it's actually, so if you have your organic listing, you have your Google Shopping listings, you've got your search listings, you are actually potentially, you are blocking out quite a large part of the search engine results page. So you look like you are bigger than you actually are because you're blocking out a lot of the competition. So if you just add ads, okay, it's good. If you are organically there without ads, good, but if you have... You're blocking out all that real estate, it's very, very powerful. People will think you are the main player.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
And also there's actually a really good reason why one plus one doesn't equal three as well. So slightly separately to that, that's such an important point. Saturating that search results page is so important, but actually one search, if a keyword has 1000 searches a month, not all 1000 of those are one click searches. The vast majority of those will click multiple results.
So actually you are getting a second bite at the cherry and if you are appearing there twice, good chance you'll get click twice. So, you're appearing more dominant and you're getting more of that pie if you like. But also, so this is the other thing as well, which is quite interesting. So ads generally, the average click through rates for ads are anywhere between 2 and 5%. There are some ads that will get more than that, but generally 2 to 5% organic is anywhere between 25 and 30, sometimes 35%. So there's potentially between five and 10 times as many people that click organic results. But the interesting thing is actually the people who click organic results actually tend to avoid ads. The people who click ads will also click organic results. So again, one plus one doesn't always equal two there. There's a certain... And every keyword will be different, but there's a certain level of actually benefiting from having that saturation.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
What is one plus one?
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
Two.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Thank you. I got confused with all that. Is it three? It's definitely three in this case anyway.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
SEO and ads, it's three.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Think you stick to colours.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
I think I will stick to colours.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
And fonts.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
I'm listening to you guys talk about search marketing and thinking I'm glad I design stuff.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
So the other thing that we've not mentioned, which is a slightly different strategy, and obviously Rich and Matt there have been talking about kind of share of real estate if you like, on the top of the search results. Actually, if you're not there, it's a great opportunity to make sure your ad is, and you can put yourself in front of that customer because SEO, it doesn't always mean you're going to be appearing at the top of Google effectively. So even if you're on the first page, probably five times out of 10 someone's going to scroll down to the bottom of that. Usually those people will be looking at the first five results and typically the first two results. So just having an ad there when you are not present in SEO can be really valuable. So thinking about where you are lacking from an SEO perspective, then supplementing that with ads can be also very beneficial as long as it's relevant to your business.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
That's a good example of one plus naught equals two.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
Can tell you worked in finance, Rich.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Now I'm completely gone. I think it's completely gone. The main conversation that I have with people is SEO takes a long time or certainly longer than ads. Ads will have a quick impact or can have a quick impact.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Certainly quicker.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Exactly. And SEO is going to be a longer, long-term strategy. So you always say, when should I start SEO? Yesterday.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, for sure.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
The sooner you start that long-term strategy, the better. And while that's building, why not get the data from ads and benefit from a return on investment?
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
So, there's another reason that's vital. So imagine you've got ads data quickly saying a particular key word is working incredibly well for you. It's not that competitive. It's generating a really nice conversion rate, nice average order value, that's gold dust for SEO. Imagine having that knowledge at the start of any SEO campaign, knowing exactly the key words that you can focus on to drive lots of return on investment. So that's another reason why one plus one equals five now.
Rich Bloomfield - (Paid Media Manager):
And there's another one because to do a stock control, if a company has a big stock of a particular product that they haven't been able to get rid of, you can switch ads on. You can target that product and conversely, if they've done well on something and sell out or close, a very low stock, you can switch the ads off. Very good for stock control
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Much more difficult to do organically as well. So if you're running them both side by side, you can control demand.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
Awesome.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Six. One plus one equals six.
Tom Haslam - (Host):
I think we've come to the end where one plus one is definitely two, but in marketing blabs terms it is seven or six. I've lost count. But anyway, thank you all for being on.
Nick Janaway - (Head of Digital):
We can make it seven if you like.
Matt Janaway - (CEO):
Yeah, we can keep going.
We'll leave it. It's for another pod. And that's a wrap for today's blab. Thank you everybody for listening. This episode provided you with the valuable insights to help you get the most out of your Google Ads campaigns. We demystified the world of Google Ads covering everything from setting realistic budgets, to optimise your campaigns for better return on investment. We highlighted the importance of quality scores, negative keywords and the growing reliance on automation and Google Ads platform. We also touched on Google Shopping as an E-commerce powerhouse and the significance of tracking your overall ad performance. We've also, across all of those, covered common mistakes that people make and how we can help you not make those mistakes. We addressed finally, the ongoing SEO versus ads debate, emphasising the benefits of combining both strategies for online success.
I'm not quite sure what the formula is, but one plus one is probably six or seven, something like that. Remember, Google Ads can be a powerful tool for businesses when used effectively. So take the time to learn, experiment, and optimise your campaigns to get the best results possible. If you enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe to Marketing Blabs on Spotify so you don't miss a future episodes. And if you have any questions or comments about today's discussion, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop us a message on our social media or email ask@marketinglabs.co.uk. Thank you again for joining us on today's blab, and until next time, happy Google Adzing.
