Martin: How are you, James, qualified to talk to us about PPC?
James: Well, I think really you needs to look back at the thirty odd years prior to me doing PPC, because I learned cold calling, and direct marketing and runing advertising, full page magazine advertising, and practiced those skills are all those years prior to discovering the internet. I built my first website in 1998 and optimised it for Alta Vista, and grew a business from that. So I was already on the internet building websites commercially. At that time, there was a tool available to us from a company called Overtures which was a keyword research tool, so we used that keyword research tool to find keywords for SEO for websites.
Now, cutting a very, very long story short, not implicating any commercial improprieties along the way, because they certainly were a few. But Google launched a programme which was then called AdWords in Australia, in, I think, late 2001, somewhere around there, and I'd heard about it, and I had a little look at a bit of a look at it. I went to an internet marketing seminar that was held up on the Sunshine Coast about an hour and a half's drive north from where I live and one of the guest speakers that seminar was Perry Marshall, who, at that time was already laying claim to being an an AdWords guru. I listened with, literally, with bated breath, and hung on every word he said.
I realised that at last after all those years of of waiting that we finally had a tool available to us that gave us absolute empirical data. So we could see at a glance, how many people searched for a certain keyword, for a certain business, we could see very definitely which adverts worked in terms of the relative number of clicks they got compared with other adverts, and we could also track the actions that people took in terms of making contact with businesses once their click led to the website because we could track the number of people who made cell phone calls or the number of people that filled out inquiry forms on your website. So we had real numbers, I mean, real numbers. So you can absolutely say to somebody, I'll give you a case study about this, if you want, you can actually say to somebody, this is where your best market approach is, these are the keywords, these are the headlines, and you can take this stuff into the offline world, and use it in practice, and make quick and easy sales.
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