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Online Advertising & Changes at Google - Full Content
Posted to Shop Management Forum on 12/15/2014 14 Replies

Be forewarned this is another long post, so grab a cup of coffee and read it only if you have the time. I want to help explain to iATN members what we've been doing that's helped our rinky-dink 3K sq. ft. 4-bay transmission shop go from $600K/yr. to $1.3M/yr. in only 3 years. This is merely an update to those activities, as Google, Bing, & Yahoo are constantly changing. This post was originally made in transmission-only forums and I thought it would be useful for those iATN members who are engaged in transmission repair. Here's my post:

I have multiple changes to report with Google that span multiple products and product lines. The only thing that ever stays the same at Google is change. The Y-gen & Millennials keep changing stuff while the old people (X-gen) oversee and coordinate what's going on.

First, I'd like to mention that when Google makes a change or comes out with a new product, they don't do a global deployment. They pick a small, manageable user base as a test bed or "sandbox" to see how users like it and more often than not, make tweaks and changes based on user feedback. Often they will slowly grow the deployment area until they feel comfortable enough to finally do a global deployment.

The first, and most important change (to me, at least) is Google Drive. For those of you not familiar with Drive, it's much more than cloud storage. It includes Google Apps which has a host of business apps that replaces MS Office and does a lot more. All of the Google Apps have been highly upgraded with much more functionality to make them more "MS Office-like" to compete with MS's cloud version of Office, Office 360. Before, the Google Apps were more like lite versions of Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Access, and the other products that come with the full professional version of Office. Now, they are closer to being the same, due to Google Apps being more powerful. The entire suite of Google products being available on your Android phone is just the icing on the cake. We bought a Galaxy tablet, but we have learned that we really don't need it because there's nothing we can do on a tablet that we can't do on our Samsung Galaxy S4's. To us, the tablet is just another electronic device we'd rather not tote around.

On the storage end of Drive, I now have access to my 1TB of storage from my Android smartphone and tablet along with all of my Google apps. The one I use the most is Calendar because that's how we schedule work at the shop. Here's a short video that will explain what Google Drive can do now, a lot better than I can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWvKAYKlnnM

The very best change they made with Drive is that the price dropped 80%. I was paying $50/mo. for Google Apps for Business with 1TB storage ever since I used it to replace Office 3 years ago and it's now been renamed to Google Apps for Work and it's only $10/mo. per user! And get this: If you have 5 or more users, the storage space is unlimited. Goodbye hard drives.

Google Goggles have been in the works for years. Google Goggles has the potential to make bar codes, QR codes, and more, unnecessary just as voice recognition has the potential to make a keyboard unnecessary. Basically it's a picture search. You take a picture of a product, ad, book, business card, or perhaps sign or menu in a foreign language, or anything else you want more information on and Google does an automatic image search for more information or translates it if there's foreign text in the picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-hXD33vXs

There's been a multitude of changes in Google AdWords over the last 6 months. Some of the changes started as long as 2 years ago, such as Universal Analytics. Google Analytics as everybody knows it, will be totally dead by Spring as those web developers who have not already voluntarily converted over from Google Analytics to the new Universal Analytics, will be forced to as Google will automatically convert those accounts over who have not already done so themselves. Old habits die hard and I feel the old name of Google Analytics will stick or maybe somebody will make up a new name like "The New Google Analytics", but the official new name is Universal Analytics. Here's the 4 big differences I see, although there's many more:

1. The same user using different devices won't get counted as a different visitor each time they visit as they were before. First visiting on your smartphone, then on your desktop when you get home will count as 1 new visitor and 1 returning visitor. Before, it was counted as 2 new visitors.

2. Easier cookie timeouts, and visitor exclusions. The default timeout for a tracking cookie is 30 minutes and you had to know JavaScript to change it before. Now it's a button you click, along with you can exclude IP addresses and websites that you don't want to count the data on, like your own IP address, employee's IP's, competitors, and etc.

3. Helps you understand how your customer interacts with various touchpoints instead of the historical last click attribution model. It integrates and follows users who make contact with your blog(s), YouTube channel, social media, website, and any other URLs you list in GA as touchpoint properties and even allows you to either link or import 3rd party (non-Google) data into Universal Analytics to see how much all these dimensions play a part up until the ZMOT for that all important phone call. See ZMOT Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIFBwIAdpu4

4. Enhanced Link Attribution-If you have more than one way for visitor to to get to another page, (2 different links on the same page that go to the same place) Universal Analytics can tell you which link got them to that next page, not that they merely went from point A to point B. For instance, if you have a button on your home page that takes the visitor to the "Contact Us" page, but on that same home page, you have a SiteSearch box to where if the visitor enters the search term "email address", it will also take them to the same "Contact Us" page, Universal Analytics can now tell you by which method the visitor went from your home page to the "Contact Us" page. This is very useful information to help tweak, adjust, and design websites for the best user experience possible.

Lastly, I'd like to comment to those shop owners who think they don't have time for this kind of stuff, this sort of work isn't important, or perhaps you can't afford it. Or maybe you can simply care less, who knows?

Google has multiple YouTube channels, as well as help websites to help anybody learn how to use AdWords, YouTube, or social media to help your business grow. One of the big shifts that Google has made is to start training business owners on how to be able to handle all their online advertising themselves, or have a key employee, wife, secretary, or anybody they trust handle this sort of stuff to where they don't have to pay an alleged "Google Guru" a large monthly sum. Google quickly learned there's a lot of "experts" out there that are giving Google a bad name and Google's way to confront the issue is through education. Here's a Google YouTube channel that Google developed strictly to teach business owners (and consultants) how to start using AdWords and develop an ad campaign:

https://www.youtube.com/user/learnwithgoogle

You can also easily learn Google Analytics by watching short courses which are usually 10-20 videos of only about 2 to 4 minutes in length each with a short quiz at the end. If you pass the quiz at the end of a course, you receive a Certificate of Completion. Here's the 1st of a 16 video playlist for Google Analytics that gives a brief overview of the course:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQFJ4fP1E7o&list=PLI5YfMzCfRtZmnYo8IWIXlI90EqJoJuKU&index=1

When you wished you had that 1 extra transmission job a week, or perhaps 2, think online advertising. And after you get your Google Adwords campaign(s) working, Bing/Yahoo conveniently have an import utility so that you can import everything out of Google Adwords and into MSN so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel all over again by designing a new Bing/Yahoo advertising campaign from scratch.

If you can read a manual or watch a video to help you learn how to fix a transmission, you can do the same to learn how to be at the very top of all the search engines in your market area like we are and have the phone ring! Soon, your mouse will become Like A Switch On The Phone To Make It Ring

If an old burned out transmission builder can do it, anybody can do it.

Larry Bloodworth, CMAT Certified Transmissions Draper, Utah 84020 523-1313 http://CertifiedTrans.com Check out our YouTube channel and Google+ page links on our website!

Larry from Utah

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