David Steiner

Google Ads For Schools: The Path To More Students

Paid Ads Product Manager, Oozle Media

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Chris:

A soon to be first-time father, everybody give him a congrats in the comments. First-time father coming up soon, David is, it says on here, David is in need of a decent haircut. I will disagree with that. I think it looks perfect. I’m jealous. I’ve never had my hair long and I don’t think I can pull that off if I ever wanted to, but uh, Steiner! What are we, what, what are we expecting? A boy, a girl, twins?

Dave:

Yeah, we just had, we just passed 20 weeks, I think last week. So we found out it’s a boy.

Chris:

All right. Awesome. Congrats, man. Well, you, if you manage your fatherhood, like you do PPC campaigns, you’re going to be successful.

Dave:

I hope so, I’ll do my best.

Chris

K, man. Well, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Dave:

Cool. So let me just share my slides here and yeah. So welcome to this session. Like Chris mentioned, this is a Google ads for schools. I’m Dave, as he said, I’m the product manager of our paid ads here at Oozle. I’ve been here for a few years now and I’ve been specializing in running PPC ads specifically on Google for beauty schools.

So I’ve got a bit of experience on what works in the beauty industry with schools, and I’m excited to share whatever insight I can with you today about that. I know that, oh, let’s see where my slides, there we go. So I know that Google can be sort of intimidating sometimes for a lot of people, but the goal of this session is to be able to give you a clear path on what it looks like to get to success through Google ads.

And the steps that we’re going to go through are applicable to a variety of different schools in different positions, right?

• If you’re a school that’s never run any ads before at all, and would like to start
• If you’re a school who is maybe new on Google ads and it’s run a little bit, wants to make sure they’re on the right path.
• If you’re a school who maybe already has an agency helping them run their paid ads efforts, but you want to make sure that they’re taking you off in the right direction

This is going to be the session for you.

Hopefully, we can provide for you what a good roadmap looks like to success on Google ads. Hopefully you’ve already got the understanding that when you run Google ads, that helps you get more students and that those students bring in the revenue that will give you the ability to fuel your future growth efforts.

Parker kind of touched on this in his session a few minutes ago, but if you didn’t think of it that way before, now, you do. Google ads is a really good way to start kind of as the catalyst to fuel your growth efforts. And so we’re going to show you the process has worked for us time and time again for a lot of our clients in the beauty education industry.

Budget

But, first things first I would be remiss if I didn’t say you’re going to need a budget for your ads. It takes money to make money in the marketing world. I think Parker said that earlier as well. If you want to a good estimate of the budget that you’ll need, this is a screenshot of a tool that we’ve built, a calculator we’ve built, on loads of data and experience in this beauty industry to help get realistic expectations for the budget that you’ll need to get the results you’re looking for.

It takes into account your goals, your enrollment rates, and your market. It’s been built for schools of all sorts of sizes. So if you want to try testing it out, get in touch with us we can help you use it. Either way, whether you use this calculator or your own version, if your budget is around a $1,000 or $1,500 a month or less, you may not be ready yet for an agency. But if your budget is higher than that, then you definitely should consider getting the help of an agency with expertise with Google ads to help you be able to manage that budget efficiently.

So here are the steps that we’re going to go through. There are five of them, but before we go through each one, one by one, I want to talk a little bit about the logic that goes into this.

A successful PPC strategy starts at the bottom of the funnel. The reason for this is that the people at the bottom of the funnel, or those who are ready to take action and starting with that group is where you’re going to get the best ROI.

So each step up from there that we’ll go through is going to require a little bit more budget. It’s going to increase your audience and expand your reach. But starting at the bottom is how you’re going to make the most revenue right off the bat. That’s the thing that’s going to get most students in most quickly and, and give you the momentum you need to get up to the next level.

So then, you know, you’ll follow the process. You’ll keep expanding, you’ll work your way all the way to the top of the funnel until you physically just can’t hold any new students in your building, or your waitlist is too long, or you reached the limit of what you’re willing to pay for an additional lead.

I’ve included a little key that kind of looks like this in the corner of my slides here as we’re going through, to give us, or to help keep track of the part of the funnel that we’re talking about. But like I said, most of the time, it makes sense for marketers to start out at the bottom of the funnel, with the lowest hanging fruit. And those are the people who are ready to take action and just need to know how and where, and that is where our path begins.

Step 1: High-Intent Search

So I want to think about this in terms of the actual users. So let’s consider this user named Pam. Pam is interested in a cosmetology course, and Pam even knows that the course she’s looking for is offered at your school. So Pam goes to Google. She types in your school’s name, cosmetology course, using your own brand name as a keyword is going to ensure that your ad shows up when Pam enters in that search. And it gives her a better chance of getting to your website to become your lead.

Some people wonder why they might have to bid on their own school’s name or their own brand name as a keyword if they already rank for it organically. It’s a question that we get a lot from a lot of our clients, but there are two big reasons for this:

1. Brand authority. So if you’re showing up on the search results page, as an ad and organically, it gives your brand name a greater sense of authority. It can also drive more traffic together. Then you might get from either organic results or ad results alone.
2. To protect your brand. This is because in a competitive market, it’s common-practice for competitors to bid on each other’s brand names.

So if someone else’s ad shows up when Pam conducts this search with your brand name, she could end up at a different school than yours, at a competitor school. So bidding on your own brand name will help prevent competitors from redirecting Pam away from your website.

It’s also very inexpensive to bid on your own brand terms because in Google’s eyes, you’re going to be the most relevant site for that keyword. And you’re going to outrank everybody every time. And it’s going to be really inexpensive to do so.

So still on step one, part two, let’s consider another user. This is Angela. Angela is interested in beauty school, but she doesn’t know your school’s name. So Angela goes into Google and she types in “beauty school near me”.

Having campaigns set up around keywords like these other options that Angela could have typed in, is another real, relatively inexpensive way to get Angela to your website, even though she didn’t know about your school before she conducted her search. She was already showing pretty high intent to convert. So she’s at the bottom part of the funnel. And now it’s up to your search ad to deliver the right message to her so that she can click on it, visit your site, and become your lead.

So that’s what search ads are really good for, showing up for the person who has made the physical effort to go type in the thing that you’re offering. And that’s step one, branded keywords and high intent search keywords.

If you start out with a combination of these two things, you’ll be off to a really good start.

And this is, if you’re a small school, this is where you can easily compete with other larger schools, because you didn’t have to invest any additional money at this point to get either Pam or Angela to this point in their journey.

All you had to do was show up when they were ready to take action. So that’s at the right time with the right message. And once you’ve got these lower funnel campaigns set up, you’ll be ready for the next step, which is remarketing.

Step 2: Remarketing and Display

There it goes. So let’s consider another user here. This is Andy. He’s been to your site already. He’s learned a bit about what you have to offer, but for one reason or another, he wasn’t ready for the commitment of filling out a form, or maybe he got distracted while he was on your site. And he left and went somewhere else.

So, remarketing refers to specifically targeting users like Andy, who’ve already been to pages on your website. Remarketing audiences are considered to be pretty low in the funnel and often just need a little push or a little reminder to get them to come back and become a real lead. So you can start this step really as early on as you’d like, but we typically regard it as step two, because if you’re new to Google ads, you need to wait at least long enough to build that audience that you can re-market to.

Google requires an audience to have at least a thousand people in it in order to target them on search, but it only needs a hundred people in order to serve them display ads like the one shown here.

If you’re not familiar with display ads, these are the little banners and images that pop up when you’re visiting other websites like food blogs, or news websites, or things like that. Unlike search ads, which are essentially using keywords as their targeting, display ads are using audiences.

So, to make sure that Andy is getting an ad to keep your school top of mind for him, reminding him to go back and fill out the form and become a lead, you can target him with a remarketing audience and a display campaign.

It might be just what he needs to come back and fill out that form. If you’re not showing up for him at this stage, when he’s already shown interest in your site, you’re leaving a window open for a competitor to come in and capture his attention. And again, that could ultimately take him to their school.

So, that’s step two. We’ve now set up search ads and some display ads, and we’ve moved a little bit of the way up the funnel. So now we’re ready for step three. And this is when we get into sort of the mid funnel.

Step 3: Mid-Funnel Display and YouTube

So we’ll take another look at a user. This is Kelly. Kelly wants to attend a beauty school, and she’s even made a few Google searches that are related to that goal. She’s checked out a few different websites, but she hasn’t interacted with your school at all. So, she doesn’t know about your brand, hasn’t been to your website, she’s not in your remarketing audience.

But, we can target users like Kelly with display and YouTube ads. But because she’s not in your remarketing audience, again, she hasn’t been to your site, we’ll need to use a couple of different audiences to make sure that she can see an ad.

The audiences that we can use here are known as “similar to audiences” and “in market audiences”.

In Google ads, you can create, it’s also known sometimes as a lookalike audience, you can create an audience that’s similar to your remarketing audience. So this list will now include people who haven’t necessarily been to your site, but fit criteria that make them similar to those who have. So it’s another, it’s a really good audience to use for that stage.

“In-market audiences” are our other option. And these are users that Google has already grouped together in the Google ads platform based on different behavioral patterns and signals like sites they visited, videos they’ve watched, searches they’ve made, Google’s keeping pretty good tabs on everybody. And they’ve created a list already in Google, for people who are in-market for cosmetology education and training, that’s something that’s already there.

So if you’re not utilizing that you ought to be at this point. These are really good audiences to use at this layer of the funnel where Kelly is, who isn’t familiar with your brand, hasn’t been to your site, but once she sees your ads, she’ll know who to search for when the time comes.

So I did mention YouTube at this stage, typically it’s at this step that we like to add in YouTube to our strategy, just because it requires that additional creative of having a video.

That being said, if you’ve got video and you want to use it earlier on, you can add it in step two if you’d like.

But once you’ve got video ads, whenever you decide to add them, you can also target the same audiences with video that you can with display. So you can make sure to target them with remarketing audience, just to give you another touch point to that user, and make sure that you’re showing up for them in all the available places.

So, okay, now we’ve got search ads, display ads, and YouTube ads. These are all the basic formats and we have them up and running. This means that we’re now ready for step four.

Step 4: Expand and Optimize

Step four is to expand and optimize. So at this point, like I mentioned, we’ve laid a good base of people for people at different stages of their journey to find us and start their journey toward becoming a student.

So, now it’s time to take a step back and optimize the efforts that we’ve made this far. By now we’ve likely gathered enough data in the account over the first few months to be able to streamline the campaign in various ways.

And this is a topic we could spend an entire session dedicated to just on this slide, for example. This is a continuous process of collecting data, adjusting, optimizing, gathering more data, testing that data, assessing the tests, readjusting, re-optimizing, and just continuously repeating that process.

These are some of the other efforts that you can make in that process, adjusting your budgets, your targets, your bidding strategies. At this point, we can even add in remarketing lists for search ads.

Like I mentioned before, they need to have a slightly larger audience than just display ads. So now maybe you’ve gathered enough people in that audience to target them on search, or we can even target our competitors’ brand names, and we can run our own competitive campaign in that way.

But as you do all these things, as you continue to optimize and run more efficiently, you will find yourself at some point up against a bit of a wall. You’ll get to a point where you’re seeing maybe you’re capturing all of the reasonably available demand. Maybe you’re hitting 80% of the impression share with your search campaigns. Or maybe you notice that you try to increase your budgets again, because you’ve seen that increased budgets increase your leads, but this time you increase the budgets and the leads don’t follow.

That would be a good indicator that you’re ready for the next step. Because so far, we’ve been capturing demand, but once all of that demand has been captured, the last step is to generate more demand. This can be done by focusing on the very upper parts of the funnel, which as I mentioned is this last and final step.

Step 5: Upper-Funnel Display and YouTube

So this is our last user. This is Holly. She’s a 24 year old woman who watches a lot of beauty blogs on YouTube. She shops for beauty supplies and she’s considering a career change.

The right message for Holly at this point in her life could be enough to sway her toward a career in the beauty industry. And it could make her consider beauty school. It might even make her consider your beauty school.

Display and YouTube ads work really well for this step because we’re focusing on people who, even though they show somewhat less intent to convert, can still fall into groups represented by your typical student.

So we can serve ads to people like Holly by creating custom audiences around things like keywords and URLs. We can target groups based on their affinity for beauty content or beauty supplies, and we can target them based on their age and gender. So these campaigns, like I mentioned, are generally less likely to immediately convert someone like Holly into a lead.

But when you invest in this group, you’re likely to see an increase in demand months later. And if you follow our process and you’ve optimized and expanded your lower funnel campaigns, that’s when those are going to kick into gear and be able to turn someone like Holly into a real lead.

So here are all the steps again laid out.

As I mentioned, we found them to work time and time again for a lot of the schools that we work with, starting at the bottom to capture the existing demand, building that revenue and reinvesting it to work your way up each additional step. And until you can get to the top and you’re generating demand for your products and for your school.

The timeline that I’ve associated with these is a bit rough. If you invest more right up front, it’ll go quicker. If you have less to invest, it might take a little bit longer. But again, if you’re new to Google ads, this is the path that we recommend implementing.

If you’re already working with an agency, check with them, compare this strategy to the one that they’ve got for you and see if their plan looks something like this.

But from there, all that’s left to do is just test and adjust and optimize, as you continue to gather more data and try to keep up with shifting trends in the marketplace. You can also expand into other avenues we haven’t touched on – social ads or programmatic, hyper-targeted ads, but so… What’s next?

Like I mentioned at the beginning, come up with a budget and come up with a plan based on our steps here. If your budget is less than about a thousand dollars a month, I recommend going ahead and getting started on your own. Open up a Google ads account and put it to the test. If your budget is more than that, you may look to an agency to consider to help you manage that budget.

And I have my email here. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, send me an email. dsteiner@oozlemedia.com

I can talk you through the plan again, or I can take a look at the plan that you’ve created. I can audit your account for you if you’d like, and we can talk about how we might even be able to get you $150 ad credit from Google, towards your ads.

I’ll be happy to talk to any of you about any of this and provide whatever other insights or recommendations that I can. But that is it for me. Chris, I don’t know if we’ve got any other time to go over questions or anything like that, if any came through.

Chris:

Yeah. I mean, if anybody wants to ask a PPC expert, any questions, I think the best way to do that for you is to, at this point, just email you directly. You’ve got that, that email address that Parker just posted, but a lot of good stuff. Steiner, thank you so much.

I know that Steiner very often will get, you know, “read only” access to a school’s Google ads account, does an audit, and provides a lot of good information back to these schools that are interested in our services, but there’s no obligation.

So, I mean, if you want an expert like, like David looking through your stuff, email him, let him know, and we can give you a free audit. If anything, you’ll get some free, valuable information. Everybody in the chat, let David know that you are thankful for his time and congratulate him again on being a father and having the best hair at the conference, at a beauty school conference. But thank you, David. We appreciate it. A great job, man.

David:

Thank you.