It’s been a while since I’ve done an update due to how insane the world is these days. Today, I’m going to cover 3 items.

• • Advanced Google Ads Workshop updates
• • Writing Compelling PPC Ads during the Virus
• • Google Ads Audit Availability

Google Ads Workshop Updates

Due to the virus, we’ve had to cancel many of the Google Ads workshops this year. We ran one at SMX West before the virus was widespread, and another virtual workshop in London.

One of the primary issues of a virtual workshop is attention span. The workshops usually run from 9am-5pm with some breaks, and the conversation often goes until 6pm. While that type of attention span can be given in-person, it’s not realistic in a virtual environment where you don’t have all the non-verbal communication and small random conversations (not to mention the distractions of people in the house or pinging you on the computer) to make the day flow easily for everyone.

As we couldn’t do an in-person workshop in London, we decided to break the workshop up into two pieces.

• • 5.5 hours of virtual instruction
• • 40 minutes of pre-recorded video

By having some of the instruction live, everyone could ask questions and conversations could take place to ensure everyone’s top questions were answered. In order to ensure that we covered all of the topics, I recorded 2 videos that can be watched on-demand for the sections we couldn’t get to during our virtual conversation. This hybrid approach worked well, and the feedback was excellent.

For the Munich workshop, taking place on September 3, we’re going to do something similar. The workshop will run from 12p-5:30p Munich time (6am to 11:30am ET), and we’ll cover some sections virtually, and others will be recorded for you to watch on-demand. Here’s the section breakdown:

• • The Buyer Journey (virtual)
• • Comprehensive Keyword Usage & Organization (virtual)
• • Everything You Need to Know About Creating & Testing Amazing Ads (virtual)
• • Audience Targeting Strategies (virtual)
• • Competitive Analysis (recorded)
• • Diagnosing Data Changes (recorded)

As always, attendees will also receive:

• • A copy of the full deck
• • Several Data Studio templates to help analyze your account or are complementary to the workshop data analysis
• • Some Excel templates for examining Quality Scores

We are hoping to return to in-person events April/June 2021 at an SMX in the US (which could be San Jose, New York, or Seattle, depending if SMX East, SMX West, or SMX Advanced is the first US show to launch).

If you’d like to join us for the SMX Munich workshop, you can view the workshop details and registration here.

Writing Compelling PPC Ads during the Virus

As I look around the industry, the ads are falling short of what searchers need these days. From ignoring safety to business changes to just forgetting about old sitelinks, most ads are not very compelling, and this is causing accounts to do worse than they should even during the economic downturns.

I did a virtual keynote for the Google Marketing Conference on PPC messaging throughout the virus. I cut down the length to distill the parts to what you really need to know and recorded a video on how to create and test ads during the virus.

This will be posted to the Adalysis Blog (along with the full text so you can also read it), shortly. If you don’t subscribe to the Adalysis blog (where I’m the primary writer sharing insights into PPC management as well as insights into Adalysis ), you can easily subscribe here.

I’d recommend everyone watch that video as it should give you a lot of insights into looking at ad trends and creating ads in the current environment.

Google Ads Audit Updates

I do many Google Ads audits each year (usually 25-50 page evaluations of an account or video reviews), and there’s often a 3-6 month wait time before I can audit your account. As I’m in the longest non-plane travel stretch since 2005 (the longest I had gone from January 2005 to February 2020 without being on a plane was 6 weeks, and there was never a month where I didn’t travel at least once), I’m much more caught up on audits than usual.

It’s currently taking 3-6 weeks from booking an audit to completion. If you are interested in getting your Google Ads account audited, you can see the process and book them online.

Stay Safe

Thanks for everyone’s support during this crazy period of time. I hope you’re all staying safe, learning to work from home, and enjoying new hobbies besides Netflix