I interviewed Kyle Sulerud, creator of the AdLeg Software Suite about how he started in Google Ads (AdWords) and why he built the software.
The AdLeg Software Suite comprises five tools that'll speed up your work creating Google Ads campaigns and later managing them. They are ...
Keyword Burst. Enter the basic keywords and locations you want to target. Keyword Burst will give you a full ad group spreadsheet to copy & paste into your campaign!
Ad Copy Generator. Answer some questions about your product or service, and Ad Copy Generator will pump out a long list of headlines, descriptions, sitelinks, and callout extensions for you to use in your ads.
Negative Keyword Pro. Enter a keyword and you'll get hundreds of negative keyword ideas based on actual user searches.
Negative Keyword Pro Elite. Dig deep into your search term data to find specific words that are wasting money.
Amazing Keyword Generator. Tap into hordes of predictive search results from Google, Amazon, and YouTube. See what people are searching for, and make sure you don't miss any valuable keywords. (Also works great for content ideas!)
The suite (all five programs) is currently priced at $49 per month. Register here.
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Kyle Sulerud: I've kind of dabbled throughout my life in different business pursuits. The last thing I was doing before this, before Google Ads was running a junk removal company. I wasn't really in the junk removal business, I was in the marketing business. Once I realized that and really dug into marketing and how do I get more customers and enough customers to really sustain this business, how do I get enough customers to do that? That of course led me to Google Ads as one of the main things I was doing to get customers.
Peter Bowen: Okay.
Kyle Sulerud: What I also realized at that point was I really liked the marketing business a lot more than I liked the junk removal business.
Peter Bowen: Yeah, okay.
Kyle Sulerud: It didn't pain me at all to stop hauling moldy freezers. I don't miss that at all. Once I developed some competence with my own campaigns, which was enough to, we expanded to a second city, but we had kind of hit the limit as far as I was concerned. The only way to keep growing was to keep opening new locations, which I didn't want to do.
Kyle Sulerud: I just slowly transitioned into doing Google Ads, which was called AdWords at the time of course, just doing that, just helping out some people I knew with that, and just slowly got into that way. Started getting some referrals, started putting myself out there some more. I realized that even though I hadn't gone to school, I don't think you can go to school for Google Ads, but-
Peter Bowen: Not yet. Obviously, Google's got their own training programs, but really that's about it.
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. I hadn't worked for an agency or anything like that. I was completely self taught. I still realized that I knew more than almost anyone, especially more than any other business owner. I felt more and more confident to do this. Once I was able to survive just on this, just on Google Ads, it kind of pushed the junk removal thing to the side-
Peter Bowen: Okay, no more moldy freezers.
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. I've continued to grow from there.
Kyle Sulerud: Also, pretty early on, then I started looking at how I can make things more efficient, and how I can do things other people aren't doing that'll give me an advantage. That's when I wanted to start developing some software.
Kyle Sulerud: The one I'm going to show you today specifically, this was the very first tool that I developed. It kind of came out of a system I had of doing the same thing very, very manually, it took a long time, and I wanted to put that into a push button program. I knew it was probably possible, so I found the right developer, gave them the right instructions, and it came to be.
Peter Bowen: Okay. That's the Negative Keyword Pro that you're going to show us today?
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah.
Peter Bowen: Now, that's not the only software product that you have?
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. Since then, I've continued to develop more software to make things easier on myself. Really, that's where all this started, was just for myself originally. I never really had plans to release to anybody else. I have four other programs, and they're all available together in a software suite. At this point, there's five different programs. They each serve a very specific but very valuable purpose.
Peter Bowen: Why don't you give us a quick breakdown of that? Then what I'll do is I will link to your website where you've got a list of all of those. The first one is Keyword Burst?
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. Keyword Burst basically enables you to take a core list of keywords, and then take a list of locations that you're targeting, and then it combines them all together. It's like an explosion, a burst of keywords, right?
Peter Bowen: Hence the name. That makes sense.
Kyle Sulerud: It takes all the different combinations using the locations and the keywords you've selected, puts them into ad groups, so instead of just maybe one keyword in an ad group, you might have 100, but essentially they're all different variations of that same keyword. That allows you to get really specific with your bidding and your targeting without putting in countless hours coming up with all these combinations yourself.
Peter Bowen: I understand exactly what you're saying. That can take hours and hours if you're doing it manually.
Kyle Sulerud: Right. Yeah. Prior to the software, I was doing it with different Excel functions. There's a tip for anyone interested in creating software. Look at what you're doing with Excel, trying to make shortcuts there. A lot of the times, those things make really great pieces of software.
Kyle Sulerud: That's Keyword Burst. Then you can also do things with the different match types. If you only want certain, exact match, if you only want exact matched keywords, it'll do that. It'll give you a sheet of ad groups with only exact match. Or if you want all the match types, or if you just want specific words with the plus sign in front of them for modified broad match, it'll do that. Just take a handful of keywords, and it allows you to pretty much find all the different combinations without doing all that manual research and manual entry.
Peter Bowen: Okay. It sounds like that's the first part of it. The next product is the Ad Copy Generator?
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. This allows you to just input a few simple values, so it'll ask you things about your business or the client business, the types of things that might go into an ad, so like, where's the business located, what are the benefits of contacting this business. It'll just ask simple questions like that. Then it'll take your responses and organize them into ads. It will spit out a long sheet of different ads you can test, headlines, descriptions, site link, and callout extensions. It just saves time, gives you a lot of ideas-
Peter Bowen: Okay, no more writer's block-
Kyle Sulerud: The ads for you. As we've seen, Google isn't very good at writing ads for us yet. You're actually writing the ads, and then the software takes what you've entered and just gives you a lot of different options to test.
Peter Bowen: Okay. That's very interesting, I've done quite a lot of work in that area of autonomically generating ads. That's pretty difficult to do. I think sometime Google's 1000 PhD programmers that they've got working on the system will eventually be able to write good ads, but for the moment, it's a pretty tough thing to do.
Kyle Sulerud: The next software product is Negative Keyword Pro Elite which you're going to demonstrate for us in a few minutes, and then the Amazing Keyword Generator. Why don't you jump across to the Amazing Keyword Generator and we'll circle back and share screens and you can take us through how the Negative Keyword Tool works?
Peter Bowen: Okay.
Kyle Sulerud: Amazing Keyword Generator basically uses predictive search information, Google or Amazon or YouTube, and you can start with just one word, and it'll fill in hundreds of predictive search results, so what are people actually typing in after starting with that word.
Kyle Sulerud: I know there's other software out there that does that kind of thing. This certainly isn't the highlight of my whole software suite, but I wanted to include it because it's nice to have all this in one place. From what I've seen, it does provide more results than any other similar type software I've seen out there. Plus the fact that it gives you results for Google and Amazon and YouTube. That's also very unique to Amazing Keyword Generator, at least from what I've seen from other similar programs out there.
Kyle Sulerud: I'll start with Negative Keyword Pro and then we'll jump from there to Negative Keyword Pro Elite, because that kind of takes Negative Keyword Pro to a whole other level. I'll jump to that, and we'll just talk about that briefly. The main one I wanted to demonstrate was Negative Keyword Pro.
Kyle Sulerud: I just talked about Amazing Keyword Generator and how that taps into all the predictive search results from Google, YouTube, and Amazon. Negative Keyword Pro does the same thing, but rather than just spitting out all those results, what it does is splits it up, and it just isolates the words for you that you might want to add as negative keywords. Let me just show you how it works and you can see what I'm talking about.
Kyle Sulerud: An example I can use that I intend to use a lot is plumber. If I'm setting up a campaign for a plumber, I want to know what are people typing in, into this word plumber when they go to Google. If I don't want to be bidding on those keywords, then I want to be able to add them as a negative keyword, before my ad ever shows up, before I ever see it in the search term report, I want to add that as a negative keyword.
Peter Bowen: Okay. This would be a preemptive list, and you would add this as a list to a campaign or an account wide shared list?
Kyle Sulerud: I'm only doing this during the setup phase of the campaign, and then I don't need to revisit this again. We'll type in plumber, we'll leave it as Google for now, we could change this to Amazon or YouTube, and then get suggestions.
Peter Bowen: Okay. That's pretty quick.
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. That's almost instant. What I'm seeing now are 540 results.
Peter Bowen: Okay.
Kyle Sulerud: If we were to type in plumber, these would be the top predicted results. This is location specific. I'm in North Dakota right now. If I were to type in plumber into Google, Google would pop up that list of suggestions before I'm done typing, this is what it would look like.
Peter Bowen: Okay. This is pulling from the auto suggest data?
Kyle Sulerud: Correct.
Peter Bowen: Okay, great.
Kyle Sulerud: Now you can see this is an extensive list here, 540 results.
Peter Bowen: Yeah. I think I saw the word meme in there. You certainly wouldn't want to be paying anybody to click on ad for a plumber's meme, if you were a plumbing business.
Kyle Sulerud: You can just go down the list and click the words that you don't want.
Peter Bowen: Yeah. Putty. Okay, that makes sense. Tape. All of the things that somebody wanting to do a bit of DIY plumbing would get, rather than someone wanting to hire a plumber.
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah, exactly. Meme. It does take a little while, but it's a lot cheaper than waiting to see all of these after you've paid for them and then add them as a negative keyword.
Peter Bowen: It seems possibly a little more scientific than just downloading a long list of negative keywords, because there are lists of standard negative keywords available, and then just banging that whole lot into a campaign. This is going to show you the kind of things that actual humans are currently searching on Google or Amazon or YouTube-
Peter Bowen: Yeah, exactly. Salary might be a word that's on a long list of negative keywords. Putty probably wouldn't be. You wouldn't see this on any other list. These are all specific to plumbers. You can select the phrase like this, business cards. Or you can just select the word cards. Once you've gone through this and checked all the words you want to exclude, when you scroll back up, you'll see that they're added to a list up here.
Peter Bowen: Got you.
Kyle Sulerud: If you look and you accidentally added something you don't want to, you could remove it.
Peter Bowen: Okay.
Kyle Sulerud: Once they're up here, you just copy, and this'll pop up with all the words-
Peter Bowen: Okay, you've got the individual words as broad match and then you've got the two words as phrase match, exactly how it should be.
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah, exactly.
Peter Bowen: Very good.
Kyle Sulerud: You just highlight all these, copy and paste them into your campaign, and you're done.
Peter Bowen: This grew out of your manual process for doing this?
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah. I was actually going to Google and typing in, I'd type in plumber, and then I'd type in plumber and then the letter A, and then I'd type in plumber-
Peter Bowen: Yeah. The alphabet soup approach I think it's called. This is obviously going to save a load of time over a lifetime of a campaign. You're going to save all the money you would've wasted in a plumber's salary or plumber tape or plumber meme or plumber boots or whatever kind of clicks that you wouldn't notice until you went through the search term report and added those as negatives. It's also going to save you the time and the hassle of doing it the manual way, plumbers A, plumbers B, plumbers C.
Kyle Sulerud: If you're just going to use this for one campaign, this could easily pay for the whole software suite for a whole year. This may seem insignificant, if you're paying $3 or $5 a click, which for plumbers it might be $10 or $15 a click, and you're just going to be seeing these here and there. It might seem insignificant, but it all really adds up. Blocking these ahead of time is huge, especially if you're doing work for client accounts. You're going to be able to get that campaign running a lot more smoothly right away, a lot quicker than if you were to have to add all these words over time and wait for them to show up in the campaign before you actually add them.
Kyle Sulerud: Every three or four dollars that you're saving on a wasted click is money that could be spent on a click from a potential customer.
Kyle Sulerud: Real quick, I'll show you the Amazon results. As you might imagine, these'll be a lot more eCommerce related.
Kyle Sulerud: You can see it's a whole different set of results here, if we're looking on Amazon. If we look on YouTube, it's going to be another whole different set of results.
Peter Bowen: What does the whole suite cost?
Kyle Sulerud: The whole suite is $49 per month. That gives you unlimited access to all the tools. I can touch on Negative Keyword Pro Elite a little bit.
Peter Bowen: Yeah, please. I took a look at the demo video a couple of days ago, and I've done some work in this field. I kind of see what you've done, and I think you've handled it really nicely. Why don't you dive into that? The Negative Keyword Pro Elite is what you would use while you were running a campaign. Negative Keyword Pro at the setup stage, and then Negative Keyword Pro Elite, that's a bit of a mouthful, ongoing as you would use it every week, every month depending on how busy your campaign was.
Kyle Sulerud: Yeah, exactly. I'm not going to demo that here, but like you said, there's a demo on my website, so anyone can go there to the link you're going to provide, and you can see all of the software demonstrated. Basically what the Elite software does, is it actually links directly to your Google Ads account, it links into the search term data in your account.
Kyle Sulerud: What happens with your search terms is you're looking through them, you can see sometimes very obviously that you need to add a negative keyword here. Sometimes it's not so obvious. There might be a word that's kind of questionable, and it's just showing up in your search terms once in a while, and you don't really know how it's doing. Maybe the word is reviews, for example. Should we be paying for searches for reviews, or shouldn't we?
Kyle Sulerud: Well, it can be hard sometimes because there might be 100 different search terms that include the word reviews, and there's not enough data for any one of them to really tell you is this word converting or isn't it.
Peter Bowen: Yeah, especially if it's only popping up once or twice every month.
Kyle Sulerud: Right. Negative Keyword Pro Elite solves this problem. What it does is it takes all the individual words that are in your search report and combines the data. Anytime the word reviews comes up, it will take the data from that, so the impressions and the clicks and the conversions, it'll combine that together, so now you have a direct view into how that word is performing. Even though it might be 100 different search terms, now we're just able to look at that as an isolated word. For every search term this appears for, even though it's 100 different times, I'm able to see, okay, if the word reviews is included in a search term, we're paying twice the average cost per conversion as everything else, so maybe I want to exclude that word.
Peter Bowen: That's really useful for narrowing down on things that you wouldn't see otherwise, just by looking at a months worth of data or a weeks worth of data in the search query report. The demo video that you've got on the site is pretty clear on how that works. I thought that was really nicely done.
Kyle Sulerud: You don't have to know which words are questionable. The software tells you which words that you're paying too much for. It'll tell you exactly, this word you've never had a conversion for, you've spent this amount of money, or this word you're just paying too high per conversion. It tells you that. You don't have to even know what you're looking for, it'll tell you.
Kyle Sulerud: There's no commitment here, it's just a month-to-month software. There's not much harm in trying it out just for at least a month to see how it's going to benefit you.
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