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I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Goodman, who many consider to be a leading expert in the search engine marketing industry (especially Google Adwords). He is also going to be speaking at the Future of Online Advertising Conference as well as Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo. He is the founder of Page Zero, a marketing company that focuses on maximizing client results from paid search campaign, co-founder of Traffick, and author of Winning Results with Google AdWords.
I couldnt find a lot of information about you prior to Traffick, so can you tell me a little bit about that?
I just tried my name on Google Scholar, and it’s proof that I never got very far in my academic career and hadn’t yet published anything. But from 1991-98 I was dividing my time between a Ph.D, starving, teaching at the university level (courses in public policy, political theory, etc.), and doing other things to keep myself interested and fed. Some of those things involved dabbling in Internet business ideas. My studies in Political Science seem to have no direct applicability to the online business realm, but in some ways they do. Much of today’s Internet activity is about empowerment and participation (look at Wikipedia, you name it). My specialty being contemporary democratic philosophy (in part, different models of citizen participation in the policy process), I had given these things a lot of thought. No doubt too much! It seems it was much easier for Page and Brin to say “a link is like a vote” and make a few billion bucks. But I’m sure it wasn’t as easy as it looked. 
Do you have a formal degree and if so, where from and in what? What did you think you would be doing when (if) you graduated from college?
I have an M.A. in Political Science from York University, Toronto. I received and sent my first email in 1988, from/to Prof. Joe Fletcher, in my undergrad program in Political Science at the University of Toronto ( B.A., 1989). The idea of email then was we needed it to communicate serious information when we were in “the lab” - in this case a statistics lab running our own survey research experiments. The big debate in attitude research circles then was whether the interest in the environment was just a yuppie “fad,” and whether it would die down again as people refocused on getting ahead economically. That proved true; the flareup of environmentalism did fade and only returned as a permanent fixture in political discourse a couple of years ago.
The summer after graduating I had already made up my mind not to go to law school, because the professors hinted grad school might be a better option. Along with working a couple of jobs that summer (one of which paid room and board and allowed me to hang out with a really funny dude, Tim Long, who went on to be a top writer on The Simpsons), I read John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice for kicks. This began a long period of reading dust-dry philosophy, and academic commentaries on said philosophy, day and night. So I went off to York U. where I nearly finished a PhD. and met some very interesting people along the way. The fact of the matter is, in 1990 that was pretty much the most interesting thing to be doing. It wasn’t like I could have gone off and worked for Amazon, or Google, or a search marketing company. So, I thought I was going to be a professor. Maybe the reason I gave up is because I can’t grow a good beard.
How did you get into adwords?
Long story short, I tried it for a few friends and noticed that it was totally a wide-open, you-can-totally-win-at-this-game, sort of phenomenon. I got in a few arguments with people who couldn’t make it work for them and before long I had written a short how-to which morphed into a longer how-to, which I began selling. I told a friend, Bill Martin of Raging Bull fame, that I hoped to sell 100-200 copies, just seeing if I would get my feet wet etc. He said “I think you’re going to sell a lot more than that.” He was right.
One of my favorite keywords then was in fact using a commonly-mistyped domain name as a keyword. My client/friend was getting like 1,000 clicks a day for .05 on this keyword, and no one else had thought of it. There was no keyword research tool in Google, remember, and no keyword research tool at the time had even considered recommending domain names as keywords. I was totally coming up with stuff I pulled out of my ass, and it worked. This is how people should break into a new career!
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In about the same place, only more so. In other words, growing whatever businesses I am a part of, steadily and innovatively. I’m involved with several ventures right now, though my primary activity is for clients at Page Zero Media. I hope the repeat business we’ve enjoyed is still a part of the mix in 5 years.
What was the biggest challenge you had to overcome when starting out in search marketing?
(1) Finding clients. (2) Finding good clients. That became a lot easier over time. It was harder for everyone then, because the field was still so full of liars, and no one wanted to do anything to measure results. A lot of firms wanted to sell “pure alchemy” - don’t talk at all about the merits of the site or the company, we’ll just rocket you up to the top of the results if you pay us $1,000 (+++) a month. And the “top of the results” probably meant #1 rankings on never-searched phrases like “toledo galvanized canary fenceposts”.
Some clients will still seek/buy that type of thing, but there is much more room for a mature, comprehensive discussion of how to move the online marketing effort forward, because both clients and outside specialists have a lot more background in what makes search special.
What have you learned over the years (words of advice)?
Small is still beautiful - in that small teams can be very productive.
Our instincts were right: you *can* build a company or run a project with free or cheap collaboration tools. This stuff was mostly available to some degree in 2000 - it’s just now with so-called Web 2.0, it’s better, faster, cheaper, and better-publicized. So don’t worry too much about which exact tools you use - get working. In a small team, debate your ideas and push out new products and services, or just content.
I probably also learned that you need to know the difference between boldness and gambling based on greed.
It’s about execution, not ideas. So by all means buy that $10 domain name for your idea, but don’t burn $10,000 on the name just because you’re excited one day.
Are you currently working on any new websites, ebooks, or other projects?
Currently I’m involved with HomeStars (www.homestars.ca), a site that focuses on homeowner reviews of home renovators, retailers, repairmen, etc. We’re rolling out to new cities shortly with a new version of the site (not that first-gen one you’re seeing). And you don’t want to know what we had to pay for the .com!
I’m working on edition 2 of Winning Results with Google AdWords.
And my company, Page Zero, is innovating service-wise. We continue to offer core services on paid search campaign management, but we’re doing more things like multivariate landing page testing.
I’m Chairman of Search Engine Strategies Toronto, upcoming June 12-13, 2007. It promises to be the biggest and best Canadian search engine conference to date. (There have been three SES’s in Toronto so far - until this year, none in the beautiful month of June!)
Can you tell me more about yourself? Anything else you think is relevant?
…people change, tastes change. Never write ads or do anything for that matter based on your own prejudices. Empathize. And test, test, test.
Read Seth Godin’s past seven books. Read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark by the Eisenbergs. And of course don’t hesitate to reserve your copy of Winning Results with Google AdWords (2nd ed.) - it’s already available for buying way too far in advance, on Amazon.com.
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