John Moran (9:40)
So we're going to start off with kind of a new feeder strategy. So we have a feeder strategy for search, we have a feeder strategy for shopping. The feeder strategy in shopping is actually something that we used Performance Max for with Performance Max's new update that came out in October that said Performance Max is no longer going to compete with Standard Shopping and it's going to allow the campaign that has the better ad rank to go ahead and kind of take control. And so we structure that in a way that Obviously we can have standard shopping be the feeder where Performance Max simply just does the remarketing of it. And it got me kind of thinking. I said what if instead of using it just for shopping, what if we were able to kind of bring this back for search? And so Performance Max for search is when you're not using a feed, when you're using lead generation, Performance Max for search is usually pretty crappy, usually pretty terrible. Usually what ends up happening with Performance Max for search is you get a whole bunch of junk leads. Those junk leads don't actually ever produce anything in terms of good quality kind of performance. And you get a whole bunch of just lackluster performance. It starts to spiral out of control. It starts to spiral out of control. Specifically in the YouTube area. Now most people have not been able to identify why Performance Max for leads for lead generation, why it fails. And we've been actually able to use edge technology into identifying the actual campaign that those spam leads were coming from. And what we found out is that when performance Max has YouTube assets, when it has video assets, when it has something that is able to be produced either from Performance Max itself, Google, which is those AI, or when it actually has video video campaigns that you are able to run on or sorry, video assets you can run on YouTube. YouTube is actually where the spam comes in. And what we identified is the last click kind of referral id which was like mobile yt. I mean the URL was, you could, you could tell it's coming from mobile users from YouTube. And so it got me kind of thinking. So two things have happened. Performance Max kind of deprioritized itself. Google hopefully kind of took his hat off his ass and said hey, you know what? This is not the be all end all performance campaign. It wasn't Performance Max at all. It was performance. Eh, sometimes Performance Min. That's my, my dad joke. So Performance Max has been deprioritized and prior, prior, prior to this it was like the BL end all. If you started something on side on Google Ads and then you launch Performance Max, it's Performance Max's job to go over and overtake everything. And so what happens when you don't use video assets, which is something that you can. Thanks Ollie, if you can hear me, that's awesome. Thank you very much for letting me know. With Performance Max, what if you don't put any sort of video assets in there? What if you don't obviously use a feed so something that is not going to be, you know, getting the, the Shopping. What if we're using this for search? And what if we use OIC only so offline conversion action imports. Can we develop a feeder strategy for search by leveraging now what Performance Max does not do, which is overtake everything? And what if we can also know that the pitfall of Performance Max usually delivering really crappy junk leads is coming from YouTube, which I'll explain here in a moment. Can we develop a feeder strategy using search and Performance Max? So I spent about ten grand last three days and here's what I found. I had this kind of going before and after and so I'll kind of share with you the results of that. But I want to kind of address why Performance Max gets a whole bunch of bad spammy leads. What ends up happening is that because Performance Max is using the area for activity to dictate where it starts to spend more and when it uses the area of activity to identify that, it then starts to push more into that area of activity, hoping and waiting for conversions to come out from it. So it says, hey, I'm starting to get impressions over here. I'm starting to get clicks, I'm starting to get engagement. This looks like it could be good. Let's allocate more ad spend to it. That channel sometimes is YouTube and if you ever had YouTube spam, it's very similar. What ends up happening is you can actually see where your click through rates are like 4 or 5 and 600% or where your views are one view, five clicks, five leads. What ends up happening when you're looking at your YouTube campaigns. And I'll see. Actually, you know what, give me like two seconds. I'm doing this by myself so you're going to have some kind of lulls, but I'm going to share with you an area where I. I'm hoping to find some spam. And you're all going to look at this for the first time with me as I haven't checked this in a couple, couple weeks. So I'm going to see if I can find an account and I know I have an account that runs YouTube at a high level and I'm going to see if I can find some spam because I want you all to see how this actually works. And let me do this. I'm going to share screen here and I'm going to again, I'm a little slower today as I'm by myself. All right, so that should pull up. Cool. Look at this. I know how to do things by myself. It's a miracle. So Check this out. So I want to go into a, let's go into a high, spend kind of a longer time YouTube campaign. So I'm going to go back to June, starting descending in cost, spend about 100. There we go, 115 grand here. Let's do this one. So I spent 115 grand here and then we go into insights reports where ad showed. Go into where ads showed here and then. Yup, I already did it. Drop down by click through rate. Watch this. So you can actually see channel no longer available. This is because of us. What we end up doing is whenever we start to see these areas we report them. And what we, what I mean by report them is you have 18 impressions, 11 views and 127 clicks. No wonder why YouTube removed that channel. That channel is gone now when you look at all of these other ones here and some of them have some kind of weird, weird names. So I'm not going to read them out loud. But when you have one view, one impression, one view and six clicks. Now we use OIC here. So this is how we stop. This is OIC offline importation of conversion actions means that we actually don't import anything unless it's good quality. And you can see there's a lot of spam here. The click through rates are 400%, 500, 600, 700%. That's not possible. I mean it's possible but it's, it's not real. No one's going to be seeing something. One impression, one view and four clicks. So when these, this is where usually your spam comes from and this is usually where the spam comes from in performance max. This whole first page is spam. 50, 50 YouTube channels in spam. Over 200% click the rate. This is very easily identifiable. Now you can already see that I'm not counting these junk leads. That's by design, that's by structure. So this whole, this whole YouTube right now or this whole YouTube live right now could be on how to identify spam inside of YouTube. So if you get nothing else, this is my little side bonus here for you guys. But when you see what you have a singular impression and a singular view. But 100 clicks or seven clicks, this is what happens these channels here and I'm going to call one out because I like to be edgy. So future forecasting group, what may be happening here, what is probably happening here? Maybe not. But what probably is is future forecasting group, the YouTube channel goes and pays click farms and bots to go and visit their YouTube channel, watch an ad, click on the ad and then go convert. And they pay for that because as they get more engagement into their YouTube channel, they get more money per view. Their ad revenue increases as more activity happens. So what do they do they by the activity? Now who's the beneficiary of all this junk shit leads us and our clients and that's what ends up happening. Now in Performance Max, you don't get that, you don't get the issue there. And I'm going to pull that case up here in a moment. You don't get that issue in Performance Max that's easily identifiable. You're just like, well shit, I have 127 spam leads. I don't know where they came from. They just popped up one day. You don't have the ability to look at the where ad showed in the YouTube portion of performance Max, but that's where they come in from. So if you're getting spam from lead generation Performance Max, that is typically where it ends up happening. So try to pull out your video assets to make sure no video assets are being developed there. That's, that's a one thing that could be. I have an 80% success rate with removing spam leads from Performance Max by just removing the video allocation video assets and making sure that your AI generated videos are not being created or if they do make sure you remove them. That should come, that should complete the spam issue. So now that we have a few things, we know that OIC will not send YouTube portion performance max down the wrong area because if they're not quality, they don't get imported. Google doesn't see them as a signal and they don't just get continually, continually spammed. So when remove the videos then, sorry oic then when you remove the videos that stops that channel. So we thought, okay, can we develop a feeder strategy for search using Performance Max and can this start to work? So here's my next, here's my case study. And this is kind of a two part case study. It came up, kind of came about just from the natural progression of what we're trying to do. And I'll take you back a little bit at the beginning. This one campaign here called Roas Hub has a lot 18 ad groups. These all used to be individual campaigns. The problem is Google in its infinite wisdom got rid of Frase Exact Match and turned everything into kind of like semi broad everywhere. Which now means that none of these campaigns can actually do keyword filtering and push the Right keywords to the right third party school that ends up buying our leads. So this is a campaign that we end up generating leads of adults with a high school degree with no college experience that want to go to college. Fairly niche. So we need to make sure that these leads are sold before we tell Google good job, give me more. Especially in performance max. This would be the immediate death of us if we did this on performance max without these two steps, the YouTube and the OIC. But now that we've combined all of our multiple search campaigns into one big search campaign, separated them out by ad group, our normal thing still applies. We still and you can even see conflicting nail keywords. This is what we're trying to solve for but now we can actually kind of like push and pull activity in and out of the campaigns by a target roas goal by the ad group but still give this 25 grand a day and try to get this thing up to them. A nice $25,000 per day in ad spend. It's fairly good, sizable account, fairly sizable campaign for sure. Like this is not a small thing. This is what we're trying to get up to. I mean if we can get up to 100, 200K a day. Excellent. So as we started to produce this, these new campaigns, I said what if we did this? And I made another little small change. So it's just if I refresh, this may even just go back to being eligible. I'm not sure. I made the change kind of like an hour ago. So I'm just waiting for this thing to come back. Well, so it's not come back yet. So we'll kind of continue moving forward but I'll still show everything. So inside the search campaign we have 25,000 doll a day that last three days spent ten grand. We can see this kind of ramping up. At the same time I have a PMAX campaign that is going to the same pages as the same page as the this campaign is here and what it's doing is going to be remarketing all the people that are bringing in for search. So again feeder strategy but the same feeder strategy applies my main campaign with direct response inbound search that can be scaled is primary, that's nine GS. My secondary campaign is lower CPC, higher TROAs. And can I get this to bring up the overall activity of my main campaign which is this one over here. So I need to solve for two things. I need scale, I need a mini funnel and search. Feeder won't do that. Remember feeder strategy on Search is max clicks, troas one feeds the other good to go. What about the people that don't convert and don't research come back into the Google fold and search the brand name. If that doesn't happen, how do we get the, how do we capture those people? And that's why, that's where my performance max come in. Because we have no meta, we have just Google. That's it for this entire company. So what we did is launched a performance max campaign that have the asset group that is very similar to the search campaign. So I'll share with you the signals, I'll share with you the assets. But what this does is this is actually the same headlines, the same URL, all this stuff here I was not. And I'm, I'm literally typing in like long headlines A so I don't get long headlines and I, I don't jump into Gmail. So I'm actually purposely like putting an A so that hopefully it doesn't get any more engagement out of this. I'm using some images, I'm using obviously the business name. I have a logo. No video though. It's very important. No video and an automated call to action. I'm just using this right now to see can I start to identify more people with inside of the search network to come in but also on display for doing remarketing. I don't really care about YouTube, I really don't care about Gmail and Discover, but hopefully I can see some good remarketing from this and see how this is going to start to grow. So what's nice about this is this campaign is actually starting to spend now and the main search campaign, this is what I want this to get to is I need this to start to hit goal and I need this to scale and I needed the performance Max campaign to do so because we've been trying for weeks and we have not been able to get this campaign or this, this company to really scale up. Not anything that's more consistent. And we need to get this to an area where we can continually grow so that negative keywords aren't an issue. Keyword sculpting is not an issue. We can control the ad spend with all of the campaigns. So if they overlap, that's fine. It's still sharing one big ad spend. But it's not say, well, that campaign is now going down because this campaign is going up. So it's wishy washy and everything's kind of switching back and forth. Everything's sharing one big campaign is Growing all the small ones and I got a, a bolt on P max. So what's interesting is the cost actually went down in PMAX from 721 down to 110 now. The cost for conversion also dropped, but the ROAS has started to go up, the conversion rate has started to go up and the conversions are not actually really going down by too much. It's actually just kind of like holding tight here. But I'm getting a lot more engagement. And so when I'm looking at the difference between these two, I'm hoping that this 200t row as it started off with a high spend and crashed down is and then is going to start to ramp up a bit, can start to have a good top line performance. And I think it's starting to because whenever I see this start to spike up whenever I see in feeder strategy a performance max working better, the standard shopping campaign blows to the moon. And that's what I want. I want the standard shopping campaign to hit goal with split attribution and then go up to the essentially keep going up to the moon. So this campaign spent 215 more. So we went from 2,900 bucks to $9,100. Cost per conversion in the main campaign dropped 21, which is really good because this one dropped 84% which actually dropped, brought down my entire account by 40%. Excellent. So I spent $2,500 less. Again, we're ramping this up and it's only the last couple days. So spent 2500 bucks less. But my CPA went 40% down in app, which is good. And I say in app because I'm, I'm okay with this because it's all oic. This is actual stuff that we have imported saying that yes, I generated a lead, we sold it to the school, the school paid us money and then we imported that paid money back into Google Ads. So this is not spec live or this is actual. No, this is the actual top line cost because it's only OIC now the ROAS is up 63% in the account and 51% between these two, which is really good. This is starting to head in the right direction. We're purposely skewing the actual revenue down inside of Google Ads because this account historically never really got above 90. So we actually once we hit it to 110 and 120, we just took 20 out. So if we actually make 100 bucks, we send 80 to Google. I don't know why Google really likes just hitting 1X. So we're like, well, let's just fluff it. So if it makes 150, take out 50 makes 200, take out 100. Just tell Google that we can never get over 100 at a scale. So that was something that worked really, really, really well. We actually remove some value in the attribution pre sending it through oic so when it pops up we kind of hit goal and. But it's actually 20% higher than what we see. So this is actually 104%. Anything over 100% is just pure profit and we're going to get this thing up to 25 grand a day and we just weren't able to get it there. But the conversion rate going up from 0.45 to 3.27 or 1.23 in the account up to 3.12. That is huge. That is huge. The account, not just these two campaigns, the entire account is up 154%. Good, that's what we want. Our CPCs are up 55% and are up 382% between the two. Yes, this is PMAX Hub. What's funny is when it first started off was doing just remarketing. Now you can kind of see this hopping into search. Performance Max is still going to try to overtake search. Fine, I'm okay. If you can get a better ROAS and go into search the CPCs. The reason why we really couldn't get over 100% ROAS is because the CPCs were massive. And so hopefully if I can do a little bit of remarketing plus a bit of secondary click and conversion through like basically an rlsa which is what Performance Max likes to do by choice. Anyway, I can get the CPCS down globally, so it's up here, but it's not down there yet. So that's what we're going to be waiting to see is will Performance Max split search and split display? Will it remarket and will it get really high value clicks but at a better return on Aspen that also allows this to scale up. So it's, it's pretty interesting. Conversion rate when it went from display to search went from 0.03 to 2.27 but it's spending less CPC so it's actually coming out better. So Performance Max is actually starting to work kind of well. It is really interesting to see how this works. You can even see the impressions like 685,000. Okay, fine, down to 2800 like it. As soon as I started to push on search and as soon as it started to perform better. Performance Max did what? I'm going to try to do that too. So it's almost like still trying to overtake, still trying to follow. It's just not able to do that. One, obviously because we have such crazy budgets, $25,000 a day versus 650. But two, my T row ads targets are higher. So I'm purposely trying to make it a lower ad rank. Lower ad rank, usually lower cpc when you want a more profit, it can't spend higher cpc. So it's pushing ad rank down on purpose, which is forcing it cheaper CPCs, but also following it because it's usually secondary click. That's the feeder strategy. Your first click and high intended bounce search. Good. Good placement. The second click performance match is waiting to convert and waiting to take credit for everything else's hard work. Good. I want to leverage it. That's. That's the point there. So these two here are working together theoretically in order for us to push Performance Max out of display, push it back into search, get this thing to try to beat my search campaign. But because it can't take priority anymore because it's a lower ad rank, it's simply now following along always. And that's the feeder strategy that hopefully with this is working, we'll see a continuous scale up to 20, $25,000 a day. It's gaining it pretty, pretty well. I don't know where it's at today. Let me just see what we're spending today, the 800 bucks. So we'll see where this thing goes. But this is, this is something where, you know, I think this is, it's working well so far. So for the cost to go down the account 15% but the conversion rate to go up 154% in a row has to go 63% and the conversion value to go 40%. Yeah, anytime you take cost out 14% and increase conversion value by 40, that's good. And it's all conversion value. It's actually OIC. And you'll see that the all conversion value is only when. Not when we generate a conversion, but when we sell it to the school. So that's where you'll see 253, we sold 64 already. So that's, that's what's cool is we've developed 253, sold 64pmax developed 5, we sold 1. Excellent. We generate the lead, we sell it. Once we sell it, Google only sees what we sell. And that is going to stop the performance max from trying to go to YouTube. Getting a whole bunch of junk conversions, getting, getting a lead from those conversions, patting on the back and blasting spam to the moon. That's what ends up happening. It spirals out of control on itself because it identifies activity must be good, identifies leads must be better. Dumps more aspen into it, gets more spam, leads must be even better. We got to stop all that. We got to make sure it's OIC, make sure there's no YouTube. But you know, I know we've been talking only for 21 minutes, but we have a new feeder strategy for search with performance max. And you also found out probably how to remove the performance max spam, the areas as to which you can identify and stop that and even push YouTube out of Performance Max into its own YouTube campaign. Until Google screws that up next year where they get rid of YouTube and push on the demand gen, we'll have a new strategy. I'm testing it right now. We have a new strategy for that coming soon. So that'll be something to stay tuned for. But yeah, it's, it's insanity what Google's doing. But I like some things. I hate some things. I like the fact that deprioritized performance max. I hate the fact that it's going to kick YouTube in the shorts. So we'll see what that, how that goes. But for now, between that interim, you can pull it out of performance max, put it into YouTube, keep YouTube clean. With looking at the click through rates, if they're above percent, you're probably getting some spam. Make sure remove those channels like you saw. After I removed the channel, I also made a complaint. Google wiped that channel. Pretty cool stuff. So Google does seemingly kind of have our back. When it's the obvious one where it says one impression, one and one view and 127 clicks, it's like, all right, I can see the spam there. So that's an area that we, we found in performance max of a spam and everything for lead generation. But these two steps to protect ourselves should keep that clean. And the third step of adding the feeder strategy is good. The fourth step of making sure that the T row has targets are purposely making the performance max have five a less add rank. So that was 22 minutes. Hopefully, hopefully that went well. I'm doing this just kind of on my own, so I might have to kind of like play this back at half speed because there's no one there stopping me asking questions and all that kind of stuff. But let me get into some questions to See if you guys have any questions so far about this strategy and how to stop the performance max from spamming the crap out of you and your clients and your customers and the world. It just, I hate it. I hate how much that that Google just allows that to flow through and then charges you for it. Like it's, it's like, like a con. So here's your spam. Thank you for your money. Then I'll see you in court. That's basically what happens. So it's up to us to protect ourselves. So hopefully this is working.
