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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
4 Ways To Manage Bad Traffic (Episode 461)
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today I'm going to talk about four ways to manage bad traffic in your Google Ads accounts. So stick around for that. I'm going to dive into this towards the end of the show. I'm going to start the show with a question from Eric and then I'm going to jump to a question from Rob. So we're going to do that right away as soon as I tell you about optio.com PSP so there's a 28 day free trial that you are eligible for to try. This is exclusively available here on this podcast and you can try this tool and you say, why Chris? Why would I try this tool? There's so many tools out there. Well, I am a extremely practical Google Ads manager. I approach things based on what's the bottom line? What can this really do for me? I only want to spend time on things that really make a difference in my account. And that's really what I believe Optio is. It provides critical management tools to help you just get the most basic important things that really make a difference in your account. Changing your search terms, managing your keywords, your bids, your adjustment, none of this stuff that just says increase your budget, add automated bidding, add a bunch of DSA targeting. This is, you know, big things that will just make your spend explode. Instead, what if you tried pausing these keywords because they perform, they provide less value for you than these other keywords. What if you lowered bids, what if you lowered budget here and moved it over to this one instead? Right. These kind of suggestions you don't see in the Google Ads engine. And Optio will help you find those suggestions that you never would have thought of. It is a free 28 day free trial that you can get exclusively by going to optio.com PSP 28 day free trial. If you chat with them and say, hey Chris from the paid search podcast brought me here, can I get that extra extension? Otherwise you'd only get the 14 day free trial. So try for free optio.com PSP all right, as promised, I'm going to jump right in with a question. You too can send in a question and thank you guys. I did a call out last week, asked for questions. You guys responded with a lot of really good questions. So I have some good stuff to go through. Gonna actually one of them, the question from Rob was actually the ended up being the topic of today's entire show. So we're going to go through the four ways to manage bad traffic. Rob wrote in with the question. I thought it was such a good question that I wanted to expound on it quite a bit. So before we do that, let's, let's talk to Eric who writes in and says, just so you guys know, Eric is always creative with his words. So you're going to hear some, some, some glorious use of terms to refer to me and things like that. So it's always entertaining. So I always, always get a good laugh about Eric whenever he writes in. So he says hello again. Sultan of Search. We are finally ready to launch a value based bidding on a new account to get water through the pipes and make sure everything works as intended. Before we begin experimenting with our established campaigns, we have a group of 8 purchase based conversions, 6 non purchase based conversions. On the paid side we have things like different membership types, credit packages, profile features, things like that. On the non purchase side of the conversions we have email verification, double opt in picture verification, other things. So Eric's question is this. Is there a best rule of thumb when you're starting out with value based bidding? We've done the math assigned values of the non purchased events and the paid ones are passing along the actual value of the purchases. Any advice you can give us on how best to test these conversion events would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for all the hard work you do to Turning us fledgling. Here we go. Turning us fledgling paid search peons into warriors of the Google Ads realm. I, I love it. As a fantasy fan I love the language so I appreciate the message. Eric, entertaining as always. Thanks for the question. So let me first start with this because Eric is a very advanced Google Ads manager and always has really more advanced questions. So I want to start from the basics. Let's define some of the deep language that he uses and definitely discuss what that means and get that out of the way. So first, value based bidding, not a term that I usually use very often. What he's referring to in Google Ad speak is called target roas. So it's t target return on ad spend. Okay, so target roas is how you say it. Other terms are referring to the max conversion value bidding. Okay, so max conversion value bidding is just a bidding strategy, right? There's manual bidding, there's max clicks, there's target cpa, there's target roas, there's max conversion value. These are all different types of bidding strategies. And if you want to use values of conversions, you can use max conversion value bidding or or target roas bidding. So that's what they're moving into. And if I understand correctly, they already have campaigns that are established and they're adding in these key metrics that point to someone that is moving along that purchase process. Right. So they're, as Eric had mentioned, email verification, double opt in, pick verification and other things. So you know, people are signing up for this software, this, you know, this, this program and they're going about the verification process, they're doing critical points and this provides some type of trigger that they've actually created a conversion for and they want to start feeding these metrics into the Google Ads system. Right. So you say, well, why would anyone want to do that? Why not just measure actual purchases? Well, the purpose behind it is because each of these are a good indicator that this person will eventually get to a purchase at some point. So what you do is you feed that information to Google in the form of a conversion that has a low conversion value assigned to it and it trains the algorithm to understand, okay, this is what a click looks like, who has a little bit of value. And then hopefully at some point that will lead to an actual purchase. So then Google will also see that that's a convert, a conversion, that is a purchase and there's a value assigned with that. So it is a whole nother stream of data. And algorithms from Google work well with a lot of data points. If you've ever run a max conversion campaign with only a couple conversions a month, you'll know that it can be very erratic. So lots of data points can lead to more precise bidding. So this is a great thing to do, or so I used to say. So here's, here's, here's what I used to think and how I've changed my thoughts a little bit. Now in 2025, formally, you can get me on this podcast on record saying I considered value based bidding to be the gold standard of bidding because no longer are you just feeding Google flat conversion, conversion, conversion, conversion. There is a value system. So whether you're a E commerce company or you're a lead generation company, whether you're trying to get phone calls or you're trying to get somebody to buy some shoes from you, conversion value or value based bidding is the gold standard, quote, unquote, because it provides the, the best data points for Google to work with and has the best control. But now, now very often I consult people and suggest that they move forward very cautiously. Okay, and here's why. So the benefits of the automatic bidding based on the value of conversion, I've made that obvious, right? Theoretically it is feeding more data, more information, more value to the Google Ads algorithm to make better decisions. But here's how the reality of what I found that that works like, I find that the value based bidding system is very slow to react to bidding changes. So when, when you're managing a target ROAS campaign and you have individual ad groups, in this one ad group you have maybe a 250% target ROAS set for this and you notice that it's not really achieving that, it's having some issues. So you push the number up to 270, you know, you give it a little bit of a push, maybe, maybe, maybe up to 300, you know, a small movement, small movement. And I found that unfortunately the algorithm seems to react quite unpredictably. In no way do I find that an ad group, when you change the target roas, that you can come back in one week and the bidding has slowed down, the positions have lowered, the search loss due to rank number has gone up. That's what we would expect. If you raise the target roas, if you raise the expected output of this ad group, the campaign would snap in and have to bid a little bit lower, bid a little bit more cautiously because it needs to generate a higher output for you. But I do not find that that's the case. Very, very often do I find that when I make an adjustment, it's like a child who's been told no and you've slapped their hand and all they do is throw a fit. You hope that by exacting some type of, some type of consequence on the wrong type of performance on this would result in snapping into, you know, the right kind of performance. Bids would lower. I mean it should try and move at a much more shrinking type of performance. It's going to get much tighter search terms. It's not going to be as risky. I do not find that's the case. I, for lack of a better term, and I'm sure most everyone can understand this, it's like slapping a toddler's hand and saying no. It doesn't react the way that you would hope it react. It can bid higher. All of a sudden it could spend 30% more. The CPCS could go up 40%. It may spend more and get less conversions. The actual roas from the ad group might actually get worse. And then maybe 14 days from the time that you did it, maybe it starts to settle down a little bit. And then 21 days after you've done it, okay, now either it's performing better or you know, it's starting to fail. It's starting to get less and less clicks. Suddenly the drop, the spend has dropped off. But that's not always the case. Sometimes it continues to act very erratically. And it's, you can tell it's, it's very frustrating for me because here's, here's the way that I manage my accounts. When something starts to act out, whenever something starts to go beyond something that I'm comfortable with, I need to pull back on it. I need to reign in the spend, reign in how much this thing's doing, and it doesn't happen that way. And then here, here's the third thing that really drives me crazy. I will have something that's, that's set at a 250Roas goal and it will run for weeks, maybe a month, just obliterating that goal, doing horrible, you know, getting a, a 50% return, right? It's losing money. And then, right, whenever I'm about ready to just call it quits and, you know, just shut it off or do something drastic, some new conversion will come in where there's a big purchase and boom, suddenly this is like the shining light of the month. Suddenly this has gotten tons of, you know, it's gotten one conversion that was worth a lot. And the roas is really, really high just for that one conversion. And then that seems to justify the next, like two or three months of spend because that one conversion made it profitable. So what I don't like is that these value based bidding things lean too heavily on the value side, right? It says that God's, you know, I could look at the, the return on ad spend and says it got a five times return, 500% return on this one ad group. But in reality it was one conversion and it spent a bunch. It got one conversion. I don't, I don't like that it will substitute revenue for volume. That may not be my goal. The client that I'm working with, the industry that I'm working in, value may not be worth as much as volume for the client. And good luck trying to force volume, right? More and more conversions on a bidding strategy that is focused on value. Because as I said before, it feels like it's as. The more you struggle, the deeper you sink. Because then we go back, okay, it's not giving me enough volume. So I'm going to lower the target roas. Now what happens, right? I slap the toddler's hand. Oh, it throws a fit. Oh, here we go. The bids are all over the place. Keywords are Exploding. I'm getting new searches, it's reacting, the positions are higher, the CTR is dropping. I don't like the instability, which is, I find, I find that happens a lot and it drives me nuts, drives me crazy. So I say all of that because, you know, we live and learn and as someone who really idolized value based bidding years ago, five, seven years ago, I've practically, I find that it's a bit of a unruly master to be under because it, it's quite erratic and I don't like a lot of randomness and uncontrollable chaos in my campaigns. So there you go. Thank you for your question, Eric. Hopefully that answers your question. You can certainly make a decision on what you want to do there, but I think the main thing to understand is tread cautiously. And it, you certainly need to test it piece by piece. I absolutely do not recommend that someone jump all in on value based bidding, assuming that it's significantly better than target cost per acquisition, target cpa. All right, so new question here from Rob, who is going to end up sparking a whole conversation of the entire podcast. And if you'd like to send in a question, I promise you, I read every single one. No question is, you know, too basic or too advanced? I'm happy to consider any question. You can send in your question at paid search podcastmail.com that's paid searchpodcastmail.com and I'll reply back and let you know if I'm answering it on the show, as I did with Rob. He said, hey, Chris, you're doing an amazing job with your podcast. I get to spend every Monday morning with you and I learn something new every time. Awesome. That's, that's so cool. I think I have to say, as someone who just, just a regular guy who just does Google Ads and I just share my thoughts and ideas and it's become such a cool experience to, to, to help people and I don't even get paid for it. I mean, I'm just helping you guys and it's fun to hear feedback. So there you go. If you, if you just want to say, hey, I'm with Rob. Thanks so much for doing it. I'd love to, I'd love to hear that. Sometimes it is kind of lonely doing a podcast because nobody ever leaves a comment on a podcast, right? You listen on, you listen on your phone, listen in the car, and nobody ever likes a podcast. You don't, you can't. There's no button to click, there's no comment to Fill out. So, anyway, back on task. First question, Chris. Is there any way to Access the first 100 episodes? Spotify starts at 101. How to find the best AdWords management company. So the answer to that, Rob, as I'm sure many people have wondered, is no, unfortunately not. There was a decision that was made years ago and those episodes were removed and sold as a package. I don't have access to them anymore. They're, they're basically gone. And no, but I, I, if, if there's anything there that I didn't cover in these, you know, in the next 350 episodes, since the first 100, I would be shocked. So I assure you, probably everything that's been discussed in the first 100 have probably been discussed multiple times in the next 350. So anyway, here's Rob's second question. We're operating in a very niche industry. Pharmaceutical, Pharmaceutical fill and. Oh, that's it. So try that again. Pharmaceutical fill and finish manufacturing. And I'm struggling with search terms a lot. I usually run phrase match, but I had to switch a lot of keywords to exact because all I got was trash traffic and bad search terms related to competitors, other terms that I never heard of, and search terms for completely different industries. I'm running on manual CPC, no automation. Approximately 45,000 per month across the whole account. How would you deal with this? Would you do exact match? Would you stay with phrase and exclude all the search terms that you get? How do you deal with this? So Rob also sent a screenshot of his search terms and keywords as well. And just for context, Rob is in the industry of pharmaceutical fill and finish. So essentially like a packaging. So if you, if you're a pharma company, you want to be able to package whatever you're making. I imagine this is some kind of machine that, that does it so seems obvious. Very specific industry, very specific thing that it's going to be providing. And Rob's issue is my keyword is packaging equipment for pharmaceuticals. And he's getting things that are Fuji flow wrapper, I guess. I mean, I'm looking at his search term list here and it's, it is obviously other brands, competitors. It's close, but it is not right. It's absolutely not right. So let's go through it, let's figure out what we can do. So I have four ways to deal with these unqualified search term problem. It's the topic of the whole podcast, the main topic for today. Four ways to deal with bad traffic in your Google Ads account. And I'm going to jump into these four real quick. I'm going to tell you first optio.com PSP to get a 28 day free trial of the best Google Ads management software out there. It is wonderful for search, shopping, performance max and even does Bing try for free optio.com PSP all right, so how to deal with unqualified search terms. Number one and Rob already hit the first suggestion in his message exact match. That's the first thing that I would suggest is specifically there will always be certain keywords and I'm going to discuss this more in depth soon in a later point, but there will always be certain keywords that are much more enthusiastic. Let's say Google likes to call it comprehensive. As though comprehensive is always a good thing. It's not. There are absolutely some keywords that are much more enthusiastic in getting impressions. They just spend and spend or they get, you know, thousands of impressions. Meanwhile, you know, their counterpart keywords get almost nothing. Okay, so the first thing that I would do to combat this is change those keywords to exact match. The reason for this is because it will improve the matching of those terms. If you understand what a broad phrase and exact is now post 2020, it is at least a way for the keyword to match the intent of the search term much more closely. It is not an exact match. It is a close to exact match. It's a kind of match, it's an almost match. That's what it is. So at least that will slow down the amount of close variant matching that you're getting in your search terms. However, it will massively lower the total volume that you're getting. So it could also stop the clicks entirely. So that's something that you need to be prepared for and I have some solutions for you. But you, you definitely should consider putting a lid on some of those more erratic keywords. Now one other thing that you may experience and you may have to resolve this because as, as Rob had said in his message, he's using manual cpc. So Rob specifically. But for the, for the rest of you, if you're using manual cpc, you may have to bid up on those exact match keywords in order for them to even get traffic at all. So be prepared to bid those up. Okay, so that's number one. Number one is use exact match keywords to wrangle in those keywords that are out of control. Those keywords that are just that continue to drive unqualified search terms. They just keep going erratic on you. Getting unqualified after Unqualified, and it's never actually on target for you. Go to exact match on those. Not everything, just the ones that seem to be the biggest issue in your account. So number two, anytime you narrow, you must add in Google Ads. You can't just shrink, you must add while you shrink. So that's why number two is add more keywords. What's happening here is Google's not understanding the keyword that you're using. And you know, looking at the keywords here that he provided, Pharma packaging machine, Google kind of understands it, but it's being way too broad in its application of, you know, how it's matching those terms. So it's giving you way too many what's called close variants. And the fact is, is there may not be traffic on the original keyword that you're targeting. There may only be close variance. So you must add keywords because you might be hammering on this one keyword over and over and you know, you change it to exact and now nothing happens. You may get no traffic at all because that keyword that you came up with may not get traffic. Pharma packaging machine may have almost no volume. So that's why there's, all, that's all you're getting is close variance. Okay, so as I said with, with, with, with, number one, do exact match. Bid up on those and try and be very specific. Block all the variations. You might even need to put that exact match in its own ad group and essentially just block anything that's not that exact match in that ad group. Okay, so part, part two of that is add more keywords, add more variations, try new angles for ways to find traffic. So one idea for this is an industry specific term. You know, the different pharmaceutical, you know, pharmaceutical is an industry. But then try and break that into different verticals, different things. And that's a good way to come up with new ideas, new angles to try and find what you couldn't find before. Dynamic search ads, if you're, if you're familiar with those, a DSA ad group dynamic search ad, that is a specific kind of ad group that finds keywords for you. It's an automated system that reads your landing page and finds keywords for you. You could run that. That's a really easy way to just kind of throw something out there. It's just, you know, fishing to see what you can find. That might be a good idea. The other thing is, you know, you could try longer tail, broad match. I mean, that's absolutely very risky. You know, you'd want to bid very low. But the idea is you need to branch. You're headed down a very narrow path only using exact match. So you need to throw out other possibilities beyond just what you're doing. Whatever way you can do that, make that happen. Because otherwise your campaign will starve and you'll never get the traffic that you want. So that's point number two. First one is exact match to try and wrangle in the most egregious keywords. Number two is add more keywords to try and branch out from that shrinking of the campaign. And number three is when you add those keywords, when you're using any keywords, avoid loose words in your keyword. What I mean by that is using words like company or the word services and in your case, in this specific example, the word equipment. That might be what Google's considering, just kind of an open ended term. If you've ever run the keyword H VAC services or H Vac company or plumbing company, you absolutely know what I'm about to say here. Google ignores the word company, it ignores the word services. It considers that to be a fill in the blank. So there are some terms that Google is, is the terms are so ubiquitous that Google just considers them to be a blank slate for what, you know, fill in the blank here. So avoid these kind of wild card terms and try and use more concrete words. And again, and this is going to be something that is not that you're not going to be able to just find it right away. This is a difficult, hard process. Anyone who's in the B2B lead generation arena knows this to be true. I work a lot in the B2B Arena. I do a lot of clients with that. It's a very difficult industry but it is highly rewarding because when you snap in those leads and when you're able to get those leads, it is, it's phenomenal because I mean there's massive returns from that. So a lot of my clients are in that B2B industry and it's fun to work in. So that's number three, avoid those loose open ended keywords as much as you can because Google tends to kind of just open it up too much. Alright, so number four, change your bids. Number four is change your bids. So whether you need to lower or raise your bids, I think there's probably something you're going to need to do here. Now I discussed this in point number one. Point number one had to do with raising your bids on your exact match keywords. But there's also the opposite effect. Sometimes your bids can be so high, a very high bid can lead to more erratic search terms. So if you don't know how the ad rank system works, the higher you bid, the more erratic the keywords will be. They'll start to stray outside of their keyword bubble. So imagine the keyword. Let's go back to the example, the keyword pharma packaging machine. Imagine the typical CPC is $2 for that. Okay? Now let's give this keyword a $20 bid. A $10 bid, right? We've multiplied it many times. So now this keyword is super powered. It can run faster than a speeding bullet, right? This keyword can exceed far beyond its boundaries of whatever it was capable of doing before. So suddenly already forgot the keyword Pharma packaging machine can get traffic for things that almost don't resemble pharma packaging machine, right? So very high bids cause a keyword to become superpowered and it can get traffic that would otherwise be incapable of it reaching before. So very, very high uncontrolled bids could cause this. This is why max conversion bidding, right? A maximized conversion bidding. A conversion based bidding system that has no target assigned to it. No target CPA assigned to it. That's. That is notorious for having super powered keywords. I just turned on a client's account the other day. I gave it a bunch more budget. We were launching into summer here in Texas and it's an H Vac company and I gave it a bunch more budget. I came back today, checked it. Suddenly Google started getting me CPCs of about $250 per click. $250 CPC? Average CPC. That's average. There are probably some higher and lower ones there, but that's, that's the average CPC I was getting because I was running it as a max conversion. There was no target CPAs attached to it. I became the victim of what I'm talking about here. A super powered set of keywords. Way overspent, okay? And on the other side, you may be bidding too low. You know, in order to even rank for some of These more qualified B2B very niche searches, you may just be bidding too low. And Google's just shoveling you crap. Just junk searches you might need, you might need to bid higher. So that's number four. Lower. Raise your bids. You need to adjust your bids, change those levers, move them up and down. And for you guys who have stuck around to the very end, I have a bonus. I said four. Actually have five. Surprise. Here you Go number five is narrow your target without changing the keyword. I think if you're dealing with a lot of spam junk, unqualified search terms. Try blocking entire areas of the Internet out. Try blocking mobile and tablet entirely. Try blocking desktop, you know, whatever you think is more appropriate for you, block everything else out. Narrow your target without changing the keyword itself. So block certain device types completely. Limit the ad schedule, so only show ads during certain times of the week, certain times of the day. There's also targeted audiences that you can add so that the person has to be within this targeted audience and searching your keyword. That's a massive way of limiting the target without changing your keyword. So there's a lot of ways to narrow your targets. Narrow the universe at which you're bidding, yet the keyword stays the same. A lot of endless possibilities there that I cannot get into because I'm already on bonus tip five here. So that is your four plus one on how to deal with unqualified search terms dealing with bad traffic in your Google Ad search campaigns. If you'd like to continue the conversation with me, get more help with your Google Ads accounts. You can Find me Chris Schaefer.com I offer live coaching training to help you and your team improve their Google Ads management. I also offer management if you just want to hand it off and have someone do it for you, happy to help out. You can find me chrishaeffer. Com otherwise. If not, I'll catch you guys here next week.