← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
5 New Tricks to Try in 2025 (Episode 443)
00:22:46
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris. Happy New Year to you all and I am going to give you five new things to try in 2025. See what I did there? Yeah. It is going to be a creative podcast because I am like you, recovering from a great Christmas and trying to get back into things. And I have a concise, focused, Google Ads focused podcast to help you come up with new ideas as you're stepping back into the swing of things, getting back into work, looking into 2025. How are you going to beat what you did last year? How are you going to improve on things that you did last year? Well, I have some new ideas for you, things that you can try that you may not have been trying before. And I'm going to share them with you before I do and remind you about my sponsor. As always, in 2024, I told you about Optio and today, for the rest of the year, I'm going to be telling you about Optio. Optio is still my only resource to making sure I get things done well. Get things done right, get things done quickly in Google Ads across all of my accounts. Whether I'm checking bids, checking keywords, location, looking at search terms, considering budget, writing reports, looking at ad copy, this system does everything. You're gonna love it. If you haven't tried it, try something new in the new year. Optio.com PSP so that's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP to get a 28 day free trial of the best software there is out there for Google Ads management. You can do this software for 100 accounts or just one account. It's scalable, it works. No matter how much work you have to do, it's going to stick with you across a bunch of accounts or just one. It's perfect for getting more out of Google Ads. Optio.com PSP okay, let's get into it. My five new tricks to try in 2025. Here we go. Number one. And by the way, the last one in the list is going to shock you. I know that's corny, I know that sounds silly, but I wrote it and I surprised myself. It's something that I think I've done before. So stick around for the last one because it's going to be a bit shocking. So the first one might not be quite that shocking. I think everyone should try broad match keywords. Okay, no, Google didn't pay me to say that. I mean, you should try broad match keywords in a restrictive Controlled environment. So I don't think that broad match keywords are appropriate for your main campaign. I think that you should run broad match keywords as an additional way to garner more traffic at a lower CPC to see what you might be missing from your more restrictive phrase and exact match keywords. Okay, so how do you do that? Well, I would typically suggest that you have a broad match campaign. This campaign should be targeted more specifically for people that are a little bit higher in the funnel, a little more generic kind of terms. Not, not super specific, but they should be something that are, you know, not going to be repetitive from what's in your main campaign. All right. And I think you should also bid about 50% lower than your current main campaign. Okay, so let's imagine you have one campaign. Your average cost per click is $8 on your main campaign. You're running that with phrase exact. And you're, you're happy with your quality of traffic. You're getting conversions. Of course, you'd love more conversions, but who wouldn't? And I'm suggesting starting a new campaign with one ad group, maybe just one ad group. Toss 15, maybe 20 broad match keywords into that new campaign and dump all of the keywords into one ad group. These keywords should be a little more generic. You could copy and paste some from your main campaign, but they should be in broad and they should be three or four words long. I don't really want you to put two word words in here. I think three, four words would be good. And here's the important part. You should have a lower budget. I don't want you to give this a big budget. Certainly not at the beginning. And then second, I want you to use max clicks to begin with. Max clicks. So you don't even have to worry about it. I'm not suggesting manual max clicks with a 50% bid reduction from your original campaign. So going back to my example, if you're running one campaign with the average cost per click of $8, the Max Click bid restriction on this new broad match campaign should be $4. Okay, so 50% less than your original campaign. The whole idea here is to garner different traffic testing. Try something new, see what you're missing. There might be some things that you could gather that you had not seen before. It might surprise you, but you should always do it in a controlled environment. That's the whole topic of these new tricks for 2025 is try something you haven't done before. But it should all be in addition to your main campaign. I don't Want you to replace your campaign. This should not have the same budget, they should not have the same bids. They are additional aspects, new tricks, new things to try. All right, number two, I think you should do and try a targeted audience for your search campaign. Again, this should not be your main campaign. What you should consider is a new campaign. Consider using broad maybe phrase, but I probably would start with broad because a targeted audience is using one of the pre generated audiences in Google Ads which is either an in market audience or an affinity audience. These are people that have either shown interest in purchasing something, interest in researching something, they have a hobby, or long term interest in something. Choose something that is adjacent to your industry. If there is. If there's not, then maybe skip this one. But if there's something that's adjacent, maybe you sell some kind of productivity software or maybe you sell life insurance or retirement services. Right? There might be certain aspects in this audience list that Google gives us for you to be able to target these people that might have an interest. Okay, so build that campaign, target those. Don't use the observation targeting. Use targeted audience so that it only targets the audience that you're, that you're choosing and the keywords that you choose. So it has to be, the person has to be both in the audience and searching the keywords and start with a bid that's 25% lower than your original campaign. So again, going back to my example, let's say you're running a campaign that is $8 cost per click, 25% lower. That means that you would put a $6 bid on this targeted audience campaign. Again, this is for testing. Do not do this in your main campaign. It would absolutely decimate your amount of traffic that you're going to be getting because people in an audience are going to be much, much lower than the general public. Okay, so that's important. So that's idea number two. Idea number three is this remarketing. Now some of you are like, really Kris, that's not a new idea. You're right, it's not new. But the number of people that I see that are not doing remarketing campaigns is pretty astounding. There's a lot of people that are not doing remarketing at all. So I'm putting this in the list because many of you out there are not doing remarketing and you should be. So you should be remarketing. Now remarketing is when you have a all visitors, all users list in your Google Ads and you target those people. It could be 2,000 people 8,000 people, 20,000 people. So you should target these in a display campaign. Alright, so build a new display campaign. Should have a low budget. I don't want you to spend much money. Might be $10 a day, $5 a day. Low bids, start with 50 cents, 75 cents a dollar, something like that. Very low bids. And I want you to show to anyone in your visitors quote, unquote remarketing audience. So if you, if you aren't sure what that is, do some research there, find out where this is located. If you're confused further, I do have consulting services. I could help you set that up. See my website, Chris Schaefer.com for booking on that. But it's really pretty simple. It's really pretty simple. Set up a remarketing audience, build a couple display campaigns or sorry, display ads for that campaign and run it. Now the end result is really just gonna be traffic. But it's the equivalent to a really effective billboard campaign. Right? You don't put up a billboard and expect phone calls the same day. You may not really see a direct lift that you can measure from a billboard or a TV ad campaign. It's more for branding. So getting your name out there, making sure that people are familiar with your brand, see your brand out there, I think that's important. And it's a great new thing to try in 2025. All right, we are down to number four already. I told you it's going to be concise. Might be my shortest episode ever. The next one is a DSA campaign. A DSA campaign stands for dynamic search ad campaign. Okay. What I want you to try is building new campaign using the DSA system. So there's a dynamic ad group that you can create. So build a new campaign, just run it with max clicks, let's say. Okay, and when you build this, you're gonna build it the normal way. But when you're creating the new ad group, there's an option to change the ad group from standard ad group to dynamic ad group. The dynamic ad group looks at your landing page, looks at the page that you're pointing people to from the ad and just creates the keywords for you. You actually don't even see the keywords, it just does it. The keywords are actually invisible, let's say. So this DSA campaign just kind of is even more broad than broad match. It just says, oh, this page is about this. I'm just going to bring traffic that matches the theme, the topic, the idea of this page. So there's absolutely nothing for you to do other than just write ad copy. And much of the ad copy is not even written by you. It's actually dynamically generated by Google. You say Kris, this sounds pretty crazy. All of this sounds automated and it is. And that's why there's a couple things you absolutely need to do. One is you need a low budget for this. As as you'll see, every suggestion I'm giving is a low budget. I think very low budget is important. Then you should have a low bid. Probably start with something 50% less than your main campaign, maybe even 75% less than your main campaign. You know. So going back to my example, if it's an $8 typical CPC that you're that you're paying for, then you should definitely bid no higher than $4, maybe even $2. Alright, so once you've built this, one more important step is you absolutely need to block your brand. Company product name. Anything that is branded or owned by you needs to be blocked. Because these DSA campaigns are notorious for gathering brand traffic. Do not let this become a brand campaign. So block all of your brand traffic and let this run. Monitor it. Look at the search terms. What is it getting you? This is a little different than my first one. My number one suggestion was to try broad match keywords in a controlled environment. My number four is go even a little further. Try a DSA campaign in a controlled environment. Now bonus tip. For those of you that maybe have a very healthy campaign, have a history of conversions, perhaps you're using target CPA bidding for some of your other campaigns. You might consider setting up this DSA campaign with target CPA rather than max clicks. This could be particularly interesting if you give the target CPA something a little more restrictive. So let's say you typically get $150 cost per acquisition, cost per conversion in your original campaign. You might set this DSA up with just $100 target CPA. Right. So you're restricting how much Google can spend per click by giving it a very restrictive bid. But you're also allowing it to have wide open targeting other than your brand. Don't give it your brand, block your brand because that's pointless. Don't pay for your brand traffic and let Google charge you for that without you realizing it. That's silly. Don't do that. So block your brand as negative keywords, but give Google leeway for a DSA ad group to garner traffic at a very wide reaching, dynamically generated set of keywords. But give them a little more restrictive bid so that's for those of you that have history, if you have more than, let's say, 10 conversions a month, that might be something you want to try. You might want to try target cpa. Now, that's a very risky thing for me to say, 10 conversions a month. Because if you spend $30,000 a month and you get 10 conversions, that suggestion is not for you. You should probably have more than 10 conversions. But I'm just talking to people that might be spending a few grand a month. 10 conversions a month, and possibly use the target CPA with your DSA campaign. All right, and number five, as I said, is going to shock you. Before I tell you, I want to remind you, Please check out optio.com o p t e o.com PSP. They have been a longtime sponsor. I appreciate their sponsorship and they continue to impress me year after year. Great software. Try it for free for 28 days. Use the chat box down in the very bottom of the page. Tell them. Chris told me about your software and they said I can get double. Chris said that I can get double the trial time if I mention the paid search podcast. That's how you get the secret. That's the secret code to get that optio.com PSP all right, number five, competitor campaign. Now, if you listen to this podcast at all, you'd probably think, I can't believe Kris is saying this. And that's what's shocking. I am suggesting a competitor campaign. Now, let me define what I mean by competitor campaign. I do mean competitors. So if you are ABC Services, and there's other companies out there that also do abc, but they have, of course, different names. I am suggesting targeting those companies. So CBA Services, you know, is the name of a number, another company. You target them, they do the same thing as you. BAC company does the same thing as you, and you target them. So you have all these different companies that are in your area that are direct competitors of yours. Now, here's the caveat. Don't stop there. What I suggest is adding some type of addendum to the other competitor brand, product names, something like price, the word alternative, the word review reviews, the word discount, something like that. So if you're running a campaign and you are a AC repair company, you do AC repair. That's, you know, there's always lots of competitors and services like that. And you have some direct competitors that are, you know, right at your kind of level. You would target that competitor, say, Bob's AC Repair. You target Bob's AC Repair, but you type in price, you type in reviews. So Bob's A.C. repair reviews or maybe Bob's A.C. reviews Bob's A.C. price Bob's A.C. discount Bob's A.C. alternatives. Bob's A.C. competitors. Right? Those are your phrase match keywords that you actually run. The reason I'm recommending this is because these people obviously are in the moment of shopping. They're searching, they're considering. They, they have not engaged with Bob's AC company yet. They are looking up pricing information, discount information, reviews. They're looking up alternatives, competitors. They're looking up information about Bob's ac. They're just about to reach out to Bob. This could be the point when you nab them and bring them to your website and possibly get them to call you instead or buy from you instead. So this is a targeted competitor campaign. I'm not suggesting that you target exactly Bob's AC in general. I think that's a bad idea. Very rarely does that work. This is a great addition to your portfolio of search campaigns because it can drive traffic that is in the moment of research and decision making that you would otherwise never get. So not going to be a whole lot of this traffic. Don't expect a lot. I would suggest probably bidding pretty high here. Possibly if your typical cost per click is $8, you might have to spend $10 $12 per click for this traffic. Don't expect very much traffic. Don't get competitor names by themselves. So don't pay for Bob's ac. You want to pay for Bob's AC pricing Bob's AC reviews. Right? That's what you're looking for. So apply that to however you use Google Ads. Whatever your business, whatever your, you know, B2B B2C whatever kind of thing you do, apply that. See how that works for you. Apply all of these. I think I just gave all of you guys a bunch of new homework which should keep you busy until my next episode. If you'd like personalized attention to your Google Ads account. If you'd like for me to take a look and help you with some of these decisions, building these campaigns, teaching you about how to use Google Ads. I do provide consulting training live over Zoom for a one hour session. You can book that on my website. Chris Schaefer.com or if you're just, you know what Kris, I'm sick of managing it. Could you just manage it for me? I do that as well. Chris Schaefer.com link is in the description. Thank you so much for listening watching. Happy New Year to you. I'll catch you next week.