← 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 Things You Need to Know About a CLICK in Google Ads (Episode 492)
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Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. Specifically, what is a click in Google Ads? 5 things that you need to know about a click in Google Ads. Important, critical things that make a difference in how you pay for it, where you don't pay, what it could mean about what you're paying for, and several things that you may not be aware about in Google Ads. So there's five things I'm going to go through in today's episode. Stay tuned. I make these episodes as packed as I possibly can with information that could make a drastic difference in what you're paying for with your Google Ads campaigns. I primarily focus on Google search. It's what I primarily focus on with these, these, these, these episodes that I do. So if that is what you're managing, if your business gets leads from Google Ads search, stay right here because that's perfect. Primarily where I focus it is a big part of many businesses campaigns. I do Google Ads management and coaching for people all around the world and I've been doing it for a very long time. So I'm sure you'll hear something you haven't heard before. So let's talk about a click in Google Ads. You don't pay for anything except for clicks. When it comes to search, you can get impressions for free. You get impressions, you get, you know, the ads showing up on search results, but until someone interacts with the ad, you don't actually pay anything. So it was revolutionary. Whenever Google introduced it back in the early 2000s, I got involved in 2003 is whenever I first built my first campaign. And the idea that you can see exactly how many times your ad showed up and only pay when someone decides to click on your ad and decide when your ad is going to show up, who it shows up to, and name your price for that and your budget for that. I mean, it's revolutionary. But do you understand the basics of what click can and does not mean? So let's, let's go through five things about what that includes before I do want to tell you about optio.com PSP it is a free tool for you to try for 28 days now. It is a wonderful tool if you are the kind of person who listens to a Google Ads podcast to try and get more out of your Google Ads campaign. This is a tool that you should seriously try. It is a tool designed to give you suggestions of improvement from everything from bidding to keywords to negative keywords to conversion Tracking to ad copy. It does everything all the way from sending you reports to sending you alerts about critical failures in your account. So if you're not watching your Google Ads account 24. Seven, you could have someone do that for for you through Optio. Optio is an automated tool that you can try for free for 28 days. That's O P T E O dot com PSP. Okay, so number one thing, a click is recorded or documented when someone interacts with your ad. Okay? That's the most basic understanding of what a click is. Someone is interacting with your ad. So let's define interacting, because there are multiple ways that someone can interact and you may not realize the amount of diversity that's involved with that traffic. So most people think that interacting with an ad means that someone just clicked on it and that ad takes them to whatever website you have put in for that ad. So they click on it, they go to your homepage, they click on it, they go to your service page, Whatever you've decided, that's the truth of what happens, period. Nope, that's not a hundred percent true. Because nowadays Google highly pushes assets. They want you to include assets and all the things that come with assets. Site links, phone numbers, location details. All these other things can be a click. So the fact is, is that someone can click on your headline and go to your actual website, or they could click on a site link and go to your about us page. They can click on a phone number and call directly from the ad. They can click on a Get directions button or get location details button and go to your Google My business listing. You can go to your, you know, pop up a window for your address to get directions. Any of these things can happen. And here's the thing, they're all considered a click. All of those things are the same click. If you were gonna pay 5:59 for a home homepage website, click on on your headline, you would have paid theoretically the same price for any of those other things. If your phone number shows up, they could have clicked the phone number and you would pay for a phone number call even if that phone number was going to be called at 3am in the morning. Not good, right? So you just paid money for someone to click on a phone number and potentially call at 3am when no one's going to answer. So you paid that. So. So an additional point to understand here is that while a click is going to cost the same, it can take multiple forms of interaction. You must understand that you can't allow these clicks to Just go wherever they want. If you're a local service business that does home services of some kind, you cannot afford for people to be clicking on. Get directions. If you do a specific home service where you come to the person's home to do the service. Electrician, H Vac, whatever. Get directions. Going to your Google My business page is a pretty ineffective way of paying for clicks. Getting a call on a phone number that's attached to your ad outside of business hours is a pretty ineffective way of getting that click. Having someone click on a site link that goes to your About Us page or goes to a blog or goes to your employee page is a way, is a very poor way of spending that click money. So these are all things that you should be aware of because if you don't monitor where your clicks are going, you could waste a lot of money. So check your site link. You know what, what, what site links are getting the most traffic? When is your phone number showing? There's a way to actually limit your call asset to only show during business hours. You can choose what business hours for it to show and you can decide to not link your Google My business location to your Google Ads so that Google can't send people to your Google My business. Right? A lot of these things are automated. Whether your phone number is going to show up 247 or not, a lot of times that's automated. And Google just will have your phone number show up all the time anytime. Your site links can be automatically added for every page on your website and you might get a lot of really crappy site links that are wasting your money. So very important to know that a click is an interaction. And there are many types of interactions. So moving on to number two, a different type of click is something that I don't talk about a lot. People don't want it. It's a click that is invalid. An invalid click is a click that you don't pay for. So whether it's a bot, some type of automated tool that someone's running, or potentially an accidental double click, Google's going to label this an invalid click. So this is a click that does happen. But Google decides, hey, this click, this click, this click was invalid. It was done in some way that was nefarious or accidental of some kind, and you're not charged for it. So that traffic, those impressions, those clicks that came through that way are not charged. Now what will happen? You may have seen this. If you ever check your account, you know, multiple times during the day, you might actually have seen your Clicks go up and then for the clicks to go back down. You may have seen that, oh, I got 10 clicks. You check back the next hour, oh, I only got six clicks. What happened to those four? Why did, why did my clicks go down? This is what invalid click filtering looks like. This invalid click takes those clicks and then moves them out of the general reporting, and now they become invalid and they're not tracked. So invalid, any clicks that you see in your reporting are going to be clicks that Google has deemed to be invalid and they are filtered out of the general reporting. Right? So there's nothing that you need to do. You don't need to go in and find these. There are ways to go in and request a refund for invalid clicks that you think have not been caught by Google. And you can get a refund in some cases, but most of the time these invalid clicks are going to be caught by Google. It's not something that I find that I ever run into a situation where I need to submit for hundreds and hundreds, thousands of invalid clicks that Google doesn't catch. Google is a big business, and if this was a major problem, I don't think that Google would be able to survive hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands and millions of clicks that are happening constantly that are invalid and wasting everyone's money. I don't think this is a chronic issue. So I don't think that it's something that most people have to worry about most of the time. Invalid click percentages are about 5, 10, 15%. And Google, as I said, credit those back to your account. So let's move on to number three. Number three fact about clicks is you can pay multiple times for the same person clicking on your ad. So this is sometimes accidental, sometimes on purpose, but it is absolutely possible that you have someone come to your site multiple times and you're paying for them each time they enter through your, through the door of Google Ads. So instance number one might be on purpose. You might have a very high funnel search where someone types, you know, watch repair, okay? And you're a watch repairman and they click on the ad, right? And then they land on your site and they think, well, I'm looking for something different. So maybe they type Rolex watch repair near me, okay? And then your ad comes up again and they realize, oh, this, okay, this popped up again. These guys must be Rolex or something. And they click on your ad a second time. That is an example of a high funnel search moving down to a low funnel. And you paid twice for the Same ads, the same person. It might even happen days apart or within a couple minutes that the person is doing it. But you don't pay for people. You pay for interactions. You pay for clicks. You pay for searches that result in clicks. So you definitely can pay multiple times. Another example might be someone who's, you know, doing a search like car repair and then they do a search for transmission repair near me. This is a person who is narrowing their search based on something they're looking for. So what you have to decide is how much of those broader searches are you willing to pay for. If you get too many broad searches like car repair, transmission repair near me might be more appropriate, and car repairs to generic, you need to put a lid on those broad searches either through negative keywords, changing your match types, pausing the keywords outright, or adjusting the bids so that bids for car repair are very low and bids for transmission repair near me is very high. Okay, so the point of number three is that you can't assume that every single click is a unique visitor. You can have multiple visitors that come from, you know, just a couple clicks. Might be, might be five visits to your website, but that might, might represent two people. So this is why analytical data from Google Analytics and, and other tracking systems are going to show different numbers. Because Google is interested in one thing. How many interactions happened with your ad. That does not represent how many website visits actually happened. You could have much fewer website visits than you do actual clicks on your ad. So this is an important factor to know. Okay, so number four. Number four is this. Clicks and conversions are different. So a click, as we've discussed, is an interaction on your ad, but you pay for clicks you wish for or hope for conversions. Conversions, which is a, an action that takes place on your website. Those are not guaranteed. There's actually no way in Google Ads to pay per conversion. You can't tell Google, okay, I've got 500 bucks. I want five conversions. I'll give you $500, you give me five conversions. Google says no deal doesn't exist. So you cannot. I mean, if you're looking for a guaranteed conversion, the only guarantee you get with Google is clicks traffic. That's all. That's the only market they've ever played in because that's the only thing they can guarantee. They can't force someone to contact you. They certainly don't know what type of experience someone's going to have when they go from google.com to your website. So they can't guarantee that conversions are going to happen. It's your job to take those paid clicks and turn them into conversions, phone calls, leads of some kind, people filling out a quote form, people purchasing, adding to cart and purchasing on your site. These are conversions. But you pay for clicks, ladies and gentlemen, that is the number one struggle in Google Ads. No one cares about just getting more clicks. Clicks are merely an end, a means to an end of conversions. Everyone wants leads, everyone wants conversions. Nobody that has a Google Ads campaign is just wanting to spend money for the sake of spending money. They want to bring people to a site to accomplish something. So that's what you're paying for is clicks. And that's the only thing Google can do now. Side note here, there is something called Google Guaranteed. So if you're interested in, say, you know what, Kris, I'm sick of paying for clicks. I don't want to do this anymore. You know, I only want to just pay 500 bucks and have Google send me a certain number of conversions for that. There is an option. It is not in Google Ads, but it is part of the Google Ads local service ads. So the LSA sometimes is shortened. The local service ads you can pay per lead. So this is an option. It is something you can consider. It's called Google Guaranteed. And you become certified or licensed or verified, whatever you want to call it, through the Google Guaranteed system. And you may have seen it. If you've ever searched for lawyers or plumbers or you know, some type of service company, there will be a list of, you know, preferred service providers and you can go through and you can, you know, look at the different pictures on there and decide who you want to call and you contact them and you contact them through the Google system and then that advertiser will pay for that lead. But I'll tell you what, a little, a little hint. Very often I hear a lot of complaints about the quality of those leads and Google really doesn't have any type of ability to qualify how good those leads are because you don't target by keywords. You can't say, hey, I want to show up when someone's looking for personal injury, you know, car wreck, attorney. You don't get to choose that. You just get to show up when people are searching lawyer stuff in general or, you know, personal injury lawyer in general. So you do not in any way get to specify your lead quality. And Google isn't really in the business of giving a whole lot of refunds when those leads aren't good enough, when you don't close the lead or the lead isn't really qualified or it's not quite right. They don't really give back the money very easily. You have to file a report and it's not great. So if you're looking for the, you know, the best chance at getting the right kind of lead, the right kind of traffic, I mean, that's Google Ads. That's where the clicks come from. Okay, so next, let's talk about the last one. Number five, you do pay for a click even if the user doesn't reach your target URL. And this is the ugly news of Google Ads. I'm going to tell you about the three different ways that that can happen, right after I remind you about optio.com PSP that's O-P-T-E O.com PSP for a free 28 day free trial of their Google Ads optimization tool. Try it out, you're gonna like it. It's the only thing I recommend in Google Ads for automated outside optimization tools that actually work. That actually work. So number five, you do pay even if the user doesn't reach the target URL, because what happens is Google tracks to know, hey, somebody clicked. And once they pass through that door of clicking, if there's a server error, if there is a network timeout, if your page is loading really slowly, you know, there's some type, you know, there's a cloud flare issue where, you know, the pages are, you know, super slow. And this is something that can affect thousands of websites all over. When we see cloudflare issues, you know, these, these servers will have, have massive loading issues. You are still paying for these clicks. There is no compensation like, oh, well, my analytics system says I only got 50 visitors. But you know, it says here that I got 75 clicks there. There's no going back and saying, you know, hey, I only got, you know, a percentage of what you said I got. You pay when the person clicks the URL. So what does this mean? You know, what, what, how do you take this information and, you know, decide you know, how to use it effectively? Well, the fact is, is that there, there's a lot to be said about a good website and it is entirely your responsibility to have a good website. Now let's talk real quick about whether you need a landing page, a website, whether you need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a super sharp, clean website. My answer to all of those, you know, do you need a landing page? Do you need, you know, you know, half a million dollars in website optimizations? The answer is no. The answer is a Hundred percent. No, you don't have to have custom landing pages for every ad that you're running. You don't, you don't have to have the absolute best website out there to get leads. If you want to know what to focus on when it comes to getting clicks from Google Ads and you know, you, you now know that you're paying for traffic from Google, right? You're, you're going to be paying for it. There's, there's no way around it. When they click on it, you're, you've paid for it. So now do you, what do you do with this traffic? The best thing that you can do is make sure that the traffic is qualified and then send them to a page that just hits these couple of simple things, answers, a couple of questions, right? Answers. What do you do and what do you expect me to do? So that's the question the person is going to be asking. They need to be able to land on your page and know what is it that this company does? And then they need to know what do you expect them to do, right, as in call this phone number, fill out this form, right? So this company provides watch repair. What do you need them to do? Well, you need to book an appointment or you need to come by, here's directions to the store, here's our business hours, you know, here's a phone number to call to find out and get some questions. Here's a quote, form, you know, whatever you need them to do, make that evident and make it very evident what it is that you provide, where you are, you know, whether you serve a geographic area, national, worldwide, whatever. You need to make that clear. So when you're paying for this traffic from Google, your job is to make sure that you're delivering people to a functioning clear page. And if that's just one or two pages, that's fine. You do not need multi level, deep complex websites. You just need to deliver someone to a, maybe a little small page, maybe it only has one or two pages, maybe it has three pages, you know, and that's really all that you need to focus on to make sure that at least your click is worth it. And the other thing you say, okay, Chris, I have that, what's the other thing I need to focus on? The next thing is the search quality. How are people searching? These clicks are coming from somewhere. You have a ocean of opportunity of clicks. You need to build very small, specifically targeted funnels that get the kind of traffic that you want. So imagine you have a giant ocean above you and you're going to poke holes right here and right here. Okay. You don't just take a knife and just cut the thing open and just let it pour poor traffic onto your website. You need to be strategic and specific. You choose what kind of traffic you want and then you deliver that traffic, those clicks to the proper page. It's there are many ways to do it. There are even more ways to do it wrong. So I can't give you all the the suggestions, but that's what this podcast is dedicated to is is is hopefully giving you some good suggestions and telling you all the wrong ways to avoid. So if you'd like some personalized help with to getting that done, you can reach out to me chrisha.com I offer Google Ads management or I can do an audit of your Google Ads account. I do offer that for free. Or if you want me to do a live session with you one on one, I can do that as well by the hour. Happy to help out. You can find more information Chris Schaefer.com Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.