← 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
9 Buttons You Should Never Click (Episode 466)
00:35:19
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm going to talk about Google Ads. I'm going to talk about nine buttons you should never click in Google Ads. I'm going to give you specific examples of areas that I find to be largely destructive to Google Ads campaigns. We're going to go through that. I also have a question from a listener that I'm going to answer and all of that in a very concise, focused podcast. So if you're looking to learn more about Google Ads, this is what I do every week. You can subscribe here to hear more about how you can get more out of your Google Ads accounts week after week after week. And one thing that makes a big difference in your Google Ads account is what changes you make. And that's what brings us to our sponsor, optio.com PSP the changes that you're making your Google Ads account are critical. And if you are just guessing and making decisions without strategic valuable information to help you make those decisions to improve your account, it could be hurting your account dramatically. And the Optio tool is designed to help managers big and small make Google Ads changes from bids to budget to ad copy to keywords to everything in between about how to improve their performance. You tell the system what your goals are. You tell it that this is what I'm trying to get out of my account. And the system gives you prioritized, focused decisions about what you can make in what changes you can make in your Google Ads account to reach those goals. It is a wonderful system to use because it's, it's like a, having a professional look over your shoulder and point out, hey, did you notice this? Did you notice your cost per click slowed down? Did you notice your, your click through rate went higher, went lower? All of this kind of stuff. It is incredibly important that you pay attention to these things and Optio can help you do that. You can try this amazing Software for free for 28 days at optio.com PSP that's O-P-T E O.com PSP that is 28 days for free. You can't get that anywhere else. Use the chat box when you go to that page at the very bottom to tell them you can. You heard about it from Chris on the paid search podcast and they'll hook you up with the special offer. I thank them very much for their sponsorship. And let's get on with the show with a question from Ben. Ben writes in and says, hi Chris, big fan of the show. We Have a lot of fishing lodges. So we are often targeting terms like fly fishing lodges. In Montana, we have found that when we include the state in the keyword, the campaign usually gets about 90% of the clicks within that state. Even if we target all of the US We've been using bid adjustments to even out the targeting. So for example, we would do negative bid adjustment of 75% in Montana. This does not seem to be working anymore. Have you seen this? And do you have any ideas about what we can do, what other things we can do to exclude the state that has the lodging that it's located in? All right, so great question. Thank you, Ben. To boil it down, Ben is trying to drive traffic of people interested in doing something in a state that they are not currently in. So they are interested in fishing in, in the state of Montana. So they're looking up, you know, a fishing lodge, you know, some kind of fishing adventures, fishing tour, you know, fishing, something, fishing, vacation in a certain state. And the problem is, is that Google prioritizes that state and he wants to get more clicks out of that state. People that are looking to travel, bigger purchases, right? You know, people that are wanting to have a full, full service kind of, you know, flight and tour and, you know, buy, buy multiple rooms for multiple days, you know, with big, big, big groups, stuff like that makes perfect sense. So how can we combat the issue of Google prioritizing Montana as our focus? Well, the fact is this, this I do not see as something that can be solved with a, a bid adjustment. I don't think using a bid adjustment at the location level, at the geographic targeting level is going to fix this. And there's a specific reason. The reason is, is because if the keywords are automatically centering the traffic on Montana and then you lower the bid on Montana, what you'll find is you'll start losing impression share very quickly. Because if the keywords are pointing to Montana and continue to drive traffic in Montana, then decreasing the bid will make that those keywords less and less competitive. So this is not an issue that can be resolved with bidding. This is an issue that must be resolved with budget. The answer is this. The only way you know, if this is no longer working, if this for some reason seems to be pulling traffic in the wrong area, you're going to have to create a strong boundary between what you want and what you don't want. If the keywords are no longer giving you the traffic that you want, you're going. I often find that simple prodding doesn't work. Anymore, you have to define a strong boundary and say no more of this, and it forces it to go somewhere else. So one thing that you could do is you could try blocking Montana completely. Instead of doing a 75% negative, you just outright block it and keep all of this in one campaign. I'm not sure that that will be efficient, but I definitely think that's a better solution than doing a negative 75. Because what, as I said, what will happen is you'll get less and less competitive. The traffic will still flow from that state, but now you'll just be bidding less and less and less. I think the best solution is to completely disregard bidding at any level and to solve it with budget. So here's what I would do. I would set up a new campaign that completely excludes Montana. Two different campaigns. One is targeting Montana and another is targeting the United States and excluding Montana. So the first one, set your budgets appropriately. Maybe you only put 10% of the budget into this because people that are in Montana that are looking for fishing lodges may not really be interested in a big time package, may not really be worth advertising. So maybe you only spend 10% there. The 90% goes to people that are looking to fly in, people from out of state looking to fly in and stay multiple days a week, whatever it is. So in this instance, you would have the same keywords, fly fishing lodges in Montana, but Montana is blocked entirely. Now you're free to bid as aggressively as possible because you know that traffic will not be in Montana. Now you need to make sure that you are targeting people only in your targeted region. So make sure you change your geographic settings so that it only allows people in your targeted region, which means all 49 states and not the state of Montana. So this should solve your problem. It's. It is absolutely understandable that keywords can kind of shift and campaigns can, can, can stop getting what they used to get. I find that happens, unfortunately, quite often where over time, for some reason, especially if you're using automated bidding, I find that certain signals in the campaign, you know, you get enough conversions in a certain area and the campaign will start to kind of trend in that direction. It starts to shift its focus from one area to another, and then you come back a couple months later and the traffic is completely different. Suddenly things have shifted. This happens with a lot of things. And it's very important that you create very strong boundaries. A definitive line to say, oh, I want this, not this, do not go past this line. Hopefully that's helpful to you, Ben. And I Appreciate your question. If those of you that are listening out there would like to send in a question, you can do so send me an email, paid search, podcastmail.com and I'll reply to your message and let you know when I'm answering your question. So this next section I need to reserve a big portion of the show for because I need to get through all nine of these things. And I'm speaking to three groups of people. I'm speaking to everyone. I'll also be speaking to E commerce specifically and I'll be listening to speaking to niche or B2B high tech, you know, highly competitive industries. You know, if you're, if you're in an industry that you think is very technical or highly competitive or particularly in the business, to business lead acquisition or sales acquisition or some kind of niche industry, I have two specific tips that, that talk to you specifically. So let's get into it with number one nine buttons you should never click in Google Ads. So this first one goes to everyone or at least 99% of the people out there. And if you think you're in that 1%, you're probably not. So I know people tend to think I'm special. Well, you're not special. You're probably not part of that 1%. Believe me. This first tip is going to be pretty much ubiquitous to everyone, and that is adding search partners to your search campaign. That is the button you should never click. And I'm saying that to 99% of everyone out there, no matter what you're, what you're in, I do not think you should run search partners on your search campaign. Let me tell you a little story. I just had someone reach out to me earlier this week who started running Google Ads for the first time. They followed the prompts and the prompts automatically click search partners when you build a campaign now. And they didn't uncheck that. So when I looked at their search terms, their search terms were very technical. This happened to be a very industrial kind of repair, industrial service kind of company. So the terms were very obvious that they were extremely specific, they were highly technical. And I thought, this is incredible. This person's running max conversions with broad match keywords. And I look at the search terms and the search terms are beautiful. I mean, they're phenomenal. They're wonderful. And I think, wow, this is going great. And then I noticed that the cost per click was A$1,25,75 cents. I mean, just incredibly cheap. And immediately my red flags started shooting off everywhere. I'm I'm thinking, oh boy, this is not, this is some, something's not right here. There are two conflicts. Number one, the cost per click is very cheap, which is great, but that isn't in direct contrast to the quality of traffic, the competitiveness and the volume of traffic that one would expect from a highly technical, industry specific, industrial kind of service, lead generation service. So very quickly I went and looked at my, the breakdown of how much traffic is google.com and how much traffic is search partners. And what do you know, 90% of it was search partners. And when I dig into the search terms, all these gorgeous, wonderful search terms are all search partners. Not a single search term is reporting to have come from google.com. so what's the lesson here? The thing that you need to remember is despite what is shown on screen, despite all the wonderful glittery, glowy things that appear to be coming from search partners, I can tell you from experience, these customers receive spam traffic. The spam alerts go off like crazy. They see international traffic, they see traffic that is coming in at late night hours, weird times, you know, from unrecognizable sources. Things that just don't make sense. So the search partner system, at this point I think everyone should avoid clicking it full stop, period. Done. I don't think anyone should run search partners. I find it to be a very strange system that seems to deliver cloaked traffic. Traffic that looks like it's great traffic that looks like it's really good but, but it's not, it's not real. It's, you know, it's not real. I'm reminded of plane lady who pointed at that, that guy on the plane and said that guy right there, that bleepity bleep guy, he's not real. And that's what I feel like doing to search part. You, you search partners, you're not real. Alright, so moving on to number two. Number two is the thing you should never click is you should not click buttons that add conversions to your Google Ads account tracking that do not truly add value to your account. So you've been convinced by someone you were talking to someone, a friend or you know, watching a video or listening to a podcast and they told you, you know, it's, it might be great when you're just getting started to, to add a conversion action for people who have been on the site for more than 2 minutes, 5 minutes. It might be great for you to add anyone who at least lands on your About Us page because you know that they've clicked multiple times or maybe add a conversion tracking action that has, that's going to trigger whenever someone views more than three pages on your site. Right. These advice, you know, this advice that they've given, absolutely horrible advice. Non profitable conversion actions, adding those to your account lead to poor decisions down the road. I'll tell you from experience, they become extremely difficult for you to wean your account off of these. You know, if, you know, I have two daughters and one of them has that. She seems to be very difficult to get to eat normal food. Like just eating. I mean the basic thing we all have to do, we have to eat. And despite a lot of frustration between me and my wife, you know, she just, she likes certain things and she will not eat many other things. The idea that we just give her candy because at least she's eating is the way that I think about adding conversions to your Google Ads account that add no value to your Google Ads account. Sure I seeing numbers on a screen and it's doing something and my conversion actions are going up, but there's no actual value happening here. Yes, I see my daughter eating, but it's candy. I'm not winning any battles here. This is not adding to anything. And in fact, over time I will have problems teaching my daughter to eat real food with when I give her substitutes for real food. And the same thing happens in Google Ads. If I, if I use real conversion actions and train the system and algorithm to track these fake conversions, I will pay the price down the road. All right, so that's where we're landing with number two. We move on to number three. Now another button. You should never click number three. Change your bid strategy from target CPA or excuse me, change your bid strategy to target CPA without testing it to go cold turkey from manual bids, max conversions, anything, even maximize conversions, anything that's not target CPA straight to target CPA is a bad idea. Let me explain why. If you're running manual CPC or maximize clicks, those two bidding strategies are the only two that we have left. Well, there's one more but we won't talk about the, the weird one out there. But those two bidding strategies are the two that we have left that are not tied to conversion actions. If you go from manual or manual bidding or maximize clicks bidding straight to target cpa, there is one distinctive difference that can kill your account and effectively. Believe me, I have seen this many times. I've had many people who have hired me to say, Kris, something happened. Our ad stopped completely. I go in and what is it? Somebody Clicked that button to say add target cpa. They add a target CPA that is completely impossible for the account to accomplish, right? Typically they get a couple conversions a month and they're paying about $150 per conversion. And somebody has the bright idea of going in and setting the target CPA to $20. This will kill your account. One click account dies within a couple days. It is it, it is extremely clear that making a decision like this and thinking that you can just tell Google, I want leads for 20 bucks, I want leads for $2. It will not happen. It will stop your account for money and it can create long term damage because when you unclick it, it may not go back to what it was. It may struggle. You know, nothing's guaranteed in Google Ads. No, no consistent performance is guaranteed. So do not click target CPA if you are not prepared for what this requires. It is a, when, when you attach a target CPA to a campaign, you're telling this system you must achieve this or lower bids. Day one, if it didn't achieve it, it's going to be lowering bids and trying other things. Adjusting your keyword reach. It's going to be changing your bidding strategy. Well, I'll say that again. It's not changing your bid strategy. It's, it's going to be changing the aggressiveness, the reach of your keywords by changing your bids, right? And then the next day still doesn't achieve it. It's going to lower the bids more, it's going to get more panicked. Day three, day four, day five is going to continue to get panicked until eventually the whole thing starts to starve out, it starts to die out. The campaign gets less and less and less traffic. And now we've got a point where we're not getting traffic at all and you don't want to be there. So that's number three, target cpa. Don't click that button. Number four, don't run ads on your competitor's company name. Now okay, I cheated on this one a little. There's not actually a button that you click that just starts running ads on your competitors company's names. But that is absolutely something I Recommend for everyone. 99% of you out there, do not run specifically targeted campaigns on your competitors. I have tried it. I, I, I try it all the time because my clients want me to try it. And even though I advise against it, I'm like, okay, you know, it's your money, let's try it. And it doesn't work. It, it is not A good investment. It's not something that I suggest. So I do not recommend that you run traffic specifically against competitors. It's not a good investment. So if you have a competitor that is called, you know, Bob's Ropes and you set up keywords to get traffic for Bob's Ropes and you know, all different kind of iterations of Bob something, it's a bad investment. It will not lead to qualified traffic. It only leads to an increased spend and poor results, period. I'm making very distinctive decisions here and I'm telling you from experience, it is not a good investment to make. All right, so for number five, six, seven, eight and nine, I'm speaking to specific audiences. So stick around because I'm going to talk to the E commerce audience. I'm going to talk to the highly tech competitive, niche B2B kind of industries, you know, out there. So stick around. Before I do, optio.com PSP is the URL that you can get. Believe me, I talk to my listeners all the time who sign up for consulting with me and they, they always praise. Thank you, Chris for telling us about Optio. If you. It's a wonderful tool. It really does help me, gives me a sense of security to know that I'm not missing anything drastic. And this tool is highly recommended by not only me, but my listeners who have tried it and tested it extensively. That's why they're still a sponsor of this show because people continue to find this amazing tool day after day after day and signing up for it and keeping it because it's so indispensable. That's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP all right, so shifting gears, let's talk to you E commerce guys out there. You have an online store. Okay, so number five is this in general. I think most of you should be spending money on shopping and not search. So. So to keep with a theme, don't click on the search button. Focus on shopping. I think in general that is true for almost all of you. The reason that is typically gonna be a better solution is because shopping cost per click is cheaper and most of the time conversion rates are higher. So that's why you usually see much higher return on ad spend roas with shopping campaigns compared to search because with search cost per click is typically higher and conversion rates vary. I'm not going to say, you know, that they're always worse, but most of the time shopping is better when it comes to product listings and products in general. So if anything, forget the conversion rate, just the cost per click distinction between how much it costs to get an ad up on google.com for a product and an ad up for a shopping campaign. I find the shopping campaigns to be more efficient. So for E commerce guys out there, stick to shopping. Put most of your budget into that. Moving on to number six now, again, speaking to E commerce people, I don't think you should change your bid strategy to target roas without testing it first. So just like my third example from, from previous, this is specifically for E commerce people. If you're out there and you're running a shopping campaign and you have max clicks or maximize conversion value or manual cpc, you're doing any of those, do not click on the target roas just because you heard that. You should, you should know what your typical target, what your typical roas is and then use that information to determine what your target should be. In the same way that a target CPA bidding strategy can kill a campaign, a target roas bidding strategy can kill a campaign. It is guaranteed to happen. If you typically get a 200% return on your ad spend and you set your target roas to, to 400% because you think, oh, I think I'll just double my return on ad spend, very likely your account will grind to a halt within a few days. Okay? So proceed carefully. Do not click that target CPA just because it's a bright shining button that seems to be very appealing. It can absolutely kill your account. All right, number seven, last one for you E commerce guys out there. I if you do run a search campaign, right? So let's say, let's say you are in the very small percentage of people that say, actually, Chris, I do think I need to do a search campaign because blah, blah, blah. Well, all right, here's my advice for E commerce running search campaigns. Do not use exact match keywords. Okay? The reason for this is because exact match keywords have the highest click CPC threshold compared to all other match types, compared to broad match and compared to phrase match, Exact match keywords cost more to get a click, right? They're much more precise, they're much more targeted. But there is a higher threshold, there is a higher capacity, there's a higher requirement, whatever you want to call it, it's a bigger jump for you to go and get an impression on an exact match keyword. So CPC is too expensive for exact match. The only time you should be using exact match is when you have, when you're in the latter stages of testing a search campaign and you have determined particular value. Great value or a lack of value. And you're very strategically using xact match keywords for a purpose. That's the only time you should use exact match keywords. And when you have a, when you have a specific purpose and you recognize the value of that particular search based on risk, based on a lot of factors. Okay, that is number seven. So I've got two more that I'm going to burn through here. Two more speaking to a different audience. These are the people who have a very, you know, if I'm about to write an ad for you and you need to sit, and you need to sit down and explain exactly what it is that you do. If you're that kind of account, if you're that kind of company, I'm talking to you. If, if whenever someone asks what you do and you have to explain it because it's a little more niche, a little more technical, a little, you know, something that requires a longer explanation, that's who I'm talking to. And also I'm talking to people that are in extremely competitive industries, highly competitive industries. This is something as well that I think generally you guys should pay attention to. Number one, running a performance max campaign. Well, actually this is number eight. This is number eight of buttons not to click. Don't click on the performance max campaign. Let me tell you again, I will illustrate this with a story. Just this week I launched a very large SEO campaign for a well known SEO company marketing agency. And despite my advice, they wanted to run a performance max campaign. So I set it up and we started running it. And oh, what a surprise, it starts getting conversions like on day one, day two, day three, it's getting conversions within days of turning on this performance max. They tell me to turn it off because they're getting spam leads, weird spam leads, junk leads, strange emails, and you know, stuff that seems to be automatically generated from who knows where. It's completely unprofitable for them. It's a waste. And it's also wasting their salesman's time. And you know, other people are being affected by this because it's going through a system and filling their, their sale system with junk. So most of the time, if you're in a highly competitive, technical, you know, specific kind of thing, B2B business to business, I highly advise not to run a performance max campaign. They are extremely attractive because they generate traffic with no effort and very often they generate quote unquote conversions with no effort. But I find that these conversions are not worth it. They are not. They're not qualified. Nor can you really train the system to deliver qualified leads for you in, in these particular industries because your industry needs specific qualified types of leads, and performance Max does not tend to do that. All right, and last one here. Buttons not to click. I know I'm kind of stretching the whole buttons not to click, but I need a. I needed a way to explain this simply, but so we'll, we'll stick with it. Last one, Button not to click. Don't click the broad match keyword button. If you're in a highly tech if you, if you are very discerning about the traffic that you want to receive. If you sell something or offer something that is a lot like this and a lot like this other thing, but it's neither one of those. It's somewhere in the middle. Don't run broad match keywords because you'll get a lot of this this thing and a lot of this other thing, but not the thing that you want that's right in the middle. You won't get it. You'll get all the other stuff right. If your product is a zen, what's called a. Those two circles that overlap each other. Yeah. Crap. I don't remember what it's called. But if those things basically represent your business where you're just that little bitty sliver of overlap in the middle, broad match keywords will not provide the discerning traffic that you need to get the kind of lead quality that you're expecting. So with that nine things, nine buttons you should never click in Google Ads. Hopefully that helps many of you and saves you lots of time and money. If you'd like to reach out to me, my name is Chris Schaefer. You can find me@chrisshafer.com link is in the description. Because you can also subscribe to this podcast on YouTube. You can reach out to me for coaching management. Whatever you'd like, I'd be happy to help. Otherwise, I'll be back next week with more advice on helping you get more out of Google Ads. See you then.