← 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
A Warning to 10+ Year Old Accounts (Episode 481)
00:35:48
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Hello, and welcome to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Chris and today I have a warning for those of you that have Google Ads accounts that are 10 years or older and I know there's a lot of them out there. I have a few things that I want to share that are specifically issues that creep up with older accounts. I see it all the time and I think it's important to understand how you specifically are in danger of some, some things that can absolutely tank your Google Ads account. And we're going to jump into that today. I also have a question from listener who wrote in has a question about how to keep applicant traffic from coming to their website. People looking for jobs. It's a big problem for some industries. We're going to talk about that. And I have Joey Bidner jumping in for a quick talk about how to determine your max CPC bid. Great stuff today. Stay tuned. Right here, I'm going to tell you how all of this happens. It's through my sponsor, optio.com PSP that's O-P-T O.com PSP if you struggle with getting everything right in Google Ads, all right, and I'm talking to everyone right now because everyone struggles with getting everything right. You don't always see everything. You can't spot everything. It is impossible. There is no 100% correct account anywhere. But we can work on getting there day by day by day. You listen to this podcast for tips to help you get there and you can try Optio to help you get even further. This tool is designed to help you find those little things that are holding you back, stopping your account from being even better than it already is. With this tool, it will deliver specific optimized suggestions to help you improve your account. Improving keywords, adding negative keywords, bid strategies, ad copy, landing pages, big drops in impression share, big drops in conversion rates. All of these things are critical for you to keep an eye on. And that's where Opteo steps in to help you get more done. You can try the tool for free at optio.com PSP that's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP for try for free 28 days. And this is a special offer you only get right here on this paid search podcast. Try it twice as long. If you were to sign up on your own, I guarantee you're going to like the tool. Everyone does. But don't take my word for it. Try it for free. Optio.com PSP okay, so I'm going to change things up Today, I usually go to questions first, but I'm actually going to get straight into the topic. And if you guys like this change in the format of the podcast, let me know. Leave a comment on YouTube, send me an email, paid search podcastmail.com and appreciate feedback on the account. Leave a review wherever you're listening. I don't ask for them very often, but stop for a second. Maybe if you're listening on Spotify, you're listening on Apple, you're listening on YouTube. Do what you can to boost my algorithm a little bit, get people to tune into the podcast. It helps me to keep this show going because it's important for me to reach New Year's to make sure that the message is going through. My sponsors are interested in people hearing it, so it's important to me as well. All right, so let's dig into it. I'm gonna jump straight into a warning for accounts that are 10 years old and older. And if you've listened to this podcast for any amount of time, you've probably heard that I've been managing Google Ads accounts for over two decades now. I started back in 2003, and it has changed a lot. So anybody who has an account that is 7, 8, 9, 10 years or more, there are specific things that can affect you in particular. And we're going to go through three things. First, one is cluttered accounts. And these are not just things I'm making up. This is from experience in seeing old accounts. People reach out to me, say, hey, Chris, I've been doing Google Ads for many years and I do an audit. I might do consulting with them or even do management of their account. And this is the number one common thing I see is cluttered accounts. And this is not always their fault. First thing is, some people don't realize it, but they're losing 20, 30% of their clicks to their sales site links. And they say, no, no, no, no, I didn't add any site links. This hasn't been changed in, you know, six years. The last time I changed it was six years ago. It's pretty much been running on its own. Well, I got news for you. Any account that's been sitting around for years upon years are going to have some things just turned on because Google just invents ideas and then just turns it on for your account. Well, dynamic site links are a thing. If you don't know how to turn off dynamic site links, I would encourage you to look and see if you have some dynamic site links that have been created in your account. And what happens is instead of people clicking on your headline and going to your well crafted landing page or website, they're going to possibly your About Us page, your Contact Us page. And it's not that that's waste, but the fact is, is that your conversion rate from people that land on your About Us page, your bounce rate from people that land on About Us page is probably a lot worse. It's probably a lot worse than if they actually land on a page that's describing a service or product that you're selling. So this is the cluttered aspect is because there's things that change in Google Ads and things can pop up. Okay. Another thing is you made some changes over the years and now you have multiple campaigns. So the cluttered aspect of an account with multiple campaigns that are accomplishing the same thing, right? So you have this old campaign and then you started this new one, and they're, they're both doing really well, and you don't know which one to cut and which one to give more budget to, so you just let them both run. This happens a lot. It is not ideal. You need to pick a winner because what's happening here is this is called cannibalization. You have two, two campaigns that are competing kind of for the same keywords. So technically they're not competing because your account can only show one impression at a time. So they're not both going for the potential impression at the same time, but they're both eligible to receive that impression. And guess where that impression might go? It might go somewhere that has a higher bid than the other one. So maybe you paid another 3, 4 cents, maybe a dollar more, maybe $3 more for this click because the algorithm picked that one and maybe you could have gotten it for a lower cost per click. This duplicate campaign, this cluttering of a campaign can be destructive to your account. So having this, where some, you know, one has a certain bid strategy, another one has a different bidding strategy, and you don't really know which one to pick, that can be a destructive aspect of an old account. Another one, and this one, this one is particularly frustrating because over the years you add more keywords and it feels like as the keyword list grows and we approach year 2021, that's when the keywords flipped over. So if you ran accounts back in 2015 and now we're in 2025, those keywords are not getting the same traffic they were before. They are getting different traffic. There is no keyword that survived the 2021 keyword. Flip. We're in a different situation now. So this keyword creep, this keyword shift, that happened on purpose, Google did this and engineered it this way. It used to get these types of searches. It used to get searches for service X or these types of things, and now it's creeped over time. And now if you do a comparison between one, you know, one set of search terms that you got back then and another set of search terms you got now, they're different. They're completely different. And it might be causing you a lot of lost value in your account. So going in and looking at, you know, how has my keyword creep affected the performance of my campaign? Very important. So next we're gonna move to the second one. Second one is outdated campaigns. Now, this in particular is pretty destructive because what happens is you have old methods in your campaigns that were never updated to the new methods. So one thing is you're running expanded text ads, which was the previous iteration of ads. Years ago, they were called expanded text ads. We had text ads first, then we had expanded text ads, and now we have responsive search ads. Okay, these aren't just rebrandings. These are completely different systems. And if you are neglecting to move your ads from expanded text ads to responsive search ads, you could be losing impression share. You could be losing a lot of potential impressions that you just are not getting with this old system. I can tell you I fought the system years ago and I found pretty quick it's a losing battle. I cannot have exclusively expanded text ads in my system and not suffer some kind of drop in reach, drop in volume of my accounts. So you're going to need to migrate to responsive search ads. And you don't have to give up control. You can pin. There is such a system in responsive search ads for you to pin. Pin your headlines in a responsive search ad. So you could do that. There's a lot of things that are still available to be able to control your ad copy. But don't hang on to these old expanded text ads just because they've always been around. They've been around for eight, 12, 15 years. I don't want to change them. Well, it could be hurting your account. This one, this second part of the outdated campaigns is something I just recently saw. Literally yesterday, I was looking at an account that had been around for long time, over a decade. And what had happened is over time, it was a shopping campaign. And the shopping campaign had a specific bid strategy. I believe it was Target roas. And the Target roas was set at let's say 300% target ROAS. Okay, that might have been a good target a decade ago, but now they're getting 4,500%,600% return. And guess what's happened now? That 200 300% target ROAS is too low and Google is bidding way too aggressively. The bids are way too aggressive and this account is spending too much per click. The bids are way too aggressive and so therefore they're limited by budget significantly. So if we compare the searches they're getting now versus what they're getting before, they're getting a fraction of what they're getting of what they were getting before because their cost per click has gone up, their conversion rate improved, their roas improved, but they could probably double it, maybe more, if they just lowered their cpc. But they've allowed an outdated campaign to kind of lag. And these aggressive bids are now way too aggressive and they're overbidding, overpaying for their traffic. So really important stuff there. Number three, last one here, this one is killer. And it is just purely out of ignorance. And ignorance is not an insult. If you aren't familiar. Ignorance is just a term referring to someone who doesn't know, hey, you don't have to know how to do Google Ads. That's why people like me are around to help you out of ignorance. Broken conversion tracking number three. Broken conversion tracking can absolutely kill your account and guide it in ways that have become absolutely destructive. So there's two things that can happen. The first is tags on your website can be outdated, websites can get out updated and tags can be wiped out. Tags can be removed. This tagging on your website is critical for conversion tracking. Whether it comes through Google Analytics or it's a native tag directly from Google Ads. It is critical in order to get conversions tracked in Google Ads. So one situation is one account might have half the conversions. It might not be getting call tracking anymore, it might not be getting web form track tracking. Maybe just one conversion method is no longer updated anymore and it's broken. It broke three years ago and now the system only gets half the conversion. And the whole bidding strategies of 2025 require conversion tracking. If you're using maximized conversions or target cpa, these systems require conversion tracking. And if one of those conversions or all of them have broken, it's going to directly affect the performance of your account. So so much so that your keywords could start shifting the kind of traffic that they get. It could start shifting what traffic is coming in because your conversion tracking broke. It absolutely happens. So Conversion tracking is critical because in 2025 bidding is directly tied to conversion tracking and bidding is tied directly to your keywords and the keyword traffic that you're getting. So just by having some issue, something break up top now in 2025 with your conversion tracking could lead to keywords changing. They can change the type of traffic they get because the bidding that's tied to the conversion tracking broken. So there you have it. That is a warning to accounts that are a decade and older. Some pitfalls that you should absolutely be aware of. So we're going to move now to a question section. You can send in your Questions paid search podcastmail.com Send in your questions. Let me know how I can answer them. Let me know what you're thinking, what the problem is. I get questions from people all around the world. This one comes in from Forrest. Forrest writes on a campaign we are running. Job applicant traffic is somehow getting through even with negative keywording out all of the generic hiring terms, brand names, jobs, things like that. I recently excluded employment from audiences as well. Chris, do you have any suggestions on additional methods to get rid of this job searching employment, job applicant traffic Forest thank you for your question. This is a great question. I can't, I mean I, I can't not give examples because this is what I do all day, every day. So I recently jumped into an account that had been running for quite a while and the account had been obliterated by job traffic. It was awful. It was really bad. They were getting tons and tons of job, you know, people looking for jobs. And I quickly pointed it out and they immediately were like, yeah, we get tons of calls, you know, we just thought it was normal. And I showed them that it was coming from Google Ads. They didn't realize it. So it's completely changed their Google Ads account. They having much better success. And I find that there are several industries that suffer from this the most. And there's in one industry in particular that I think it has become the destruction of the entire industry on Google Ads specifically, and I'll give you that one here in a second. But home services, cleaning services, pest control, H Vac, things like that have had massive issues with job applications. People looking, you know, to be hired by a cleaning company or hired by a, you know, I want a job as a pest control person or I need to become a, an AC guy or a plumber or something like that. I mean, this is horrible. Those particular industries have a lot of issues with it. Another one that is really destructive is nursing nurses Home care, home care, aides live in, aids, senior care, things like that. People doing this kind of job where anything, where there's a service and they need people at a low entry kind of bar, right? I mean, a lot of people could be caretakers and you know, could clean houses with very little training involved. So there's a lot of very low hurdles for someone to cross. Anytime that there's something like that, there's going to be job application traffic that comes in because people are going to be looking to get into that entry level job. And one in particular I don't even take, I don't even take these accounts anymore. Whenever someone approaches me, hey, can you make, manage an account for marketing agencies? Can you do this for me? I need to launch a marketing agency. Ppc. You know, we want to, we want to start getting people that are looking for a marketing agency in their area. You know, from tv, radio, even online marketing, online strategy agencies, video agencies, things like that. I don't even really take those anymore because the number of people that are looking to be hired on as interns as entry level, it is crazy destructive. It just wipes out the campaign because, well, because of this. And here's the answer. Forrest, you've got to avoid generic searches for things like agencies, services and companies. I know that seems baffling. You know, how do you describe what it is that you're doing if you can't use the word agency, service or company? But the fact is, is most of the time these terms are those surface level kind of, I just want a agency near me, I want a service company near me. I want companies near me. Most of the time those are saturated with job applicant searchers. If you can avoid search terms that reflect this kind of empty, no knowledge, plain surface level type of search and go after terms that describe a deeper knowledge of the industry. Something specific, need based, specific keywords. I think you'll have better success. For example, don't go after words like senior care agencies or senior care agencies near me. Horrible. I found that this is crazy, crazy bad. You get tons of people that just want to become a, an aid giver or a caretaker for this agency. No, instead use things like dementia home care or private home care. Now I realize there's a lot less volume on those terms, but at least being aware that if 60, 70, 80% of your searches are all this agency near me, care agencies near me, stuff like that, it's, it's really bad. And you'll get more and more and more job applicant stuff. Furthermore, on that same point, if you, if, if you get a lot in Near Me in your searches, you might consider isolating those terms, bringing those terms into a more controllable environment. And let me, let me explain. You know, it might be a separate campaign that contains all Near Me so that you can monitor that, maybe send those people specifically to a different kind of page and see if, you know, if you send them all to this one page, perhaps you can realize, oh, wow, yeah, when I send them to this page, suddenly I notice all of the job inquiry stuff comes from this form and not this form over here. So if you shuffle some of that traffic around, if you isolate it, not, not necessarily to shut it off completely, but maybe at least isolate it, test it, send it to a different place, that might be a way to do it. And if you, if you do decide to isolate, if you do decide that this is. Yeah, I think you're right, Chris. I think this is where a lot of our job applicant software, job applicant application searches and clicks are coming from. Realize that that traffic has now become riskier and you should avoid hitting first position a lot. You don't want to hit absolute top on these. So pulling the bids back, being a bit more, a bit more restrictive on the bids and the CPCs to keep those from hitting first position all the time, they're now higher risk terms that are not really going to be as useful and you're going to have to go after something just a level deeper. Just a little deeper. Okay, so thank you for us for the question. And we're going to wrap all of this up now with Joey. He's going to jump in and share a discussion about how to determine your max cpc. There's a special link that Joey's gonna reference and is. It is in the show notes. If you're watching on YouTube or listening anywhere on the podcast apps out there, there will be a link and you can access Joey's special spreadsheet that he's sharing. And I appreciate you guys listening. And before I give Joey the soapbox here, I wanna remind you about my sponsor, optio.com PSP you guys listen and you consume this show for going on a decade now. I think we're coming up on 500 episodes and I would like to keep going. Like, like I've always said, I'm happy to do this podcast as long as it makes sense. And one of the ways that it does make sense for me is by having a sponsor. So I appreciate those who have tried my sponsor out and certainly many who decide to keep it. For those of you that haven't, I do ask that you try it out. Optio.com PSP for the free trial. Thank you guys. And Joey, take it away.
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Hey, what's up Chris? So today I want to talk about setting Mac CPCs when using Smart bidding. So, as you know, I am a big fan of smart bidding strategies, but with it comes the responsibility of monitoring how they can sometimes get out of control and putting the right system check in place to correct this. Because I'm going to share a situation that I've seen countless times in an exercise that I want everybody to do that can expose Google being sneaky and charging you way more than it should for specific clicks. So we're going to go over that example and we're going to go over how I determine what that target CPC should be based off of profitability and the metrics that I have in the account. So the exercise that I want everybody to try is this. I have a situation where I have an account with a standard shopping campaign and it's got an average CPC of 80 cents. Pretty good, nice and low. It's a healthy campaign with a good return on ad spend. You know, products are around $200, so that's a healthy ratio. And when I do my search term analysis though, and I filter by cpc, what I mean by that is you click on the top CPC column and it's going to bring the most expensive CPCs up in the search term report. And I saw that there are upwards of $40 CPCs and a decent amount of them, but just not enough to tip the average because we get a lot of clicks that are under 80 cents a lot that are way over the average sits at 80. And I can see that these really expensive clicks are nothing special. It's just Google being greedy. So this is where we can implement a portfolio bid strategy to to set a max cpc. Because in any smart bidding strategy, by default there is no max CPC setting. But the workaround is applying an individual portfolio bid strategy to a campaign. And that's the part that usually gets in the way. People think portfolio strategy means managing multiple campaigns under one bid strategy. But no, we can set multiple portfolio strategies and just apply it to one campaign. And the beautiful part of the portfolio strategy is this max CPC option. When you're in the portfolio bid strategy, scroll to the bottom and you'll see a Advanced options tab. Open that and you'll see max and a min. So that's where you can set your max cpc. You'll set Your target return, ad spend or target CPA apply to the campaign and you're done. But then the next question is, what do we set this max CPC as? I think that if you were to take your average and just put it above the average. That's not what I do. Because even though some clicks will be above your average, there will still be a lot of very qualified, slightly more expensive clicks that we want to include. Because one thing to remember is typically the lower funnel, the search term, the closer that person's search is to purchase, the more expensive it will be. Now, in this case though, going from 80 cents to $40 is ridiculous, right? And in my observation of the search terms, I could see that there are nothing special about them and they didn't have conversions. So this is a clear example of when I can apply this. So what I do in establishing what my max CPC should be is I have a pretty simple calculation that I'm going to share with everybody. There's going to be a link in the show notes for you to download this sheet for free. And you put in a few pieces of information and it will calculate for you the average CPC or the max CPC you should spend theoretically to get the return on ad spend that you want or to hit the target cost per lead that you want. And it uses a few pieces of your data. So for the E Comm section, which you'll see in the sheets broken up into E. Com and lead gen, in the E. Comm section, you're going to need your conversion rate, your average order value, and your break even return on ad spend. So we've covered how to calculate your break even return on ad spend and cost per lead in previous episodes. But if you need a refresher on that, just drop a comment in the YouTube video and I'll write it out in the comment section. But once you import your conversion rate, which in this case is 2.4%, you put your average order value in this case was $232. And my break even return on ad spend was 2.3. I have a max CPC of $2.42 that I should spend to theoretically reach my goal. Now, I will use that as my starting point and I'll wiggle around it. I might set my max CPC actually at $3 or $3.50 because I don't want to just shave off too many of those expensive low funnel terms because that is one of the results that could happen if you set your CPC too low. Well, two things can happen. One, you might not spend the full budget. If your target return on ad spend is too high, or if your TCPA is too low, the goal and the CPC are going to work like a teeter totter. And this is going to be your starting point on leveraging those to move forward from here. So if I set it to $3, let's say, and all of a sudden I can't spend my full budget, I'm going to need to raise that CPC or lower my target return on ad spend goal. The other thing you're going to want to monitor is, is if your search terms dramatically shift in intent. So if we shave off a lot of those expensive clicks, we want to make sure our low funnel search terms are not disappearing. And by low funnel, I mean closer to purchase intent. So I'll give you an example of a full funnel based off of an example of a Japanese kitchen knife store. So high funnel, so less purchasing intent would be kitchen knives or even Japanese kitchen knife. Low funnel would be the more specific term of the type of knife they want. So it could be Japanese santoku kitchen knife, or the brand name of a specific Japanese kitchen knife. Those are going to be more expensive clicks than the higher funnel stuff. And we just want to make sure that when we lower the cpc, we're not cutting those out. One clear indicator of this would be if your conversion rate drops. But what I like to do is after I let this run for a couple weeks, I'll export my search terms before the change for a couple weeks and then after the change for a couple weeks, and I'll throw those into ChatGPT and I'll ask ChatGPT to analyze the search terms. I'll explain that funnel to them and say what percentage of my search terms are associated to each part of the funnel? And make sure you say only pay attention to clicked search terms, and you just want to make sure that that ratio has not fallen off of a cliff. If it's become all high funnel search terms and your conversion rate dropped, you know, you got to crank up that CPC a bit, in which case it might go from a $3 CPC to an $8 or $10, that's still going to be better than getting those $40 clicks for what I saw were actually mid and high funnel search terms. So in most cases this works beautifully and I actually don't need to do all that much wiggling around. And I typically see a small lift in my return on ad spends or a drop in my cost per conversions because we're, we're stopping Google in its Tracks of being greedy. Now, one thing I want to mention when it comes to monitoring your CPCs this way is we can't always get around the fact that CPC grows like inflation. Every year it goes up. So we have to get used to just increasing them over time. But the point of this exercise is to cut out those egregious CPCs. So again, in this sheet you're going to see an E comm area which I just, just explained. And right under it you're going to see a lead generation area which has a little bit simpler math even to calculate your max cpc. It's basically just taking your target cost per lead, dividing it by your close rate. We've spoken about target cost per lead in the past before, but just to give you a quick breakdown because it's a little bit easier to explain, it's essentially your customer lifetime value and you divide that by your close rate on being able to turn leads into closed customers. So I'll give you an example. Let's say the customer lifetime value is $400. You can ask your client, right, what the customer lifetime value is. Let's say it's $400. And for every four leads that your campaign generates, if one of them turns into a closed deal, that you again would have to ask the client about how many of them actually close. That's a one in four close rate. So you take the customer lifetime value 400, you divide it by four, that gives you a $100 cost per lead goal and you divide that by your conversion rate and it will give you the max CPC threshold. So I hope this breakdown is helpful and I encourage all of you to do that exercise of looking at your search terms to see how high some of your CPCs are. So feel free to jump in the comments to ask any questions about this and click on the link in the show notes to download this calculator for free. All right, back to you, Chris. See you next time.
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All right, thanks, Joey. If you guys would like to reach out to me, you can find Me Chris@chrishaefer.com is my email. You can find my website chrisshafer.com or you can reach out to Joey, joeybidner.com for his website. Otherwise, I'll see you guys next year. I'll see you guys next week right here.
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Bye.