← 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
Answering Questions about Google Ads (Episode 459)
00:38:57
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm answering your questions. It's been a while since I've done this. I have three really good questions from listeners that I'm going to answer. If you'd like to participate in the podcast, send over a question. Happy to get it. You can send the email to paid search podcastmail.com and I typically reply and let you know that I'll be answering your question. Happy to do more of these Q and A's. They're always surprising. The questions you guys send are always really interesting. I never, never know to expect. So happy to hear from anyone who has a question about Google Ads. Paid Search podcastmail.com so I have, as I said, I have three questions and later in the show I'm going to have Joey talk about using Google Ads with Amazon.com this is something if you have an ability to run ads to Amazon.com have you considered it? Have you considered the benefits of what it could be like to not run ads to your website but instead send them to Amazon.com and what that could look like. Joey's gonna break it down later in the show after the questions, so stick around for that. Before I jump into the questions, I wanna remind you about our number one only sponsor, the only people I get behind when it comes to making changes in your Google Ads account. And that's optio.com PSP. That's the special URL to get your hands on a 28 day free trial of the world's only Chris Schaefer approved paid search podcast certified program that will help you make better decisions in your Google Ads accounts. So it's overwhelming that the number of things that you can do in Google Ads, the number of options that are available to you and with this tool it will help you break down decisions and see. Should I apply a different bidding strategy? Should I pause this keyword? Should I block this specific negative keyword? Has my search impression share increased? Decreased? Does it matter? Do I need more budget? These kind of decisions are critically important across your search shopping campaigns. Even, even Microsoft ads is something they can handle. So if you need help making decisions in Google Ads and who doesn't, you can try optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial to help you with an amazing performance boost. Or the fact is you have, you have nothing to lose if it doesn't work, which it will, but it's still totally free to try. I promise you will learn and gain something from it. Optio.com PSP all right, so Joey's coming up a little bit later, but first we're going to jump in on some questions. Three of them, to be exact. The first one comes from an anonymous. A person who would like to remain anonymous. And always happy to accommodate that, because I know someone's boss, coworker could be listening to this podcast. So if you don't want your name used, just let me know. I'll happy to accommodate. So we have a question from anonymous. They say, hi, Chris. I absolutely love listening to your podcast. Every week. I've come across an issue this last week that I wanted to share with you. Set the scene. Here's some background information. So I'm going to read each of these points. I'll do them quickly, and then we'll get into the answer. So they had an account running that was getting leads, but not enough volume of leads, and in other words, the cost per lead was too high. Okay. Brand new account, brand new campaigns. So they had a freelancer with a lot of experience come in and what they decided to do was change these phrase match keywords to exact match. And the purpose behind this was to try and improve the impression share while maintaining costs and preventing the campaign from running off with the spend. Okay, so the campaign has a couple other phrase match keywords running, but there are no keywords that are duplicated. So either one keyword is phrase match or it's exact match. There's not duplicate keywords, one in each match type. Okay, so keep that in mind. After the exact match keywords were added, the campaign continues spinning across all keywords, including the new exact match keywords. After day four of these changes, the campaign has completely stopped spending or even showing the ad. I've looked through all settings and potential issues, but none are showing to be the problem. There's been no other changes made to the campaign. My manager, the person they hired, believes that either the keywords are clashing or that we should have duplicated the campaign and then relaunched it with the exact match keywords in place as the campaign wouldn't have been used. Wouldn't have been used to exact matches. So now you have. Now you understand the purpose behind the questions that we're going to ask. Right. There's keywords that were phrase match change to exact match, and they stopped running. The campaign's been getting no traffic. Right. So that's what this anonymous person's question is. I have two questions. If the keywords were spending, collecting data and showing positive outcomes with no obvious clashes, what could be a potential reason that the campaign has suddenly stopped. Okay, there's another question, but I'm gonna answer this first one first. So the campaign. Thank you, Anonymous, for your question. The campaign stopped because changing phrase keywords to exact is not a strategy. Okay? Changing keywords and just going in and just changing all match type from phrase to exact is not a strategy. This is a gimmick. This is not a strategy. There is no strategy where it is appropriate to just change exact match key or change phrase broad anything from one match type to another. This is, and I call it a gimmick because it's just kind of an idea. There's. I understand that. I understand what the manager was going for, but this is not a legitimate strategy. This is not a way of controlling risk. Okay? So, Anonymous, I know that you had said you listened to my podcast weekly, so I know you've heard me talk about risk in keywords. Keyword risk is a major factor. There is no way that every single keyword that was changed from phrase to exact had the same amount of risk and that they all required exact match. This was just a kind of catch. I'll just say, okay, we want better search impression share. We want to better restrict the targeting. So we're just gonna change everything to exact. The proper way to do this would have been to assess, okay, what is this phrase match keyword? Getting that we need to block or perhaps lower the bids or perhaps change the match type from phrase to exact every time. The answer is not always. Change the match type, change the match type, change the match type. Sometimes it means lower the bids, raise the bids, add some in negative keywords, change the keyword entirely to add some additional context to the keywords. Not every single time is the appropriate answer to change the match type. So now let me explain why I think the keyword stopped. And this is a relatively new term that's come up in the past three years. It's called minimum CPC threshold. Okay? This is a new term Google threw at us post 2020 when they decided to change the definition of a keyword. So there is this thing called minimum CPC threshold, minimum bid threshold, whatever you want to call it, essentially some keywords will not show. So you didn't mention what industry you were in or, you know, showing ads for. But the fact is, is that even if there's no competitors, and especially in the situation, let's say that there's no competitors for what you're doing, these are very specific keywords, very targeted, there's no competitors for these keywords. There's nobody else in the auction insights for this. There is a minimum CPC threshold that is required in order to show ads. There is no longer just a minimum. Like you can spend a penny and potentially show keywords have a minimum market to enter the auction process. It's unfortunate. I don't like that. But that's the way it is. It's not always been like that. So by changing from phrase to exact, you have artificially raised your minimum CPC threshold. So it's very likely whatever bidding strategy you were using, whether it was automated, whether it was manual, suddenly the minimum CPC threshold has been raised so much that whatever bids were there are no longer sufficient. Therefore, the ads likely stop because the bids were no longer high enough to get clicks. Now, that's the guess that I would say that this is. This is a minimum CPC threshold issue and it's a bidding issue. The proper method that I think would have been more appropriate is to instead have looked at the individual phrase matches and figured out, here's what we want, here's what we don't want, and possibly rebuilt the campaign. And that leads me to your next question. The next question coming from Anonymous is should I duplicate, Should I duplicate and relaunch the campaigns when changes like these are made or when performance starts to drop? To answer your second part of your question, no. Again, duplicating a campaign and relaunching it is not a strategy, it is a gimmick. It serves no purpose for improving the results of a campaign. I see people do this all the time where they'll see a campaign performance starts to drop, they'll copy it and paste it, pause the old one, turn on the new one, and it starts doing well again. This is, this is, you know, just like certain sports people wearing the same socks over and over. You know, I mean, I am, I am not going to put luck or, you know, any kind of superstition into Google Ads because it has no place here. This is not a situation where you can kind of just try some kind of little trick and it just works because you don't exactly know why, but it just seems to work. If I applied that rule to one campaign, perhaps it will. If I tried it to another campaign, it won't. There's no significant results that I've seen that continues to say, oh, if you duplicate a campaign, it'll, you know, it'll kind of re. Kick in, restart. No, it's ridiculous. It is not true. The only time that you should duplicate a campaign and relaunch it is when you want to keep the original campaign intact as a kind of backup. So in this instance, whenever you had a working campaign and the suggestion was to change everything to Exact Match, that would have been an appropriate time to duplicate the campaign, changed everything to exact Match, pause the old one so that you keep it as a relaunchable backup and then launch the new one. Exact Match. That is, is a strategy because we all know things go bad in Google Ads. Things can go poorly in Google Ads. That's a strategy because you've been here before, you know that these are ideas and ideas can absolutely fail in Google Ads. So you shouldn't just assume, oh, this, this will work and just do it. Because things can, can, can absolutely fall apart. But it is not, you know, duplicating a campaign and relaunching it as a strategy within it, within itself is not a strategy, it's a gimmick. So there you go. I hope that is helpful to you. Thank you for your question. Moving on now to Jordan. Jordan writes in and says frequent listener to your show. I appreciate all of your help. I wanted to hear your thoughts on creating individual landing pages for each service you're running ads for versus running the ads through your website using different service pages. Okay, great. Classic question. Thank you, Jordan for the question. Just to be clear, make sure everybody understands Jordan is saying option A, individual contained landing pages that are specific to each service. So when you say this, I assume, Jordan, what you mean is they are self contained and they don't link back to the website. They are siloed out pages that don't have navigation. They, they are not connected to the original website or even connected to one another. Each of these pages are silos independent of each other. So when you send someone to this individual landing page, they go to that page and there's no additional links to go anywhere else. And the other option, option B is the client's website, your website. And there's service pages and there is navigation. It's all under the same umbrella. They can go to the homepage, they can go to a different service page, they can go to the contact us page, they can navigate to anywhere they want. There is no siloing of the user or the page itself. So you're asking what are my thoughts on these things? So I'll tell you, both personally and professionally, I hate landing pages. I do not like them. And I say professionally because as a Google Ads manager for many, many years, I've worked in both of these situations. I do not like landing pages. I do not like siloed self contained landing pages. And personally, whenever I am searching, shopping, browsing the Internet for something, I do not like landing pages. And the funny thing is, most of the time it's because of the same reason and the same reason many of you listeners probably don't like landing pages personally either. You may not have a professional opinion, but personally you probably don't like them because here's why. They force you to either convert or leave. A landing page says buy now, convert now, fill out this form now or get out. You know what the majority of people do? They leave, they get out. Because in fact, as Joey will tell you later in the episode, he's going to mention the fact that shopping online is, is not a linear process. He's going to get into that topic and I completely agree. Listen to how he describes it and what he's going to talk about. And I'll tell you the same thing. People don't just click and buy, click and buy, click and buy, click and call. They don't do that. It's a very organic process. You know, very rarely do you just search and ah, that's exactly what I'm looking for and then just make the decision right there. Doesn't really happen that way. So either convert or leave, buy or get out is not a black and white, black and white approach of how you would typically want to send traffic to your Google Ads account. It's not something that I recommend for most industries. It's not ideal for an agency however, to use a client's website. So you say, Kris, why, why do so many people use landing pages? Why are they talked about so much? Well, the, the answer is this. Agencies like to use landing pages because it provides solid tracking data so that they can have clear reports about how many leads they are getting you. Right? So that way they can say we got you 15 leads and that way the client doesn't get five additional leads that they weren't able to track and get credit for. They want credit where credit's due. They want credit for every single lead they've gotten because they want to keep that client happy. And knowing that they're doing a good job, it's understandable, it's understandable. But I think it is ideal for the client to use their own website. They're paying money for it, They've put a lot of time into it. And you know who loves landing pages? You know who's the biggest fan of landing pages? People who build landing pages. Agencies who sell landing pages, freelancers who sell Build landing pages. That's who loves landing pages. So why do they get used? Why are they so popular? Because people who sell them make them and recommend them and put them into their service, right? You hire an agency, you hire a person and they say, okay, I'm going to build you a Google Ads campaign and I'm going to build you custom landing pages. You say, great, you know what that does that, that makes their service more expensive. You're going to pay for those. You're going to pay for those landing pages. It takes takes time and money and effort to build those and you're going to pay for them. So I prefer to start. Here's what I would suggest. You say, well, Chris, you know what is the preferred method? Well, here's what I like to do. I prefer to start with different service pages on the website. That's ideal. I don't like to use landing pages at all and preferably have a different service page for each of the major categories that the company is selling. Okay. I start running ads and then I optimize those different service pages based on the traffic that I'm getting. So that might mean some of those pages might need different headlines. I might need to convey a different feeling or message, different type of headline for each of those pages. I'm not saying that each page is an exact duplicate. In fact, some might need different images. So some might need more images than others. Some of these service pages might need a phone number and a web form. Some people might, it might be best to just have a form or just a phone number. So I'm not saying that all of your service pages should look exactly the same. No, I think you should optimize your service pages based on what would be best for that, that clientele that's gonna be coming to that page. So I don't think they should be uniform, but I don't think they should be siloed off as individual landing pages. I feel that they are bounce factories. You know what I mean by that? I mean, people come to the page and they bounce. They come in, seconds later, they leave. I mean, there's only some very specific instances of clients that I've worked with that have landing pages that continue to work well for long periods of time. It's not common. So, Jordan, thank you for your question. And going to wrap up the three questions here with Emily. Emily writes in and Said says, very, very simple question, very simple question, very important question as well. Emily says, what's the purpose of running a brand campaign on Google Ads? And Is it always beneficial to do so? Great, Great question. I definitely have addressed brand campaigns a lot. Just to define brand campaign for those that are confused by that essentially means traffic that is searching for your business for your product. Specifically, they are using your business name on google.com and they're searching for you. They're brand searches. Okay, so here's the answer, Emily. The only legit reason to run a brand campaign is to fight against lost sales or leads. Okay? In other words, the reason they would be lost is because a competitor ad or a competitor organic listing is showing up when your business name is being searched. So there's instances when companies have split, their names are now very similar. There will be competitors that try and mask themselves as though they are your company, but they're actually a different company. Right. These are situations when competitor ads purposely are poaching or cloaking themselves or doing something to try and leech leads traffic clicks from your business to get them to come to their business. Okay, Absolutely. Verifiable reason to run a brand campaign. Some other issue perhaps that is causing a loss of brand clarity on google.com that I'm not listing here could also be a reason to run brand on a search campaign. Okay, so essentially, as I said at the beginning, the only legit reason to run brand campaigns is to fight against lost sales or leads or traffic directly due to some kind of issue that's happening. If there's no competitor issue, if there's no listing issue, if there's not some kind of clarity issue of your ads showing up when they should organically, then you need to supplement those organic listings with paid ads. Any other reason I don't think is valid, you say, well, Chris, why do so many people run brand campaigns? Why do so many people set them up? Well, the fact is, is they get bad advice. They listen to a podcast to YouTube, they ask, you know the wrong person and they help them with it. And the first thing they do is start punching in their company name as a keyword. They just get bad advice. Very. They just don't know. They're just ignorant. So you should not be advertising your company name unless you're under an instance of duress for some purpose of having to do that. Number two of why so many people do it, they don't understand that it's a waste of money. They don't know that they're wasting money by advertising their company name. That traffic would have come in organically. Now, if there's some reason why it wouldn't be coming in organically then that's a legitimate loss of sales and traffic that you would want to run brand traffic for. But just because you run paid ads on a brand keyword and get clicks, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have come in organically. In fact, 99% of the time, they would have. They would have just searched and clicked on your business listing, your organic listing, your social media site, something like that. They would have found you. They're the one that did the search. They obviously have a goal. They typed in your name. Don't pay money to sell them a second time. You already did that. It's a waste of money. And the third and final reason why it happens so often, unfortunately, in right in line with last week's episode. Scammy, slimy agencies want their reports to look better. They do it on purpose because a report with a brand campaign that's running looks a lot better than a report without a brand campaign that's running. The difference between a report that shows brand traffic with non brand traffic could mean 300% more conversions. Right? The non brand traffic may have gotten 10 conversions, 5 conversions, but the brand brought in 25, 40 conversions. Which report do you think the client will be more receptive to? Right. This agency just got hired because the company before them got fired. They want to make sure, this new agency wants to make sure they keep this client. So they're going to send the most glowing, impressive reports they can. And the best, not the best, but the easiest way to make that, to force that to happen, is to sell brand traffic back to the client because it always converts, it always looks good, it's always cheap. So hopefully that puts some clarity into the understanding of what brand campaigns are for and why they so often exist. And I have Joey Bidner coming in. The last part of the show is going to talk about Amazon. So all you E commerce clients, business owners out there, listen up because you can talk about E Commerce and Amazon and some of the benefits that you may not have considered. Before he jumps in, I want to tell you about optio.com PSP. You can use the new Ingram finder tool from Optio, which identifies wasteful search terms and simplifies the negative keyword process across Google Ads. And you can do this and many, many other things right there in the tool, phenomenal tool for Google Ads managers, Google Ads, business owners, anyone who wants to get more done in less time. Optio.com PSP all right, Joey, take it away.
- [29:21]
Joey Bidner
Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I would like to Talk about Amazon. And I want to share with you a really powerful, powerful strategy of using Google Ads for Amazon and sending traffic to Amazon. Now before I get into the strategy, I want to talk a little bit about the relationship of Amazon with any paid media effort really. But if you're, you know, an e commerce store that also sells on Amazon, it can be tricky to really see your customer journey because as we spoke about in, in previous episodes, customer journeys are long and complex. Nobody just clicks on an ad and converts anymore. They click on an ad to find you and then they leave, come back, find a competitor, come back, leave, go to Amazon in the end often. And this Amazon data can't be imported to Google Ads. You can't see that attribution. But it's really important to look at your Amazon as kind of like a landing platform for the customers that you generate on Google Ads. And I often correlate, well, try to visually correlate my Google Ads efforts to Amazon. And pretty simply, it's just, you know, when you launch a new strategy, maybe you increase your budgets like watch how your Amazon grows. It's really important to observe that correlation because you know, Amazon, there is a lot of, of buying power and Amazon when it comes to consumer trust, right? If you land on a website where you don't know this company, you don't, you know, necessarily even trust them with your credit card information or you don't have time to fill out your credit card information, create an account, as soon as you find out it's on Amazon, boom. Like the barrier to purchase just got dropped. And I love clients that sell on Amazon and the website because again, it is a pulling down of a barrier to purchase. And people who have Amazon prime, for example, like they, they can trust the delivery times again, they don't need to put in their information. It's just as soon as they find out it's on Amazon, it makes it much easier to purchase. But finding you as a viable option is where Google Ads comes in a lot of the time. So many times it's customers will find you on Google and then find out you sell on Amazon by searching Amazon and purchase there. So I just want to kind of start with that and don't, you know, discredit your Google Ads efforts because, oh, our Amazon is doing so well, but our website doesn't do nearly what our Amazon does. Well, guess what? Google Ads is helping your Amazon. Now I want to talk about a strategy to further assist Amazon and it's a strategy that also will help you and help your pocketbooks, because there is an incentive from Amazon to do so that brings down your Amazon rates. So before I get into the strategy, I want to give credit where credit is due. And I learned about this strategy from John Moran, another thought leader in the space. And I've been using this strategy for a couple of years. So right out of the gate, one of the really interesting things and programs that Amazon launched a while ago, I don't know how old this is, but it's in Amazon's best interest to get traffic from external sources, right? So they created a program where if you send traffic from your Google Ads, for example, from a Google Ads, click, you can get a 10. If you send that traffic from Google Ads and somebody purchases a product, one of your products, you get a 10% kickback and rebate on the purchase. Now Amazon's, Amazon's service fee is what, 15%? And you get 10% back. It's huge. And it's, you basically have to apply for this referral program. I think that's what it's called. It's referral program. It's really easy. You basically set up like a campaign. And the campaign, just like you get to select the products you have, you can even direct people to a page, a product page, or like a, a big fancy landing page. And they give you a URL and you just use that URL in your Google Ads. Now this is where things gets really, this is where things get really interesting is again, it's in Amazon's best interest to send traffic from external sources. So they pulled down the barriers on using Amazon.com as a keyword, also using Amazon in ad copy, and even using Amazon's logo in your ad. Okay? So with that, what you can do, what I do is you create a little campaign. Again, this must be a campaign. Don't put it in an ad group with your other stuff. Create a campaign where your keywords are really focused, right? So let's say you're selling patio umbrellas. It's Amazon patio umbrella exact match. Okay? A few variations of, let's say the different types of patio umbrellas. But people searching for the product you sell on Amazon, that is the keyword target. Then in your ad copy, you can say Amazon's best selling patio umbrella. And you can put the Amazon logo there. And you can even, you can even put Amazon.com as the business name in the ad. You know, there's that section for business name. You can even put Amazon.com there. So when someone types in patio umbrella Amazon, which we Amazon user search. Like as an Amazon user, we all search with the intent of buying on Amazon. Again because those barriers to purchase are easy and it's so predictable. So you know, trust me, those searches are out there. But yeah, when someone searches that, they then see the Amazon ad copy that that reassures them that it is looks like it's from Amazon more or less and it goes to your product page, your collection page, whatever. And when they purchase, you get that 10% kickback. So yeah, another benefit of this strategy is Amazon usually gets 10 out of 10 quality scores. So your cost per click can be really low. Now I have seen in some cases for unknown reasons, I had one situation once where the cost per click was like way higher than our average cost per click. But that was an isolated situation. I've done this on countless brands and it's usually almost always a cheaper cpc. So yeah, I really love this strategy. And one other thing I want to mention is, you know, usually the one place of pushback I get with suggesting this, even without the 10% kickback that you get is oh well, you know, we make, you usually get this from the brands that I'm pitching this to, you know, my clients. Oh, you know, we make way less margin on Amazon. So I don't really want to push Amazon, I want to push our website. Now I had a client where it's a rather large brand with, you know, a complex Shopify store with a lot of features, a lot of apps. And I asked them to do an exercise and I said like, I want you to really count up all the costs on the website. How much does your website actually cost you from, you know, app fees, maintenance fees for the website and more importantly also credit card processing fees, shipping, all this stuff. How much does it actually amount to? And after we did this long and drawn out exercise, we actually found out that for this client in this situation, Amazon was actually a more profitable shopping space for them than their website. And you know, you just don't really assume it because you know, it's not laid out in a CLEAR oh, it's 15% per purchase. But it turned out that Amazon was a lot more profitable than they assumed. So it, it steered a lot of our strategy and we're going heavier into Amazon. So with all that said, I want, you know, you to consider Amazon as an extension to your marketing efforts if you get purchases on Amazon. It doesn't mean that those people were isolated to just searching on Amazon. They likely come from outside Amazon and Amazon is just the landing pad for them. To buy. And don't underestimate the power Amazon has on getting somebody over the hump to purchase. So I'm starting to push Amazon messaging a little bit more as well on websites, in ads, you know, available on Amazon and seeing it as a holistic effort as opposed to the traditional isolated, oh, I've got my website and I've got Amazon. And yeah, give this strategy a try. It's very low risk and I'll just say like, keep it really simple, right? Like create its own campaign, a couple keywords, make them really Amazon focused, exact match and see where it takes you. And yeah, good luck. I'll pass back to you, Chris. See you next time.
- [38:30]
Chris Schaefer
Thank you, Joey. Thank you guys for being here. Thank you for subscribing to the podcast week after week. I will be here next week if you would like to reach me. ChrisHaefer.com is the website. If you'd like to reach reach Joey, it's joeybidner.com both of our websites are linked in the description. Whether you're watching or listening, it's all there. Thank you so much for being here. I will catch you guys next week.