← 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 Your Questions About Google Ads (Episode 477)
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Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Surge podcast. My name is Chris and today I am answering your question questions about Google Ads. It's going to be a packed show. If you want to participate in my Q and A sessions, you can do so by sending me an email paid search podcastmail.com I always try and follow up, let you know that I see your question when I answer it so you'll know not to miss your episode when Chris answers your question. Before I jump into the first question, did you, did you consider how important reports are for your Google Ads accounts? Do your reports look boring? Do your reports take hours and hours out of your first of the month or last of the month week? I've got a solution for you if you didn't know. Optio, my sponsor, offers amazing reports that you can generate quickly and you can customize them for internal reports so that you can see what's happening without having to look at the busy Google Ads dashboard. You can send these reports directly to your clients. Anything that you want to build Optio is there to help you generate some kind of clear, clean report at the push of a button. It's amazing. As much as I preach about how great Opteo is, a lot of people use it simply for the amazing reporting system that it provides and it's not something that I talk about a lot. So if you'd like to try this report system that gives you customized metrics about your Google Ads accounts as you need them, you've got to try optio. Optio.com PSP is the URL to go to to get a double portion of their free trial. You can try the tool for free for 28 days. It is a great tool. I cannot tell you how many times people sing their praises about. They send in an email to me and say, hey Chris, here's my question. But by the way, also thanks for telling me about Optio. I'm totally in. They've been trying it and they love it. So try for free for 28 days. Optio.com PSP that's O P T E O.com PSP use the chat box down at the bottom and say, hey, Chris said you got an extra 14 days for me. Can I get that? They will hook you up. They are great people like that I can guarantee. All right, let's jump in with the first question. We are getting right into it. A question from Augustina about the strategy for her client who sells premium beef in the United States. So I'm not going to read the full email. I'm going to have a bit of a summary here. Let's jump to the part right here. Her client sells premium beef in the US typically around 50 to $60,000 monthly sales. So, you know, they got a lot of, a lot of beef going out the door. And they use Google Ads mostly for their lead generation and sales. So Augustina says we have a search brand, broad match campaign to target the bottom of funnel and a performance max to target full funnel. This last campaign has maximized conversions as the bidding strategy, but the campaign continues to ask for more and more money and has hundreds of thousands of impressions but no conversions. So what she's referring to is the performance max asking for more and more money with nothing to show for it. She says she tried changing assets in the performance max, tried adding a shopping campaign, and she's wondering, should I separate my campaign by states? Should I look into a different bidding strategy? She needs a way to make this more successful. So thanks for your question. And at the very top, I am going to apologize for how rude and mean I'm going to be. But I, you know, I will apologize. I'm sorry, but you came here for the truth. And I'm going to tell you what I think based on what you said. Now, of course, I'm only reading two or three sentences about a summary of what you're doing, but I have to assume a lot based on what you said. But let's start at the top. So Agostina has brand and broad match, and that's supposed to be for bottom of the funnel. So the truth is, is that this strategy provides no added value for your client. What's happening is now I'm going to put each of those determinations into a separate budget, a separate bucket for you. So if you have a campaign that has brand, then there is no added value that's happening here. You are advertising to people who have already been to your client's website, have already purchased likely or, you know, already familiar with the client's website. Right. So there's no additional value that you're adding by advertising for brand keywords. The other bucket, let's say there's some other broad match in there. These broad match keywords are being, are essentially riding the coattails of your brand keywords. So if I were to get into your account and do an audit, what I would immediately do is I would parse out brand and show you the amazing metrics that brand is achieving. And then I would parse out broad and show you the Bismol awful quality of traffic that you're getting with broad match. And it would be very obvious that this broad match, this spend that you're getting on broad, you know, wide, broad match keywords with, you know, automated bidding is not performing. It is wasting money. The only reason the campaign is showing positive metrics is because the brand is providing the lift that the broad is pulling down. Okay, this is not working for the client. Now let's move to the next out of experience. I've worked in premium beef sales, people that do delivery. I've worked on several accounts in this industry. I can tell you performance max for this kind of high cost premium product is highly unlikely to succeed. Now there are those of you that say aha, wait, I have one that's working. Okay, this is when I say this, let me qualify that and say if it's not working now, just throwing it into a performance max is not a strategy. This is some kind of magical voodoo thing that is not going to just fix things. Throwing performance max at a failing campaign does not fix. Is going to continue to ask for more money as you said and it will continue to deliver next to nothing as far as results. These types of high value premium kind of products are really tough to sell. You must sample the market in each of the levels of the funnel. And I don't think that either one of these strategies are appropriate. And here's the reason. Your current strategy allows Google to make all the decisions for your traffic. Your broad match search campaign is allowing Google to both pick the bids and the keywords, the search terms, the traffic for everything. And then in order to cover up the crap that it's getting it brand keywords, make it look even better. Okay, that, that is you're not making any decisions on your traffic. Google is. And Google's interested in one thing. It's interested in getting people to click on your ad. That's the ugly truth is Google and you do not have the same priorities. Your client wants to sell things and Google doesn't really care if they sell things or not. They just want you to continue to advertise on Google. That's what they want, that's what their goal is. So you must force these systems to have the same priority as you. You can throw large budgets with, you know, as much freedom as you want to give the Google system. That is not a guarantee that it will perform any better. You can have 100% optimization score and have an absolute trash campaign. You and Google do not have the same priorities. So you must pull decisions away from Google and force it to have the decisions and the quality of traffic and the things that you want out of it. Okay, so it's just not, I'm not giving you just negative answers. I'm going to give you a solution because people wouldn't listen to this show if I just griped and said well you suck, get out. I'm going to give you some solutions. So hopefully this will help you. So number one, focus on decisions that put quality of traffic first in your account. So if you don't put that first, if you don't focus on quality of traffic, Google won't do that either. You won't get quality of traffic. And what I mean by that is getting people who are actually interested in what it is that you're selling, people that are qualified, people that are in market, people that are likely to buy from you. This is critical. So how do you do that? So how do you put quality of traffic first? Well, the first thing I would start with is a standard shopping campaign, not a performance max shopping. So stop your performance max and create a standard shopping campaign. Standard shopping campaigns only serve from the data feed. They do not have assets attached. They don't go outside of google.com, they just serve on google.com with pictures, images, prices. They look a lot better. And typically people are more motivated to purchase because there is a incentive. They can actually see the product, they can see the price. Alright, so that is the first place to start. Start with a standard Google Ad shopping campaign. Next, build an exact match. So search campaign and focus it on some of your best guesses on what is going to convert. If your client sells really good ribs. Focus on people that are looking for ribs. If they sell really good chicken, steak. You know, start with, as I said, quality of traffic. Start with the, the best guess of what someone who. Imagine someone who's going to purchase. And now imagine one step back, what did they just search for? That's quality of traffic. Quality of traffic is the step right before they purchased. What did they do, what did they search for, what were they interested in? Target those as exact match. Okay. And I mean exact match specifically because I'm, I want you to focus on qualified searches at a narrow pace and then scale from there. Okay, so I'm assuming that the campaign is in its death throes right now. I mean it doesn't sound like it's working very well or it sounds like it's feeding you false information and lying to you about the performance. So my suggestion is build your foundation, start small. Start with exact match Keywords start with something, build on that traffic, get the right kind of traffic. The conversions will follow. Now and these are in order of preference of when you do them. So if you can't do them all in one day, you know, set your time aside and you know, do them as time allows. Third is build a broad match, no brand top of final search campaign. You'll have to decide what that looks like. But most of the time I tell people, you know, that's the kind of campaign that has, you know, people that are looking for best and what is and how should and can I kind of questions, you know, people that are researching. This is not buy premium stake online, that's not high funnel. I want you to go after cheaper CPC so the cost per click should be cheaper. All of this will basically replicate what you have in performance max but give you actual controls to make it do what it wants you to do. You're as I said pulling the decisions from Google and now you're making the decisions. So I, I hope, I hope this helps. As I said, I'm sorry I was rough on you. So I'm. But I, that's because I see this failure all the time. I see people that focus on brand, you know, allow brand to disguise failure in a Google Ads account. You do not focus on brand. Focus on adding new customers, new value, building upon what you have. Don't just have a snake that eats its own tail, right? Consumes its own value over and over. It's, it's a dying system. All right, so moving now into the next question Bernardo writes in about using brand in performance max. So again we're going back to performance max. And by the way, I have a third question that I'm going to get into. It's going to get really heavy. It's going to be a little bit later in the show. We're going to be jumping into bid strategies. Going to talking pretty deep. This is a pretty deep question that I'm going to answer in parts because it is a really good question and it deserves its own segment. So it's a little bit later in the show, stick around for that. Going to be discussing brand strategies, Roas, bidding target, cpa, when to use it, what it all means. Should be a very informative section. All right, Bernardo says hi Chris, I'd like your take on handling branded keywords when they're running both search and performance max when we're running both search and performance max for a hotel client. Alright, so historically I've excluded brand terms from performance max to Stop it from competing with the branded search campaign with this new client. However, results dropped across both campaigns. Once I applied the exclusion, fewer reservations happened and a higher cost per acquisition. Some colleagues say leaving brand queries in Performance Max feeds the algorithm more data and it actually lifts the performance. What's been your experience? Do you keep brand terms in performance Max or do you exclude them? Any test setup or guidelines that you'd recommend? All right, so first thing, let's answer the question that you asked. I do not let performance max have brand searches, period. I do not allow them to come through. I will explain why in one moment. But let me go back to a question you didn't ask. You said, historically, you've excluded brand keywords from performance max. And then you said. And then you said this sentence. With this new client, results dropped across both campaigns once I applied the exclusion. So what I'm deducing here is that you came to a new client that was maybe you launched or you didn't launch. Maybe you jumped into it halfway and you applied this rule to a campaign that did not have it applied already and you saw things drop. This is a perfect example of why I don't allow brand in my performance Max. Because when you are allowing it and then you take it out, you see the reality of what the campaign's actually doing without brand. As I said with the previous question, brand has a hori. A horrible tendency to disguise failure, disguise metrics that are worse than you thought. So I think what you experienced is reality. I think you experienced having a campaign that once you excluded brand, you saw the reality of what it was actually doing. So, you know, getting back to your question, I do not let performance Max campaigns get brand. And here's why. Performance max is, as Google has sold it many times, all the speeches and videos and play playups they do. Google Performance max is the culmination of Google's best algorithm al algorithms and AI systems and all the learnings and supercomputer power systems they have, right? So this is a pretty powerful system supposed to do all the. All the 20 plus years that Google's been you know, putting into these, you know, systems and algorithms and learnings and data that it's gathered. Here it is, we now have Performance Max. At least we do until the next thing comes around. And now that's the best. But that's what we have right now. So Performance Max is supposed to be the most impressive system. Now contrast that with getting brand conversions in Google Ads is the easiest, simplest thing to do in Google Ads. It requires no skill. It is hard to mess up getting brand traffic and making it convert in Google Ads. Okay, so we have big powerful system and then we have little bitty baby, you know, almost no skill kind of process to get, you know, success with, with brand. Why would I feed, why would I outsource the easiest and most abused aspect of Google Ads to Performance Max? Why would I give this system that's supposed to excel at doing wonderful miracles of algorithm and AI learnings and blah blah, blah. Why would I let it do something that I can build a manual bid campaign and get and have full transparency and know exactly what I'm giving, getting from it, Control the budget, control the bids, control the ad copy. My branding messaging is very clean. I, I control every aspect of it. Why would I give that to a system that's supposed to be essentially overpowered? I mean this is supposed to do so much. I do not let the system do it. I do not. And I'll go even further. I don't use remarketing audiences in my Performance Max campaigns. You know what I do use? I use remarketing audiences in everything outside of Performance Max. I might set up a display campaign or I might have a remarketing search campaign. I don't throw it into Performance Max. No, no, no. I'm gonna do all this part. I'm gonna get my hands into this big powerful Performance max. You do the hard part. You find the conversions that I can't use all your special algorithms and get the success that I'm not able to find myself. I give it the hard job. If it's gonna do its amazing job, let it do it. No, no, you don't get this easy part, right? So I don't use brand keywords in my Performance Max campaigns. I don't use remarketing. I avoid all forms of retargeting in Performance Max. You get me leads that haven't heard of me before and go do it. You know, I give it all the assets that it needs, but do not resell me my own leads. Alright? And I said what I said earlier, I said it very specifically. Brand traffic. Brand leads is the easiest and most abused aspect of Google Ads. Brand targeting should be kept under close guard. I'm gonna get into this a little bit later in the show. It's actually another question that comes in around brand at some point. So I'm gonna, I'm going to give a little more aspect about that a little bit later. But keep this picture in your mind. Okay? I'm going to, I'M going to end this question with an illustration. You know, I imagine a lot of the people that are listening to this podcast can remember Gremlins. You remember Gremlins, that movie? Like you, it might have scared you to death and, you know, still haunt you because you were a kid and you shouldn't have watched it and it was way too scary, even though you watch it now and it was really dumb and you. And you're like, why did I get scared of that? But you're a kid, you know. But Gremlins, I equate to brand traffic, brand keywords in Google Ads. They, you, you don't feed them after midnight and you don't get them wet, right? These things, when you break the rules of Gremlins, they multiply and they become evil when you break those rules. The same thing happens in Google Ads. Google Ads, brand keywords, brand traffic. When you don't keep them out of water, and when you feed them after midnight, they can overpopulate and become evil in your campaign. They can destroy and saturate what used to be a good thing. So your brand keywords are gremlins. Keep them safe. Keep them secret. Don't feed them after midnight and don't pour water on them. Don't let, don't let them jump in the pool, which is what happened in the movie. Okay, so we're jumping into. The last question comes all the way from Pakistan, which is really cool. I don't know if I've had a question from Pakistan. Maybe. I have. Yeah, I have. I have. Before Khan from Pakistan writes in, and I'm going to answer his question about bidding strategies. ROAS target CPA. Right after I remind you about optio.com PSP please, if you value this show, it just helps to signal to my one and only advertiser that I am, that I have a real audience that listens to me. Right? I don't, I don't have billboards. I don't have commercials. You know, I have to provide real results for my advertisers. And it does help when you guys, you know, try out the tools or, you know, you know, do something to, to, to let them know that these ads are being heard by real people. So I appreciate when you guys do that, and I know you do. So thank you for that. Optio.com PSP if you haven't. All right, question from Khan from Pakistan. Hey, Chris, I hope you're doing well. You answered a question I sent a few months ago, and I'm really thankful for that. Also. That weekly 40 minute podcast has been a real blessing. Oh, thank you. Okay, so I'm not going to read the whole email. I'm going to do a little bit of editing here. But essentially what Khan talks about here is an account that has two different conversion types. One conversion type is a purchase, which is very high value and rarely happens. Right? So a purchase on the website. The other is a sign up. This happens a lot more frequently, but of course it's a lower value. The person is only creating an account. I assume they signed up, they created an email account or shared their email or something. So this is more common, less value. So now that you have that context, let's continue on with his email. When does assigning values to conversion actions actually work? Does it work better with maximize conversions or maximize conversions Target cpa. Okay, so good question. I'm glad you asked because this is a very clean answer to give. Assigning values to a conversion only matters. With Maximize Roas and Target Roas, there is no other bidding strategy that recognizes values other than maximize Roas. That's R O A S return on ad spend is what that stands for. Maximize Roas, which is a type of bidding strategy and Target Roas Roas bidding. So those are essentially the same thing. Target Roas is essentially Maximize Roas with just a little checkbox hit on it. Okay, so that is the only thing that Google uses to optimize or change its bidding strategy. This is very important because if you are adding values and using maximize conversions or maximize conversions with target cpa, you are impacting the bidding of, you know, of Google, the bidding influences of Google zero. It does not matter, which is very important. So con, you're asking the right question. You're asking the right question because if you have two different bidding strategies, one's a purchase which provides 10x value of the signups. Then that's a good question. You should be assigning values. But it is not gonna make any difference unless you use the proper bidding strategy. Okay, so we got, we got that out of the way. Let's move now to another question from Khan's email. He says, in my brand campaign, I'm getting 15, 10 to 15 purchases per day. Should I even include signups as a conversion action for my brand campaign? Okay, so remember, he's got two different types of conversions, purchases and signups. High value, low value, high volume, low volume. So the answer to your question is. This is an irrelevant question. I set you up there. I'm sorry, but that they say there's no such thing. As a dumb question. It's not a dumb question, but it's just an irrelevant question. That's not the question you should be asking. You should not be asking yourself, should I add this conversion action to my brand campaign? It's an irrelevant question because brand campaigns are not about getting conversions. If you're advertising for your company name, your company product name, something that is directly associated with your company, who cares what conversions you're getting? I mean, you should probably care, but you should not be worried about optimizing for roas or optimizing for certain conversion actions. You should do this. You should run a brand campaign with manual bidding and focus on impression share and absolute top percentage. So you should not use maximize conversions. You should not use maximize roas. You should bid to have your ads show at the top and beat your competitors if competitors are bidding against your company name, which sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. So it doesn't mean everybody should do this. But when it is happening, forget any strategy around conversions. It is not about conversions. It is about manual bidding is about getting your placement. So if you're uncomfortable with manual bidding, use Target Impression Share. Use Target Impression Share because this can kind of automatically do what manual bidding does and ignores all of your conversion metrics. But however you get it done, don't use max clicks, don't use Maximize Conversions or target CPA or any of those things. Use either manual or Target Impression Share. Those are the only two appropriate bidding strategies I think, that should be used in brand. No one should be bragging about how many brand conversions they get. There's really no one that should be bragging at all about brand. As I mentioned in my first question, it's the easiest and most abused metric in Google Ads. Contain it. Run it as though it only matters that you show up and show up first. Period. Okay, hope that's clear. We're going to do a third part to Kahn's question here, so we're still on the same topic. He goes on with the third question, which I really loved all three questions. So that's why I'm including everything here. So here we go in my non brand and DSA campaigns. So let me clarify what he's saying here. Non brand. So it doesn't include brand keywords and it's dsa, that's dynamic search ads. So these are non keyword campaigns. They don't have keywords in them. They're dynamically generating traffic. So let me read that again. In my non brand DSA campaigns, I'm currently running Maximize conversions without a Target cpa. And I only see around one to two purchases per day, sometimes zero. Because of this, Google seems to push more towards the easier conversion action of signups. What's the best setup in this case? All right, so you are 100% correct. Target CPA or even maximize conversions will always go after the easiest conversion action. So whatever happens the most often, if it's a sign up, that is what it will optimize for. Because it's the lowest hanging fruit, it's the easiest one to get. For example, if anyone has ever added store visits or get directions as a conversion action, you've seen that those conversions can overwhelm the calls and the forms and the legit leads that you're getting. These store visits can explode. You can get hundreds and hundreds of quote unquote conversions, hundreds and hundreds of get directions. And I see this happen for people that don't have a store, don't actually, you know, that's a plumbing company and no one's coming to your plumbing, plumbing service company store to get their plumbing done. You know, it's obviously a worthless metric, but with Target CPA maximize conversions, it will always go after the easiest to attain conversion because you're telling it that all of them are of equal value, which is not the case. So here's your two options if you're having this issue. Option number one, which is what I would do. So for clarity, of my two options that I'm going to lay out, the first one is what I would do in your situation at least to begin with. Use manual bidding and manage the bids based on the ad groups that have the higher percentage of purchases. Okay, I recommend this because if you jump straight into Target ROAS or Maximize roas, you lose your bidding control immediately. You have no ability to control your CPCs, no ability to control your keyword bids. Everything's gone and now it's all under Google's control. So at least at the beginning, I'm going to manually decide, okay, this one's doing pretty good. It has like a 2x return, you know, and I'm going to bid a little bit higher for this one, see if I can get better rankings on this. But this one over here only has like a 0.7 return. It's getting a whole lot of signups and hardly any purchases. So I'm going to pull back on this one, maybe make some adjustments here and there. That's what I mean by manual bidding. I am going to manually adjust based on where I see the value coming from particularly paying attention to the return on ad spend numbers. That is the critical metric that's going to make the big difference. So that, that's how I, I do it. And you know, number two, this one, I'm not a big fan of this one because it is more dangerous and I want to minimize risk in my Google Ads accounts. The other option is to assign values to your campaigns and start using target roas or maximize conversion value. This is more risky as I said, because you lose your bidding controls, you have no more bidding control. So I like to kind of step into this process. First step, let me start managing for the ones that have, you know, the most purchases compared to signups. Slowing down the ones that need slowing down, speeding up the ones that need speeding up. And then eventually I'll add in values at some point and I might experiment with an automated bid strategy to see if Google can do even better. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. But you'll regret if you jump those couple steps and jump straight into maximize conversion value and the system fails. That's a big leap. It's a big leap to take and I absolutely advise against large risk in Google Ads management. If you would like to speak with me about Google Ads management coaching about your specific Google Ads account or maybe get a get me to take a look at your account. I offer, I do offer free audits of accounts. No, you don't have to do anything. You just send me your Google Ads ID number and I request access and I do an audit. It's not even a PDF audit, it's a, it's actually a video. I actually record a short video and do some stuff. So this is a one time thing so far. For those of you that have already done this for, please don't reach out again but happy to do that if you haven't had that provided for you before, something that a lot of people find value in, you can find me@chrishaefer.com otherwise you'll find me right here next week.