← 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 (Episode 441)
00:42:14
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Chris
Hello and welcome to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Chris and I'm back. I took a little break. I hope you forgive me. It was a long Thanksgiving and I was busy sleeping, napping, just trying to work off all that dressing that I ate. So I'm back. I'm here to deliver answers to your Google Ads questions. That's my purpose today. Many people have written in. I appreciate the really good questions that I've gotten. Some of you have waited a while and I'm finally going to get to your question. I appreciate your patience. If you would like to send in a question, you can go to my website, Paid search podcast. There's a link there. Or you can just email me directly. Paid search podcastmail.com and I will get your message. All right, so I have, let's see how many. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Wow, I really overdid it. I have six questions to answer. I got a little ambitious I guess. Consider it my early Christmas gift to all of you. And I will be answering these questions in the order that they were received. If you would like to send one, please do. I try and do these question and answer episodes once every month or so. Usually some really good topics come up and this is no different. So thank you for all of those. And no episode would be complete until I told you about my favorite software that I have to remind you about. Because everyone talks about it. Everybody tells me. Thank you for telling me about it. Thank you for alerting me to this wonderful software. Optio.com PSP you are not getting enough out of Google Ads unless you have the power of Optio behind you. This is a system that will give you, that will crunch through the data and give you information that you otherwise would have been blind to. It dives further because it is a powerful software that looks at data differences in your click through rate, your cost per click, your performance, your conversion metrics, your search impression share, when ads should be turned off, turned on different times of the day, your quality scores, your responsive search ad performances and gives you suggestions. This is not the kind of thing that you just turn on and it just changes your account for you. I would never recommend that. I want you to make informed decisions about your Google Ads accounts. And that's what Optio is all about. It's about. It's about making informed decisions to slowly improve your performance month after month after month. You can try it for free for 28 days. That's twice as long as you get. If you were to sign up just on their website so go to optio.com PSP that's optio.com PSP to try the tool for free. All right, so let's jump into it from Brittany in Richmond, Virginia who tells me to say a special hello to her boss out there. Hello boss. She is obviously a hard working employee of yours. Sends in a very good question. I can tell by the type of question that she's asking. This is someone who pays attention to detail. So obviously you've got on your hands a great employee. Brittany says. Hi Chris, I'm a new listener of the podcast and love how informative it is as a new account manager and I love that the podcast gets me thinking about management in a different way. Well, good, thank you, Brittany. I've noticed with some of the Google Ads accounts that the website call conversion action showing an inactive tag but on the back end of the client's website the event snippets are installed correctly. Google Ads shows that the last activity was at the end of October, but the last seen date is mid November. Has there been a Google Update that is affecting the website call conversions? How do we fix this inactive tag so we can improve our conversion metrics from our clients? So thank you for the question. I actually have a follow up from Brittany who I always respond to the emails and let you know when I'm going to answer your question. If I have your email and if you send it to my Gmail account, I always respond. She actually sent a follow up and said we found out that we can use GTM linker to bypass the issue and get the web call tracking active. She says that they'll be implementing it next week with their clients. So this is an update. So first of all, if you're curious, if you're having the same kind of issue, you've heard about it or you're curious about it, Brittany's saying that this kind of issue where you're having an issue with the inactive status on website call conversion popping up the GTM linker can help bypass the issue. So let me take a stab at this and I want to tell you these kind of issues are so isolated, they're so specific. Everything that you're having an issue with could be the same kind of thing someone else is having an issue with, but the problem is a different problem resulting in the same symptoms, but the problem is different, right? And it takes a different solution for all the other people that are having the same problem. So unfortunately I can't address this in a universal way, which is what I try and do on the podcast, I try and address these questions in a way that is universally applied and people can listen to it and get their answers. So I'm not going to try and answer this specific thing, but I think, Brittany, what we can do is I can address some of the confusing aspects of conversion tracking and some of these notifications that show up on here. So some of you, this is simple and very elementary, and others it may not be. But regardless, I think it's important that you understand that there's different types of status records for your conversion actions. The ideal status that you're going to want is going to be one that says active, okay? Anytime you see status on one of your conversion actions and it says active, that means that there is recent activity and the tag doesn't have any problems. There's no issues. There's no problems. It's active and getting conversions regularly. Okay? And by the way, if you want to see what these tags are, they're located in the summary section of the conversion. So you go to the goals section of Google Ads, then click on summary, and there will be a status column for each of your conversions. So another one that you don't want to see is one that says inactive. Okay? This is one that means there's possibly a problem with the tag. There's possibly a situation where the tag is correct and it just hasn't gotten any conversions and it never got any conversions. So Google can't confirm that the tag is active or not. It's just inactive. Okay? This is not something you want to see. This is probably the worst situation because in this situation you don't know if it's broken or if you're just getting zero conversions. Ideally, you just hope that you're. That the tag is broken and you're not getting any conversions. And once you fix the tag, then conversions will start pouring in. But this is definitely the worst situation to be in. A little bit better is one that says no recent conversions. So if it says no recent conversions, then in the last seven days at least there have been no conversions at all. So it's not inactive. The tag is working, but there's no conversions. So that means that there were conversions at some point and now there are not. So it's gone dormant, let's say. And then last, a very common one that you'll see is one that says needs attention. Now this one I would largely ignore most of the time. If it's working. If your conversions are working and the status says needs attention, what it's probably wanting you to do is change the attribution of that conversion. In other words, it wants you to change it from last click to data driven or, you know, some other attribution type of setting for that conversion. Personally, I'm largely indifferent to the types of attribution. What I don't necessarily like is being forced to go from one attribution to another because Google recommends it. A bit skeptical of that. I'll get more into that type of thought here after a few a few more questions, but that is, I think, a little bit of a summary there that helps you understand kind of what these issues pertain to, how you can diagnose kind of where you're at. Have you ever gotten conversions? Are you getting conversions? The tag's broken and you're not getting conversions. But the important thing is that Google does recognize a difference in Google Ads between a tag issue and a lack of conversions. It does give you different status indicators based on each. So Brittany, I hope that answers your question, especially since you you figured out what the core problem is. So I appreciate you following up on that. Next we're going over to Rudra sends in a question says hi Chris, I started using your podcast. Oh sorry, I just started listening to your podcast. I'm a beginner in Google Ads, currently working in an agency managing accounts. I had a question regarding an account I am managing which provides commercial cleaning services in Ontario, Canada. The CPCS are really high, at least $9 per click. The client had a really low budget of 1000 per month and the account is new. I ran standard search budget and it used to get exhausted in about three to four clicks every day. Most of them were competitor search terms. So I added 90 plus competitor negatives to the account. And just for the last says just for just for an initial test I tried launching performance max suddenly Ruda says Rudra Rudra says suddenly I'm getting at least two conversions a day of good traffic after running manual for a month. I don't understand what happened here. Okay, so if I can understand the thing here is that you launched a performance max. I don't know if what you mean is that you had I don't know if the performance max is getting conversions or if suddenly the other campaign is getting conversions. So I'm not sure. So I'm going to have to just make a guess for you here. I assume what you're saying is that the performance max suddenly when you started trying it started getting tons of conversions and you're a bit surprised. I believe that's probably what you're seeing, you were trying it on your own, you were getting traffic, you were having trouble with competitors, and it wasn't, it just wasn't working. Then you tried Performance Max and suddenly you're getting lots of conversions. So that's what I expect. You're probably saying, because this is quite common and you say, Chris, if going from no conversions to lots of conversions just by turning on performance max is common, why don't you recommend it more? Why isn't it something that is the most important thing that, you know, you talk about do performance max. Performance Max works well, let me tell you why it's not something that I just preach and recommend a lot, is because a conversion in Google Ads is just. And I'm talking about services because Rudra's question was specifically talking about commercial cleaning services. A lead on a service company's website is typically a phone call or filling out a web form or something like that. So when you run a performance max for a service company, all you're doing is confirming that the person filled out a form or did some kind of action on the website. So when this happens, you, I think, wrongfully assume that this lead was qualified, that it was a good lead. I find with Performance Max, sure, it delivers conversions, but the problem is not that it delivers conversions. The problem is the quality and the type of conversions that it delivers. Let me explain what's under the hood on Performance Max. The reason you suddenly start seeing these conversions is because it can deliver tons of traffic at very high volumes. Because it's serving on mobile apps, display, YouTube, Gmail, you know, we assume probably you, Apple, sorry, YouTube, TV, things like that, it's serving on these very low cost impression impressions are extremely high, very low cost CPC things. And very often I find that wherever these conversions are coming from, number one, they're, they're not qualified. Number two, sometimes they're spammy bots, just weird things, you know, just odd. They don't, they may be human filled out by a human, but it's not someone who's actually interested in hiring this company for commercial cleaning or whatever it is. So this is obviously a major problem. So now you're magically making conversions show up in your Google Ads account, which is a lot better than not having it. But now you've got a deeper problem where, how do you qualify? How do you improve the quality of your conversions? And I would say, in my experience, there isn't a way to do that in Performance Max. There is no knob, button, lever to turn. And although you're having problems generating qualified traffic in your standard search campaign. At least you can see that a lot of the traffic was competitor traffic. Show me how you can stop that happening in performance Max. Show me how you can stop showing ads on mobile devices and apps and Kids games and YouTube music videos. You can't. You can't. You can't even measure it. You don't even know how much you're getting, much less how to stop it. So this is why you can go from failure with a standard Google Ads search campaign to massive success with a performance Max. But I ask you this question. Is it really success if it just says it on the screen? Is it really a lead just because Google tells you it's a lead? I would say no. True leads lead to actual value in your business. A real lead is a real company that wants to hire this commercial cleaning service in Ontario. And if that's not happening, who cares what the performance max says it's delivering? Because that's meaningless. I could have a campaign with 10,000 leads, but my business could still go out of business because those leads are worthless to me. So moving on now to Katrina, who writes in another question. Said, hi there, Google Ads newbie here. Wow, this is. This is three newbies in a row, I believe. Yeah. Didn't Brittany say? Yeah, she knew Google Ads. Yeah. Manager. Yeah. So well. Great. I'm really glad to help people who are new in Google Ads. That's what I focus a lot of my content on. So I'm glad you guys are here. New Google Ads newbie here. Trying slowly to learn as some friends have asked to help manage their Google Ads accounts. Okay, cool. Is there a method to organize search terms found in the Insights? I'm trying to review the keywords once a week to sort out the negative keywords. As our budgets are very small, I don't want to waste money on unqualified leads or unqualified clicks. More technically. For example, when looking at a list of, let's say, 100 search terms, I find a handful that are definitely negative. So I move those to the negative list, and I may find one or two that seem to get a few clicks, and I would consider those to be good. So I add those as keywords to my keyword list. Okay, so what Katrina is talking about is there's some obvious negatives. There's a few things that are worth adding as obvious keywords, but there's a lot of in between. Okay, so let's go on with the question that she's asking. What I Am wondering about is what to do with the rest. I don't necessarily want them to be considered negative keywords, but I don't want my ad spend to be spread too thin across 100 keywords if I were to add all of them, however, without doing anything to them. Every time I come to this list, it's huge. And I find myself having to sort through the same ones to categorize is my problem. Just I should be checking it daily to make this list smaller, to make it more manageable. Okay, great. Really good practical question, Katrina. Thank you. So let me answer your question directly. First of all, I don't think you need to check it more often. You talked about having a small budget, so I think once a week for a small budget is perfectly fine. I think your problem lies in trying to analyze every single keyword. Okay, I. Especially keywords or. Sorry, every single search term. Let me clarify. I don't think you need to analyze every single search term and categorize it between should I target it or block it? There should be a very large amount that you just don't do anything with. Okay. Especially search terms that have no clicks. I very rarely look through search terms that have zero clicks unless I'm doing a deeper dive into the quality of the traffic that the client is getting. So I think you can ignore probably a lot of these that you're looking at because there's probably a lot of zero click, one impression, two impression, five impression kind of stuff happening. Okay? So most of this stuff you can ignore, and the ones that do get clicks, you can probably ignore those as well. But that brings me to the second part of my answer. If you're finding yourself getting a lot of one impression, one click stuff, you know, and you're like, it's not a keyword I want to target, but it's also not one I want to block. My thought is there might be a deeper issue to this. You might be using too broad of keywords. And I don't mean broad match type. I mean just the keyword is too generic. Okay, so let's go back to the previous question. Let's say you do a commercial cleaning service and that's what your business is. Okay, so let's say that your keyword is phrase match. Commercial cleaners. Okay? And that's delivering most of your traffic. I can guarantee you the search terms that are coming up for commercial cleaners is probably just full and full of search terms. Lots of different search terms, just over and over. Just tons of different variations. And some that are negative, some that are okay and some that are great, and some that are just. I don't know what to do with these. The problem is not that you need to spend more time in your search terms. The problem is you need to address the ambiguity of these search terms themselves. Tighten up your search terms. Build more consistent ad groups that have a theme, and then that theme has very specific terms. So instead of just commercial cleaners, you might want to have something about office cleaners near me. You know, an ad group around those kind of terms, and then another one around janitorial services near me, and then maybe a. Another one weekend weekend cleaners or commercial cleaners near me. Right. I mean, I can't. I can't build this out in my head right away. But the point is, I want more concrete themes for each of the ad groups. When you do this, you will find that Google does a better job of matching your keyword to your search term. So if you find yourself having to battle hundreds and hundreds of kind of bland, generic search terms, go back to the keyword itself. Let's address those. Let's figure out what's causing this generic explosion of terms that you find yourself having to manage constantly. Okay, so I have. Boy, I mean, I told. I over. I overdid. You know, it's after Thanksgiving. I guess it's not a surprise I overdid it at Thanksgiving and I'm overdoing it with my questions. I just need to learn portion control, I guess. So let's take a quick break, tell you about optio.com PSP that is my sponsor. They will be my sponsor next year, too. They just. They keep seeing so many of you guys sign up. And I cannot tell you, thank you enough because this does take a decent chunk of my time out to record this. And I don't ask for you guys to sign up for Patreon or send me money or I don't pitch my services very much, a little bit at the end. But that's the main way that I make sure that this investment is worth it this time. Investment is, you know, Optio pays me to be able to mention them. And I do appreciate when you give them a chance because I've gone through a few different sponsors and they are by far the best people to work with. Really nice people, great people, just super friendly and really dedicated to building us great software. So check them out@optio.com PSP all right, we go to Jack, who has a question about compliance with cosmetic dermatology terms. Hi, Chris. Hi, Chris. I've been listening to your podcast for a few months during my commute to work. I'm a dermatology PA specializing in both medical and and aesthetic dermatology. Recently, I started experimenting with Google Ads to attract more patients to my practice. However, I've encountered issues with Google flagging certain cosmetic dermatology terms like Botox, despite removing this term from my ads and landing page. Also tried appealing the decision. Google continues to flag my account with messages stating restricted drug terms or restricted medical content, health and personalized advertising. Interestingly, I've noticed that my competitors are using the term Botox without facing any limitations. I'm wondering how I can remain compliant while using this term in my ads. I came across something called LegitScript for certifying healthcare professionals. But I've read on forums that others have successfully worked with a Google representative to resolve similar issues. Any advice you could offer would be greatly appreciated. Okay, so Jack, you didn't say specifically if you're offering Botox, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna assume that you are because you're doing dermatology medically and aesthetically. So I assume that this is a service that you're offering. So you're not just, you're not just picking Botox as a keyword because you think people that want Botox may also want your services. I'm assuming that you're offering it. So in that case, hopefully I'm not wrong here. But if you are offering it, then you don't have and it's on your site even though you said you remove the term from your ads and your landing page. But if you're offering this service and wanting to advertise for it, and if you're wanting to use it in any way, you're going to have to get approval. LegitScript. There are some terms that just cannot be used without LegitScript Google Ads approval. And sometimes you say, well, Chris, I don't sell this. Let's say, Jack, that you don't do Botox, but you do things that are kind of like Botox or, you know, more natural alternatives and stuff like that. And maybe your keywords are things like alternatives to Botox or safe Botox alternative things like that. Well, you will not be able to use these terms. You're, you're, you're not going to be able to show up for this because there are some health related things. This also happens in the legal space and in other areas, but very largely in the health space. You will not be able to use these terms. So you're not going to be able to talk to a Google rep to be able to get them to remove this restriction. They don't have, I don't think they even have that ability. There are some restrictions that just won't go away, can't be just ignored. So either you just don't use the term or you, you get certified. Now I'll tell you some examples that I've had in the past. I actually had clients that do a medical service that was not FDA approved, Federal Drug Administration, something like that here in the U.S. whatever that is, it wasn't FDA approved. So Google won't let you run things, you know, different medical procedures and stuff like that that's considered experimental. It just is off limits. It just won't run. So if you want to be able to advertise something that is just off limits and you have to have a certification for it, essentially what you have to do is you have to do advertising on everything that just is adjacent to it. For example, the one of the clients I worked with did some type of like pain management nerve kind of stuff and I couldn't use the word, but I could advertise pain management solutions and how to, you know, how to fix my joints and you know, things like that, very general types of things that didn't use this specific practice or this specific type of medicine or you know, whatever. And then I had them build a page that never mentioned exactly what it is that they did. They just talked about solutions to provide this. And this is the kind of service we provide images and stuff, but they never actually said what the service was. That's the only way to basically avoid the entire restriction arena. But if you're sampling in the healthcare stuff at all, anything to do with pharmacy, medication, certain medical things, you're not going to able to get past it. It is a giant gate that is closed only to those that have the key. And LegitScript is most of the time the only key that you can open that gate with. All right, next we move to the next to last one, Siri with a C. Siri with a CE in the uk. So Siri says hi Chris, I'm based in the UK and have been listening to the show for the past few years. I share your frustration with some of Google' changes over the years. Losing modified broad match search terms, report, etc. Yes, yes, that is upsetting. Absolutely, you're right. Siri, with us losing more control, do you feel Google has maybe gone too far? What's your opinion on this SNIPPET from the attached article that you sent. Thanks for the podcast. I always find it very useful. So Siri, thank you for the question. I had not read the article. I'm familiar with the topic and for those of you listening, the article discusses the somewhat recent monopoly judgment that was decided by the US Government, I think the Justice Department, specifically around Google, and how they found Google to be guilty of monopolistic practices and things like that. And just to read something, snippet, a little snippet from the article, I'll read this. This is from an article in the Verge says the government, the US Government is proposing that Google give advertisers more transparency and control. Under the proposal, Google would have to give advertisers more insight into their ad performance and costs and give them more options on how their ads are targeted. So to answer your question Siri, yes, I do feel that Google's gone too far. I, I do a lot of consulting and audits and things like that where I talk to people one on one about their Google Ads accounts. And one of the things that is consistently said very often is the lack of trust with Google, sometimes even using the word evil or shady or slimy or something like that. So very often using very negative terms. Which is ironic because up until about seven years ago, something like that, Google had the don't be evil tagline which they dumped when they swapped over to Alphabet. So it's absolutely concerning to hear so many people just distrust the numbers or distrust the salesmen from Google who calls, you know, the. This is a sad situation because if you listen to the podcast for a while, you've probably heard me say, you know, I hope to lift the PPC industry to be, to be less slimy shady, to be more open, to be more honest about what they're providing their customers. Right. As managers I hope that we can help businesses and not hurt businesses. And I try and talk about how to do that. Yet one thing that I cannot touch is I can't, I can't help Google be less gross and icky when it comes to doing these things and making these decisions. You know, removing modified broad match, changing the definition of what a keyword is, changing the definition of broad phrase and exact, hiding search terms from us, delivering new campaign types that are 100% opaque, non transparent performance max comes to mind, things like that. You know, a lack of transparency moving in that direction brings about a lot of this, you know, like, you know, I don't like this. You know, the auto apply recommendations. The new system that Google has implemented just this year that will automatically pause keywords in your account, that will automatically pause ad groups in your account without telling you. You can't turn that feature off. It pauses it. Why? And then we recently heard that Google is going to be deleting data that's over a certain number of years old. I mean, you can store 16 gigabytes of my cat photos and I can't keep my Google Ads data. So, Siri, I'm getting upset. So I try not to be too emotional in this podcast. I try to be very straightforward and Google Ads can be a very emotional thing because it's not Google Ads that's emotional. It's the fact that your business, your livelihood, your family, what you're building is directly connected to Google Ads. And sometimes, yes, I do feel that Google goes too far. I feel like they have gone too far on many things. And I agree. I think at this point, you know, any movement towards more transparency, if it, if it, if it has to happen because the government steps in and forces it, then I applaud that. I, I put a lot of trust on people that are managing their own Google Ads account rather than trusting Google to deliver exactly what I need as one of 15 million accounts that they're getting money from. Right. I would rather trust the business owner to make independent decisions about what they're doing in Google Ads rather than Google Ads deciding for me. I don't think Big Brother knows best, and that's a big part of what I put into this podcast. So, Siri, very close to the heart question. I've tried to. I wanted to answer it. I tried to tone down some of the panic and emotion that often goes with this. But yes, it does bother me and I hope that, I hope that it improves over the next few years rather than getting worse. We will see. All right. And last, we have Isaiah. Isaiah says I've been running this small moving company account for a while now and the result, numbers wise are okay, but the actual calls from conversions are all spam, all spam and sales calls. According to CallRail, it's rare that we get a call from an actual customer. I believe my client is losing faith in me to give some background on the account. It's a campaign that runs 300 per month and has local and long distance moving ad groups. So that's the focus moving company. I'm sure we're not paying full price for clicks, so do you think we could be getting lower quality ones because of the budget? Let me know what you could do. What you would do in the situation. So Isaiah, this is spammy, spammy traffic. Spammy leads is a symptom of couple different things. Number one, if you're running performance max, that's definitely a source, as I mentioned earlier in the show, that can lead to spam. Another thing, if you're running display campaigns, it's very easy to just let display campaigns run. So I don't know if you're running those, any of those very often can be common to have trashy traffic which will lead to kind of bot spam traffic that somehow fills out your form or calls a number and it's total spam. The other possibility is that you're running a search campaign and maybe you have phrase match keywords and everything's just real tight and neat and it works perfect, but you have search partners turned on. So if you're dealing with spam and you're not running anything that's, you know, outside of just a normal search campaign, even with a small budget, you have search partners turned on. That absolutely, I found, is the most common reason that search campaigns get spam. If search partners is not turned on, then also display, if you have the display network turned on, turn that off as well so that you're just getting google.com traffic. Now let's say possibly you're getting spam from these other things and it's, you know, some somewhere else, let's say and it's not search partners and, or the display network in that instance. My suggestion is that you tighten up your keywords. Possibly you're, you're utilizing dynamic, dynamic keywords, dynamic ad groups, dynamic ads technically as it's called, don't run those, only run actual keywords. And I would suggest you tighten those up. Use phrase match, exact match and you're going to have to work from the bottom up, start to target specific things until you can build volume. So you're going to start smaller, start with much more specific terms and you might not be able to spin the traffic fully, but you'll have to increase your bids a bit and you're going to have to pay for quality. I think the biggest thing that you're, that you said that's the biggest giveaway is that you're not paying full price for clicks. So I assume if you're doing a long distance and local moving, I mean the typical CPC for something like that is, you know, 10, 15, $20 a click, possibly, you know, sometimes even higher, depending on the area. So if you're Getting clicks for $2, $3, $1, something like that, then absolutely. The quality is the issue. And it's probably from search partners display, or you're running broad match keywords with automated bidding and you're just getting spam traffic coming in through there. So you need to build the campaign in such a way that your cost per click is closer to expected CPC rates. If you are getting super low CPC rates, it's not because you built a phenomenal campaign most of the time, it's because you have spam coming in from the searches, the search partners display, something like that. So, and with that, I will wrap up the show. My name is Chris. If you'd like to read Reach out to Me for management of Google Ads Consulting or something like that for your Google Ads account. You can do that at chrissafer. Com. Otherwise, I will see you guys next week.