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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today I'm going to talk about some questions I've gotten from listeners. It's been a while since I've done a Q and A session and I think it's about time I did. I always answer questions every week from listeners. You can get your question in for either next week or the next Q and A that I do. Send an email to paid search podcastmail.com and I will do my best to answer your question if I think it fits the show pretty well and have several questions from Aaron Roman and Eric who sent in questions. Appreciate those. We're going to talk about bidding, we're going to talk about roas and also going to talk a little bit about AI. Some new topics coming up this week from some really good questions. So before I jump into the questions, I want to remind you guys that this podcast every week is brought to you by optio. Optio.com PSP that is the dedicated URL for you to get a special 28 day free trial of the world's best Google Ads management software, period. You'll actually hear in the questions, people praising Optio and so glad for their use of Optio because it's helped them to level up their campaigns. Guys, this is a real thing. Optio can change the performance of your campaign and they're always improving the way that their tool works. You say, well, how does it improve it, Chris? Do I just push a button and it just optimizes for me? No. You're listening to a podcast about Google Ads. So I know that you're interested in learning and not just trusting whatever some AI bot automated system just tells you to do. You're not going to fall for that again, right? You've done that before. You need something that can help you make decisions and that's what Optio does. It helps you to make sound decisions in your Google Ads accounts based on numbers, metrics, trends. Proof to know that you can change this keywords, bids and it will make a difference. Proof that this keyword needs to be paused because it's a detriment to your campaign. Proof that this new headline that you created is performing much better than the other headlines. Incredibly important information. You can do all of this in a lot more in Optio. That's optio.com PSP. Use the little chat box in the bottom of the screen to let them know you heard about it right here on the paid search podcast. So without further ado, let's Jump in. First one is from Aaron. Aaron says, longtime listener. And I told you, you're gonna hear it. Longtime listener and Optio user. Love Optio. Thank you, Aaron. I started a long time ago on Google search in my massage service back in 2021, 20, 2017. Excuse me, 2017. But he goes on with a few other things, and I'll skip through that. And this says, continues with this important part. Impression top page percentage and impression absolute top was in the 35 to 50% range. So with the top page being top of page being higher than he was getting. So after listening to some of your latest podcast, I decided to go back to try manual bidding again to see if I could get higher percentages in my ranking. Okay, so I feel like I kind of butchered Aaron's email here. Let me. Let me say that again. Basically, Aaron wanted higher percentages in his ad rank. He wanted to show up in first position more often. Okay, so continuing on with Aaron's message, once I did that, I noticed on a lot of words that my bid amount and my average cost per click can be almost twice as much. Can be 100% more. So if his bids $2, he might be getting a $4 click. Right? So twice as much. Even after I zeroed all of the bid adjustments, I'm still getting bids that can go up to 75, 100% more than my bid amount. For some reason, Google seems to be acting like enhanced CPC is turned on all the time. Can you please help me understand what's going on here? So thanks for the question, Aaron, and yes, I can definitely help you understand because there is something you're missing. If you're using manual bidding, which I'm a big advocate of. If you're using manual bidding, you absolutely have something turned on somewhere. And I have a list here of places that you need to go check. So let's go down. Number one. There are two places that in manual bidding that your bids can be put in at. Number one is the ad group bid. Okay, so if you have an ad group bid of $2, all of the keywords in that ad group will be bid at $2. Now, there is also a bid at the keyword level. If you have any bid that is not blank for that keyword, that bid overrides the ad group bid. Okay, so I see some people that will manually type in $2, $2, $2 on every single keyword, even though their ad group bid is, you know, just the same thing, $2. So then maybe down the line, they end up Lowering their ad group bid to $1 and they wonder what? I just changed my ad group bid. Everything still says $2 on my bids for all my keywords. They don't realize that they those keyword bids override the ad group bid. So the first thing I would say, if you think you might be having issue with your cost per click being higher than what Your bids are, 0 out all of your keyword bids. You can actually highlight all of your keywords and then change your bids. And then when you change the bid, just leave it blank. Right where you know you can set a certain bid, you can set a certain dollar bid, you can increase, decrease, do a certain percentage of bid. Just set the bid and then leave it blank and it'll wipe any keyword bids that you have in place. Okay, so then by default everything will be at the ad group bid for that manual bid campaign. This might be one reason why you are experiencing higher than you expect CPCs. That may not be it. So let's move on to the next one. The next reason why you could be expecting higher than higher than expected CPCS is because you have some kind of bid adjustment somewhere. Some kind of bid change either up or down. Probably up in your case since it's so much higher. So devices both at the ad group and the campaign level. Now you'll have to. If you don't know what I'm talking about, there are ad group level device bids and there are campaign level device bids. You might not know that if you have a campaign device bid for your mobile devices at 0, 0%, no adjustment. 0%, no adjustments. But your ad group bid might be 50%. That ad group bid is going to override the campaign bid. So even though you have a campaign at zero, your ad group bid could be 50. That could be causing the problem. Also, I'll run through a few other things. Location, ad schedule, demographics, audiences, even the rarely used ad interactions, which is also known as advanced bid adjustments. So any of those things, location, ad schedule, demographics, audiences and advanced bid adjustments, those could have some kind of increased bid that's causing things. So let me lay it out this way. You may have 25% here, 35% here, and then another 35% somewhere else. All of those add up in concession and lead you to a higher bid. Maybe as much as 70, 80, 100, 100% more than you're expecting. They all pile up on each other. So you say, well Chris, I've looked everywhere, nothing's there. Well, one final thing that could possibly point you in the right direction is go to your ad group view, right? So you click into a campaign and look at all your ad groups. You should see all your different ad groups in one screen. Add a new column called Active Bid Adjustments. This is only available at the ad group level. It's called Active Bid Adjustments. Add that new column and that column will tell you anywhere in that ad group that there is some bid adjustment in place. You possibly have it in your audiences, you possibly have it in your demographics somewhere. It will tell you it'll say devices, it'll say audiences. If it lists anything in any of those active Bid adjustments, that means you have something there. So you have to find it. So that would be the final. Just check to make sure that you don't have any adjustments that you're not aware of. Because these active bid adjustments, if you're doing max clicks or manual cpc, they are directly affecting your cost per click. They are inflating or deflating your CPCs and you may not realize it. So it's an important number to watch out for. All right, good question. Thank you, Aaron. And moving on now to Roman. Roman writes in and says, hi Chris, love the show and I've been listening since 2017. Crazy how things have changed in eight years. Yeah, you're right about that. In Roman. I, I do, I do remember seen your name popping around here and there. So I'm glad to hear from you again. And based on your email, sounds like things are great because Roman says my question is in regards to the growth of AI and how that might affect Google search. I've been noticing my own search habits starting to change based on AI responses that you would usually get when typing a longer search in Google. These are usually research or question based searches. I usually get my answers straight from AI responses, so I don't need to click on links as often. I've also been hearing rumblings that, and here, here's the big phrase, AI will be the end of Google Ads as we know it in the next five to 10 years. Obviously that's a bit alarming. What are your thoughts on that? And if you don't agree with it, how do you envision Google Ads continuing to be the leader in paid search with AI continuing to grow and improve? Okay, great question. Multiple things to hit on here. And I like where Roman's head here is because, you know, he identifies it, he identifies his own habits in realizing, you know, I'm probably not alone in the way that I use Google now and how I interface with AI. Sometimes you don't even have to realize you're doing it. You know, in, in a Google search now, you don't click on a link. You know, just the other day I was looking up something on one of the remotes on our TV was broken and I just searched it. And instead of going to a website, I just read the little bullet points at the top of the screen to help me figure out a way to fix it. You know, and I think that's a perfect example of my opinion on this. I think it's. I think it's absolutely true that people are searching different. When I did that search, I did not interact with anything on Google other than just searching. Okay. Now that doesn't bother me as a paid search professional, because my search that I did was not necessarily something that as a paid search professional I'd want to engage in. Most of the time when I build campaigns very much the, the kind of AI answerable traffic is not the kind of traffic that I want to get for my clients. So you can see where I'm going here. I think it's great that we have new choices in our ability to get information. AI is wonderful in its ability to answer these questions and, and give us information. But the fact is, is that, you know, for a lot of these AI answerable things, they are informational symptom, problem searches, just educational, just straight data, just straight information. How do I kind of stuff. Very rarely do I want to directly engage with those at any kind of high level. So it doesn't necessarily bother me that people aren't clicking on a link. And I feel that Google knows this. Google's got way more data than we could possibly imagine about the tone and the need of these searches and what their eventual interaction is with Google. Right. I'm drawing from just personal experience. Google's drawing from a billion personal experiences. So I'm absolutely sure that Google knows that there are some things that land in one bucket of very unlikely to interact with paid ads, very unlikely to interact with organic or anything, you know, very unlikely to interact with anything other than just using Google as a Yellow Pages or, you know, a thesaurus, a dictionary, or, you know, just a world book. I don't know how much of my audience understood those references. Google it if you don't know what a world book is. But the point is, is that I firmly believe that the areas that's going to be directly affected, at least in Google search about these things, are going to be areas that I don't directly have a lot of interest in as an Advertiser because they probably didn't really interact with my ads much anyway. And the ones that do, I still think I'll be able to get that traffic. I don't think AI will be able to answer those questions. So people still will continue to use Google and so it does mean possibly less clicks on ads, but I don't feel like that will directly affect the kind of traffic that I want. I feel like the slice of the pie that I want is still going to remain largely what Google is used for. So perhaps Google starts to lose some volume and value for some things. But I think that's okay. I, I really like, I mean, I'm, I'm a fan of capitalism. I mean, obviously I live in America. That's what, you know, has brought me success and has brought Google success. I think it works very well and I welcome the choices that are here. And if Google can remain successful, if it can remain successful, valuable and valid in this environment, I think people will still continue to use Google to find products, services, you know, answers and a little bit more tangible thing rather than just information. Informational searches never really meant a whole lot. At least in my PPC world, I don't find AI to be a good alternative to online searching for products and services. When I want to find, you know, a, you know, a phone stand to use on my desk, I don't go to AI, you know, I mean, I go to Google and, you know, I'll look at some of the shopping ads and, you know, I might browse and end up on a Best Buy link, you know, an Amazon link or something like that and browse those. And I absolutely would end up engaging with paid ads for that way. I don't find that AI provides any kind of thing. And also, you know, there's a point where it's like, no, no, no, back off. I'm going to do my own shopping. You can't, you can't outsource shopping in that way. At this point, I don't feel, I think a lot of people are going to want to just say, no, no, I don't know what I'm looking for yet. I'm just going to shop around in the way that they always do. I need to find an AC company. I'm not going to just look at AI and just have it choose one for me. I need to get my roof repaired. I'm not going to just ask AI, who do I call? You know, obviously that's, I think that'd be a very dark situation if we're having AI answer questions like that without any kind of personal preference or decision making of our own. So I hope that answers your question. Great question, Roman. It's. It's some. AI's definitely been something that I've been using more. Not really for, for work very much. I, I actually, I love to use it for. You want to know what I use AI the most for? I'm kind of break away a little bit. I just go a little little off on topic here. I do it very little, so forgive me, but I, I could absolutely see a world where I use it for my own personal book club. I don't know if you expected that or not, but I have. I've been reading. Oh boy, I'm gonna say it. You know, it's French, so my French is not bueno. Les Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. Very old book, right? It's a classic. Been reading it and no one's reading with me, but I've at several times I'll get through a chapter or get to a certain point and I just want to talk about the book. I just want to get reactions. I'm like, what was this about and what was that about? The same way that I would have with a book club. And it's actually been really fun to hear because AI will actually say, well, there's actually some connections here historically. This and this and this. And it's like talking to a really smart person who's very engaging, you know, a dream person to have in a book club. I've been in a bunch of book clubs. I love book clubs. I love discussing books and things like that. And I find AI to be a really fun book club partner. Never thought I'd, never thought I'd find a use for it like that, but I've really been enjoying it because I can dig into books that would otherwise, you know, kind of just go over my head. Like I don't understand what that was about, but instead I do a little chat and say what happened? What was this about? And oh, wow. The contextual understanding, the, the, the interface between this and this. And I'm like, wow, suddenly these things that would have passed me suddenly become very engaging. So there you go. I. Maybe my next podcast I'll do will be a book podcast. I absolutely could do that, especially with AI to make me sound really smart. Okay, so going to go on to the next question here from Eric. Eric says, hi, Chris. Thanks to the insights from your podcast, I've grown our Google campaigns a lot. We started with Max clicks, moved to target cpa. And it's been a game changer. Optio. There it is again, guys. Optio has helped quite a bit during this process, so thank you for that. Now with 99% accuracy on our new offline tracking that we've implemented and the ability to send dynamic revenue values, we're ready to graduate to the next point, and that is target roas. Okay, so just to. To summarize what Eric's talking about, thanks to Optio, which you can try for free@opteo.com PSP thank you, Eric. He went from max clicks to target cpa. Now they've started importing offline tracking. In other words, this is lead generation. So he's, he's tracking through a, a CRM or something like that, pulling these leads and getting concrete information about how much of the, each of these leads are bringing in, in value and stuff like that. Now they have concrete information with incredibly good accuracy, I might admit. You know, 99% accurate offline tracking is, is wonderful. So now they have. Not only they have conversions, they have conversions with revenue information value attached to it. Okay, so they're ready to graduate to target roas. Right. So he asks any advice on this? Any pitfalls to watch out for? Does this plan that I've laid out make sense? All right, Eric, thank you for the question. And first of all, congratulations. Eric mentioned how much they were spending and stuff like that. Sounds like a, it's a very high spending campaign. So obviously Eric's put a lot of work into this and congrats on that. So very exciting time. And great question, because I absolutely have some thoughts about what is that graduation like from target CPA to target roas. So just very briefly, let me explain what that graduation means for those listening in. Target CPA means you're just managing based on how many conversions you get per click. Essentially you say, I hope to get, you know, five conversions for every hundred dollars spent. And then that gives you a certain cost per conversion. You know, if you want a $50 cost per conversion, you would hope to get one, get, get two conversions for every hundred dollars that you spent. Right. So target ROAS goes much deeper and it just talks about profitability, revenue, actual money. So if we spend $1,000, we hope to bring in now not conversions, but value, an added value of 4,000. So you spend 2,000, you get 4,000. That's a 2x return, 2.0 return. Okay, so that's what ROAS is. All right, so now on with the advice, Eric. Number one, start with an Experiment. And I do not mean that in the general sense experiment, quote unquote. I mean specifically the experiment tool in Google Ads. I cannot tell you how many times I have worked on other accounts that are spending at your volume. And we run experiments and they are actually a big disappointment on some campaigns and a massive win on others. So do not assume that this is a graduation period. Target ROAS is not always better than target CPA because there is a balance between volume and value. That's the balance here. And sometimes value can be very detrimental to volume. Right? You have a 5x return, but now you're getting half the volume that you used to get, right? That won't work. You have to have both volume and value. And sometimes managing for value does not equate to enough volume. So number two, another suggestion, I suggest starting with whatever Target Roas Google gives you. So when you're gonna set up a new experiment in Google Ads, it's gonna give you a target roas. Use that Target roas. Don't get creative and you know, come up with something twice that or you know, add little numbers up. Some, you know, I would be very cautious and just use whatever Google gives you and then go from there. Now at this point, if you're gonna be using Target roas, I hope, I hope that you have a campaign with a lot of well segmented ad groups. So in other words, you don't have one campaign with one ad group. I hope that there are multiple ad groups in this, lots of ad groups. Because you will lose the ability to control specific topics or business trends or shifts or changes in your account if you just dump everything into one ad group. You're essentially just dumping, dumping 100, 200, 300 keywords into one ad group. And you have no ability to manipulate which one has priority. Slowing some things down, speeding things up. You don't have that control anymore. So you do not want that. And that's important because this next point here is later down the road. I highly recommend a adjusting these Target roas bids at the ad group level, not at the campaign level. But you have, you know, 25 different ad groups. Some need to go up, some need to go down, you need to adjust these. Some are doing very well. So you loosen the leash and let this thing run wild. Let the CPCS go up, let, let the search impression share go up. Let your ranking go up by, by lowering the, the target roas and really give it some rope here. You know, conversions are working well, something's working well, push it and then the Inverse for something else. It's not doing well. Restrict that thing, you know, slow it down. And you need to do that at ad group level. Target Roas bids because, and here's the next thing I say, all of that to say this, Target Roas will not always hit your goal. Now, you probably know that because Target CPA doesn't always hit your goal, but Target ROAS is not necessarily a graduation in that it always gets it right. Target CPA is not always going to get it right and Target ROAS is not always going to get it right. So don't, don't expect just because you're graduating from one to the other that the new one is somehow much, much better. And it's always going to keep at that targets that Target Roas number. No, that's not true. You will need to slow things down. You will need to speed things up. And that's an ad Group Roas bidding is how you do it. And again, I say all of that to say this, Target Roas is a graduation, but it is a even further step away from CPC bid control and it's a big leap forward into the mysteries of algorithmic bidding. So you're taking quite a step forward into the black box of algorithm bidding and all this stuff that very often provides absolutely no reason why Google's bidding on certain things. So understand what where you're putting your feet on. You're putting your feet in an area where there's a lot of mystery, a lot of confusion. You see, keywords will just start to start to pick up and this one will start spending, and this one will start spending and this one will start slowing down and the searches may not really look any different. And there's another level that is working under the hood that you cannot see. There is no metric, there is no numbers, there is no column or anything that you can see why this was decidedly bid higher. The only thing we can see is the fact that it got you better. Roas or not. So Google will choose based on these factors. You can't see them. So understand that that's the direction that you're moving. Could be wonderful, could be scary. Don't know. But it's a great place to be. Thank you for your question and thank you guys for listening. If you would like to chat with me on a deeper level and maybe discuss books or talk about Google Ads, I guess you could do that too. You can find me@chrishaefer.com I offer management of Google Ads campaigns, big or small, and I offer live Google Ads coaching for you, your team, whatever you'd like. You can find more chrishaefer.com Otherwise, I'll catch you guys next week.