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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
Competitor Campaigns: When, Why, and How (Episode 474)
00:34:13
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Transcript4 lines
- [00:00]
Joey Bidner
Foreign.
- [00:20]
Chris Schaefer
Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today we're going to talk about competitor campaigns. Going to go through that a little bit later in the show and I also have two questions from listeners about Quality Score and bidding that I'm going to discuss. You can send in questions as well and get your question answered by me. You can email me at paid search podcastmail.com as I've done before, I ask if you have a question. I can pretty much guarantee many other people have the same question, so feel free to write in. I've been really enjoying the great intriguing questions that have been coming in and you know, when I have a backup of them, you know, they kind of fill up the bucket. I'll do a whole episode answering questions to try and knock out a bunch and get your questions answered. So paid searchpodcastmail.com is the email address to send that to. As I said, I'm going to talk about competitor campaigns. We have a pretty deep discussion about Quality Score that we're going to get into and bidding Maximize Conversions, Target CPA going to have a discussion about that. And then all of that is coming up right before I tell you about optio.com PSP special URL for you to try the only tool I think you need in your PPC Management tool belt. This tool is designed to help you get more done in Google Ads from every aspect that you need help with. Most people don't know what's wrong. That's usually the biggest issue that I have. People reach out to me, say I'm having issues and I don't even know what questions to ask. Can you just diagnose it? Can you just find the problem? This tool is probably the best I've found at trying to diagnose and guide the optimization process for you without just going in and ruining everything. Oftentimes I find these softwares to be too aggressive. It'll want to do it for you. Put it on automated management for you, hit a button and it just does it for you. That is not something I recommend. This tool is designed to get more done and provide you with the critical information you need to make the critical decisions that in your Google Ads account to get more out of your search, shopping, performance, max campaigns, display campaigns, even Microsoft ads. So you want to try this tool for free for 28 days. That's an extended trial. You can go to optio.com PSP use the chat box at the bottom of the screen to say, hey, I heard about the Special offer. Can you get me that offer that they talked about on the paid search podcast? And they'll say done and you can say thanks and you'll be a happy camper. Guarantee that. All right, so let's jump into the first question. First question of the episode comes from Josh says. Hi, Chris, longtime listener of the show. I've learned a ton from you over the years. Great content. Here's the question. I noticed that my quality score for my keywords in one of my accounts is 1 out of 10. So that's the lowest possible quality score. Getting a lot of rarely shown due to quality score messages on some of my keywords. All right, so what Josh wants to know about is he's referring. So we're going to go through a couple things here. What he's referring to is there are three columns in your Google Ads, keywords that help you to identify what the what is keeping your quality score from being better. Alright, so that's what I'm about to reference here. So if you haven't heard of this, that's, that's, that's what that's called. There's a landing page experience. There is a. Well, there's three. We're going to go through expected ctr. We're going to go through those here in a second. So here's the rest of Josh's question. Starting with the landing page experience. I have first created a new landing page more closely related to the keywords that I'm targeting. I also increased page speed insights to about 75 average score and added more relevant keywords. So here's three questions that Josh sends in. The first one, how long does it take Google to reanalyze the new landing page and update the quality score? Alright, so let's tackle that first one. The fact is, Josh, unfortunately there is no direct answer that Google does not specify any fixed time frame for quality score updates. Basically, quality score is derived from 90 days of data that it's collecting in your account and you know, everybody else's in some cases. And at some point you can experience an update. It's, it's constantly changing but you may never see it in the ui. So quality score is constantly changing. Every time you show up for a new auction, there is a new quality score that you are set with for that auction. That number is actually very long. It might be 5.1643164. I, I mean just super long number. We don't ever see that number. But what we get to see is the culmination of what those numbers are close to, that's where we get the 1, 2, 3, 4 up to 10 quality score. So the fact is, is you may not see that. It may take a week or months to see that directly updated in the ui. So unfortunately I don't have an answer for you there. Some people estimate, you know, it takes a thousand impressions to finally see. But, but really that's not the case. There is no definitive number. It's just, it's just going to take time and I've seen it short windows and longer windows. So Josh's next question is this. My expected CTR says below average, but my click through rate, my CTR is 20%. Is there a specific percentage threshold that dictates an above average expected ctr? Okay, so expected CTR is a measurement from Google and unfortunately there is no threshold for what is successful and what's not successful. This is going to be quite frustrating to you, but the fact is is that you have very little control on what your actual expected CTR score is going to be if it says below average. The fact is, is that expected CTR is a prediction of how likely it is that your ad will be clicked. And here's the bad news. This is a historical CTR performance of that keyword. So this takes into account industry benchmarks and auction time signals that happen. And it's going to say this particular keyword. This specific keyword generally generates an below average click through rate for advertisers that are advertising on this keyword. You know this exact phrase and therefore Google will give you. Even if you have a 20% click through rate, you will still struggle with a lower than average, below below average expected ctr. You can try and outshine everyone else and have great ads, but the problem is Google doesn't like the keyword. You probably can't change that if you're experiencing a very low ctr. It's just, it's not that Google is, you know, trying to communicate to you to fix it. This is, this is not a trigger for you to go fix something or try and get your CTR higher. It's communicating in general, this term is not satisfactory to the performance of ads on Google. So the fact is, is you probably should change your keyword, probably try something different. Try coming at this type of traffic in some other way, you know, adding action terms to it, you know, services, business, you know, near me, things like that. You know, these are more action oriented. Sometimes I find that explicitly listing what you are selling is not good. For example, if you're a chiropractor and you might have the keyword chiropractor that might get a 1 out of 10 quality score. Because chiropractor provides absolutely no context for what the person's looking for. Who knows what they search for. There's absolutely no contextual value to to that search. So click through rates will be very poor. People very often do a different search and don't really stay on that search very long or even click any ads or organic listings. So chiropractor near me might get a 6, 7, 8 out of 10 quality score simply because the context, the interaction of the people searching on Google is better because now there's some kind of context of what they're looking for. So it's not your keyword that's wrong, it's just that the people who search this keyword are wrong. Right? There's just not a whole lot of integrity in the search results for this. People don't like what they see. They find it to be bland, unuseful for some reason. So the fact is, if this is highly concerning, your direct click through rate will not improve your expected ctr. So it's good and bad news. It's good and bad news for you. The last question is this from. Is it Josh? Yeah, Josh. Okay, sorry, I forgot the name for a second third question from Josh. Does match type have a major influence on quality score? For reference, all of my keywords that I'm using are exact match. Okay, short answer is no. Match type is not a direct factor for quality score. If I were to target chiropractor, broad match, chiropractor, phrase match, chiropractor, exact match, Google is going to read that keyword in context of landing page, expected ctr, all of those factors. You know, it's going to read that as though it's just the word. It's not going to read it in all the ways that that word could match to the search terms. It's just going to say the word chiropractor and all the interactions that come with it have this expected ctr, this, you know, this kind of performance and it's going to give it a quality score based on that. So if you're concerned with the performance of your quality score, I would say the issue is best resolved by improving ad copy relations to the keyword, improving your relation of the keywords to the landing page and the relation between the landing page and the ad copy, making sure that trinity of connection is all done and then make sure your keywords are actionable, not just the word itself. So don't. Target chiropractor. Target chiropractor near me. Chiropractor for back pain. You know, back pain, chiropractor. I mean, these are more contextually in depth terms that will provide a better quality score because people get a better experience when they do these searches rather than just the plain vanilla boring term itself. Okay, great question. Thank you, Josh. Moving on now to Angela from Sydney. Angela is very complimentary, says hello, Chris. I found your podcast earlier this year. Just wanted to say thank you. Your clear, calm explanations have been incredibly helpful. As someone still learning Google Ads and English as a second language, it's been great to learn both at the same time. Well, that's a double challenge. I applaud you, Angela, because not only are you having to learn a very complicated advertising platform, but I'd say English is probably no simpler. Good luck with both. I'll try and help you with one. Maybe not so much the other. So as far as Google Ads goes, what her question is is about bidding. So I'm just going to get straight to the question and read it out here. Angela wants to know, when should I switch to target cpa? Should I do it now or once we hit a CPA that is more consistent? Okay, so good question. Here is the question I'm going to throw back. And don't worry, I will answer the question, but I want to throw a question back. I'm not so sure you should, you should switch at all. And let me explain why you should never assume that target CPA is better. If you're not watching the video, I'm doing air quotes. It's not better than maximize conversions. Target CPA is just the same kind of bidding, but has one factor of control. There is an ability to throttle up or down the capacity at which Google is allowed to bid. So if you have maximized conversions, there is no throttle. You just pour gas in the tank, point in a direction, and it tries to get conversions based on. It tries to get clicks based on what provides the best chance for conversions. And there is no go higher, lower, and none of that. Okay, so target CPA is just the same system with a throttle that you can pull down and up. So target CPA is the same thing. You're, you're pouring fuel into the system, which is your money you're targeting. You're pointing it in a certain direction with your keywords. And there's one other tool on the dashboard that you can do. You can rev up the engine or rev it down. It's Summer here in Texas and I've been mowing my pasture a lot. I have a beautiful green John Deere that I drive around, and it's wonderful. And if you've ever driven a tractor, you, you, you might know, you know, you don't use, at least nowadays tractors. You don't use a brake in a, in a gas. You use a throttle, much like you would on a riding lawnmower. So if I want the RPMs in the system to speed up, I push that throttle up. And that's essentially what raising the target CPA would do for a target CPA bidding. If you have a $50 target CPA and you change it to $100 target CPA goal, that is pushing that throttle up, it is now going to start spinning up much faster. It has a, has essentially your permission to bid more aggressively, to consume more impressions at a more aggressive bid threshold, or if you were to take a $50 threshold target CPA and drop it to $25, you've now slowed that engine down, you've pulled back on the throttle. It's now spinning at a slower, more cautious rate, consuming fuel at a slower rate. But the fact is, as someone like me who waits until the grass is way too high in the pasture, I have to push that throttle up. Because if you pull that throttle down too much, it's going to gum up as you're, as you're bush hogging, you know, as you're going across the grass, it's not going to be able to cut that grass fast enough. Now, hopefully this tractor analogy is working for you guys. I hope you see that your keywords are designed to, you know, spin up and get traffic. And if you pull back on the throttle too much, it will stop that system from working as well. It may actually stop completely. You may get less traffic if you restrict the throttle too much. So hopefully that's helpful to you. So the answer, I know I kind of went off on tractor talk there for a little bit, but the answer is this. Should you switch to target cpa, when should you? The fact is, is if it's working well with maximized conversions and not you're not experiencing massive fluctuations up and down, then I say keep it, don't change it. The only reason that you would need to change is if you feel like you need that control to push things up enough to guide it a bit more, to be able to push forward, pull back. This might be perhaps seasonal, depending on the industry you're in. So the last question you didn't ask this but just the last point that I'll add is the best way to apply this if you're, if you're ready to do it and if you're wanting to know is now a good time to do it? Is whenever you open up that bidding window in the settings and you click that target CPA checkbox to apply a target CPA to a maximize conversions bidding. And Google populates a number on that line. That is a predictive analysis of Google saying, I have enough positive conversion signal data to making educated predictive analysis that we can maintain this, this cost per conversion for you. That's a good time. That's. That that would be if you're ready to do it, that that's a good time. If there is no prediction there and it's blank when you hit that checkbox, you might want to wait longer. Okay, Angela has one last question that I'm going to answer and then we're going to jump into a discussion about competitor campaigns as promised. So here's our last question. I'd like to bring back some old ad groups that had mixed performance before, before I made my changes. Should I do that now under maximize conversions or wait until after switching to target cpa? Is it better to rebuild these old campaigns and you know, take the old ad copy and update it, change the keywords a bit or should I just re enable my old campaigns with their existing structure? So the short answer is this. You should absolutely turn on your old campaigns and test them. If you are finding success now and you're looking to scale, it's a good opportunity to just turn on more ad groups and see what happens, especially if the automated bidding is doing well for you. So absolutely, I say turn them on. But I cannot leave this topic without doing one final little note. It sounds, Angela, like you are assuming that a certain bid strategy is a magic fixer of a bad ad group. That is not the case. I don't want anyone to assume that you can fix something simply by changing the bid strategy. That is a very risky assumption to make. You should never assume that you can take bad targeting, bad ads, bad keyword, bad decisions, and just throw a bidding strategy at it. And it works for 99% of you. It's not going to work. And if you think I'm the 1%, you're. You're not the 1%. You're not, don't do it. It's not going to work. The issue, in fact, is the quality of traffic, the keywords, some decisions you've made about the level of the funnel, the kind of keywords, the match type, something that is probably a better place to start with a failing ad group and not just throwing new bidding strategies at it. There's really two sides to Google Ads, as I say many times. There is bidding and there's targeting. And I talked about how to audit your account, how to define failure in your account. I talked about that last week. So go listen to that episode from last week if you're interested in defining failure, identifying and diagnosing failure in your account. But I hope that works for you. And thank you so much for your question. Okay, so surprise guest for you guys. It is none other than Joey Bidner who is going to talk about competitor campaigns. Why, when, where, how it's going to answer the questions. And I think it is a great discussion, very anchored in practical advice. So that's why I've left it here in the main topic of the show. Before Joey jumps in, I want to say thank you to Optio for their sponsorship of this podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, for which I charge $0 for this, and I know many of you have listened for many years, if you could please give it a chance, make sure, you know, send them a tweet, send them an email, say, hey, I don't want to use your software, but I just, I want to say thanks, you know, that helps me. But really the best thing to do a favor for you and a favor for me is going to be to try the software. There's no other advice I can give that I haven't already said in one of these episodes. It's really a great software. It does so many things at such a affordable price. So try it for free. And without further ado, here is Joey Buidner discussing competitor campaigns.
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Joey Bidner
Hey, what's up, Chris? So I want to talk about competitor campaigns. We're going to go over when and why I like to run competitor campaigns. I really want to go over the methodology on what it's truly for and not to mix it up with the same kind of goals you would have for other campaign types. And we're going to get into the nitty gritty. I want to talk about campaign structure, keyword theory, bidding, ad copy, and even landing pages, what you should have for competitor campaigns. So before we get into the nitty gritty, I want to talk about why a lot of people start with competitor campaigns and I want to align on what your real goal should be. So just to bring everybody up to speed on what a competitor campaign is, this is a campaign type in Google search where you are bidding on your competitor's brand name and you're showing up above or next to that competitor in the search result. And I find that most people get started with a competitor campaign as soon as they find out that their competitors are bidding on their name or they see it as some, you know, low hanging fruit. Whereas, oh, if I just, you know, intercept them, I'll get the conversion. And this is where I really want to lay the foundation of when and why to run a competitor campaign. So competitor campaign should not be seen as a high converting campaign like full stop. This is not a campaign that you use to increase the efficiency of your account. From a conversion perspective, consider a competitor campaign like high funnel awareness. We are not expecting it often even to break even. Sometimes you are bidding on your competitors terms to show up next to them. Doesn't even have to be above them, show up next to them in their consideration or their reevaluation of their loyalty to that brand. And when I have a client ask me, okay, like when should I run a competitor campaign? I usually like to use this analogy, okay, I find this analogy kind of, kind of paints a good picture of when, when to run a competitor campaign and when not to. If you were a restaurant, okay, and you had a signature dish and you had people lining up out the door for your signature dish, but every day you had to turn people away, you did not have enough of that dish to satiate the line, I. E. This is you running out of budget, not having 100% search impression share. And if you had a little bit of extra money, would you make more of that dish to feed the people in line? Or would you say I'm going to use this to create a new experimental dish that I don't even know will work. I find the easy answer is if you have more budget, you would usually just feed the line, build more of the dish that you know sells. The time that you go for a competitor campaign is when you've satiated that line, you've got some more budget to experiment with. And you know that if you just put it in your existing campaigns, you're, you're maybe not going to get the return that you want because, because you've reached that point of diminishing returns. We want to consider competitor campaigns as that again awareness style campaign, not high converting. So I hope that really allows you to reframe how you think of these campaigns because again, I run them in a number of accounts where they're justified and they're barely profitable and that's okay. We have the budget in the campaign reflective of what we would put towards a high funnel awareness campaign or I kind of see it as almost similar to a remarketing campaign. It's usually just 5%. 5% of the budget, if that. Right. So I hope that helps you either step off the ledge of a competitor campaign if you're feeling some level of, you know, fear of missing out, like don't fall into that. So with that in mind, let's talk about how to run a competitor campaign. So I like to keep it really simple. One campaign, one ad group per competitor. Okay. Within those ad groups you have a small list of exact match keywords. Literally I will have three. Right. I'll usually I find the best performing ones are not necessarily just the name of the brand, but people still in the consideration phase of that brand. So I will put, I will put in the keyword the brand name and reviews or the brand name and prices or sometimes even support because somebody is reaching out to support. Maybe they are unhappy with their service, but that one's a little bit riskier. I find more my go to will be usually the brand name, the brand name reviews, brand name prices, and again, all exact match. In terms of bidding manual, do not do max conversions because again, this is not a conversion campaign. You're likely going to get very few and the ones that you get, to be honest, often aren't even that great quality. If you end up going max conversions and you have a really aggressive bid that's always at the top of the page. What you might get are accidental calls where someone types the brand name. They click on your ad thinking you're the brand and they call you. That's not what you want. You want people to just see sometimes it's successful just to have an ad that doesn't even get clicked in a competitor campaign. You just want it next to there so you get brand recall. So this is a volume play where you just want volume of impressions and clicks, if that. So I go manual and bid as low as you can to get as many clicks as possible with the budget that you have. So 100% of my of my competitor campaigns are manual bidding in terms of ad copy. This one you want to be careful of because if you have a competitor that is trademarked, that's when you'll get flagged and it'll be disapproved for trademark issues. So always keep that one in mind. You don't ever have to worry about trademark for the keywords. It's just the ad copy. So when it comes to the ad copy, I like to say exactly what I'm doing there in terms of where I'm in the serp. Sometimes I'll write like the brand name and alternative to. And I'll be honest, use ChatGPT for this mention you're doing a competitor campaign mention you want some ideas on referencing yourself as an alternative to that competitor and you'll get some good ideas. And if you, if you know, value props that you are, let's say cheaper than them or you're faster than them, put that in the ad copy. That's what will get you that qualified. Click that people will land on your site with an expectation of you as a competitor, not just an accidental click or just landing on your site with just zero expectation of why you're there in their search. And that then translates to the landing page. Um, my favorite, this doesn't work every time, but if you have a client that has the capabilities to create pages, and I really like to create a dedicated page to each competitor on the website that outlines the differences, you know, having one of those charts that says us versus them, now you don't necessarily need to name the competitor, that also might get you in trouble, but straight up, just doing an us versus them and using the word them like it could be anybody. And you could use this page for all your competitor ad groups if you want. But having that like value prop comparison, that's way it's not just going to your homepage where you're expecting the user to click through your website to make that comparison. You know, they see the comparison ad copy on the ad, they see the comparison ad copy, they click through and then they see the comparisons and your value. Props acknowledging where the competitors fall short and where you come above, I find those are the most impactful user experiences. So in summary, don't use competitor campaigns as a, you know, conversion play. This is a volume play. Simple structure, one campaign, one ad group per competitor, lean amount of keywords, exact match, manual bidding, and do very purposeful ad copy and landing pages. And that's usually a wrap and I would say for your budget, again, a smaller portion of the budget and don't flinch if the conversions aren't high. This is a volume play that is for those clients that are looking to just get placements and brand awareness next to those competitors. So I hope this answered some competitor questions and I'll pass it back to you, Chris. See you next time.
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Chris Schaefer
All right, thank you, Joey. Excellent discussion. Solid stuff. You guys have a great week. I am going to be back next week. As always, hard at work. If you would like to work with me on your Google Ads account, you can find my services at chrishaeffer. Com. Joey is available joeybidner. Com to reach out to him. Otherwise I'll be right here next week to discuss more about Google Ads. See you then.