← 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
Custom Labels in Google Ads Shopping (Episode 455)
00:31:29
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- [00:00]
Chris Haefner
Foreign.
- [00:18]
Joey Bidner
Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm going to answer questions about Google Ads and I'm going to get into some really specific stuff about custom labels. My friend Joey Bidner is going to join me later in the show to discuss some really good advice that could bring your Google Ads campaign to the next level. So stick around for that. And without further ado, I'm going to jump right into the questions. If you would like to write in a question which I read every single one and answer them when I find appropriate. Not every single one I don't answer, but you can send your question in paid search podcastmail.com questions about bidding, questions about budget, keywords, you know, whatever you have questions you have about Google Ads, I am happy to answer them, whether they're about search, shopping, display, video, performance. Max, happy to share my opinions. That's what I'm here for, to try and spread some knowledge about Google Ads and help you perform better for your Google Ads campaign. So let's start with the first question and I have practiced and I'm going to try and say Isaru's name correctly. First question comes from Isaru, who is writing from Australia and says, I recently started my own agency and I'm in the process of evaluating different tools to streamline our Google Ads management. I'm currently looking into Optio and was wondering if you have any experience with it, specifically in the context of an agency managing multiple client accounts. Would you say it's a suitable solution for agencies like mine or better suited for individual businesses? Well, Isaru, thank you so much for the questions or the multiple questions and absolutely I'm happy to tell you that Optio is a good solution. I happen to be sponsored by Optio, so I bring it up every single month but or every single week. But regardless, it is still something that I use, something that I recommend. There's a lot of tools out there. I think it is the most reasonably priced, most powerful tool out there. There are some tools that do a lot more, but my goodness, they're expensive. It's ridiculous. And if in the more accounts you throw into these extremely expensive tools, the prices just accelerate further and further. So I feel like Optio does almost everything that these big tools do, but do it at such an affordable price. And that's important because whenever you are an agency running accounts, you know, and you have multiple accounts, you know, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, if not millions of spend that you're going to be throwing into this tool These tools do charge based on the number of accounts, the amount of spend that you're churning through them because they have to process and, you know, all of that. And that makes a difference how much that tool costs for one account, because that's going to multiply with a lot of accounts. So, absolutely, I think it's a great tool to use. And beyond just the economical aspect of the tool itself, I think a big part of it is that it, you know, as an agency, you need to be able to unify your team. Okay, whenever you're making decisions about Google Ads, how you train your managers, your employees in house is going to determine how they manage their account. And as a Google Ads manager myself, I talk to a lot of other managers. Everybody has their own style, and if you don't unify your team under some kind of umbrella, everybody will just do what they feel like doing. You know, you need some type of unification to help to follow a certain pattern, and Opteo is a great solution for that. In fact, it's something that, you know, I think works very well. I've spoken with many agencies that use it and use it for their team to help determine decisions that they make. You know, they can pull up the program in front of them and see, oh, wow, you know, there's this warning on this account and this warning on this account. You know, it's. It's a very structured type of system. And, you know, this. This was a legit question that came in. So I thought I would use this opportunity to speak about Optio in a very different way than I usually do and share a little bit about why I like the tool and how it. I think.
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Chris Haefner
How.
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Joey Bidner
I think it's great for multiple. For agencies that have multiple accounts to be able to utilize. You know, it was built specifically for that reason. It is a power tool of a Google Ads Manager to get stuff done. So if you are considering it, whether you is or anyone else out there is considering it, you guys can try it. Because you're listening to this podcast, you can try it for free for 28 days at opteo.com PSP use the chat box at the bottom right of the screen. There's a special thing. You can leave them a message and say, hey, I heard about it from Chris on the podcast. Could you get me that special offer? And they'll hook you up with that special offer. So it may not say that the offer is available on screen because it is exclusive to listeners. So they have to make sure you heard about it here. They want to Confirm that, and it does help me. So thank you so much for writing in about that because it helps me to let them know. Yeah, Chris, people listen to your advice, and I do appreciate you guys signing up. And I don't feel bad about recommending it because I think they're a great team. It's a great company. I really like the people behind the system, the tool, very smart, very thoughtful about what they do. And as I've talked about just a few weeks back, about the advice they give, the reports they give about the lack of negative keywords. You know, I did an episode about a big report that Optio put out about the lack of negative keywords in performance max campaigns. You know, if they were concerned about you spending more about, you know, wasting money on Google Ads, they wouldn't point out the fact that more people need to use negative keywords in their performance max campaigns. You know, I feel good about people that are concerned about how much money I put into Google Ads. That feels like a very honest thing for people to be concerned about. And when they are concerned, they point out things like that. So thanks so much for your question. I have another question. This one is not about Optio. So this one's from Lamar. So it was a long, long question. Lamar is over in the northeast, I think the Pennsylvania area northeast of the United States, and writes in a long. A long question. I'm going to very quickly summarize it and then get to the answer. So Lamar runs a cabin vacation rental service and particularly in the Poconos, and has concerns about how a. How to properly target. In the tourism industry, particularly. How do you target people? Do you. Do you target. You know, where do you target them? How do you target them? You know, what are some basic settings and some basic strategies about how you can accomplish getting the right kind of traffic. Traffic more likely to book with you in the tourism industry. It's a great question. And so I have listed several points that should help make a drastic difference in the performance of your campaign. So I'm going to go through them one by one. So if you're in the tourism industry or anything having to do with, you know, luxury or, you know, travel. Listen up, because, you know, this is how I would basically approach any new tourism campaign myself. All right, so what I would refer to this strategy is the near and far approach. Okay, so near and far. So the near aspect is you want to target people near your area. So these are people that don't have to drive very far. They are, you know, aware of this Vacation area. And for them, it's just a car drive, right? It's, it's a short drive. They don't live immediately in your area. They are maybe a couple counties over, maybe a state over and over. In here in Texas, when you're a state over, you're a day's drive away. Um, so that's, that's a big difference. But over in the northeast, state away is a lot smaller. So it, you know, I don't know. I don't know. You can decide what that might be for your area. 50 mile, 100 mile, outside of a hundred mile radius, perhaps. Okay, so that's the near approach. Target people in, in your near area, but not in your immediate area. Now what you want to do is you want to target people from, that are. From your. Outside of your immediate area. And those people want to. When those people are searching, you want to find those people that are including more generic searches. Vacation cabins, cabin, getaway, you know, something that is near me. If they don't include a term, right. If they don't include, you know, a different geographic term, if they're not looking for something in Jamaica or in Mexico or, you know, New Zealand or something, and they just say near me, or they just use more generic terms around, you know, vacation cabins nearby, near me, right, that might be a great strategy to try. That's a little riskier, but it's not as risky because at least they're nearby. Okay, so in this campaign that you've created, you're targeting kind of a donut approach, right? You're targeting the outside area, but not the inside. And it can include people that don't use Poconos in their term. They're just saying getaway cabins or getaway cabins near me. Getaway cabins, you know, vacation cabins nearby, stuff like that. Okay, so now let's take that and expand it now as far as you want to go. It could be the rest of the United States. It could be the northeast region of the United States. It could be all of the eastern region of the United States. However far you consider the term far to be, you could target those people. And for something like that, I think it's too risky to include terms that are, you know, just saying cabins near me, because that wouldn't, you know, if you're targeting someone in Louisiana or Colorado, that wouldn't make sense. So for the more far regions, what I would suggest is something that's certainly risky because they're a long distance away, but also less risky because they're going to Include the word poconos in their search. So these people in this far region are going to be searching for things like vacation cabins, Poconos, getaway cabins, Poconos, cabin rental, Poconos. You notice every single time it's going to include your geographic term in their search. Okay, so you can see what I built here. I built a near campaign that is actually using a little riskier terms, but it's not as risky because they're closer. Right. So they're more likely. It's less of a risk for you to send traffic to them because they are nearby and a drive is not near as much as a plane trip or a cross country drive would be. Right. So a little more likelihood of purchasing a little bit less risk involved. So you raise the risk on the keywords for the near and lower the risk because they're closer. Right. So that kind of balances it out. Now, on the far, you include poconos because a plane drive or a plane trip is going to be much more expensive. So that's going to lower the likelihood of them purchasing and booking with you. So you, you need to include at least some kind of reference to the fact that they're looking for you, whether it's the word poconos or, you know, you know, something specific to your region that's going to be indicating that they're interested. Okay. And this is going to work really well. If I had to say what might be the most successful, if I had to guess, is the near going to work better or the far going to work better, My guess is the far is going to work better, particularly because you're going to get millions of possibilities of good searches. And these people are looking for you already. So the cost per click might be a little bit cheaper depending on the competition. These people are already in market for exactly what it is that you're offering. So if I had to lean one way or the other, I feel like the far approach is going to be a little bit better than the near. But you never know. You never know. Now, a couple important things. Just for specific tactics on how to approach this. There are different geographic targeting settings whenever you set up these campaigns. And Lamar, you had specifically asked about this, so I'm addressing this specifically because of the email. The setting that you want to use in both of these campaigns is people in or regularly in your targeted area. Do not use the other one, which let me get the exact wording. Do not use people in or who show interest in your targeted location. That is not the setting you want okay. The setting that you want is people in or regularly in. Not the show interest. Not the show interest. Okay. That's important. So a couple more things that I think are important is going to be the bidding. If I were to run this, I would run this manual. I run everything. I start manual bidding every single time. Very rare instances that I don't use manual bidding from the start. But if you're new to Google Ads, I don't recommend that you start with manual bidding. I do suggest that you start with max clicks. So for max clicks, you can just set an arbitrary cost per click that you want to begin with. You know, you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to just choose what that is on your own. Maybe that means a $2 max CPC. Maybe it means a $5 max CPC. Now, like I said, if you want to distinguish between the far and the nearest, then what I would do is I might give a higher bid threshold to the far campaign, right? The campaign that is people way outside of your area across the United States, possibly the entire United States. You might give a higher bid there because like I said, I think that might be a better opportunity because they're already looking for your area and they're already looking for what you're selling. So I feel like that might work better, but it's just a guess. So do set some kind of CPC threshold on a max clicks bidding strategy and then let the clicks start coming in. I do suggest you use phrase match. As I describe in my discussion about risk management, my 10 principles of Google Ads. I talk about number six, controlling risk with Google Ads. Risk management is an important part. So that's principle number six. Be sure if you don't know what I'm talking about about choosing the right bid strategy and, you know, choosing the right bids and risk and managing risk with match type and bids. Please listen to that because it will be important because you are running two different types of risk campaigns here, so that'll be important for you to know. But anyway, I hope that's helpful. That's a good strategy for anyone in the industry of tourism or vacation rentals or something like that. You might be able to balance a near and far approach for yourself. So as promised in the later half of the show, I now have Joey Bidner who's going to join me. He has a very detailed discussion about using custom labels in your Google Ads campaigns. And real quick, before I do, I want to tell you about Optio again. I do appreciate you guys taking advantage of this very special offer. @optio.com PSP it is a special 28 day free trial and you can take advantage of Optio's Ngram Finder tool which identifies wasteful search terms and simplifies the negative keyword process across Google Ads, search shopping, even performance Max as as well as Microsoft ads. Wonderful tool. That's optio.com PSP and without further ado, Joey, take it away.
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Chris Haefner
Hey, what's up Chris? So today I want to talk about custom labels. Custom labels are easily one of my favorite Google Shopping attributes to segment necessary products by. And what a custom label is is it's a, a special label that you can put on products that you want to split out that is outside of the regular segmentation in Google Shopping. So typically we spoke about this in, in other episodes, but typically the way we structure a Google Shopping campaign is, you know, by product type or brand. Those are the two that are most common. So you know, if you sell kitchen knives, for example, you know, we would segment by product type in the sense where you would have, you know, one campaign, you'd have an ad group for bunka knives, you'd have an ad group for chef's knives, you'd have an ad group for the various different knives that have the product type label. Or you might segment by brand. So again with the knives example, you'd have Shun, which is a brand, you'd have Shun as an ad group, you'd have Wusthof as an ad group, and that's segmenting by brand. Now sometimes within that structure we need to segment a little further and using custom labels allows us to do that. So I'll give you an example. In the context of a sale, right, in your brand or your product types, you might have products peppered in there that are on sale, but not all of them, right? A third of the products might be on sale and for sale products. Usually because your margins are lower, the return on ad spend target is a little bit higher, right? If normally, you know, at your 45% profit margin, you can afford a 250% return on ad spend when you put it on sale and you're at 30% profit margin, that return ad spend now needs to be 300% or 350%. And it's important to segment those products out so you could bid accordingly, you know, maybe offering a little bit of a lower bid on them. So the way that you do this is by applying a custom label and breaking it out. So custom label is done at the merchant center level, right? We and I won't get too into how to apply it because it all depends on how you populate your product feed. If you use a feed management software, if you do it manually, it'll all be different buttons to push. But essentially you can say I want to apply a custom label. Think custom label as like a, just a label, right? To any product that has the tag sale. So I'll ask the client, okay? Put all your products that are on sale, give them a tag and something you can do in any e commerce website, right? Shopify makes it easy. Put a tag on it that says sale and then I will go into merchant center and I'll say any product that has a tag that says sale or as part of a collection that is the sale collection, apply this custom label, okay? And then that allows me to create an ad group where instead of picking product type or picking brand, I'm going to pick custom label one where I made it sale and I'm going to segment by the sale items and all those sale items will be in that ad group. Now we spoke about this in the past, but one of the things you always want to do, there's a little trap door when you do this. Every time you select any, any segment we product type or brand or custom label, you always need to go back into the product group and exclude that everything else line. You know, you'll see your products, you'll see the sale line item with, you know, you'll see how many products are populated there and then that's enabled. Then right under that you'll see everything else, all your other products and Google automatically makes it enabled, which just means all your products are in that ad group. So always exclude the everything else. Now this goes the other way though. Now it's time for us to exclude those sale products from our other ad groups. And this is where it's a little bit tricky. So it's going to be kind of tough to explain, but bear with me. Maybe turn the podcast on slow motion. But what you do is when you go into your other ad groups, you're going to go to, you know, your, the. You have to kind of take two steps back on how you segmented it. Where you initially, you know, on your all products tab in your products groups, you hit that little pencil icon and you picked product type. You need to go back to that first level and you're going to, and you're going to segment by your custom label first. So you're going to pick that custom label that we want to exclude, okay? And then you're going to see that page again where it says that line item for the custom label, which is sale, and under it a line item for everything else. Now in this moment, this is where we're going to exclude sale and we're going to include everything else. Okay, so sales excluded, everything else is included. Now this is where we need to take it one step further. On that everything else line. You're going to hit that plus button again. And this is where we go to segment. Okay, product type. You can pick your, the knives you want, whatever. You pick the product type that you want that has sale excluded because it's in the everything else category. And then you select that and then you exclude everything else after that because then there'll be another line of okay, you've got your bunka knives and then you've got everything else, you exclude everything else. And now you have just the product type that you selected minus the sale, the sale products in that category. So I hope that wasn't too confusing, but that is how we use custom labels to segment sale out of a, out of an ad group or campaign. Now I also like to use custom labels in sometimes to break out products that I don't want to exclude from the base campaign. So I'll give you an example. If you've got products that have higher profit margins. So let's say, we'll use the knife example. Let's say within our knives there are a few knives in, you know, peppered along our ad groups, our product types that we get better profit margins on. But it's not clean cut like, oh, this product type gets better profit margin and that one doesn't. It's like within a product type, maybe three or four products are like really good profit margins. You want to push those further, right? So in this context what I would do is I would get the client on their website back end to apply a tag or make a collection of the products that you get higher margins on. So I can identify them. Then in merchant central, I'll make a custom label for those products and then I'll create another campaign with that custom label. Right, with that custom label. But I won't exclude them from the base campaign. And the reason is the two campaigns will kind of share the data. And sometimes it happens when you've got all your products in one campaign, Google doesn't know that one product has better profit margins. And if it's not necessarily getting a return on a good return ad spend, it might forget about that product. It might start serving it less for whatever reason or just serve it equally to other products that have worse profit margins. By separating it out, you're going to force ad spend on it. It will collect data and theoretically you could exclude it from the other campaign and just separate it on its own. But in all honesty, I don't. I keep it in the base campaign, especially if it's just like a small set of products. I keep it in the base campaign. I put more dollars on those products in this segmented campaign and just let them both run and then you can observe how that product overall lifted. I'm going to give you one more good example of when I like to use custom labels. I recently completely changed actually how I structured a, a fashion brand's Google Ad structure based off custom labels. Because previously, you know, we had the, the structure based off of garment type, you know, so in a campaign we had blouses as an ad group, shirts, skirts. You know, every product type had an ad group. But we, you know, I got thinking and, and fashion brands are seasonal, right? This brand would release a collection every season, fall, winter, spring, and, and, and truly it's the seasons of the products that would have a rise and a fall. And of course, when, you know, when you have things segmented by, by the product type of the garment type, you know, all those collections are peppered through it, right? So in blouses, we would have all of the blouses. So that's the spring, the summer, the fall, the, the new collection in there. And we wouldn't be able to bid accordingly based off of inventory or based off of, you know, when you release a bunch of new products because it's new, the algorithm doesn't really know what to do with it. So sometimes it might hold off on it, but you really need to push inventory because demand is there. So what we ended up doing was we made a custom label for every collection type. So I just made a, so they already had the collections in Shopify, you know, spring 2024, summer 2024. Each collection had, each seasonal collection had its own Shopify collection. So I made a custom label for that. Now we have an ad group for each collection. And I monitor how those collections kind of rise and fall in popularity and, and return on ad spend. And as we transition out of a season, if the algorithm doesn't start pulling back on it soon enough, I will do it manually and bid it down. So that's another example of how I use custom labels to structure an account based off of how the products should be managed. It doesn't always have to be brand or product type. So I hope that was helpful. Give custom labels a try. They can be really great for segmenting out sale products or pulling certain products out to drive more spend to or possibly restructuring a whole campaign based off product type. So feel free to reach out if you have any other questions but I'll pass it back to you.
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Joey Bidner
Chris all right. Thank you Joey. Thank you so much for great advice. And if you would like to reach out to Joey you can find his website link joeybidner.com you can also find my business link chrishaefer.com to hire me for management or consulting within your Google Ads and I hope this helps you get more done, helps you be more productive, make better decisions in your Google Ads. Thank you so so much for your support over all these years. I am blown away. I am approaching my 500th episode. I'm four. This is episode 455 which is pretty incredible. Thank you guys for being with me for so long. I appreciate all the positive messages I get through my email and I'm going to keep doing it as long as you guys continue to listen and support me. I'll catch you guys next week.