← 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
Deep Dive: Looking at Metrics of a Successful Account (Episode 462)
00:32:24
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- [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 Google Ads. I have questions from listeners, a couple of those coming in, and I'm going to do a follow up on one of my episodes two weeks past where I did a deep dive into one of my own accounts, discussed some of the ways that I set the campaign up and invited questions. And I got some questions and I'm going to address those in the later half of the show. So before I jump into the questions, I want to start the podcast with a reminder that I am sponsored by the best Google Ads management software out there, optio.com PSP Now, I tell you about this software all the time. It continues to improve. It continues to be the number one shining management software for Google Ads, period. Now, if you're not familiar with the way management software works in Google Ads, you say, chris, why would I need management software? Well, the thing is, is everyone is limited by one factor. No matter how good of campaign you have, big or small, everyone's limited by time. Okay, time. And many of us are limited by knowledge and experience. If you struggling, if you're struggling with time, time and experience, then Optio is the perfect package for you because it will shrink the amount of time that you have to invest week to week to getting your campaigns running and performing better. And it lifts your experience level by pointing out areas that could be improved based on the metrics of your account, different areas that need attention, from campaign keywords that are underperforming to bids that might need to be updated, ad copy that's poor, poorly performing, and all kinds of inter account settings from ad groups to campaigns. It will look at all of that and help you lift the campaign. So time and knowledge is a massive boost with this software. You can try it for free for 28 days at optio.com PSP that's optio.com PSP all right, so I'm actually going to start off with an immediate change to the tempo of this and we're going to jump over to Joey. Joey Bidner has been a guest on this podcast many times and I actually got a question directly to Joey. So Joey, please take it away.
- [03:09]
Joey Bidner
Hey, what's up Chris? So I'm going to answer a question from a listener and this question is from Jacqueline and Jacqueline writes in hey Chris, thanks for spreading the knowledge with all of us. This podcast is full of great info, tips and tricks and I would not be the PPC expert I am today without It. Good job, Chris. My question today though is for Joey, that's me. He mentioned using Amazon affiliate links and creating Google Ads campaigns to generate traffic for that. My question is how can I import those conversions that occur on Amazon into Google Ads? So Jacqueline is referring to a couple episodes ago where I talked about an Amazon strategy to use Google Ads to drive traffic to your Amazon store. I talk about this in episode four. 4:59. Yeah, episode 459. So if you want to hear more about that strategy, go ahead and listen to that episode. And in short, it's all about using Google Ads to send traffic to Amazon. And Amazon has a little bit of a referral program where they actually give you 10% of your 10% of your processing fee back. So there's like an incentive for it. You get cheap cost per click. So there's a lot of benefits for it. I love the strategy. And Jacqueline asks asks a great question that I, I actually completely forgot to mention in the episode and that is about attribution. And it's funny the timing of this because shortly after I sent off the recording I messaged Chris kind of saying, oh, I forgot to mention this one thing and it was too late. The episode got out. So I'm glad Jacqueline is asking this question about how we can see the conversions that occur. And the answer is in Google Ads we can't. Google will does not have the ability to connect to Amazon to import those conversions back to Google Ads. Unlike you know, offline conversions that can happen if you have a CRM. There's no connection to Amazon that will connect those clicks to conversions. So the only the way that we monitor this is in platform, in Amazon on your, your referral dashboard. There's a dashboard that has the links that you make that we use for the ads and they will show the conversions there. Now I'll be honest, I am not a whole like I'm not very confident in an Amazon's attribution in the sense where we don't know what the attribution model is. Like if someone clicks on an ad, put something, puts something in cart and then leaves and comes back organically, does that still count? We don't know. I'll also mention it usually takes about three weeks for any conversion to show in this Amazon dashboard. So it's not a perfect system. But like I had mentioned, I think at the top of the episode in episode 459, you want to look at your overall Amazon lift, right? When you start pouring more money into one thing. Let's Say it being this campaign, this effort, or even Google Ads in general, it's important to look at your Amazon results holistically, right? How did your Amazon lift when you started spending more on Google Ads? How did your Amazon lift when you started spending more on this campaign? When it comes to the Google Ads campaign itself, because we don't have conversions, we can't really optimize towards them. Even though you could more or less see them in your Amazon dashboard, I'll be honest, I optimize for this towards clicks and ctrl, right? I want my goal in this strategy is to get the cheapest clicks possible and making sure I'm getting a good ctr. So looking at your search terms, making sure they are all Amazon related and your product category related, making sure your ad copy resonates and getting as cheap the CPC as possible. So I won't I do not use smart bidding for this. I do not use maximize conversions target roas. I either use max clicks. I usually launch it on max clicks just to kind of get it rolling and then use manual to bring them down as low as possible to generate volume. This is a volume strategy to Amazon. So Jacqueline, I hope that answers your question. And yeah, feel free to reach out to the podcast again if you have any other questions and I'll pass it back to you.
- [07:40]
Chris Schaefer
Chris all right, thank you Joey for that follow up. And if you would like to send a question to Joey as we have here or you can send a question to me, you can always send in the questions paid searchpodcastmail.com that's where you can send your questions in. I read all of them and try and answer as many as I can. I have one coming in from Jacob in Australia. So Jacob says, longtime listener, first time question asker. Great. Good to hear from you Jacob. I have a client who offers a service helping people manage their disability support funding. There is only a limited number of keywords that I believe are relevant to be high intent searches that should generate a conversion for my client. When I run keywords in phrase match all I am getting is our competitor names showing up because they have used these keywords, these core keywords in their business names. What can I do to eliminate wasting so much budget on competitor names when running the core keywords without locations in them. So I can still find those high intent audiences. So I picked this question up Jacob, because this is such a common nuisance to many people. I really hate it whenever companies name their their company after the service that they provide. You know there's many Home services that do this, whether you're a plumber or you're trimming trees. And there's also professional services that serve B2B or you know, high, high tech types of things and do the same thing as well. And if you, it makes sense because the name is self explanatory about what the business does. But what this leads to is difficulty for them to rank organically for their own name. And also for us paid Google Ads advertisers, it makes things very difficult because now we're having to exclude these searches from our core keywords. So to answer your question directly, Jacob, here's two ways that I try and deal with it. Because this is a, this is, this is certainly a common issue. So option number one, unfortunately is just to push through and keep blocking those competitor names. When you run a phrase match keyword with the core service name, very often you'll get those competitor names showing up. So your job, day to day, week to week for the initial first push of this is just going to be going in and adding negative keywords. Now let me dive in on what I mean by adding negative keywords because that's a very broad statement. Well, Chris, how do you add negative keywords efficiently? I'll tell you, you can waste your time by adding exact match negative, but that is not where you need to be putting your time. You need to be adding one word broad match keywords. So if there are business names that have things like Premier or you know, Johnson or something like that, you need to add the word Premier and Johnson as a single word, Premiere, broad match negative at the campaign level. Okay? This is something that will immediately stop you from getting all the different variations of Premiere plus that word. Right? So the industry that you're working in, you know, somebody could be typing Premiere, blah, blah, blah, or put the word premiere at the end or have Premiere in there somewhere. It's going to block any, any search that has Premiere in it spelled that way completely from your account. And there's even something that I've started doing more often. I actually will sometimes go and have AI give me a plain text list of competitors. And I mean that list can go on and on and on. Now I absolutely don't just copy and paste the whole list. I need to make sure that there's no terms in here that could stop me from getting good traffic. But this is a great place to start. If there's some obvious terms that are, you know, like, like I said the word Premier or you know, a person's name, those Absolutely. Can be single word, one word, right? Premier Johnson. You put someone's name in there or just the word itself. Put those as broad match negatives and AI can help you generate a longer list. You could also just go to Google and just look at the other ads and just start adding some of those company names as negative keywords. And eventually, eventually you'll reach the end of the tunnel. I can assure you that this will happen because I have done this strategy many times now. It might take a month, it might take two months before you finally reach that point. But if you are, if you have enough budget and you're focused on getting this done, this is a reoccurring task. You work on it every week, every couple days, whatever you need to do, however much spin there is that requires its attention, you'll eventually reach a point where these terms have been blocked sufficiently. So now you're actually getting intent keywords that don't include the competitor, but instead are just those core words with no competitor terms at all, or at least very minimal. Okay, so that's option one. Option two is tougher because it's not just a brute force. Just get it done and you'll eventually win. This one doesn't necessarily have a happy ending because it may not exist. So option two is dive deeper into industry terms. So this is where people who are in the industry, people who understand it, typically use abbreviations or in market or, you know, in industry types of terms that are far deeper than the surface level terms. This is something where you might need to talk to your client or read some, some documentation on their website or look at some competitor websites, try and find abbreviations, other terms that don't just repeat that same term, but are deeper level kind of things. And this is something is absolutely true. If you're doing any kind of IT tech service kind of thing, you know, people that are looking for service for this type of server or this type of software solution, that they're going to use these technical terms that dwarf how many times the general term is used. Right? Managed IT is a good example. IT management, full service IT management, you know, those kind of, they are absolutely incredibly expensive, ridiculously underperforming. They do horrible. But if you find integral terms that are subtly represented within that IT management field, you'll find that you can get a lot of really good searches that don't include the IT management. It's parts of the IT management service that they represent and then you can hook those people. So look for those terms. And I have one more bonus Tip for you, I said option one, option two. But there's a bonus thing that I think that everyone should do when you're faced with a problem like Jacob is if you're having a problem getting Google to find what you're looking for and it's buried under junk terms, I think you should also have what I call a phishing ad group, some set of keywords that provide an expansion of your Google Ads vocabulary. Okay, so what I mean by that is longer tail, broad match, often longer tail that include a question, how do, what is why does kind of stuff. You know, they don't all have to be questions. But this phishing ad group can help you find and fill in the holes of things you don't, you wouldn't otherwise find by targeting the, the core word itself. So this can be done with long, long tail, broad match. You know, when I say long tail, I mean, you know, four or five words long at least. Or you could also do a DSA dynamic search ad where you just give Google a URL and it finds keywords for you. So that's a specific kind of ad group that you could, you could try as well. So I would encourage you to try that as a extra layer of creativity for you because no matter how you go forward from here, it will be a grind. It is difficult, but there is absolutely success. Those searches are out there and I'm sure you can find them. Okay, so we're jumping now to the latter half of the show and I'm going to follow up on a deep dive looking at one of my successful accounts. And if you're not familiar, go back two episodes ago. The title of the episode is Deep Dive. Looking at one of my own successful campaigns. It's episode 460. And I discuss the structure of one of my accounts. And today I'm going to go in. I got a question from Alex in Taiwan who is reacting to that structure and I want to share his questions and I also want to share further details about what the metrics of this successful account looks like. So if you're curious, you know what other accounts look like. Some further examples. This is a great topic to listen to and before I jump in, I want to remind you one more time optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of their amazing software. That's opteo.com PSP all right, so let's jump in. Quick summary. If you're not going to go back and listen to the old episode, what it is, it's a, it's a company in the specialized health services industry and they spend about 4,000amonth. They're in the Northeast US area. And I'm running multiple campaigns and each of those campaigns have multiple ad groups. And what I'm going to talk about today is Alex's questions and reaction to what those metrics look like and what surprises him and questions about why I do things the way I'm doing them. And then also I'm going to go into the details of what these metrics actually look like. You know, what some of the real metrics are in the account. So first questions from Alex are this. He had noticed that the ad group bidding is surprising to him because I've been running this account for a long time and I'm still using ad group bidding. Okay, so I have lots of keywords in here. Why would I have lots of keywords and then still only use ad group bidding? Why wouldn't I go in with manual bidding and be adjusting individual keyword bids? Great question, Alex. The answer is this. My conversion rate, which I don't think I shared this. No, I did not share any metrics. So my conversion rate, which I will now share for this account is 0.67 less than. That's right, less than 1%. So my conversion rate for this client, who I've been working with a very long time, very happy, never has any issues, very happy with the results they're getting, literally has a less than 1% conversion rate. So there's a whole lesson there, there's, there's a whole thing that we could talk about there. You know, this is an extremely low converting and the success is just based on the quality of traffic that they're getting. There's not a whole lot of proof in the metrics that they're getting tons of calls, but it makes a difference in their business and they know it. Okay, so there's a further lesson that we could look at here is why don't I bid on individual keywords? So back to Alex's question. The reason I don't bid on individual keywords is because of the conversion rate. Individual keywords do not shine through and have really good metrics. In fact, there's, there's very few conversions that happen overall. So whenever I don't have keywords that are absolute best performers, you know, because in a, in a six month time period, one keyword might only have two conversions and, you know, a very low conversion rate, less than 1%. So this is not a, a reason for me to try and push and Create winning exact match keywords and bid really highly on them. The value that's derived here is that the client wants a variety of clicks. What's important is that they're getting a lot of clicks. So this is actually a lot of a very different type of shaped campaign. They're interested in receiving and owning a percentage of the traffic out there, but not individual searches. They're interested in owning a topic of traffic. Right. They want to show up for a variety of searches that orient themselves around one general healthcare service that they offer. So there's no reason why I need to take one keyword, bid really highly on it, hit them in first position all the time, get high search impressions on that. No, they want to cover a wide range because this is a consumer level healthcare service and there's a lot of people that search a lot of different ways. So variety is really important here. So I only bid at the ad group level because there's no one individual keyword that needs to shine through. More than anything else, it's not important. With a low conversion volume, my goal is to get traffic around each of these topics and not specific exact search terms in the account. So that's my reasoning. Regardless of the amount of time here, it, it has to do with the fact that the conversion rate is not very high. So another question from Alex is would I consider or have I considered doing occupational therapist with a geographic term? So occupational therapist in this area, you know, area A, occupational therapist in area B, types of keywords. Right. So whatever kind of industry you're working in, you could, you could insert, insert your topic here. But Alex is wondering, should I, you know, why haven't I put keywords in place around geographic areas? Because certainly some geographic areas are going to be more important. And another great question, and my answer is probably less of a professional decision and more of a personal preference. And maybe I should say perhaps experience based on. I personally do not like geographic ad groups. I find them to be a technical nightmare and I avoid them at all costs. I do not find that targeting geographic keywords and then sending them to a very specific ad copy and then that ad copy going to a very specific landing page is necessarily a winning combination. I think it's more efficient to target a more general term and allow the geographic terms to come in and send them to a page that lists all of their locations. So if it's a dentist, if it's, whatever it is I'm working in, that page will say, we service this area, we service these counties. And I don't want someone to, you know, land on a page and be turned off because they happen to search for a geographic area, land on a geographic page and they realize, oh, you know, that's the wrong, you know, I just find it to be a technical nightmare. There's a lot of reasons. I don't really want to go through all the reasons, but believe me, I've gone down that road and I don't find that it works efficiently in Google Ads and I don't typically find that it works efficiently as far as conversion rate goes as well. I don't find a lift in the performance. So this is something, to be clear, something I used to do 10, 15 years ago. Absolutely. But that is, that is not the case anymore. Geographically, I do not find that Google is precise enough for me to set up geo fenced campaigns and be sure that people in that geofence are the only ones that are seeing it. Second, and anyone running Google Ads search campaigns now knows this. I cannot be sure that my geographic keywords get consistent traffic to just those geographic ones. Google will see my keyword around, you know, some geographic area and throw in other neighborhoods around that, which is something I may not want. So it becomes a technical piece to, you know, I gotta babysit that. And in the end I don't find it provides a lift. So thank you for your questions, great questions. You're obviously paying a lot of attention to, you know, my discussion there. And you know, the great thing is, is that anyone running an account like this, every situation is different. So I wanted to share my breakout of how it's working for me and I want to go into a few other things to get into the metrics of the account to share further. You know, what this looks like and again, the whole piece here is that I'm saying that this is a successful campaign, this is a successful account. Not just a account. I've been running it for years consistently. I mean, I hear almost nothing from the client because they're always happy and it's running very well for them. So here's some other things that might be shocking. The account has an 18% impression share. So if you're not familiar with that term, what that means is if there are a hundred searches happening at any given point, my client is showing up for 18 of those. Or you could say there's 82% of the searches that they're not showing up for during a month's time, a week's time, 18% impression share. So very little saturation. Now why is that? Well, the Biggest constraining factor is budget. Okay, so budget is highly limiting. Now a very astute focused listener would say, well, Chris, you said you were running these in manual cpc, don't you have direct control of the cpc? Can't you just pull down the bids and Budget wouldn't be quite as impacted? The answer is yes, I could. But I found that in this particular industry, if I don't show in first position pretty regularly, I have in a. There's, there's almost an immediate drop off there, there's a drop off on ctr. The click through rate drops off very steeply if I don't get those ads showing in first position. And my average cost per click is about $6 per click, which is not crazy, but it's certainly not cheap. But $6 average CPC puts me at a very high percentage in the absolute top ranking. So I do this on purpose. I actually bid very aggressively to get them to high positions because visibility happens to be important here. And unfortunately we sacrifice a very high CPC for that visibility. And the budget doesn't go very far. So they only serve 18% of the market. But overall the click through rate is 8%. The quality of traffic is good and we could always raise budget if we wanted, but that's where they want to sit. That is as high as they want to go. It provides the lift and value that they need. They're very visible for the searches that they're there for and the other ones that they don't show up for, they don't show up for. They get what they get and they run out of budget and that's as far as it goes. So 8% click through rate, $6 CPC, 18% impression share, and the absolute top percentage that I'm getting them is around 50, 50%, typically 50% absolute top ranking. So that's a pretty aggressive position. Above organic position percentages are about 80% or higher. So high visibility, good quality of traffic, very low conversion rate. This is an example of an account that is not focused on conversions. Maybe that surprises you, but this actually happens a lot. And these types of accounts I run for years and years and years because as long as I can keep the traffic qualified, even if I don't see the numbers on screen, good traffic will work itself out. Good quality traffic that ranks well, good ad copy goes to a good page. I don't have to have shining conversion rates because it still works. It's good. So that's why I press and push people all the time. You know about their search terms, right? What's phase one of Google Ads quality of traffic. If you get phase one ironed out, if you get your quality of traffic figured out, even if your conversions are not good, at least in the Google Ads tracking system, this can still be successful. You may never see it on your end, but the client will be happy. And that's what, that's what matters. It makes a difference in their business. All right, so that is the end of today's episode. Appreciate you guys listening in. You can reach out to joey, joeybidner.com or you can reach out to me chrishaefer.com both websites are in the description and otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.