← 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 One of My Own Successful Campaigns (Episode 460)
00:36:25
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to do a deep dive into one of my own Google Ads accounts. Gonna take a look at the campaign, go through some of the metrics and maybe some things will shock you about what a successful account looks like. Give you some very specific examples of this account and also we're answering a couple questions from listeners here at the top of the show as well. You can join in on the fun by sending your email question to paid search podcastmail.com Getting a lot of really good questions and I do appreciate the questions because they really help to provide a lot of variety to the to the show. So if you do have a question, don't hesitate. Please do send in a question. I try my best to answer everyone as long as it's appropriate and I feel like it'll lead to a good learning point on the show. Anything about Google Ads? Happy to answer those questions. So I have a couple questions. As I said, we're going to jump in. Before I do that, remind you about optio.com PSP There is a 28 day free trial for you to try the best Google Ads management software out there. They have a variety of tools in this toolbox that they've created. So you're running your own, your Google Ads account, maybe one account, five, maybe 80 accounts. Whether you're doing multiple accounts or just a few, this tool scales and helps you to make better decisions about everything from keywords, ad copy, bidding, all the stuff that you grind through day to day. It helps you make solid decisions. And these I would call power tools. These are tools that take what you usually do, things that I talk about doing on a daily basis or weekly basis in your account and help you do those things faster. Absolutely critical. For those of you that want to bring your Google Ads account to the next level, level up your ability to manage multiple accounts even faster. Try your free 28 day free trial at this exclusive link optio.com PSP link is in the description and use the chat box on their website to let them know that you heard about it and you'll get that special offer exclusively from the paid search podcast. All right, so we're going to jump into the first question. First question comes from Jan who says, hi Chris, love the podcast for a 3k monthly budget B2B SaaS account aiming to increase demo bookings. Should I focus on search performance max or both? So again, there was a lot of information packed in that first part of the question. He says for it's, it's 3,000amonth. It's a B2B. So that's business to business SaaS, that software as a service. So you know, any kind of thing that you log in on and use to accomplish tasks, that's what a software as a service is. So very specific. Right. And they want to book demos of people looking at the software, you know, trying to consider if they want to purchase it for their business, for their purpose. So the first question is, should I focus on search, performance max or both? Alright, so let's jump in with this first part. There's a second part coming up in a moment. B2B SAS is the disqualifier on this. I do not recommend performance max. There are some times I kind of recommend performance max, but most of the time I do not. Absolutely not recommended here because it is a B2B, highly technical type of thing. And booking demos, I find for a very specific industry like this, B2B in particular really relies on the demos and the bookings being qualified, right? People actually showing up to those bookings, people actually being in the industry that you're trying to target. So the quality of the demonstration that you're booking with this lead is incredibly important. So I do not find that just a performance max campaign that's just spitting out conversions, you know, as fast as it can with the highest volume that it can. I don't find that it differentiates and qualifies the leads the way that it needs to. Okay. So however, on the other hand, search I think is very difficult. But in the end, even though search is a difficult task to accomplish lead generation for this type of industry, I feel that it is better because the quality of lead is more important than the volume. I, I run and have run many B2B SaaS accounts in my 20 plus years and they absolutely have the same complaints. You know, Chris, we're getting a lot of conversions, but we really need to make sure we're focusing on this industry, this industry. We need more people to close our closing rate, right? They, they look at my conversion volume, but they also really focus on the closing rate. And I'll tell you, it is a much worse problem to have a very poor closing rate as opposed to, you know, tons and tons of conversions with a poor closing rate and you know, very few conversions with a very solid conversion rate closing rate. So you know, you got to pick what you want there. And I think search is probably your best bet. So jumping into Jan's next question says also with a low demo Conversion rate. So a low conversion rate of about four a week, limited data for Google. Is it wise to use maximize conversions with micro conversions like just viewing the book a demo page as the primary goal to help Google's algorithm to learn. My thinking is that clicks show interest on that book a demo page even though they didn't convert, but they did land on that page. So what Jan is talking about is giving Google a much lower bar. Hey Google, if someone views, even views the book a demo page and don't doesn't, I don't care whether they fill it out or not. If they just view that page, if they view my contact page, if they're on the account on our website for more than three minutes. Right. That's the kind of conversion tracking that he talking about here. And the answer here is pretty simple training maximize conversions or any kind of algorithm based conversion system using a non converting action, in other words a page view or time on site or anything like that I think is extremely dangerous. I would consider this to be a shortcut, right Quote unquote a shortcut. And if you listen to the podcast, you know, short, I believe shortcuts do not exist in Google Ads. You either do it right or it will never be right. Okay, there's no shortcuts. It's a big reason why I'm not a fan of performance max and a lot of these, you know, set it and forget it kind of stuff. There is no shortcut this shortcut to boosting the algorithm. But once the algorithm is hooked on this action, there's no going back. If you're getting 50 quote unquote conversions, you know, views on the book of demo page, good luck trying to optimize or wean the campaign off of that conversion action. You're not going to be able to go from 50, 75 conversions a week, you know, the shortcut conversions and then slowly trying to move it over to the actually book to demo kind of conversion, you'd be hooked on it forever. And it's not something that I would recommend. And last part of the question from Jan is this, Chris, should I stick with manual bidding or max clicks? Okay, so right. He's, he's, he's saying if I don't go with maximized conversions, which one should I choose? Manual bidding or max clicks? And I want to say this, whoever's listening and might have the same question and you find yourself conflicted between the two, I would give you the advice of don't be lured by flashy smart bidding strategies. And these are Quote, unquote, smart bidding. Okay, you're. You're racing to, to use a late bidding strategy, a late stage bidding strategy, whenever you jump into, maximize conversions, target cpa, target roas, maximize conversion value. Any of these smart bidding strategies is what really is a late stage management tool. The best road forward is a slow and steady method. So for that reason I prefer manual bidding. But even using just simple max clicks is still better and more controllable than the smart bidding strategies. Let me paint a very quick, easy picture for you. Max clicks, with some different tweaks and twiddles here and there, can be pushed and prodded and guided through the valley of where you want to try and take the campaign, maximize conversions. And target CPA cannot accomplish that. And I'm referring to campaigns that don't have tons and tons of conversions. You cannot guide a target CPA campaign in the same agile way that a manual CPC campaign can be guided or even just a max clicks conversion. A max clicks bidding strategy can be guided. Both of those are much more agile. And I value agility for my campaigns in the early to mid stage and use different strategies for late stage. And when I say late stage, I mean phase three, phase four of Google Ads management. When you have conversions, when you're getting steady inflow of regular conversions. And these are qualified and they're actually leads. Okay, so again, if you'd like to send in a question, you can do so paid search podcastmail.com send your questions in and I usually, well, I always reply and let you know that your question will be answered whenever I pick it up. So another question coming in. Hamza writes in and says, hi, Chris, I recently got a new client ad account for dental services. Once I got it, the previous company tried to sabotage the campaigns by adding hundreds of negatives to the campaigns that were more or less the main keywords or the targeted regional keywords that I was using. I did not expect anyone to do such a thing. For a week while I was planning and creating new campaigns, I did not check out the negatives and as a result, the campaigns crashed from 400 conversions to less than 30 conversions. I've removed all the negatives. Now what should I do next? Or how long will it take the campaigns to settle back into place? Do you think they might have caused permanent damage? Well, Hamza, that sounds awful and I just, I just have to comment on this. I, I don't want anyone listening to this to think that this is in any way normal or standard for what typically happens. 99% of the time, the transfer of an account from one agency to another is simple, easy. Most of the time it goes quite well. The instances when it doesn't is something like this where a company will try and sabotage. This is actually the first time I've ever heard about something like this. I've never experienced that directly nor heard about it, but I absolutely believe that it happens. Makes sense. I totally believe that there's agencies would, or freelancers or anyone that could do something like this out of spite. But I'll tell you this. Anyone who's, who's listening and is on the, you know, who is a business owner, I'll tell you. The worst agencies that you could work with, I find, are the ones that own your account. If you do not own your own account and the company that you're working with, you then fire and they refuse to give you access to your own account. Maybe you've paid tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars into this account. They've been managing it for you. And now, now maybe you're the agency and you have grown apart, maybe they've done a phenomenal job, but you're just ready to do something a little different. And they're not quite right. Right. Even with a happy split, here's what happens. And I just dealt with this with a new lawyer client that I brought on. They'd been running with this one account for long time. They've been spending tens of thousands, lot of money with this agency. And when they fired the agency, the agency said okay. And they just shut off their ads. And they brought me in and I said, okay, can I have access to your account? And I'll pick it back up, we'll make some adjustments, we'll keep going. No. The agency that they were working with said, no, no, this is our intellectual property, which is absolutely bonkers to me because the client, the lawyer was paying to fuel this account. If anyone's paid for the intellectual property of this Google Ads account, it is the client, not the agency. The agency is not doing anything that's so revolutionary that they can't let anyone else see it. That's absolutely ridiculous. And if anyone has rights to this, it's certainly the client who has paid tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, not only to Google, but also to the agency to utilize their skills to get this done. So it's absolutely bonkers to me. And if you're in that situation, be very cautious whenever you don't own and fully have access to your own Google Ads. Account. Let me know if you have questions about that. You know, it's a good question to write in about if you have further questions on that topic. But let's go back to Hamza's question. Back to on topic. So to remind you, got, I got off topic a little here, but Hamza's account was sabotage. Okay? So sabotage by negative keywords. Somebody did that to the account when it was transferred over. So the answer is the campaigns in this situation should recover quickly. They perhaps might be a little slower in returning back to full, full blast of what they were getting before. But I would say that's only the case if you're using automated bidding, like max conversions, target cpa, something like that. If you're using manual bidding, it'll snap back in right away because as soon as you shut off the negatives, there's no learning phase or there's no bogging down of the algorithm that had happened, it would have snapped right back in. So it depends on what kind of bidding strategy you're using. And if you are dealing with a situation of sabotage or some kind of massive upset, the conversions have broken, or something like that, the answer is, if you continue to use the smart bidding, you should raise your target CPA. Let's say your target CPA is $50. You should raise it to $100. $150. And this allows the campaigns to breathe a bit after seeing a massive performance drop. So if you go from getting 400 conversions to getting 3 Hun to getting 30 conversions, you should raise the bar on the bidding strategy. So give it some room to grow and have some, some, some threshold to work with. Otherwise the campaign will starve out and, and die. And the good news is last here is there's no permanent damage as long as the negative keywords are removed. And you should be able to see those very easily based on, you know, the change history. You can look at the change history and see what was added. You can remove those and know exactly what was added. Remove those. No permanent damage here other than the lost potential leads that the client suffered. So there we go. There are two questions from listeners around the world. So whether you're here in the US In Texas, with me, around the world. Send in your question and I will happily give you my thoughts. All right, we're going to jump into a deep dive here. I'm going to be looking at one of my successful campaigns, and this is a bit of an audience participation. I'm going to ask you guys to participate because I think this is going to carry on to either next week's show or maybe the following week. And before I jump in, I want to remind you again, opteo.com PSP opteo.com PSP to try out their new brand new Ngram finder tool which identifies wasteful search terms and simplifies the negative keyword process across Google Ads from search to shopping and performance max. And they even work with Microsoft ads as well. Try them for a free 28 day free trial exclusively available through the link optio.com PSP so let's do it. Let's jump in to a deep dive looking at one of my own successful campaigns. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through every different level. I'm going to talk about the structure, the bidding, the keywords and the location targeting for this account. And next week, or perhaps the week after, I want to give you time guys to write in questions and comments and, and kind of join in on the discussion here. I'm going to share with you the metrics, what the metrics look like. But today I'm only going to go through the structure. What kind of structure do I have? What kind of bidding is there? What's the budget, what's the keywords look like? I'm going to go through all of this and I just want you guys to listen and you know, what do you notice about this? What's different from what you're doing, what surprises you, what doesn't surprise you? And we'll go through it step by step. So just so you know, you can write in same email address, paid searchpodcastmail.com Send in your comments, questions about this and we will address them again in the follow up Show Part 2. So here we go. The client is located in the northeast usa, right? So it's in the northeast and they spend about, about $4,000 a month. Okay. So good healthy budget. They are focused on a very specialized health services, a very specialized health service, I should say. They're not a hospital, they're not really a clinic. Right. It's a very specific type of service where someone with a child or possibly even adult might have a specific issue. And there's specific terms that are being searched where they're looking for a specialist, someone to help with this thing. Okay. And again I'll share metrics, clicks, conversions, all that kind of stuff in next week or the week after show part two show. But for now let's talk about how does this campaign look. So I'm going to, I'M going to pull it up here. I'm going to go through it. So first $4,000 spend, I have three campaigns. Okay? So one campaign is for their most important service, right? And it's specifically for occupational therapy and speech therapy. Okay? So that's the industry that they're in. All right. Another campaign is for their less important service that's specifically early intervention for children and also traumatic brain injuries sometimes. Those obviously are typically adults. Okay, so understand what's happening here. Three campaigns. I've already divided it into two areas. And you say, chris, why do you have two campaigns for those? Couldn't you just put it into one? The reason I have those in two separate campaigns is because I want to prioritize occupational therapy and speech therapy, which is very important to the client. Okay. Their second, not as important industry is the early intervention for children and the traumatic brain injury. Okay? And then there's a third campaign. And this, this third campaign is a specific location that they have that they want to try. You know, they're. They're. They have another facility that they want to try and target and hit. Another facility. Specifically, it's. It's a newer facility that they've opened, and they want to try and really hit that area with very specific keywords for what that specific location focuses on. Okay, so what do you. What conclusion do you draw from this? I mean, you see, based on the structure, what I've done is I didn't break it up based on geographic location. I didn't. I didn't break it up based on ones for occupational therapy, ones for speech therapy, ones for traumatic brain injury. No, I grouped it based on priority importance. That's how I chose my campaigns. So that's one strategy of how a successful campaign account might be structured simply based on. Well, Kris, this is our most important. These are our second most important. And then this is something we kind of want to add as well. Right? So three campaigns. Now, each campaign has three to six ad groups, so not very many. And then each ad group has between 10 to 27 keywords. My biggest ad group has 27 keywords. Okay. And then each ad group has one responsive search ad. And if you're curious, I do have all 15 headlines filled out. I don't do any pinning or anything like that. Unpinned. And I let Google kind of pick the best combination, but I give it the best possible headlines that I can come up with. I really stay away from generic throwaway headlines. Every headline nowadays especially, it's a little easier because I. I use ChatGPT to help me come up with more creative ideas. So much easier now than it used to be, where I end up repeating things over and over again and kind of having my toolbox of, of topics. But Now I use ChatGPT to come up with really specific, really cool ideas that it helps me. So I use ChatGPT a lot for ad headline writing. Okay, so that's the structure. Four grand in spend and three campaigns. So, you know, we're, we're, we're not looking at a whole lot of keywords. In fact, you might be interested. Let me pull up the active keywords. Total active keywords, you know, that are actually Getting clicks is 50. There's about 50 to 60 that are actually getting clicks. So that gives you an idea. You know, there's a lot of keywords that aren't getting, you know, getting hardly any traffic. They're getting some impressions, but very few clicks. Alright, so moving on now to bidding, you say, well, what kind of bidding strategy are you using? Well, this has been an account that's been running for a very long time, years and years, been doing very well. I said it was a successful campaign and I'm still using manual bidding. Okay. I am not using automated bidding. The reason for this is because this account does not get a ton of conversions. The conversion rate, which I'll talk more about in part two, is not real high. It's, you know, it's, it's, it, it doesn't have a whole lot of, of, of conversions regularly happening. They're a little spotty because one of the reasons is we don't track every single type of conversion. And as I'm doing this, by the way, I'm, I'm realizing I told you guys wrong. I had a filter when I was looking at my keywords. I was wrong. I have more like 70, 70 to 80 keywords that are getting clicks. So I was wrong about that. There's a whole lot more. I had a filter on my keywords and I didn't realize the total keyword volume is actually 212 keywords across all three campaigns. And about 80 keywords are actually getting traffic and clicks. So there you go. Quick correction there. Alright, so no automated bidding. In fact, I am not using any keyword bids at all either. Everything is bid at the ad group level. Okay? So the reason I do this is because each ad group is based on the risk and the topic of what I want to target. So there might be an occupational therapy ad group that I have and in this ad group it Might be occupational therapy, you know, speech therapy for children specifically. And I have bids based on the performance of those searches and how important it is to the client. And the bids are just at the ad group level. I don't have my bids at the key. I don't have individual keyword bids. My bids are set at the ad group level. And then for another one, my pediatric early intervention ad group, I have a specific ad group bid for that. So this is much easier to manage. So when I do a lot of consulting, which, which I offer consulting and, you know, help people dig into their accounts, I did. I do them every single day. You can, you can book on my website, Chris Schaefer.com and I get guarantee you'll learn something. I guarantee it'll be a useful hour for you. In fact, it might be even overwhelming as I've done a couple sessions this week and people were absolutely blown away. They were listeners of the podcast and they took me up on it. They signed up and were shocked at how much we were able to get through in an hour and how helpful it was. So anyway, my purpose for bringing that up is the fact that I see a lot of accounts and I see a lot of accounts that bid at the keyword level. And I'll tell you right now, it is a very inefficient way to manage a Google Ads account. You have to pay much closer attention to the keyword bids because one keyword bid might need to be adjusted because you know, you have that one, that one's twice the CPC as everything else, and you need to go check that individual keyword. So it's a very inefficient way. If you don't need that kind of precision with your keyword bidding, which most accounts don't. So no keyword bid, everything's manual bidding. And I bid at the ad group level. That means all the keywords in that ad group are the same bid. Okay, so now let's move to keywords. My keywords, zero. Broad match. Absolutely no broad match. This is not always true, but it is true in this instance. The reason I don't use any broad match is because when you're in a specific industry like this where you know it has to do with diseases, symptoms, problems, you absolutely must stay away from what's called research, you know, high risk, high funnel symptom searches. And this is not exclusive to the health industry. This is true for anything that tiptoes across a very thin line. Right. I was working with someone recently who was in a highly, very thin line that they're walking. If they stray to one side of the line, they're going to get completely off topic searches and they stray to the other side, it's completely off topic searches for the other for a different reason. So you, you have to walk this very thin line of traffic quality and broad match keywords will not walk a thin line. They walk a very broad as Google calls it. If you're just listening air quotes on this comprehensive, broad match. Comprehensive does not mean efficient. Comprehensive means they're going to do whatever the heck they want. Broad match means you have no control. Comprehensive is like bringing your three year old to a candy store and telling them to choose wisely, pick the healthy ones. Right? I mean absolutely not. That child is going to be very comprehensive in all of the suites they decide that they want to buy and catch their eye, they're going to want all of it. So no broad match. I have 172 phrase match keywords and only one of those is actually a two word phrase match keyword. 171 of those phrase match keywords have at least three words in them. So in other words, if I pulled up the keywords scroll down here, let's grab one towards the middle. Pediatric speech therapy, right? That is a three word phrase match keyword. Pediatric speech therapy, not speech therapy, not pediatric therapy, not two words, three words. And that is how almost 99% of my keywords look. They have three words only one is a two word. And then I have 38 keywords that are exact match. Okay, so last few things Here, there are 525 negative keywords. Most of those negative keywords are one word broad match. Okay, that's very important. A lot of people don't utilize one word broad match enough for their negative keywords. So the words like review, job, jobs, college classes, training, video, these are all searches that I, I didn't, I didn't just come up with these, I don't just make these up. I found these and I targeted these so ended up being about 525 most of those one word broad match, a few or two word phrase match and then about 170 of them are exact match negative. And wrapping it up now is locations. My location targeting is county specific and city specific. So I have multiple counties and then I have some specific cities inside of those counties. No zip code targeting, no radius targeting. And the reason I do county and city is because that way I can pick a certain city in my location targeting and bid up on that certain city. So I don't have to bid up on an entire county. You say, Chris. What? You know, why would you target a city inside of a county? Why? Why would you double up? Well, with manual bidding, I could bid up on a specific city so the county might get, you know, a $5 CPC, but I might bid up 50% on a specific city within that county. So now that city, if they're in that city, they're going to get a 750 max CPC. So that's it. That's how a successful campaign is built out. It's been running for years. Been doing very well. I am happy to revisit this, talk about the metrics, answer some questions that you guys have about it. I'm gonna try a little bit of a two way conversation. Send your question in paid searchpodcastmail.com for the show. If you would like to reach out to me, see about booking a one hour consulting call with me that I guarantee you will learn a lot from. Whether you're beginner, intermediate or highly advanced. I can absolutely speak on any level, Chris Schaefer.com to speak to me there. Otherwise you'll catch me right here next week. I'll see you guys then.