← 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
Enhanced Conversions, Performance Max, & Micromanaging (Episode 451)
00:35:56
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- [00:00]
Joey Bidner
Foreign.
- [00:19]
Chris Shafer
Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and I have questions for from listeners today. A lot of really interesting topics. I even have my friend Joey Bidner who is going to jump in on one of the questions about performance Max and I have a lot to cover today so I am not going to waste any time with chit chat. We're going to go right into it. Optio.com PSP is the sponsor that keeps me going and if you haven't tried them, do me a favor and try them out. I cannot tell you the number of positive reviews praise of people telling me Kris, my goodness, why did I sit on this? Why did I sleep on this? It's a great software, helps you for day to day management of your Google Ads. Very straightforward. You open it up and it says hey, do you know you have a keyword that's been underperforming for six months and it spends 20% of your budget? Who doesn't want to know things like that? It's incredibly valuable. It help helps you from ad copy to bids to keywords, negative keywords, search terms and all kinds of reporting and things that you want to automate, things that you need help on. And it helps you do it and make solid decisions week after week after week. Try for free@opteo.com PSP that's opteo.com PSP get a 28 day free trial when you use that link. That's the special link only for listeners of this podcast and without further ado, my fastest intro ever. We are straight into the question from Dan who writes in at my email address, paid search podcastmail.com send me an email there and maybe you'll be featured on one of the shows. Dan says. Hi Chris, love your show. I'm a new listener. I found it about three months ago and have listened to a couple dozen episodes so far. Welcome Dan. You got a whole lot more to listen to, but I promise you'll hear a new one every Wednesday. So. Or every, every Monday. No, Wednesday. All right, so Dan asks, he has a question about enhanced conversions and should he turn them on. Basically he wants to know if they just provide more data on each conversion or if having enhanced conversions alters the way Google handles things like maximize conversions. So great question Dan, and here's the answer. So first let me explain Enhanced conversions. Okay. Enhanced conversions, you might think for those of you who haven't heard about it is a certain bidding strategy or something like that. It is not about bidding. Okay, to be clear, enhanced conversions does not Change your bidding strategy. It does not mean you're going to get more sales necessarily. It does not mean that you're going to pay more per click or anything like that. Enhanced conversions simply allows Google access to private data through your website. Okay, so if you remember many years ago, Google did this big show about we care about your privacy. And they really pushed, not using cookies, which are little private bits of data that are pushed through every time you go to a website, you get a cookie on your browser and stuff like that. And people tie that to your information when you're on your site. They tried to pull that information and say, we care about your privacy and we're going to stop using cookies. We're going to try and change the industry. And so they, you know, started doing an internal type of private data consolidation, you know, so, you know, we're not going to be allowing this information to be much more transparent and it's going to be safer for you. Okay, so what this is, is, this is post cookie world, where now what Google is doing is they're saying to advertisers, hey, can we have access to that person's personal information when they fill out a form on your site or share some kind of information? Can we have that email address, that phone number, you know, whatever it is that they're sharing so that we can then match it to that person when they go to other sites? So the ironic thing is that there's still tons of private data being shared. There's still tons of information that Google has and they're asking for actually more than they had before, but it's now in a closed loop. Okay. So it's very specific to them. So it's whether it can help you or not. Yes, it can help you. I, I don't know how much. Nobody can really tell you. That's why Google doesn't necessarily say turn on enhanced conversions and you'll get, you know, this much better cost per conversion and stuff like that. They don't, they don't give predictions like that because nobody really knows. And I couldn't possibly answer that question. It could provide additional conversion data that would other otherwise be zero. So let's say somebody goes to your site and, you know, paid on, clicked on, clicked on a paid ad from Google. But then the next day or the day later, a day after that, a week later, who knows, however long they use a different browser, something that's completely untied, you know, they start a new session or whatever, something happened that completely breaks the tracking AB of Google. Ads, and they end up converting, buying, filling out a form, whatever it is on your site. And if you have enhanced conversions turned on, this person who converted would potentially be tracked because the line of tracking is now tied to their personal information and not just a cookie on their browser. So this is a simplified version. I don't really want to get into all the specifics. I don't know all the specifics. I'm not, I don't have that kind of technology depth about that stuff. I just know that no additional data from the conversion is for you. You don't get like better conversion data or anything. You just get more conversions potentially that would otherwise have been lost. So you, you might receive a little bit of a boost in conversions. That doesn't mean you're receiving more leads. It doesn't mean you're receiving more phone calls. It just means that you're tracking more of them. And who gets, you know, the most out of it really is Google because they now have additional data. Those blind spots, those black holes of mystery about this person did this, you know, did they convert or not? What'd they do? What's their activities that happen after the click. Google now has that information, okay? And it can potentially enhance your maximize conversions. Your, your smart bidding. It could potentially help because now Google has more data points to connect the dots. But in the end, you know, I wouldn't say that there is a definitive advantage that you could put your finger on. I've never heard a story, nor have experienced anyone or myself saying I turned on enhanced conversions and that was the key. You know, that's what really made my campaign take off and start doing great. No, nobody says that. I've never heard anyone say that because nobody can, can, can, can say it was at my enhanced conversions that caused my performance spike. No, it's not a performance spike. It's a tracking spike. You might now have conversion data that would otherwise be attributed to organic. It's now being attributed to paid search. Even though paid search didn't get that click, it got the original click, but it didn't get the second or the third click. Right? So hopefully that helps. Dan, it's. If you're looking for advice for me, I guess turn it on, it doesn't hurt anything, I don't think, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm kind of indifferent to the whole thing. It's, you know, it's just, it's just another way for Google to have more data. And I guess that's great. I guess so. All right. The next question is from Joey. Joey, who is specifically asking a question about stuff I don't usually talk about on the podcast, but I thought it was a pretty interesting question. And even though those of you may not be managers of Google Ads, you might find this to be an interesting discussion, whether you're on the side of an agency or you're on the side of, you know, someone who's being managed by an agency. So let's see what Joey's question is. He says that he's been running Google Ads for service based businesses for about five years now. So specifically he's asking about a home service client who's spending about, you know, five figures, a high five figures in Google Ads every month. So, you know, tens of thousands of dollars every month, hundreds of thousands, you know, a year. All right, A lot of money happening here right now. He notes that the client has become increasingly micromanaged. Actually the word he uses, increasingly micromanaging, which I immediately know what you mean, Joey. I've been there and that's why I thought this was a great question, because I have a lot of experience in this area. So essentially what the client's doing is they're making or suggesting changes, telling him to make changes every week, sometimes more than once a week, like emails, meetings, you know, change this, change this. You know, I imagine it's everything from ad copy to new ideas to landing pages to something they, they, they saw on a YouTube video. You know, who knows? Micromanaging multiple times a week sounds exhausting. So here's Joey's question. He says, is there a good cadence to make changes to your Google Ads account that will play nice with the Google Ads algorithm and also help me, the, the agency, the manager, show the client that I'm working to help them improve. So, really interesting question and I hope, I hope my answer is helpful to you because I'm not. Joey, I'm, I'm sure you're a smart guy. I'm not belittling you or anything. So don't, don't take offense. I'm going to answer this as honest as I can because I've been in your shoes and I try and avoid being in those shoes. So let me ask, why is the client being micromanaging? I can tell you I have this situation come up and I've had it come up so much that I've learned to spot this and try and get at the root of the problem before it becomes a deeper problem. So here's what I've learned. You need to figure out it's one of two problems, things. Well, maybe one of three. We'll get into the third in a minute. But it's either a volume problem, right. They're not getting enough volume of traffic. Usually. That's very clear. You know, you'll tell them what the cost per conversion is or the roas and they'll tell you that's not good enough. Right. You know, I'm getting $500 cost per conversion. Nope. I want 300, I want 200. Right. That's usually very plain. You usually know that it's likely that someone becomes micromanaging because it's a problem with the quality, the quality of the traffic. Something's not clicking on their end. Right. So their closing rate is dropping. Right. They're getting more leads, but they're closing less of them. This is a quality issue, and this is very difficult for the client to explain. They'll very often not tell you because it's not really any of your business that they're closing less. You know, they don't really consider it to be your fault, but the fact is, is that it is your fault as the manager. The quality of the leads and the volume of the leads are both our faults. It is a direct reflection on the type of traffic we're sending to the site, the kind of campaigns that we're running. So I would first find out, dig probe volume or quality, find out that if that's not it, this is the third thing. In that case, it is the worst situation, which is trust or overall value in your service has been lost or is losing ground. So that's the three situations. I hope it's not the last one because that's the one that happens right before you get fired. As soon as you lose the client, lose trust with you, they start to micromanage and tell you to do things because they don't think you're doing it and they're gonna try and forced force push the value up of your service by telling you how to do your job. Okay, so hopefully that's helpful. Don't worry, I have more. But that was something you didn't ask, but I answered anyway. So to answer this question, you. To further answer this question you didn't ask, and then I'll eventually get to your. To your. To your answer. Better communication will help with this issue. And I would say being more transparent with them will. Will help. Ask them about lead quality, inquire more about what's not working. If there's a good number of conversions with a lot of spend you know, push, try and try and make changes as often as you want. Because I do think that, you know, responding to the client's need is more important than worrying about the algorithm. Okay? So when they tell you this and that about the Google Ads, you know, make changes as needed. Because here's the main thing. I hate being an algorithm babysitter. I really don't like the algorithm. I don't like that the algorithm somehow manages me and I'm supposed to somehow change my habits to babysit this algorithm. If the client has a problem, I don't care what the best practice is for, you know, no, this needs to sit for 14 days. You know what? I don't freaking care. These are people's jobs. This is a real business. This is real life for people. And I am not going to babysit this stupid algorithm. That's why I very often say, you know what? Screw it, I'm going to go straight to manual and negate the algorithm entirely. So if you feel constrained because of the algorithm, you know, if you're trying to find a good cadence to make changes in Google Ads and you feel restricted because of the algorithm, so what? Forget the algorithm. Forget it's there. Focus on the person who has hired you, the person who's providing the funds to run these Google Ads campaigns. The algorithm is supposed to assist us, not command us and control us. And I mean, I think I made my thoughts on algorithm stuff very clear because it's, it's something that I think can be extremely helpful when, when, when, when used properly. But when it becomes a weight, when it becomes a burden on managers, when it becomes something where you're trying to just coach and feed this algorithm so that it'll coach and feed your Google Ads campaigns, you've stepped further away from your job. You're now a, an AI manager instead of an actual Google Ads manager. So I hope that's helpful. I'm gonna move on to the next one. Next one, surprise. We have Joey Bidner. Joey, please take the next question from Ryan here.
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Joey Bidner
Hey, what's up, Chris? So I am going to answer a question from Ryan. He is writing in from Scotland and I'm going to summarize his question instead of reading it out just because he wrote a little bit of an essay. Ryan recently took over the Google Ads management of the company he works at that was managed by an agency previously, and they were running performance max campaigns. And these performance max campaigns were getting a lot of clicks and spending, but not getting any conversions. And Ryan is clearly a smart Marketer because he went ahead and launched some pretty focused search campaigns. So search campaigns that had ad groups going to specific pages from the website with very lean short lists of phrase match keywords. And this is, I should mention this is also in the B2B space. So shortly after Ryan launched these campaigns, they started delivering results. They got a number of high qualified leads from the search campaigns and after a week and a half he went ahead and paused the Performance Max campaign. He was running them both side by side. Now his problem is shortly after he paused the performance max campaigns, things started to change. Ryan said that the leads dried up and the account was no longer spending in full. Now he says the account started slowing down and spend. I'm not sure if he means his, his search campaigns are not spending in full. I'm going to assume he says the search campaigns are no longer spending in full. But, but anyways, that's the issue he's facing and is asking us if we have any, how we would handle the situation. So before going into how I would assess the situation to bring back that full spend of the campaigns and getting the leads back, I want to mention the relationship between search and pmax because there is one when they're being run alongside each other, when you run a search campaign, or shopping campaign for that matter, alongside a pmax campaign, the two are not working in silos of each other. And by that I mean when a user clicks on a search campaign, the second time they click an ad, we can't guarantee that it's going to be within the search campaign. It's probably going to be the Performance Max campaign. Then their third click, it could be the search campaign because both are going after the same traffic and this makes it very difficult or it makes it impossible for anybody to really evaluate, you know, which one is performing better. It is not an AB test. They are not only working alongside each other, but they're actually assisting each other as well. When that user comes in for the first time on either campaign, their data is stored at the account level. And the second time they click, the two campaigns are sharing that data and basically deciding who gets the next click. And that could come down to how your bid strategy is between the two, what bid strategy settings you have between the two. But usually what happens is a search campaign, again depending on your bidding strategy and how you're, how you're leveraging, that will do a better job of going after the cold traffic those first time clicks. Then the performance Max campaign will take over the nurturing of that person. The clicks past that point and it will share that data between the two campaigns. And this can have an effect where it can actually help the search campaign spend more. There is a strategy out there called a feeder strategy, coined by John Moran, another thought leader in the space. And there are practices out there where people strategically run performance max alongside shopping or search campaigns to assist each other to help scale campaigns. Now, that said, I'll be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of the feeder strategy. I've tried it, it's got its specific purpose. But I wanted to bring it up because this can help explain possibly why your spend started slowing down in the search campaign. When you turned off the performance max campaign, those users were being bounced back between the two and they both kind of serve a different purpose in the customer's journey. So that really could help explain why you're seeing that data shift. Now, the next thing I want to mention is you want to be careful of how soon you react to the data that's coming in from a change. A week and a half is not a lot of time to make an observation and react to a change. And this is because of your conversion lag. Now, conversion lag is something that we've spoken about in a previous episode, but I'll bring it up again. Conversion lag is basically the average amount of time your customer takes to make a click and convert. Because again, gone are the days of someone just clicks an ad and converts. People search a lot before making a decision. So every account is different. Sometimes it's two weeks, sometimes it's a month, sometimes it's three days. In B2B, it's which is, you know, in this context, Ryan is in the B2B space, it's usually pretty long, so I would be surprised if it was less than two weeks. But the way that you can see your conversion, like Google doesn't always show it to you. But if you look at your conversion, sorry, if you look at your campaign view and you look at the line chart above your all your campaigns and you switch one of the metrics to conversions, sometimes a little blue bar will appear under the timeline chart and it'll go over the amount of time that your conversion lag is. So if you're looking at the last 30 days and this little blue bar goes over two weeks, that's a two week conversion lag. And you can hover over it and it'll read you what this means. But usually when I make a change, I know that I need to wait at least two weeks for the first click to come to fruition. So, you know, if you make a change, usually you need to let it run for a few weeks and then to react to that change, you need to look at a few weeks outside that. So what I do is I take my conversion lag and I multiply it by two and that's the amount of time that I use to reflect on a change. And this goes into the context of what you're experiencing right now. Ryan, when you turned off Performance Max, regardless if maybe it was a little bit premature or not, whatever you turned off Performance Max, you need to wait or I would recommend waiting a little bit longer for the data to kind of flesh out now if you know the campaign's not spending at all. I'm not saying to just wait that out. Make the necessary changes. Maybe it's increasing your TCPAs or you're increasing your bids if you're on manual bidding. But I just want to mention that we don't want to make very quick reactions to any observation from a change. Look at your conversion lag and think outside of that. So going back to what you should do now, again, I don't think you should turn back on the Performance Max. I think you made the right choice and it's just about seeing it through for what you have. And I would go back to that campaign. View the time chart and start looking at what data has fluctuated when you turned off the Performance Max campaign. So open your date range when looking at this timeline chart to well outside when you turned off the PMAX campaign. So let's say you turned off the performance max campaign. January 15th. I want you to look at January 1st to January 30th. If today was January 30th, so you got two weeks out on both sides and looking at the search campaign, start toggling between the the metrics on that time chart and see what changed on the day or as of the day that you turned off pmax. Did your, you know, switch it to loss due to rank? Did your loss due to rank spike up and start or start crawling up after that point? That tells us that okay, you're not bidding enough. You need to increase your bids and, or increase your, your tcpa. You know, maybe your, your click through rate started going down because performance Max is no longer holding up that remarketing element. Maybe you need to adjust the ad copy. I'm not sure. Look at the combinations and make sure that they resonate for a first time and returning visitor. But some piece of data changed and this view will be able to tell you what changed so you can make an educated decision. Outside that, I would say launch a, launch a display remarketing campaign because Performance Max was holding up display remarketing. I do want to mention as well, Performance Max and search will still do remarketing of search. You know, it's going after new and returning visitors that's remarketing when it's going after returning visitors. But display remarketing is certainly a large part of Performance Max and that could have been nurturing these leads as well. So yeah, look at the timeline chart, see what, what shifted and launch a display remarketing campaign. So I hope that was helpful and I'll pass back to you, Chris.
- [27:55]
Chris Shafer
Awesome. Thank you, Joey. Great answer. And we are now moving to the last question of the episode. Before I do that, optio.com PSP is the URL to get your free 28 day free trial. That's o p t e o.com PSP all right, last question comes from Panos who says, hi Chris, I hope you're doing well. I am Panos, a PPC account manager from Greece.
- [28:26]
Joey Bidner
Yay.
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Chris Shafer
We have some international traffic today, so. All right, Panos question is this it? I'm not going to read the whole email. I'm going to summarize it again just to make it move faster. Essentially it is a challenge regarding time lag in conversions. All right, so essentially with Panos account, the users convert after five to six days. So we're talking about like a week delay on these conversions. So that means the recent data, the recent conversion data, you know, all, all that, it's not complete in Google Ads. So when you're checking week over week, 14 days over last 14 days, that kind of stuff, it's not going to be a fair comparison. So essentially the, the, the question that he has here is it's difficult to understand what's going on at the campaign level and he wants to know, do, do I have any thoughts? So yeah, I do. This is not as common of an issue as, you know, many people will try and build their websites in such a way that can generate conversion tracking on a faster pace. So I'll say this is not something that I see very often because, you know, a lot of people will try and have a phone number, a lead form, something like that. So I assume, you know, what's happening is people are coming to the site and it's an expensive purchase or it's a, you know, long lead time for them to make the purchase. So it, they eventually come back and make the purchase, but it takes time for them to do it or perhaps a phone call has to be made in between or something. So the first thing I'll say is if there's any way for you to track the intermediate step between the final conversion action and the, you know, the initial click, if there's any, any intermediate step there, I would say track that. Now there are ways in Google Ads to wait one conversion over another, you know, to, to tell Google to put more value on this conversion over another. It's, it's called ROAS return on ad spend. You can put conversion values into different conversions, you know, so there's ways to do that so that you can still prioritize the later conversion but still show value in the earlier conversion. So, but, but let's say that's not an option. If that's not an option. I'm going to give you some advice on management for a situation like this. So what you want to do is watch, you kind of have to watch the machine from, you know, not, not 10,000ft up, but more like, you know, a thousand feet, 2,000ft, you know, so you need to see a big picture, but not a giant zoomed out picture, right? So I want you to watch the account for big changes in secondary bidding metrics. For example, like if you, if you see a big change in the impression top percentage, right? Or maybe more specifically the impression absolute top percentage. If you notice that the ads are, you know, after a week, two weeks, you're noticing, you know, three weeks in a row that these metrics are changing, they're getting much lower, they're getting much higher. These are the precursors that might give you the information before you can actually see it in the conversions. Right? This is the system, for some reason, you know, something is not feeding positive signals to the algorithm and it's not reacting quite right. So you know, this, this, this initial symptom that you're starting to see, you could possibly see it in the algorithm reacting because it doesn't have the same volume of conversions and the bids are kind of going crazy. Suddenly they're backing off or they're way up beyond normal. So look for fluctuations like that. Another precursor possibly could be the click through rate. You know, one thing about the click through rate is the click through rate is a really good indication that the search terms have taken a left hand turn. You know, click through rate doesn't usually tell you a whole lot, but it's absolutely a good indication of the relationship between the ad copy and the Search terms. So if your ad copy and your search terms are off, that could be an indication that, you know, Google's starting to bid on some rather erratic search terms. You know, the search terms are suddenly off, you know, and that's hopefully you're watching your search terms. That's definitely another tip. You need to monitor your search terms because that's really the only thing that you can see on an immediate basis day to day is your search terms. So you'd be able to spot a problem right away. But if the CTR suddenly starts just dropping, dropping, dropping, you know, this could be an indication that the search terms have gone off. They've completely left the, the basis of the traffic that you want. Because this, you know, the, the searches are way off. And my last tip here is, is this, and this is more of a 10,000 foot view rather than a 1,000 foot view. But look at the trends from the month of January compared to January of last year. Look at the trends of month to month, season to season. How is this winter season different from last winter season? How is this spring different from last spring? How is January different from last January? Look for trends that are easier to spot because they happen over a longer period of time. Hopefully, as long as you haven't done massive changes to the Google Ads account and your conversion tracking is still accurate and the same, you should be able to spot these differences and perhaps you can notice things that you would not otherwise notice. So, you know, while you may not be able to do week over week comparison, you certainly can do season over season, you know, year over year comparisons to notice bigger trends. This won't help you with micro adjustments. That's where the fluctuations in bidding and CTR and search terms come in. But certainly year over year, season over season changes, quarter over quarter changes can, can help you make those decisions. So thank you guys for being a part of the episode. I am happy to dive in. If you feel like you're lost in Google Ads, you need some solid answers in Google Ads. Happy to help with Google Ads consulting, coaching. You can reach me@chrisshafer.com also my friend Joey Bidner, who answered a question earlier in the show, you can find him. He does the same kind of thing as well. I personally coached him and helped him and I really respect work that he does. So you can find him as well@joeybidner.com Both links are in the description. Thank you guys for being here. I'll see you next week.