← 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
How Successful are Ads on Google? (Episode 447)
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and I'm going to talk about Google Ads. That's what I do every week and this week is no different. This is episode four. 47. 447, right. That, that's a lot of episodes and I still have plenty to talk about. I'm not, I'm not done yet. So let's keep going for another 400. What do you say? So today we're going to talk about how successful are ads on Google. You know, a lot of new people are starting Google Ads campaigns first of the year businesses considering doing it. You know, a lot of businesses are a bit frustrated with their meta, Facebook, Instagram stuff. You know, they're not really happy with it. So they're trying out Google and you know, good question to ask is how successful our campaigns typically? What, what is a probability that my campaign will work? You know, how often do these things work? That's a great question to ask and I'm going to answer it towards the end of the show. And before that I have a couple questions from listeners who sent in their questions and we're going to jump into those in just a moment. But first, optio.com PSP is the software that helps me to, to bring this show to you every week. That is the sponsor of this week and every week of the show. And there's a good reason for that. They are the best management software for Google Ads, period. Extremely practical, very fast to dig through the metrics and the numbers that matter in your Google Ads account. If you need more from your Google Ads, if you need to improve it in this new year, you need to maybe spend less or try and double the number of leads that you're getting or double your return on ad spend. This is a software that can help you do that. It is a highly technical software that takes things that are tough to understand and then simplifies it for you and helps you make solid decisions. Need to know what you should do with your target CPA bid. Should you increase it, decrease it? Well, this can help you understand that. Do you know if you're having issues with your search terms, maybe you need some to pause certain keywords and other keywords need to be increased in their bids. Well, this software can help you make those decisions in and out very quickly. See what matters. Turn that on, off, make some adjustments and move on very quick to make these adjustments. You'll like it. You can try it for free for 28 days@opteo.com PSP. That's the special link. Tell them that Chris Schaefer from the podcast sent you and they'll give you that special offer. Use the chat box on their site and that's how you can let them know that you heard about it right here on the paid search podcast. So we are moving on A question from Jordan who wrote into the show recently. Jordan sent in his email paid search podcastmail.com. that's how you can get in touch with the podcast. If you'd like to get in touch with me about management or coaching help with your Google Ads, you can find me at Chris Schaefer. And let's move on to Jordan's question. Hi Chris, love your show. I started my marketing company a few years ago and focused mainly on running Yelp PPC campaigns. But I have started taking on more Google Ads clients. Was recently referred a service client that spends more than 20,000 in Google Google Ads. I'm diving in right now and first thing I notice is that the account only has one ad group. What would be your best advice on how to handle taking over a new account in terms of where you would start and how you would go about setting up the appropriate conversion? Tracking the past company built a landing page for conversions, so I need to set up new conversions on their website. Okay, Jordan, great question. And first of all, congrats on a new client spending 20k. I, I assume that's monthly, so great stuff there. That's a, that's a great client for you to cut your teeth on for sure. So the first thing is we need to make sure you do this right. You know, don't want to mess up something that's spending quite so much. Obviously should take it very seriously, which I'm, I'm sure you, you do. So you're going to take this seriously. You need to make sure that you do well for this client. The first thing is never walk in to an account assuming that everything is broken and wrong and horrible. Younger me, you know, I've been doing Google Ads for 21 years now. So younger me, which is, you know, 10 years, 12 years ago, I would get new accounts and just assume, well, I know what's best. I'm very cocky and I'm the best manager in the world and I can fix this for you. And I go in and make a bunch of changes and don't really think too much about, hey, this client was doing okay, they just want to improve it. Maybe I should step into this role a little more slowly. No, I just rush in Head first. And suddenly they might say, hey, Chris, our phones have stopped ringing. Or, you know, we've had a big drop in performance, you know, something you really want to avoid. So the first thing you really need to decide is does this have conversions or does it not have conversions? Okay, I think that's the most important thing. If it has conversions, start very slowly, use the data that you have to try and make some decisions. Learn from what's working and learn from what's not working. Okay. If it has data, look, what can you derive from this? Your first day or two that you're managing this? Maybe you don't make any changes, you just keep notes. You, you start brainstorming, you start mind mapping exactly what you need to do, what's, what's important, what's not important. So that's a situation where you have conversions in the account. If you don't have conversions, that's a different situation. Probably want to just start fresh. I don't necessarily see a lot of reason to dig in and, you know, try and learn what's working and what isn't working because you, you don't really know. In that situation, I probably would start fresh, brand new campaign, because there's not really anything that you can truly learn other than what the clients told you about what it is that they want. So if they say they want this kind of keyword and they're getting a completely different kind of keyword, then you know it's probably wrong and you need to start over. So the worst situation is when you have zero conversions because then you hope you make the right decisions, pick the right keywords, do the right things to make it perform better. And let me stop here and say this. Whether you have conversions in an account or don't have conversions, the next thing that you should consider is, does the client tell you things are good? Do they know if they're getting calls and leads? Do they only do Google Ads as a marketing, as a marketing platform? Do they use anything else? Because if they only use Google Ads and they consistently get new sales, are those only referrals? Or maybe Google Ads is working, they're just not tracking it. Very important for you to consider, you know, how successful is Google Ads? Are they just throwing money at it and getting nothing, or are they throwing money at it and getting something they just don't know? So very important. And let me address and wrap this part up about the conversions. When you're setting up conversions, what you want to do is track what matters. Okay, now that is a discussion between you and your client. Tracking what matters is the most important thing, because if you track what doesn't matter, it will destroy your account. For example, if you track something silly like people landing on an About Us page, they didn't fill out a form, they didn't call a phone number, they're just clicking around on the site, and maybe you have a 30% conversion rate on people that are landing on the About Us page. That is not a metric. A conversion that matters. It's not important. What you need to track are things like people filling out forms, making phone calls, right? People that are calling from the ads, they're calling directly from Google. People that are calling from the website. You need to track that. You need to track people who have filled out contact forms, filled out quote forms, made purchases, whatever it is that matters to the client. Track that and nothing else. There might be a point in the future when you're tracking more complicated situations, you know, key points that happen during the sales funnel potentially. But for now, track only what matters, because you just need to know, is this good or is this bad? Did this conversion get me anything? Or did this. Excuse me, did this keyword get me anything? Or did this keyword get me nothing? Okay, so now it's a great question, Jordan, because now I need to turn this around now. So we talked about conversions. How do you approach something? Because I'm quite shocked that this 20k spend only has one ad group. So the first thing I would say about, you know, beyond conversions and things like that is you need to make sure that you segment this client's services in a way that helps you to determine value. So, for example, if they do some specific kind of service, and there's three different ways that people will look for it, this is a service that does repairs, it does installation, and it does replacements. Maybe, you know, you need to be able to track the different ways that people engage with this service. So there's three ad groups immediately so that you can immediately track, you know, who's doing a new installation, who's doing a replacement, who's doing a repair. Because I guarantee you, the client sees those services at different levels. Some are extremely important. Some are just, you know, good. They like to have repairs, but they. What they really like are new installations. That's where they really get a lot of money from. So it's important that you designate each of these different levels of value and designate the different ways that people search for the service. So segmentation is incredibly important, and you put each of those into different ad Groups so that you can measure, control, bid, write different ad copy, point them to different pages on the website and make better decisions in Google Ads. So all that to say tread slowly, make sure you light your path very clearly with conversion tracking so you can understand success, failure, you know where that is. And start gathering data, start making critical decisions about how to track this. Let's try this over here. Let's try this over here. Start little experiments here and there in small places, seeing how it does and then reviewing the results. So great question. Thank you, Jordan. Moving on to Rudra, Rudra writes in and says, hi Chris, I hope you are doing well. I've been a regular listener since the last four months. So I've been noticing a lot of other search terms in my search term report in one of the accounts based in New York, almost 90% of the conversions are coming from other search terms which I don't know what those are because they're hidden. The only thing I can do about this is just know what keyword triggered the conversion. I cannot see the search term that triggered the conversion. Is there anything else I can do for this? Thanks for your help as always. Well, Rudra, I am very sorry. I wish I had a good answer for you here. Other search terms are hidden and there's supposedly some ways using Google Analytics and you know, some trickery here and there. Possibly you can see a little bit more of these using some internal data from analytics and things. But as far as Google Ads, there's nowhere you can go in Google Ads to uncover these. I'm not an analytics expert, so I can't speak to exactly how that's done. My might want to look at some searches on Google. Maybe other people smarter than me in analytics have mapped out a way on how to see some of these other search terms that come from ppc. But I'll warn you, there's nothing that gives you the hundred percent full picture. Maybe you can see a few more clicks. So for those of you that don't know what Rudra's talking about here, this is a very unfortunate aspect of Google Ads that we have been dealing with for about four years now. Search terms are what people type into Google when they're doing a search. And Google decided that some of these search terms are too private. They're information that Google does not want us to be able to access. Even though for what, 16, 17 years of Google Ads history we could see all of this information. I don't know how it harmed people before, but suddenly in the last four we can't see it, it's gone, it's hidden. It is now considered other search terms. Search terms that are other search terms that are not a part of the search terms report they are hidden. So this is a major issue for accounts that typically work in a more sensitive industry. Health, law, medical, things like that. You know, I often find it maybe insurance, anything that has a little bit more of a sensitive aspect will have some severe other search terms. So if you're Rudra, if you're working in an account that is experiencing this, it's very likely that you're working in something that has a little more sensitive nature to it for some reason. And if that's the kind of traffic you need to get, there's not really much hope for you to lower that percentage of hidden search terms. So what do you do? You know, you can't really verify the quality of the search terms because you can't see most of them. You know, what do you do? Well, for one thing, you know, definitely keep checking, definitely keep going back and checking these search terms to see if you can get any data around them. You know, over time, you know, the 10% that you're able to see, at least you can see those, you know, check those, see what kind of long term trends you might notice. But other things that you could possibly try is, you know, sometimes exact match keywords tend to do better than broad match keywords. You know, that might be helpful, but that's not always true. I find that to be a hit and miss kind of thing. I mean, sometimes you can try different match types and they provide different levels of transparency. But I'll tell you what, it, it's nothing concrete, nothing scientific. It really is a case by case situation. So if you can't beat it, join it. So how do you, how do you, how do you use this accurately? How do you use this in your favor? Well, the point is, is you're going to have to lean into more blind Google Ads management. You're going to have to lean into a situation where you have to look at the only guiding star that you have in this. And that is, it's not search terms, it's, it's conversions, it's secondary metrics. So what that probably means is, you know, you need to have a more segmented kind of campaign where you can see when I have this specific kind of term, when I have this specific kind of keyword, it does this so that you can basically derive, oh, okay, I'm assuming that this keyword is getting this kind of traffic And I can see this kind of performance. So you know, maybe you run, you run that in its own ad group, really, really targeted, really specific and you make adjustments knowing that that keyword is probably getting that specific kind of thing. Another reason to do something like that is to play more into the blind Google Ads management system. Probably going to need to use more automated bidding, maximize conversions, target cpa, target roas, something like that, because you're not going to be able to entirely tell what it is that you're getting. But you can let the system automate your bidding perhaps because you can't necessarily see it, you can't really know for sure what it is that you're getting. But at least you can utilize algorithm. So, you know, perhaps automated bidding would definitely be something more valuable for you because it would, it would at least give you some kind of guide, guide point. So not a whole lot of hope for you. No solution that I have. The point is you just have to work with what you're given and hope that perhaps you'll have another campaign in the future that isn't in one of these sensitive industries with a limited view of your search terms. So we're gonna move on now to the main topic of the show. The big topic, the theme of this week is how successful are ads in Google? I think it's a very important question if you're new to Google Ads or you just kind of want to get a gut check of, you know, am I alone out here? You know, how lonely am I here at the bottom or the top of Google Ads? You know, what does it look like? And I'm going to tell you about that real quick before I do. Optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of their wonderful software that helps you make decisions quickly and adjust ad copy, utilize AI in many ways, generate new negative keywords, bidding adjustments, all of that can be done. And more in optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. All right, so how successful are ads on Google? Well, the fact is, is I. Nobody has a full picture now. There's definitely companies out there that have a ton of data. You know, software companies like Optio will sometimes run reports where they'll take all their clients and put some numbers together and things like that and put out some reports. But you know, I am, I'm not really interested in stealing someone else's data and then talking about it as if it's my own. My own. I would rather speak from experience. That's what I do on this Podcast I talk about this is what it's like for me because I think that's valuable to a lot of people who just want to hear someone talk about it from their point of view. And so that's what I'm going to do. I put together a few things about where I think most people lie. And as far as success, failure, you know, moderate success in Google Ads. And here's how I see it. Based on all the accounts that I look at, based on the kind of clients I have, the auditing, the coaching that I do, I touch a lot of accounts. I have a lot of accounts in my mcc, you know, people that I work with a couple times a year weekly, and my own accounts that I manage for my own regular clients. So what I find is I think about 30% of the accounts out there are wasting most, if not all of their money on Google. That's. I don't know if that's low or high or, you know, surprising to you in any way, but I think about, you know, probably less than a third. But close to a third of the accounts out there are wasting most, if not all of their money. You say, well, Chris, how, you know, how does someone waste money on Google Ads? Surely they would want to know if things are working or not working well, as you would expect. I mean, business owners, marketing managers, people are busy. And if it's not their job to manage Google Ads, if they don't really know how it works, it's very easy to just turn it on and forget it. And I find many people say the same phrase to me all the time. They say, I know enough to be dangerous. I cannot tell you how many times I hear that phrase. I hear that phrase all the time. And it's usually a very scary phrase. Usually it's not a good sign. I know enough to be dangerous usually means I've poked around and I have a general understanding of how to put stuff together, but I don't know how to measure success. I don't know if I'm doing it right. I think that's what they mean by enough to be dangerous. And of those people, a much higher percentage of the people that say that are absolutely wasting their money. So overall, I think close to a third of the people out there are wasting money because they just turn things on and don't know how to measure it. They don't know if it's successful or not. Another way that people could just waste money on Google Ads is most of the, quote unquote, successful traffic they get is Traffic that is searching for their own company name, their own product name. I just did an audit on an account, international account, lot of money, big products. About 90% of their value that was being derived in Google Ads were people just looking for their company name. That was it. That was it. I found absolutely minimal value from new generated sales people who had not already heard of them. They were basically wasting their money on ads that were returning people who they had already sold to at some point. Right. This is, this is another example how a third of the people out there can just waste money and then another large percentage just run things and just allow the Google Ad system to automatically optimize for them. They're running stuff on the display network search partners, they're running stuff on performance Max, they're running stuff on YouTube and just generally just looking at the number of clicks I get, hey Chris. I get a lot of clicks, I get a lot of impressions. You know, they're just looking at Google Ads as just a traffic generator, which is mainly a waste. If you look at Google Ads is just a system to generate traffic. Not all traffic is created equal. So it could be an absolute disaster because you know, the cheapest traffic out there is junk. It's a waste. So what's the other percentage? Well, I would guess about 50%. So you know, close to the majority of the accounts out there are breaking even or slightly profitable. Right. They're, they're making their money back, they're getting their investment back or they're getting it back plus the lifetime value. You know, they're, they're, they're growing their business. It's growing at a slow rate, but there is value. They're getting leads. It's, you know, it's, it's more, it's more value than it is loss for them in the long term. I find that that's 50% of the stuff out there. You know, most business owners are going to be careful at least to know, hey, I'm spending three grand, four grand, you know, two grand a month here. I at least know that something is worth it. And you know, they'll, they'll test that in various ways like, you know, slowing spin down and then noticing, ah, it's not working as well and they bring spin back up and then, oh, now we're getting phone calls again. So they know there's some value, they are getting something out of it. That's a large percentage of the accounts out there. So that brings us to the last, and I would say 10 to 20% of the of accounts out there are making very good returns, 3x5x and higher returns. So this is absolutely a minority of the accounts out there are getting excellent returns. And then of course, a very small percentage get extremely high returns. And let me say this. The number of people that think they're in that 10 to 20% are not. The number of people that have false impressions about success in Google Ads are way higher. There's. There's a mountaintop. And talking to most Google Ads, people out there that think they're at the mountaintop, there's not enough room for all of you there. There's a lot of you that are back down at basecamp and you think you're at the mountaintop. I don't know why they believe YouTube videos they watch, they believe things they read or they believe the metrics on the screen. They believe the reports they get. They believe their agency. Tell you what I mean, that's the ugly part. A lot of these companies have people managing for them and believe their agency, and perhaps their agency is not directly lying to them. But sometimes I wonder, you know, they think that they're making top 10, top 20% metric returns on their Google Ads accounts, and it is not true. It is absolutely true that a minority, a small minority of accounts are making 3x5x returns. It is extremely difficult and it takes a long amount of time. And usually the people that are doing that have one thing in common. They are tracking. They are measuring. They are tracking. They have conversion tracking. If they're in, if they're in E commerce, they're tracking the roas very carefully. If they're in sales, you know, service company, they're. They're tracking not only the conversions, but the closing rate of those conversions. It's very important. So a couple other points that I want to point out now that I've mentioned that, and just to restate, if you, if you say, Kris, what was that again? It was, it was 30% bottom, 50% mid, and 20% top. So the bell curve is a little skewed on the low end. If you kind of map that out, that would mean the bell curve is not a bell. It is a lopsided bell. I think that the majority of accounts are in low to poor range in performance. Okay, that's, that's why I have a job. That's. That's why my business continues to grow every year is because always there's always more people that are realizing, ah, crap, I need help. And that's, that's what I do. So let Me say this, of the 70% that's profitable or extremely profitable, right. The 50% and the top 20%, they find Google to be the best source of their leads and sales. Facebook, you know, other, other avenues do okay, but by far Google's the best qualified. It's more difficult, but it's a much more serious network. People tend to, when they search and they convert, they're much more serious about what it is that they're looking for and want to get done. Let me say a few other things that you know, since we're giving out guesses and theories on performance, I would say about 80% out there. So these are the people that are on the bottom half, right. The 30 and the 50%. Right. The, the lower end have no idea how Google Ads is going for them at all. They don't measure it, they don't really know. They just know that it's worse when it's off and it's better when it's on. They just keep doing it, they just keep spending it. So I think it's unfortunate. I would prefer most more people to understand the true performance. But that's very, very true. More people don't really know the true value of what they're getting in Google Ads. If they did, I think they would probably make some major changes in their management of how they're doing it. So to wrap all this up, how can you avoid being in that bottom third? That is wasting money. That is most of the money if not all the money is wasted. Well, here you go. Track your conversions. Track your conversions. Track the actions that are happening on your site that matter. I mentioned this in my, my question section at the top of the show. Track the actions that matter. If you're in service, you have a service company, measure the closing rate of your conversions. Alright, don't just measure conversions. The calls, the web forms, the leads. Real good management means that you know how many leads that come from Google close. You know the percentage of your Google closing rates and you know the percentage of your meta closing rates. You know, it's important that you know those things if you're in the sales arena, right. E Commerce, I should say, if you're in E Commerce, measure the roas, the return on ad spend. And that's, that's basically just how much did you spend and how much did you make from Google Ads? What was the total raw net value, the conversion value of what you sold? You spent 5,000 and the total products that you sold was 5,000. Right? That's a, that is a ROAS of just one. You got what you paid for but that's probably not enough. You need to know, you know, how much is that overhead costing you? I mean these, these are things most important. So if you want to avoid being in that last 30% measure, measure, measure, know what you're paying for, know what you're getting out of what you're paying for and make adjustments accordingly. And if all of that sounds like a massive headache and you are frustrated and confused, well, that's what I'm here for. My name is Chris Schaefer. I've been managing Google Ads accounts for over 20 years now and I'd be happy to help you out. I offer management services and Google Ads personalized coaching as well to help you understand it. So reach out to me. Chris Schaefer.com link is wherever you're listening or watching. Otherwise thank you so much for being here. I will catch you guys next week.