← 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 to Audit a Failing Google Ads Account (Episode 473)
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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 talk about Google Ads. I have a couple questions from listeners to go through and I'm going to tell you the best way to audit a failing Google Ads account. I have specific instructions for all the different methods to check the campaign, find where the leak is, find where the problem is, and hopefully solve it. So we're going to talk about that later in the show. Also have questions from listeners around the world. Let's get to that as soon as I tell you about Optimistic. The special URL is important because you're going to want to try this amazing tool for the extended period which is exclusively offered right here. So let me, let me explain why. This is a tool that can help you get more done in Google Ads and that's why you're listening to a podcast like this. For listeners of this podcast, you want to find, find problems in your Google Ads account. That's what we're talking about in today's show and that's what we're going to discuss. And this tool can help you skip a lot of those mysteries that are hidden in your account. So whether it's ad copy, landing pages, quality score, bidding issues, conversion, tracking, it does everything. It even provides reports and a kind of power system to help you power through some of the rather meticulous details of Google Ads management that really becomes quite laborious whenever you want to get through it day by day by day. So whether you're managing one account or a hundred, this tool can help you get through it faster. Try this amazing tool for free@opteo.com PSP use that special URL to get that 28 day exclusive free trial. All right, so we're jumping into the podcast here with two questions. If you would like to write in a question, you can do so. My email for the show is paid search podcastmail.com first question comes from Rob from Down Under. Rob says, hey mate, it's been a while. Yes, thanks Rob. Rob's written in several times for a long time. So good to hear from you, Rob. Catching all of your podcasts and loving the content. And I have a question. What are your thoughts around AI Max for search campaigns, pros, cons? Well, Rob, thanks for the question. First, as always, I'd like to provide some context for those of you that are not familiar with what Rob is talking about. So it's kind of hard to miss it nowadays. Google, anytime there's something new, especially AI anytime there's some new AI thing in Google Ads. It is going to show up in every nook and cranny that Google can fill your screen with alerts and, you know, giant flashing lights to say, turn this on, turn this on, this will make everything better, whatever. Well, you can probably tell by my tone I find it to be a bit, a bit, a bit frustrating because these one, you know, fix one button, fix all kind of problems using AI is I think, quite silly. And that's what this new AI max is. So far I have not fully tested it, but essentially what it does is it expands the reach of your campaign by taking your keywords and adjusting the bids dynamically in a way that will drive more traffic beyond what you would have gotten before. So this is something I'm still testing. I don't really have a final verdict. This is more just kind of an initial hands on testing. So far I'm okay with. Seems to definitely punch the clicks and impressions up in a, in a way that I'm okay with. It seems like it's, you know, I see certain searches and certain metrics and things that it's doing. I'm like, okay, I'm okay with that. It seems to be getting a decent increase in conversions, but I absolutely am going to be testing it with different industries, different types of campaigns. High funnel, low funnel, you know, all of that stuff. So I will get back. It'll probably be an entire episode that I'm going to be talking about my findings with this. But you know, that is how it works. And you know, I would hope anyone listening to this show doesn't take my word for it and you test it. Don't just turn anything on in Google Ads just because there's a button that pops up and is flashing and say click me. Click me. Please don't do that. And also don't do it just because I say it's a great thing. Anything in Google Ads, especially new technologies that are released in the software, you should absolutely take slowly and test it to see how it's going to affect the performance of your campaign first. But I will be coming back to that. It is something interesting and we'll see if it's as good as Google says it's cracked up to be. But we'll find out. All right, now moving to a question from Nick. Nick writes in and says love the podcast and I found it very helpful. I run an E commerce store in Canada and have tried running search ads for our products in the past but found it to be prohibitively expensive in terms of cost. Per conversion. However, I think it's time to pull the trigger on Google shopping ads as it sounds like there will be cheaper CPCS and a much better conversion rate. All right, so Nick, your instincts are correct. Nick has the impression that search didn't really work out for his E commerce online store and perhaps shopping will be a better venture for him. I'm here to confirm, yes, Nick, what you've read and what your instincts tell you about shopping on Google for e commerce is 100% true. I find that there is a massive distinction between search and shopping made up by two metrics that will make a world of difference in the performance that you get in Google Ads. Number one is the cost per click. So the cost per click in shopping is much more affordable. And the degrees by which it's more affordable could be exponential. I mean, if you're trying to run extremely targeted exact match keywords that have a low amount of traffic and you know, they're, they're, as you had said, extremely expensive, the results that you'll get from the CPC of a shopping campaign will be fractional compared to the cost of what you're doing on search. So immediately, $500, $1,000, $5,000 will go much, much further than it would for a search campaign. So shopping will take your dollar per dollar spend and take it much further. You get a whole lot more traffic. That's great. Why is that a good thing? That's at least you're going to multiply the chances of getting a sale and, and a, you know, some type of value because $1 brings in multiples of people rather than just one person per click. So that is, that's a great thing. The second thing is this, because shopping provides images and it provides pricing and additional information as well as the title of the product right on the screen, people are more motivated. If you were to advertise on Google a pair of shoes, there is no way for you to accurately convey in every headline all the information that can be conveyed in a picture with a title and a price and maybe a few other assets attached to it. So the value of being able to show a product image is infinitely better because as they say, the picture's worth a thousand words and we don't have a thousand words to work with on Google search. We only have a few headlines and some short descriptions. So just by having a visualization of your product, people will be more motivated. And I find just from the fact that they're clicking on product with a price, I mean their expectations of the pricing the way it looks is already brought to reality and therefore they're going to be more likely to convert. So I would say for anyone that is running an E commerce campaign, I absolutely would suggest starting with search, your chances of success are greatly enhanced with a. I think I said that wrong. Let me try that again. Anyone who is in the PPC world and has an E commerce campaign, you should start with shopping because your chances of getting a conversion and getting more traffic for your budget will be greatly enhanced simply by not having overly expensive search campaigns. And I'll tell you, the amount of potholes and mistakes that you can make in a search campaign are much greater than the potholes and mistakes that you can make in a shopping campaign. Okay, so now we're moving on to the main topic of the show. I encourage you, if you find yourself confused and frustrated by a campaign that continues to fail and you're not sure why I have four symptoms. Well, let's say I have four diagnosis diagnoses to tell you about where I think the failure might be. And then I'm gonna go through just a very quick lightning round of all the different campaign types and where to look where I find some of the most common failures happening. So let's go through the four different types of level of failures and where I think your problem is. So to begin with, for those of you that are experiencing failure in your Google Ads campaign at the level of no sales, no leads, I've gotten nothing, Chris. I've spent X number of dollars on my Google Ads and I've received nothing beyond just clicks. Okay. In this case, I would press the likelihood be being traffic. It's most likely no matter how you're engaging with Google Ads, the traffic is probably the problem. You're sending people that are unqualified to your Google Ads account and they're to your website, that is, and they're clicking on your ads and they're not really interested in what it is that you're selling or offering. So they're looking for something else or they're not qualified yet. Right. They're still considering, they're still researching. They are unqualified, completely unqualified. So you need to work on your keywords and how you're bringing people to your website through Google Ads. This is not something where you're just going to change your bidding strategy. This is not something where you just go in and change your bidding strategy from maximize conversions to maximize conversion value. That will not fix it. It is not a bidding issue. It's a traffic issue. So change your ad, change your ads, change your keywords. You know, try restructuring so that you can get the right kind of traffic for your website and increase the likelihood of a conversion. Now moving on now to group number two. If you find yourself not getting enough sales or leads, you have gotten some, but there's just not enough of them. You've gotten one or two, or you've gotten 50 and you need a hundred. This is both a traffic and a bidding issue. So I would encourage you to play with both sides of the coin in Google Ads. There's only two sides to the Google Ads coin. There's either traffic or. Or there's bidding. No matter what you do in Google Ads, you're adjusting how people come to your site, how they perceive your site, and then there's the bidding side, how much you pay for it, where you're ranking on Google Ads. So I would have to tell you, unfortunately, you're going to have to play with both of those. And typically the best way to do it is to engage with trying one and then trying another. I don't suggest you. You adjust both at a rapid pace at the same time. All right, so now number three, if you're getting conversions and you are having issues with, you know, not enough, in particular, you're having issues with unqualified traffic. So this traffic is calling you. They're filling out the forms on your website, but they're never making it through your sales cycle. Right. They're adding to cart, but they're never purchasing. They're calling your phone number, but you can't ever close the deal. They're signing up for a meeting with you, but they never do sign up for a subscription. If they are basically unqualified leads, again, this is likely a traffic issue. There's a lighter chance that it's a bidding issue. But I would say largely this is a traffic issue. Many symptoms that I find could be the case for this is you're getting a lot of competitor searches or people just looking up pricing information or people that have singular problems and they're trying to solve a singular problem. They're not actually looking for a service yet, Right? So they're often shocked by pricing or the complexity of the solution. They're not ready for the solution yet. They're still dwelling on their problem. So you're going to largely have to address the traffic and perhaps a little bit of bidding. Now, this last one is very unique. In this last case, it's probably the most detrimental and the most frustrating of all because you're getting tons of conversions. Your Google Ads interface is telling you that you have extremely high conversion rates. You get a lot of conversions, a lot of sales leads, calls. But in fact, you can look at your CRM tracking. You can look at your call history on your phone or talk to your intake team. No one is calling, no one is emailing. If this is an instance of that happening for you, this is very important that you fix your conversion tracking. This is a problem that's happening with the conversion tracking. Don't try and fix it with your keywords. Don't say, I'm getting tons of leads, but no one's closing, let me change my keywords. That's not the case. If you have conversion rates that are in the 30s, 40s, 50s, you know, those kind of percentages, 30%, 40%, 50%. It's likely that you have set up some kind of conversion tracking that is well below the standard of success for you. They're just adding to cart, but they're never purchasing. They're landing on a Contact Us page, but they never actually fill it out. They're clicking on a phone number, but they never actually do stay on the line long enough to speak to someone. Something is broken in your conversion tracking and you should fix it. So those are the four issues that I find most common about the level of failure that you may be experiencing in Google Ads. And next I'm going to dive into each of the categories. Search, display, shopping, performance, max, all of those and talk to you about how to address and where to find the most common areas that are breaking down the performance of your campaign. Before I jump into that, very quickly remind you, optio.com PSP is the 28 day free trial link for you to try this. It's in the link of this podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, if you're watching on wherever else, really, YouTube is pretty much it. If you're listening on your podcast, you can find the link in the description there. Okay, here we go. Let's get through this. Because this is a bit of a lightning round. I want to go through each of the critical areas that I find that you should audit if you're experiencing failure in your Google Ads account. So let's talk about search. So the first thing you should ask yourself if you're experiencing failure in Google Ads is where did the traffic come from? So the important thing to consider here is that it's very common for people to be getting traffic that is not google.com. you may be advertising on Google Ads, but You could be getting traffic from other sources. So you should check to see where your traffic is coming from first from Google, the search partners or the display network. So if you find yourself not knowing what that is, there's a particular way. You do some research, find out how to segment your traffic so that you can get a report on how to see that traffic information. It may be that you're getting 80%, 50% of your traffic. Outside of google.com that would be a severe issue. I find that very common that display traffic from search campaigns, search partner traffic is highly unqualified, largely full of spam and junk traffic that provides absolutely no value to advertisers. All right, another one. Where'd your traffic come from? Was it mobile, desktop or tablet? If your campaign is failing, you might be getting a few conversions from desktop visitors, but 95% of your spend may be going to mobile. It might be important that you cut off or lower the amount of traffic that you get from certain device types. So go in audit, find out how much traffic are you getting from these device types. Is there a significant difference between these different device types? Alright, next, if you're experiencing failure in search, you'd want to really dig into the number one thing. What are they searching for? Where did the traffic come from? Right. More important than that is why did they come to you? What were they searching for? And this is important that you look at your search terms and not just look at your search terms and kind of glance through them, you know, all 4,000 of them, but instead focus on what are these search terms telling you? Do these search terms, the top 1%, 5% of your search terms, do they convey relevance of the topic plus an action? So if you're selling H Vac services, you know, AC repair for homes, are your top search terms just things that say ac, air conditioning, you know, home, ac, broken, ac? Right. That is just relevance. That's not relevance with action. You want to have something more important like home AC repair services near me or home AC repair near me. Right. And just something like AC repair near me may not be relevant enough. It does have an action because it's near me. Right. Someone's looking for a service, but it may not be relevant because it could be a car air condition that's broken or a home air condition that's broken. You don't know actually what kind of ac. So relevance plus action in your search terms is critically important about knowing why they clicked on your ad, what were they searching for? And then last, this one I find is Very common. I find that business owners, marketing managers are blind to this. You look at your website, the webpage that you're sending people to, does it answer the Kindergarten Cop question? Right? For those of a certain age, you may remember Kindergarten Cop movie and funny situation where he asks all the children, who is your daddy and what does he do? Okay, I use that illustration. It's a silly illustration, but it helps perhaps for you to remember the number one question that your webpage should answer. It should answer that Kindergarten Cop, that question, who is your daddy and what does it do? Your page should explain who you are and what you offer. And particularly if you're a local service, it probably should answer another question, where are you? So who are you? What do you do? And where are you? If you're locally based. But, but most important, the top two questions, who are you and what do you do? That needs to be answered in seconds. It needs to be in the headline. It needs to be illustrated in imagery. I'm not saying to pack your website, your webpage that people are landing on full of content. I just want at least someone to know. Oh yeah, these guys can replace, can rotate tires in my immediate area. That's what they do. That's what I was looking for. Oh, these guys sell running shoes for, for people who pronate, you know, I mean, it should answer the question of what the search originally was. And if it doesn't do that, it's likely breaking a lot of things for you. So hopefully that quick audit on your search campaigns will help. I'm going to speed up a bit here on the last three. I'm going to talk about display. If you're having failure for a display campaign, consider the traffic that you're getting from mobile apps. I find that asking yourself, where did the ads show in a display campaign or a YouTube campaign? Did it show on the display network? And if it did for YouTube, that might be a major problem. Did it show on mobile apps? If you're showing on the display network just showing image ads, if that happened, that could be a major issue. I find that mobile apps for the display network can be huge spending weights on your display campaigns that provide very little value. The next thing is, was your targeting too broad? If you're experiencing failure in Your display in YouTube campaigns, was your targeting too broad? Did you try and cover your entire market in just one campaign? Right. You took all of the people that are wanting to buy or purchase your product or hire you for a certain service and you tried to encompass it in one ad group. One audience you targeted 100 miles around you and that's it. This is probably too broad, your targeting is probably too broad, too high level and you're just Google's unable to really narrow down and exactly what it is that you want. And last, for display in YouTube, check your time of day. What time of day did the ads show? Are the ads showing at midnight to 3am could be a particularly bad time for display and YouTube ads to show if you're interested in highly motivated traffic. So that is number three, display and YouTube or number two, display and YouTube. Now we're moving to number three, shopping. If you need to audit and understand how to improve your shopping campaign, I'll tell you this, the solution here is probably a lot simpler than everything else. It's likely a bidding issue. Now there's a chance that you know your, your data feed that's pushing into Google Ads and you know, the targeting that's matching to those search terms could be a problem. But I'll say for most people I find that you need to ask, am I overbidding for my search terms or for my shopping traffic? Is this shopping traffic cheaper? Could I get it for cheaper? And that's going to increase your chances of getting conversions. As I talked about earlier in the show, cheaper cost per click on, on shopping is always an advantage. So it's likely a bidding issue. Try and lower your bids. Find out. You know, try and do some investigating. Find out how much did you pay for these and where does that put you on the search impression? Share loss due to rank. It's an important number to be aware of. And last, as far as improving your targeting with shopping, you can't pick your keywords, but are you using negative keywords? Are you blocking specific terms that are highly unqualified for your product? And if that's the case, you know, maybe you should add more. Maybe you should really analyze your search terms, figure out where your traffic is coming from, what they're searching for and add some negative keywords. All right, now we are on the last one. Last one is performance max. So if you are experiencing failure in a performance max campaign, the first question you should ask is what kind of traffic did you get? This is important and it's a little difficult to analyze the details of this, but the best place to look would be your campaign insights, your actual search terms. We can actually see some search terms in performance max campaigns now. So where did the traffic come from? Did it come from the kind of clientele, the kind of searches that you think are going to be valuable for you or not? If it didn't, then perhaps you need to move to the second question. Did you feed the campaign enough conversion data so, you know, if you're, if you're targeting really broadly and you're getting the wrong kind of traffic, is that your fault or is it because Google's unable to get a proper bead on what is a valuable action on your website? So adding more signals of conversions, add more conversion methods to your Google Ads. This is, this is dangerous. I'm about to give you some dangerous advice here at the very end of the podcast. But please consider that this can lead to a very detrimental end if you don't eventually wean yourself off of this method. But what you can do is you could add an add to cart as a conversion. You could add a specific engagement level. Not a conversion, but an actual engagement level. How long did they stay on the site? You know, things like that number of clicks on the site, they viewed the About Us page or something like that. You know, something that's not quite a conversion, but at least they were somewhat engaged. You could measure that as a conversion. And if you did that, you might actually be able to push Google towards the traffic that is a bit more motivated than your average traffic. Okay, so that is it. That is the four different points of hints and ways to audit all the different campaigns in Google Ads and where you might find some of the biggest issues. And I hope that helps you to improve your performance in your Google Ads account. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can find me for management or for coaching of your Google Ads campaigns. And that's the live coaching that I do with people through Zoom. And you can book a session with me right on my website. Website is Chris Schaefer.com Otherwise, I'll see you guys next week.