← 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 Build a Successful Search Campaign + Easy to Follow Instructions (Episode 490)
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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 great show for you today. I'm going to discuss how things are still the same in Google Ads after all these years. You know, we're moving into another year. 2026 is coming up and where is Google Ads in 2025, 2026, you know, are things completely different? Are things still the same? I'm going to talk about one thing that remains consistent in Google Ads and is still a foundation of how I manage and get my clients and the people that I consult with leads every day. Sales every day in Google Ads. We're talking about manual bidding. We're talking about why manual bidding is still relevant, why it is still so divisive in the way that people talk about it and considered and think that it's outdated. But I still say that it is extremely relevant and works very well for many situations, if not every situation. All right, so we're going to talk about that and I'm going to go through a discussion about how you can use it. I'm going to give specific examples about how you can use manual bidding. If you'd like to try it, and I highly encourage that you do. I have a specific way that you can try it and, and test it out for yourself and see if you like the results. Before we get started in the main part of the show, I want to remind you about my sponsor, optio.com PSP. They are offering right now a 28 day free trial of Google Ads optimization software that they made from the ground up. This is a tool that they designed to help you get more out of your campaigns. Whether you're running manual bids, whether you're running automated bids, max conversions, target cpa, target roas. It helps you with all of these different strategies of bidding. It helps you with your keywords, it helps you with your ad copy, landing pages, budget management. It helps you from the beginning of your Google Ads to the very end of the optimization process. When you're excelling and moving into phase four of Google Ads Optimization, it helps you with all of it. It's a wonderful tool and you can try this tool for free. It's the only tool that I recommend in Google Ads and it is entirely free for you to try for 28 days. Go to opteo.com PSP that's the special URL to try. Use the chat box at the bottom of the page to let them know that you heard about it here on the podcast and they will hook you up with that 28 day free trial. Okay, let's get on with the show. I'm not going to be doing any questions today, but you can send in your questions for my upcoming question and answer episode that I do once or so a month paid searchpodcastmail.com send in your questions there. I'll be doing one here shortly. Anything you want to know about Google Ads questions? It's great if you also send a screenshot or a a quick video recording of your screen. Let me see what's going on. Let me try and help solve your problem. Okay, so let's get into it. It is the end of 2025 now, moving into 2026. I've been doing Google Ads for a very long time. I've been hearing for a very long time about how manual bids are not useful, how Google's going to stop allowing people to even run manual bidding, how Google's going to delete it, how it's gone, how it's irrelevant. But I'll tell you, it is a standard by which I run every single new campaign that I launch. And I'll tell you, many advanced managers might go so far as to say, oh, manual bids are outdated, they're useless now. But then in the same breath they'll tell you, but I, yeah, I do use them sometimes. Or they'll say, oh, I use them when I launch a new campaign before I get conversions. As soon as someone gives that kind of clarification about how they actually use manual, then it immediately makes it relevant for thousands and thousands of businesses. Because there are many, many businesses that can still use manual bidding in Google Ads because it's relevant for them. Because not every Google Ads account is inundated with conversions. I'm speaking to many of you right now. You don't get conversions very often. You get conversions never. Or you get conversions at a very inconsistent rate. If you're in that scenario where, where you hear about max conversions, target cpa, and you've tried those and you continue to be very frustrated cause the campaign doesn't run or the cost per click skyrockets, or you get horrible results and you flip and flop between different bid strategies, the problem is that your conversions are inconsistent. The fuel for maximized conversions target cpa, all of these things is conversions. If you don't regularly bring in conversions in your account, maximize conversions, target CPA will not provide consistent results. The system relies on a type of recognition of positive signals. Right? The conversion is a positive signal of success. Now you could get a phone call and Google might recognize that as a phone call. That happens and it's a success trigger. But what if you get a bunch of phone calls and none of those phone calls are even relevant? Maybe you're on the opposite side of the spectrum. You get tons of conversions and the conversions are unqualified, yet maximize conversions. Target CPA optimizes for these conversions as though they are successful and they're not. They do not provide value. They do not lead to bookings, sales, or quotes or any type of success for your business. So there's a type of bell curve that works here where the people in the middle talk about how wonderful it is because they happen to have a business that is doing well with the system. But what about the people on either side of the spectrum either get no conversions or the other people that get tons of conversions and they're worthless conversions. The phone rings, but every time it's someone trying to sell them something or someone outside their geographic area, they're worthless leads that can be. One of the most frustrating situations to be in is where you're spending money and Google's telling you things are going great, but you know they're not. So what about these two categories? Is there an option for that? Because in Google Ads, there's only one option that would be available and that would be max clicks. Maximize clicks is an automated bid strategy, but that's not what we're talking about today because it doesn't provide the key ingredient that manual bidding provides, and that's bidding based on value of traffic. That's what we're talking about today. We're talking about bidding based on your value of traffic. Value based bidding is the cornerstone of what makes manual bidding work so well. So how do you make that work? I'm going to give you specific examples of how I use it in many of my client accounts, and you can see practical examples of what the numbers look like over months and months and years of data. And trying this, I'll give you two specific examples and some other examples as well. Okay, so let's, let's jump into it. So the core principle here to restate is traffic is not equal. Not all traffic is equal. Traffic can be extremely worthless or very highly worthy, very highly valuable. Okay, a $3 click and a $30 click would distinguish the difference between nearly worthless and very valuable. But with automated bidding, there's no way to prioritize that value and say, I want to pay a whole lot for this and I want to pay less for this. There is no decisive way to control your cost per click and thus control the value of your traffic. Right. There's no way to tell Google, I want more of this and less of this. Unless, unless you can choose your bids. You can say this group of keywords I want to spend a little bit on. So I'm going to bid a dollar, $2, $3 for this. This traffic is very valuable to me. I'm going to be, I'm going to spend 15, 20, $25 per click for this. Okay, so how do you define that? How does that work? What does that look like in Google Ads? So that breakup of the keywords, that distinction between keywords you want to pay $3 for and keywords you want to pay $30 for is called an ad group. So what you do is you create an ad group of low value keywords. Okay, so let's do an example. Okay, let's say you have a home generator, backup generator service. Okay? So your main clientele is homeowners who want a backup generator, a secondary power source in their home if the power goes out. Okay? So of course there's going to be tons of people that are looking up generators for their home, Whole home generators, home generators, what do they cost? What, what comparison between this brand and this brand, looking up well known brands, just typing in the word home generator, generator for a house, stuff like that. What I have laid out is essentially the least valuable or at least moderate valuable traffic. This traffic is going to be people who are looking for something, but they have not yet decided that they're ready to pay for a service or pay for a product yet. Okay, so you should not pay top dollar for someone in this example that's searching for home generators, but they haven't searched for someone who can do service, installation, some type of service company to provide that home generator. Okay, so what I have in this campaign that I'm looking at here is I have four different ad groups. I have an ad group about home generators. That ad group is bidding at $3 per click. So the keywords inside of that are going to be things like home generators, different brand names, generators for your house, you know, different keywords of people just researching, right? They're looking up things about home generators. The next campaign is an install campaign, so installation focused. So these, every single one of these is going to be someone who's looking for installation services of a home generator. So the keywords is, you know, install, get home generator installed, get generator installed at home, whole home generator installation, generator installation companies, things like that. Okay, so that ad group is bid at $10. So here's the difference. It's a 3x difference. The home generator general, non installation, non service, non maintenance. It's just about generators in general. That is a $3 bid. Installation focused traffic is a $10 bid. So I'm paying more than three times the cost per click because the value of the installation traffic is so much more valuable. Now, the distinction here and the reason you spend less for home generators is because more people search for just the word generators. Generators near me, home generator, backup generator, they search for those at 2x3x the number of times. Because that's much more common for someone to start with a very generic search. But you don't really want to pay a whole lot of money when they're doing a generic search. You want to hook them. You want to really bring them in when they've made the decision that they're looking for someone to install. How do I install, who can install, who installs, what, what should I install? You know, that kind of search is much more valuable. That's when you bring them in. So you pay twice as much, sometimes three times as much for that traffic. And the same is true for other categories. I have a maintenance ad group. So people that are looking for a company that can provide maintenance and repair for generators, right? They obviously already have it installed, so they're searching around maintenance of some kind. And then I have people that are looking for service service company. You know, they may be looking for an installation, they may be looking for repair. We don't really know. But I'm bidding $20 for service company keywords. Right? So we had a $3 bid, $10 bid, and now a $19 bid for this service company. That's because there's much more traffic for home generators general than there is people looking for installation of home generators or service of home generators. Okay, that's the idea. So I want to stretch further, push harder for the traffic that is a little more rare but more valuable for me. Okay, so to categorize the four levels that I think represent pay per value in Google Ads, is there is a funnel adjacent traffic. Those are people who are searching for something and you're offering them something different, right? You're. They're looking for a solution. You say, well, instead of that, actually, you should consider this. That's what I call the least valuable. That's funnel adjacent. They're not actually looking for you, but you know that they would definitely be interested in you. That's funnel adjacent. You want to pay the least for that. The next step from there is moderate value. These people are high funnel. That's an example of the home generator. They're looking up things about home generators. They're saying home generator, just, just the search. Home generator, generator for house. Right. That's moderate value. A lot of searches. That's high funnel. The next step up from there is what I call good value or mid funnel. These are people that are maybe doing searches that are something like home generators or whole house generators. Entire house generators. Generators that can power my entire home. That is someone who's mid funnel. Right. They've realized, you know, this does exist. I'm not just looking it up. I want to make sure I find something that covers the entire house. They're doing research about specific things. Mid funnel. And then best of all, is low funnel the best value. These are people that are looking for installation services of a home generator. They have made the leap. They know they're looking for this. It's highly qualified. So what I've described to you is potentially four different ad groups. Now you have to apply this to your account, your business, make sure it fits for you. But that is, that's how it works. That is how you decide how you bid in Google Ads. You say, okay, well Kris, I, I get it. I get the ad groups, I get, I get the layout. But how do I decide the bids? How do I decide how much to pay for these? Well, I gave you an example earlier. Home generators is $3. Then i3x it all the way up to $10 for installation and then double it again for service keywords, up to $20 for service related. Okay, that's a pretty good rule in general on how to establish some type of hierarchy for your ad groups for manual bidding. When you do manual bidding, do not separate your ad groups at these different value levels by a dollar or a few cents or a small percentage. We should be talking about 2x3x differences. So I find it's easier to start at the bottom and work my way up. So figure out what your high volume, low value keywords are. Home generators, for example, just the word generators. I'm going to need to pay about two to three dollars per click to show up. Okay, there's your starting point. Double that for your next tier. So, so if it's $3, at least start with $6 on the next one. Maybe you start with 9. You know, if you really want to be aggressive, but that's a good rule of thumb. Every time you move up from least valuable to moderate value to good value to best value. Basically a 2x every single time. So you would go from $3 to $6 to $12, potentially to $24 as you move up. Now that is in no way a reliable metric for everyone to use because sometimes it just doesn't work that easily. But that's usually the biggest step is to get numbers on the board to work with, start with something. Let's do another example of another completely different type of company. This company is a service company. There is no actual product that's given, no physical services done at someone's home. This is a company who provides loans. And this particular service is for people who are looking for loans that have a particularly hard time of getting a loan. Okay. So this is something I've learned about, as I always do with my clients. I learn about a new industry I've never heard of. But there's a specific type of loan where it's someone who can only show stated income or have a bank statement or have a no income verified type of loan. Right. Essentially they just, they don't have any kind of income, but they do have a certain bank statement they can share or something like that. Okay. So these people are going to have very difficult times in getting traffic or sorry, not traffic, getting loans because of certain reasons. So in this example, you might say, well, this doesn't make sense. Right? Everything's going to be, you know, the same. It's going to be how to, you know, how to get a loan. You know, the keywords are all going to be the same. Kris, how could you possibly create low to high value in a situation like this when these people are searching in all these different ways and there's no direct way of doing that. There's no installation keyword for a situation like this. Well, the secret is some people know the term no income. Verified no verified income, I think maybe is the term. I don't remember exactly. But basically if someone knows that term immediately, they are a bit more qualified than someone that just says how to get a loan when I don't have a job. Right. That's going to happen a lot. Those I would say are high funnel searches. Right? Those are going to be very common. But as soon as someone knows that in, in metric, you know that that specific type of term around no verified income loan, immediately they move themselves up into the more qualified level. Mid funnel, high funnel, something like that. Right. Now let's move further. Maybe there's someone who even knows the term stated income loan. They know that term there's not going to be a whole lot of those, but those are low funnel, best value types of searches. And that is the distinction because here's the difference. I get very little traffic. Honestly, I get about a 20 to 1 ratio between people that are searching no income verified and stated income. Not many people search for stated income, but here's the distinction. I get a conversion rate that's twice as high whenever they use the term stated income. When they search for stated income loan, they know what they're looking for and they need someone who does that type of loan. So I bid twice as much. I bid about $15 for the stated income searches, but for no income verified, I bid about $7 for that. Right. And here's the thing. No income verified, which I bid less for, gets about a 5% conversion rate. Stated income where I bid twice as much. It doesn't happen very often, but I bid twice as much. I'm very aggressive that. About $15 bid, I get about a 10% conversion rate. So the math works out here. My no income verified ad group provides a lot of volume, but I have to bid lower because there's a lot of competition there. People aren't super qualified, but it still works well at about a 5% rate. Stated income gets much better conversion rates because these people are qualified, they're more valuable, so I bid more for them. Okay. So I hope that makes sense. That's. It's another example of how I divide these ad groups based on people that are knowledgeable about what they're looking for. So therefore more valuable to me as a business. And the people who are still researching people are still looking up stuff, they're not as valuable, but I could still potentially sell to them at a lower rate. So I bid lower for those people and the results often speak for themselves. I usually get much better conversion rates. So when you're doing this, when you're building these types of campaigns, think about that. Think. If nothing else makes sense in Google Ads, think about the four levels of value in Google Ads. There is funnel adjacent, high funnel, mid funnel, and low funnel. If you want to think about it a different way, it's least value, moderate value, good value, and best value. And if you, if you want to use a simple repeatable formula, start with $3 bids, $2 bids for your lowest, and then double it every time and start there. You'll quickly realize, okay, I'm going to need to 3x this one or I'm going to need to bring this one down a little bit and this one up, you'll start to see where the volume comes from. You'll have to start paying attention to how you know how these keywords react to real life search terms. What the click through rates are, what the conversion rates are. That's the beginning of manual bidding. That's the beginning of bidding based on the value of the traffic. And I want to share one more thing, but before I do, I want to tell you again, if you would Please check out optio.com PSP it is a wonderful tool that I highly recommend that's O p t e o.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of their amazing tool. Okay, so one last spin I want to put on this is you say, Kris, you have discussed the bidding, you've discussed keywords and how to group these keywords. But there's one thing that looms. No keyword stands by itself. Every keyword must have a match type. So when you say these things, Chris, what are you talking about? As far as match types, is everything exact match? Is everything broad match. The fact is, is that as a rule of thumb I would suggest phrase match for everything to start. Okay, so everything, every keyword you start on this four value level bidding strategy that I've discussed. Every keyword should be phrase match to begin with. Now I'll tell you, there is risk on both sides. So let's talk about the two areas that you're probably going to have trouble with. The first area you're going to have trouble with is the least value or the high funnel side of the campaign. You're going to have trouble there. Because let's go back to the home generator example. If I have generator or home generator as a phrase match, even though I have a $3 bid that is leaving the door wide open to a lot of different traffic. So there is high risk on this end when you have really generic, just plain vanilla keywords as phrase match. So I suggest testing this yourself. But what I would recommend is that for really plain basic terms like the word generator or home generator, I would suggest when they're real short, simple words that aren't more complex, don't have intent behind them, I would suggest having those in exact match. So that means maybe only one or two are exact match. I don't suggest you do all of them exact match. But if they're one word or two words and they're just the word generator, home generator, something like that, exact match is going to be better because it's going to shrink the capacity of how far that Keyword can stretch. So a $3 bid with an exact match won't go as far as a $3 bid with a phrase match. We're not even talking about broad match here, not even going there. Okay. Now the same is true on the opposite end. You're bidding $20 $30 for really specific terms like home generator installation or who installs home generators. Home generator installation near me. Those are great keywords, they're very specific. But when you start throwing ten, twenty thirty dollar bids on these as a phrase match, they can become quite unruly. They can get traffic using your search term report. Look and see what these keywords are actually getting and you'll find that they're being quite ornery. They are not getting you the traffic that you intend. So the opposite is true here. The keyword is stretching too far, not because of the match type but because the bids are so high. So in the same situation the keywords are becoming unruly, they're becoming difficult to maintain. So there might be some with the high bids that need to be set to exact match. So again, this is not every single one of them. It's a few. But I would suggest picking a few of the more aggressive terms that are really precise that seem to get a lot of traffic, a lot of impressions. Snap those into exact match to keep them in line, keep them from going too crazy with these really high bids just to make sure you are right on track with the kind of traffic that you're looking for. So that's the the real management process when it comes to manual bidding. You can attain the right traffic that you're looking for using manual bids in this really simple method of bidding based on the value of the traffic you're looking for and hope that makes sense to you. I hope that makes Google Ads management, particularly manual bidding, approachable and easy for you to handle. If you're looking for a hands on approach from me, you can reach out to me chrishaefer.com the link is in the description Wherever you are listening, listening or watching this. I offer Google Ads management services or coaching to help step you through this process and take a look at your account. Reach out to me chrishaefer. Com Otherwise I'll see you guys next week.