← 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 Rank #1 on Google (Episode 437)
00:39:18
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Chris Schaefer
Hello and welcome to the Paid Series Podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm going to tell you how to rank number one on Google specifically paid ads. This is not an SEO podcast. It is all about getting your paid ad first on Google. That's what I'm talking about today because seems to be a bit of a mystery. It sometimes it seems like it should be easy to do, but it's actually a bit more complicated. There's a lot of decisions, a lot of things, a lot of mistakes that you can make that will keep you from actually attaining what it is that you want and potentially wasting a lot of money on your path to do it. And today I will help you to recognize those pitfalls, help you to recognize what settings you know, how to do it and when you should and when you shouldn't do it and what, what it all means. So that's going to be at the very end of the episode, but I promise I have two very good questions from listeners that could interest you about Google Ads. We're going to talk about those as well and we're going to jump into that right now after I tell you about optio.com PSP that is the special link that you only hear about here on the podcast where you can get access to the Google Ads management software that I have recommended for years. They are constantly developing new ways for their users to understand, grind through the metrics, all of the complications of improving, analyzing, making adjustments to your Google Ads account. When you open up Google Ads, you're presented with metrics. There are so many metrics. It's so confusing to see, you know, do I change this, do I change that? Don't you wish you had someone, something that could point to things and say, hey, I noticed this. Why don't you try this, this and this to fix it? Well, that's exactly how Optio works as well as a reporting system, a way to help you write ad copy, a report card system to help you understand where your worst areas is and your better performing areas. That there's a ton of tools in this massive tool belt that is optio.com optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial of their software. You only get half that if you just go sign up. You're hearing about it for the very first time here. You're like, I'll go sign up. Wait, try optio.com PSP to get double the time for a free trial of the software. All right, so on with the questions. And these two questions are straight from My inbox, which you can drop a note in there through my email. Paid search podcastmail.com and the first question comes all the way across the world over in the uk. Not really across the world. It's close, but it's about halfway from me across the world. It's in the uk. Hamza. Hamza, maybe in the UK has a great question. Hey, Kris, I recently started working with a charity client and wanted to tap into your experience with Google Ads. I'm aware of the Google Ads grant for nonprofits, but I'm wondering if you had any experience with its limitations Specifically, are there any challenges you faced in terms of managing the $10,000 monthly ad spend, keeping within compliance, or generating conversions? Any insights or tips would be appreciated. Well, so first, let's start with the fact that I have not touched grants in probably six years or maybe more. And there's a specific reason for that. So 10, 15 years ago, the grants system was very different. It was not quite as well known. It was not something that Google kind of threw out as much. You know, they marketed a lot more, they give it out a lot more than they used to. And it was because of that change with the grant system that now there's so many people in the system that the restrictions and the requirements are much more difficult to get. Any kind of significant progress with your Google Ads account, specifically the Google Ads Grant account. So let's say you have a Google Ads Grant account and you've been told that you can spend up to $10,000. Well, the giant quotes in the air should be up to, because anyone who can spend $10,000 on a Google Ads Grant account is going to have to make some pretty big changes to their website, to the strategy on how they're running their Google Ads campaigns. Because the only way that you can beat other advertisers and show up is to essentially use a conversion bidding system in order to overcome the, you know, the bidding limitation that comes with a Google Ads grant campaign. So you've been given up to $10,000, but everybody else has that $10,000 they can spend as well. And there also are limitations on the CPCS of what you can spend to achieve those clicks. So everybody has the same limitations on their CPCs. Everybody has the same limitations on their spend. So it's a race. The only people who are going to pull out ahead are people that utilize conversion bidding and different strategies to help the algorithm push you further ahead because of that automated bidding. So what will often happen is someone may just build a campaign As I describe it right here on the podcast. And you'll get nowhere because you can't bid higher than anyone else that might have the grant. So maybe you want to run a grant campaign for helping teachers and you come up with a bunch of keywords. And the problem is there's just not a lot of traffic around that. So you need to maybe expand and maybe you try something a little more generic like charities to give to or something like that. Well, bad news is there's a lot of other people that will actually advertise on those terms to show up on Google about charities to give to, especially this time of year with Christmas coming, it's a big giving time of year, so there's a lot of advertisements that will pop up at that time. So now you are not competitive in the market, so you end up not able to spend your budget. So how can you overcome that? Well, the strategy requires using conversion based bidding. You have to use conversions and then utilize maximize conversions or target CPA or something like that to try and effectively kind of go around your CPC bid limit. It uses the algorithm, it uses the additional matching features of maximized conversions, automated bidding to get you more than what your minimum CPC ceiling would be otherwise. So it's not as simple as you would hope. It's actually quite frustrating at times because spending to that maximum $10,000 limit is very difficult. So the tip is this. If you're going to try and actually get volume with a grant campaign, if you're actually trying to move the needle and you don't get, you know, get anywhere close to that $10,000 spend, it may require a landing page, a micro site, a new website entirely that is geared towards churning out conversions, conversions that might be lower level conversions, you know, not a conversion that's a, that's a sign up or a phone call, but it might need to be newsletter signups or different types of engagement, lower engagement level, that can then feed that to the algorithm. And then in turn, the algorithm gets you more traffic because it's feeding on those conversions and it's a constant rotation of more conversions, more traffic, more conversions, more traffic. And not the key to this is making sure that you are utilizing conversions in the most efficient way possible so that you're feeding the algorithm, the algorithm will feed you traffic back. So that's the way to get around that limitation on the cpc. And the fact that I don't really touch them anymore, I think is a testament to how specialized this industry has become. If you're really interested, you know, probably would want to seek out some specialists. There are some specialist agencies out there that work specifically in the Google grant system. And you know, it might be best to try and find some of those because it is not an easy industry, because the industry is essentially anyone that has a grant campaign. Right. You're not, you're not just competing against anyone else who wants to help teachers or help kids or help firefighters right now. You're competing against anyone else that might be bumping up against you on nonprofits to give to this Christmas and things like that. There's a lot of competition. There's only so much search out there, but there sure are a lot of nonprofit campaigns that are actively trying to generate traffic for their nonprofit. So let's move on. Now I have an email from Greg in the US I don't know exactly where, but Greg in the US says I am a 28 year old looking to buy a plumbing business somewhere in the usa. Before I buy one, I'd like to see how competitive a market is in terms of cost per lead. How do you typically go about doing this? I've tried using SpyFu in the past and haven't learned much at all. Okay, so Greg, you are definitely, you've definitely learned a lesson because that's where a lot of people would go. You know, when you do searches about, you know, how much are leads, how much are cost per, and what's the cost per click in this industry, that industry, you know, you get a lot of advertisements for, you know, find out what your competitors are spending, find out how much your competitors are paying per click. And it's very tempting because you think, well, this information will be right here. But in the end, it's very unfruitful. It's very frustrating because there might be 2,000 keywords, 10,000 keywords, and you don't know which ones are actually working for them. You don't actually know how many conversions are coming through. Are conversions coming through from these keywords or these keywords? And, and if they're paying this much per click, what's their conversion rate? There's a lot of percentages and metrics and numbers that no system anywhere is going to have because conversions are going to be subjective to every single client, every single account is going to have conversions that are set up internally for their purpose. And that's not going to be something that can be tracked outside of their company. So for that reason, let's go to the area that matters the most. There's only two numbers that matter when it comes to the cost per conversion, and that is cost and conversion. Right. Very simply, it means cost per click and conversion rate. So how much does it cost to get a click and how often does that click lead to a conversion? So there is no tool, unfortunately. Well, maybe. Fortunately. Fortunately there's no tool that can tell you this, because if there was a tool, that would be an extremely sensitive topic for people to be able to dig into other people's conversion rates and cost per click. I mean, I'm glad that's not out there. I think that would be an absolute disaster. So instead what I do is I apply my experience to make a judgment call based on one single estimate. Okay, so the single estimate it is. And you can do this without paying for any software out there. You know, you can use google.com to do a search. You can use AI if you want. You can use whatever you want. You just need a basic answer using public information. You know, what people post and share and, you know, reports are done all the time. Public information out there. You don't need anything specific. Just search for how much is the cost per click for X industry, you know, so you're looking to buy a plumbing business. So you could say, how much is the typical cost per click for plumbing on google.com and Google AI, whatever will tell you an answer. I just did that search and I came up with pretty incredible range of $5 to $50 per click, which I agree. I do think that the typical CPC that I experience is usually is very typically in that range. Almost never is it above 5. Sorry, almost never is. Well, I'm going to say never. Never is a decent click going to be less than $5 for a plumbing lead. And I would hope very rarely is anything above 50, although it certainly that's probably more likely than being below 5. So as a rule of thumb, anytime you see this range, I'm gonna want you to trend on the higher scale. So if it says 5 to 50, you can probably cut off the last 50%, right? The lower end of the scale. So, you know, 5, 10, $15 is probably out. Maybe $20 is out, you know, so maybe we look at it from 20 and up. That might be a more appropriate range. Okay, so if we look at it, let's do this instead. Let's say 25 to 50, right? Let's take the higher range, the higher half. All right, so 25 to 50. And that leaves us with one other question to decide. What is the conversion rate? And that's not something that we can know either. Now there's, as I said, there's no way to look up conversion rate. So what we do instead is we just apply some scenarios. So if the cost per click is 25 and the conversion rate is 1%, then we can calculate that the cost per conversion would be $2,500. So it would cost for one lead with a 1% conversion rate at a $25 CPC, $2,500 to get one lead. So obviously, that's really bad. Okay, that's the top end for $25. Hopefully, you know, it's a higher estimate. Now, same situation. Let's say $25 is the average cost per click, but the conversion rate is 10%. Now we're looking at $250 cost per conversion. Okay, now let's change it. Let's say, let's go all the way to the top. Let's say you have a $50 cost per click and a 1% conversion rate. The answer to that is a $5,000 cost per conversion. And then as you would expect, if you Change that to 10%, so $50 CPC, 10% conversion rate. Now it's a $500 cost per conversion. Okay, so now we're left with a range. If you take the highest and the lowest, that's a range of 5,000 all the way down to $250. I would say you could probably assume a very, very poorly run campaign might be getting a $5,000 cost per lead, and a decently run campaign is going to be getting closer to a $250 cost per lead. So the answer is probably somewhere in there, maybe better. Maybe they're getting a $15 CPC and they have a 10% conversion rate. So that'd be $150 cost per conversion. The answer is every answer could be correct. There is a scale of success ranging from every point from the bottom to the top. Some people have phenomenal conversion rate. Some people have very, very poor conversion rates. So there's no way that I can tell where the right answer would be, what you would expect, because it's always different for everyone. But the answer is going to be somewhere in there. So if you want that formula, if you want to know how to calculate that, and assume certain CPCs and assume certain cost per conversion. Sorry, Assume certain conversion rates in order to determine a cost per conversion. The formula is this. Cost per conversion divided by conversion rate. That's it. CPC divided by conversion rate. So $5 CPC divided by.01 equals $500. $5 CPC divided by 0.1. That's $50. $15 CPC divided by 0.01 equals $1500. So that's how you can estimate it. You say, you know, maybe you ask around people in your area, maybe you do some research looking at things, talk to some people. You know, I don't know. Whatever you want to do, figure out what your expected CPC might be. Hopefully you're going to assume something a little higher. Don't lie to yourself and think you're going to get a $5 CPC or a $7. It's going to be closer to a 10, 15, 20, $25 range. And then who knows what your conversion rate will be. Could be 1%, could be 10%, could be 20%. But the answer lies somewhere in there. Okay, so thank you for the questions. Great stuff. I like those questions. Those are good. If you'd like to send in one of your good questions, as I said, you can do it at paid search podcastmail.com so we're going to move on to my topic of the week. Topic of the week is, I think, a question people ask all the time. They want to know how do I rank number one on Google? I mean, I have a certain keyword and I am sure that my service, my business, my product, whatever it is, will do well. I just need people to see it. I just need to be there when I search. I don't see my name. This mysterious impression, this mysterious click that I'm paying for. I don't see it. Right. I can tell you I've had many clients turn on their Google Ads campaigns with me. You know, I manage, I build everything out, it's gorgeous campaign, right? I built it. It's gorgeous, wonderful. It's going to work great. They do searches for their own company name or their own product or, you know, their service, something like that. They don't see themselves. They get frustrated, turn everything off. They shut it all down. Cancel the whole project so we can talk about this whole mysterious. I want to see my ad mystery about why people get so frustrated with this invisible click that they're being charged for. That's understandable, but that's not the topic. The topic is how can you get to the top? What's the best way to just go straight to the top, make sure you show up for something. That's what we're going to talk about now. And I have five points about how this is done and done efficiently. So point number one is pick your target. Okay? So picking your target is two things. Keyword and geographic targeting. Okay? Both of these will absolutely kill this whole project if you do it wrong. The first is you need to be specific with your keyword. So in this example, let's say you are a closet remodeling company, okay? And you really want to show up when someone does a search for your service. Well, the first thing is you need to decide what that search is. And I'll tell you. I will tell you. If you're a business owner listening to this, you are bad at picking this. First thing I'll tell you right now, most business owners are absolutely horrendous at picking what their best keyword would be. You think people are searching for this weird thing. And I'll tell you why you're bad at it, okay? You're bad at it because you're in the industry. And you know what the industry term is. You know how you describe your business. And when you talk to someone, you use these industry terms. And what do people usually say? They say, huh? What do you do? What does that mean? Right? That that's what they say. Because you're in the industry, you use in industry terms, and then you expect people to search for these in industry terms. So you might think for closet remodeling, that closet remodeling might be a great search. But I'll tell you, that may not be how people think of the term. They might just say custom closet design, custom closet designer, something like that, you know, I don't know. But the first thing is you need to decide what you're going to pick. You can't pick everything because I. This doesn't work if you don't pick something specific. If you want to really test whether you can get calls, leads, sales from a specific term, you need to pick that specific term. So the first rule is, be careful about what you pick. Because you, the business owner, are bad at this. You might need to need to do some kind of research, something, you know. So ideally you derive what this keyword is because you're running other campaigns and you can see data to prove that this search is common. And you do well with this. You know, this is a very good search for you. So you really command this search. That's why you want to be first. You want to make sure you show up first. Okay? So number one is keyword. Pick your target for your keyword. Don't pick wrong because it could ruin the whole system from here. Number two is geography. If you do this, be aware every level that you move up on your geographic targeting requires more money and makes this more expensive. So if you want to target just in an immediate city, that's going to be the cheapest level, right. There's always, there's obviously less people within a 5 mile radius, 10 mile radius, versus a state and certainly a country. So choose appropriately based on how much you can afford each level. You move beyond city, state, region, national will cost you more because there will be more searches. Okay, so the worst mistake you can make here is pick something really broad like closet company rather than custom closet designer. Custom closet design. Right. That might be a lot better. And the other mistake you can make is you decide. I think anyone, really, I'm willing to travel to anyone in the whole southeast region. You know, Florida, Georgia, anywhere. I'm just. And you just, you just target a hundred million people, right? And you've completely screwed up your chances, right. You've picked a bad keyword and your geographic area is way too broad. So be careful about that. That's the number one thing. Now number two, these are the technical settings. Number one, you should only do this with exact match. Do not use phrase or broad. That's important because if you pick a very specific keyword, you need that keyword. And keywords very much like it, very little variation. Because this is a test to see if you can be really precise. And hit boom, boom, boom, first position on this keyword over and over again because you want to figure out, does it work? Is this good? Do I, do I have the right page? You know, can I, can I move the needle here on my business if I get traffic looking exclusively for this thing? All right, number two, manual bidding. I think you should do this using manual bids. That's my suggestion because I am all about manual bids. I think it is a superior method of bidding and running your campaigns. It's the most direct. So that you can go in, you can say, okay, I want to do this, I'm going to do this for one month and I'm going to put this budget on it. I'm going to target this area with this keyword and I'm going to put a $15 bid, $20 bid on this keyword. I want to try this, I want to see, you know, how does this work? And you can choose your bid. Done right? You're. And you can lower your bid, raise your bid and it's immediately done. Very simple, right? Higher bids are able to rank higher on Google. So put a pretty strong bid in place. $20, $25. I mean, you can always change it later. I'm going to talk about in the next Section how to measure success and how to measure if that cost per click is too much. But the point is, I think manual is going to be the best option. If you don't want to use manual the Net, the next choice would be Target Impression Share. That is another bidding strategy that you can use where you can tell Google, I want to try and hit first position this much and you can set a certain cost per click limit. Not nearly as good, nowhere near manual bidding, but it is an option if you're intimidated by manual or for some reason don't want to use it. But manual is the first option by far. Absolutely no. Max conversion, Target cpa. No way. Always wrong. Don't use it, don't care. Your arguments are silly. Those don't work for hitting first position on Google. It won't happen. All right, and then last in the technical settings is I want you to be specific with your ads. Be specific with the page you're pointing people to. So choose a page and not your homepage, preferably. This is a very specific thing. Hopefully you have a service page. Hopefully you have something that speaks directly to what this is and it's going to speak directly to the people in your area, what they're looking for, all of that. So it's going to be very important that you deliver the right message to the people that are landing on your website, not just dropping them on a homepage and assuming that they're going to understand what it is that you do and click around in your site. Don't assume anyone's going to click around in your site. That's a massive mistake. Treat them like they have five seconds to read your page and make a decision, because that's pretty much what you have. All right, number three, measuring success. Once you've turned this on, once you've started getting traffic, there are three things that you can do to measure the success of whether you're hitting first position, whether you know you're actually dominating and covering your term and showing up. So, number one, your absolute top impression share. Sorry, I said that wrong. Let me say it again. Absolute top impression percentage is going to be the first thing you look at. That's the baseline. Are you hitting first position? Okay. This is represented in Google as Impression app absolute top percentage. So it's all abbreviated. So it's really annoying. But it's impr. Impression abs. Absolute top and then a percentage sign. So it's impression absolute top percentage. That needs to be like 100%, 90%, 85%, something above 80 at least. Then you know, you're showing in first position a lot. You're hitting first position. Great. Very basic metric, you want to hit first. First position, you're doing it. Number two, search impression share. So this tells you not that you're hitting first position, but that you're doing it over and over and over again. If you hit first position one time, but there's still 30,000 more impressions that you're not showing first position on because you're out of budget, because that first Click cost you $20 and you can't afford more than one click per day, you need to know that. So look at your search impression share and that needs to be 90 to 100% if you truly want to dominate this term. You need to be 100% on your absolute top impression rate or at least above 80. And your impression, your search impression share needs to be above 90, at least above 80. Okay, so you need to be there a lot and you need to be at the top. If you don't see that you're showing at the top and you're showing there all the time because of these two metrics, then you need to adjust your bids and your budget. Very likely it's a problem. One of those is holding you back. And then last on measuring success here, are you getting conversions? Right? I mean, I can't go past this discussion without telling you and asking you, are you getting conversions from this? I mean, it's never worth it just for traffic. Hopefully you're getting phone calls, leads, something. So you know that's going to be something to consider after a certain amount of time of doing this. You know, you never want to continue if you're not getting something out of it. Google Ads is worthless if you don't get a return. And nobody runs Google Ads without some return in mind. All right, so I have two more sections here. We're going to talk about adjustments and one bonus tip number five that I'm going to talk about real quick and remind you about optiopteo.com PSP to get a 28 day free trial of my favorite Google Ads management software out there. It is something that a lot of people use now. I love to be the spokesman on this. A lot of people have discovered it and realize, oh my goodness, my life is so much easier because of this tool. And I'm telling you, it, it really is. It's really nice. You can try it for free for 28 days@opteo.com PSP so last two adjustments, number four adjustments. If you cannot afford something, if you find that? Yeah. Okay. Turns out, Kris, I did everything you said, but my impression share is so low, I can't afford. It's so competitive on this term. Well, you need to change something. Perhaps go back to the keyword itself. Maybe you need to be more specific. Maybe you need a keyword that's less searched. Try adding some terminology to it. Right? Custom closet, Dallas, custom closet, Fort Worth. You know, something more specific. Custom closets near me perhaps is better rather than just custom closet design. You know, so try some different keywords. Try and see what you can do if you're, if you're hitting the wall on your budget, in your bids, you know, it's just costing too much. Try doing that. Another option, shrink your geographic targeting. Instead of doing an entire state, try doing a, you know, a few counties instead of doing a few counties, maybe target a certain radius instead of a radius, maybe try a few zip codes. See what you can do there. Okay, shrink something because there's always less as you get more and more specific in Google Ads. And then another option is this one's not going to be as impactful, but you can limit your ad schedule. Maybe you only show from 12 to 5pm, right? Or maybe you only show from 8 to 12pm so maybe only show a few hours of the day rather than 24 hours. Maybe only show from 8 to 5. That's not going to make a big, big enough difference. Obviously most of the traffic is going to be 8 to 5, but that could make a difference for some people. Okay, so adjustments are important. Look at what your metrics tell you and then adjust accordingly. And number five, this one is a special bonus tip. Just to make sure I don't get any hate mail from people or sad stories from people telling me, hey, I used your get to first position strategy and it worked great. I did it for my brand. Please don't use this strategy for your brand. Please don't invest this money to make sure your company name is what you're spending this money on. Don't advertise for your brand name unless you're forced to do it. And when I say forced, that means someone out there, some jerk, is directly bidding against your company name, right? If someone was bidding on your company name specifically and you use different ways to determine if they're consistently showing up and it's yours specifically, not because it showed up once, but because it's consistently showing up, if that is a problem, then I think that could possibly justify paying for your own brand name. But please do not think that it is responsible, smart, creative, or in any way a good idea to advertise for your own brand name, product name. If you're a lawyer out there, don't pay for your own lawyer name out there unless you're forced. Unless someone is advertising directly and they have a campaign directly against you, which happens. But it doesn't happen as much as people think. So that is it. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer. I am a Google Ads Manager. Been doing it for 21 years now. It's all I do out of my home in Texas. If you're interested in speaking to me about management of your Google Ads account, feel free to reach out. My website is chrissafer.com I also offer training coaching for people who want to learn to do it themselves or just have questions about their account. Those are sessions that I do live through Zoom. I do those every single day. I've done probably a thousand or more of them at this point. But thank you so much for being here. I will catch you guys next week.