← 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 Revive a Stale Campaign (Episode 479)
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Foreign hello, and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and I'm back. I had a very busy week last week, so I did not get to talk to you guys about Google Ads, but that's what I'm gonna do today. I'm happy to discuss a very special topic that came about with one of my training sessions that I did with some very nice Brits that I met. So I have a topic to discuss that is about how to revive a stale campaign. I have five things that are very specific that I find can make the biggest impact in the performance of your campaign. How can you get a campaign that's been getting moderate success? How can you take a campaign that's been getting the same number of conversions and never seems to really push past that barrier into a campaign that's really excelling? How can you do that? Well, I have five specific tips that I think make the biggest impact, and we're going to go through those today. I'm actually not going to answer questions because I'm saving questions for next week. I want to make this whole episode focused on this one topic. So get your questions in now. I'm going to answer a bunch of them. Next week. You can send in your questions to paid search podcast mail.com paid search podcastmail.com and I'll answer questions next week in a big Q and A episode. I have several that are already in queue to answer, so if you didn't get a question answered, send it in again. You know, bring my attention back to it. And if you, you know, if you're interested, there's something that you really want to focus on. Let me know anything about Google Ads, top to bottom. Really, I'm going to talk about just about everything in Google Ads. That's what I do every single week. And I've been doing Google Ads management for a very long time. I started in 2003, so I have pretty good authority and experience to be able to share what I've learned. And that's what I do in the podcast at no charge at all to you guys. The only thing I ask is that you consider my sponsor, Optio. Optio.com PSP is a free tool that you can try to make a big difference in your Google Ads account. Today we're talking about how to revive a stale campaign. Well, a big part of reviving a stale campaign is seeing the numbers, seeing the metrics, seeing something you may not have seen before. And that's really what Opteo is about, is helping you bring a campaign to A higher level of success by pointing out areas that you may not realize. This is a deep algorithmic metric focused optimization tool, right? It's Optio. It's, you know, it's the optimization process and it helps you to find buried bids, keywords, settings in your Google Ads account that keeps you from being able to achieve the success that you possibly can. And it's being pushed down by some of the things that you unwillingly have allowed to happen. You followed some recommendation from Google or you've turned on some setting that's allowing things to happen in your account that's actually detrimental to the performance. That is what Optio is about. And you can try this tool for free for 28 days. That's twice the time that you'll get if you sign up straight on their website. If you go to Optio, that's O, P T E O to get a 14 day, no, a 28 day free trial, a 28 day, almost a full month. You get to try it, see what kind of difference it can make. And you're gonna like the tool, but it's totally optional. You can, you can stop after that. But I'll tell you, many people continue because they find it worthwhile. They find it to be absolutely worth the price of investment to get back what they want from Google Ads. Optio.com PSP okay, let's dive in. How to revive a stale campaign. And I think before I jump into this, I have to define what is a stale campaign. And the best way that I can define this is essentially to use my own terminology, use my own definition of the phases of Google Ads. So I'm going to quickly review that and help you understand where I think most of the stalemating of a Google Ads account happens. So a quick review. I believe that there are four phases to Google Ads. My particular philosophy and theory is that every Google Ads accounts, no matter where you are, what you're spending, how long you've been doing it, you are either in phase one, two, three or four of Google Ads. And phase one, very simple. Are you getting good traffic? Every account hopefully reaches this at some point. But I'll tell you, some people never actually get out of phase one. Some people barely get qualified traffic. Some people are just, you know, spending money and getting mostly bad traffic. Believe me, I've been doing this too long to say that. Oh, I'm sure everybody's getting qualified traffic. No, I can definitively say that many people run accounts for many, many years and never actually achieve anything beyond phase one. They are Solidly tiptoeing around in phase one. Okay, so that's not where I find people stalemate. Okay? Phase two is where people are getting conversions. They're getting sales, they're getting leads, they're getting phone calls. As soon as you get your first phone call, lead sale, you have now stepped into phase two. And right here is where people stalemate. Right here is where people sit and stay for months, years, even decades. I have personally managed accounts that have never truly achieved reaching phase three. Phase three is where you are regularly getting sales, purchases, leads from phone calls, and you get them to a degree that make, that makes the campaign profitable. You can calculate, however you calculate to determine, ah, this campaign's making me money. Every client I get, I convert one out of five of those, and I make X amount of dollars off of each one of those that I sell and I spend this much. So therefore I know I'm making money three times, four times, five times over what I'm spending on Google. This is not a point where people stalemate. Okay? Phase three, it's kind of hard to stalemate on that because things don't, don't, don't, don't trend to stay at a phase three. It's really easy to slide back into phase two. Okay, so stay with me here, because phase one, it's really tough to get yourself into phase two. You know, how do you, how do you find the right traffic? And then once you've jumped over into phase three, it's really easy to click the wrong button, change the wrong settings, try something new, get curious, and, and slide back down into phase two. Now you're just getting conversions, but it's no longer profitable. And the absolute peak where people very rarely get to and never stay is phase four. Phase four is scaling. You are achieving a profitable point in your Google Ads account and you are growing. You're spending more every month, every year, and it's staying at that same profitability that might happen on a long term. It doesn't happen month to month. You're never going to grow every single month and grow more and more successful. They're going to be dips. So you're going to slide back down. Okay, we're not quite scaling. We let some of these metrics slip. Let's recoup, you know, what's happening here. Let's, let's look at where we're losing. Let's make some changes. All right, now we're steady again. Now let's increase spend again. Right? So that's, that's A sliding of up into phase four, increasing budget and oh, okay, we're slipping a little bit. You know, Christmas came seasonally, things are a little slow during the summer. Let's say you slide back down into phase three, maybe phase two, but then eventually make it up to back to phase three and then maybe pop into phase four again. Right. So if you could see the picture that I'm painting here, most people are going to end up sitting at phase three and never go up to that. Excuse me? People are going to be sitting at phase two. I think I said the wrong thing there. They're going to be sitting at phase two and never go up to that phase three. So that's what we're going to talk about. How can you go from phase two into phase three? What are five ways? Many more than just five. But I'll try and cover, I think the biggest impacts that can help you to get there. Alright, so let's do it. Number one, the biggest reason you are unable to calculate whether you are being successful or not. It's quite simple. You're not measuring all of your conversions. I have many people I do coaching and training with people I manage month to month. My own clients, my own personal clients that I manage and people that I just do audits for. I provide audits for free for people. You can find out more about that@chris shaffer.com Shoot me an email and we can make, we can make that happen. And I see it over and over where people have a phone number on their website, people have an email address on their website, people have a calendar booking on their website, people have a chat on their website and there is no conversion tracking for one or two or three of those conversion methods. Those, those call to action methods. Oh sure, yeah, yeah. We have a chat system. We can't track it, we don't track it. But you know, we get maybe 20% of our leads that way. Oh wow. Okay. Well one out of five you just throw to the wind and have no idea. That's an important metric to track. Oh, people are booking directly on your website through a calendar system, but you don't track that because you don't pay for the premium calendar tracking system. Right. I mean that costs an extra 100 bucks a year maybe for you to have that, but you're not paying for that. But you do pay 20 grand a year, 50 grand a year for Google Ads. But let's not track that conversion for the calendar bookings, which represents 10, 15, 20% of your, your conversions that are happening Through Google Ads, right? These things add up. 20% here, 10% here, 5% here. Now we're talking a pretty significant number of lost conversion metrics. And as you'll see, the reason I mentioned this first is because these metrics are what bring you from phase two to phase three. So you need to track everything that is important on your website. And let me pause here because some of you may say, no, I have all my stuff tracked. I track everything on my website. I have a web form, I have a web form on my website, it says, you know, book appointment, right? On my website they fill that out and I track every one of those. All right, let me talk to you guys. Because one thing that's universal I find is websites with one call to action, one aggressive call to action, often have lower conversion rates if you are any kind of service company and you're not just directly selling to someone. Alright, so I'm going to talk about lead. People that are booking leads, web forms, phone calls, emails, chats, calendar, bookings, things like that. If you have one method to, to try and get people to convert, you are losing opportunity. This is another reason why you are stalemating in your account. You need, I'm going to call it a soft, medium and hard kind of conversion method. You might have a way for people to just a real short form, it says name, email message and someone can just say, hey, I'm looking for this. Is this what you guys do? Or not real short, but at least they contacted you. Conversion, really easy web form to fill out a phone number to call. These people that don't want to call your phone number may fill out the web form. But people that are on their lunch break need to quickly talk to you because they need a solution by the time they get off work that day and you know, they need to get this resolved. They have about 30 minutes to talk to you during the lunch break. They don't have time for you to answer your email. They need to call a phone number. Having a phone number could absolutely increase your conversion rates. The best thing to do is have web forms, phone numbers, calendar, booking, chat, every method to try and engage them from whether it's a soft lead, medium or hard lead. This is important because you're trying to engage on the level of engagement that they're interested in, not just what works for your business. So try and have say, you know, just a casual conversation lead or a book an appointment. Today we will come to your house, you know, today, you know, for that, for that, to get an estimate for you, that kind of stuff. So hopefully, I mean, that should cover and perk the ears up of many people that are listening. Whether you're tracking one of those or you only have one conversion tracking and you need more, that first one should hopefully hit home for several of you. That should help you bring up the conversion actions in your Google Ads account. So now we build on that. Once you have more conversion actions, you have more actionable data to work with. So many of these stalemate conversions campaigns are going to have max conversion, target cpa, maximize conversion value, some kind of automated bidding. So tip number two is this. Stop using automated bidding. That is max anything, max conversions, max conversion value. Those two automated bidding strategies are killing your ability to move from phase two to phase three. Let me explain why. It is specifically because these bidding strategies do not respect the ability to increase or decrease your ad group bids. Max conversion, bidding, maximize conversions, whatever you want to call it, is just a flat line bid everything up and try to get as many conversions as possible. So it can bid some keywords that are really quite generic. And we're going to talk about keywords here in a minute. But what happens is these really generic keywords can be pushed really high in the algorithm and they drive a lot of spend. So a way to push keywords that have more value, a way to push keywords that have a more specific type of search associated with them. And we'll talk about what that is in a minute. I'll dig into that. That's actually number three. But a way to avoid that happening more and more and more where you start to stalemate and you have a unweighted and unbalanced campaign where 50, 60, 70% of your spend is coming from two keywords instead. Try Target CPA, try Max Con, Max clicks bidding. Try even, even better personally manual bidding. But all of these three, target cpa, max clicks and manual bidding, my favorite manual bidding, all offer the same push. You can differentiate at the ad group level which ad group is more important to you. So if you are selling. I was recently working on an account that sells a car wrap service, right? It's this type of plastic wrap that goes over a car to keep it from any of the paint being chipped or dulled. You know, it's like a shield around your car. And there is absolutely a difference between someone who is just looking up car wraps and vehicle protection, car wrap, something like that, or vehicle protection wrap installers, right? Each of these are of different value to the advertiser. Someone who's just searching for car wrap could be something having to do with putting essentially a big sticker on your car because you want to advertise your business or, you know, you want to have some cool flames on the side of your Mustang or something. Right? That's a completely different service. That is not the same. So you shouldn't bid as highly target. CPA allows you to increase or decrease the initiative of each of these ad groups. In max clicks, you can do the same thing. You can bid up or down using the device bids of each of the ad groups. And in manual bidding, in manual bidding, you can go so far as to bid individual keywords up or down. This is the ultimate level of control that I personally prefer a little more advanced, but it's really easy to teach. I've taught it to hundreds and hundreds of people in my coaching sessions that I do. And anyone who's heard me talk about it, they say, yeah, actually once I heard Chris talk about it, it's not as scary as everyone says. It's totally doable. It's quite easy to manage and make these decisions. So use something that doesn't just bid equally. It doesn't just push everything up at the same time. Where you're getting clicks that are $30 clicks, $50 clicks, $60 clicks, I see it all the time. Your average CPC might be five, ten bucks, but if you go look, you might actually be getting clicks that are 30, 40, 50 bucks because Google's just skyrocketing some clicks to the sky just, just because they feel like that one seems like it's probably going to convert for you. This seems like a good bet. Oh really? You're betting with my money, Google? That's my money you're betting with. Do you just hand 20 bucks to your 8 year old and say, hey, see that table over there? Go bet some money on that. And I understand that's a bad analogy because Google's certainly not a, the Google algorithm is not an 8 year old. But the point is you don't just hand money to, for someone else to bet. You at least want to have some input. You at least want to have some control, some gate system here. And that's what I'm encouraging for. Number two is use bidding strategies that allow you to put, put a, a control system at, at least at the ad group level of your campaigns. All right, number three, avoid high spending keywords. Number three, avoid high spending keywords. I already hinted at this one, so not a whole lot to say. Except if you have keywords that have a high Percentage of the spend, this is you, this is holding you back from a successful campaign. If you have one keyword that's spending 30, 40, 50. If you have two keywords that are spending 40, 60, 80% of your spend, I'm talking to you. You have a unbalanced, overweighted campaign. You do not need to spend that much money on those particular keywords. They are keeping you from really defining the traffic that you want. You say, well, Kris, how do I not do that? This has been happening for six months like this. I don't know how to wean my campaign off of these keywords. Well, number one, if you're using broad match keywords, stop using broad match keywords exclusively. Alright? And then number two is break those big spending keywords up by looking at the search terms. You can do a search term report on individual keywords and then look at those search terms from just that one keyword and figure out, okay, the keyword is car wrap shop. You know, car wrapping shop. But the ones that actually have converted for me are, I think the term is like PPV installers. That's the term that converts, not car wrap. So I should, I should actually have an ad group for PPV installation slowly trying to pull traffic towards this term and not these generic car wrapping terms. That's an example of how you pull and push the traffic. You find out what's working, build that out and encourage Google to put money there because that's where more value is. So break up those terms and then once, once, once you have those new terms, those better terms built out, use the method that I talked about with the bidding to pull those over weighted keywords down, slow them down, don't stop them, don't pause them. My goodness, don't, don't sabotage yourself. Right? This is a, this is not a one day fix. This is, this is gonna take weeks, possibly months to try and decelerate, decrease, pull down those bids. Okay, all right, Number four, this is a common thing and there's a lot of ways to try and do this, but I find this to be very common. A stalemated campaign is going to have poor impression share search. Impression share is the measurement of how far your ads are, are reaching. So improving increasing your search impression share means you're saturating your market more and more. So what's happening here is if you have a very low impression share, your highly converting keywords likely have a very low impression share. So when those really good searches are happening every day, all the time, during critical times of the day you cover 10% of those, you cover 15% of those. You're never really there. And you're also covering 10 to 20% of kind of crappy terms too. So you're just kind of, you know, just throwing out your bids nonchalantly to keywords that are kind of crap keywords that are really good, but you only show 10% here, 10% there. Instead, when you break out these keywords, whenever you adjust bids and you slow down the broad and generic terms and you speed up the really specific valuable terms, what you end up getting is an increased impression share because it never, it never fails to happen that really specific terms have lower search volumes. So There might be 10,000 impressions a day for Car Wrap Co. But there's only 100 impressions a day for PPV installers near me. Guess what? Your budget can handle a lot more of it can cover first all the PPV installers and then sample a little bit of the car wrap stuff. So get high impression, get your impression shares up, improve those impression shares, decrease on these high spending keywords and increase on those specific targeted keywords. Alright, and number five is the last one. Number five, focus on clarity in your ad copy and explain what that means. Remind you real quick. Take a moment please to check out opteo.com PSP they have generously sponsored me for years and are baffled despite their efforts to try and replicate the success that I've had by sharing tons of free information for people and then saying hey, if, if you like me, check out my sponsor. I'll tell you my, my audience is a wonderful audience that trusts me and I don't. I'm blessed to have an audience that puts so much faith in me and just tells me all the time. Like Chris, there's, you know, I just, I feel like I know you, I trust you because you say so much. So if you appreciate that, just do me a quick favor and check them out. Try them out. It's free. 28 day free trial at optio.com PSP number five, focus on clarity in your ad copy. I'll give you specific examples of what this means. Biggest tip that I can share right away. Do not use your business name in your ad copy. Who the heck cares if your company is called Dog Walkers usa? That does not help sell your service. I don't care what your company name is, stop using it. Absolutely stop showing it in first position. That first position nowadays is often the only. I say first position. Actually the correct term is first. Headline position's an old term but that first headline in your ad copy is premium real estate. Because nowadays we only get one headline that shows. And if you just show your company name, how in the heck are you encouraging people to click on your ad? The first ad says dog Walkers usa. The second one says, I love your dog. Let me walk them. What a great ad. Oh, wow. That person's really excited about walking dogs, actually. That's kind of cool. I like that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna click on that ad. Don't use your business name. Use clear language about what you're offering. Be different somehow. And if you don't know what that means, think of it this way. It actually means you want to exclude some people from clicking on your ads. In Google Ads Management, not everyone is your friend. You know that. But what I mean is not all potential customers are your friend. You don't want everyone clicking on your ad. You don't want everyone that sees your ad to say, oh, that's perfect for me. Oh, that's perfect for me. That's perfect. No, it's not. Probably only about 10%, 5% of those is probably perfect for that person. Give yourself the best fighting chance and exclude some people right up front. If that means that your vehicle wrapping Service starts at 5k minimum, you might want to say starting at 5000 for a basic wrap. This is an aggressive way to exclude people based on price. But there's other ways to do it where you describe your product, you describe your service in such a way that you know this is specific for this. So you want to try and drive people that are more likely to convert, not just people. Don't get people to click on your ad. Get the right people. And then one last tip on, on, on clarity in your ad copy, try pinning a few of your most aggressive, most clearly written headlines to headline one. Pin three different headlines to headline one. Sure, you might suffer a little bit on quote, unquote, ad strength, but I'll tell you what ad strength can. Blah, blah, blah, blah. I really stopped caring about ad strength more and more recently. I've been doing some tests and I've been seeing that, you know, even though my ad strength is average, sometimes poor, I'm not seeing the huge impression drop. You know, that really makes a big difference for me. I'm just still doing more testing. But I'm not so sure ad strength is quite as important as, you know, Google presses it upon us to be. So if you go from excellent ad strength down to good, maybe down to average, that's fine. I'll tell you what. I value clarity in my ad copy more than I value ad strength. And I think you should too. Alright, there we go. So there is five ways to help bring your Google Ads campaign from phase two into phase three. Get it out of stagnant same old same old and get it into a place that's actually performing well. If you found this helpful and you'd like to dive in further, you can reach out to me. Chrishaefer.com link is in the description. If you're watching on YouTube or listening on podcasts, you can find the link there. Otherwise, I will be back next week to talk more about how to get more out of your Google Ads. See you then.