← 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
Huge Q&A: 5 Questions + SPECIAL BONUS! (Episode 484)
00:48:00
Loading summary
Transcript4 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign.
- [00:20]
B
Welcome to the Paint Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. I have way too much to tell you today to mess around with any introductions, so we're just going to jump right in and I've got five questions. I've got Joey Bidner right in the middle of it to talk about a topic about the upcoming holidays, Christmas, big sale time of the year. So if you're in e commerce, be sure and listen around because I've got some great tips from Joey coming right in the middle of the episode. But honestly, I have way too much to talk about. We're gonna jump right in. I have a request from, well, it's from me. I request from for myself that I would love to see more people send in videos of what their question is about what questions they have in Google Ads. So I had a listener send in a video. Gavin. He'll be later in the show. And it was so helpful to have a video to look at that. I want to encourage everyone to do that. So if you have like a little video recording thing, make it short and show me what the problem is and it makes it really, really great. I'd love to have a bit of a more. I'm not gonna show it on YouTube or anything like that, so it'll be entirely private. I'll be the only one to see it. But if you have a question, send me a quick video showing me your screen, showing me your Google Ads account, and maybe I can answer it. So send your Questions in paid searchpodcastmail.com Send in a link to the video as well, and I'll do my best to answer it. Today's first question comes from Casey. Casey writes in and says, hey Chris, longtime listener and you've taught me a ton. Thank you for that. I've been running a shopping campaign for many months now, and I recently noticed I've been getting a lot of clicks but zero conversions. It was showing my shopping campaign on keywords from other products listed on my website, even though those products were excluded. And also super broad and unrelated search terms were getting clicks. A lot of clicks. So here's the question from Casey. How can you control the kind of terms your shopping campaigns show up for when you aren't even able to choose keywords? I'm sure optimizing the product titles and descriptions are the first steps, but what about beyond even that? Are there ways to tell Google to ignore other products on your website other than excluding them from the campaign? So Casey thank you for the question. And the answer is in this order. Number one, product title. And put the most important words first. If you only get, you know, a couple of items to tell Google what kind of traffic you're expecting from Google shopping, then you, you, you have to understand that the most important things to communicate, that is in the product title and the description, those two things, and then one other thing as well. But those two things are really important because they provide Google basically the critical information that it has to be able to make the decision of what search terms you're going to show up for. So if you put really generic titles like widget, you know, small widget, medium widget, large widget, that is not sufficient for Google to give specific types of traffic. Additionally, on the page that you know people are landing on, that's going to make a, it's going to get a little bit of a difference because when people click on it and they see that information, a very generic page with very little information about what the product is and what it does, that's also going to lower your conversion rate. But most important for Google is the product title. The beginning of it is what's going to show first and most likely going to be all that shows in the shopping results. The description is important for Google, mostly for Google to understand what it is, because people aren't really going to see the description, product type and product category. Those are important. But probably most important of all is the GTIN number and the MPN number. These are very important because they use kind of a, a crowdsourcing type of system. And this is something that Joey's talked about before. It's brought, it's brought up many times, but if this is the first time you're hearing it, it's very important that you give that information to Google because it uses other people that have that same product. So if you ever were to search on Google for stores that sell specific products, you know, there's this specific product that I'm looking for and it says, oh, it's sold at this store, this store, this store, this store. That. That's because it has that specific ID information to know what exact product it is and who has it in stock and where it is. So this is important for making sure that Google shows the right products to the right people in Google Shopping. Last thing, Casey, I'll tell you is you should definitely use standard shopping campaigns if you're really concerned about showing the right things to the right people. So a standard shopping campaign is not performance max. You should not show up on, you know, perform. You shouldn't. You should not do performance max because you have less ability to add exclusions and even bid level management in performance max. With a standard Google Ads shopping campaign, you can build ad groups and even choose manual bids for individual products or you know, entire ad group with a bunch of products in that ad group. Break out your ad groups by different products, different things, and then anything you don't want to show in that ad group or in the campaign itself, exclude that within that ad group. So it's important that you understand the ad type is something that you can break out. Sorry, your product type is something you can break out all of your products by and then manage the bids for all of those product types or even product ID. You could see all 300 or 3000 of your product IDs and manage those individually and exclude them at an individual level. So perhaps if you're looking for more in depth method management of your shopping campaign, if you're not using standard shopping, that might be the direction to go. Otherwise, really put some time into the title description and gtin MPN numbers. All right, we have a question from Cash. And before I jump into Cash this question, I want to remind you about my sponsor who makes this whole podcast possible. The very famous amazing software Opinion. Optio is an online Google Ads management platform designed for people just like you who are nerds about their Google Ads accounts. Rightfully so. Right? We need to make money and we need to have successful Google Ads campaigns. That's what Opteo is about. It's optimization of your Google Ads account. Quickly, easily. For anyone who has even a basic knowledge or a highly advanced knowledge of Google Ads. This system will help you to make clear, concise decisions about your Google Ads campaigns. It looks at what is working and what isn't working in Google Ads and then suggests changes to move towards a more productive, optimized campaign. You've got to try it. And good news is you can try it for free for 28 days at a special URL that's in the link of the description. Wherever you are listening or watching this podcast, optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. All right, now moving to Cash. Cash with a K. Cash says great show. I've been listening since PPC Daily. Wow, that show is still live by the way. It hasn't been updated in forever. But yeah, Cash, you've been, you've been around for a while. PPC Daily, when you were the only one to always make the most sense, have Been subscribed to your show ever since. Oh, well, thank you. There's that old mystery guy that used to be a part of the show a long time ago. Who knows what he is. We forgot his name. But yeah, you're right. I'm the only one that made sense. I appreciate that, Cash. All right. He says, I love the latest episode, episode 482. And it makes me think of a question I feel like everyone's dying to ask for beginner managers. And even the managers still manually managing multiple accounts and have yet to get Optio. What's your recommendation for tracking changes or documenting your thoughts when you're optimizing against a certain goal or hypothesis in the account? Additionally, is there some kind of structure you use to make sense of your next move? Days, weeks, as you, as you optimize is do you just use something as simple as notepad to track that? Okay, good question, Cash. So number one, my, my number one tip for people that have multiple accounts or even one account is to use the notes feature feature to track your changes and your thoughts day to day, week to week, month to month. So there is a way to add a note to the graph that's on the campaign screen of Google Ads. You can actually add a note to a certain date. So I highly recommend look into that and what you do, you say, well Chris, how do I use the note? What do I do? The way I use it is I'll put a note and say, you know, October 2nd, I increased bids on, you know, these particular ad groups or increased bids campaign wide or something like that. Or I'll make a note conversions are slow question mark you know, to remind myself, hey, something seems to be odd about these conversions. They're slowing down. Something's broken maybe. Or I'll make a note that I stopped a specific experiment from running to remember, hey, there was an experiment that was running up until this date when I stopped it. Or I'll make a note about increasing budget. I increased the budget on this particular day. So things like that are really important to remember because when you're looking at something and you don't really know why you're spending so much or your cost per click has gone down or up, I mean these are important things to remember. What was my mindset two weeks ago, two months ago, two years ago? And I'll tell you what side note here, if you haven't noticed, Google in their just infinite wisdom has decided you can no longer see history changes in Google Ads past two years. Do you know that do you know you can't see change history in your account past a two year mark? So if you want to go back and see what did you do back in 2021, it's gone. It, let's not get upset here. It's gone. You can't see it. So every month that rolls around 24 months back, your change history is deleted out of your account. You know what's not deleted? Those notes. Those notes that you've made are still there. So you may not be able to see what you did three years ago, but you can at least see what your notes were on that very important. If you didn't realize that. One last thing, a lot of people want to know, you know, Chris, how do you manage so many accounts? And I do, I do have a lot of accounts that I manage. You know, I don't really want to give specific numbers, but let's say, you know, it's, it's, oh, it's a lot. I don't want to share it. But the, the thing that I do, I specifically use an app on my Mac called Things. As in, you know, I have Things to do things app. It's real simple. It's just a to do app. Does not matter what you use. You can use whatever you want. But the point is for best results, I highly recommend a system that on Monday pops up all the things you have to do on Monday and then each of the line items in that to do app. Clients that you need to take care of or specific campaigns that you need to check. And then once you do that, you might put notes in that specific to do line and then push it to Wednesday when you need to check it again, or next Monday when you check it again. Or maybe Tuesday, tomorrow when you need to check it again. That is the best way to do it. You need to make it a way that's extremely practical so that you'll actually open the app every time you manage. I cannot manage any of my accounts unless I open my Things app first and look at what I have to do for the day. Notepad I don't find is something that works because you can easily just jump in and not look at Notepad. I tried a lot of different things. The only thing that works for me is something that tells me, okay, what do I have to do today? What is my to do list? I look at that and right there in my to do list for each item, notes about what my goals are, what I'm thinking about, what I'm working on, what the budget is with all of that stuff. Okay. All right, so let's move on now to Gavin. Gavin has a great question. Actually, I'm going to change that. Gavin, I'm going to push your question back a little bit. Don't worry. I think now is a good time to bring in Joey. Joey's going to bring in a short discussion about those of you that are in the shopping, you know, Google shopping realm, the E commerce realm. Now is an important time of year and you need to know what you need to do now to prepare for the upcoming season that's happening soon. So Joey, take it away.
- [15:05]
A
Hey, what's up, Chris? So sales season is around the corner and it's that time of year where we start talking about all the different ways we can use Google to make the most of this holiday season or any sale for that matter. So I want to talk about again, the various tools within Google Ads for search, shopping and display, all the things that I use to execute a sale. And we're also going to talk about how to spend appropriately for the sale. Now that's kind of where I want to start because I find it's one of the most important pieces. One of the things that I see a lot that I find is the first misstep is in running a sale is to just crank up your spend at the time of sale. Now the reason why this doesn't work goes back to the methodology of why we run a sale in the first place. Okay. The idea of running a sale is to create a pipeline of new traffic to your site and to use the sale as, as like that carrot on the stick to close this new business Right now. If you just have your consistent budget that you have for all the year and just crank up budget at the time of sale, all you end up doing is most of the time just serving that sale price to your existing customers or people who are already in your pipeline. And I will add at the most expensive time. When I do my scaling of spend, it's actually well before the sale. I like to use that added budget to prime the pipeline of new traffic. Right these few weeks or a month before a sale, people are searching for what they're going to be spending their dollars on. That's when I invest most of my sale season budget. I create this pipeline and then at the time of sale is when I hit them with the offer and that's what closes them. This is how you really get the best value out of a sale. Because again, when you offer a sale, you are losing margin, right? You are losing profitability. One thing we often forget is you know your return on ad spend goal. Let's say it's 2.5 at a 40% profit margin. If you offer a 30% discount, you need a 3.3 return on ad spend to be profitable. Most of the time, you don't necessarily see a massive surge in your return on ad spend. You see a surge in your number of conversions. Which means that our play here is customer lifetime value. We want new customers closed, even if it means we're losing money on that initial sale. And the best way to ensure that is to invest your money in those campaign types that get you really good cold traffic, new visitors. So what you want to do in order to establish when you should start scaling your spend is first look at your conversion lag. Now, conversion lag is essentially the amount of time it takes for somebody to interact with one of your ads to convert. And this is different for every business. And Google shows you this metric. So if you're in your campaign, view your time series chart. If you select conversions as one of your metrics, you don't see this all the time, but often what you'll see is a little blue bar underneath this time series chart and that is your conversion lag. So if you're looking at like one month, let's say it will show this little blue bar over the course of two weeks and you hover over it and it says X amount of your sales come in over the course of two weeks. That's your conversion lag. That's how much time it takes for somebody to click an ad and convert. Usually what I'll do is I will start scaling my spend double whatever my conversion lag is. And again, I will use the campaign types that typically get the best, like cold traffic. So that's standard search, standard shopping, not really. Pmax. PMAX does a lot of remarketing. So I'll typically spend scale, standard search and, and remarketing. And the way you can validate this is go into the back end of your store and as you start scaling spend, just look at like your new visitor counts. You know, you want those going up, not just traffic in general. You want new visitors, then at the time of sale. Usually I don't even really change my budget because one thing that happens is if you scale up your budget at that time, it's gonna put your algorithm all out of whack. For the most consistency, I typically scale before and then keep things constant, maybe increase a little bit at the time of sale, but I definitely do not like double my spend at the time of sale. Again, it's the most expensive traffic. You don't want your campaigns just remarketing to existing customers. And if you don't have a pipeline of new potential traffic, that's all it's going to do. So with that in mind, we've got the theory out of the way. Now we can get into the tools. So for search, there's a few really easy tools that I love back in the day. A couple years ago to change ad copy, you had to go in and manually put in a headline and then remove it at the end of your sale, right? Those days are over. Google has given us an asset type formerly known as extensions, right? An asset type called headline and description Asset. These are easily my favorite and my most used. You can essentially set a headline at the account level so it applies to all your search campaigns. For your sale copy, you can do at the campaign level as well if you have different copy for different campaigns, but you can set it at the account level or multiple campaigns if you want. And you can put in your headline and then schedule it. So this headline will basically be used as one of your responsive headlines. You can choose to pin it if you want, but it will go across all campaigns and you can set a start and an end date. So this is something we can set in advance and then we won't need to come in at midnight to remove the headline to avoid it showing after the sale. So this one is like a no brainer. Now the next is a promotional asset. This is essentially like another extension that shows similar to how like sitelink extension would show. It shows underneath your descriptions and you can set your promotional information. You can say the sale that you have if it's Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you can say if it's a discount or if it's a monetary amount. You can put your promo code in there if you want. And you can also set a start and end date. This again alleviates that heavy lifting that we used to have to do of adding and removing our assets at the time of sale. So schedule everything. And again, for both of these headline description and promotional assets, you just go to the additional settings. It's a dropdown or it might be advanced settings I think it's called. And then you'll see start date and end date there. And you can even select specific times if your sale starts or ends at a specific time of day. Now for shopping, this is the one that I want to spend the most amount of focus on because there are two ways to do promotions and shopping, one of which is my favorite, the other of which I absolutely hate. And that is promo codes or compare at price. So promo codes are kind of like the first to be adopted because it's kind of the easiest from a website development perspective. You just set a promo code, you apply it to your whole account, and that's it. But this one causes the most problems in Google Ads because if you want your promo, your promotion to show in shopping with the promo code, you need to apply for it in merchant center. You need to set up a promotion, you need to select the dates, give the code to Google Ads, and then they need to approve it. And I've had this happen in the past before where you're trying to do this in advance and it gets rejected because the promotion, even though you scheduled it, the promotion's not active yet. And the way that they approve it is they scan your website to see if it's a true promotion. And I just get it reject. A lot of the time I hate using promo codes because it's got a big rate of being rejected. So that's my least favorite. But the way it shows, you know, it shows on the shopping ad and the promo code is there. And usually you click on the ad and then it gives the user the option to copy the promo code to their clipboard. Anyways, that's the one that I use the least amount of the time. And I usually discourage my clients from using promo codes. What I like is compare at price. So compare at price. It's called that way in Shopify. Every platform might have a different word for it, but this is where you set an alternative price to your products. And on the product page on the website, you know, you'll see the old price scratched out in red and then the new price. Now this data can be imported automatically to Google Ads. And that new price will show in the sale column in your merchant center data. And then that old price scratched out in red and new price will show in your products on Google Shopping. So there's no, you know, click the ad to copy the promo code to your clipboard. It's just, here's the price, here's the new price. This is the old price. Click on the ad takes you to the page. The price is already applied. You don't need to apply it at checkout. You know, it's just got way. It's got far fewer barriers to success. And by that what I mean is with the promo code, you land on the page and you don't see the sale right away. You have to apply the promo code to your checkout. So the user experience is a little bit broken, right? What I like is sale price. To show, click on the ad sale price shows on the landing page. So that's compare at price. And I can't say enough like compare at price is by far the best way to show an E commerce discount no matter what sale you're running. So this segues us to display because if you use dynamic remarketing, which is the form of remarketing where your merchant center products follow you around the Internet. If you use compare at price they're also going to show there. So users will see this price on the listing. Follow them around the Internet. Now if you use dynamic remarketing, I also encourage you to add one of the five headlines as copy for your sale. Because often the delivered ad is not just your listing, it will still have a headline under it. You know, the most common we see is you see like three or six products with a big headline underneath it, right? And they'll see those beautiful scratched out red old prices and the new price. And then underneath, you know, 40% off site wide. Get it now like that's a beautiful display ad. So that's also what I will usually do. Now that one does not have like a headline asset like search does. You have to go in and manually change it and remove it in your display campaigns. I also still like to run static display ads, right? Those display ads that you get your client to design, I find these are really impactful because they have that element of branding. The one thing about dynamic remarketing is they're all about the product and they're very stale. There's no visual branding, they look like every other ad. It's just the discount that gets people's attention. But during a sale when everybody's discounted, it's hard to actually distinguish who's who. So I still like to use static ads that have that element of design to them. Especially if you have like strong branding, a color palette that you like your ads to reflect. Static old school display banners are great. So now that we've wrapped up the various ways to conduct your sale, I want to talk about the sale itself. Now one thing that I want to mention is don't be doing any baby discounts. There's nothing worse than, you know, trying to capture that new potential customer with a 10% discount. It's just not going to move the needle. You're just going to end up losing margin without that surge of new business. So there's two ways you can do this. Hopefully if you have a decent profit margin, you can offer a good discount knowing that you'll probably lose on that initial sale, but you're counting on the repeat purchase. So if you have a high repeat purchase rate, I think it's okay for your profitability to dip a little bit again because we are counting on nurturing those clients after the sale. Now if you really can't afford that margin loss right away, then think about bundling. Bundling products is still a really great offer for big sales. Right. You see it a lot in like the cosmetic industry. Cosmetic industry, they'll very rarely actually have like a big site wide discount. It's mostly all about bundles. And this is where you can, you know, play with the profit margins of your products. So you can throw in some products that maybe you're sitting on a lot of inventory that you have a worse profit margin on, that you can, you know, get a little bit of benefit from bundling with other maybe loss leader products. Right. So I find bundling can go a long way. So the last thing I want to mention is a tool in Google Ads to let the algorithm know you're having a sale. Because as we all know, once you have that big fluctuation of conversion rates, it's going to throw the algorithm off. And the reason we really want to signal to the algorithm that we're having a sale are most importantly for the first couple days of the sale and after the sale, because it's going to take the algorithm a little bit of time to adjust to this influx of conversion rate. And then once you have that for a few days, it's going to think, oh, this is my new normal. And then once it finally falls off the cliff, it's going to go, okay, time to recalibrate. So we can use something called a seasonality adjustment. Now seasonality adjustment is a tool that allows us to give a few set dates to Google and say, okay, between this date and this date my conversion rate is going to go up by 20%. And typically what I do is I look at previous years, look at what the conversion rate increase was and apply that. And that will essentially just tell Google that you've got some big days coming. And what it'll typically do is even if your budget doesn't scale, like let's say you don't change your budget for the sale days, Google will still increase your spend on those days, knowing that the following days it's going to be a Lot worse and it will spend less. Remember, it's not a necessarily a huge issue if Google fluctuates your spend, but because it's still gonna spend your desired monthly budget over the course of those 30 days. So this is another reason why you don't necessarily want to fluctuate your budget day to day too much. You can just tell it we're gonna have a sale on these days and it's likely going to spend a little bit more on those days cause it knows it's higher performing and then less on the fallout, the hangover after the sale, it will spend less. Now, there was a new tool announced by Google at. They had this event a couple months ago called Think Retail. It was this event just for like E commerce where they talk about a bunch of new and exciting tools. And they are going to be releasing this new tool called Promotion mode, which is essentially the same thing as seasonality adjustment. But instead of saying, okay, my conversion rate is going to go up at this time, it actually you tell Google that you, you have a new offer at this time. And this is important because the reason why we have seasonality adjustments is to signal to Google when we have a peak season. Like for example, if you sell back to school items, we know that September is when you're probably going to have a peak season. So you let the algorithm know through seasonality adjustments. Now we basically hijack those for sales, which does the job. But I love that Google is coming out with the Promotion mode to give us a tool specifically designed for promotions. So I hope that was helpful. I hope this helps you rethink your strategy for this sale season. Again, my. I think the key takeaway is scale before the sale, not during the sale. And look at your conversion lag to establish how far out you should increase your budget. So I'll pass it back to you, Chris. See you next time.
- [32:45]
B
All right, thank you, Joey. Great stuff. And you can, you can reach out to joey@joeybidner.com he does a great job. I really like Joey. He's been phenomenal in his suggestions and I'm glad he's continuing to be a part of the show. All right, Gavin, I'm back. Thank you for your patience. Gavin writes in. Gavin, by the way, was the inspiration for my suggestion at the top of the show. In case you forgot, send me a video because Gavin, in his wonderful Irish accent sent me a video and showed me his Google Ads campaign. And I would have never been able to give Gavin this advice if I had not seen his account. So let's read his question and then we'll get to it. Hey, Chris Gavin from Ireland, living in Victoria, bc, Canada, longtime listener way back. You guys are. You guys are amazing. Way back to the dynamic duo days. My gosh. Was that, was that like back in. That was that was probably back in the. The first 100 episodes for sure. Dynamic duo, wow. Yeah, it's now. Now it's the dynamic solo. All right. Gavin says you changed the game for me in Google Ads. I thought I knew stuff before I started listening. You totally blew my mind wide open and continue to do so. Love the new setup. Keep the good. Keep up the good work. Wow. Thank you, Gavin. That's great. All right, so Gavin has a long question. I'm going to summarize it this way. Gavin is having an issue with an account that's getting what he calls and I also refer to as search term crossover. So essentially the search terms from what should be in one campaign are showing up in another campaign. And the problem is that this crossover is successful. What should be a specific product service focused campaign is getting more general service keywords. And it's working. It's successful for some reason. So should it be worried about this lack of control? Should he just accept the success and just be happy? So what I saw on Gavin's video, that really opened up my eyes here. I will share in just a minute, but first let me answer the question. Is search term crossover a problem? Yes. Yes. I think what I would call lack of control in Google Ads is a problem and here's why. Lack of control in Google Ads will lead to failure. I'll explain what that transition looks like and why I think that's going to be the case for most accounts. And here is probably the most likely example how I usually find that it's happening. The client is seen an increasing number of conversions. Let's say things are going really good and every month there's another, you know, 10 to, you know, 12% increase in conversions, kind of up and down, back and forth, sometimes better, sometimes a little worse, but consistently goes up. Right. But guess what happens? Suddenly the quality of the leads start to decrease. The client saying, hey, we're getting a lot of calls for people looking for this and that's not really what we can really sell very well on. Can you see about trying to get, you know, these other people who are a little more focused and you'll say, uh huh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. And you kind of, you know, don't make eye contact or kind of Say, okay, well, I got to go, you know, because you realize you can't fix that. How do you fix a campaign that you don't control? Because here is the progression. Chaos in an account leads to confusion in your management process. Confusion leads to poor decision making. In your management process, poor decision making leads to decreased results. Right? You made a bad decision to block a certain type of traffic, add a certain kind of keyword, increase bids, decrease bids. You did something, but you didn't really understand what you did because there's so much chaos. And in the end, here's the product. You now have chaos plus failure. You have a failing account because you made changes that you don't fully understand exactly how it's all working. You made a bad decision and now all of your success is starting to fail. Boom, boom, boom. Might happen, it might take months, it might take weeks, but it's gonna fail. And you can't bring it back because you didn't know why it was successful in the first place. So, yes, I think search term crossover is a bad thing for the long game. I think it's a bad thing for the short game. Enjoy it. I mean, it can be great. But here's, here's the answer for fixing it for the long term. The answer is to slowly make changes over time while trying to maintain success. And what you're trying to do is restore structure. Okay, so you say, well, Chris, great. How do you do that? Well, I would refer you back, I think, to last week's episode and I'll summarize last week's episode like this. Still go back and listen to it because I dive into it much deeper. But it's basically the scientific method. You establish a hypothesis, you try an experiment, you analyze the data that comes from that experiment, you make a conclusion, and then you make adjustments. And this is not massive grand changes. This is a long term thing. You want to maybe in the next three to six months to see some movement towards more structured, organized ad groups. That is why you don't want pure confusion in your Google Ads campaigns. And that's how you avoid chaos. Leading to failure is by again, the scientific method hypothesis. Set an experiment to test that hypothesis, analyze the data from the hypothesis, the make a conclusion based on that data and then make adjustments in your Google Ads campaigns based on that conclusion. Okay, so here's the big reveal and I have Jordan, who wrote in a question that is going to tip my hat to the answer that I have for Gavin. Okay, so here's Jordan's question and those of you who are paying attention will realize what my answer is before I even get to it. Jordan writes in and says, hope all is well with you. Have you experimented with AI Max yet and Google? If so, what are your thoughts and areas of concern? Thank you, Jordan, for your question. Gavin, the problem, the success that you're seeing in AI Max or the success you're seeing in your Google Ads campaigns is from AI Max in the video. You can watch your own video and you'll see it. Look at this match type column in your search term report. Every keyword you're pointing to in that video is AI Max for the match type. Not a single one of those is actually from your search terms. In fact, it's so starkly different that your cost per acquisition from your actual keywords in that campaign that you showed me are three times more expensive than your AI max cost per acquisition. So I think it's like 20, $25 cost per acquisition for your AI max terms and $75 cost per acquisition for your keywords. Gavin, the success and the confusion that you're seeing is from AI Max. And believe it or not, I got these questions, like, back to back. So, I mean, Jordan and Gavin, I mean, you guys have like a synergy going here. That is, that's the secret that I saw immediately in your video. And that's why I'm suggesting people send, you know, send me a video. Send me a video with your question and, you know, I'll answer it because this was a. This was amazing. I saw it immediately. And Jordan, great question, because this is such a clear answer to why I don't like AI Max. It adds chaos at the campaign level. What Gavin was getting was success, but uncontrollable success. These are not searches that he can control. You can't get these searches under control because they don't come from keywords. It's a dynamic collection of these search terms that is uncontrollable for the advertiser. So I do not like AI Max whenever, and I don't recommend AI Max if you're managing a campaign that has multiple levels of traffic types and services that need to remain independent from each other. It can be really destructive if, you know, Gavin's running a pest control campaign and he had stuff for mice and rodents and different things, different campaigns. But the problem is the generic pest control stuff was coming in through the mouse campaign. So that's a perfect example of where I do not like AI Max because AI Max absolutely oversteps its bounds, starts collecting traffic from other Campaigns. And now what do you do? You have a mouse campaign that looks like it's phenomenal, but it's not because it's mice traffic. It's just pest control in general. You can't stop it, you can't control it. So you say, well, Chris, what do I do? I want to try AI Max. Well, I think a better choice is dynamic search ads. You can create dynamic search ads and these are specific ad group types. Look it up if you're unfamiliar with it. These are DSA ad groups. DSA dynamic search ads. And you can create these at an ad group level and control them. You can actually place bids for a DSA ad group. You know what you can't do with AI Max? Control the frickin bid. You can't control it. It's out of control. There are no bids. It does whatever the heck it wants. As we saw in Gavin's case, it blew up. The campaign overspent. It was working. But what if it doesn't? What if it doesn't work? Right? That's the problem. Okay, I'm way over time, but I do want to. One last tip. Jeff writes in and brought up something that I don't know if I've talked about recently or ever. And I do want to bring it up very quickly. So if you're listening to the very end of the show, thank you so much. You are the kind of person who would absolutely love Optio, I can promise you that, because you're listening to this very nerdy Google Ads podcast all the way to the end. And I've gone long today. So try optio.com PSP do it for me. If you've been listening since the Dynamic Duo, try it out as a favor to me and I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Jeff writes in and wants and also did a video. You guys are amazing. You're sending me videos of demonstrating things. I love it. I love this trend. Let's keep it up. And reminds me about the horrible nature of automated assets. And I want to close the podcast here and tell you to do yourself a favor and turn off automated assets. If you guys don't know what it is, write me a question and I'll dive into it deeper. But basically go to your Assets tab in Google Ads, go to the far right of the screen and there's three vertical dots in a line and it says the word more underneath it. Okay? Look for that. Click that in, a hidden prompt will pop up and it'll say account level, Automated assets. Click that and a new screen comes up that you've probably never seen before. Ignore that screen. It doesn't matter. Look over to the far right again for that same triple dot more button. Click that. And now click Advanced Settings. Okay, what you see on your screen is account level, automated asset settings. You need to turn. I suggest turn the top three off. Many, many people turn all of them off. But I absolutely. If you're going to turn anything off, turn off the dynamic site links. I hate dynamic site links. It drives me crazy. It pulls in stupid pages like my About Us page and my testimonials pages from my clients, which are stupid pages for them to spend money for people to come to. I really appreciate the question or the comment from Jeff because for those of you that don't know about this, you could literally be spending three thousands a year to send people to your About Us page or some dumb page that has poor conversion rates and people are landing on that page and then immediately leaving. So look at your automated assets. Turn them off and then maybe even go in and delete those automated assets that have been added. That's your choice. But whatever you do, be sure and come back here next week because I'll be here and I need you to be here. You can find me on my website. Chris Schaefer.com I am now accepting new clients for management. If you want help managing your Google Ads account, I can help with that. If you just want advice from me one on one, I promise I will blow your mind. I've said that before and I delivered for every person that questioned me on it. They booked a session with me and I blew their mind. I promise I can do it. I. I have hundreds and hundreds of people that I've worked with, thousands, really, at this point, that I have done this for over many, many years, and I promise I can deliver some value for you otherwise. If not, you'll catch me right here at the paid search podcast next week. See you then.