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Foreign. Hello, welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. I have questions from listeners all around the world and I'm going to answer those questions right now. If you'd like to email questions to me, you can email the podcast. Paid searchpodcastmail.com let's jump in right away. Let's get started. We got several questions to go through. We're gonna start with Robert. Robert says, hi Chris, your podcast is great, very informative. I took your advice and I'm now three weeks into an Optio free trial and it's a game changer. The reports feature alone is well worth it. Instant, great looking reports with really useful info and Optio comes up with so much analysis and so many suggestions. A human just couldn't do that. Well, thank you Robert for essentially doing my Optio podcast sponsor reminder to everyone that optio.com PSP is the best software for, as Robert said, reports, generating suggestions, ideas, doing deep analysis of your Google Ads account. And if you want to try it for free, just like Robert did, he's three weeks into his free trial and he's loving it. He's got a whole nother week to go. You can try it for 28 days for free at optio.com PSP use the chat down at the bottom of the page and tell him you heard about it from Chris on the paid search podcast and they'll hook you up with that special extended trial only available if you use the special link opto.com PSP and, and that link is in the description as well. So thank you, Robert. Let's continue on. That wasn't all that Robert had to say. He had a actual question. So let's get to that. My question is about Google Ads certifications offered by Google. Are they worth doing? Have you done them? Okay, so first easy question to answer. Yes, I've done them. I do them every year. I do all the ones that I need to maintain my certification. It's, they've, they've changed over the years, but they're still the same Google certification exam questions. I'm a whole lot less nervous than I used to be years ago about doing them. But even if you, you know, even if I fail, you know, I get below an 80, you can take them again after a short amount of time. So yes, I take them and anyone who is certified has to take them. And the main question that Robert's asking, and this is for those of you that are in the business of ppc Managers, big, small, you are either certified or not certified. And if you're not certified, you're wondering if should I be certified? And if you are certified, maybe you're wondering, like me, do I need to stay certified? Is it worth it? So is it worth doing? Number one, being certified is something that helps establish trust, credibility. As someone who is certified by Google, if a client asks or they want some kind of proof that you're certified, right then now you're certified. But this is already kind of a silly advantage to say that you have because being certified on Google is only worth it if someone cares. If your client cares, that's the only reason that it would be worth it. Most of the time people don't ask. I mean I very rarely have people ask me, are you certified? Now granted it does say that I'm a partner on my website, which I'll get into in a minute. But very rarely do people care. They care if you're good at it or not. Because in the end you can still manage Google Ads accounts whether you're certified or not, whether you're a partner or not, you can still do the same things that anyone else can do, mostly uncertified and not a partner. So when it, if your question is, is it worth it? You know, in order to manage accounts and get a, you know, be able to maintain the ability to manage accounts, no, it is not worth it to do certification because you can still manage accounts, you can still be a manager, you can still help people, you can still have your own business or work for someone at an agency and be uncertified. Okay, so let's take it a little deeper. Is it worth it because you can close more business? Well, the advantage of being certified is that you can be available to be a partner. You can be eligible to be a Google Ads partner partner, a Google partner. Now this comes with a different level of advantages. You can have a little badge, a little certification partner status badge on your website. You'll be listed on the partner directory. You'll have access to betas and things like that that supposedly other, you know, other non partners can't get. But that I don't find that that's true. If anyone engages with Google support and asks, basically you can get beta access. You do not have to be a partner. That's not even really any advantage. And then the last advantage is you can talk to support. You have your own dedicated support. This is probably the least valuable of all of the advantages of being a partner. It I wouldn't say having Access or having a dedicated support manager on the Google side is going to level up your game at all. In fact, I would say it would probably hurt your management skills. In fact, they're going to have very different priorities from what you would have for your client. If you follow the structure and pattern that I talk about in this podcast, you're going to have very conflicting advice from the Google support. So we've kind of gone through here. So is it worth it to manage? No, it's not worth it to manage because you can still manage. Is it worth it because you can sell your services easier? Well, that's only if people care. And I find very many businesses, very few people, very few businesses, very few people ask or care or even aware what a partner is and what certification is. They don't know what tests you took. And these tests are easily passable. Certainly you do not have to be a deep Google Ads expert with decades of experience under your belt. No, they can be passed understanding the basic education that Google provides for free on the website. So is it worth, what is the value of being a partner or a certified Google Ads Manager? It's. It's just being able to tell people that you are. It's just the way that it's always been. There's no true regulation to say you can't do this if you're not certified. You can't do this if you're not a partner. I find that there's ways around all those things. They're not really set in stone. So in the end, the value of being a certified Google Ads Manager, a partner of Google Ads, is limited. I'd say the only thing that really people might say, oh, it's really nice for this. When you're a partner, you can get gifts from Google, you can get, you know, free swag from Google by having points for increased spend for new business that you brought in. But really, I mean, I can't tell. I mean, everybody nowadays has, you know, some Google swag for that they got from managing Google Ads accounts. And for what it's worth, you know, I don't know if it's. I don't know if it's worth the hours of taking tests that you have to do all the time. So I guess there's your answer. You can decide whether it's worth it to you or you can just do like I do. I still maintain it, but I don't necessarily know that there's a lot of value still inherited the system as it stands now. So that's it. That was my quick little speech. We're gonna go back to Google Ads Optimization now with a different Robert who's gonna write in and he has a specific question. Chris, really enjoyed your podcast recently about how to use and target with audiences. Personally, I'm quite familiar with different audiences and how to select and assign them for specific campaigns. But what I'm not familiar with is how can you generate a report to see the performance based on specific audiences? For example, if I assign five audiences to a particular campaign or ad group, I can run a report to see the return that's been associated with that audience. Is that correct? Robert S. So thank you, Robert, for your question. The answer is yes. Yes, you can see individual audience data in the audience tabs and I'll answer your question and then I'll kind of swing back around, we'll circle back around and I'll explain a bit of a few points that I want to share about audiences and why this data matters. But you can see that data if you go to the Audiences tab, which is inside of the audiences keyword and content section over on the far left. It's right below the keywords tab. So if you click on the Audiences tab and then at the very top of the page that loads, there is an option to add audiences. Okay. If you've already added audiences, you can expand that window. If it's not already expanded, and that is row by row. If you have five audiences, there will be five rows in that table. This is where you see that data. And this is the best way to generate a report of the action of these audiences. So there will be two different sets of data in this audience. There will be clicks, impressions, cost per click, cost conversions, impression share. There will be a lot of data inside of these audiences. And for every audience that received a certain number of clicks, impressions, cost per click, and cost, all of that, it will be associated with that audience. So if you have 15 audiences, some audiences will have clicks that are, you know, 5, 10, 15, 100, 200 clicks. Other ones may have 5 or 0 clicks. That's because the people that are associated with those audiences searched your keywords and were a member of those audiences. So there's something important. Now that we've kind of gone through the basics of where to see this data, there's something important I need to share that really matters about audiences. The fact is, is you should not be looking at just basic standard top level metrics of audiences. How many clicks an audience gets does not matter. There is no value to getting an audience with hundreds Thousands of impressions, you know, lots. A really high click through rate. It means absolutely nothing. You have not actually done anything. All audiences represent is segmentation of different types of people that are coming through from your keywords. Okay, you say, well Chris, alright, so the clicks don't matter. A lot of the metrics don't matter. CTR doesn't matter. Cost per click, cost, none of that matters. What does matter in my audiences? Well, what does matter? What you should be looking at is conversion data. What you actually care about is if someone searches for these set of keywords, comes through and is labeled to be a part of this particular audience. If that audience has a very high conversion rate, that's a key critical data point that you should act on. There's something there, there's something interesting there that you can take a lot of different actions on depending on, you know, what that data looks like, what it means to your industry, what it means to your business. And the fact is it's better to have specific audiences in your Google Ads account rather than hundreds of audiences that mean nothing to your Google Ads account. For example, if you are a, a beauty salon, do haircuts and nails and makeup and you know, who knows, I don't go to them very often, but whatever they do in those places that my wife spends so much money on, you should assign appropriate audiences based on people that have certain interests that are likely to go to your facilities. So it might be based on certain things that people that are interested in beauty and makeup and nails and hair products and things like that. Right. There's going to be a certain demographic that's going to be very interested and very likely to convert. You should add that might total up to five or six audiences total. That is a direct relation and very relatable to your targeted keywords and your audience. I should rephrase that. Very specific to your targeted keywords and your demographic. Your audiences need to be associated with the people that are going to be coming to your website. For example, if you are a plumber, it might be useful to target people that are homeowners, people that are interested in home renovation or I think there's even a plumbing service audience out there. These are relevant things that would likely be associated with a high percentage of people that would be clicking on your ads. So now once you found that out, once you've decided on those, and it might be 5 to 10, there's not going to be a whole lot. There will be a few, add those and then figure out what's interesting about that data. You might find some interesting data points that point to a high conversion rate for some things that might surprise you and then go from there, test try new things from there because that's going to be the optimization process. That's the value of having these audiences. So just looking at the clicks and impressions and you know how much cost is coming through these audiences means nothing. Having real broad wide audiences. For example, if you're a, if you make business signs, if you know the signs that people put up for businesses and you know, the brightly lit signs that are on the corner of a street to say, you know, donut shop here, stuff like that, and you're running that kind of B2B campaign and you put audiences about mothers with newborn babies as an audience absolutely irrelevant. This doesn't matter if they had a new baby. This is not going to be a direct association with the conversion rate that's related to your product or service. So hope that makes sense. I hope you understand how to act on this data because this data can be really useful but really 90% of it's useless. It's really the conversion data and the actions that are associated with these audiences that really mean the most. Alright, next we're going to move to Grace. Grace is writing in, I trimmed it up a bit so I'm going to just summarize some of this stuff. She's talking about Google's suggested searches and how to get her own businesses, her boss's business associated at the top and in order to show up and pop up on this suggested search. So her question is, I'm curious what your thoughts are on how to strategically and tactically approach this. In other words, get a desirable Google suggest, a Google autocomplete to pop up whenever people are typing into the Google bar. Specifically how do we get those shadow word suggestions that are popping up? Is this paid or is this organic or is this both? Okay, so if you're unfamiliar with what Grace is talking about, if you go into Google and start typing what is there will be a list underneath your type, your typed words to suggest what to type next. It'll autocomplete. And that's technically what it's called. It's Google Autocomplete or Google Suggest. And the question is how can we game this? How can we make this work for us? And you know, Grace has a particular boss who's interested in doing that for an advantage for their own business. You know, how can we get people to have an interest in this? And Grace, the short answer is you can't at least as far as this podcast goes, you'd have to listen to a different podcast because when it comes down to it, there is no paid avenue to make this happen. You cannot run ads, run keywords aggressively to try and have these things populate. And let me explain why. The Google autocomplete system comes from popular searches. It comes from searches that happen a lot. Sometimes it comes from your search history. So if you're signed in on Google and you have search history turned on, it will pop up. Other searches you've done in the past as these Google complete autocomplete and Google suggest suggestions that pop up. Trending searches can sometimes be a factor. New things that have recently happened, events, news. It can also be location associated. So if you're in a particular area, one area versus another might have different location. Auto suggest, autocomplete, words that pop up. And it goes further, it goes into language and certain things that are newer versus old things that will go away. So in the end, this is a pretty simple question. There is no solution. You cannot engineer Google suggest to happen through paid ads. The only route, and this is why I say you'd have to go somewhere else to hear advice for this. Because the only route to get into something like this would be to create your own trend, your own popular viral search, some way outside of the paid realm. So it'd have to be organic. So you know, you'd have to start some kind of social media thing, you know, just basically blanketing a certain area of the globe, big or small, to try and influence searches, to say do this search, do this search, you know, search for this, you know, key phrase. And it might trigger popular searches, it might trigger trending searches, geographically associated things. But I'll tell you what, I have no experience doing that and I would imagine the threshold, the bar at which to attain that autocomplete level is probably very high. And I imagine it is also curated to some degree. I imagine Google doesn't just let anything show up. It doesn't necessarily want that to become a marketing tool for businesses to try and game to have their search show up more often. Okay, so thank you for the question and we are going to round up the questions here with a big question from Ali. This is going to be a doozy. I have a lot of notes on this and I am going to start now. Ali says, hi, Chris, I'm a longtime listener the Paid Search podcast and I have to say a huge thank you. I have learned so much from you over the years. I've been managing and using Google Ads. And she doesn't want to say this hesitating because it shares a bit of both of our ages. She says she's been managing for over 20 years, which. Welcome to the club Multi decade. Glad you're here, Ali. Glad to have some company. So here's the basics of her question and I think this question is really interesting. She says, are you finding what used to work in the past not doing so well anymore? With the sheer amount of AI pushing that is happening within accounts from Google, I'm really questioning my ability to service clients. And how long will we be managers for something like this? How many other people are you hearing from that feel like this? I find it hard to believe that experience managers are being taken in by the Google narrative all the time. And I don't, and don't even get me started on Google support. I no longer feel like Google is working in the advertiser's best interests. The trust has absolutely disappeared. And that is a sad fact. It just feels like a very uncertain, scary time right now for managers on this platform. Well, Ali, I, I took your question and added it here to the list because it is something I want to bring up and I, it seems to be a topic more and more so I'm happy to address it because I, I feel like contributing thoughts to the, to, to this topic, you know, maybe will help other people kind of understand their feelings and have a little bit less worry and anxiety about this topic. And she adds one note here at the end. Thanks again for everything that you do for the community. I've been an Optio subscriber for over 3 years thanks to your recommendation. And there you go, ladies and gentlemen, again, another multi decade. Sorry, Ali. Multi decade Google Ads manager who's using Optio and solely found it here. I'm telling you, I love being the guy that introduces everyone to Optio. Wonderful tool. You can try it for free as I mentioned and as Ali tried three years ago, you can try it now for free for 28 days at opteo.com PSP that's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP. Okay, so let's go to these questions because this is, it's a heavy topic. So number one question is what works in the past doesn't work now? Yes or no? The answer is 100% yes. And what, what used to work what the way that things worked in the past. Now I'm not going to go into how things used to work because that's completely pointless now. But the reason things don't work the same way is because keywords have changed, the functioning of keywords have changed and therefore we have had to completely change the way that we build campaigns, the way that we drive traffic to our clients sites. So this is the number one reason for change in Google Ads. Of all the other changes which I'm going to talk about a little bit of that. There is nothing else that's had as much of an impact in our abilities to precisely carve out a intricate flow of a very specific funnel of traffic. And this is, it's, it's quite frustrating. So you're correct, it does not work like it used to work in the past. And let me answer the question a little bit different way. Maybe you're saying it doesn't work like it used to work in the past as in it used to be successful in the past and now it's not successful. I disagree with that. But I do have some thoughts about whether my abilities to be successful is the same for everyone. So let's go into that. Let's go into the next question that Ali asks. Questioning of your abilities. If you're a Google Ads manager and you're managing your own account or other businesses accounts, everyone has wondered is this even possible anymore? You know something's wrong. Is it because Google has changed? Is it because I've changed? Is it because the people who are searching have changed? Which of these have changed? And as far as we're able to tell and as far as we're concerned, the only thing that we can really change or manage from our end is just the ability of how we target things in Google Ads. So some industries, I have found because of the differences in the way that Google has changed things, some industries are gone. Let me give you an example. I've looked at recent Google Ads accounts and found that specific technical services, managed IT, B2B tech services, you know, multiple levels down in its complexity. Right? Not just business to business, business to business is still extremely strong. I do a lot of work in that industry, but some business to business areas that are highly technical, very specific managed it, which is people who. Well, it's a very, very lucrative industry. But I have found that it is. It was already difficult before, the volume was already low. And because of the introduction of AI, because of the change in the way that Google Ads works, the volume of our ability to target the right keywords has changed and the volume of searches and how it's happening on Google has changed. So much so that the, the little bit of Sliver of success that we could dip into before is now gone. That's probably the scariest thing that I have found is that over the decades that I've worked in Google Ads, I firmly believe that some industries are gone forever. Of being able to be successful on Google Ads. I do not think some industries have survived the change within Google and I think some industries have not survived the shift from without Google. In other words, the introduction of AI and other diversification of the way that people search for data, search for information on the Internet, I think that that has killed some industries. Another thing that makes me question my abilities and other people question their abilities is a lot of our data is gone. So now we can no longer process data in the same way that we used to be able to because we can't have specific searches flow through specific keywords with the same precision we used to have. And also our ability to measure the precision that is gone. Search term data and to some degrees this is extremely severe. I have seen accounts, not very often, but I have seen accounts that suffer from about 80% search term blindness. In other words, if they get 10 clicks, Google will only show them two, maybe one. If they get a hundred clicks, they'll only get to see 10 of those clicks, 20 of those clicks. And sometimes it's even worse than that. On even more rare occasions, the exclusion, the loss of data directly influences our ability to be successful and causes us to question whether we even can be successful. Other things like losing the physical location of where the clicks are coming from, this is absolutely a detriment to our ability to manage, makes us question our ability to be successful. We now only have what's called matched location data. We no longer have user location, physical location data. It's gone. Modified broad match, another powerful tool that we used to have, is now gone. So questioning services. Yes, I have people that talk to me in my consulting sessions that I do with agencies, with individuals, with freelancers, with individual companies big and small. That question should we just quit? I have many people that ask, should we just quit? Because it doesn't seem like we can do this anymore. Sometimes the case that I've told them is, yeah, you should. It's probably not for you anymore. That doesn't happen very often. But every now and then I do tell people I don't think that Google Ads can provide you the same volume that it used to. I don't think that the volume of searches, the volume of conversions is there anymore. And that's both because those people have moved other directions outside of google.com and the delusion of our tools within Google itself. So absolutely, I hear it all the time and it is quite frustrating. But to take a positive spin on this, there is still plenty of success. I still do this podcast. If I saw no future in Google Ads and it was at the point of absolute death, I wouldn't be doing this anymore. I still get many, many people emailing me, contacting me, looking for help. They still find Google to be the best resource for them for new business. So it is far from dead. But there are absolutely some dead ends within Google Ads now that did not used to be dead ends. And last, probably the most depressing part of this answer is this. Your question was, do other managers believe the Google narrative? Do they believe that the best thing to do is use broad match automated bidding? The best thing to do is throw in performance max and you know, just leave everything to Google and we merely guide from the top and drop in data points and asset groups and things like that? Yes, I find my best guess is probably around 75% of the people out there largely, if not fully swallow the Google narrative. They believe that the proper way to manage their Google Ads account is through the suggestions. The optimization score, automated bidding, performance max, broad keywords, maximize conversions, target cpa. That is the only way to do it. And anybody else who's still using any antiquated quote unquote ideas is doing it wrong and doesn't really know Google Ads. And why do they say that? Well, because didn't you take the certification test? Didn't you see your optimization score? The certification test says that the optimization score is very important. An optimization score says that you should add more broad keywords. The optimization score says that you should use max conversions. And they wholly believe this circular logic. And I make these conclusions based on the fact of me auditing other agencies accounts, me auditing certain businesses who have interacted with big agencies and small agencies and other freelancers that are just absolutely in the dark. And when I come across a company, just this week I came across a company I believe they were in the uk, an agency that was managing a very difficult industry and they did a good job. And in my audit I specifically said keep working with these people. They wanted to hire me. I told them not to hire me. Because when I find someone who is not drinking the Kool Aid of the Google narrative, this is a diamond, this is a gem to treasure. Because I find more and more people are just diving in headfirst and believing it and taking whatever Google's suggestion is and just doing that and assuming that's the best way forward. But I still think it's the far majority because in last story and I'll wrap it up here, I spoke with a company just this week and they said that they have been through five, six, seven different companies and everybody pretty much has said the same thing. And so I asked for them to trust me, give it one more chance, and let me do an audit of their account. And they were shocked because I was the only one who was able to speak intelligently about why their account was not working because I was the only one that could see through the matrix. And if you want to see through the matrix, you want to be able to see through all the baloney and the narrative and the stuff that's really, that really matters, but you have to look for it. I mean, that's what I talk about in my podcast here. So I thought this question was a great question. Ali, thank you for sending it in. Because if there's anything this podcast is designed to do, it is designed to help you see past the Google narrative, to help you see past all of the stuff that we're supposed to do and really get into what we should do. So thank you very much. If you'd like to learn how to see past the matrix, you can reach out to me, Chris Schaefer@chrishaeffer.com is my website. Reach out to me, chrisha.com for consulting and training and even management of your Google Ads accounts, big and small. I appreciate all of you listening and I will be here next week to share more information about how to see through the matrix of Google Ads.