← 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
I’m Sick of Scammers in Google Ads (Episode 458)
00:30:14
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today I'm going to talk about Google Ads. At the first of the show I'm going to talk about a new update from Google that anybody running Google Ads, shopping campaigns or anybody that has a newsletter that they send out apart from Google Ads should listen in. Really crazy update coming from Google recently that I want to discuss. And then later in the show I'm going to get into the main topic which is, hey, I'm sick of scammers in Google Ads. Not something that I thought I would write an episode about, but I want to talk about it. So let's dive in with this Week's show number one, starting with my friends@optio.com PSP so if you'd like to take your Google Ads to the next level, you're listening to a podcast like this where you can get tips and advice about how to get more out of your Google Ads. Well, I can tell you that there is no better place to go than Optio to try and get more done in Google without spending hours and hours grinding through the metrics trying to find the hidden gems that are buried in your account. Whether it's Google search campaigns, shopping campaigns, even performance max campaigns and also Microsoft ads is there as well. You can optimize your keywords, your ads, your bidding, your negative keywords, your search terms, everything I talk about in this show. This tool is designed to help you with it has a wonderful interface to help you prioritize what is critically important on down through the list of what is less important but still important. You can try this tool for free just because you're listening here@optio.com PSP the link is in the description. You can fill out the form and let them know that you heard about it from me here on the paid search podcast. Tell them Chris told you to come and they will give you 28 days for free. That's twice the time that you'll get if you just sign up anywhere else. So that's optio.com PSP for that free 28 day free 28 day free trial. Okay, so let's get into an announcement at the top of the show here and it's something that I was not aware of. One of my clients brought it to my attention because they received an email and I want to read this message to you that comes from Google and you can let me know what you what you think you can write into the show. Write into the show at paid search podcastmail.com leave a question, comment, feedback request, whatever you'd like. And I'm happy to discuss that on the show today. The topic, the subtopic, the top of the show topic is Google's update about and here's the title of the email. Google will automatically display relevant information from your marketing emails. So let me say that in an abbreviated sentence. Google's reading your marketing emails and they're going to use anything they learn from it to quote unquote, optimize your campaign. So this is automation to a level that we have not seen before. This is AI, this is whatever you want to call it of Google going in and subscribing to your newsletter and taking content that it reads. So you say, well Chris, that's ridiculous. I mean what could it possibly use? Well let's, let's read the report here. I'm not going to read the whole thing. You can, you can look it up if you're interested but I'll read the parts that I think really matter. And the main thing is that Google uses contents from your marketing, from your marketing email to receive information about new arrivals that you have sales, ongoing promotions and blah blah, blah. So that's where I want to stop right there. It Google can use promotions and sales from your marketing emails to add to your shopping campaigns to your search campaigns potentially. And what they do is they actually have a dedicated email address. It's, it's, it's marketing email to googmail.com so they actually that Gmail address subscribes and will be a subscriber on your marketing email and it will read links to your social media channels, specific highlighted social media content, brand images and videos, brand voice and values. And in particular what really stands out to me is upcoming or current sales and promotions. So this is pretty crazy because it, Google specifically says in their documentation that it will collect and display relevant content from what it learns and use it on search and shopping. And this includes explicitly the sales and promotions. So you know, I don't think this is great. And actually it was something that was so new I reached out to Joey Bidner who's regular on the show and he gave me his thoughts and I'll just read from what he had said. He said this kind of update signals to me that Google's going deeper into the rabbit hole of automated AI driven campaigns and getting access to more business data to achieve that. And if this is more automation, I'm not a fan. So yeah, I completely agree with Joey. This feels like a kind of a very Quiet update. I've been, I had trouble finding people talking about it. I had trouble finding documentation about it. And once I did, it's very clear. Absolutely is a deep dive into something that is, you know, it's not on your website. It's, it's kind of like a, it's not on your social. It's specifically email lists and I work with clients that send special emails to their customers, you know, exclusive lists that they curate and perhaps there will be things on there, mentioned links on there that are not for public consumption. And, and it makes me worry, you know, how can we control this? How can it affect us? How much is this going to be implemented into our campaigns? Where can we see reporting on this? Because my thought is it's just going to show up as quote, unquote, other or it's going to show up as an asset. It's not going to be specific Google Ads. Read this from your marketing email. It's not going to be documented specifically. And if you listen to this show once or a hundred times, you know, my biggest issue in Google Ads is lack of transparency, not being able to see what is this? Where did it come from? How did this get here? What does this mean? Where did this click come from? Who searched this? A lack of transparency leads to a lack of decision making in Google Ads. And if there's something happening that we can't understand, then we can't take steps to push it more or pull back or stop it or block it. I mean, not all of it's bad, but certainly what if it's good? What if we, what if we learn something from it? Maybe it turns out this is, this is great and I want to try and push this and there's no way that I can measure it. So lack of transparency is, you know, Google can do what it wants to do. Google is Google, they make their decisions, they don't ask us. And I think the least that we can expect is just tell us, tell us and account for every penny of mine that you're spending. Wherever I'm spending my money, if you find a way to make that more efficient, great. But tell me how, tell me where, tell me where that came from. And there's absolutely no information on this sheet to tell me where this is going to be reported. It just says that they'll treat it as content subject to the merchant center terms. You know, I'm not sure what that means and I'm sure if I don't know what it means, a lot of people don't know what it means. So there you have it. That's where we stand with this latest update. And again, the title of the email was Google will automatically display relevant, relevant information from your marketing emails. So we have that. So on goes the changes and updates from Google in a never ending cycle of a struggle for control from us and a struggle for relevance and being on the cutting edge for Google. So moving on into the later part of the show, which I'm leaving quite a bit, I'm not doing questions, I'm not really doing much more than just cranking right into this topic. And it's the topic of the whole show. As the title says, I'm sick of scammers in Google Ads. And I want to talk about this. And the reason I want to talk about it is because I do a lot of consulting. And when I say consulting, what I mean is I do live zoom sessions where I look at Google, Google Ads for people, I look at their account, I do an audit on their account live and I help them and I make changes and I build campaigns for them. So I, between my clients and all the audits and, and all the consulting that I do, I see a lot of accounts, I have a lot of accounts in my mcc. And so I'm exposed to a lot of things that, you know, shock me and surprise me. And there is nothing that really shocks me and makes me angry as much as scammers and maybe, maybe, perhaps liars in Google Ads. And I'm gonna explain what I mean. So what I want to talk about are four ways that I find people are most often cheated in Google Ads. And the bad part about this is who I'm talking about are not the spammers and scammers that you would think. These are not people who call you on your phone and you know, pretend they're from Microsoft or for pretend they're from Google and you know, try and tell you that your business listing has a problem or something. I'm talking about the scammers and the liars right in front of us. I'm talking about agencies, Google Ads managers, maybe even people that are working for you that whether they know it or not, are straight up lying to you. So if they don't know it, perhaps they're not. Maybe that's not the definition of lying, right? If it's ignorance. So out of their ignorance they're giving you false information. So it's not my place to tell you whether these people are liars or they're just ignorant. But I'm really tired of Seeing it and it makes me very upset to see it. And I will describe the four things that I see most commonly happen with this ignorance or straight up liars in Google Ads and what they do. So I'm sick of scammers and the number one thing that I see from scammers is they deliver junk traffic. Okay, I'm not going to go into how they do it. I mean, you can listen to the podcast and everything I describe not doing is how they do it. But you say, well Kris, why I'm paying an agency, I'm paying a freelancer or a consultant or someone to do this. Why would they do that? Well, the fact is, is that junk traffic has a massive advantage is the fact is, is that it's cheap, it's extremely cheap. When you get extremely cheap traffic, small budgets can get explosive volume. This is, this is going to boost the clicks that you get. This is going to cause a hundred dollar ad day budget to get more and more. And it always builds, it always gets more and more and more and more traffic and it looks quite impressive. It boosts the amount of clicks. And when you combine junk traffic with the potential to start acquiring spam, which I consider to be different, junk traffic is traffic that's just, you know, unintended traffic, unqualified traffic, whether it's coming from the wrong area of the world or it's searching the wrong thing, whatever it is, it's, it's worthless to you. There's no value to you. Now spam is a bad player in that junk market area who's running some kind of bot or some kind of system that automatically searches and clicks on your ad and fills out your form on your website, there's a lot of reasons why things that like that can happen. So when you combine junk traffic, which is worthless traffic, and you combine that with spam traffic, which is a bad intending player, now you have junk traffic that can actually get you conversions. And these are fake conversions. These are not real. It absolutely is true. I cannot tell you how many times I jump in and see accounts where people are saying my agency's sending me reports where I'm getting amazing cost per conversion numbers and my conversion rates are phenomenal. But I just don't. All I get is a bunch of spam calls or I get a bunch of, you know, people from outside of the country or outside of the state, or they don't even seem like they know who I am or why they're even calling or why they're filling out the form right this is someone who's suffering from junk plus spam. And the part that really makes me mad is that the unknowing business owners, marketing managers who are getting these reports, they get glowing reports. When you are a victim of this scammer in Google Ads, you're going to see a report that has extremely low cpc. Maybe you're, you know, maybe you'd run campaigns before in Google Ads and you were getting $5, $10, $15 clicks and now you hire this company and they're getting 60, 60 cent clicks, 40 cent clicks, 20 cent clicks. You're like, wow, this is amazing. How are they? And then look at your conversion rates. Your conversion numbers are phenomenal. But for some reason the bottom line isn't moving. You're not getting more sales. In fact, your secretary or your office staff is complaining about the quality of calls or lack of closing rates or just straight up weird calls. No one's on the phone, or it's a robotic voice on the phone or something. If this sounds familiar to you, you may be a victim of this scamming, you know, and, and like I said, I'm not. I don't know if it's willful or ignorant, but either way it is destructive to the person that's paying that Google Ads bill number two. Number two is this. And this is something again, that is pretty innocent. But the most common thing that I see, I just saw this today. I was doing a coaching call with someone and they had had an agency months and months ago set up a Google Ads account and they set it up in such a way that the only value, the only value this company ever spent on Google Ads was coming from brand traffic. So they took one campaign, one ad group, dropped their brand keywords in there and then a couple of obscure keywords and the only traffic they got was from brand. And guess what, the metrics look great. So here, so, so here we are. And when I say brand traffic, what I mean is the company name, right? The company's name is ABC Parts or something. ABC Widgets. And that's the actual keyword that the scammer agency put in there. And whether it was on purpose or just out of ignorance, I don't know. But the point is, is that this company paid hundreds, thousands of dollars and the only value they got was just bringing people who had already heard about their business, their widget company and come back to their website and they paid money for that. We could debate about whether that's of no value or some value. It's not the point. I bet if I, well, I know I asked, I asked this guy, is this what you wanted? Was this explained to you about this is what this was doing? Absolutely not. He immediately was upset. We immediately turned off the campaign. So there's two parallels here that are happening. The first one was junk traffic, particularly junk traffic when paired with spam. What does that do? That brings great metrics. The conversion rate looks great. The cost per click looks great. The number of clicks looks great. Massive movement in the metrics looks amazing. In a report on paper, it looks amazing. Brand traffic, what's that look like? Numbers look amazing. Very low cost per click. Big, big click numbers. Because the cost per click is so low and the, the CPC is cheap. So small budgets can go a long way. So those two things make you, and this is now if you understand that, you understand where I'm at now, is this willful ignorance? Is, is this, is this just ignorance or is this a liar? Is this just a flat out liar? And I'm, I'm sick of seeing that. I only have so much doubt about how much ignorance there is. I see this so much, it blows me away. And so that's why I just want to talk about this topic so that you can be aware. This is how you get scammed in Google Ads by these trash agencies that pretend they know what they're doing and they set you with, set you up with junk or brand traffic. And then number three, this is the third thing, companies that set you up with false conversion numbers. Okay? And I know I'm writing a playbook here. So if there's any scammers out there that want to get in the business of scamming on Google Ads, I'm afraid I'm writing a great playbook here, but I think I'm doing more good by educating the people that you're looking for, for clients. So if that's you, well, screw you. I'm not talking to you. I'm talking to the business owners, Business owners out there. What this number three is, is the false conversion metric. So what they do is they set up conversion numbers that will fire when non critical things happen on your website. So when someone lands on a website and they're, they click on a link three times, right? They click services page, then they click the about us page and then they click the contact page, right? Boom. That's a conversion to this slimy level of management. That's a conversion. Even though you may have never gotten a phone call, a contact form, nothing, all they did was click around a couple Times they never submitted a form. They may never submit a form, but they clicked three times, four times, two times. Whatever interaction on a website derives no revenue for a business. Other things could be tracking add to cart as a conversion. Other things could be people viewing an about us page as a conversion. There are a lot of ways to set up conversions that don't actually represent a sale, a purchase, a lead, a phone call, and thus the report that is generated once a month. Guess what that report looks like? If you've been listening, you know, the common denominator here is what Great metrics. The metrics look great. So you can see. I really start to doubt whether this is on ignorance. And this seems purposeful because the scammer always benefits from a great report. They always benefit from the business owner seeing a glowing report that they themselves generated and not knowing any better. Just saying, great job. You know, I don't understand. We must be in a slow season. For some reason. Our leads are really drying up. Our sales are drying up, numbers are bad. Must be a slow season. We'll go. I'll tell you what, we'll throw another 10,000 at this. Oh, you guys will make more money because of that. Okay, well, that's fine. You guys are doing a good job. Obviously, from this report, I can tell that you guys are doing a phenomenal job. Look at that cost per click. Look at that, look at that click through rate. Look at those conversions. Just wonderful. Here's another 10,000. Right? So it seems less and less doubtful because of this positive metric generated from these tactics that it, you know, that it's, it's not on purpose. So number four is the most destructive. The most destructive thing, because when you add this to any one of these other three, it only accelerates the damage being done. And this is where. This is what they say. They say, well, sir, ma'am, what we really need is we need more budget. You know, we're not able. The reason things are slow is we're getting a lot of good leads. But your competitors are spending more. Your. This is a busy season. You know, we need more volume. We. If you give us another two times, three times, four times, five times more budget, that's really what's gonna do it. Because, and here's the lie. Volume equals value. If you spend more, you'll get more and more of the good thing. And that's not a lie because. Because volume doesn't lead to more value. It's a lie to think that volume leads to efficiency, that somehow more spend leads to better Cost per conversion, better roas. That is not the case. More spend just leads to more clicks. But if you're getting junk traffic, if you're getting brand traffic, if you're getting fake conversion numbers, you know, more spend only leads to zero value in that case. So when you pair more budget, more volume with more junk, more brand, more fake conversion numbers, now you've got a whirlwind of waste. You've got junk traffic. You potentially have some of your office staff, some salespeople answering phone calls that are a total waste of their money, following up on leads that are never gonna go through because it wasn't even a real person. You can see the destruction and the amount of anger that this gives me. This is not a rare thing. It happens a lot. And it happens much more than I wish it did. I wish it happened zero. And the best I can do, as I've done for many years and almost 500 episodes now, is to try and educate you about what to watch out for, what to, what to do about this. And before I sign off, I want to, I want to say this. Opteo.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. Try them out. They'll change the way you're managed. You manage your Google Ads account, that's opteo.com PSP I want, I want to say this. There, there are some agencies out there. I've noticed since 2020 they've really leaned into this automated kind of thing where set it and forget it has become the standard. Throw broad keywords at it, put it on automated bid, ask for a big budget and it'll just work out, right? It'll just work out it. So I feel like the amount of scamming, the amount of lying, the amount of fibbing has increased because the idea of set it and forget it, that everybody's account with enough money will succeed. I feel like that lie has increased in volume exponentially since 2020. If you go back to my 2020, 2021 podcasts, you'll hear us. It was me and Jason for a while and now it's just me. You'll hear us and then me talk more and more about the lack of control, you know, particularly what happened to our keywords back in 2021. You know, what happened to search terms, the update with the ui. So there's something trickling down that's unfortunately being consumed by agencies. And the fact is, is that success in Google Ads is not a guarantee. No amount of money, no amount of just wishing it will make success happen. It's purposeful, it's strategic. It happens as you progress through the optimization process. Phase one, phase two, Phase three and phase four. So I hope this serves as a warning that you can see through the BS that is thrown out there from scammers, liars, or just ignorant, whether it be willful or non unwillful ignorance from Google Ads managers out there now. Thank you guys for being a part of the show. If you'd like to speak with me, you can find my information at chrischaefer. Com. Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.