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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
Improving The Quality of Leads (Episode 445)
00:37:01
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Unknown Speaker
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Chris Schaefer
Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and let's talk about Google Ads. I'm going to answer a couple questions from listeners and then we're going to have Joey Bidner jump in and discuss a strategy that is absolutely worth trying. So we're going to have that later in the show. But first let's jump in with a question comes to us from Jeff in New Hampshire. And before I do that, I want to tell you about optio.com PST so that is the special link that you go to to try the best Google Ads management software for free for 28 days. You can try this amazing tool for 28 days and it will help you get more done in Google Ads than you ever thought possible. I was recently talking to an agency that was trying to figure out, you know, Kris, how to do we make decisions on, you know, how many accounts our Google Ads managers can handle. You know what, what's, what is too many, how much workload can be done? Well, I'll tell you, when it comes to the workload and checking budgets and bids and all the things that go into Google Ads, there is one tool that can help you get all of that done faster. Whether you're managing one account or 200 accounts, I think optio.com PSP is your solution. So if you're an agency, absolutely check out this tool to help your employees become more efficient. And if you're just running your own account, absolutely this will help you get more done so that you can manage your business rather than worrying about managing Google Ads. All right, let's jump in with the first question. Jeff from New Hampshire, he says, hi, Chris, I'm not sure if you talked about this in the past or not, but I wanted to submit a question for the show that I struggle with a lot at my agency. I work with both B2B and B2C clients and in both scenarios, I struggle to deter leads from people who don't have the necessary budget for our clients work or services. So to pause here, basically he's having issue here with traffic coming to his accounts that are looking for services but can't afford said services. Right. They are not qualified once they reach out to the client. Turns out, oh gosh, I can't afford that. Right. Absolutely an issue. Qualifying your leads is absolutely a major issue. So continuing, other than regular scrubbing, adding negative keywords, excluding certain lower household incomes, what are some of your strategies you've used for avoiding someone who just doesn't have the budget to spend that our client's looking for in a lead. So. Great question, Jeff. Thank you so much for this. This is absolutely a critical issue and I find it to be very common in services, particularly home services that are not emergencies. Right. You, you want to do some landscaping or you want to get new windows or, you know, something like that. Something that is not, hey, my toilet's leaking all over the bathroom. Right? That's something that you're just like, I need to get this fixed. This is not really something that's optional. Right. Obviously that is a different situation than someone who's wanting to add another wing onto their house or something like that. So putting aside the issue that some people are just ignorant about pricing, right. It, they just don't know that home improvement, you know, some things just cost more than they realize. So putting that aside, we can't fix that, but we can certainly try and drive traffic that is more likely to be educated about pricing services. You know, what to expect. This isn't something that they're absolutely caught blind about what to expect or how much to pay. So the first tip I have on this is I often limit the most common high volume searches. So I mentioned landscapers before. Let's, let's go with landscapers. I might limit how much I'm targeting and getting clicks for just the word landscapers or landscapers near me. Right. This seems like a very obvious funnel into a much longer funnel. Right. If you just do a search for landscapers, you might quickly end up doing more searches for landscapers for this service or landscapers that do this or landscapers that offer this. Right. So this is something I typically do where I don't want 90% of my spend going to just the same very bland kind of searches. I try and really diversify my traffic by avoiding these repetitive very high, you know, high, high, low funnel. Right? They're, they're low funnel searches, but they're technically kind of high in the low funnel aspect of marketing. So limiting that next, rather than just limiting, I now try and branch out in areas that are more specific. So again, landscaping, I might try and focus on things like landscaping companies for retaining wool, new home landscaping services. Okay, so this is someone who has done their initial search and now they're looking for retaining services for a specific thing. I very often love searches that have the word for in them. Right. F O R for, because it implies purpose, it implies a very specific project. It implies that you know what you want and you're looking for someone to do that. Right. Rather than just the word Landscapers, Landscapers near me. This tends to be a lot less traffic and it might be a little bit more expensive. But as you start to branch out and try and diversify your traffic outside of that same old search, you'll find all kinds of ways that people search that aren't covered with just the word landscapers. So a nice wider kind of search campaign rather than just 1 foot wide and 20, 20 foot deep. Right? We don't want to go 20 foot deep with a 11 foot wide search on landscapers. Right. We want something that's very wide reaching but doesn't necessarily have to go super deep into each one of them. You sample across all the different ways that people search. Now the next one, my next tip is probably obvious, but you really want to avoid searches that contain the word cheap, affordable, discount. You know, these are things if you're struggling with the quality, the affordability of your service for some people obviously cut those out. Look at the search terms, make sure you're not getting things that would imply they're looking for a discount of some kind. Okay, that one's easy. Now the next two a little more complicated. I would suggest that you, if you're struggling with this, don't try and hit first position all the time. Okay? When you're in first position, and I mean absolute top position, you are going to get insta clicked a lot more. You're going to get clicked on and there's not a whole lot of reading your ad copy at this point. You're just first click, boom. I especially find that this is going to happen a lot when it's mobile devices, right? They're often, you know, just tap, tap, tap, tap. Do a quick search click. The first thing may not be a whole lot of reading, a lot of volume, a lot of clicking, a lot of just kind of casual research. I find that it's a little bit different if you are happening happen to show up on computers. Computers. 10, you know, computer searchers tend to be a little more thought forward rather than just impulse. So that's very nice. I would encourage keeping yourself from trying to dominate first position, certainly in the more generic terms. Number five, this one might seem a little counterintuitive. So it depends on whether you're really having a problem or not. But I want you to consider pre qualifying your searches and pre qualifying your clicks more specifically in your ad copy. So you have keywords like landscapers near me. More generic terms maybe in the second line of your ad copy it mentions landscaping services starting at $2,000 right. I mean, put something a little aggressive there. Put some kind of, you know, like, you know, you're not going to take a project. Most projects are going to start at this amount. Put that in there. And, and don't just do like, you know, $sign 2k write it out $sign 2, 000. Maybe even put, you know,.00. I mean, make it obvious. Pre qualifying in your ad copy is a good way for people to, you know, kind of just. I'm not gonna click on that. Obviously, you know, that's expensive. I was just looking for someone to pick up my leaves. Right. Suddenly these landscaping services immediately make themselves known by the fact that we're not picking up leaves here. We're building new flower gardens for you. Okay, I hope that helps. Five tips there. Appreciate your reading writing in Jeff. And if those of you who listen to the podcast haven't written in to me before, I appreciate questions. I always try and answer them when they, when they come in. If they, they fit the podcast topic well enough, you can write into me on my email. Paid search podcastmail.com paid search podcastmail.com now keep in mind, if you want to reach out to me, Chris Schaefer, the Google Ads service provider, you can find me Chris Schaefer.com the link is in the description of this podcast. So I have another question. This one's coming from Down Under. They have Matt from Sydney who writes in, longtime listener, great podcast. Just thought I'd share my thoughts on competitors. Okay, so first of all, Matt is coming in and he's gonna, he's gonna talk about something that I consider to be rather a hot topic. I have some pretty strong opinions about competitors and Matt is, is deciding to share some additional thoughts in his experiences with competitor campaigns. If you don't know what that means, I'll explain that in a little bit. But let's continue on with Matt's question. I have a dedicated competitor campaign and I don't include calls in the campaign goal settings. I add negatives for things like login and phone number. And I also measure conversion performance in a CRM. That's a client relation management system. So then with these competitor campaigns, your main issue is obviously higher cost per click due to the quality score of the keywords. But I've had great wins over the years with larger organizations where the clicks are more expensive and conversion rate is much lower. But the competitors have a stronger brand, so it's worth it. Obviously, this is a campaign you do later in your Google Ads process. It's not a part of your core launch strategy. And by the way, P.S. i couldn't agree more with turning off search partners and dedicated brand campaigns. Okay, thank you Matt for the question. So multiple points Matt comes up with here and talks about, and some I want to point out specifically because what he lays out I think is a smart approach to a competitor campaign. Let's take it step by step because I don't think Matt really asks a question here. He makes a few points and I think it's, I think it's worth going through because it's not my opinion. I'm looking at what Matt said and I agree with it. So I appreciate the input. Number one, he mentions not mixing your competitor campaign and your main search campaign because he says specifically a dedicated competitor campaign. So that's the first thing to understand here. If you're going to, if you're going to advertise against competitors specifically, you know, other competitor names, things like that, do it in an isolated campaign, don't mix it with your main campaign and also have a dedicated budget for this so that you can control how much spend. All of this is important because the number of searches is certainly, if you go after much, much bigger competitors with, you know, a household name kind of thing, massive marketing projects where it's going to get tons and tons of searches every day, it could blow up your budget very quickly. So it's important to have a dedicated budget, a dedicated campaign just for this competitor. Now the other thing to consider is he mentions not doing it at the top of your Google Ads marketing strategy. This is not a day one out the gate kind of thing. The reason for that I think is because you may not have budget for something like this once you realize, oh wow, my normal core keywords are way too expensive, more expensive than I anticipated and I need the budget in my normal search campaign. I don't have budget right now for competitor campaigns. I mean, there could be a lot of reasons, but this is absolutely true. I don't suggest that you start that as part of your core alpha, you know, beginning campaign that you launch. I don't, I don't typically find that it's particularly useful. It's, it's an, it's an add on, it's an optional boost to what you're currently doing. Okay, so next he mentions where you're going to make sure that you're not wasting money and you know, gonna make sure that you measure things appropriately. He mentions adding negatives. I think that's very important. I want to harp on that for a second. Blocking obvious competitors, customers. Okay, so these people who are doing searches like competitor name plus the word login or competitor name plus the word phone number, this is absolutely important because they definitely don't want to talk to you. If they click your link or if they call the number in your ad, you have just absolutely wasted money because those people are just current customers just trying to get to their login to find out what their quote was or if their package is shipped yet or something. So it's a bad idea to get anything having to do with an obvious current customer. Okay, so in that same point of view, let me say this. A even smarter competitor campaign that you might consider doing is a campaign where you actually target your competitor's brand, but only do it in a way that also contains the word review or prices or alternative or discount or. Or sign up, something like that. So this is a campaign where, sure, you're targeting your competitors, but you're only targeting people who are in the buying process. So if someone types, you know, ABC Company reviews, they're probably not a current customer. They're probably doing some research before they purchase, before they continue forward with their purchasing process. Great time to pop in there and possibly show an ad. So this, this is absolutely a very consolidated, very tight kind of way to do competitor marketing because it's, you know, it's going to be very limited spend compared to what you would usually do. So really good stuff. Thanks for the email, Matt. I appreciate that. And again, if you'd like to send in a question, comment, some feedback about the show, I appreciate it. You can do that at paid search podcastmail.com so, as promised, I've got a word from Joey Bidner, who's going to share some great strategy ideas that you, you know, it's always good. So certainly in the new year, you're thinking about new things to do. How do you plan out 2025? It's a great way to get started with some new, fresh ideas to expand your campaign. Joey, take it away.
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Unknown Speaker
Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I want to talk about something that might get me banned from this podcast forever. It's a. It's a topic that I know many are not a fan of. It's a strategy that gets a bad rap because it's often misused, but I find it's honestly the unsung hero for a few very specific scenarios. And I want to talk today about DSA campaigns. That's dynamic search ads. Now, dynamic search ads are typically, again, misused because you know, usually people first approach them when they get, you know, a recommendation from their Google rep saying oh, create a catch all campaign with, with dsa. And all that's done is, you know, basically is an all web page catch all, which just gets a lot of brand and it's junk. But I want to talk today about using it for two specific scenarios, one in E commerce and one for lead generation. So just to take two steps back for anybody who's not familiar with what a DSA campaign is, unlike search campaigns, there are no keywords, right? A DSA campaign, basically you give Google your webpage. It can be a specific web page or a collection of web pages and Google will use essentially your kind of like SEO rankings. Like it will use everything that the crawler can read so your headlines, the topic and content in the page and it will make matches to search queries based on the content on the page. Okay. So you know, typically in the past you hear a lot of people using it for keyword research. If you don't understand maybe who your target audience or what your audience is typing, you could use DSA because you don't really have a lot of control over the search terms. So you could get pleasantly surprised sometimes on what can you can get matched for. But for the most part the way that it was misused was people would just do all pages of my website and you'd end up just getting a lot of brand traffic and a lot of random junk. Now there are a lot of controls in DSA campaigns that we're going to get into the structure later. But I want to first talk about two scenarios that I honestly love using it for. So the first for E commerce. Okay. So the one problem with Google Shopping is users are sent to a specific product page all the time and it's not always in the best interest of the person searching to send them to specific product page. If somebody is higher funnel in their search journey, meaning they're not yet looking for a specific product, but rather they're looking for a category of products. They're still in their browsing phase. It's in their best interest to actually send them to maybe a collection page, right? Because they're just looking for a store that sells this specific thing. I'll use an example. If you were selling let's say high end product kitchen knives, right? Like Japanese, Japanese knives which are very expensive products and somebody just types in Japanese knives, sending them to a specific product doesn't really do them any good. They want again they want to go to A page that's got a collection of products that they can browse through. And that's where search comes in because we can control where they land. Now creating search campaigns for higher funnel strategies are tricky. There are a lot of maintenance, there are a lot of work. And let's be honest, higher funnel campaigns are a smaller piece of the strategy, right? Not every account even needs them. But when you do need them, it's important that we have a system that is, you know, gets the job done and is easy to manage. And that's where I find DSA fits in because we can tell Google, okay, Google, here is my collection page, right? And you can use, you can use any collection page of products. It doesn't always have to just be, you know, text based pages, right? It can just be your Shopify collection page of all the products that relates to either that brand you want to show up for. If somebody's, you know, in that search for a brand, they don't know what product they want yet or just a style of products. So typically what I do, and I'll use the knife example again is I will have a campaign that's meant for high funnel and it will one, I'll use the collection pages for, let's say Japanese knives or German knives and those will be specific ad groups and then I'll have another ad group where it's just the brand of a specific knife. Right? Because people searching for a specific brand, again they don't know exactly what product they want that that's what shopping will be for, right. Sending them to just a collection page of that brand or that category of product can be really powerful. You'll typically also get slightly lower CPCS because it is a higher funnel search. Right. If you are trying to use search for the low funnel stuff like specific product models, like it's way too expensive, it's, it's not worth doing. Right? This is where you need to catch yourself. When you're starting to do search in an E commerce setting, you really need to pick it for its lane. I do not necessarily like using search all that often for granular product searches because it's going to be more expensive than shopping because that's just the nature of search. The CPCS are technically typically higher and shopping does a great job at that, you know, granular level of low funnel. But for higher funnel I like search for this purpose. Now how do we use dsa? So the first thing I like to do before I even get into how we're going to segment it, you want to make sure your website is crawlable, right, that you're going to show up for the search terms you want. And there is a way to check that if you use the Keyword Planner. What's great about Keyword Planner is it gives you the option to throw in your URL, right? So what I like to do is just to make sure you know, the SEO is up to par. To get the DSA results I want, I'll take that collection page, whatever page I want, and I'll throw it in Keyword Planner and make sure you select like, you know, this URL only and it will crawl that page and it'll show you what, what that page triggers keywords for search terms for. So you can get a sense of, okay, like this page is going to roughly get me the terms that, that I want. So once it passes that test and you go into, you know, your dynamic ad targets, you have three options. So the first option you have for your targeting is search categories. Now, a search category is basically what Google has crawled your website for. Now you don't really have control over this. This is just what the crawlers have identified. Your, your website is what it's available to see. So if you don't see anything here, it usually means you need to submit your website to, to your search search console, which is like Google's like SEO portal or in your campaign settings there's also a toggle button for like DSA targets. You might need to just turn that on and then you'll see your pages here. But anyways, you'll see all kinds of categories and this is where you can, you know, most of the time I find what I need here, but you don't always get exactly the category you might want. But you know, this is where you'll see those higher funnel categories of, okay, Japanese knife, that could be a category or, or the certain brand you're looking for. So those will usually be the first place I go. If you have something there, great, select one, throw it in the DSA target, then right under that. In dynamic ad targets, you have specific webpage. Now this is where you get to do two things. You can either use an exact URL, which I will then throw the collection page URL in there, or you can create a rule that targets specific pages. So you can say if the URL contains a certain modifier. Now this can be a little dangerous because let's say hypothetically you want to target a brand, right? And you put the name of that brand as your URL target. What it's going to do is it's going to target all the URLs that have that brand in it, which might mean you end up getting a lot of those specific product low funnel matches where you'll get a search for that product and it will go to that page, which isn't a problem. But again, that's what shopping is for. So I won't use this one as much as just the exact URL or the categories. What you don't want to ever do is the last option that you'll see in dynamic ad Targets, which is the checkbox for all web pages. This is what your Google reps want you to do and this is what gets you all that junk. So definitely do not do that. Now before you know, you click save. The last thing that you really want to make sure you do is at the top of the page in this dynamic ad targets area you will see negative dynamic ad targets. This is really important because you want to negative your brand terms. Because even if you pick a specific collection page or no matter how granular you get with your structure, you still always have the opportunity to trigger for your brand terms because every webpage is there's your brand that's crawlable somewhere. So make sure you add a negative target for your brand name. And I usually like to also negative target things like blog pages or about us or the things you really don't want to send users to. But for the most part when you, when you use this option of the specific URL or the categories, they don't go there anyways. You'll typically see the blogs and all that other junk get traffic if you just do that all web pages category thing. So for E commerce, that's what I really love DSA for. Oh, before I go to lead generation, I do want to mention how you can quality control your your search terms because one thing people don't realize is you can see search terms at the ad target level. So remember how I was just saying, okay, we can control if we want to search, if we want to use our exact URL or those ad categories. Well, when you go into your ad group, let's say it's the ad group for a specific brand. And in that ad group you're going to have, you know, the category for the exact URL or sorry, the dynamic ad target for the exact URL and the dynamic ad target for the category that Google gave you, that list of, you can hit the little checkbox next to either of them. And when you hit that checkbox in the blue bar that appears above it, there's the search term button. Just like how we can look at the search terms for specific keyword, you can look at the search terms for a specific ad target. And this is huge because then we can test which ad targets are more effective. Is it the ad categories or is it the exact URLs? And sometimes it's either or. And then I'll usually stick with one of the two because you will usually get better results in one versus the other. And I honestly am blown away at the quality. Often, often blown away by the quality. Okay, so now I want to switch over to lead generation. So the times that I use it for lead generation are definitely fewer and far between. But I want to use an example of, of a consulting call that I had recently where I had a client that was explaining to me a, it was a really smart marketer. Okay? This gentleman was a really smart marketer and he's got a really good Google Ads account and he really understood that you often need to go higher funnel at times, right? When you have an account that's pretty big and you've really, you know, your, your lower funnel, you know, your, your keyword campaigns, your people searching for exactly what you offer. Once that really gets saturated, you can't really push it much further. You need to go higher funnel and start going for those searches where people are not necessarily yet looking for the exact problem or the exact product you offer, but they're searching for fixes to the problem, you know, they're searching for their problem searches, you know, and one of the structures they were going to do was this very well thought out, robust structure of using their, their blog posts to trigger, to match the searches for those information searches. You know, how do I fix this thing in my house? And they offer a service that would be that service that would fix it for you, right? So they were really wanting to target those like how to searches. And it was going to be like a really huge structure where, you know, they had like hundreds of blogs and every blog is going to have its own ad group and every ad group was going to have its own set of keywords and it was going to be like a ton. And I just said for this, why don't you try dsa? Because your blog has a lot of rich content and because it's focused on a specific problem, there's a really good chance that Google is going to be able to actually do a half decent job matching to those queries. And what you could do is you could still have the same like ad group structure if you want where there's an ad group for each one of your, for each one of those specific blogs. Or you can kind of bucket them and still use the, the category function or the exact URL function because within an ad group it will still go to the specific pages of those of those targets. So you can kind of consolidate a little bit. And the best part about it is it when you're going higher funnel again, it's a bit of an experiment that you, you don't want to, I hate to say it, but you don't want to do too much heavy lifting. Sometimes you want to just test the waters to see if anything is worth exploring further and spending more resources on. And DSA is a great way to, to just dip your toe in the water, see what kind of search volume is out there. Also get some experimental, you know, you don't know exactly what people are searching when it comes to those how to's. You want to see how they're searching. But then also just being able to see, you know, do the, do they convert what the average CPC is for them. So then you can, once something proves concept okay, then yes, it makes sense to, you know, switch over to standard search and run a keyword campaign and, and go more focused and hard at it. But I really like DSA for just getting off the ground running and doing it in a, in a really focused manner that still gives you good control. You still get really transparent insights in regards to search terms which I think a lot of people don't realize that you can see search terms at the ad target level. Okay. Like I find that's huge. And you can still add negative keywords. You know, you can still add, yeah, you can still add negatives. So I find when used right, it's truly a win win. And yeah, I'd love to hear what you all think. If you have some questions or you want to share your experience with DSA, hop in the YouTube comment section and let me know how, how you're running your DSAs and I'll be happy to kind of go back and forth about it. So yeah, back to you, Chris. See you later.
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Chris Schaefer
All right, thanks Joey. Great information. Hope you guys take advantage of that. And if you'd like to reach out to me, chrishaefer.com you can also reach out to Joey, joeybidner.com or just stay tuned right here. I will be back next week with another episode full of Google Ads tips and suggestions for getting more out of your campaigns. See you guys next week.