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The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
Most Advertisers Get Audience Bid Adjustments Wrong (Episode 468)
00:35:42
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Joey Bidner
Foreign.
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Chris Schaefer
Hello, and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and I'm going to talk about Google Ads as I always do. That is where you get the most concise 30 minutes of Google Ads advice that I think you can get anywhere. That was the purpose of the podcast when I created it years and years ago, and that's what I'm still doing now. So be sure and subscribe if you are interested in keeping up to date with strategies and all kinds of things you need to know to get your Google Ads performing better. This week the topic is about why I think most advertisers get audience bid adjustments wrong. I'm going to have my friend Joey Bidner jump in. He's going to do a quick segment about audience bid adjustments and then I'm going to follow up with five key points that solidify what Joey's talking about and why I agree and sometimes disagree with Joey's assessment. So, uh, let's jump into it. This podcast, as all of my podcasts are brought to you by optio.com PSP if you would like to try the tool that does everything from A to Z in Google Ads now, that may not be what you're interested in. You say, chris, I don't want the tool that does everything. I just want to do this. I just want to be able to get some decent reporting, or I want to get an email alert if my ads stop working, or I want to, uh, see what the best keywords are because I don't really have time to go through everything. I just need some kind of summary alert to let me know what I should pause, what I should change. You're in the right place. It does all of those things. Or if you just want it to do one thing, it can. It is encompassing across every spectrum of Google Ads that you need it to help you with. And the thing is, it helps you make decisions. It gives you a internal dashboard in Optio to help you make these decisions and logically decide. Is this what's best for you? One of the things we're going to talk about today is audience bid adjustments. And maybe you don't know which audience you should bid up, down, or possibly remove or even add a new audience. That's the kind of thing Optio looks at and helps you to make decisions on. You can try the tool for 28 days. That's an extended free trial. If you go to opteo.com PSP use the chat box, tell him you heard about it from me. Chris Schaefer on the paid search podcast and they'll give you that extended free trial. It's twice the time you would get if you just sign up anyplace else. That's optio.com PSP all right, so we always, most of the time, start with a question. That's what I'm going to start with today. I'm going to talk to Ruda. Rudra. Rudra. I'm gonna go with Rudra Rudra, who sent in a question as you can. You can send in your questions by going to paid searchpodcast.com or you can email me directly. Paid search podcastmail.com now those are for people who want to send in questions and comments and feedback about the show. You can reach out to me because there's sometimes confusion about this. My website, if you'd like to speak with me about management consulting is Chris Schaefer dot com. That's where you can sign up for my training and management if you're interested as well. All right. Rudra says. Hi, Chris, longtime listener. Just got a new account to work with in the. Now listen, B2B leak detection sensor and system where we're selling building owners and multifamily building owners. This specific leak detection system. Okay, so this is a very complex question that's packed in really shortly. So just make sure you understand this is a B2B leak detection lead generation search campaign that Rudra is focusing on here and specifically building owners. All right. And he says, I'm in a conundrum. The niche keywords, long tail keywords I'm targeting show that they are not eligible because there's no search volume. Yeah, that's a problem. But then when I try broader keywords, even in exact match or manual, I get generic search terms and then I get really high CPCs for that. Yeah, I understand. So he goes on and says, how should I go about this? Would really appreciate your insights, especially for B2B businesses and how Google Ads works for them. Since this is my first B2B account, I mainly work in E commerce. Okay, so let's, let's summarize the problem, then we'll get into the solution. First issue is targeting exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish. Specifically lead generation for leak detection B2B building owners. There's no volume that is not searched. Okay, stop right there. Not a surprise. Okay, so Anyone who's advertising B2B or anything where you have a service and then you add on a specific demographic industry, you know, anybody in a certain, a certain part of any Business, you say, well, I want to sell widgets, but I really want to sell widgets to the people that need them to do this. With those widgets, you immediately are going to run into a problem 90% of the time. Most of the time, people do not search with their intent on how to use said widget for a specific purpose. So, for example, you're not going to have people searching, I need a leak detection center for my multiple homes or hotels that I manage, or Airbnb properties that I sell or something like that. It is not the way people search. And specifically, there might even be searches around it. But Google is not great at finding these needles in a haystack and being able to say this exact match keywords. I want to target those random things that happen once in a million doesn't happen. Okay, so second problem. Second problem is there was volume on the second try with a broader aspect, but no value in the traffic. So Rudra came through, tried to broaden the scope, ended up getting stuff where it was actually getting clicks, but there's no value in those clicks. It was completely off topic. And then third, again, tried more volume, something different entirely, but then the searches were not relevant at all. Okay, so multiple tries, multiple failures. I totally understand. So let's go through my suggestion on a solution for this. And this is gonna be something a lot of people are gonna be dealing with. Anything in the B2B spectrum where you need to pretty much exclude everyone. You need to exclude everybody that's not in your little tiny 10% target, right? There might be an entire industry interested in leak detection, but not what you're looking for. You want that tiny little 10% right in the middle. That's only someone looking for a leak detection system, right? Not. Not just do I have a leak? All right, so here we go. Tactic number one, Target the problem. Okay? This is something that I would suggest doing with Broad match. Okay, completely ignore the B2B aspect. Do not include anything about hotels or Airbnb or, you know, any kind of office building or, you know, some rental properties, things like that. No, absolutely not. Just go out there and try and find people who are looking to, you know, how to have some type of leak detection center sensor system, you know, how can I monitor leaks? How to monitor leaks? What is a way to monitor leaks? Best way to monitor leaks. These are people who have a problem. They. They have not found the solution. They're researching a system, a solution. Okay, so target the problem. Number two tactic now in a separate campaign, probably target the solution so this would be something like leak detection system, leak detection sensors, water leak sensors. These very likely would need to be. I mean, it depends on how much tolerance you have to play around with some junk searches. But if you have very little tolerance and very low budget, you know, and you really can't play around, it's a very short window of success that you're going to have to go with probably exact match because there's gonna be a lot of people looking for plumbers, people trying to find out do they have a leak under their house, trying to find out if they have a leak under the sink, how to detect leaks under a sink. You know, you don't want that. So you might have to go with exact match on this. But the third tactic, and you may have already guessed it, is you don't use B2B searches on any of those. You do not include hotel at all. So those are completely separated from any kind of B2B. They're just people looking for systems. And here's the thing, that might be your only two options. That might be only two options. Your third tactic is once you've launched these and run these for a while, then if possible, you might find some searches within those first two tactics that turn out to be really good B2B leak detection sensor lead keywords. Okay, so you might be running these and you realize, oh, people say this, they say, you know, corporate or enterprise leak detection center. You know, I'm making up keywords here. But you don't know what those keywords are. You have no way of knowing. You obviously can't find them. So your first two tactics is to build separate funnels, get the right traffic flowing in through each one of those. Then sometimes in one of those funnels, a diamond will drop down and. And you'll say, oh, that's a good search. That might be your third tactic. You may be able to get that third tactic to bring in that exact traffic. You set up a third campaign that's targeting these really good diamond folk, like a needle in a haystack kind of thing. You didn't think of this keyword. It's not something you had any research on before, but it comes through the search terms. You find it, you target it specifically. It might only be two or three keywords total. So I hope that's useful. It is a very difficult industry. And the secret to building a good B2B campaign is sometimes you build it like you're not managing B2B. Okay, that might be shocking to you, but in order to build a good B2B campaign. You may not know what those B2B searches are, and you just have to target everything as close to the core as you can. And then when you hit the bullseye, when you hit dead center, you're, oh, perfect. Pluck that out of one of the Tactic one, Tactic two campaigns and put it into Tactic three and target that specifically. Isolate that. Okay? This is not always true for every B2B, but in this specific example, when it's hard to find those little nuggets, it's what you're going to have to do. So. All right, so we are moving on now to a segment where Joey is going to discuss audience bid adjustments, going to remind you guys about a few things. Then I'm going to come in, stick around just at the end of the show because I'm going to mention five points that I think are critically important that you understand why most advertisers get audience bids wrong and what I think you should do about it. Joey, start us off.
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Joey Bidner
Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I want to talk a little bit about audience bid adjustments. Now, I know it's something that's been spoken about a lot on the podcast, but I wanted to revisit a specific use case on when and how I do my audience bid adjustments, because I find that often it's a little bit overused, to be honest. I find I see it in a lot in coaching and consulting sessions as well as audits where, you know, you see accounts that have, you know, large audience lists layered into search and shopping shopping campaigns with either a bunch of really small bid adjustments or a few large bid adjustments that on the surface might look like they are an appropriate change, but actually are just unnecessarily inflating your CPCs. I wanted to break down exactly when and how I use audience bid adjustments with a real life example and kind of walk you through the thought process of how to approach it. The first thing I want to say is, as we know or as we've spoken about before, the thought process on when to do audience bid adjustments are when you have an audience that's observationally layered into a campaign and you see one that has a large conversion rate in relationship to the rest to bid it up. And I want to first stop there just to explain how that can be dangerous. Now, this goes back to that classic saying of correlation does not mean causation. And that basically means just because a piece of data correlated and looks like it's got a high conversion rate does not mean that it's the cause for success. So a lot of the times what I'll see is somebody will build a search, a shopping campaign and they'll layer in a ton of audiences, right? All kinds of audiences that don't necessarily relate to the product. So you'll see, okay, we're trying to sell kitchen tiles and oh, there is a audience bid adjustment on shoppers, right? Something really general or a positive conversion rate correlation to something totally left field like people who are into photography. These are the things you obviously want to stay away from. Just because somebody is in a really big audience does it doesn't mean that by increasing the bid strap the, the, the bid on it, you're going to get more conversions or get better conversions, especially in those cases where it's very large audiences, because it's just going to mean that all the people searching your product are in that audience anyways, so you're over inflating it. Or again, the totally tangent audience, people who are into photography have a really high conversion rate for your products. It's likely just a, it's, it's not a correlated cause. It's just a happenstance situation. So avoid those. Now the other one that I might get some pushback on is when you have an audience bid adjustment on the exact same meaning or the exact same search intent as your product. If you are selling bathroom tiles and you increase the bid adjustments in the market for bathroom tiles, I'll be honest, I usually stay away from those as well. Because if your search terms are good, you're already capturing that search intent by just saying you want to bid more for people that Google deems are in that market. I personally believe you're just over inflating your cpc. So I do not bid on the same audiences as my product just because it's there or even just because it's got a high conversion rate because all those people are in that audience. So of course it's got a high conversion rate. I want to explain the cases for when I do use audience bid adjustments and that's when I'm trying to find, I'm trying to lean into an audience that is different than my target, but running parallel to it. I know that's kind of vague. Let me just give you an example. Okay. I've got a client that sells custom T shirts, right? And they've got a bit of a problem where they sell custom T shirts to individuals who want to buy one shirt for $45 one time. And they also sell shirts to businesses, sports teams, like clients that will Buy large orders of shirts and then repeat for years. You know, one customer's got a high customer lifetime value, the, the business and then the other one's got a low customer lifetime value, the individual. The problem is they both search the same way. They both just type in custom T shirts. They don't, you know, there's someone, the, the enterprise client, the business client looking for their small business or large business. They're not typing in, you know, most of the time at least business custom T shirts. Sometimes they do and we have that segmented but it's, it's very small. You can't really scale it. So what we want to do is lean into those people who are searching for custom T shirts but have a, that own, that own a business. So what I do is I observationally first layer on in that custom T shirt campaign audiences that would indicate that the person searching is from a business. So what do they have? They've got employers of a small business. So that means it's like the person who is essentially the owner of the business who employs up to 50 people, that's a small business. Then they have one for medium business and large business. So I layered those on and then you know, I got a little creative. I just went into the search function and typed in, you know, anything business related. And I found one and this one turned out to be the highest performing is in the life events for recently acquired a business loan. That tells me if someone got a business loan, they are starting a business and they probably need logo branded T shirts. So I layered those on observationally to see the conversion rates and a couple months later they came back and the conversion rates were really strong. So I am okay to bid those up because it is a audience that we might just be scratching into. But I'd like the algorithm to lean in more to that audience because they have higher customer lifetime values, higher average order values, and just the bidding system in general might not see that whole picture. Now when it comes to manual bidding versus smart bidding, obviously like manual bidding, it's a pretty direct correlation. If you, if you have a $1 max CPC and you add a 20% bid adjustment, your new max CPC is $1.20. With smart bidding, it's different. And this is where there's a bit of a misconception. A lot of people think like, oh, it's smart bidding. There is no audience bid adjusting. And that's not true. You can audience bid adjust if you're on smart bidding, but it just works differently. It works as an audience Signal similar to kind of how putting in a performance max audience works. Right? It's not targeting that audience, but it's working as a signal. So if you increase the bid adjustment on these business loans by 30, 40, 20%, whatever it's telling the system, these people mean more to me. Lean into it, it still will likely increase your cpc. But it's not just that cut and dry system of manual bidding where it's, you know, physically increasing it, it's leaning more into it, which means bid more for it. So, and I want to also just, you know, take two steps back and mention as well, be careful with these audience bid adjustments because they will stack and layer on top of your other bid adjustments, demographic bid adjustments, location bid adjustments. So a lot of times people will see like, oh, why is my max cpc, you know, why is my CPC three times higher than my max cpc? And it's because you got all these bid adjustments layered on. So just be careful of that. I do not layer on too many. Again, like, I typically don't really do demographic bid adjusting all that much or location bit adjusting unless there's something that really truly makes sense from not just like a data perspective, but like you got to put your marketing hat on and think outside the box of the data of what is who is my avatar, my audience, my searcher, and think about layering in the audiences. That truly makes sense from a marketing perspective, not just a data perspective. We gotta find sometimes step away from just looking at the numbers and, and look at the meaning behind each one of these line items and how they actually relate to your target. Right. We always come back to the target. In the case with my T shirt company, the target was we need more business related searches in a world where everyone searches the same. Gotcha. That means I need to find some business related audiences, layer them in, see the data, that's proof that it's valuable, then bid it up. So I really wanted to just talk about that quickly. I hope it's helpful and feel free to reach out to us if you have any more questions about it. But back to you, Chris. See you next time.
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Chris Schaefer
All right, thank you, Joey. Excellent to hear from Joey. I completely agree with what Joey's talking about and it was such an interesting topic that I want to tag along here and follow up on five points about things that I think are critically important that you should know about audience bid adjustments. Okay, number one and Joey hit on these and I just want to concrete in every one of these as clearly as I can. Number one, use observation Audiences. There are two options whenever you target audiences in Google Ads with a search campaign. One option is an observation audience. Another option is you can change that to targeting. So observation layers on, on top of your keyword. So it can be someone who searches a keyword and they also happen to be in this in market audience or this affinity audience. The other option is targeting this. One is the person must be in both so they have searched your keywords and they must be in a specific in market audience or affinity audience. The fact is, 90% of you guys, maybe 95%, should only be using observation. Using targeted audiences is much more advanced. And I'll tell you right now, the phases of Google Ads, four phases of Google Ads, most of you are not going to reach the point where you're in phase three, phase four, when this would be appropriate. I do not think using targeted audiences and segmenting all this stuff out really specifically is appropriate for most of you guys out there. So use observation audiences only. All right, that's number one. Number two, tiny bid adjustments. 5%, 10%, 15%. I strongly believe that these are undetectable bid adjustments that will just add complexity to your Google Ads campaigns, but in the end be indistinguishable from all the other things that you're doing. 5, 10, 15% bid adjustments will, especially if you're, you're doing manual and or max clicks and you, and you have other different bid adjustments you're trying to do. You have some device bids and you have some audience bids and you have some location bids and some ad schedule bids. These little tiny bids which I see happening a lot. I think people get it wrong. Tiny little bit adjustments only add complexity so that it's actually hard to see why your CPCs, you're bidding $4 and for some reason your final CPC is $8, right? Micro bid adjustments. Most of the time I find people do increase bid adjustments, right? 5% up, 10% up, 15% up. If you start with a $3 bid, add 15 different small micro bid adjustments, it ends up being a whole lot more expensive. I don't think this is a good strategy. So instead this is what you should do. So that's how you're getting it wrong. And Joey actually brought this up in his discussion using specific bid adjustments for key components. So this is still number two when you make bid adjustments, make them big and bold. Don't, you know, don't, don't adjust something at a small degree. So number two is no small degree adjustments. So number three is when you do decide to make an adjustment for a observation audience, make it aggressive. I like to do 50, 60, maybe 100% up. Let's find out if this really does make a difference in your performance. Monitor the results. Once you've made this adjustment, don't just set it and forget it and say, oh, this is a permanent change. No, that's probably not going to be the case. This might need to be something that it works or it didn't work, and you need to know that. And 5% bid adjustments. Don't do it. Instead, make aggressive bid adjustments. And it's important that you understand number four. So number four is this. Once you have decided to make these adjustments before you do that, and this is again where people get it wrong, do not make these aggressive bid adjustments on broad audiences. Joey actually talked about it in his video. He said that he found a specific audience for his client that was someone who recently got a business loan. All right, great. This is someone who could very well be interested in that product or service. Right. Because this is tied into someone who would be in that industry. And it's not going to be someone who's just interested in business marketing in general or someone who's interested in business investment or, you know, it's a smaller segment. So when you choose your audiences, you should choose them in very. Not very small, but smaller audiences that don't encompass millions, sometimes billions of potential impressions. I want you to have smaller subcategory targets. All right, so. And then here's the fifth thing. So all this ties together number five. I don't think you should have more than five or 10 audiences. I mean, maybe just one, but 10 seems like that's probably about it because most of the time it's only going to probably be one audience that really makes a difference. And I think a lot of people make a mistake when they target 15, 20, 100, or all of them. Years and years ago, I used to just grab all of the audiences and add them in to all of my new campaigns. And I won't get into it here. I know I've talked about it on the show before. If you're interested, you can send an email to me and I can tell me that you're interested, but I can explain why that's a bad idea. But it's a bad idea. It's better to choose small subcategory audiences, whether they're in market or affinity, whatever they are. Observation target. Set them as observation. And. And you should choose them based on the fact that they're relevant to the product or service that you're selling. Okay? And when you decide to bid up right, you start at zero, don't bid up right at the top, start at zero and then see how that works. And if it seems to be performing well, bid up, but bid up aggressively. See, see what, what adjustments come whenever you throw a 35, 50% bid adjustment, come back a week, two weeks, a month later, see what those results turn out to be. If it's worth it, then maybe you back it down to 40% to make it within the CPA goals of what you're looking for. Right? But if you do 5%, 10%, you'll likely forget about it. You'll forget about it, you'll forget that it's there and it'll just be there forever bidding all your stuff up 10% and it won't be worth it. So if you're at this point in the show speaking to some of the real hard nosed PPC managers out there, so this is, this is for you. I actually have a bonus section here that I want to get into because Joey made some advice and I pushed back and we sent some emails back and forth and I said, joey, I don't agree with what you said. And let me explain what I don't agree with. Joey specifically stated that making audience bid adjustments with automated bids target cpa, target roas, maximize conversions with these automated bid strategies. He says to go ahead and do it because it does signal to Google that this is an important audience or important signal for you. So you're not necessarily bidding up, but you're signaling to Google something. I'll tell you what, I've had a lot of people ask me about this and you know, I have to be hard nosed about what I believe and don't believe because I don't like to be wishy washy and tell one person this and tell another person this. I have landed in the camp of those don't work. I firmly believe that audience bid adjustments using automated bids. So to be clear that basically it means not manual and not max clicks, right? So automated bids that encompass conversion, some kind of conversion tracking, using audience bids with those non manual, non max clicks bidding strategies does not affect it. And after some discussion with Joey, I've realized this is actually a very polarizing thing. The PPC professional world disagrees about this, about using bid adjustments on automated bidding strategies and Joey gave you advice to do it. And I'm saying it doesn't matter. But the fact is this is what you're listening for, right? Find out for yourself. Try it. Send me some results and let me know if you want to try it. But from my experience, and specifically what is in the Google documentation in multiple ways, in the Google documentation support docs, it says they do not account for for any adjustment to the campaign. And to be clear, the reason that's so obvious to me is because if you're using automated bid adjustments through maximize conversions target cpa, Google's going to say, no, no, no, you don't get to choose audiences anymore. Either you give us full bidding control or you don't. There's no micro adjustments. You know, you don't get to adjust device bits, you don't get to adjust ad schedule and you don't get to adjust audiences. I find that to be the case. It's documented in Google Ads. But I respect Joey. I believe him. If he says that it works, then my thought is decide for yourself. So there you go, a little bit of disagreement in the PPC professional world, which is fun and you get to decide what you believe. So thank you guys for being here. Thank you for being a part of the show and subscribing. If you would like to reach out to Joey, you can find him in the link or you can find me in the link, wherever you're listening and watching as well. Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.