← 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
New Changes Coming to Google This Year (Episode 465)
00:36:39
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Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about new changes coming to Google Ads this year, right now, this instant. There's stuff that's live in Google Ads, there's stuff that's coming and we're gonna talk about it. I have my friend Joey Bidner who is going to discuss these changes and then we're gonna get into a discussion about something you may not have heard about before. It's a new way of thinking about how to apply the right pressure, the right settings, the right keywords, ad schedule, ad copy, all of that to your Google Ads account. It's called Friction Strategies in Google Ads. How to apply the right friction to get the right results out of your Google Ads. I'm going to talk about that and we're going to jump right into it today. And before I do that, optio.com PSP would like to make your Google Ads accounts better. That's, that's what they're here for. If you haven't heard about Optio, it is an online software designed to optimize your Google Ads accounts. Whether it's one or a hundred of them. It can help you get more out of your time to invest in your Google Ads accounts the right way. Set the right bids, choose the right keywords, make sure that your negative keywords are applied properly. Make sure that you're not missing any obvious budget adjustments or ad copy optimizations that can make your account perform even better. It works across the search, shopping and performance max systems. It even works in Google Ads. If you guys are interested in Microsoft ads, it does that. Whatever you'd like to do, it pretty much covers it. It is a massive tool. You can try it for free@optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. That's o p t e o.com PSP the link is in the description of wherever you are listening or watching. And by the way, if you're listening to the podcast, which is how most of you consume my weekly content, you can also subscribe on YouTube. I have quite a few thousands and thousands of listeners. We're right at about 10,000 subscribers at this point. I, we're just a few subscribers away from that. So if you'd like to subscribe on YouTube, I mean it, it doesn't really do anything for me except it'd be, it'd be cool to see those numbers. I don't know, I'm trying to set goals here. You know, I'm not, not real Real big on any of that stuff, but seems like people do that. So there we go. Subscribe to me on YouTube and thumbs up and all that stuff. All right, so let's jump into it. So we have Joey who's going to discuss the Google Ads announcements that just happened recently. Joey, tell us what's up.
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So today we're going to talk about Google marketing live. So for anyone who doesn't know, every year Google has this big two day press conference. Day one is where they talk about all the new hardware and software that they're releasing. And day two is the part that applies to us. That's where they talk about the marketing platform, all the new tools and features. And basically it's also a huge sales pitch for why to advertise for Google instead of advertising, you know, spending your advertising dollars elsewhere. But I want to talk a little bit about the features that I'm excited for. Now this podcast is an experience sharing podcast, not a news, you know, a news breaking podcast. So I am just going to talk about them briefly because I don't want to over hype what they're saying until we get our hands on them. And then maybe in later episodes we'll talk about the experience we had with them once we really have some time with these new features. But at the very least I want to say which new things kind of piqued my interest. And then also I want to talk about how to really participate in these, like how to really listen to these press conferences and not falling into the sales trap of Google. Because to be honest, like a lot of these press conferences are pretty eye rolling. I can't tell you how many like wax statistics they use to try to explain why you should use a specific feature of Google. So but for the most part I want to just mention which features I really liked. So before we get into that, let's talk a little bit about, yeah, the bit of the cringeworthy moments in these conferences. And this is a cautionary tale because this language is not just used in these conferences, it's used by sales reps, it's used by Google notifications. And the big thing is they always say when they have a new tool, a new feature, they'll say, you know, based off of our betas and tests, advertisers who used this new thing saw 20% more conversions. I absolutely hate this sales pitch because what does that mean? Okay, they saw 20% more conversions. If you had a, let's say a search campaign, a shopping campaign, whatever, and you follow their advice and Add a performance max campaign and they say if you add a performance max campaign you'll see 20% more conversions. Okay. If you add 20, 30% more budget to this new campaign, of course you're going to see 20% more conversions. These campaigns convert alongside your other campaigns. The question is at what level of profitability did they convert? Were these conversions new customers or they just existing customers? Was it just existing traffic? Was it just, you know, capturing your demand versus creating demand? So I really eye roll when I see these wax statistics of that they use and you know a big part of this conference, these conferences are, is a sales pitch. So be careful with the sales pitch because this, like I said, this language is used by your Google reps and used by Google notifications. So don't fall into the trap when they say you're missing out on conversions if you use this. All Google tools get conversions about finding the ones that get you the most profitable conversions to grow your business. So that's the first thing I want to mention right out of the gate. Okay, now let's talk about the fun stuff. So I'm going to briefly mention the tools that I like but again I'm not going to be overhyping them simply for your attention. This is just what piqued my interest and what I'm looking forward to test and maybe later we'll share those results. So firstly I want to talk about an update they did to Demand Gen. So if you Listen to episode 457, we talked a lot about why I like Demand gen and why we all need to kind of get used to Demand Gen because certain pieces of video YouTube campaigns are migrating into Demand Gen. I won't get into why to use Demand Gen. Now listen to episode 457. You can dig into it. But they're recently releasing some new exclusion features which I really like. So one of the issues with these high funnel campaign strategies where you're trying to, you know, get in front of new customers is sometimes they will also just remarket a lot, right? And it's hard to keep that traffic cold as we call it, right? Where it's purely new visitors. Now they're adding a whole layer, a whole suite of exclusions that we can add to Demand gen campaigns. So we can exclude existing customers, we can exclude people searching for your brand, which is pretty cool. We can exclude people who clicked on your ads or content on Google or YouTube. We can exclude website visitors and app users. So I think it's pretty cool. We're gonna have to see how well it works. A lot of times when they say, okay, we'll exclude website visitors, the question is on what timeline? Google doesn't say we'll exclude your website visitors within the last month, within the last two weeks, we don't know. So I am going to be testing this and comparing the data to some third party attribution softwares that I use. So we'll be able to see if these really work. But again, episode 457 if you want to know more about demand gen. Okay, moving forward, Performance Max. They did give us an update on Performance Max channel reporting. So one of the issues with Performance Max is that we are never able to see where our performance was coming from in terms of is it coming from search, is it coming from shopping, is it coming from YouTube, is it coming from display, Gmail? You know, we don't have controls, we didn't have transparency over that. So now they're giving us sort of channel reporting. And when I say sort of, I mean they're going to give you channel reporting on impressions, interactions and quote unquote results. So I guess that's like conversions and conversion value. But the part that they're missing out and giving us is the part that really matters is spend. They're not telling us how much we're spending on each channel, which is frustrating and they're obviously not giving us control yet, which I don't think they ever will. But at least they're giving us impressions, interactions, results, whatever. I would still recommend though, if you're using Performance Max, go listen to episode 452 where we talked about scripts because there is a free script from Mike Rhodes that allows you to see your channel, spend and results. So my go to if I've got Performance Max is I am still using that Performance Max script. But it's kind of cool that they're starting to open things up. But again, I think this one's a little bit of a, a little bit of a flop because we don't get spend. Okay, next, they did mention very briefly for a quick hot second that they're going to be introducing Merchant Center A B testing. So while they were explaining all this like AI creative integrations, which to be honest, I'm not all that into because even though they give us all these tools to create AI generated imagery, the ads manager should not be making those because there's brand guidelines. I think the brand owners should be making the creative. And sure, they can use these creative suites that Google is giving us these AI tools to make creative but as the ads manager, I don't touch creative. But while they were mentioning how we can use AI to make creative and they did mention that there is going to be a merchant center, a B testing tool for headlines and images, they mentioned it for like a second. So I'm hoping that it is what they said it is, which is A B testing headlines and descriptions because until now you haven't really been able to. The only way we could a B test headlines or images was to create a duplicate feedback which can be messy because you're technically usually only allowed one primary feed. And if you create duplicate feed with duplicate SKUs, I never do it. I think it's kind of redundant and you don't get that true AB test. It's like running two search campaigns alongside each other. Like you don't get conclusive results and you can run the risk of getting disapproved if you have the same SKU duplicated. So anyways, AB testing for merchant center, if that's a thing like they said it was, I'm very excited for it. Okay, so next, this is kind of big news that was released about a week before Google Marketing Live and that's this new campaign type called AI Max. I'm not going to give them any originality points on the name because AI Max is pretty weak. But essentially AI Max is the. It's basically search campaign mixed with a DSA campaign. And we've spoken about DSA campaigns in the past. I absolutely love DSA campaigns for very specific functions especially related to E commerce. So AI Max basically takes your. Takes your search campaigns, looks at your keywords, but then also goes beyond it and won't just go to the URLs that your ad group is for. It can go to other URLs and it can, it can basically do DSA things. Now again, I have not had my hands in this yet because it's brand new, but I'm assuming, you know, or I shouldn't say I'm assuming what they did say is that it's just going to be a toggle switch in a search campaign, which I think is kind of weird. If it's going to be dsa, we still need to give it DSA URL targets. That way it can create the, the query connections to certain pages. But the way they said it is just going to be an on switch where it's going to use the power of AI to look at your keyword and go beyond them. So a lot of people are saying it's broad match on steroids. But the way I see it as well is it is going to be looking at your, your website to read your content and make queries. Because what they are going to be giving us is some transparency like DSA does where it's going to say, okay, here are your search terms, here are the headlines we created for them and here are the landing pages they went to. So it's still unclear if you know, if you have an ad group that goes to a specific landing page. Is it going to be sticking to that landing page or is it going to go to all your landing pages? By landing pages I just mean URLs on your website. Is it going to go to all those URLs? If it is, I would hope that they have controls for us to pick which ones like DSA does. Because I love that about dsa. I can say take this URL or take this collection of pages and find me searches for them based off of the content on that page. So yeah, this one I'm going to be trying it in a small capacity on clients that I think it can work for. But obviously I'm highly, I'm going to be highly skeptical of it just because it's, it's just another campaign that is likely for Google's best interest. You know, it's going to be about getting more, more search, you know, showing up for, for more impressions and clicks on more queries that we have less control over. So we'll see. But I don't want to over bloat this one and say it's the next best thing until I get my hands on it. So real quick, a couple more things. They did release news on something called a creative partner hub. So with YouTube, a big part of YouTube strategy is influencers, right? Getting your, your product to influencers. They make content you use that they either you leverage their channel to use their audience to talk about your products or they make content for you to use as ads as like influencer, influencer ads. Right now YouTube is launching a creator, a creator hub where you could basically put in your industry, let's say and it'll identify a bunch of different creators in that industry. So if you're in like, let's say you make like beauty masks, you can type in like wellness and beauty and it'll give you all these creators that focus on wellness and beauty and you can start that creative partnership. I think that's pretty cool because there's no question that you know creators and influencers and it is where a lot of Media strategy is moving, so I'm definitely looking forward to at least learning more about the creative partner hub. I thought it was pretty interesting because previously it was kind of tricky. You know, there's a lot of agencies out there that say, you know, we're going to find you the creators. There's a whole model on it. And as an advertiser it can be kind of tricky sometimes to go and find the right creator just organically on YouTube. But this is a hub dedicated to it and they'll even show their pricing. It's all transparent. I assume that there's going to be payments through the platform and that's probably where Google makes the money. I don't know, I'm not going to speculate, but I think I thought it was really interesting. I thought it was really cool. Okay. Lastly, video was definitely a big part of this conference. It's very clear that they're making video more blended into a lot of search and shopping strategies. And we can see that with how they create campaign types like Performance Max, you know, blending video and search from how we buy media, but also how users digest media. Because a big part of the conference was talking about how it's no longer really a linear funnel. People are searching so sporadically all over the place. It's just about appearing at the right place at the right time on all channels. So one of the things that I thought was really cool is that they're going to be mixing in video with search. Kind of like how an image extension is on search. They're going to be putting video in search, which I thought was super cool. And especially, you know, if you watched anything from Google IO the, the conference the day before about their software and product offerings. They're releasing this big suite of like video creation, AI video creation and being able to slice and dice videos. Anyways, I'll get into that. But you know, giving the tools to make video content and then giving us a platform where we can get it out there beyond just YouTube I think is really interesting because I do think like I believe in video based advertising and I think that it should be blended in the searcher's journey very seamlessly. So I thought that was really cool. And lastly, I just want to say on the, you know, speaking on the topic of video, they're going to be releasing a functionality for branded search attribution for video ads, that's they called it. So basically they're going to be able to tell us, and I assume this is through enhanced conversion data. They're going to be able to tell us that if somebody watched a video, then searched our brand name, they're going to be able to make that attribution line. Now previously we spoke about this in a previous episode previously the way that we used to do this was we would create, if you're running YouTube ads, you can create an audience of people who have seen your ad, right? Then we would take that audience and layer it onto a brand campaign observationally. So then if somebody typed in your brand name and converted in your audience list, you'd see, oh yeah, you of all the conversions you got in your brand campaign, this many came from people who saw your ad. Now that works theoretically, but it was never really complete. I found a lot of times, yeah, I just found it wasn't very good attribute. It works, I still do it, but I always felt like it didn't give you the full picture. Who knows if this will. But I love that they're trying to make that connection because video gets no attribution, right? Like you really have to observe your top line data and see how growth occurred over a long period of time. After you introduce video, nobody really clicks a video ad and buys. They see your ads, they remember your name, then they type your name and purchase. So you know, a year ago Google released enhanced conversions which are a way of measuring conversions through user personal information. Emails and emails are associated to YouTube so they can see if someone's email saw the YouTube ad and then converted if that same email was used in the form at the end. That's how they're making these connections. So all in all I think the conference was good. Like there's a lot of cool tools that I like but at the same time I can't tell you how many times I rolled my eyes at the delivery. It was like I listened to a press, like a two hour sales pitch from a Google rep. So not a fan of their delivery. But I really like a lot of these tools and I like some of the directions where Google's going. That being said, obviously shaky ground with a lot of this, these AI campaign types, but it looks like they're trying to give us levers of control. So all I can say is without overhyping things, I'm going to be trying them and likely letting you know what we think down the line. So. All right, back to you Chris. See you next time.
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All right, thank you Joey. Thanks so much for laying that out. It is huge benefit for us to get such a concise, well stated summary of that very long winded marketing speech. That Google's given us. So thanks so much for that. So next I'm going to jump into, as promised, friction strategies in Google Ads. So this is something that is hopefully going to help you apply better decisions to your Google Ads because of one simple rule. And we're going to define what friction is and how you can use it and avoid it if you need to. Before I do that, remind you very quick, opto.com PSP that's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP to try their software for free for 28 days. That's twice as long as you'll get any other trial. If you sign up directly on their site without that URL, you won't get the 28 day free trial. You only get 14 days. So try it for twice as long@optio.com PSP use the chat box in the bottom corner of the screen and you'll be able to take advantage of that offer. So here we go. Friction. What is it? What does it mean? What am I talking about? Well, friction is any element in a user experience that slows them down from clicking on the ad, signing up, purchasing, buying anything in the process, from the initial search all the way to the very last click to buy. If it slows them down, creates hesitation. Some kind of friction that's applied to the process could be a massive benefit to the performance of your account. This can be intentionally added or friction can be removed. If you add friction, you limit the amount of audience that you're going to bring in. If you remove friction, you broaden your audience. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to discuss all of the methods that I think are the most obvious of adding friction to your Google Ads account from before the click to, right at the click to after the click. Five methods of adding and removing friction that could greatly benefit the quality of traffic or the quality of leads that you're getting. So keep in mind, friction is not always bad and you don't always want no friction. You don't always want lots of friction. There's a balance that's happening. I'm going to talk about how to balance this. So the most obvious method of adding friction would be in your keywords. The top level of the most frictionless method of driving traffic is to target the problem. If you target the problem in Google Ads, you will drive a large amount of traffic that will not have any real distinction between quality. So some traffic will be interested in fixing their broken sink, right? Maybe that's the Problem. A sink is leaking. So my keyword is leaking. Sink or sink is leaking, right? This is a problem. Some people will just be looking up if they can do it themselves. Some people will just figure out should they just buy a new sink because they want to know how much is it to replace it, how much is it to repair it. Other people will just say, no, I'm going to get it repaired, I need someone to repair it. Any and all situations from beginning to end of this scenario could be represented in this very frictionless type of keyword. When you target the problem, you drive a ton of traffic. Very frictionless, come straight through the pipe and it's going to spend very long. Quickly take it a notch down, add a bit of friction. What do we do? We target the solution. So in this example, plumbing services near me, no longer am I targeting anything about the sink or how it's leaking or not. I'm targeting the solution. Plumbing services near me targets the solution. So that immediately wipes out anyone who is a DIY focused. You know, sync is leaking is not going to be driving traffic through. The keyword. Plumbing services near me. Right? And then the last level with the most friction, the least amount of volume that's going to be pouring through would be targeting the problem and the solution together. So this is a very important method that you need to use very carefully. Because in this situation, much like when you target the problem, when you target the problem and the solution, it's the inverse problem, you actually have very little traffic that you'll get. There won't be much of it. It'll be so little traffic, you might actually have problems spending your budget or getting anything out of it. So at the top of the frickin friction. Frictionless ladder. Frickin ladder. That's funny. Frictionless ladder is targeting the problem all the way down. At the end is the problem and the solution. Right? And what that looks like is sink repair plumber. You combine the problem itself and the solution. Sync repair plumber would be the most finite way of targeting it. So what's the right answer? Well, as I said before, you'll have to figure out how much of each traffic you think is most appropriate. You might have one campaign that targets the problem, another campaign that targets the solution, another campaign that targets the problem and solution and try and figure out where the best results come from. For you. The right answer is not the same for everyone. There is no right answer. The amount of friction that you apply to your campaign is going to be different than how your competitors do it and how everyone else does it. So another method of adding friction or removing friction would be ad schedule. This is all before the click. So ad schedule would be 24, seven would be the most frictionless method of targeting your traffic straight through. No, no difference between day, night, weekend, weekday. It all flows through same amount of spend. Now someone who wants to apply friction might do it only Monday through Wednesday, 7:00am to 7:00pm or even more friction, 7:00am to 2:00pm Right. So you can apply more and more friction and suddenly that that that window of traffic narrows more and more. What this might do is this might increase your conversion rates. It might help you to apply your ads to the most valuable traffic that's happening during that window of the day, hour of the day. Okay, so ad schedule is very important. Another one, all of this before the click devices. If you allow traffic on mobile, computer, tablet, any device, that is the least friction. Something that you could do to restrict the traffic to add friction is to just target computer block everything else. That is absolutely something I do very regularly when the situation arises. If I have a business to business lead acquisition or a business focused software or something like that, I might do targeting the problem. Right. Which is the most frictionless method. But I might only do it Monday through Thursday from 8am to 2pm and I only might do it on computer. Right. So wide open, no friction keywords. Limiting a bit on my ad schedule and then also limiting on my devices. You can see how friction can be applied in multiple levels, right? It's quite fun to figure out what is the right amount of friction that I should apply. And maybe it's not just in one area. So if you've been thinking that friction is just in your keywords, just in your negative keywords, just in your bids, I'm telling you right now, the right method is going to be perhaps a dynamic friction system that flows across each of these areas. And there's more than what I'm naming here, but these are just some examples. Now let's shift gears and let's get into ad copy. This is right before the click. You've already gotten the impression right before the click. You add friction by adding price, by adding something to your ad copy that causes hesitation. We only work with people who have minimum orders of, you know, 100 or more, hats, shirts, you know, special order, something like that. We only work with people in this state or this county or, you know, this city. Now you're going to have to make sure that this friction can fit in your headline. Anything in the description is not really going to cause much hesitation. Headlines are absolutely what people read. They don't really read the description. So put your friction ad copy into the headline and that will slow the click. Qualifying the click will stop you from spending the money, right? Adding very broad terms like sync repair as our example was, right, we're talking about sync repairs. If I just put in my ad copy, sync repair, sink plumber, we fix sinks, things like that. That is not friction. That is inviting anyone and everyone who's interested in anything about fixing their sinks. But instead, if I said service fees start at $150, that's hesitation. That is some type of hesitation that is going to cause the person to slow that click. Wait a second. I'm not going to spend 150 bucks just to have this guy come out and look at. Forget it, I'll put some duct tape on it and leave it alone. Alright, so the last method of friction comes after the click. So an example of this is in your web form if you're in a situation where you say, chris, I can't really limit my keywords. My keywords are pretty much always the same, right? If you're a realtor or something like that, and it's just homes for sale near me and you don't really have a way of getting the people who are really specific because they're just looking for homes, they just want to see all the homes, so you can't really discern it there. And if you put in your ad copy really specific stuff, it's not going to get any clicks. So perhaps the only way to qualify, not the click, but the lead itself is, is to add more fields to your web forms, make them jump through a few more hoops to complete that web form, add something to it, make it a little more complicated. Maybe you don't have a phone number that they can call. Instead it's just web forms or online booking form to schedule a call or something like that, right? This would be a friction adding method. Or if you want to open up the possibility, then you might just have put your name and your phone number in here and we'll call you. Or they can just buy the product, no limitation. They can schedule the call. No limitation. This is an after the click. So this is going to be a very unique situation because keep in mind you've already paid. So this is not appropriate for many people. Most people, I would suggest, apply these friction methods before the click because that's when you pay. The money is after the click. You don't want to. You don't want to try and filter your traffic after you've already spent the money. That's a very bad way to do it. Alright, so friction is not good or bad. It's just a tool. It's a filter. You adjust your friction based on whether you're optimizing for quality or quantity. Do you want volume in this area and then you try and shrink the funnel towards the end or do you shrink the funnel at the beginning and then open it up very wide for anyone that does come through that very thin hole at the at the front of the pipe? Right. So removing and adding friction is a critical marketing tool that you should remember. It applies to every marketing method out there, but certainly in Google Ads. And I hope these five methods help you to learn how to apply those. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can talk to me about this method and have me look at your Google Ads Experience account or possibly manage your Google Ads account. I can do anything with that. You can find me@chris schaefer.com Also Joey Bidner, who is at the top of the show, he can help you as well with those from management to consulting. You can reach him@joeybidner.com otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.