← 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
PPC Basics - Building Your First Campaign (Episode 487)
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Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. This is part of my PPC Basics discussion where I am going to tell you about building your first campaign. And maybe you say, well, Chris, I've built a bunch of campaigns. I'm a long way from ever building my first campaign. Well, let me tell you, sometimes in Google Ads, things don't work out. Things don't work out and you need to start over. This is also a good place if you need to build your first, first campaign again for the first time, maybe the third time, fourth time. Plenty of people meet failure in Google Ads and there's always new ways to try things. And that's what we're here about on the Paid Search podcast. I talk about Google Ads every single week right here on the show. No paywalls, nothing for you to subscribe to. You know, some, some percentage of, of, of anything. You just get the content right here. So if you appreciate that, be sure and let me know. Leave a review. You know, you can check out my sponsor who is optio.com PSP to learn more about what they do, which is something I highly recommend because if you enjoy this show, you're the kind of person that wants to be smarter and faster at Google Ads. And that's exactly the goal of Optio. It's designed to be the smarter way to manage Google Ads. So it gives you recommendations to get things done. You open up your Google Ads, you just stare at the page and you feel like you have writer's block. You. I don't even know where to start. I don't even know what to look at. What, how do you improve when you don't even know what questions to ask? Well, that's where Opteo can fill in the blanks for you. It can tell you about certain placements that you might need to exclude. You might need to stop certain device types from showing up. You might have some bids that need to be adjusted, increased, decreased. You have some specific ad schedules that need to be adjusted because in this time of day or this day of the week is highly underperforming and that might be critical to improving the areas that are doing better. So really important stuff. And you don't know to look unless you have something smart looking over your shoulder to help you find those things. And that's where Optio steps in. You can try it@optio.com PSP that special link gets you 28 day free trial. That's twice the time as everyone else gets, just because you heard it here. The link is in the description of wherever you are watching or listening to this podcast, optio.com PSP all right, so back on track with building your first campaign. All right, so you're sitting at the keyboard. You're, you're ready. Well, let me step back for a second and tell you a bit about what's happening at Google right now. Okay. If you pay attention to Google's marketing, you know, Google's salesmen that call everyone and talk and you get the emails and you see, you see all this messaging that comes in, there's one thing that might be standing out to you lately that Google's really pushing. Google's new hot word right now is investment. They seem to be really pushing this idea of invest in your marketing. Invest in here, Increase your investment. Make sure your investment is, is really good. And then there's this even. There's this new investment strategy tab that they've introduced in the recommendations section. And you know, it's all about how to make, help you make informed decisions about how to allocate additional budget across your campaigns to maximize performance. Well, I'll tell you what, Let me, let me, let me do a little, a little bit of decoding of this language because it says it right here in the discussion about what this investment strategy is all about. You. When you invest in something on your Google Ads, in Google's point of view, that just means more money. When you invest, they don't want you to just invest and let it sit. They want you to invest and then invest and then invest. And that means growing your budget, spending more. And we hope that this investment leads to more success. But the fact is, is that's the problem. More spending in Google Ads does not mean success. Spending more, increasing your budget does not lead to success. I can tell you this for sure because some campaigns, many campaigns, as I've described on the show before and gotten some pushback about it, many campaigns are not successful. They don't even reach a point of success. They only get one thing out of their investment, and that's traffic. That's the only real thing you can get out of Google Ads is traffic. You can get more traffic if you invest into getting more traffic. More budget means more traffic. There. There's no guarantee that more budget means more sales, more success, more calls, more leads, more purchases. That's. That is not what investment leads to. Investment in Google Ads is still only the same thing that it ever was. It means traffic. That's what Google Sells, you know, the, there were, there's a cereal here that, that everybody knows Cheerios, right? You've heard of Cheerios. And they, this is what marketing companies always do. You, if you eat Cheerios, you're going to improve your heart health. And they actually got in trouble here in the US for saying that because they jumped, they took several leaps forward in saying that cereal, this breakfast cereal, helps you improve your heart. And no, I mean when you eat breakfast cereal, you get what breakfast cereal gives you is you get food, you get calories, you get some value for eating the cereal. It's not you. You're not eating a better heart, you're not eating better cholesterol, you're eating cereal. It's a ridiculous leap to make. And I see the same ridiculous leap whenever I see people saying, make the investment into your Google Ads and it will help your business. Well, that's too much of a leap. I don't eat Cheerios to make my heart better. Just like I don't put money into Google Ads making expecting it to immediately boost my business. There are multiple levels that you must first attain before an investment in Google Ads does lead to value, does lead to sales, purchases, phone calls. Today we're only talking about the one thing that is guaranteed in Google Ads. It's not profits, it's not sales, it's not phone calls, it's traffic, clicks, views. If you're doing YouTube, it's the only guarantee that can be made. In fact, I had a very timely coaching call with a guy that I've worked with for several years. I talk with him a couple times a year. He has a very successful business in the Midwest. And he shared something really interesting to me. And he spends a lot of money on Google Ads. Right? We're talking hundreds of thousands a year in Google Ads, you know, multiple hundreds of thousands. And he tried something in Google Ads that to most people would absolutely terrify you. On two months of the year, he shut off. Well, he didn't shut off, but he reduced his budget by like 90% in Google Ads to see if he would notice a difference in 2024 and then in 2025. So 2024 he didn't reduce it. And then in 2025 he did. And what happened is that there was no discernible difference in the 40,000, 50,000 what, 80,000 clicks? I don't know, however many clicks he got, there was no discernible difference in his sales that he was getting on his website. And then he thought, well, we'll see that later in the year. Right. So we didn't get as much traffic during this time of the year. And they'll be in effect January, February of the next year. Those numbers were the same too. You know, after the holidays, you know, perhaps things will change. No, they didn't. How can you make a pitch to someone who shuts off their investment, right. Investment in Google Ads and sees no difference. It make you question whether that investment is really an investment. Like what, what is he getting? Well, the only thing he was getting was traffic. And there was no discernible difference in the bottom line. Like he's looking at his books, he can look at his purchases, bottom line numbers to see how the company performed. And there was essentially no difference between the two, between spending tens of thousands month and spending a couple thousand a month. There was nothing. There's no difference. So what does this investment mean? Whenever you're gonna make an investment, you know, what's the one thing that you can guarantee? Even if you're successful, even if Google says that you're getting tons and tons of conversions and you're getting lots of value, what is the one thing that you can guarantee that you are getting? Well, it's, it's clicks, it's traffic. And if you invest in the right traffic, if you invest in the right things, the sales, the phone calls, the profits will follow that traffic. So that's where we're starting today. If you're facing failure, if you're facing an issue with Google Ads, you've tried and failed multiple times. If you've had other campaigns that provided no discernible difference in the performance of your business, let's start with one goal. Let's downplay all the investment talk. Let's downplay all this discussion about, you know, equating Google to a growing business. Right? That's the same as Cheerios saying your heart is now healthy, right? No, no, that's. There's a lot more to business than just spending money on Google. And there's a whole lot more to my heart than eating a breakfast cereal. Let's talk about it. Let's assume the one thing we're going to nail down is getting good traffic. How do we get good traffic on Google Ads? And I'm going to go through eight points on what I suggest. If you are frustrated, if you are terrified, if you've never done this before, I'm going to build something. I'm going to tell you all the steps to do on how to build this. And, and this is a difficult thing because there's so many industries out there. There's so many complex things. So you know, I'm going to, I'm going to have to take some, some leaps here to try and cover everything. So there might be some adjustments here and there, but try not to deviate too much on specific things that I'm saying and I will give you reasons for each of these eight points about why I'm suggesting this, why we are doing this. And all of it is going to evolve around this one point. Get good traffic to your website. Get qualified traffic. Invest in good traffic. And if you have a good business, you have a good website, you have a good product, you have a good sales team, the value, the purchases, the sales will follow. Alright, so we're leading with that. And in case you're wondering, I am happy to answer questions. I'm probably going to be doing a bigger episode in a couple weeks or so for answering questions. Many of you have sent in questions. Thank you so much. I am keeping those in queue for right now and I will do a big question answer episode soon. So if you want to get your question in before that time, please email me paid search podcastmail.com and be happy to answer those questions. But not this episode. This episode we are entirely focusing on building your first campaign or building your first next first campaign. So here's how we do it and I'm going to tell you each of the points one by one and then I will summarize at the end. So if you didn't think you caught everything, I will summarize very quickly each of those eight points that I'm going through. Okay so number one, the first thing is I'm going to suggest, and we're going to start with keywords. Now point number one is exact match keywords. I am going to suggest that you use exact match keywords. The reason for this is because I am trying to find a way to ensure business owners can build this and not have to make a part time job out of managing their Google Ads. I'm very interested in something that is functional and reliable for people that don't just like do this like me and spend all day looking at Google Ads. Right. You have other stuff to do. So I'm going to suggest exact match because those are the most tightly regulated keywords and they will, they will deviate the least for the kind of traffic that you need in Google Ads. So I'm going to go with exact match. That is a specific match type. And I suggest every single one of these keywords are Exact match. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, let's talk about the keyword itself. The type of keywords you're going to build are going to be made up of these two elements. A word and then an intent. So a core word of a thing. We'll say a noun and then an intent, some kind of adjective, action, verb, something like that. Okay, so I'm going to give you multiple examples and try and make this as practical as possible. So this is number two. What kind of keyword do you use? You use a word plus an intent. So here we go, an example. Skydiving instructors. Skydiving is the noun, verb, whatever you want to call it. And then instructors is someone who has intent. Right. If we just had the word skydiving as an exact match, you get the wrong kind of traffic. There's no intent for someone to purchase or get a quote or call about skydiving. If they're just searching. Skydiving, if you're selling instructor courses. Alright, so skydiving instructors is a word plus intent. Windshield relation repair is a word plus in 10th, people want the repair. Pull builders, fence installers. You notice these exact match keywords I'm pointing you towards are very short and there's a purpose for this. So what I'm trying to do is have very basic terms, shorter terms, but using exact match, I can control the intent of what kind of traffic's getting me from these terms. So fence installers, Ford truck dealerships. Right, that's, that's one with three words there. But I don't want to do truck dealerships, I don't want to do Ford dealerships. I want to do Ford truck dealerships. Right. So you can take some liberties. But I don't want you to go beyond three words. Three words is the max. Two words is ideal if you can get away with it. Like appliance repair. Three word example, carpet cleaners, Miami. Right. So the intent there is a little extended because carpet cleaners, that might be a little vague. That's not necessarily intent. Carpet cleaners is not intent. Carpet cleaners plus a geographic term, that's intent. So service plus a geo is great for local businesses. Right. Junk car buyers is a core word. Plus someone looking for some type of intent. Service company. Right. Junk car buyers. Right. So hopefully that makes sense. That's the second one. If you can stick to that, I think you'll get better quality traffic. And again, the whole point here is put your investment into the one thing you know you can get out of Google. You can get clicks, traffic. Get good traffic. Let's focus on that first for your first campaign. Okay, so now that we have keywords, we have exact match keywords built in a very precise way. If you want to have, you know, three, four, five of those, that's fine. Do not feel that you need 100 or 50 or even 10. If you want to have three keywords that follow that type of word plus intent, exact match, go with it. You do not need to risk more money because you think you need a whole bunch of keywords. Don't overdo this. Let's start small. You can always build more, but you can't take the money back if you built too much and waste it. Right. It's a whole. Good luck getting Google on the phone and having them return your money. It's not going to happen. So next we move into ad copy. This is number three, ad copy. I want you to do this. The first headline for your ad should be pinned. So when you write the ad pinned, pin the first headline to first position. And it should be a word plus intent plus confirmation. In other words, the most important feature. Confirmation means most important feature of what you offer. Okay, word plus intent plus confirmation. And again, I will give you examples. So let's go through our examples. We had before. Skydiving instructors, Las Vegas. Right, so you're repeating word intent and then confirmation. Skydiving instructors, Las Vegas. There's the confirmation. Yeah, we do it in Las Vegas. Skydiving instructors, Las Vegas. Another example. Fast windshield repair. Right? Fast windshield repair. There's a confirmation. There's an important feature we can get. We. It doesn't just say we do windshield repair. It says we do windshield repair fast. So not only do we do it, we do it quickly. Fast windshield repair, affordable pool builders. Right, so I'm confirming you're looking for pool builders. We do pool building. We're also affordable. There's multiple levels of communication you're making here. You're confirming they're looking for this and you're confirming that, yeah, we do that, but we also do it in a very affordable way. So this is critical because the only thing you really need to cover in your ad copy is confirming. Yes, we offer what you're looking for and then tell them why you should click on. They should click on your ad. Right? It's because we're affordable. It's because we're fast. It's because we're in Las Vegas. Right. Wood fence installers. We do wood fence installation. Wood fence installers, same day appliance repair. Right, there's another one. Great. A very important feature that I'm leading with in my ad copy. Same day appliance repair, Ford trucks for sale. Right. So this is the confirmation along with the word and the intent of what someone's looking for. Alright, so that's the first headline. We're still on number three, right? We have eight total. So number three is the first headline is going to be word intent confirmation and the second headline is going to be pinned to second position and it's going to be call to action or some type of special offer. So be creative here. I don't really have a format for this but basically it's just going to be something like call for free. Quote Minimum $500 cash offer. Right? That'd be for junk cars. Minimum $500 cash. Book an appointment, drive your home. Drive yours home today. That would be something for you know, like the Ford truck dealership. Right. So this is some type of call to action telling someone do this, this is what we want you to do or some kind of special offer. We offer this kind of cash or you know, this, this is some kind of special we're doing now or some kind of seasonal thing, who knows. But the second headline should be some kind of hook. Pin that to first position. Pin. Pin the second one to second position. So the first. So here's an example of what one of the ads would look like. The first line would say Ford trucks for sale. The second line would say drive yours home today. Another one would be fast windshield repair. Book an appointment. That's the whole ad. Now I'm going to make your life a whole lot easier. I don't care what your ad strength is, okay? I don't care. Google's gonna tell you that your ad strength is poor and it's gonna want you to unpin those. It's gonna want you to add a whole bunch more. Now you might have to add one third one there because I think it requires three headlines. But write whatever you want there. But you're pinning the first and second headline. The third one's probably not going to even show. So I don't care what your ad rank. Here are your, your, your ad strength score is don't care, it doesn't matter. Let's get this ad running and let's get the right intent and messaging along with the ads and with the keywords and then we can worry about ad strength stuff later. Who cares? Alright, so that's number three. Number four, I'm going to suggest max clicks. Don't Use max conversions. Don't use target cpa, target roas or maximize value. You're going to do max clicks. Or in other words, the way Google phrases it is focus on clicks I think is the language they use now. Instead of calling it maximize clicks they call it when you choose your bidding options, you either focus on conversions or clicks. Telling you to focus on clicks. Because again, going back to the top, what is our investment we're hoping to get out of this? If you said sales and money, you're wrong. We're looking to get traffic. So for right now let's just get clicks. And I do not suggest any bid cap. There's a checkbox there for you to actually add a bid cap capacity. A bid cap on that $5, $10, $15. I suggest leaving it blank, leave it wide open, let it deal with the bidding. Get you the best quality clicks for as cheap as it can. It'll take care of it for you. Leave it at that. Max clicks. Bidding done. All right, I've got four more and I'm going to run through. These are going to be quick. Be sure and check out my sponsor opteo.com PSP. You can use their many tools for shopping, search, performance, max and even Microsoft ads in this all in one tool that does everything from reporting to alerts to bidding enhancement to campaign optimization. From one end to the other, it does it all. Check it out, check it out@optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. Alright, number five, geographic targeting. Don't do anything smaller than a county. I'm gonna suggest if you're targeting like one city, I really don't suggest that you do anything with zip codes or cities. I suggest if you can do it, do an entire, do the whole county. Now some of you live in extremely large cities and you might be right dead center in the middle of a, you know, millions of people. So in that instance, please use your discretion. But the main point is I highly discourage you from picking specific zip codes and being really picky about the neighborhoods and excluding stuff. That, that is not the goal here. Be, be more liberal with your geographic targeting. I would suggest a county. You know, I, you know, if you're in Dallas, target Dallas county in and I don't know any other counties. I don't live in Dallas, but I live near Dallas, but I'm not going to say what county I'm in. But anyway, that's the, that's the geographic targeting. Real simple, Keep it simple. All right, number six, I'm going to suggest Monday through Friday 8 to 5. Whether you are B2B business to business or you're business to consumer, let's keep it simple. Let's put the money where people typically do the most purchases like waking hours of the day, working hours of the day. Maybe if you feel unsure about that, you can push that to maybe let's say 10am to 7pm something like that. But I would suggest about eight hours of the day, seven to nine hours, something like that. Monday through Friday. Let's put the money where the best value is probably going to be. Alright, and that's number six. So that's ad schedule, Monday to Friday eight to five or something comparable to that number of hours. Number seven. I'm going to suggest a budget of 25 to $50 a day. That may not be a problem for you at all. You may say I want to do 100, I want to do 200, I want to move this faster. No, no, please remember the investment start small. The word invest implies you start and you grow. You know, this is, this is a time producing type of process. This is not an instantaneous thing. Start small and build. You can always add more budget. Remember you can't call Google and get them to send the money back, but you can certainly withhold it for right now until it proves to be an investment worthwhile. So 25 to 50 a day will get you between 500 and 1,000amonth running five days a week. All right. And then number eight, I am highly encouraging you to avoid all of the fancy little assets that Google points you towards like the site links and the call outs and the images and, and all that stuff. It's really, I'm trying to find something that you can do quickly here and the quickest way is add a call asset. Add your phone number if you want to get phone calls and you're okay with people directly calling you rather than, rather than going to your website. You can put a call asset in. You could put some images in there, you could put a business name and a logo if you like. None of these really matter. They're going to make no difference in the performance of your account. A call asset would be the only thing that I would suggest. Absolutely no. Site links do not create site links. Don't allow Google to create them for you. There is an automatic system that will create them for you if you don't turn it off. So I highly advise no site links. Just give people an option to go to the website and call you, buy from you, whatever. I mean just click on the ad and buy. All the other complications come later. This is the way of doing a first or doing Google Ads a second time or a third time, you're gonna try again, you failed or you're doing it for the first time, no matter what. This is a simple method that I think can be applied to almost anybody, certainly anybody in the service industry. I think. I think for many e commerce companies this would work as well. So if you found that useful and you'd like for me to help you further, you can find my website, chrisshafer.com to book a time with me. Be happy to go through your account with you, help you build this, help you expand on it and give you more advice. If you have thrown up your hands and you are sick of Google Ads and you don't want to touch it anymore, but you need someone to do it for you, I do that too. I offer Google Ads management starts at 600amonth for my management and my coaching is 400 per session. So you can find that and book that on my website, ChrisChafer.com Otherwise, check back here next week and be sure and send a question in at paid search podcastmail.com and I'll see you guys next week.