← 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: How To Manage a Search Campaign (Episode 482)
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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. I have a special episode today. We are digging in to what I'm calling PPC Basics. Whether you are brand new to Google Ads and I promise, even if you're advanced in Google Ads, this is something that everyone needs to hear. This is something that you won't hear very often, but it is a question that everyone wants to know. I'm going to talk about how to manage what. What is managing Google Ads? How do you manage a Google Ads campaign? Multiple campaigns, an entire account. What is the one key ingredient that I find most people are missing? I'm going to tell you today and we are skipping all, all other thing. I am dedicating the entire episode here to this question and I'm going to talk about how this came about and we're going to dig into it right now. So I'll take you down a little bit of a story here. I started Google Ads in 2003. Okay? So that was a long time ago. And my first time to train someone on how to manage a Google Ads search campaign was in January of 2012. So since then I have, I estimate, done about 1500 training sessions. I've trained. I would. It's not 1500 people because many times there were a lot of people in those sessions. So definitely more than 1500, but. And plus what I've trained with people just listening to the podcast. I know I do a lot of education this way as well, so that this doesn't count. But 1500 sessions, and in these 1500 sessions, many times the most common question that I get is, okay, Chris, but how do you actually manage a campaign? What do you actually do? Like, how do I manage, I understand the theory, the principle of what I'm supposed to do, but how do I turn the wrench? How do I apply this practically on Monday morning, I get up, what do I do? Now it makes perfect sense. You go to college, you get trained for a career, you get educated. But when it comes down to hands on the keyboard, hands on the tool, to, to, to get something done, sometimes the training and the, in the application are two very different things. So I'm going to talk about what is the key thing that many people miss? And, and this is really important. So stick around. Before I jump into it, I'll remind you about what makes this podcast possible. It is my sponsor, optio.com/PSP. You can try this amazing tool that helps you practically manage your Google Ads account. And when I say practically, I mean in a very practical way, I mean this tool is designed to help you get your hands in the system. And what I'm going to talk about today is going to be the solution that you can take to Optio and get things done faster. So I'm going to give you the knowledge, the go ahead. I'm going to give you the permission that you need on how to manage your Google Ads account, and then Optio can help you apply that. It is a tool that is designed to get into your dashboard, your Google Ads system, dig around, you're sleeping, you're having lunch, you're doing other things, and meanwhile, this thing's digging in and finding stuff in your account and it will alert you about what needs taken care of, what things need to be applied, what things need to be fixed, and where the issues are. So if you want to try this amazing tool for free, you can try it for 28 days for free, no cost. You can try it at opteo.com PSP that's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP. Use the chat box down at the bottom of their page when you go there and let them know in the chat, hey, Chris sent me from the paid search podcast. Can I get that special offer? And they will hook you up. All right, so As I said, 1500 sessions is what I estimate that I've done in. A very common question is how do I manage my Google Ads account? How do I actually apply this knowledge? And here it is. Management is all about setting a goal based on the phase of Google Ads that you are in. And then once you've set that goal for the phase that you're in, manage for that goal. And you say, okay, I'm. And actually, I want to say it again because this is the key point that will fuel the rest of the podcast. Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you what those goals are. So let me say it one more time. Management is about setting a goal based on the phase of Google Ads that you're in and then managing for that goal. If you did not know, I believe there are four phases to Google Ads. This is a principal Google Ads for me, something that I came up with about two years ago. If you have not heard my lecture about the phases of success in Google Ads, check out episode 385, 386, something like that. I go into the 10 principles of Google Ads. Listen to those episodes. I've talked about it Multiple times. If you're unfamiliar with the phases of Google Ads, we're going to, we're going to touch on them briefly and I'm going to give you what goals you might assign to yourself based on the phase that you're in Google Ads. So these four phases, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you examples of what these goals might look like. Okay? And we're going to go through them. Phase 1, 2, 3, and 4. And I will define the phases. Now, phase 1 of Google Ads is to get qualified traffic. Traffic, just get traffic. That is not a waste of money. It's a very low standard because everyone should try and get into phase one as quickly as possible. Some people don't even make it to phase one. They're still in phase zero like they have. They've never actually achieved qualified traffic in Google Ads. I've seen it. And your goal to achieve the next level is to get qualified traffic. Once you've obtained qualified traffic, Phase two of Google Ads is convert that qualified traffic. Get sales, make money from that qualified traffic that's coming from Google Ads. So people that are looking for what you're buying or what you're selling, whatever service, product, whatever it is that you are selling, get those people to buy it. That's phase two. Once you have achieved the process of getting them to buy these products and services that you're selling, you're ready now to move into phase three. Phase three is achieving and maintaining a key performance metric, a key performance indicator that might be cost per conversion, it might be return on ad spend, it might be just the number of conversions that you're getting. You set some kind of attainable goal, hopefully. And once you hit that, you're now in phase three. So that's phase three. Achieve and maintain your performance metric that you've set for yourself. And then phase four, the very last phase, is growth. Grow. Once you're achieving success, once you are successful in Google Ads, you grow and hopefully continue to grow over time. Those are the four phases. Now, I do not know what phase you're in. I would if I were to guess the majority. The vast majority of you are in phase one and phase two. Very few are in three. And maybe no one listening to me now is in phase four. Maybe, maybe one of you. So I'm going to talk to each of these phases and I'm going to give you examples of goals that will fuel your management. Okay, so back to the core thing. What are we learning here? We're learning how to manage a Google Ads campaign And how do you do that? Well Chris, you set a goal and then manage towards that goal. Alright, so what does management look like? How do you set these goals? What are examples of these goals? Example number one for phase one of Google Ads is limit risk. That means don't overbid when you can't control your traffic. My goal is to try and limit my risk in my Google Ads campaign. That could be a very simple starting goal. I'm going to limit risk. I don't want to overpay for traffic. That's not worth it. Really simple. So for example, you might realize because I've set this goal of limiting risk, maximize conversions might be a very bad decision For a Phase 1 Google Ads campaign because that does not allow me to limit risk. It does not really allow me to manage my bids. Okay, Another example of a goal for phase one, stop bad traffic and increase good traffic. Right. Really these goals will get more and more complicated as you move up. But phase one is just really simple. Get good, stop bad. That's it. Right? So this means practically how you manage the campaign is you try to gain more control of your goo, of your Google Ads traffic. So what does that look like on Monday morning, Tuesday morning? You, you try different match types, you add negative keywords going back to the first one. If you want to limit risk, you know, what does that look like on Monday and Tuesday morning? It looks like adjusting bids, taking action of some kind to try and get good traffic. Limit the bad traffic. Don't overpay for any of that traffic. And then the, the final one, the ultimate goal of phase one is get your first successful lead or a sale. That, that should be the ultimate goal for everyone. But definitely for phase one, let's get some success. Let's get some trophy on the board here. Let's get a call, a lead, a sale, a booking, let's get something. Okay, so how do you attain that? By limiting the risk of your keywords, limiting the junk and unwanted traffic that is unlikely to lead to a sale. And you know, what does that look like? Well, I was just working on a Google Ads account just this morning. Brand new account's been running for a week and one of the campaigns has five, maybe six different ad groups in it. The top spending ad group, when I dig into it and I look at the actual search terms and I look at the kind of competitors that are showing up when I look at the bids, how much is costing me for each of these clicks. When I look into it, I Realize, you know, this top spending ad group, I don't actually like any of it. It's too risky. I'm overpaying for this risky, possibly unrelated traffic. So you know what I did? I stopped the entire ad group, turned it off. I'm interested in these other ones, you know, for now, I'm gonna shut this entire ad group off and go after these other ad groups. That is what I mean. That's a practical example of how to manage. You limit risk. That could be a goal, another goal. Stop bad, get good traffic, that is, and then last, get your first success, successful lead sale, something like that. All right, that's phase one. There could be many other goals, but hopefully that gives you some examples. So set a goal and manage for that goal. Shifting gears, phase two. Those of you that are in phase two, you say, chris, I've gotten conversions. I have gotten conversions. I'm past the phase one. I think, you know, I'm getting conversions on a steady basis. What do I do in phase two? Well, this is critically important, and it's the only goal that I could really come up with that I think is legitimate. Establish an acceptable KPI, establish an acceptable cost per conversion, number of conversions, return on ad spend. Establish some kind of important metric that you are managing for. Okay, so if you're getting steady conversions and you get five a month, and those cost you $150 a lead, you say, okay, I want to get $100 a lead. I think I can do that. I think there's room for that. Okay, so if you're above that number, if you are above that acceptable cost per conversion or you're below that acceptable return on ad spend, you got to make cuts. You got to make cuts to achieve that cost per conversion. You got to make cuts to raise that return on ad spend. So how do you manage for that gold? That gold, how do you manage for that goal? Okay, Monday morning, Tuesday morning, what does that look like? Adding negative keywords, lowering bids, raising bids. Sometimes it isn't lowering bids. It might be raising bids. Perhaps there's an ad group that shows a bit more promise. These keywords are a bit more contextually deep. I think the people that are searching these really actually are low. Funnel ready to purchase. You know what? I'm going to double the bids here. I'm going to raise the bids, right? So I might lower over here, raise over here. I'm going to cut over here, and I'm going to plant over here. Another thing you might need to shrink your ad schedule or increase Your ad schedule. You know what? I don't think Friday afternoons, Friday evenings are good. I'm going to shut off anything after noon on Friday and not run my ads from Friday until Sunday afternoon. Most of the time we don't ever get leads or we don't get sales until that window, you know, between that window anyway. So I'm going to shrink the ad schedule. You know what, I'm going to expand and show up Sunday evening, maybe earlier on Monday. That's an example of shrinking and growing or increasing your ad schedule. Alright, so you make cuts, move it over here, make decisions that you think will bring you to a higher chance of achieving that KPI. Same thing is true for all the other things in Google Ads. Hopefully you're thinking about things here. Geographic area, smaller or larger geographic area. Test things, try things, do things, test it. How does that change it? Try this. How does it change it? Less keywords. Maybe you go really small, maybe you try really specific targeting on keywords, maybe you try more keywords, maybe you try broader keywords. What does that look like? So establish an acceptable KPI, Establish some kind of goal that you want to achieve and, and then test, test, test until you can reach that goal. All right, that's phase one and phase two. We've got phase three and phase four coming up. All right, so goals for phase three. Now phase three is people who have achieved and are now maintaining some kind of KPI. So these people are in pretty good position, right? They're, they're really doing maintenance, they're really just maintaining the status quo. So this is where, this is where I find people make the biggest mistake because their goals are actually more appropriate for phase four. But they're not really in phase four yet. They, they, they're, they keep kind of dipping and raising and dipping and raising. They kind of waffle back and forth unable to decide should I do this, should I do that? And why. The reason for this is because they haven't established a goal. They have not decided what is my acceptable KPI, what is my acceptable performance and then managing for that goal. So an example of a goal in phase three of Google Ads is you manage your bids based on whether you are in or out of that key performance indicator. So if you have a set of keywords, a campaign, an ad group, that is much better than your KPI, right? You have $150 cost per conversion and your goal is a hundred, that's a lot worse. So you might need to lower bids, limit the risk of that lower performing ad Group whatever set of keywords the whole campaign, lower the bids, slow that down, try and bring that number down. If it's doing much better if that. If you have a hundred dollar cost per conversion and your goal is to have 125 or 150, you are outperforming your KPI. Raise bids, try and invest there, push there, try and grow that. That will contribute to the overall performance of the account. And that's, that's what your task is day by day. Raise your bids, lower your bids, react to whether you are in or out of that KPI. Okay, another example for, for those of you that are in phase three, basically you react to your results in relation to your KPI. Okay, so I want to say this another way. It may not be raising bids, it may not be lowering bids, but basically think of it this way. Have you ever seen the circus act where they have plates spinning on sticks? You know, they're, you know, they have like six, seven, eight plates that are spinning on these poles, right? And they're, they're running back and forth and all of them are going at once. It's, you know, pretty crazy. And they're frantic. They're always frantic. Like, turn this one, spin this one. This one's slowing down. That's you and Google Ads, but of course a lot slower. What you want to do is ignore the plates that are spinning and are fine. Ignore the aspect of your campaign that is moderate. It's not really, really good and it's not really, really bad. Ignore those. Look for the outliers. Focus on the outliers. Focuses, focus on the huge successes and the huge failures. That's an example of a goal in Google Ads. I'm going to find the outliers in my campaign. Where are those? And what do I learn from finding these? I look at three years of data, thousands of dollars of data, and what do I find? You know, these particular searches that have this in common seem to do really well. You know, these set of keywords, these set of search terms, this time of day, this day of the week, this geographic location. Where can you find these huge successes and build upon them? Where can you find huge failures and build upon them, but you leave the, the middle ground, the moderate stuff alone. Just like that guy who's spinning the plates, right? He's not paying attention to the ones that are doing fine. It's the one that maybe he overspun and it's, it's flopping, right? Or the one that's not spinning enough and it's Starting to fall. Right, that's what he's paying attention to. The ones that need attention, that's what you focus on. Leave the middle ground alone. Focus on the highs and lows. Alright, so that's phase three. It's an example. I mean, I could come up with many more examples of goals, but hopefully this kind of gets your brain thinking on how to establish a goal and then remember, I'm not. The whole point of the podcast here is not to help you come up with goals. Goals are merely the fuel to manage your campaign. You set a goal and manage for that goal. You don't just set a goal and then just keep doing what you're always doing. You set a goal and then manage for that goal. Put your eyes on that goal and push towards that. Focus on that. That's how you get real results done. All right, and we got our last phase four here. For those of you that are in the growth phase, I do have a few goals for you. This is a rarely achieved phase four of Google Ads, but it is something that is worth setting some goals. And here it is. Well, I spoke too soon. Actually. Optio.com PSP is something that can help you reach the next phase of your Google Ads account. If you would like to achieve more success, please check them out optio.com PSP to get a free 28 day free trial of their wonderful software. That's twice the time you get if you don't sign up with my special URL of opteo.com PSP all right, goals for phase four. Long term growth. That's your goal. Long term growth. If you are in phase four of Google Ads where you're hitting your KPIs, you're exceeding them, you're doing well, and this is happening for an extended amount of time. You are now in phase four. You're growing, you're expanding, you're optimizing, it's a fun place to be, Everybody's making money, everyone's happy. An example of a goal should be quarterly growth, yearly growth, not daily, not weekly, probably not monthly. It should be long term growth. So if you're managing to try and beat last week's numbers, you're doing it wrong for phase four. Okay? That's an important goal. Someone who's in phase four is a very mature manager who should not be making the mistake of getting to today's numbers better than yesterday. No, no. Two possible goal is, is this, and this is something I, I love to do. I, I do this all the time. Form a hypothesis and test that hypothesis with an experiment. Okay, so I wonder if I do this, I wonder if this season of the year or these types of customers that are in this audience or these customers that are of this age. Or I wonder if I change my ad copy to mention price point or if I use more colorful language in my ad copy or this on my landing page. If I try these colors, what happens? Form a hypothesis. That means. That means come up with a guess about if I do this, I think this will happen. If I do this, I think I'll get better results. That's an example of hypothesis. If I change my call to action buttons to pink, I wonder if we'll get better conversion rates on my landing page. That's a hypothesis. Test it with an experiment. That is the kind of thing a phase four person will be doing. And last, an example is you look for the extremities in your campaigns. What an example of this is. I'm going to find all the extra the big numbers in my Google Ads account. What keywords get a ton of spend? Can I unpack the density of this keyword and find hidden gems inside this keyword? Can I find the ad group that spends a huge amount of spend and possibly unpack that, break that, that ad group out and try and create a little bit more optimized, smaller versions of that? Okay, can I grow, can I, can I pluck this off and start it and grow it independently apart from that big monster that's taking over my spend? Try the other side. Look for the extremities. Can I build upon something that gets very little coverage? What area do you have? Extremely low search impression share for what area has always been an issue and you're not really sure why. Can you build custom campaigns around that and structure it to see if you can bring that niche market out more? Okay, that's an example of building upon extremities. Really, really high spend and really, really low spend. Find those, test those, dabble in those. That's another example of a goal. So ladies and gentlemen, there is no reason why you would have nothing to do with management if you set a goal and your goal is to achieve something. And depending on your phase one, two, three and four, you should be able to move your campaign forward. And you do that by setting a goal and managing for that goal. That is how PPC Basics, PPC 101 is done. That's how you manage a Google Ads campaign. If you would like further instruction about how to do that, if you'd like, for me to demonstrate and work through this with you or take over the campaign and show you how it's done. That is the service I provide to many companies, big and small. Typical clients that I work with, by the way, you know, usually only spend a few thousand a month. I don't work with. I'm not exclusive to. I do have plenty of high spending campaigns. But just so you know, I don't work with $10 million a year clients exclusively. I work with small clients all the time. I actually tend to prefer those. So reach out to me. Chrishaefer.com the link is in the description. Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.