← 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 - Simple Ad Strategy That Works (Episode 494)
00:29:43
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. Specifically, I have my series here about PPC Basics, which goes through some of the basics that everybody needs to know. Whether you've been doing Google Ads for a long time or you're just getting started, these strategies about PPC basics will help you no matter your skill level. So I'm going to discuss a simple ad strategy that works. That's the topic for today. So your ads are the part that show on Google, right? That's the only thing that shows on Google. All your keywords, all your bidding strategies. There's only one thing that people actually see and it's your ads. What did you write in your ads? What did you put in your headlines? What'd you put in your descriptions? That's the only thing that Google shows to its users. So, you know, obviously you need to put some time and thought and strategy into your ads. And that's what we're going to talk about today. I have my friend Joey Bidner is going to join us for a brief session about a new feature that brings this strategy forward even more. And then I'm going to add on to that towards the end. So we're going to jump into that momentarily. But first, happy 2026. It's a new year and it's my favorite sponsor, Optio. That's right. They're here again with a great offer for you. Listeners of this podcast exclusively get a 28 day free trial of their amazing software to help you manage your Google Ads. Whether you're running one account or a hundred accounts, this tool scales. It helps you do things that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Helps you with keyword management, ad copywriting, bidding, conversion, optimization. It alerts you when something's wrong. It lets you know when there's amazing optimization opportunities that could make a massive difference in your account that you may never see otherwise. This tool is a power tool for anyone who wants to get more out of their Google Ads. And if you're listening to this podcast, that's you, that's you. Because this tool is designed for people who want to squeeze every bit of value they can out of their account. So you can try this tool for free for 28 days@opteo.com PSP so that's opteo.com PSP that's opteo.com PSP and they have a new feature called deep linking where you can actually click a link directly in Optio and it Opens opens up that part of Google Ads for you. So if you want to work on an ad, Optio says, hey, this ad is an issue. You click on it and it directly opens it in a new tab. So not only is it a power tool for you, it's now a deep linking center for multiple accounts, multiple campaigns, those really complex situations. You can just go straight to it instead of having to open a new tab, login, pull it up. It does everything you need to do. So check them out@optio.com PSP all right, so without further ado, I have my friend Joey about to jump in here. He's going to talk about a new way to measure your ad copy performance. Joey, go ahead.
- [03:50]
B
Hey, what's up, Chris? So today I want to talk about ad copy and in particular I want to discuss how to observe the data of our ad copy to make changes and observations. And this is important right now because as of, I believe it was in June where this change came. But we have been given more data to make ad copy data observations up until now in our responsive search ads. As I'm sure everyone here is already aware, we have not been given a lot of great data points. Frankly, we've been given no great data points. Responsive search ads at the, you know, line item level of our ad copy. We have been given impressions and this rather useless metric that just tells us if something is poor, average or good. So I think we've all been rather desperate to get more data transparency. And I want to explain how to view these new data points on our ad copy, but also how to use them. You know, like the good old saying goes, with great data comes great responsibility. I don't believe that more data is always better. And in this context, I'm going to explain with which data points should be taken with a grain of salt so you're not, you know, led down the wrong path. I think when it comes to ad copy, there are a few data points that truly matter and others that don't. So I'm going to be covering all of that today. Okay, so first I'm going to explain how to navigate to this area because it is a little bit confusing. We are not going to be observing this in the ad itself. This is not in your Asset details button on the ad. We are going to go to the Assets tab in our account view. So if you click on Campaigns and scroll past your Campaign ad Groups Ads view, you'll see Assets. You're going to click on that. This is where you normally add your. What were Formerly called extensions, but now it's all called assets. Now there is one, one really confusing part about all this and it comes from Google calling everything assets, right? We've got headlines, which are now called assets, and formerly extensions, which are also called assets. And this is where it gets a bit confusing because when you go into the Assets tab, by default we are on associations, right? And you'll see on the associations area there's all these other tabs and Headline is one of them. If you click Headline in the Associations tab, this is kind of like the headline extension area. This is where we could add that headline asset that would go across all of our campaigns, right? We like to use this for ad copy, changing for a sale, for example. This is not where we see our headlines like we're going to navigate to in a second. So at the top, when you click Performance, this is when the meaning of this headline button changes. Now when you click Headline, it's going to take you to or it's going to show you all of your headlines and the data that corresponds to them individually. Now this area is really sweet because like our campaigns view, we have a columns button where we can pull in not all of the data points that we're used to, but a good number of them. We've got clicks, impressions, click through rate, cost, conversions, conversion rate, all kinds of stuff. Now I want to break down the things that matter to me because I feel like this can be dangerous. And I'll start with conversions. To be honest, I do not optimize my headlines for conversions because I don't believe a particular headline really has an effect on the conversion rate. The conversion rate is going to be more influenced by the keyword and its relevance to the landing page. The landing page and the keywords are going to have more of a conversion rate importance. To be honest, for me, I optimize to click through rate. I think click through rate is the metric that truly speaks to the importance of the nuance within a headline and how it relates to the keyword. So I'll be honest, I more or less ignore conversions. Here I look at click through rate. So when I'm observing the data in this view, I'm also looking for anomalies, things that kind of spot out as problematic, right? I'm looking for things, things that have, let's say, a high amount of spend, but a low click through rate, that's something that I'm going to maybe change or exclude. I'm not necessarily just going to take something that has a high click through rate. And apply it to every ad across my campaign. I'm not necessarily being proactive here. I am being reactive. I'm reacting to problems as opposed to being proactive on things that I make assumptions about. Right. So again I don't overthink my ad copy. I really just make sure the click through rates are good and anything usually above like a 2 is good. Now a lot of my ad copy is well above a 2, which is fantastic. But I'm looking for those things that are below a 2 to maybe exchange. Now Google, to be honest, does a pretty good job. You won't often see those cases where there's an over delivery of spend on something that has a bad click through rate. I very rarely see it. So what I'm typically using this for is finding headlines to swap out for other ones and they will usually be also low spending, low click through rate copy. So if I've got a new headline that I want to add, what I'll typically do is go to this view and find the one to swap out. Because I'll also be honest, I don't necessarily try to fill all the spaces of my ads. I don't believe you need 20 headlines to have a successful ad, especially if you have a small budget. If you have a small budget, don't fill all 20 because then it'll take 20 years for Google to optimize to what works. I just have the amount of headlines that is necessary. Right? I don't overstuff, I don't repeat things multiple times. I like to have a headline that says what the product is and a few headlines that say the value propositions and that's it. And then I'll swap out the ones that Google sees no sticking points to. The ones that have very low impressions are usually the ones that have the low click through rates. And Google has said, yeah, this one's not really doing much for me right now. I'll swap those out. So if it's got a low number of impressions or a low click through rate, that's usually good criteria for me to swap out. Another interesting thing you can see is you can observe which headlines are pinned. So there's a column for pinned and you can see how many ads have pinned headlines. Now you have to be careful when comparing click through rates on pinned headlines versus not pinned headlines because obviously the pinned ones are going to have a higher click through rate or they often can because they're just shown a lot more. So I like to observe them in chunks. I'll often filter by my Pinned headlines if I have some and then filter by my non pinned headlines. And one thing that I wish this view had that it doesn't is when you make a filter, it doesn't show you your filtered view at the bottom compared to the account view. So that's one thing that I do wish that it had. But this view as I find incredibly helpful because again, you can observe your headline data at the account level, campaign level or ad group level. I really like zooming out a little bit and seeing how my headlines are performing holistically. So I can see certain things that maybe pop out at me that I would have missed that I might not necessarily have the time to look through every ad one at a time. That was also the problem with the previous system of looking at our ad copy. At the ad level. If you wanted to see your asset details, let's say the combinations area which was quite helpful at the ad level you could only see it like one ad at a time, which is kind of useless because if you have an account with a ton of ads and you can't compare the copy and the combinations from one ad to the other, it just becomes less impactful. So I really like that we can see this from the top down and narrow in as we need to. So this view is also not just for headlines as I'm sure you will notice right when you go to this performance tab you can see all of your assets in this view. You can see videos, you can see images, you can see descriptions. So it's, it's been really helpful also for assessing the click through rate, for example on image assets, which I love by the way. Image assets are getting more and more used. So I just think this view is a massive asset pun intended to our workflow. So I encourage all of you to find this little area and use it with the discretions that I mentioned. Don't get over carried away with conversion data here. In my opinion, Click through Rate is our source of truth. And be careful again how you compare one piece of ad copy to the other if you are pinning them. All right, I'll pass it back to you Chris. See you next time.
- [14:02]
A
All right, thank you Joey. And you can reach out to joey@joeybidner.com he is a great Google Ads Manager and can do a ton of work in consulting and management and all kinds of stuff. So if you're interested you can reach out to him. But let's continue on with Joey's topic that he brings forward about measuring your ad copy. Okay, so Joey brought forward that there's now a new tool, new ability for us to see. Some pretty old school stuff, right? This is not groundbreaking, but it was for a while taken from us. You couldn't see this data. So now that we can see it, now that we do have a way to see it and measure it and take action on it, there's a whole new world opened up for us to start doing strategies and start doing things in Google Ads that we kind of let slide. Right, so I'm going to talk about strategies that you can use for ad copy. And the way I see it, there are two camps in this. There is the camp of inviting someone to click on your ad and isolating people to basically not click on your ad. Alright, so let's talk about these two camps because the way I see it, it's really straightforward and you need to decide which strategy you want to try with your ad copy. So let's talk about the first one, inviting. This is where 90% of people are writing their ads, which I think is a mistake. Okay. Essentially this strategy is inviting everyone to click. It's inviting everyone, it's encouraging everyone, Click my ad. Click my ad. Click my ad. The most common strategies for this is repeating the keyword that the person searched for. Right? They searched for something. And you, you, you say that in your headline. They searched for Widget XYZ and you say we are making sell. We do, we fix Widget xyz. Right? So people click on the ad because they see what they searched for. Right? Pretty straightforward. This is a vast majority of very boring, non, non interesting ad copy that, you know, works, it works fine. But that's not really what we want. We want to try something perhaps different. So people that venture out and try different things might try something like putting discounts or offers, actually saying something around free or using percentages, you know, free estimate, free land adjustment or you know, I don't know, something. All right, or maybe you sell something and you know, 15% discount for the new year. This is a New Year offer, 25% off in January. Right. This again invites people to click. So this is a very specific inviting strategy. Works great if you want lots of people to click on your ads, which is the majority of people. Most, most advertising is gonna be focused at, you know, people that are exclusively trying to reach. Well, I shouldn't say exclusively. People who are trying to reach everyone. Advertisers are trying to reach everyone. Right? So everyone has air conditioning, everyone has plumbing issues. Every now and then, you know, everyone needs shoes, clothes, food, Banking, things like that. Right? So this type of stuff, you need anyone and everyone who's searching for it to click on the ad. So these are inviting ads. You do discounts and offers, give things away for free. Use percentages in your ad copy. Right, so the third and final of this inviting strategy is you saying some kind of feature or benefit. All right, so something that's different about your company, you know, this, this bank is specifically in your small town, right? It's not in Dallas, it's in your specific neighborhood. So maybe that's a feature, some kind of benefit. Might be the fact that this, you know, this T shirt is made of a certain high quality material that wicks away sweat or, you know, absorbs certain odors and things like that. All right, so features and benefits, again, invite people to click. So when we want people to click on our ads, we use inviting language by repeating the keyword, by using discounts and offers and doing some kind of feature or benefit in the ad copy. But what about those companies that try something different? And this always intrigues me, and this is what I call the isolating strategy. This is actually actively working against getting a click for 90% of the people out there, perhaps because they, these advertisers are offering something that's different. Maybe you are a resort that is unusually more expensive than other resorts. Maybe you're a wedding venue that's particularly high priced, or you have a very specific venue that only caters to specific needs. You would need to isolate your ad copy. You would need to isolate people from clicking on your ad, which is a whole unique strategy. You actually have to work against what Google wants you to do. Google wants you to get high click through rates. They want you to get lots and lots of clicks. But you need to write ads that tell people the part that's gonna make your business, your product, unappealing. Well, how do you do that? Well, you can mention that the price of your resort is, you know, 3,500 a week minimum. You know, that's the, you know, starting at 3,500. And this is a situation where I actually use the currency sign, the dollar sign, you know, dollar sign, three comma, 500. I lengthen it out, I make it very big. This is isolating because people that are shocked by that price would not click on it. But, but, but, but, but some people are going to be enticed by it. Some people would be interested in it because it is exclusive, because it is high price. This is something that entices the right people. But isolates them from the rest of the group. So now you have maybe a lower click through rate but better qualified traffic. Right. This is something that is particularly interesting for many accounts that I run and manage and it works great. Another example is actually calling out based on age or gender or certain aspects of an individual. Mothers over 65 or athletic fit, clothing, you know, specific things that are going to isolate that person from the, from everyone else. And no one else is interested because they don't fit that profile. But the ones that do, they click the ad. It registers with them. So some kind of isolating aspect, whether it's demographically, whether it's physically or as we talked about earlier, whether it's based on affordability. You know, this is not affordable to 95% of the people out there. So don't click on my ad if you can't afford a car that starts at $80,000. Don't click on my ad if you're not willing to pay at least $150 for these shoes. These are exclusive isolating features. So the click through rate goes down, but you get better qualified traffic. Okay. A third specifically to speak to people who say, well, Chris, it's not necessarily expensive because it's a service that we offer or you know, we have to give a quote. We don't know what kind of pricing usually equates to. It could be 10,000, it could be 10 million. So the pricing doesn't work. And also it couldn't be certain ages or genders or aspects because it's a service or, you know, it's not something they wear or put on. It could be anyone. We advertised a business to business, right? So how could that possibly work for us? Well, here's the third, the third isolating strategy that you could use technical language. This is something that should come pretty easily for those of you that have been doing something for a very long time. Right? This is the kind of thing that you have to tamp down when you sit at the dinner table with your family, right? You could speak in this technical language that you've learned over your many decades of doing this industry, but you don't speak to that language outside of work. Right? Now's the time that you can do that, write ad copy that is specific that those that are understanding and within this industry would understand and click on that ad. I find this a lot, you know, doctors, anything within a specific professional realm that's, you know, usually higher educated or highly technical. There's a lot of IT stuff. For example, I was working on some Ads for a company that does server AI room, you know, server room, types of air conditioning. And it took me a while to learn about this, but CR A C expert, right? I don't know if you're supposed to spell that like crack. I don't know how you're supposed to say it. Maybe it's just crac. Crack experts doesn't ring very well. But CR A C experts means someone who's an expert in computer room air conditioning. Right? But. But CR A C expert doesn't ring true to anyone, right? No one who's looking for an AC expert is going to be clicking on that unless they know what CRAC stands for. So now we're talking. Now we're speaking the language of the people that we want to bring in to the site. So high price, specific aspects about them, whether demographic, age, gender or something like that, or using specific technical language. That's an isolating. So we have inviting and isolating. Those are the two strategies that you can use in your ad copy. Now let's talk about how to use them. I have one final section. None of this makes sense unless you follow this final step because throwing all of this in randomly doesn't really work for reasons. I'll tell you in a minute. Before I do, quick reminder. Please check out Optio. They are my longtime sponsor. They have decided to sponsor me again in 2026, which I'm very thankful for because you guys continue to support me by checking them out. So please do that. If you have enjoyed the show for many years. Do a free trial. Try a free trial just for me. Optio.com PSP okay, so final thing. How can you use these strategies? How can you utilize these strategies in a way that actually makes sense? Pinning. You need to pin these to the first headline. What you do is you create different ads. Maybe you try an ad that is inviting and you try an ad that is isolating and judge the results. Or maybe you try only isolating ads. And what you do is you pin that high price, you pin that age, gender, aspect, some kind of isolating language to the first headline of your ad. You use that highly technical language and pin it to the first line of your ad so that Google is forced to use that every single time. In fact, now we're getting advanced here. But what I really suggest is that you do three different versions of that and pin three versions to the first headline. So you don't just have one pinning, you actually have you write, you know, starting at 3500 a week in your first headline. Then you write a second first headline and you pin that and you say 3500 per week starting price. That's your second first pin headline. And then you write a third one, 3500 starting price. Right, that's. So all three of these all say 3500 in them every time, but they're just written a little bit differently. You pin every single one of those to first position and Google rotates those out. And then the rest of the ad copy, who cares? It'll be second or third position. First position, the very first thing. First, first headline. Not first position, but first, first headline is what that's pinned to. And that's it. So now you can test isolating ad copy. You can test inviting ad copy. You can test this. And as Joey mentioned, we can now see the click through rate, we can now see the click through rate, we can see the click through rate percentages. And you can, you can, you can test and see which ones actually, actually perform better. Now keep in mind, isolating might have a lower ctr, but maybe you're experiencing better qualified leads. So that's it. That's the, the very first podcast of 2026 for me. I hope this has been useful for you. If you'd like to reach out to me, you can find me@chrishaeffer.com I offer management, I offer consulting for Google Ads. That is the one and only thing I do. You're not talking to a team, you're talking to the, the guy that does all the work. I don't, I'm not, I don't represent an agency. I represent me. I'm the only one here. Otherwise, I'll catch you guys next week.