← 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
Q&A: Answering Questions from Listeners (Episode 497)
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Foreign. Hello and welcome to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Chris and today I am answering your question questions. This is a common occurrence here on the podcast. I answer questions from people who email me paid search podcastmail.com you can find me there for podcast related things. If you'd like to reach out to me for Google Ads work, consulting, coaching, management of your Google Ads accounts, that is Chris Schaefer.com but today is not about my management of Google Ads or anything. I'm talking about your questions. So send in your questions. I have more questions that I'm going to answer. I'm saving those for a kind of a response episode from last week's topic. So if you haven't listened to episode 46496 for 496 which is my episode about the PPC home services industry dying on Google, listen to that. Send your comments in. I already have several that I've gotten and I have more to share about how I feel about that and you guys are voicing your thoughts as well. So I appreciate that. But I have four questions for us to go through today and they're going to be talking about what to do about drop in performance. How do you deal with that? They're also going to be talking about recommendation system in Google Ads. I'm going to talk about different campaign types in Google Ads as well as the bid for new customers only setting in Google Ads. I'm going to talk about all of that about that four questions in total right after I tell you guys about Optio. Optio.com PSP is a special URL that you can go to try the growing popular tool from Optio that provides management for Google Ads. This tool is a specialized tool designed for managers that want help getting more done and analyzing. Digging deep into your data to find answers. You know you listen to this podcast because you want suggestions, tips you want to get better at Google Ads. Well, this tool is designed to help you be better and faster at your Google Ads management. Whether you're doing one account or a hundred accounts, this tool scales to your needs, offering dashboard, type of interface to see your data, how it's changing, what areas you should be concerned about, certain alerts about dropping in performance disapprovals, certain negative keywords, bidding issues that you need to be aware of. All of it is right there and it's extremely easy to use. You can try it for free for 28 days. That's an exclusive offer right here. Opteo.com PSP that's O-P-T-E-O.com PSP for that special 28 day free trial. Let them know that Chris sent you and they'll get you that special offer. All right, let's jump in. First question comes from Dan. Dan asks the age old question, the question that keeps us up at night, the question that terrifies all Google Ads managers. Sudden drop in performance, right. Dan says a sudden drop in performance happens. What is your approach? What's your favorite report to analyze? What's your system for dealing with it? All right, thanks for the question, Dan. Number one thing that I look at and I often question is right when we consider, I'm going to assume when Dan says sudden drop in performance, we're referring to conversions, not just ads stopping entirely. That's a completely different conversation. But I'm assuming conversions drop your con, your conversion rate, tanks cost per conversion, skyrockets, or maybe you get no conversions at all. Very first thing I'm looking at is am I still getting conversions the same way I was before it the problem started? Did one of my forms break? Did my call tracking break? So the first thing that I look at is I'll do a comparison before and after and oftentimes this ends up being the problem. The client changed their website and all tags that I had were removed. So now anyone that fills out a form, I get no more forms. Maybe my call tracking is still working, they kept that, but all my forms are gone. So I would see that if I look at before the problem and after the problem, I would notice that, okay, I'm getting half the conversions and I notice I'm getting zero forms or I'm getting zero call tracking, right? This would immediately solve the problem because there's not a drop in performance, there's a drop in tracking, right? This is, this is good news. It's something that needs to be solved, but it's a lot better than the other possibility. The other two possibilities is this. It's either bidding or it's targeting. I've said this many times. In my view of Google Ads, you have two options. You can approach things from solving it through bidding or you can try and solve it through targeting. That's really the only two avenues that are going to be a problem or going to lead to success in Google Ads. So when it comes to targeting, one of the ways that I like to assess, you know, has something broken, has something changed, is the search terms have changed. So I might do a before and after. I might do a comparison past 14 days compared to the previous 14 days, past 3 months compared to the previous 3 months. And then look at my search terms. Are the search terms on the before and after view completely different? Is there one particular search term that has stopped serving or one particular search term that has taken over 70% of the ad spend that was not there before? This is because a keyword went rogue on us. It went wild. Or maybe it's, you know, a particular keyword is getting too much spend. It was only getting 30% of spend and now it's getting 70% of spend. Now this is likely a situation that happens with bidding strategies like max clicks, maximize conversions or manual bidding sometimes too. So I often find that keywords can really get out of hand with those three bidding strategies because there's not necessarily a gated restriction system that would stop that from happening. So that's the targeting side. Let's talk about the bidding side. What would be the issue with bidding that might have caused it to crash? Well, bids are too high or too low. Did I recently make a change? I go back and look at the change history. Did I make a change in the Google Ads account by dropping the target cpa, dropping the target roas, or did I make a manual bidding change that would have tanked the campaign? Right. I might have had a hundred dollar target CPA and then I changed it to 25. Suddenly my positions on my ads have dropped. I'm not showing in first position anymore. I'm not showing in top position anymore. So my ctr, my click through rate has dropped to nothing. I'm getting no traffic, I'm getting no conversions. It's because of my bids have been changed somehow. My manual bidding, I, you know, I did it manually. I adjusted bids up or down. You know, that is likely the issue. Or it could be a combination. Here's a particular situation that I see happen a lot. It's a combination of everything I've said. The conversions broke and either they broke and you're getting half the conversion. So your bidding now is going crazy. Your target CPA was, was able to maintain $100 target CPA. The conversions broke. Now it's a $200 $300 target CPA and the bids are going crazy. The traffic's going wild because it's trying to attain that same acquisition cost and it can't do it or for something. I see a lot. Somebody put a code on the wrong page and now I have a 50% conversion rate because I'm getting doubling of the conversions. They put a conversion tracking code on my contact page and not the contact form itself. So now my conversion rate is skyrocketed. I'm getting hundreds of conversions and Google Target CPA or Target ROAS is going nuts and it's bidding like crazy and all kinds of dumb keywords. And these are not sales, these are not valuable. Okay, so this is one of those situations is going to be the case. And hopefully, Dan, I hope that this is helpful for you to find and isolate where those may have happened. Okay, so next, moving on to question number two, we have question from Authy Oathy. Yeah, I'm going to go Oathy. I'm going to go with that. Oathy says, hi, Chris. I've been listening to the PSP for a long time and I was surprised you didn't mention something in the recent episode about optimizing optimization scores. I go, Oathy says I go into my recommendations once per week and dismiss the ones that I feel would damage the account. Typically, I'll choose not relevant for my business. And when I dismiss the recommendation, the optimization score goes up. Okay, so he goes on and says it's a little bit of extra work, but it keeps the account safe and my optimization score always looks good to the client. Is there a reason you did not mention this in that episode? Okay, Othi, thank you so much for the question. And you are right, I did not mention this. And I'm glad that you are bringing it up now. I. I didn't include it in the episode because that episode was entirely focused on how bad the recommendation system is. I wasn't going to talk about how to kind of hack the system and fake the system out like, and dismiss everything. That. That was not the focus. It was. It was a discussion about how bad the recommendation system is and how poor those recommendations actually are and the kind of damage they do to the count. So let's use this opportunity to discuss dismissing recommendations and what that can do. So when you go into your recommendations tab, there are three little tiny dots up at the top right of each and every recommendation. You can click this and then it'll pop up a menu. One of the options in the menu is to dismiss the recommendation and it'll ask you why you're doing it. You don't have to answer and you just hit dismiss. And what it does is it moves your optimization score up. So my optimization score might start at 35%. I go in and dismiss five recommendations and then I look at my optimization score and it is now 75%. I have made no changes to my account yet that has improved my optimization score. So obviously this is proof that the optimization score means nothing, right? If. If my optimization score is 35% and then it jumps up to 75% and I've done nothing, what does that mean? It means the optimization score is pointless. It's a game. It's a gimmick. It doesn't actually reflect the performance of your account, the success of your account. So why, why then does Oathi even talk about this? Why do I even bother with it? Why would I even discuss it? Well, it's because Google for, For. For managers like me, agencies that, you know, want to maintain their Google partnership have to have a certain recommendation or optimization score for their clients. And many times we largely disagree with those recommendations that Google gives. So we have to dismiss those recommendations in order to artificially boost that optimization score. It is a game, it's a gimmick, it's a waste of my time, but it's something that managers have to do. And also, it also gets those recommendations off the screen. Because the amount of damage done to accounts, the amount of money that's been wasted, wasted and spent, the tens of thousands, maybe, maybe millions that has been spent over the years. For some, from someone clicking on an optimization, not realizing that they just added 15 broad match keywords with automated bidding to their campaign, the amount of damage and spend that is done is really. I mean, who knows? Who knows? It's not something that can even be guessed at because it happens all the time. So it removes the chance of my client or, you know, someone clicking on that recommendation and causing untold damage to their performance in Google Ads. So there we go. All right, I've got two more questions here, and I'm going to tell you one more time. Optio.com PSP is the tool to use. If you have not tried it, I strongly urge you there is some big changes coming in the next few weeks. I'm going to be telling you about an upgrade that is coming to Optio. You're gonna like it. I'm not. They've. They recently gave me a demo, told me about what's coming. It is some really cool stuff. I'll be telling you about it soon, but for now, get in while you can because this tool is growing. It's gonna get better, and you're gonna want to learn how to use it. It's amazing. Optio.com PSP all right, next question. Oh, I did not write down who this was. I apologize. But you know who you are. I replied to your email, so, you know, it's your question. I apologize. Hey Chris, I'm starting to run other campaign types for our E commerce company and I'm beginning to play around with demand gen and Performance Max for retargeting. Specifically, can you go into depth on different campaign types within Google Ads and what are some good things to know about each one that you've seen within the platform? And then there was a list of all the different types. So if you're not familiar with the many types of campaigns in Google Ads, there is a long list. There's a long list and you might be surprised because you say, Chris, you only talk about like two types. What about the other 12 that are out there? Well, I focus on search a little bit on maybe some others and I'll talk about the others here in a moment. But I focus on search because it is the only serious campaign type period. Whenever I look at businesses that are spending millions of dollars on Google Ads, you know, multiple millions. It is not millions in demand gen. It is not millions in performance max. It is not millions in app installs, video, hotel campaign types. None of these are serious contenders for my time that I'm going to put into Google Ads discussions because they don't, they don't move the needle, their add ons, their additions and that's people don't contact me with questions about their hotel campaign or their demand gen campaign. Most of these other campaign types that I talk about can't be managed, they can't be tweaked and messed with. And there's no buttons and switches and gears for you to kind of tweak around with. It is meant to be set up and left alone. And if you listen to this podcast long enough, you'll know that I don't like that. I don't like opaque, non transparent campaign types that have no control, that have no guardrails, that have no capacity to customize and set yourself apart from other advertisers. If everybody's being sold the same basic package, how is mine going to succeed? When all my competitors are using the same thing, how am I any different? But I'll tell you, search is there. Every search campaign I look at is different. Most Performance Max campaigns I look at, most video and display campaigns I look at, they're all the same. They're using the same boring settings, they're having the same crappy success. You know, they're, they're not, they're not unique, they're not custom. So that's the short answer about why I don't talk about them very much. But I will Discuss a few things. I'll give you some basic ideas about the few campaign types that I do see and I think have some validity. But every. But it is a mile behind search. That's where the real contender is. That's where the real skill comes from. That's where the real success is. From accounts that spend millions on Google Ads every year. That's where it is. All right, so number one is display campaigns. I've seen display campaigns that have been successful with remarketing. So someone sets up a remarketing campaign. I think that has been, you know, largely successful. I think that's worth the investment. So display campaigns are probably pretty good. I think they make very. A very good argument for, for running something like that. Minimal spend, good, good return, good investment. Another area that I find, display campaigns, when they do work, which is not very often, I find that they often work with placements. So someone has found a certain website or blog or something, some website somewhere that accepts Google's ads and they are placing ads, very specific targeted ads on a certain domain. I don't mean New York Times, I don't mean some big, huge thing, you know, just, just for clout, just for, just, just for the, the fact that your ads are showing on the Wall Street Journal or something. No, no, I mean specifically targeted to the people you're trying to capture. So placements, specifically targeted placements and display campaigns. I think, I think that is worth it because it's gonna be minimal spend but efficiently spent on who you want to reach. Okay. And then third, for display, I do see success and many accounts that have really highly targeted audiences, really specifically. And this is not something they just think up and it works. This is something that they, they test and do trials and experiments and have theories and try this. And eventually over months and years, they say this is the one that works. And this specific targeted audience works for us. That's another area of display that I, that I find works well. So next is shopping. Very common in particular, standard shopping campaign. That's another campaign type. I absolutely prefer standard shopping campaigns over performance max, at least to a point. But I'll talk about performance max in a second. But standard shopping campaigns, I've seen plenty of success specifically with E commerce. Right. And that's, that's where the question was all about. It's a person that is doing E commerce. So standard shopping is a great choice there, I think. Absolutely. Makes plenty of sense if you have an E commerce system that you're selling a product on. Standard shopping is a obvious solution. Whereas search may not be a good choice at all. Performance max is the next one. Performance max is. I really only like performance max for one thing nowadays and that is E commerce. That's it. I don't like it for placement of my ads on apps and websites and video. No, I don't like that. I do not recommend it. I find performance max to be mostly useless for everything else except for E commerce. Its shopping component I think works well. It can succeed in ways that a standard shopping campaign cannot and sometimes they run well in conjunction. So you run a standard shopping campaign and a performance max shopping campaign and they have different settings and different configurations and I've seen that work well. I've seen it work well. And that's really it when it comes to things that actually move the needle. Where I'm going to actually spend my precious, you know, 30 minutes talking about something. It is not with demand gen. It's not video, it's not mobile apps, there's not all the other silly things out there. I don't, I don't see the investment worth it. I don't see it in my clients accounts. I don't see it with people I consult with, you know, and train the. That's not what they're interested in. It's search mostly. All right, and last question. Efren writes in and says. Hi Chris, what has been your experience with Google Ads? Bid for new customers only setting, particularly for search campaigns. In the campaign settings under customer acquisition there is an option to check bid for new customers only. I'm curious how this performs in practice. All right, Efren, I have a great answer for you. I don't use it, so I'll tell you why. I'll tell you my particular issue with it. So I know your question was how's it work and how does it perform? Basically you want to know should you do it? Well, I'll tell you why I don't do it and why I don't like it. I do not use it. I have zero experience with it. Number one, it requires value based bidding. And a couple episodes back I ranked my favorite bidding strategies and maximize conversion value and target roas were pretty low on the list. I was very negative about my, my opinion of those bidding strategies and those are the two that required are required bidding strategies in order to use the bid for new customers only setting. I don't like those bidding strategies and so that almost completely eliminates me ever using this setting at all. But let's say, you know, let's get past that. Let's ignore that issue and let's get down to another giant hurdle. It requires passing customer data to Google. That might seem like a small thing. Some of you chuckle because you know that is not a small thing. Sometimes that requires jumping through hoops that are impassable for your business. Passing customer data to Google is a bit of a joke because many clients, many people I work with, talk to in the community, the PPC world, struggle just getting conversion working, right? I mean I, I'm working with a company that is literally spending like $7 million in their Google Ads every year. Okay. Hundreds and hundreds of thousand is being spent constantly every month. And I sit it on meetings and you know what they say, you know, the company doing the management of this account where I, where I'm, you know, kind of consulting as a stand in here, they'll say hey, you guys got 400 leads this month and they just ignore that number because no they didn't. They got 150 leads. If a company with this kind of capacity of spend has conversion tracking issues, what hope is there for many smaller businesses getting conversions that actually say the right number of conversions? They're actually correct. Data is I would say almost near 0%. It basically doesn't happen. So at what extent do you think people can correctly send customer data to Google and it be reliable enough for the system to work? I think we're at essentially zero here. I think it's absolutely ridiculous, number one, that you have to get conversions tracking to the accuracy that it's reliable. And then number two, you have to pass this information over in a way that is reliable as well, which requires jumping through technical hoops that can sometimes be impossible. And then number three, I really don't like this system. Not for the bid, not just for the bidding, not just for the complexity and the unreliability, but not only that, it requires enough volume for this system to work correctly. You can't just have a little bit of data. You have to have enough to make it over the data calculation hoop. I don't know, I don't know what the proper term is. Doesn't matter. It requires a certain level of data volume to even be eligible. So the hoops to jump through this just so that I can what, trust Google with more data that I can't see. I'm going to give Google more information. I'm going to, I'm going to send client privileged data, customer privileged data to Google so that they can optimize my conversions for new customers only. No, I can accomplish that other ways. You know what? I don't care. I don't use it. I don't like it. It's ridiculous. The hoops to jump through and it's unreliable. I think I made my point. I'm gonna leave it there. So if you'd like to talk with me, argue with me, have me look at your Google Ads account, I do offer a free Google Ads audit. If you've made it to this point in the podcast and I haven't looked at your account in the past, I haven't done coaching with you before, I haven't done an audit for you before, reach out to me and confirm that you heard it here at the end of the podcast. I am happy to do a free audit of your account. I'll look at your account, provide a 35 minute video, tell you what I see, give you some advice and no obligation. That's it. Something that I can can offer listeners. If you're interested, you can find me Chris Schaefer dot com. The link is in the description, wherever you're watching or listening. Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.