← 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
Search Terms in Performance Max (Episode 446)
00:33:35
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads. We're going to answer a question from a listener who is in a bad spot. He needs some help with a crashing account. We're going to go through some tips on how to fix a crashing account. Also, we're going to talk about a great reminder about why it's important to stick to the basics of Google Ads, why I talk about what I talk about and we have a happy story to share. I also have a Performance Max update to share with you guys. Some additional thoughts. Some things have changed. Maybe I've changed my mind about Performance Max. I don't know. You'll have to stick around to see. This is the Paid Search Podcast. Thank you guys so much for being here. I do this podcast every week and also every week I tell you about my one and only sponsor, Optio. Optio.com PSP is a special URL that you can go to to get a 28 day free trial of the best tool to help you optimize and manage your Google Ads account or many accounts all at once. This tool is designed to take you through some logical processes very easily about making decisions about your account. Need to know if this particular campaign should have some bidding adjustments made to it should you change the target cpa? Well, read through a couple prompts here on the screen and it'll help you to understand what the effects might be, why Optio is suggesting this change and you decide what to do. It helps you stay informed and make clear, focused decisions based on priority number one priority about getting stuff done faster in Google Ads. Making those decisions to improve your account every single day. Wonderful tool to help you stay on top of all of your Google Ads accounts or if you're just having trouble with just one. It is a very practical tool to just make sure you stay on top of the most important things from bidding to search terms, negative keywords, ad copy, websites, conversion rates, everything. It covers it all. You can try this for free@optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. You don't get this time trial anywhere else except for@my URL opteo.com PSP all right, jumping in with the question of the week is from Chris who I believe is in Little Rock. Chris says first and foremost, thank you for the coaching call last month. Really appreciate it. I wanted to ask a question about having account performance crash and burn after years of great performance. I have an account that for a year has been providing 10 to 12 decent leads per month, with one to three of those converting and the rest being quality out of nowhere. In 2024, our cost per click doubled and tripled on certain keywords, and our performance absolutely tanked. Fewer clicks, less conversions, getting hammered, and we have gone two to three months at this point without closing a single Google lead. I feel like we're digging a hole and getting deeper by the day. How do you go about handling these situations? Okay, all right. Great question, Chris. Thank you. And for those of you listening, if you'd like to send in a question, you can do so directly to my podcast, Gmail, which is paid search podcastmail.com okay, so here's how I go about handling the situation. You have to think about it in a compartmentalized way, and this is the best way that I approach it. First, you need to decide through process of elimination, Was this caused from targeting or was it caused from bids? Basically, in Google Ads, there's only two areas that you can fiddle with, Right? If you can imagine we're sitting in our Google Ads space, and there's a panel over here on the left that's all targeting keywords, negative keywords, geographic targeting, device targeting, all of that. Then on the right side of the Google Ads interface panel in our imaginary world is bids. You can change your bidding strategy. You can increase bids, lower bids, add a target cpa, change to a different bidding strategy entirely, eliminate certain times of the day by blocking the bids for those. There's a lot of things that you can do to adjust either the targeting or the bids. So the first thing you do is figure out which one of these has caused the problem. And what you do is you start going down. Some of the things I'll tell you about looking for red flags. Find red flags that are like, oh, that's surprising. As soon as you have that feeling, oh, that doesn't look right. That's odd, then you may have already discovered the problem. So let's talk about ways that you can have that aha moment. Okay, how can you find that red flag? Easier said than done. But here's an example for targeting. Go to the keyword view and set the date to the past two to three months, which is, Chris, what you had said, you said he had a problem in the past two to three months. So set it for the past 90 days and then do a comparison. Previous 90 days compared to the most recent 90 days. Okay? And when you do this, look in the keyword area, what pops out at you? Some examples, potentially one Keyword that has had a massive increase in traffic. Another keyword that used to get you a lot of traffic and is no longer getting traffic. You know, keywords that had zero traffic, maybe didn't even exist in the past 90 days and suddenly do exist and now getting a lot of traffic. You want to look for highs and lows here, particularly with the impressions, but more importantly the clicks, because that's where the money is being spent. So look there, find areas that are going up, areas that have gone down significantly, and then consider, you know, what does that mean? Look at that specific keyword search terms. Were those important? Look at the new keywords that are driving lots of traffic that you weren't getting before. Are those useful? And hopefully you can find a red flag to say, oh wow, this keyword, it used to get a lot of traffic. It's not anymore. It's been replaced by this other keyword which is really kind of crappy and it's getting a bunch of junk traffic done. That's a targeting problem. Okay, Another example could be potentially, you know, you lowered bids on a certain device. Type something like that, right? You changed your targeting in some way. You used to target mobile phones and for some reason you turned them off. Or perhaps Google Search Partners got turned on or the display network got turned on for some reason, or you eliminated a certain location or added a location. This absolutely could cause a massive issue with your targeting. You used to have these people seeing your ads. Now it's been split between those people and a bunch of other people that are not qualified. So find these secondary areas of your targeting that could affect things. So not your keywords, but the devices that your keywords are showing up on, the locations where your keywords are showing up on the networks. Google Search Search Partners display that your keywords are showing up on. Find out if those are any different and again do that by doing the comparison tool right there in Google Ads. Alright, now let's change gears. The other, remember the other console in front of you here is the bids console. So something may have changed there. So again, what you need to do is do a comparison, same thing as before. Compare last 90 days to previous 90 days and look for differences like position. Has your absolute top position changed significantly? Has your impression share dropped? Particularly if it's dropped, that's going to be the biggest indicator that some kind of keyword has exploded, right? And maybe that keyword has too high of a bid and it's suddenly consuming way too much traffic. Spending all your money, right? That'd be A bidding issue at the keyword level. Your positions have changed, maybe your bids have been too restrictive and you're losing positions. Or maybe even look at the click through rate, maybe your positions are dropping, that's causing your click through rate to drop. Getting less conversions. This is just an issue of just getting. You need to bump bids, you need to get more aggressive with your bids and get up there in the proper position to make sure your ad is shown. So that's an example of one bidding issue you could have. Another example is another tool buried there in Google Ads is the auction insights. Do another comparison. Past 90 days compared to the previous 90 days. Look at your auction insights and flip back and forth. What competitors had the biggest overlap and of those that had the biggest overlap, how high were they showing above you? Then compare that to the other 90 days, the previous 90 days that things weren't bad. Has a new competitor come in or a competitor that was formerly below you, now suddenly they're blowing your budget out of the water. They're showing above you all the time. That absolutely would be not a targeting issue, but a bid issue. So now you need to figure out, do I need to try and isolate and beat this competitor? It's now a race. Maybe I need to adjust my bids to try and be more competitive in this particular area for this competitor. And then last, just to throw this out because sometimes this is the case. If nothing seems to be raising a red flag for you, then I would suggest the issue is probably outside of Google Ads. If it's not targeting, it's not targeting and it's not bids, then look for an issue. Very often I have people, you know, clients emailing me like Kris, we're not getting calls anymore or our form's not being filled out. They're very upset, as they should be. And then after some investigation, you know, turns out their little web update, they did, they, they broke the conversion tracking on their site or they broke the form on their site or it's going to an email that nobody checks. And it's just all these leads are dying in a dead inbox. So that's another possibility there. So hopefully that is helpful. Thank you Chris for the question. And if you're interested, as Chris had said at the top of his email, I do provide coaching. I did a one on one with Chris about his account, talked about all kinds of things. Any question he had about his account I was able to answer. I do that every single day. If you're interested in my personalized Google Ads coaching, which is A live session over Zoom. You can go to my website chrishaeffer.com to sign up for that. All right, next, I have a bit of good news here. I got a great email from a longtime listener, Carlin, here in East Texas, which is where I live. And he has benefited from years of hearing me and my former co host Jason harp on and on about things to the point that it's now embedded in his head. And he saw something, he saw something in Google Ads and he was able to fix it because of the habits that he's formed from, from listening to me preach about, you know, what I do. So I'll let him share the story. Carlin says. Chris, I'm so thankful for all the specific technical info you give on the paid search podcast. You recently consulted with me about a plumbing campaign and your advice gave me something to work with and it is slowly improving against deeply entrenched competitors. But my spend suddenly jumped all, all of it on one particular keyword, home service plumbers, which is a phrase match. And for some reason Google is using this keyword to show me for competitors. And that's pretty much the only thing this keyword is showing for. And because of what you and previously Jason emphasized about viewing search terms with clicks while using keywords as a column in your search terms report, I found this issue in a matter of minutes. Had you guys not taught me that, I don't know how long it would have gone on wasting my client's money. It's so easy to miss little issues like this. Thank you again. Thank you Carlin. That's wonderful to hear. And that's when I get upset about Google Ads and you know, it's, it's such a struggle sometimes to work in this industry when I'm having to work under a massive corporation, world leading corporation that seems to not really care about my day to day quality of life using their tool, right? They'll just throw out a, an update to the interface in Google Ads doing things, removing things that were important to those of us that spend tens of hundreds of hours in Google Ads and they just remove certain features, they change things, they just cut stuff out, they make massive it. It's absolutely devastating at times to work in such a frustrating situation where I just hit my head against a brick wall and messages like this are always so nice because it's nice to know that even though I say a lot of the same things all the time that you guys are able to save endless amounts of money for you or your clients because of this. And I Just want to restate if you're like, I missed it, Chris. What, what did he do exactly? What, what was it that Carlin was specifically excited about that he saw that he did. Could you, could you explain that? Yes, let me explain exactly what saved his bacon in Google Ads, what saved his clients bacon in Google Ads, right? From, from, from spending tons and money, tons of money on something completely worthless. So Carlin had a certain keyword and it's a phrase match keyword, a three word phrase match keyword home service Plumbers. And let's say, you know, it's been cranking along, it's been getting clicks and then in the past 30 days, suddenly this keyword's getting more traffic, a lot of traffic, and the CPCs are going up and spending more. Now if you're just looking at the keyword and you're not investigating further, you have no reason to think that anything's wrong. You would think, oh, I got 50 clicks on this. Home service Plumbers. That's a, that's great. That's exactly what I do. That's exactly what my client does. I can't turn that off. That's, you know, maybe I'll bid up higher because it looks like it's great, right? This is a completely uninformed decision because you're not opening the hood up, let's say, on that keyword. So how do you open the hood on a keyword? How do you, how do you look under the hood? Well, you look at the search terms and what Carlin did that showed him the disaster that was being done before it ended up being a disaster was he saw that this particular keyword continuously, over and over and over was delivering competitor terms. So ABC Plumbing, XYZ Plumbing was the search term that was resulting from the keyword Home Service Plumbers. So let me lay this out for you. I know this is very elementary, but it's good to remember these things. About five years ago, Google decided that the old style of keywords are gone and the new keywords are much more forgiving in their matching of how people search. So now home service plumbers can basically entirely deviate from the word home, from the word service, and maybe even the word plumbers. So what Carlin was getting home service plumbers may have resulted in a click from the search that was Joe's Local Plumbing. Now if you paid attention, Joe's Local Plumbing has no single word that is the same in the original keyword. In fact, it's someone that's looking for a completely different company. Joe's local plumbing may have already done the plumbing job. And they just want to call to see, like about the, you know, the invoice that they got. They're not even interested in a plumber anymore. They're just trying to get the phone number. They're using Google as a yellow pages to look up the phone number, yet you just paid 16 bucks, 20 bucks for that. Click. This is a detriment to your campaign. So what you must check is that your keywords are delivering the traffic that you think. And if you're just looking at the keyword, if you're just looking at what's on the screen there and not looking at the search terms, you'll never see it. So what you can do is on the Search terms report screen, if you go to Insights and Reports in Google Ads, there's a tab over on the far left that says insights and Reports. Click on the Search terms button there in the Insights and Reports and you'll see all of your search terms right there on that screen. You can add a new column and this is what saved Carlin from lots of wasted money and potentially getting fired is he had the keyword column turned on in that view. So you go to your columns, click Modify columns and then add the attribute. It's called an attribute keyword. Add that keyword column to your view in the search terms, and now you see what matters most in Google Ads. The connection between the search term and the original keyword which brought it in. If you continue to see certain keywords that bring junk traffic. Junk traffic, junk traffic. You can see that in this view and make a quick decision to say, oh my gosh, I'll never be able to block enough negatives to stop this keyword from getting junk traffic. What I need to do is just turn off the keyword. That is how you can make that happen. That's how you'll see it. Otherwise you'll never see it. So thank you, Carlin, and keep up the good work. Any, anyone in the East Texas area would do good to hire Carlin to work on his account because he's obviously paying attention. And nowadays seems like, seems like a big ask nowadays for just a manager to just pay attention and not just run a performance max campaign or something, just throw some money at it and just run it on auto. You know, it's, it's. I don't want to say lazy, but it's maybe just a bit ignorant as to the reality of Google Ads. So speaking of performance max, I have a quick update about performance Max, which I will give you in just one moment. Very briefly, I will tell you and remind you about optio.com PSP. That is my one sponsor. You would do me a massive favor if you let them know that you appreciate their sponsorship on this podcast. I don't have a Patreon. I don't ask for donations. I, I don't ask you to go sign up or buy this. I really have very little pitch at all. I mean, I tell you about my services, which is what I do, but I don't waste much time with that. The only thing I ask is give my sponsor a chance. They're a great sponsor. They've been a sponsor for years and they will continue to be as long as I'm able to do this and they're interested in sponsoring me. So keep that going strong. Optio.com PSP to try their tool out and thank you for your support. Okay, let me, let me give you an update on Performance Max. As I hinted at the top of the show, maybe it's something that I'm interested in again, right? Maybe it is. Okay, I'll quit teasing. No, I'm not. Spoiler. The end of this conversation is not going to end up me, you know, me telling you I love Performance Max and I'm going to start using all the time. Okay, no, that's, that's not what I'm here to say. It's not, it's not the end result of this. But I do have some updates to share with you. Those of you that don't give Performance Max much credit or you know, or like it at all, like me. So my biggest gripe with Performance Max is that it's essentially a vending machine of Google Ads with me putting in money and out comes quote unquote conversions. Now my problem is that any, anybody spending money should be critical of what their money is getting them, right? You don't just spend money on something and don't question the quality of what you get back. And that's my biggest issue with Performance Max is particularly for service lead generation companies, is that the quality can vary. Now for E commerce accounts, it's a different conversation. You can definitely see the quality. You can measure the integrity of the sales, the leads by measuring your return on ad spend. But with lead generation, it's not so cut and dry. So it's not something that I'm a big fan of because I can't control it. One thing I don't like is it's not transparent. I can't see the Search Terms. I can't see the quality of traffic. You just heard me talk about Carlin's discussion about how he saw Search Terms and was able to make it a change on his account or his client's account. Okay, this is, you know, something that's previously impossible with Performance Max. But I'm here to say that there is a more in depth way now to see Search Terms. This was pointed out to me, somebody had sent me an email and you know, noted some of the changes that have been made in Google Ads Performance Max. And I looked at it and indeed it is a bit updated and there is a bit more transparency which I like. You can and I'll do this on screen. Well, I'm not going to share my screen, but I'll look at this screen as I'm talking through this. You can go to your Performance Max campaign and click on the Insights view and scroll down and if you go all the way down to the search term Insights, you can click View Detailed Report and this gives you a full screen. Finally, they give us a full screen in Performance Max. They seem to have major issues with the margins for some reason, making everything tiny. But they give us a full screen of a Performance Max version of Search Terms. Now this is limited. You can only see this data since early 2023. But you know, I mean that's, that's quite a ways back. And you can also only see it with certain columns. So you can't see all your metrics. There's no position metrics, there's no click through rate metrics, although you can calculate your own metrics if you want by using the clicks and the impressions and you can calculate your own. So you're limited on how much you can actually see here. But there is a way to sort by what is my highest volume of clicks, what is my highest volume of impressions on what we assume is Google Search? I don't really know. It could be search partners. But it's going to show you a list of all the different kind of ways that, that people search and interact with the ad in your performance. Now this is great, but there's no way for me to prioritize or deprioritize these searches. I can't tell Google get more of this, get less of that. Which is frustrating, but that's what you give up here. There's no control over the system, which is okay, I guess you're not supposed to be able to make those decisions because you don't have to pick keywords if you want to pick Keywords and all that build a normal Google Ads campaign. That's not what this is, but it's great to be able to see this. You can see it now and you can even sort by conversions. So you could see directly how much of your conversions are coming from brand searches, which I, I think is critically important because that is the next thing that I'll gripe about. And I don't think there's a better solution here. I don't think there will be for, for a while at least. But there is no way to see a specific search and block that search in any kind of simple way. There is what, what they call a brand exclusion so that you can exclude certain brands from your account so that you don't show up for those. But I'll tell you what, that is not built for mom and pop brands. That is built with big brands, larger brands. They don't have every business listed here. So you may not be able to exclude your own brand from your own performance max campaign. So you could be getting phone calls, lead forms from your own brand. And this is true for shopping. You could be getting your own brand through performance max, which would artificially inflate your metrics. And there's no clear way to stop that. There is a performance max negative keyword system in beta, but it's not here. And for right now it's not open to all accounts and you can't, not everybody can use it, but it is an option for some. I don't, you know, who knows how long it's going to be in beta if it will ever see the light of day because there's plenty of beta systems that never make the light of day here. There is also a account level negative that you could add. I don't think that's a good solution because you can't add account negatives to block everything in an account because that affects your other campaign. So if you had a brand campaign and you wanted to block your own brand, it would screw up your brand campaign while trying to block Performance max. So it's not, it's not a good solution in the end. Again, no real control. You have some more data, you have no real control. Additionally, there's no direct way to tell Google, I want more google.com traffic or at least show me the google.com traffic. You can't see that. You can't ask it to do more display or less display or more YouTube, things like that. You know, those are, those are things that I don't really like about it. I am Encouraged by the fact that Google is listening. And we did get more transparency with Performance Max. It will never be the kind of thing where you can pick your own keywords because that's not what it's supposed to be. That's what the standard Google Ads search is for. But it is nice to be able to see a bit more through that opaque window and be able to see what's going on under the hood, which I value more than anything. Nobody just dumps money into something without expecting some level of quality in return. And for lead generation in Performance Max, which is what I talk about a lot, that was my example a moment ago with Carlin was plumbing. I was talking about plumbing. That is the most important part. You can't just get leads. They have to be qualified. You can't just have people that are calling about any old kind of job. It needs to be a qualified lead. You know, it really depends. You need to control that more. And that's not the situation that I find Performance Max to be able to run at. I often find in the end that when I run Performance Max for anything other than shopping, that it leads to a detrimental waste in junk leads, unqualified leads, uncontrolled spikes in leads and drops in leads. It goes back and forth. It's very frustrating. Not something I recommend. So I wanted to give that update on Performance Max. I appreciate, I forget who sent me the email, but I appreciate the gentleman who sent the email over to me. Thank you for that. If you guys would reach out to me for consulting management of Google Ads. As I said, Chris Schaefer.com Otherwise, stay tuned right here and I'll be back next week with even more tips and suggestions on how to improve your Google Ads accounts. See you next week.