← 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
Simple Alternative to Manual Bidding (Episode 434)
00:34:31
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:20]
Chris
Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm going to talk about Google Ads specifically. Specifically, I'm going to talk about a simple alternative to manual bidding. You guys know I'm the manual bid evangelist. I am. I've always been pushing it. I'm always a fan. I think it is a phenomenal way to run a campaign for almost everybody, with a few exceptions here and there. But I'll tell you what, sometimes manual bidding is a bit too complicated, a bit much for people to do with their normal job. If you're managing your own account or you have a bunch of accounts, sometimes it's too much. I'm going to talk about a simple alternative to manual bidding that might be a better option for you, for a few of you out there. So that is going to be talked about at the end of the show. I'm going to put that into the main topic of the day. And to start the podcast, I have three questions. I kind of went crazy. You guys have been sending in some great questions and so I just, I grabbed three. It's more than I usually do. And I'm just going to do three questions and then the topic of the week. So let's get into it. First question is from Chris. That's not correct. It's. I did not write down the name. They're saying Chris. The first message is to Chris. That's me. I didn't write you. I didn't write down your name. I am very sorry. You're gonna know who you are anyway. This person. Thank you for your question. Says, I found the podcast this year and I've been listening religiously to it ever since. I've been playing around with manual CPC more and more and feel lost at times. Sometimes it's a obvious that a keyword is not performing and it isn't getting any conversions that you want at the cost that you want. However, sometimes I feel lost, especially on lower budget accounts. I'm sure this is a complicated topic, but how do you manage cpc, manual cpc? What metrics do you look at? When do you increase bids? When do you decrease? When do you add keywords? When do you turn them off? Okay, whatever your name is, thank you so much for the question. Also, there's a addendum, an add on here that they said. They said I started, by the way, I started Optio this month. It's great software and I'm looking forward to using it. Thanks for the extra free month. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Perfect beginning to the show you can grab an extra free month of my recommended software Optio. This is my sponsor for many years and it is something that I hear praises about. All the time that people save using this software, all the situations that it points out to correct and alerts and warnings really helps you dig into an account. If you find yourself staring at a screen with numbers and and buttons and you're like what do I do? Where do I start? What should I be looking at? Optio is a great tool to help you simplify the complex world of Google Ads, save time, get more done with Optio. That's opteo.com PSP for a 60 day, 8 week, 2 month free trial of this tool, you'll get an extra month just like you heard if you use that special URL, it's in the description on wherever you are listening or watching. That's optio.com PSP and if you don't see the offer about the extra free month on that page, which you won't because it's hidden, message them through their chat form and they will get you that extra month. Okay, on with the first question. So it is indeed a very complicated topic. I think I can best answer this in a simple way by telling you I manage my manual CPC based on risk. It honestly is the best way I can describe it. I think to define how I manage cpc, I mean I need to define risk because risk comes in multiple forms. Let's say option example A is I'm running a manual campaign and this particular campaign doesn't get conversions. It's a very high funnel. You know, it's a lot of how do I what is, you know, kind of stuff, right? So it's very high funnel. So I don't have conversions here. So I don't manage based on risk of cost per acquisition, CPA or ROAS or anything like that. So risk comes in the form for this client of certain searches are just not worth as much. Some things I'm not interested in showing for they're all broad match. So my risk comes in the form of search terms and cost per click. If the search terms are off. If my cost per click is too high for certain searches, certain keywords, certain topics, certain areas, I will turn off a keyword. I'll possibly increase bids if I like some things, decrease bids with other things. That's what risk looks like when I have no conversions and I'm doing a lot of kind of high funnel awareness type of stuff. Risk comes in that form. Now in another form say I'm Running a very standard Google Ads search campaign. All phrase match, exact match, no broad at all. And I do have conversions in this and let's say I only have like two a month. I get very few. Well, risk comes in the form of a combination of cpa, cost per acquisition management. I'm looking at the conversions, which ones are leading to conversions. Perhaps I need to look at six months worth to really make some assessments here because 30 days is not really a lot of data to look at. If there's only two conversions, maybe a month. So one side of risk is going to be assessing what kind of searches tend to lead to conversions for this client. And then the other side of risk is going to be looking at which ones do I think have the best chance of being qualified. I'm actually looking at the search terms and assessing, okay, this is probably good quality traffic. You know, this seems about right. It hasn't gotten great cost per acquisition, but I keep the bids lower. There's more risk involved. It doesn't have a whole lot of conversions, but I still think it's worth it. So I move the bids up and down based on what I think it's worth. So that situation is a combination of conversions and quality. Now campaign number three, this is where I'm getting. I get multiple conversions. I get a lot of conversions. Let's say this is all mobile click to call. You know, I get a lot of mobile click to call for this lead gen client and there's maybe 15 conversions a day and I'm spending a bunch of money on this and my margins are very tight. I need to make sure that my cost per acquisition is below $50 for this client. I am making a strict risk adjustment based on that target CPA based on that goal CPA number. So if a certain keyword starts to slip, I might decrease bids on that and then other ones are performing better. I might increase bids. Some keywords that are bringing in the wrong kind of searches, I might replace them with keywords that more appropriately bring in the kind of traffic that I do want. So that's what risk looks like in its three forms based on traffic quality, traffic value based on a combination of traffic value and conversions and then based just on conversions and that comes in the form of cost per acquisition, CPA or roas or whatever you're using. So great question. I am very sorry, I forgot to write down your name, but great question nonetheless. Thank you so much. If you, the listener would like to send in your question, you can do so by sending me an email paid search podcastmail.com Please make sure that you send questions to the show through that email or through my website. Paid search podcast.com because that's how I make sure I see the question. Sometimes I do get messages through my website. That's not the proper way to send in the question. So thank you for doing that. Moving on now to a question from Jess. Jess says, hey, Chris, thank you for your commitment to your podcast show. The episodes are so helpful, but also reassuring. I appreciate that. I'm glad I talked to a lot of people that say, Kris, I feel like I'm all alone. I feel like I'm, you know, I'm, you know, I have this imposter syndrome where, you know, I feel like, am I doing anything right? Am I by myself? Like, is, am I the only one that has this problem? So I assume that's what you're talking about. Jess is like, I help people identify. Yes, this is normal. This is a problem everyone struggles with. So I'm happy to communicate my failures and frustrations and problems to affirm everyone. Yes, this is normal. Your ups and downs and failures are pretty common in Google Ads. So if I don't communicate that, I think I'd be a hypocrite because I definitely, I have my long list of failures in Google Ads, don't you think? I don't. All right, getting on with Jess question. I have recently taken back management of an account which I used to manage a year ago, which was previously profitable for the business. Within this year, somebody else has been managing it and started to have a dwindling success with it. The old campaigns have been chopped and changed, so I've decided to start fresh with new campaigns guided by my prior knowledge. This brings me to two questions. First, in your opinion, what time period is a reasonable length of time to expect a similar result? Or on the flip side, how long do you give a new campaign to determine its success? Alright, so let's start with the first question. So, Jess, first of all, I am very sorry to hear that somebody chopped and destroyed your previously successful campaign. That is, that feels like a very personal hurt. I've had that situation before where somebody fires me and then hires someone cheaper and they ruin my work and then come back. I've been known to tell that person, no, go away, you had a chance. I did great. You fired me. I'm not going to fix it again. So that's very nice. Jess is a nicer person. I am, because I will be a little bit more bitter, let's say, about that because, you know, I take my work seriously and when you just take it for granted. Anyway, I'm kidding. I'll get off my soapbox here. Okay, so the amount of time I would give something, a reasonable length of time, I'll tell you because you already said it yourself, Jess, you already have prior knowledge of what worked. So I would say a normal time period to know if something's going to work is maybe like a 90 day time period, three months. I usually tell people in the first month I'm going to learn something. Second month I'm going to start to see if my learnings are going to lead to success. And by the third month I can tell if this success, if it's possible, if it's even on the radar, it's going to be sustainable. So, you know, typical 90 day window seems about right. Maybe four months. Possibly the window extends if you have a very small budget. So, you know, keep in mind, a 90 day window is assuming I have something to work with. I'm getting more than like two clicks a day. So the idea that you could shorten that window with prior knowledge, a campaign that worked before typically means that you could probably cut that number in half. I would say one to two months, maybe two months should be enough to start to see some return there. Now what would affect that is outside factors like competitors that have come in, an industry has maybe changed a little bit, the economy changed, different time of year, maybe, maybe you're starting in a little bit slower time of year or more competitive time of year that, you know, that could affect things, that could affect the speed at which it reaches successful. But I think if you are measuring how fast something can go from 0 to 100 as far as success, you know, a 90 day window is decent and any prior knowledge or prior data that you have is only going to shorten that. Now let me qualify. When I say shortened, that doesn't mean you're going to reach success faster. I think that means you're going to find out if success is possible faster. Again, I would be a hypocrite if I implied that all I need is 45 days and I can reach success. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you can measure whether it's possible. I'll know in a shorter amount of time if this is going to work or not because I already have a little bit more narrow of an idea about what I'm trying to achieve. So within 45 days I might say, yep, this is going to work. Or Nope, this is not working. So don't, don't assume that you know it's right all the time, that it always works. Google Ads does not always work. I wish it did. All right, so Jess, second question says we used to get a lot of phone calls using the call extension, but I have not received any so far. Is there anything that I should be checking or do you think it's just a matter of time now? Great question here because I want to point this out. If you are trying to get calls from your call extension, your call asset, your phone asset, whatever the heck Google's calling it nowadays, quit it, Google. Stop changing your friggin names. What I would suggest is I'm going to assume you're using manual CPC or max clicks, because otherwise I don't really have a solution for you. But if you're using something where you have some control over the bids, there is an option where you can do advanced bidding. You can click on the advanced bid options and increase the interaction bid. So this is something where you can encourage Google to try and get you more traffic or more impressions with your interactive assets in your campaign. So this would be something like a call extension site links, things that can be interacted with, can be bid up. So that's one option. Another option is if you're not really getting any impressions on your call extension, your call asset, what you would want to do is potentially raise your bids, get more aggressive because it does require a certain ad rank threshold to show an asset. Assets are not shown for ads that have a very low ad rank and you increase your ad rank by raising your bids. So last thing here is you're like, well, Chris, I don't know if my call asset is showing. I don't even know if it's showing up at all. Well, in that case, go to your campaign and click on click Type. There's, there's a segment button up towards the top right of the screen of the campaign. When you're looking at the campaign view, you can click on, click the segment button, then click Type. And there's an option for you to see how many impressions your call, your call extension, your call asset has been shown. You can see how many times that's been shown. If it's very few impressions, then you know it's eligible to show, you're just not showing it. So that's likely a problem due to your ad rank due to your bids. So get those bids up, it'll show your assets more often. Okay, speeding right along here, I have a very Interesting question from Zach. Zach says first off, thank you so much for your podcast. You're providing great content and information as a developing, as a developing Google Ads Manager, I found your conversations very useful. Joey Bidner has been a great, has been great as well. Hey, there you go, Joey got right here in the email. Look at that. You got a little compliment. That's, that's nice. Well, I plan to have Joey on more in the future, so he'll be on and in different ways I'm sure he'll be on as the Christmas season starts to come on. He always has some good tips for ramping up for the Christmas season, so stay tuned for that. On with Zach's question. I have a few clients that are using an external tool called Acuity Booking and I'm having difficulty tracking conversions for bookings since they're essentially booking outside of our internal websites once they get into the scheduling tool. How do you think we could properly measure conversion since we don't have access to any back end and thank you page or anything like that? Zach, I have been in your shoes multiple times. I know exactly what tool you're talking about and there's no definitive solution for this. But I will throw out some ideas. Nothing is as good as tracking actual booking. But let me say what I've tried and what failed. You know, one time I had thought, well, let's have a thank you page. Route people back to the website. You know, they go to Acuity, the Acuity booking happens and then it automatically pushes them to a thank you page back on the client's website and that will trigger a conversion. Doesn't work because sometimes that rerouting is, you know, a 30 second delay, 10 second delay, something like that, and somebody just closes the page and it never works. Also, when someone leaves the domain and then comes back to the client's domain, that effectively wipes their, you know, the linear conversion tracking path and it breaks the whole thing. So it doesn't really work right anymore. So I had tried that. Doesn't really work. You know, as far as I know as of recording this, the last time I messed with Acuity, there was no conversion tracking way of getting it to work. Perhaps now with GA4, there's possibly a way to use GA4 and add GA4 to the acuity page, but I highly doubt it. One possible solution, again, I don't know if this is possible, but I've seen something like this before. Perhaps not with Acuity, but with other things where they embed the tracking in the client's website and the tracking happens. So that way they never actually leave the domain. That can be a problem because then you have kind of an iframe system, a framing system, and sometimes the conversion tracking won't work because it's not reloading the page itself. So there's even some issues there. All of that. One last suggestion that I might have is you could do a, I think it's called in GA4, a key event. So you can have a key event assigned so that when someone clicks on a certain link on the client's website to start the booking process, that tracks as a conversion. Now this is extremely inaccurate because there's plenty of people that look at the possible booking options and pricing that might be the first time they see the prices and immediately drop. So this could lead to 30, 40, 50% conversion rates. This could be a major issue. You know, you would never want to manage, you know, for example, target CPA or maximize conversions with such a loose conversion action like clicking on a button that leads them to a long funnel of purchasing. That would be. That would probably be very detrimental, but it's at least something. It's a key action that you could track that would start the process. But hopefully something like that got you thinking about a possibility. But as far as I know, there is no clean method that I know of that will get you that kind of a solution. So best of luck, Zach, and let me know if you come up with a solution. I'm sure there are many people in your situation that have the same problem with acuity. I know I have and I remember looking it up several times in the past. Okay, so now on to the main topic of the week. The main topic of the week is my easy, simple alternative to manual bidding. So I want to discuss something. It's not a secret, but you may not have ever really considered it. I was actually doing a consulting session today where the gentleman that I was talking to had never heard of Impression Share bidding in the past and they were intrigued by it and asked questions. And I thought, well, this, if you haven't heard of it, there's probably a lot of other people. So that's what I'm gonna talk about is Impression Share bidding. And before I do again, I want to remind you opteo.com PSP to get a two month free trial of the tool. It is going to give you the ability to run reports, do audits, make changes, get alerts, notifications, do keyword research, check your search terms, check your ad copy, write your ad copy. There's Tons. And they continue to roll out new ideas and make the tool better and better and more and more worth your investment. So be sure and check them out. And I happen to know that they are a great tool because I just keep hearing positive things about them. So. Opteo.com PSP so impression share bidding, you say, Kris, what is that? Well, impression share bidding, I say, is a simple, easy alternative to manual bidding in that you can manage for one simple metric without having to have the hassle of the housekeeping that comes with manual bidding. The problem with manual bidding for many people is that they are stuck. They feel very overwhelmed by making the right choice. How do I choose the right bid? How do I. How do I choose whether I go up or down? Chris tells me about, look at this, look at this, look at this. Not everybody has the time to learn and get over this learning curve. Perhaps if you're in this situation and you want to use manual and you're managing to one particular metric, perhaps target impression share is a better option for you. Let me tell you why it would not be a good option for some of you. It wouldn't be a good option if you are managing to a specific target. Cpa. If you get a lot of conversions in your account, conversions are the primary metric of your account success. This is probably not a good solution for you. It'd be a very specific situation whenever you would want to use this. Because most of the time it's not going to be something that you want to do. Because impression share bidding does not take into account conversions. It takes into account one, maybe two things where on the page you want to show up, which means, number one, you know, top position or somewhere else on the page, okay? So it tries to get you where you requested, and then number two, it tries to get you a certain percentage of the impression share overall. Okay? So I feel like I need to define just for the new people here, what impression share means. Impression share means how much of the market you're showing up for. So if I had the keyword, let's say bulldozer rental near me, okay, Something very specific, and I had that as a phrase match, okay? My search impression share for a $50 budget might be 70%. Okay? Now, if I change that exact, I change that keyword to an exact match, suddenly my search impression share might be 100%. And you ask, well, how did you do that? Well, I changed my keyword. I didn't change my budget, I changed my keyword. So search impression share is a direct relation to the kinds of keywords and targeting that you're doing. You can change your impression share simply by changing your targeting. So you have direct control of this. So with that said, you have the ability to choose specific keywords and just tell Google, get me 80% search impression share and show me as much as possible above organic. Okay, you have that option to choose that you can tell it, I want to show up above organic 80% of the time search impression share. You can give it a budget and if it can do that, it'll do it. All right, that's, that's something that you won't have to go in and adjust bids. You won't have to change your manual cpc. Typically I tell people do that with manual CPC and you know, you can adjust based on risk, as I discussed at the top of the show. But maybe you don't want to put the time in. Maybe it's confusing, maybe it's not worth it. This is kind of an automated ad placement bidding. Okay. So another opportunity to use this tool is, let's say you're running a campaign where you have some broad match keywords and you know, there's. Let's say you do the same thing, Bulldozer Rental near me, and it's broad match and it can show for all kinds of things. You know, you know Bulldozer is a construction equipment. It could show for lots of different construction equipment types of searches. It won't show just for the word bulldozer. So for that you might have a very wide search Impression share. And you're like, you know what, as long as I'm showing up for stuff like that, that's fine. So you tell Google, using impression share bidding, get me 30% search impression share and show me anywhere on the results page. And you're fine with it. You just want to try and just be out there. Right? You don't have any conversions. You know, maybe you're not even able to track conversions. You just want to be out there. You don't want to use maximize clicks because you know you don't want the cheapest clicks out there. You want to try and control it a bit more. That's a, it's a great option as an in between between max clicks and manual bids. It's got a little bit more control than max clicks because you can choose your placement on the page and you can choose your max CPC and you can choose your impression share to target. So there's more options with impression share bidding, but there's a lot less options than manual. Manual, you get to pick your ad group bids, your keyword bids, you can choose a lot. There's a lot of options available to you. There's a lot of things you need to consider when you're choosing your bids. So it's a middleman between max clicks and manual and it might be a really good fit for you if you're intimidated by manual cpc. You know, another option is I have Target Impression share set up for some of my clients brand campaigns. Let me give you this scenario. I choose 95% impression share, maybe 100% impression share to target for my client's brand campaign. That's when the keyword is only their brand name, right? That's all I care about, is just showing up as much as possible, getting full saturation of the market. And I want to be in top position as much as possible. And I give it a bid limit of $20 per click. You know, has Sky's the limit pretty much, you know, for a brand click. $20 for a brand click is very, very high. So in that scenario I don't need to go in and monitor my manual cpc. It's going to be trying to hit those positions at very high volumes. If it can do it with the budget, then it'll do it really easy. And it's better than using max clicks because max clicks will get me the lowest, cheapest clicks. It won't necessarily show me at the top every time, which is what I want for brand campaigns. And it's better than target CPA because target CPA will optimize for conversions. I don't care about conversions for my brand campaign. That makes no sense at all. There's no reason for me to bid for conversions with a brand campaign because these are people who already know what my business is. There's no value in optimizing for conversions there. Just show me when someone searches my name, period. That's all it is. A much better solution, much more simple solution that hopefully helps several of you guys and you might consider it. It's technically an automated bid. Even though there's no conversion tracking happening. It's an automated bid in the same way that MaxClicks is. The only manual bid is manual CPC bidding. That's it. That's the only one that exists. All right, so that is it for this week. You will now be thrown into another seven days of non paid search podcast time. I hope you survive. I hope you make it safely until next Monday in which I will return with more information about Google Ads. I wish you all good luck. If you would like to try and survive a little longer and have a bit of time with me between podcast episodes. I'm happy to tell you I am for rent. I am available Chris Shaver.com to find out how to reach me. I can help with Google Ads Consulting and Google Ads Management Services on demand as you need. Reach out to me there. Otherwise, good luck and I'll catch you next week.