← 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
The Right Way to Use Audiences (Episode 476)
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Foreign hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today I'm going to talk about Google Ads. I have a I have three really important topics to talk about today. The first one is the right way to use audiences in Google Ads. That's going to be a little bit later in the show. Before that, I'm going to jump into a topic I'm going to talk about. Should you, as a Google Ads Manager, specialize in a specific PPC industry or is it better to just be a general PPC specialist? Going to dive into that. And also I'm going to answer a question that I don't dive into very much. What do I think Google Ads is going to look like in the next five years? What does the future hold for Google Ads and what are my thoughts on I'm going to share that with you in today's packed episode. So stick around. There's a lot to learn. Before I dive any deeper into the episode, I must tell you about this new tool. If you haven't heard about it, it's new to you. Optio.com PSP to try this new tool. This is a tool designed to help you get things done. It is a data crunching metric measuring tool to help you make decisions in Google Ads. You have tons of data at your fingertips. Do you know how to measure this data appropriately? Do you know what data to look at? Do you know what measurements of the metrics you should consider? Well, Optio is here to help you make those decisions. It is a tool that you can try completely free for 28 days. Okay, not two weeks, but you can try it for 28 days. Two weeks is what everyone else gets. They try this amazing tool and they end up loving it, of course, but they only got two weeks free. 14 days. You get 28 days. Twice as much time if you go to optio.com PSP this tool boasts of many different power tool aspects that help you determine what kind of searches are best, what kind of keywords you should consider, what kind of bidding strategies you should do. Even diving into things like audiences. Have you tried audiences? Have you applied audiences to your Google Ads account? So for those of you that are using Optio, what I'm talking about today may not be news to you because you had Opteo on your side to help you. But if it's news to you, then maybe you should try a tool that helps bring these things to your attention. Exactly as Optio does. Use the chat box on their website to say, hey, I heard about your tool from Chris. Can I try it for 28 days and they'll hook you up. So thank you to them for their sponsorship of this podcast. I appreciate that. Keeps me going and also your questions keep me going. Two of the topics today that I'm going to talk about come straight from a listener who wrote in. You can write in your questions as well. Paid search podcastmail.com to take advantage of my brain, my knowledge, my experience. I've been doing Google Ads for over 20 years now. It's all I do. I don't build websites. I don't do Facebook or meta or whatever the heck they're calling it. I don't do any of that. I do Google Ads day in, day out. 10,000 hours is what I did in the first 10 years of my, my time at Google Ads. I'm now on my second 10,000 hours or you know, whatever they say it takes to become an expert. I'm way past that on my number of hours. So let's jump in with a question from Dan. Dan says, hey Chris, I started a PPC business this month and I'm currently managing ads for multiple clinics. I recently recently graduated from college and therefore I'm very new to this. Your podcast has been a great tool for diving into the nuance of ppc. I'd like to thank you for your continued effort into teaching us newbies how to navigate this niche industry. Oh, great to hear it, Dan. Dan has two questions. First question from Dan is what are your thoughts on specializing within the PPC industry? For example, being a healthcare PPC specialist or just broadly being a PPC specialist? There seem to be trade offs either way. I'm curious what your thoughts are. So absolutely good, good first question. So I'm going to dive into pros and cons of being a industry specific specialist. So to be clear, you know, you do just, you know, healthcare specific ppc or maybe you only work with chiropractors or maybe you only work with divorce lawyers or something like that. Right. So you are very specialized in a niche industry of PPC management. An advantage of doing this from what I found is you have a higher closing rate. You can, when you bring people to your website, when you expose them to your services, if they are within that industry, you can close leads much easier because obviously you know there's is not much of a competition. Someone who doesn't specialize in their industry and someone who does seems like an easy, an easy pick there. So you will have a higher closing rate because of that. The disadvantages for those that don't specialize, they're going to have more volume. So if the specialist is going to have less volume, less opportunity to sell and pitch their products. Because if you don't offer service to all the other hundreds and thousands of other industries out there, they're not in your wheelhouse. They're the landing pages and website you have that speak specifically to that specific industry. If they're not in that industry, you're out. I mean, obviously. Oh, they don't, they work with med spas. I'm not a med spa. Pass. Right. So you miss a lot of opportunity. An advantage is you can see better ranking and visibility for search. You know, if someone is looking for a roofer specific PPC agency or company or specialist or whatever, then you may have an opportunity to show up because those searches are being done. And you know, not, not everybody's going to be able to rank for that or even interested in ranking for that. So that's, that's great. However, here's a disadvantage. No two roofers, no two med spas are the same. No two industry leads are the same. And the message that you give one, the solution that you give this med spa company is not necessarily the same solution and pitch that's going to work for another. So just because they're in the same industry doesn't mean you can pitch them the same thing. And it's going to be a perfect solution for those companies. They likely have different needs, they're at different situations in their business. Some are going to want to grow, some are just getting started, you know, so your pitch isn't just a copy paste kind of thing. It may not work even though they're in your specified industry. Okay, so moving on, another advantage, if you're going to specialize, it's very easy to build and launch new clients. This makes sense. If you have a new roofing client and you work with five other roofing clients, then you can basically copy paste. If you don't, if you don't actually copy and paste, you can certainly copy and paste your strategies. The strategy for this one can copy and paste into the strategy of another. You may not. I'm not insinuating that everyone who's in specialized industries just copies and paste their campaigns over to new clients. But I am saying that what you learn from one, you can move on and apply that to all your other clients and your new clients so it's easier to jump in and launch. You know exactly what you're going to need. But here's where my list of advantages really ends. And I'll give you the the real answer is I am not a specialist. I do not specialize in specific industries. I work with all industries and there's a specific reason for that. The what I find is that companies that work in specific industries tend to have a lack of exposure to other parts of the Google Ads sphere and it leads to a type of tunnel vision. Tunnel vision management seems to be more common with industry specific agencies. Industry industry specific managers. You know, they, they, they know they're part of Google Ads, but they, you know, you ask them to really answer general questions about other things and other strategies they don't really know. That's not because they don't want to know. It's just they've never been forced to know that. They've never been forced to investigate that because there's no need. They may not know much about display or YouTube or other types of bidding strategies that they've never done because they don't need to and therefore it cripples their ability to truly be an expert in Google Ads, period. Furthermore, I find the copy and paste strategy idea is not a guarantee. Anyone who's run two accounts in different locations for the same thing knows just because it works in one area doesn't mean it works in another. So the idea of specializing in a specific industry doesn't mean you're going to be successful, you know, the second time or the third time. You can have absolute failure the the first time, success the second time, failure the third time, and you, and you did something different every single time or you did the same thing every single time, there is no guarantee. And I find that when you work with the same kind of keywords, the same kind of industry, the same kind of call to action, the same, you know, this lack of ability to, you know, really see the bigger picture and the full exposure of Google Ads leads you to a lack of maneuverability in any new opportunities. You know, let's, let's say you ended up getting a really good lead that was not within your protocol of industries. Now, I mean, you don't really know exactly how you're going to approach it. Should you do automated bidding, should you start with broad? Should you start with, you know, other strategies that you hadn't really tried? You don't really know because the only thing you know is what you've done over and over again. So it leads to a specialization that I think really cripples people and makes them a bit of a tunnel vision manager in Google Ads. So I hope that's helpful for those of you out there. I think I've worked with plenty of people that specialize in certain things and do great at it. I don't do that. That is not the way I run my business. I work within all industries. There's nowadays I've done it for so long I don't know if there's an industry I haven't worked in or seen. But every now and then I'm surprised. I see things I've never seen before. So hopefully that's helpful. We are still on Dan's question. Good question, Stan. Glad you wrote in. So I'm moving on to Dan's second question. He asks, what are your thoughts on the market outlook over the next one to five years? Is PPC going to be more or less valuable with will AI disrupt and replace our skills or become more of a tool that increases specialization? So don't know that I've spoke on this very much. It's a good question and I figured I might as well jump in and give my thoughts on this. So in the next five years with Google, specifically Google Ads, I will give my predictions and you can bookmark this and come back in 20. Wow. 2030. That would be 2030. Sheesh. Sounds like a long way away. But it's only just five years. It's only five years away. Here's, here's, here's what I think. I think Google will lose some of its dominance for information gathering. I think, I think it'll be a large amount of dominance that it will lose for information gain gathering and I use that term specifically because Google will still own search. But I don't think search will hold such a default method of information gathering in the way that it has before. I do not think that people will gather information, find information, look for things when they just when they Google it. I don't think Googling it will be the default as much as it is anymore. I think it will be more, much more diversified and I think that's already happening. I've seen that quite a bit both personally and professionally in my life. Because of that, Google Ads will broaden its scope to include a lot more non search elements in its marketing efforts. We have already seen evidence of this with the proliferation of performance max and you know, demand gen and these things that take search but also pad in other areas of Google. You know of Google's reach from the display to Gmail, YouTube, mobile apps, things like that. So these systems don't just put you on Google search, they diversify your portfolio automatically. It's not something you even choose. You don't even get to choose how much you show up on search if you use these automated systems. And the truth is, I think this is a bad thing. I actually think this is a bad thing for Google overall because google.com search ads are unique in the way that they offer data and customization and instant metrics and feedback and solid controllable methods unlike any other kind of marketing that there is out there. When Google Ads started, that was their pitch is that you can see exactly. I mean, back then they're competing against tv, radio, billboards, right? So the pitch of why people should use Google Ads is that you can see your clicks, you can see your data, you can see exactly what you're getting, where your money's going, and you can measure that and get actual real metrics. So we're losing what that was and what that has always been. I don't think there ever will be something quite as unique as what Google search is and how you can reach untold number of clicks, impressions and get really specific while you do it. Couple more predictions for you. I think google.com searches will decrease. This shouldn't surprise you if you know, with my first prediction that Google will lose its dominance for information gathering. But I think the value is still there. I just think there will be less of it. I think there'll be less people that just straight up do google.com searches. The, the ease of searching for niche things, weird things on AI, however you engage with it, whatever app you use, whatever system you use, it is a more natural way to find answers to things, more so than a Google search. And I'm aware that, you know, there's an AI mode and Google's trying to answer questions directly in, in, in Google. But that's not how people have used google.com for decades. They have not used google.com the way that we use AI, the way that we use chat, GBT, Grok, you know, we don't use these systems. The way that we use google.com, when we, when we open up Grok, we ask it and speak to it in a much more humanistic way than we do. We've been trained by Google to do Google searches. When do you ever type near me anywhere? I mean, that's something we never did before. But google.com and all the, our apps and phones taught us to do that. So instead of having to learn how to use the google.com system, we just use AI. And it's a Little more natural. You just kind of type the way that you would ask a person so it's easier. And then last, no AI is not going to take the job of a Google Ads manager. I think good Google Ads managers are still going to be valid. Dan, I think you are not wasting your time jumping into this industry. I think this industry will still be valid, but I think it will not be the king of search marketing that it is now. I think it will change in the ways that I described. So that is, that's that. And if you'd like to get your question answered, as I said, feel free to jump in, send in paid search podcast gmail.com and I'll get your question answered as best I can. So now we're jumping into the main topic and I'm, I have, I've written bullet points. I promise this is going to be a concise method of using audiences the right way in Google Ads. The right way to use audiences in Google Ads starts with understanding first what audiences are. So let me do a quick explanation of what are audiences in Google Ads? Audiences are not keywords. They are a separate system that are predetermined, pre categorized. Inside of Google, There are about 25 different main categories of audiences according to Google Ads. These range from arts and craft supplies to autos and vehicles, to food, to home and garden real estate. There's tons of big categories. This essentially cover all the different in market things that Google can measure someone's interest in. When you go to buy something, it's likely going to be covered in one of these bigger, broader categories of in market audiences. And that's what we're talking about today is in market audiences, people that are ready to buy, ready to engage, you know, serious buyers, serious lookers for these types of services and products. Okay, so if you have a Google Ads campaign and you have keywords, you don't necessarily have audiences. So you say, well, Chris, my campaign's working fine. Why should I have audiences? You know, what, what's, why would I be interested in it? Well, there are two methods that you can apply these. And the reason you would want to is on one hand, data gathering methods. If you use what's called observation audiences, it is a wonderful way to gather data. And that's where we're going to start. All right, so observation audiences layer on top of your keywords for search, and they just gather data. And what I mean by that is each audience gathers clicks and impressions and conversions and CPCs and, you know, all the normal data that you usually get. Is all you know that you would get with a keyword. You get with an audience so you can gather data to say the people who are searching these keywords are a part of these audiences. That's data you would not have unless you add those observation audiences on top of the keywords. So the first thing is use observation audiences for data gathering. The next right thing to do, the right way to use audiences is use smaller subcategories. So there are 25 main categories in Google Ads. There are over a thousand subcategories of Google Ads. So an example is a main category is beauty and personal care. A subcategory of beauty and personal care is skin care products, tanning and sun care products. That's an example of subcategories within a larger main category. So my suggestion is do not use main categories. Use much more specific subcategories for your account and I'll explain why. Number three of the right way to use these is you need to pick relevant categories. So the reason that you want to use smaller subcategories is because you're able to see nuances between if someone is more likely to convert if they're interested in skincare or, or tanning sun care products. Right? If you just add beauty and personal care as a main topic, you're going to miss out on the minutia between if it's skin care in general or if it's tanning specifically. You know, these relevant categories will tell you information that you wouldn't have had otherwise. You should not, you know, just add things that have no relevance. Only pick relevant categories that apply to your industry in some way, whether it's tangential or it is, you know, directly related. If you're selling skincare products, okay, add skin care. But also these people might also be, you know, maybe they're largely female, so they're buying different types of arts and crafts things. Maybe they're largely moms who are buying, you know, types of things. Make decisions about your demographic and figure out what other things might they be in market for that I could layer on, on top of my keywords to get that additional data gathering. Now, what you should do once you start that data gathering is you should remove unproductive audiences, audiences that show poor returns. Specifically in as far as conversions. If you see zero conversions in one and you know you are getting conversions in another one, remove those unproductive audiences. You don't need to gather data for those anymore. If they are, you know, over a long period of time have. Have shown absolutely no progress as far as people converting, remove them. I also think you should bid up the ones that are productive. Okay, so bid up on the productive stuff when it's set itself above the others. You know, if your typical cost per conversion is $150 and this particular audience with these keywords gets you a $50 cost per conversion, that's a productive audience. Bid up on that. Try and gather more of that audience keyword traffic. Now, the only way to tell you the right way to do things is also to point out the bad stuff. So I'm going to run through a quick list of observation. Audience, do not. So do not add all of the audiences. Do not add hundreds of audiences. Only add, I don't know, 10, 5, 3, maybe 15, something like that. Add only relevant audiences. Don't add them all. Don't add hundreds. Add a small, limited, relevant number of audiences that fit within your demographic that, that, that relate to your product or service. Do not bid down on unproductive audiences. So if you have something that's getting a $300 cost per conversion on that specific, specific audience and everything else is about 150, don't bid down on it. Just remove it. Okay, I'm not going to go into the reason for that and try and keep the podcast brief, but there are specific reasons why you just want to remove it and don't bid it down. Short answer is it has to do with your keywords. Not so much your audience. But moving on, do not bid up on all of your audiences. I'm going to say that again. Please, please, please, please don't let me do an audit on your account and see that you listen to this episode and bid up 50% on everything. Do not bid up on all of your audiences. This is a bad thing. You have now raised every single CPC by 50% of. That's not what you should do. You're looking for outliers, something that is better than everything else. Not just everything. Bid up 5% here, 15% here, 10% here. Make exclusive decisions that this is a good investment. Let's. Let's try and consume more of this audience. Okay? And last, do not exclude audiences just because it's been doing poorly. Don't add it as an exclusionary audience. Don't block people. Just either bid up or just ignore that audience entirely. Okay, last section here. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get into something very unique. It's called using, targeting audiences. So you're targeting audiences with keywords. Very important. Before I do, please remember My wonderful sponsor who has been with me for years. They are so easy to work with. And if they're easy for me to work with, I'm ornery, I'm very complicated, okay? And they work great with me. So, you know, they build good software. You know, they build practical, easy to use software. And I highly recommend it. It can help you find little things like we're talking about today with audiences that you can completely be unaware of unless you have a software that can point these things out, bring them to your attention. So that's optio.com PSP so here we go. Last section here. Using audience targeting. This is where you actually only target people within the audiences that you've chosen that are searching for your keywords, okay? So for this, you should use it for isolated testing of audiences. So you might want to target people that are interested in car audio because maybe you're selling high quality headphones. And these people, obviously, if they're willing to invest in specialized car audio, maybe they're also interested in really good headphones, right? So this is isolated audience testing. That happens separate, outside of your main campaign. You should use smaller subcategory audiences. Do not target consumer electronics, target car audio, target camera lenses, target home theater systems, target subcategories of that consumer electronic. Don't target the one that gets, you know, 3 billion impressions a week. For this separate campaign, you should use broader, higher funnel keywords. Now, you can define that however you like. If that means you actually use broad keywords, then so be it. If it means that they're exact match, but they're higher funnel, so be it. But the point is, you don't use your same keywords that you have in your other campaigns. You don't duplicate your campaign, use the same keywords and then use a targeted audience. Don't do that. Don't do that. You have. This is a separate marketing system, separate marketing initiative. It is not a duplication of your main campaign. So use broader keywords that you're not testing in other ways, right? So you have a targeted audience and a set of keywords. Last on the things to do. The right way for audience targeting is this. Use it with your remarketing audiences. If you have a remarketing audience, set up a search remarketing campaign. These are people who are searching about your industry and are, you know, seeing your ad because they're searching around things like camera lenses. And maybe you sell different types of camera equipment. You know, so maybe you have a broad keyword around cameras. You know, cameras for sale and you're also targeting people who are interested in camera lenses. You would never do with a broad match for stuff like that. But you would on this highly targeted subcategory audience. And that's, that's specifically you can do that with remarketing. Okay, last section. Do not. So here's the do nots. Okay. I can't tell you what's right unless I also tell you what's wrong. So do not. I already said this once, but do not duplicate what's in your other campaign. So don't take this idea and take the same keywords and target the same people in this. Do not self cannibalize between two campaigns here. Do not use broad wide audiences. I've said this before, but financial services is not going to be a good category of in market audience to use. Estate planning, that might be a good one. Pretty specific home theater systems. Great. Might be good. That's a small subcategory consumer electronics. Too broad, too wide. Okay. And then last, avoid highly specific exact match. I don't suggest you do this kind of targeted audience with really exact match targeted small search volume keywords. Instead, if you want to do that, do that with no audience targeting. Leave audience specific in market targeting with broader keywords. Use broader higher reaching keywords. Because the subcategory of these in market audiences will limit your scope. Instead of millions of potential impressions that you can reach millions of people you can potentially reach, now you're reaching tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands at the most. So you can't pair that with a tiny keyword that nobody searches. It won't work. So that is it. I hope this episode has been helpful to you. I've packed a lot of information in. If you find this to be useful and you want to to discuss it with me and say, Chris, I have more questions. Can you show me how to do that? Absolutely. Chrishaeffer.com to reach out to me, I offer coaching as well as management services for Google Ads. Otherwise you'll catch me here every week on Monday. I'll see you then.