← 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 Worst Account I’ve Ever Seen (Episode 442)
00:31:53
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Chris
Hello and welcome to the paid Search podcast. My name is Chris and as always, I'm here to talk about Google Ads. Specifically, I have a couple nightmare stories to share with you. These are going to be scary, so prepare yourself for the worst account I've ever seen. Now that title is a little dramatic. Okay, this is not actually the worst account I've ever seen, but what I have are a couple different stories and situations to share with you today that I would call cautionary tales. Situations that we can learn from, you can learn from. Things that you need to avoid that other people have fallen victim to. And today's podcast is a little shorter than usual. End of the year, busy time for everyone, me included. So no questions, no metric of the week, nothing except straight into the topic. That's all I'm going to talk about. Before I do that, let's get to the business of optio.com PSP the sponsor of this and every episode that I put out is brought to you by Optio. It is the Google Ads management software for everyone and anyone that wants to get more out of their Google Ads account. If you need to optimize your account in any way, and that's everyone, you need to use software that can help you get further. Because as humans, we can't see everything. We're not able to see everything. We're not able to calculate and notice trends as easily as software and algorithms can do. Now, you can always use the Google Ads recommendation system, but hey, that's a little one sided, right? Why trust the salesman to tell you what's best with his product? Instead, we have a software like Optio that can help you find and improve situations in your account that need improving. You may not realize you have a bidding problem. You may not realize you have some ad issue problems or some negative keyword problems or conversion issue optimization problems. This software is designed to help you get more done in Google Ads. You can try it for free for 28 days, almost a full month. 28 days for free@optio.com PSP use the chat box on that page, optio.com PSP and tell them you heard about it right here on the podcast and they'll give you that extra long trial period. Okay, on with the show. I'm going to talk about the worst account I've seen recently. Okay, so you guys know I do a lot of audits, something that I like to do to help me understand my clients, my consulting services that I offer. I look at Google Ads accounts and I help find and facilitate areas to improve. Well, this situation was no different. I was doing an audit for a company, and this particular company sells equipment for people who are hearing impaired. They might be deaf, they might just have hearing issues of some kind. And they're selling alarms and visual indicators for people that need additional help to be able to be alerted or maybe something as simple as an alarm clock. Okay, so I get into the account. This account's been running for quite a while. And what I do is I look at the past 90 days. Okay, not interested in what happened five years ago or two years ago. Let's. Let's look at more recent data. Here's what I find. Now I'm going to share some numbers with you. Okay? There were 29,000 clicks, and the total spend was about 2700. Okay? So for those students who are listening, students of Google Ads, hopefully your ears perked up a little bit. 29,000 clicks and only $2,700 in spend. That is an amazingly low cost per click. So low that it would be suspicious. So suspiciously low that you might conclude there's some problems here. And if you conclude that, you're absolutely right, there is a massive issue. It took me all of two seconds to comprehend what I'm looking at here, which is an account that is spending largely on most likely absolute junk, spam, worthless traffic. So let's dig a little deeper. Okay? The first thing that I notice in this account, and again, this is a cautionary tale. I want you to be able to spot what I spot, see what I see, so that you can avoid these things. If these numbers sound familiar to you, you may also be having some issues that you need to fix. So the first thing that I noticed that out of 29,000 clicks, 28,000 of them were from the search partners. This is an absolute red flag. Spending copious amount of budget on the search partners is, I think, a massive mistake. So they're spending in the past 90 days, almost $3,000 and $2,500 of that money is going to the search partners. The cost per click for the search partners was 9 cents per click. I have only found one account in recent history that is going to, you know, that can actually get quality traffic for 1, 2, or $0.03 per click. That is a very unique account that I have seen in the past year. There's a gentleman that was running a campaign, had been running it for about 20 years now, and he was getting clicks at $0.01, $0.02, $0.03, and it was pretty astounding. It was wonderful. Never seen anything like that ever again. And you may say, well Kris, I'm enjoying 10 cent clicks. I'd like to see it because I have never found somebody who's spending 10 cent clicks and getting anything that's worth more than that. This company was paying $0.09 per click and absolutely overpaying for their traffic. They should have been paying nothing for this traffic. 9 cents per click is akin to worthless traffic on Google. And this wasn't even Google, this was search partners on Google. They had spent about $150 in the past 90 days and gotten 812 clicks. So they were paying 17 cents per click on Google. Most of that traffic was absolute spam junk, worthless traffic. You know, I say spam, I don't mean bots and you know, you know, not real traffic. I just mean in the context of spam as in worthless, of no value for this business because nobody gets traffic and is happy because they just get traffic. Traffic is not created equally. A click is not of equal value across the board. There's always different value of click. And 17 cents per click again is overpaying for junk. This client was or this company was paying 17 cents for junk traffic. So we've got nearly three grand spent, tens of thousands, 30,000 clicks coming through and almost none of it's coming from Google. It's coming from search partners, the display network, very little coming from Google itself. So let's dig a little deeper. How is this happening? Well, part of the situation is the keywords that we're running were some of the worst keywords that I think I had seen in a very long time. I'll read you a few of them. Remember that the product being sold here is a visual aid for hearing impaired. You know, that kind of thing, you know, for people who are deaf, stuff like that. Number one keyword with going on 10,000 clicks in the last 90 days. Loudest alarm sound Loudest alarm sound. Now you could see that there's a little bit of relevance here, right? If someone needs a very alarm allow a very loud alarm sound. Perhaps they're hard of hearing, but I have a new teenager in the home and sometimes people just need an alarm sound that's very, very loud because they won't wake up because they refuse to go to bed at a decent time despite their parents being very upset about go to bed, go to bed, I'm not tired. But yet you don't wake up. Anyway, let's put dad Chris over to the side and get back to Google Ads. The problem is this keyword is delivering Junk traffic. Another one was sound to remove water from speaker. Let me say that again. This is a phrase match keyword sound to remove water from speaker. If you don't know what that means, that's essentially someone who has dropped their phone in the water like an iPhone or whatever. And there's this, you know, deep bass sound that will kind of cause the frequency of the sound to push water from the speakers. This is not an appropriate keyword. Another one was alarm alarms. Alarm alarms. So that's two words. This is phrase match. And keep that keyword in your mind. Remember that keyword, because I'm going to come back to that keyword in a second. Alarm alarms is like the fourth most common clicked keyword in their entire account. Okay. And there's a whole bunch more. Okay, so you think, why did this person put these keywords? These don't even sound logical at all for someone who's trying to sell devices, specialty niche devices for people. Well, that brings me to point number two. The reason this account was doing so bad and was wasting so much money is because the auto apply system in Google Ads, the auto apply recommendations system, had been turned on and it had added these keywords to the account. So we're twofold now. Number one, we're getting traffic outside of google.com Number two, the system is feeding itself junk. It's feeding itself keywords like alarm alarms and continuing to drive worthless traffic to this guy's account. Let's dig deeper. It gets worse. These keywords were leading to absolute, just saturation of search terms that were junk. Okay? Search terms are what people typed into Google. So alarm sound was the number one search term by far. Thousands of clicks on just the word alarm sound. This is obviously someone who wants to just download some wav file or play something on their phone. Who knows what their reasoning is. You shouldn't be paying for it. No one should pay for this. Yet it was the number one search term. Number two was loud alarm sound. So alarm sound and loud alarm sound. So that brings us to the third level of destruction on the waste of money happening here. It's not Google traffic. It's keywords that have been added to the account that are not added by the client, by the company, by the account manager. These keywords are then leading to traffic that gets really bad search traffic from not Google searches, but from search partners and getting extremely low cost per click. So tens of thousands of these happening all the time. I imagine well over 100,000 a year. Multiple hundreds of thousands a year. So let's go a level deeper because I'm telling you it gets worse. Remember I told you to keep in mind that alarm alarm keyword. Well, because these keywords in this account were so bad, the ad copy was pulling keywords into it and showing these keywords ad copy. So someone would type loud alarm sound and the headline of the ad would say alarm alarms. This is because this account has DKI in its ad copy. DKI stands for dynamic keyword insertion. So that means that the person had told Google, hey, when someone searches, take one of my keywords and put it into the headline that matches their search. So remember, some of their top keywords were things like alarm, alarm, loudest alarm sound. So that means not only do they have crappy keywords, crappy search terms, now their ad copy is encouraging it by saying something like alarm alarms in the ad copy. So it's an endless loop of junk, junk that's being served in the ad copy. It's attracting junk because of the keywords. The keywords are leading to junk because they're matching the search terms. All the while the system has automated bidding that's pushing the cheapest possible traffic as much as possible, which is leading to traffic from the search partners. It's impossible to stop a loop like this because as soon as you start adding negative keywords or you pause keywords, the auto Apply recommendation system will just add more keywords. You can't lower the bids on something like this because it's automated bidding. It is 100% the biggest waste of money I've seen in a long time. So if anything like that sounds familiar to you, if you're using the auto apply recommendation system, if you're running traffic and getting extremely low cost per click and you think you're a pro at Google Ads because you're paying 10 cents, 15 cents per click, be very careful because you may be paying for junk traffic. Let me change the tone a bit and tell you about another disaster that I had seen recently. Okay? I was doing another audit on an account and let me set the stage for this. This account spends let's say 30, 30,000 month. Okay, it's $30,000 a month, lots and lots of traffic. But this account is doing very well, a very positive return on ad spend. This is an E commerce account and it's all Google Search. They don't run any kind of performance max or anything like that. It's just pure Google search, a very well known industry. It's for selling ropes and you know, different types of ropes. If you, if you've never looked into ropes, which I had not before. There are a lot of different ropes, marine ropes, cotton ropes, different types of material and style, and ropes for using things for all kinds of purposes. Okay, so a very large industry, but doing very well. Campaigns been around for a long time. But here's why it's coming up in this conversation. Because after a long history of conversions and running very easily and running, running very, very well, this account had something happen. Nobody knew that it happened. It happened with no notifications. It happened with no indication of, you know, no notification, no email, no Bing. Hey, something just happened. Nothing. Okay? Nobody knows it. So it went on for quite a few months. What happened was the Google Analytics system imported a new event into Google Ads. So in analytics, there will be lots of events. There's events like how much time someone spends on the website. You know, if they pass a certain number of seconds, that can be a event trigger. Or if someone fills out a certain web form, or if someone goes to a certain page or someone adds an item to a cart. These can all be events. The problem is that this event was not a conversion. It was a duplicate conversion of something they're already tracking. So how it came into the account, I don't know. Perhaps it happened automatically. Maybe someone did it without realizing it. They pushed apply somewhere in analytics and it pushed it to Google Ads, I don't know. But the point is, it happened and therefore it doubled the number of conversions tracked in Google Ads. And if you know anything about E commerce and roas bidding, what that means is the client may have been getting 2.5 ROAS and happy to spend at a certain level on that and doing very well with that, happy with it. It's providing value for them. Suddenly their 2.5 over a period of a couple weeks becomes a 5x return. It's a 5.0 return. So their roas, suddenly Google thinks, oh my goodness, the conversion rate has now doubled. It's doing phenomenally well, and therefore the campaign starts spending more. This particular campaign had a very high daily budget and it was never spending that daily budget. Suddenly now the ROAS bidding starts bidding twice as high because it has a 250 goal. But now we're making a 5.0 goal. So it's able to spend at twice the rate because it's getting double the conversions. One of those conversions are doubling the other one, which is causing a 2x in the ROAS. So therefore the client ends up spending two to three times more per month. We're talking tens of thousands of dollars in excess spend per month. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. Especially because on their end, all they're getting is more bills from Google, but their sales are not going up, or at least their return on ad spend is not going up. They may be getting more sales, but their actual roas is probably going down because Google's bidding higher, thinking that it's achieving its goal, exceeding its goal even, but that's not happening. So this situation where this E Commerce account doesn't realize it and it goes on for months until it's eventually fixed, but that money is not coming back, that money's gone, it's spent, the traffic has been acquired and there's no refund button in Google Ads. All right, so one more tale in this string of horror stories that you can learn from is this. It's the opposite situation where an account is very productive with a long history of conversions. This is a lead generation account. It happens to be a business to business acquisition. So they're getting quotes and calls and forms and doing quite well, been running for a very long time, getting a solid conversion rate around 3%, 4%. But business to business, they're happy with that. Each contract, each successful contact can result in tens of thousands of dollars of value for them. So it's working great. And it's been working for so long that this client is on automated bidding. Okay, so they're on target CPA. So they're getting about $150 per lead and they're happy with that. And they have a very strict, they have to maintain at least 150. So they have maybe about a $200 max target CPA. And it's exceeding that. It's getting $150 target CPA. All right, so it's doing quite well. It's succeeding. Now here's where the problem happens. Something happened on the website. Someone changed something on the website. Somebody deleted a code. Somebody changed something in Google Analytics. I don't know. I don't know what happened. All I know is this account went from running very well to getting great traffic, getting conversions on a consistent basis, to suddenly the system getting no conversions, no conversions are happening at all. From a certain date forward for multiple weeks, multiple months, no conversions. So what happens over a period of weeks? Google starts to see the cost per acquisition, the CPA start to increase. Suddenly instead of 150, it's now 250. The next week, it's now 400. The next week, it's Now 600. And there's a point when it snaps. The target CPA system can no longer deliver traffic and attain any kind of goal acquisition price. So every time it bids on a keyword, it doesn't get a conversion anymore. Conversion rate drops to 0%. No conversions at all. So the automated bidding stops serving ads. So what happens here? The business stops getting leads. Suddenly the phone calls stop. Suddenly the forms stop. They think it's just things are slow. Maybe they're also getting some organic stuff, you know, brand stuff is coming through. You know, they're still getting calls, but they don't realize that their most important resource, Google Ads, leads have stopped. To them, things are just slow right now. But reality is, their marketing system has ground to a halt. They're no longer running ads. The ads are not running because suddenly a target CPA restriction in their bidding has forced Google to stop serving their ads because their conversion tracking is broken. Because someone changed something on the website, because a code got changed. Something like that. So this business gets to the point of almost becoming crippled. It almost, I mean, talking to the gentleman, he's already had to start laying people off. Now, luckily we're able to fix this and stop this situation from happening further. But the destruction had already been done. People's lives had been changed. People had lost their job. I'm sure the guy had sleepless nights, you know, stress, probably physical effects on his body from like, you know, what's wrong, you know, I'm not, you know, he didn't understand what's wrong. Then he realizes, oh, I need to go check my Google Ads. He doesn't know what he's looking at, but it's just not running anymore. He doesn't know why. Right. Terrible situation. All three of these are terrible situations. So why do I share this with you? Why do I share something like this with you? It's because these are things that I see happening all the time. They happen all the time in Google Ads. So much more than I would expect. A lot more than you would expect. Either somebody paying for absolute junk, somebody paying for a conversion rate, quote unquote, that is 100% false or doubled, not realistic at all. The Google numbers are not with reality or they have a good system that suddenly comes to a grinding halt and all of their ads stop running and they don't know why. And the most important thing that I can say from this is that Google Ads, despite what I think Google would hope that you believe, despite what the recommendation system and what the industry might have you believe, Google wants you to think that Google Ads is just a vending machine system. Put money in, walk away, that's all you need to do. Leads are going to come in. You can trust the system. I find that that's true for a minority of accounts. The majority of accounts must have someone monitoring, watching and making sure things don't run astray. One person going in and making changes to an account can lead to absolute destruction. Just adding in search partners, just turning on auto apply recommendations, just adding one broad match keyword to a well tuned set of keywords. Just doing little things here and there you can see each of those situations all fell apart from just small things. And particularly the first story you can see was small things that led to greater and greater and greater destruction and waste in the account. So a shorter podcast today, but the main message I want to share with you is don't let this happen to you. Don't fall underneath the assumption that your Google Ads accounts are safe, that they will always just run well and you don't need a manager or you don't need anyone to check on it or you know, it's just gonna, it's gonna be fine. As long as things are fine from my end, I'm sure they're fine. On, on Google Ads side it could be so destructive that it can. I have seen it so many times. Businesses fail, businesses go out of business, they have to fire people, they downgrade because they're suddenly getting junk from Google Ads where it used to be quality traffic. They're suddenly paying twice as much, three times as much to Google but receiving only the same number of leads from Google or lose leads entirely, stop getting traffic completely. So I appreciate you guys following along. This year I have one more podcast that I will be putting out before the end of the year and then I will you in 2025. I hope that you take these words and act with caution in the new year with your Google Ads accounts. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and I will see you one more time before the year is out. I'll catch you in a couple weeks.