← 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
These TRUTHS Will Never Change (Episode 439)
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Chris Schaefer
Hello and welcome to the Paid Search podcast. My name is Chris and I'm going to talk about Google Ads. That's what I know. That's what I do. That's what I'm here to talk about. I do it every single week. As always. On Monday, this episode goes live all over the world. And I can guarantee you that in the next 30 to 40 minutes, you're going to learn something about Google Ads. I answer questions from listeners. You can send in a question to the podcast here. And that email is paid search podcastmail.com and I will do my best to reply back and let you know, Hey, I got your question. I'm going to answer it so you'll know when to listen. But please do subscribe and leave a positive review. I appreciate that I'm getting this podcast out to more and more people. It's really fun to be facilitating a positive discussion about how to make a real difference in your Google Ads campaign. Sticking to the facts, sticking to things that provide legitimate improvement to your capabilities to achieve the kind of traffic that you want, getting the results that you want out of Google Ads. That's what I focus on here. And if you would like to reach out to me, I do provide personalized consulting services and I do offer management services if you need someone to help you. My website for business purposes for Google Ads management and consulting is chrissafer.com you can find me there. But enough with all that. Let's jump into the show. Episode 339. Currently in November, the very end of 2024. Pretty crazy. Coming up on Thanksgiving and Christmas now. Pretty amazing. And I was reflecting on, you know, how much has changed. I've been in Google Ads for like 21 years now, going on 22 years. Long time. A lot has changed. And I was thinking about it, you know, what hasn't changed? You know, there's not a lot of value in telling people and whining about, this is different. Oh, this is different. And we used to have this, we used to have that. I mean, there's been a lot that has been taken and given in Google Ads and we have to work through it. We have to work with what we have. We don't really have an ability to raise our hand and say, hey, can my account have expanded text ads again, please? No. Okay, well, can I have all of my search terms back? Can I have average position metrics again? Can I have modified broad match? You know, just a few gravestones that I stare at every single day that I wish that we had? We don't have those. So it begs the question, what still stands? What is still true in Google Ads? What is still an anchor in Google Ads that has never changed and never will. And we're going to talk about that. That's going to be the main topic of the show. Before I do that, I'm going to go in and answer two questions from listeners. They send in a question through my email and going to answer those questions. One of them is about the roofing industry. I'll discuss that. And the other one is about manual bids and that pesky little below first page bid status. We're going to talk about that. So stick around, lots to share. Before I talk about that, I want to remind you about my sponsor. The sponsor, exclusive sponsor of this podcast is optio.com PSP so this amazing software continues to churn out amazing tools to help you get more done in Google Ads. If you need a system to help you understand Google Ads, to treat you with respect and give you data and provide a decision making system, that is what Optio does. It helps you to make better decisions, more informed decisions in Google Ads. And you say, well, how would it do that? Is this AI? Well, I don't know. I don't know how it works, but I know what I get from it. What I get from it is a layout telling me, hey Kris, we noticed that your search impression share law student rank is increasing. You might want to consider raising your bids because you're losing positions. And here's the data why. Here's some charts, here's some graphs, here's some data about your bidding, here's some data about your budget. Hey, we noticed that this keyword's underperforming compared to others. We think you should pause it. Here's why. Here's the data around it. Here's all of it in a very easy to read dashboard. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You go through the priority of each one of these items. You just did a thorough Google Ads check through in a fraction of the time. If that's interesting to you and you want to try it out, you can try it out for free for 28 days. Okay? They double the typical trial time of Google Ads optimization software. Here you can do it twice as long@opteo.com PSP that's optio.com PSP for a 28 day free trial exclusively available at that link. Use the chat box to let them know. Hey, I heard from Chris and he said you got a special offer for me and they will hook you up. Optio.com PSP now, let's get on with the first question. Andres in Bolivia writes in and says, hi, Chris, I'm Andres. I'm writing to you from Santa Cruz, Bolivia. I bet you don't know where it is, right? I have. I, I would guess like, I think it's South America somewhere. Bogota, Colombia, Bolivia. I think South America. But you got me. You got me. I told you at the top, I'm a Google Ads guy. Did I say I was a geography expert? I know one thing and that's why I have a podcast about that one thing. You're not going to hear me brag about other knowledge and a lot of other things that I'm good at. One thing, I'm a one trick pony. You got me. I don't know where it is. But anyway, on with your question. I've been following you for over five years and thank you very much for this space. I'm with a new client in the usa. They are a new roofing company and as you know, it's a very competitive market with a high cost in the cpc, very high cost per click. I have no experience in that area and I could use some tips regarding it. Please, for. And then Andre adds in another question. Do you recommend lsa? Okay, so let me, let me, let me address roofing and give some tips. So first of all, my tips on roofing might surprise you because the very first thing that I think is going to be important for roofing is going to be a good website that might surprise you because you sent your question in about Google Ads. But there's a reason for this. When it comes to roofing as opposed to, you know, a lot of other industries, there's not a whole lot of value incentive whenever it comes from one roofing company to another, right? As homeowners, they may not be able to understand one roof for another. Most people aren't going to really care. It's just, I need it to get fixed. I need someone who's easy to work with. I need a decent price. You know, there's not a whole lot of incentive about using one company over another. Okay? There's no loyalty. So for that reason, I think the most important thing is that you get a good website that has good, clean, focused call to action, phone number, web form, booking an appointment, you know, as many ways that you can hook them and get them to convert. And I say that because that then leads us in back to Google Ads because I think the key to a successful Google Ads campaign for a roofing Client is not careful analysis of very important keywords and making super detailed decisions about when someone says roofers near me, is that more important than roofers in Dallas, Texas? You know, which one has the better cost per acquisition and which one provides better value for the client. I find that these discussions don't actually matter in roofing because it's very unpredictable. There's just not a lot of decision making. I, I think that goes on in roofing accounts. People will very often just click and call. You know, you need a roofer at 8am on a Tuesday, but you didn't need a roofer at Monday night at 8:00pm you know, you weren't really thinking about it and doing research about it. It's just, I need a roofer now I'm going to do a search because we found a leak and we need to fix it. It's not a matter of like, you know, buying a new phone or investing in a new car or a house or something like that. You know, this is very different. So very often what I need you to do is have a good website, get people to call. What that will do is that will feed into the algorithm of Google Ads. Max conversion, Target, cpa. All of these bidding strategies rely on good conversion data. And if you can start to build that engine, if you can start to build conversions, sending those signals back to Google Ads, I find that that's a more reliable way than building some super complex thematic kind of thing. So believe it or not, I'm actually pushing back against a lot of the strategies that I talk about in Google Ads about, you know, having thematic ad groups and stuff like that. It's a very different kind of beast because it requires, you know, data conversions and kind of playing into that algorithm. So hopefully that helps. And as far as the question about, you know, SLA lsa, which is short for local search ads, I don't really have an opinion one way or the other on that. I don't manage them. They don't really need management. They're not something that I really get behind. There's not a whole lot of qualification that an advertiser can do. You know, if someone says, get me a bunch of roofing clients, you know, you just kind of turn on LSA and either it works or it doesn't. And it might work for a little bit and then not work. It might. I find that it's just kind of a meh system. You know, I haven't found a lot of clients that just love it. They kind of just do it and really lean on Google Ads to provide the real precision and volume in what they're getting from from from Google. So hopefully that is helpful. All right, moving on to our second question. I've got two questions today before we get to the main topic. Emerson from San Diego hello Chris, I'm Emerson. I'm an online business owner based in San Diego, California, but originally from Brazil. I wanted to express my sincere appreciation for the valuable insights you share through your podcast. Your content has been instrumental in expanding my understanding of Google Ads. Well, thank you. Appreciate that. Currently I'm running a low budget campaign in a cost effective market. My strategy started with max clicks bidding in order to build volume and generate initial conversions to improve both the search impression share and impression share loss due to rank. I recently switched to manual bidding. After analyzing the average CPC I adjusted the bids approximately to 10 to 15 keywords, increasing most of them and decreasing others. However, and here's the question, the issue arose Most keywords now show eligible but limited and below first page bid. So there's that. If you've ever run manual bids, you see this all the time below first page bid status and that is despite having increased the majority of the bid values. What's particularly puzzling is that this is happening even though the previous automated bidding strategy was operating with a lower cpc. I would greatly appreciate your insights into why this might be occurring and any potential solutions you might recommend. Thank you for your time and consideration. Alright, so I'm speaking to a few of you. I know a lot of people use manual. They don't always use it, they use it sometimes and even less people use it all the time. So let's dig down into why you would be seeing this below first page bid status so much more. The fact is is that this status indicator is not something that's particularly helpful and I think the short answer is largely you can ignore it. It is not something that I personally use as a guide other than knowing, you know that when I turn on a campaign and I see that below first page bid before I've started to get any clicks, it might guide me to guess at what the CPCs might be. But that's pretty much the extent of how useful it is. Any value that comes from it giving me a below first page bid and then a number to increase it to that is worthless data to me. I ignore it. It matters nothing to me. So the reason you're seeing it is because those keywords that have that status warning are losing some impression share due to rank. So they're probably in the probably, let's say twenties and up. I would imagine the search impression share law student rank is probably from, you know, 20, 25, 30, 35 and up. It's very unlikely that this number would show for something that's, you know, below 20 law student rank. But it still can. It still can show Even if you're 20%, 10% law student rank even single digits. I've seen it, which is crazy. So this explains why I find it to be completely a useless status indicator is because it it is odd how Google will warn me about certain keywords and then ignore others. I'll have warnings about some keywords that have a 30% loss due to rank and then I'll see another one that has a 70% loss due to rank and it does not have this status. So my answer Emerson, is this. I would completely ignore the status warning here. I don't think that it matters. And the reason you're seeing it is because there's some kind of trigger for manual bids that will cause this. My suspicion is it's a combination of potential volume plus the lost impression share. So it may not show for certain keywords that have lower volume potential and also aren't losing a whole lot lost due to rank. So maybe you have a really specific exact match keyword and it doesn't have a whole lot of volume and Google knows that it's not really going to get much volume so it doesn't show this status. Meanwhile you might have another one that's losing 70% impression share and there's a lot of potential volume and so the status might show I'm not sure. I'm not sure why, but the fact is it doesn't matter. What does matter and here's why I do think you might kind of look at it, but not really what does matter if there is a winning keyword in there? If there are really important keywords that are just bringing quality traffic driving, the perfect kind of traffic, really qualified clicks driving, especially conversions on a regular basis. It's an anchor for the number of conversions that you're getting for the whole account. I think it would be important that you pay attention to this warning just in the fact that it has a warning, not what the number is, not that it says you need to increase it to this certain number. It says you need to change it to a $15 CPC in order to get first page bid. Not that you need to just notice the fact that it's there and then reference the laws due to rank. Look at your impression law Student rank number and consider how much am I losing on this very important keyword? Would it be helpful for me to consume a higher volume of traffic for this important keyword? And how much am I losing? Maybe it's important that I go ahead and increase it. So what's important is the loss due to rank number, not the fact that Google thinks you should raise that bid to some, you know, higher number. Ignore that. Instead, work with what you know. You already said it in your message, Emerson. Work with what you know. Look at that loss due to rank impression share. Loss due to rank. Look at that number and determine do I need more of this impression share? Do I need to consume more of it? Do I need to rank higher for this? And if so, take action. Increase those bids, get those impressions much higher in order to consume and drive better results for you or your client. All right, and that is it for the questions. We're going to move on now to the main topic of the show. And I know Google Ads is confusing for a lot of people, especially with the volatility of how things change so much things go away, new things come in. You hear rumors, other people are running Google Ads. You talk to an expert and they say this, and this other expert says this other thing. You don't want to be taken advantage of. You don't want to feel like you're a victim. That's why I'm going to tell you seven things that I think are truths in Google Ads that will never change. These truths will never change in Google Ads and here's what they are. Number one, start simple in Google Ads and adding on to that truth, nothing is guaranteed. So you could reverse it and you could say, nothing is guaranteed in Google Ads. So therefore, start simple. What this means is don't overanalyze what it is that you think you're going to get from Google Ads. Don't spend so much time researching. Don't try and emulate some YouTube video you saw or some strategy you read in a book or some competitor you heard talk or, you know, something you heard from, you know, a speaker at some conference. Start simple. Don't make too many assumptions and work on the basis of this is the traffic I need. I want to try and garner that. I want to grab that traffic, I want to get that traffic, I want to rank for that traffic and then from there I'll find out what to do, right? Get the traffic that you need. Get the traffic that you think will convert and then let the data tell you from there. Is it converting Are they staying on your site? Are they calling you? How are you ranking for this? Is this affordable at all? Is the cost per acquisition too much? Are you getting any calls at all? Nothing's guaranteed. No phone calls. Leads are guaranteed in Google Ads. You may get absolutely zero back other than just traffic, which is worthless. So number two, next truth is the top position in Google Ads will always matter. So ranking in Google Ads, ranking first is important. I do not think that you should misunderstand that you should always be first. But ranking at the top will matter and has mattered. It will continue to matter. Because think about, anytime you're searching for something on Google Ads, the ads that you pay attention to are the ones that are visible, the ones that are at the top, the ones that are right there. Very often they drive better conversion rates. They definitely drive higher click through rates. And being first is certainly more powerful than being last. And very often when you're last, you end up dropping off and you don't show at all. So top position, top ranking is important. I could say it another way. Visibility on a marketing platform is important, right? I mean, that's a very basic understanding. You need to be visible or it won't work at all. So top position is probably the most guaranteed way to be seen. It's not the guarantee, best way to get the most calls, but it definitely does matter when you're at the top. All right, number three, and this is something that I've come to realize over the past couple years, this is not a value or truth that I always understood properly. So the truth is this volume and value are the gold standard of measure measurement. In Google Ads, volume and value are the gold standard of measurement. What I mean by that is Google Ads does not is not exclusively just a volume game, not a numbers game. Cost per conversion is not the only factor that you should consider in Google Ads. And quality of leads, or in other words, volume. Well, let me say it again. Quality of leads. In other words, value is not the only thing you should consider. You should consider both. So let me explain it in plain English. When you're managing your Google Ads account, you would be very unhappy if I got you 100 leads in a day. And all of those leads were looking for yellow shirts. And all you sell is red shirts, right? I got you a lot of leads. Volume was very important there. But the problem was there was no value. No one purchased a lot of volume, but no value. And the other way around, let's say I got you five leads from people looking for red shirts, but in order to make your business work, you really need about 50 conversions of people looking for red shirts. So it's not enough volume. The value is right on target, but the volume wasn't high enough. So when you're managing Google Ads, when you're managing Google Ads, you can't just consider volume to be the success point. Cost per acquisition, CPA cost per lead is not the single indication of success. Anyone who does lead generation in Google Ads knows that it's not how many times the phone rings, it's how many times the phone rings. And it's a qualified opportunity for us to try and sell to. That's what matters. And anyone in the shopping e commerce industry would know that. Even if you're let, let's say your ROAS, your return on ad spend is 20x, you're getting 20x volume on your Google Ads, but that's only coming from two sales a month. That's not enough volume. Value is amazing, but the volume isn't there. So the truth here is this. You need both volume and value to make it work. So don't manage your campaign to get the cheapest cost per conversion because you'll starve from poor leads. And don't manage your campaign to get the highest roas, the highest return on ad spend because you'll starve from lack of volume. All right, we're going to get on to number 4, 5, 6 and 7. But first remind you about optio.com opteo.com PSP it is the tool to help you make better decisions in Google Ads. That is the point of this entire podcast. Not just this episode, this podcast. That's what I focus on is make better decisions at Google Ads. And that is what this tool exemplifies through many different assets that they've built into this tool. I cannot possibly list them all. Everything from bid optimization to keyword to negative keyword to budget alerts to disapproved ad alerts in reporting, AI ad writing systems. It's an amazing system. You can try it for free for 28 days. Optio.com PSP all right, number four, search terms are always important. That is a truth that will be true until we no longer have search terms. And then they were important and, but now they're gone. Search terms are always important because they are the closest connection that you have to a raw just data point to who came to your website. Because let's, let's go back to the roofing. You know, I talked about roofers earlier in this episode. Let's say There are, you're getting 2,000 clicks a month. And you want to know, Kris, should I have gotten 2,000 clicks a month or should I get 4,000 clicks a month? And I would have no idea what to tell you until I looked at what those clicks were. Clicks are not equal. Each of those 2,000 clicks represents value independent of each other, right? There's some people, there may have been 2,000 clicks that just said the word roof and those were entirely wasted clicks. That's wasted money. But if it was 2000 clicks that said roofers for hire near me, roofing companies, roof repair near me, stuff like that, those are 2,000 clicks that are worth it. And you only know that until you look at your search terms. The search terms determine the value of those clicks. So it's important that you measure, you, monitor, you adjust, you constantly try and improve your search terms to get you the best quality traffic that you can. Search terms are the heartbeat of Google search. They are the linchpin of making sure that your money spent in Google Ads is money spent well or money spent poorly. Number five, ad copy is a customer's first impression of your business. When someone sees an ad, that is the only representation of all the time that you put into Google Ads, all the time that you put into picking keywords, choosing bids, making decisions, you know, getting your website perfect and getting all the conversion tracking working and the phone call tracking working, all of that is on the line. If you don't write good ad copy that gives a good impression of your business, that's the only thing that they see, that's the very first thing they're looking at your front door. Your front door is your ad copy. If you write crappy ad copy, it will not lead to good traffic. It will be the first crumbling point, the crumble if the first point of deterioration of your campaign. Because your click through rate the quality of clicks that you're getting, you're not giving a good first impression. So ad copy will always be important. No matter how you're attracting people, there's always going to be something on the page. There's always going to be something written in the ad. There's always going to be some image communicated in order to entice that click. Number six, you can't judge your Google Ads campaign from what you see personally. All right, this is something I will say over and over again, but I will still have to talk to people who do not believe this. And they may say they believe it, but their actions don't prove that they do. You can't judge your ads from what you see. You can't judge your campaign, you can't judge the results from what you see. And what I mean by is someone says, hey, I searched for blank and I didn't see my ad. I don't see my ad. I haven't seen my YouTube ad pop up yet. I haven't seen my display ad. Hey, I haven't seen my remarketing ads. I'm searching for, you know, roofers near me and I don't see my ad. It's not working. That is, that's crazy. I can't imagine how complex it is behind the scenes from one search on one computer, one device doing a search and diving into the depths of the Google search engine interface. And maybe when you do that search, you come up with your own ad and your own ad shows for you and then you judge it. But that is such an inferior way of judging success based on you seen yourself on Google. That is never going to be an accurate way to judge measure the success of your Google Ads campaign. The correct way is to use the data that we're given. Use impressions, clicks, click through, rate cost, average CPC conversions, conversion rate, target roas or roas. I mean search impression, share, search impression, lawsuit of rank, search impression, share, lawsuit of budget. These are real concrete numbers. Seeing yourself in a Google Ads result is vanity. It is vanity and it makes no difference. Stop searching for yourself, stop searching for your keyword and focus on what matters. Are you getting the right kind of search terms? Are you getting phone calls? Are the phone calls qualified? Not. I didn't see myself when I searched Yesterday afternoon at 2:00 for this keyword. I don't care, that's not success. And the very last one, which definitely will never change and continues to get deeper and deeper and deeper. Number seven, we don't know everything about Google Ads. We don't know everything about Google and why should you? No one outside of people that make these decisions will ever know why your ad didn't show up, why you're not getting calls, why the calls happen in spurts, right? Why you get three calls in four days and then you go two weeks with no calls and then you get five calls in two days and then you go two weeks with no calls. We don't know. Why did Joe's ads work and Jim's ads didn't? We don't know. We only have the data that we're, that we're given. There's a lot of mystery, there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of frustration that happens because of the mysterious black box of Google Ads. It's a digital product. People have paid who knows how much, you know, billions and billions. All the small businesses, all the big businesses, all the medium businesses in the world are paying for this mysterious digital thing and it absolutely brings real results. But it all goes into a black box of mystery and there's a lot of things that we don't know and that will continue to be true. Hopefully it doesn't grow. Hopefully that black box stays the size it is. Maybe shrinks a little bit. It'll still be there. I don't really want it to grow but it will always be there. So a little bit of dose of reality there. Hopefully these seven truths help you making good decisions in Google Ads. My name is Chris Schaefer. Chrissafer.com if you'd like to reach out to me. Otherwise I'll catch you guys next week.