← 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
Tips for Shopping, Search, and Display Campaigns (Episode 506)
00:37:42
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Foreign. Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris and today I have tips for you about shopping, Google search and Google display campaigns. So it's going to be a packed episode. I have my friend Joey Bidner who's going to pop in and give us a great tip about your shopping campaigns, a great tip for optimizing your product title in your product feed. Really good stuff. And then later on in the episode I'm going to answer questions from listeners on a variety of topics. So stay tuned for that. As always, I want to start the show with a mention of my first favorite Google Ads optimization software, Optio. Optio.com PSP is a free 28 day trial that you can grab. Just because you're listening to this podcast, there's only one way that you can get this access to a special invite that is exclusive to the listeners of this show. Recently, if you haven't heard, Optio has expanded their amazing tool to to be multichannel and basically it is a system that allows you to analyze your Google Ads. Used to Optio was a system of recommendations, worked phenomenally well and now they've upgraded. After 18 months of work they've launched these new features and you can try it to be able to get quick answers about your Google Ads, your LinkedIn, your Meta, your Microsoft, your TikTok, all of those things it can channel through and you can get answers immediately. Why is your cost per click increasing? Why have your impressions gone up? Why have your conversions dropped? What's up with your search impression? Share all of these things, you can interact with your data and get real answers immediately from Optio about your account. So try it for free. 28 day free trial. That's opteo.com PSP to get in on this special exclusive offer. Alright, so let's jump in. At the top of the show I'm going to bring in Joey. He's going to discuss a great tip for optimizing your product title in your product feed. Joey, take it away.
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Hey, what's up Chris? So today I would like to talk about product titles once again. This is something that we've covered before in previous episodes where we discussed the various fields you can optimize for in merchant center for E Commerce shopping campaigns. But today I want to focus on product titles. Not only because is it, you know, one of the most important fields to optimize for in a shopping campaign, but I need to address an issue that I see way too often and Almost, I'd say 90% of the coaching calls and audits that I conduct to evaluate the health of a shopping campaign and the products in it do I see this issue. And it comes primarily from stores that have the native Shopify integration. It comes with a little overlooked setting that can easily fix the your title issues if you have them. So I want to, I want to cover that in today's discussion. So before we get into this little setting that will save the day, I want to circle back to why product titles matter so much. And it really relates to the quality of your search terms and how Google uses the data in your product feed to match to those queries. And the first place Google's going to go to is really your product title. There are a lot of other fields that matter, but the product title in my opinion is the most important. It's going to look at all the pieces in that title to match to your query. So if you have issues with really generic searches, search terms that are not really hitting those key features or those really granular searches, the first place I look at is what do the titles look like. If the titles are really basic, then your search terms are going to likely be really basic. If you're not showing up for key attributes that signal a low funnel search term, it's likely because that term and attribute is not in your product title. And I want to remind people that we have 150 characters that we can use in our product title. So I always encourage people to use them. Make that long string. And this long product title might not be read by the user, obviously, because you know, they are. It is truncated to just the first like three or four words. But we're making this rich title for Google to match your product to relevant queries. That's really the point here. It's almost like we're going back to the SEO principles. You're optimizing it for the system to read your product, not necessarily the user. So I like to say, you know, load that title in with all the key attributes that pertain to your product. If you want to show up for searches like I'll give you an example. I have a client that, that sells high quality patio umbrellas and a high converting term is wind resistant patio umbrella. And their patio umbrellas are particularly good for high wind because of a lot of features that it has. So in the title, you know, we put wind resistant and that allows us to match for more search queries that have wind resistant search intent. So that's just one of the many examples of why you want to have a rich product title. And I Do want to mention a couple key things here? Your brand, your brand name, your store name does not need to be in your product title. There is a brand field on your search ad. So I want to get that out of the way, get your brand name out of the title. The only time where you really want your brand name in the title is if you're like selling like something like Nike shoes. If you're selling, if you're the reseller of a brand that is competing with other resellers for that same brand and the brand name is really important for the search query to match for, then put it in there. But if you're a store, don't put your store name in your title. If you're a unique brand, don't put your brand name in the title. You have a brand name brand field that gets pulled in. So got that out of the way. Now I just want to circle back to the main reason why I'm bringing all of this up. And that is the issue that comes with the direct Shopify integration. And it's a really simple one. You're going to laugh and when I mention it because it's really so simple. But by default, Shopify is going to import the product title on your store, right? And that product title is usually not optimized for a Google Shopping product feed. Usually the web store's product title is not really even meant to be read in a long string. It's just like the name of the product, right? It will usually just be the SKU variant name. It's not going to have all this rich information. And the way to get around using that is in your Shopify Google YouTube app settings. You know the app that connects Merchant Center. There is a setting to use the SEO title and description for Merchant Center. And if you recall, at the bottom of every product page in a Shopify store, at the bottom there's an area for SEO title and description. So this will allow you to write a really rich product title that will be sent to Merchant center without having to change the titles of the product in your store. Because I think we can all agree you also don't want this 150 character long string optimized title visible on your store. So I'm not saying to change that and import it. I'm saying use the SEO title description at the bottom of your backend product page and tell Google to use that instead. And once again, that setting to use the SEO title description instead is simply in your Shopify, what they call the Google YouTube app settings where Your merchant center connection is made. If you're using a third party software, there's always a setting to use this area instead. And if you take the time to optimize this SEO title description area, it's also going to help your SEO. You know, that's what the Google crawlers use for organic listings. So it's in your best interest to use that anyway. And in most cases when I point this out, most of the stores are already using that SEO title description in the sense where they filled it out, but they just were not telling Google to use that. Instead, the, the Shopify integration by default just uses the page title, not the SEO title. So that's the real, you know, the real trick here is simply hit that toggle button to use the SEO title description and optimize that area for what you want to show up for. So this is really the easiest win to get better granular searches for your products using Shopping or pmax. So, all right, I'll pass it back to you, Chris, and I'll see you next time.
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All right, thanks, Joey. Good stuff. Let's jump now to the later half of the show where I'm going to answer questions from listeners. I get questions in my inbox all the time and I answer them periodically. Today's one of those days. If you'd like to jump in and get your name in the hat, your question in the hat for the next episode, you can email the podcast at paid search podcastmail.com get your question in and I'll let you know when I'm answering it so you won't miss the show when it comes through. So the first question on the docket here is from Matthew, and it's not actually a question. Matthew didn't really have a question. He had something that he wanted to point out and ask, you know, do I, do I use this and bring this specific feature to everyone's attention, which I appreciate. I'm glad that you guys are sharing some things that you find in Google Ads and discussing, you know, how it's helped you so specifically, Matthew was talking about a column in the campaign view. So you can add columns, you can remove columns whenever you're viewing your campaigns in Google Ads. If you don't know that that's going to be a huge, that news alone is going to be huge because you definitely need to specifically see clicks, impressions, click through, rate, cost per click, overall spend, conversions, conversion rate. That stuff needs to be standard. Even further, I highly recommend seeing things like search impression share search impression share loss due to Rank, search, impression, share, loss due to budget. These things answer the big basic metrics of your Google Ads campaign. And of course, if you're running a ROAS focused campaign, then conversion value over cost is going to be important as well. So what's another column that you might consider once you get past some of the basics? Well, Matthew brings forward the results column. So in the campaign view you can add a results column and this provides a line by line breakout of all the different conversions that have come through on each individual campaign. So if you have more than one conversion, Google will show you which conversion it was and how many of those conversions happened in that campaign. So I'll talk more about how it works and why it's important. But first I want to say I do not use this, this particular column. It's not something that I find useful mainly because it, it makes my, my rows, you know, the row, you know, each campaign row to be extremely wide because there's multiple lines and it makes, you know, it makes scrolling through my campaigns pretty, pretty difficult because it takes something that should be an inch or two wide and are tall and then it makes it five or six inches tall, which is really, it's not useful to look at it that way. So it's merely just based on preference. But I agree it's an extremely useful metric to see. I'll tell you what I use instead, Matthew, is I use the segment button. So right there on the campaign screen you can actually see there's a segment button. And if you go to segment and then go to conversions and then segment by conversion action, it'll actually show you this same information. It'll show you all your conversions, how many of those conversions have converted for that particular campaign in all the campaigns. So I find this to be most practical because I can hide it and show it when I want it. It doesn't have to show up all the time. But let's talk about something that Matthew specifically brought up that I think is really important and that is the fact that when you view the actual conversions that you're getting and you actually break them out, segment them out by the different types that you're getting. What Matthew noticed was one of the conversions that Google was tracking in his campaign was store visits. Matthew's not running a retail store visit location. So this was, you know, a bit of a shock. Why would store visits track as a conversion that's being optimized for in the campaign? This is not a critical metric. This is something that is not important. So you know, someone that's getting directions or visiting the store, things like that. I know many people run Google Ads campaigns out of their home. I know multiple home service companies that might have a location as their home, but they only go to the client's home for blinds, custom blinds or plumbing, or for exterior homework, something like that. Um, so their location and whether a person requests directions to the location is important. That, that has nothing to do with success of their campaign. So if you haven't looked at your conversion actions, if you haven't looked at the results column or if you haven't segmented by your conversion actions at your campaign level, do that because you might see that you have a 15% conversion rate. But once you segment that data and actually look where those conversions are, you might realize, oh my goodness, 50% of my conversions are things that I don't care about, phone calls or you know, things that don't move the needle for you. So thank you Matthew for bringing that forward. No matter how you view that data, I highly recommend that you pay attention to it because it's going to be critically important information for the performance of your campaign. Alright, so next we move to Liam. Just going to read Liam's message here. It says, I'm a longtime listener and want to say how grateful I am for the help you've given me throughout my time listening. Well, thank you Liam. In my campaigns I've noticed that the search terms section, there is a tab labeled other search terms at the very bottom. Some of my campaigns have over 50% of their clicks in this other section and I cannot see what topics terms my ads are appearing on because of that. Do you know how I would go about finding these search terms or is it even possible? Well, let me take a breath here because I mean this is a, I mean as as many topics are, this is a very upsetting discovery when you find this. It's upsetting to me because it's been going on for a very long time. For those of you that have been doing Google Ads five or less years, you wouldn't find that this is an odd thing at all. And maybe you're not bothered by it because you've always had it this way. But let me tell you, this was not always the case. These quote unquote other search terms are hidden and you cannot see these. Google literally restricts any data of these other terms. Now Liam, in your example you said about 50%. You know, that's a rather high percentage. Other times it could be as low as 30%. And I've seen it as high as 60 and 70% in some instances. And there's really no advice that I can give to say this is how to fix it or this is what you should do. You only have to work around it. So let me tell you what the best method is, because here's the facts is let's say that you have a representation of only 50% of the traffic and let's ignore the stuff that is good and let's focus on the things that are bad. Because when you're reviewing search terms, a critical part is to actually look at the search terms and figure out what search terms you don't want. Want, right? So when you're looking into searches you don't want, there might be some in there that are, you know, maybe competitor names or, you know, let's say you're a photographer and you're trying to sell headshots and you keep getting the names of other photographers in there. Well, you know, there might be some other photographer named Ashley Smith and you want to make sure that you exclude Ashley Smith photographer, right? So you've done that. But what if there's other searches that are Ashley Smith and it's just worded differently and that has been blocked? That's part of the hidden other 50% that you can't see. If you've exclusively blocked Ashley Smith photographer as an exact match, you've only blocked that. You haven't blocked all the other potentially hidden searches that contain Ashley's name. So the important part to remember here is since we can only see a small percentage in some cases of your search terms, it's important to when you find something in your search terms that's unqualified, take aggressive action to stop that from showing ever in any scenario. So in this example, I would take the name Ashley and add that as a broad match negative. Now it's important one word, broad match negative. I might also do that for the word Smith. So anytime it shows up, whether Google shows me the search term or not, I'm now actively blocking any of those instances because maybe I only see 12 impressions with Ashley Smith's name in them, but there could be another 24, 100. I mean, we have no idea how many of these searches Google hides from us. So it's important to take aggressive action when you do see these search terms because you're not only blocking for what you can see, you're blocking for what you can't see. And this whole one word negative approach is very important because it excludes topics that you don't want to cover. You know, if you provide repairs to fences and you don't do installation and every time you see something that says the word install, installation, things like that around fences, you just block that exact match every time or that phrase match, you're missing the boat on all the stuff you can't see. You need to go in and add the word install as a one word negative broad match to that search campaign or even shopping campaign. That is very important. And then also while we're on it, installation. So the word install and installation, because installation has the word install in it, but that's not the same word. One word broad match only matches to exactly how that word is typed. So you need to put installation, install and installing and installers. And installs. All these one word broad match negatives are incredibly important because I see a lot of people using exact match and you are, you're missing a ton of, of hidden search terms that you're not blocking, that you may never see. Okay, so thank you for your question, Liam. We're move on now to Corin. Corin writes in and says, hey Chris, I loved your recent episode about the top six questions specifically about sitelink assets. It's made me take a deep dive into conversions by click type. And that's where this question comes from. What do you think about image assets? Do you think they're stealing clicks like site links or stealing clicks? They look nice with the ads visually, but the data says they're a waste of money. Corinne, so glad you brought this up because this is, it's a very interesting situation where Google shows when you segment by click type as you, as you talked about it will show clicks that happened on a site link, a headline, a phone number, you know, all these different segmentations of different clicks. And it will also show image clicks. This is very deceiving because unlike any of those other click types, image clicks still go to the headline of the ad itself. So unlike phone number clicks or get direction clicks or site link clicks, those go to different places, those have a different interaction. But an image click is just the fact that they happen to click the image and not the link, the blue link headline at the top. So this is, this is really important because it is not a waste of money if you're, if you notice that your image clicks have a lower conversion rate that has nothing to do with any different page or, you know, process that, that they're brought through. It's not like it pops up the image on their screen. There's no waste of money here. The image Clicks through the image asset system still send people to your page, to your final URL. Okay, so they're just clicks on the image itself, which is the same as if they had clicked on the headline. So let's talk about. So that's. So that's the misconception, Corin. And let's talk about why I think they're important. I do encourage, unlike sitelinks, which I'm not a fan of, I do encourage the use of images because visually they're appealing. There are many clients that just by showing an image, it enhances the understanding of what the client or, you know, the, the ad is actually advertising. If I want to convey a distinct difference between what one service is doing and it's a little different than what they might expect, then an image can take the headline text and make it much more understandable. For example, say that you are doing some type of warehouse distribution. You're a warehouse and everybody else has a warehouse in some metro somewhere and everybody else wants people to send products to that warehouse. Right? So you might be a warehouse
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for
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E commerce or stores that want to ship their products and you have a centrally located warehouse and multiple metros around the area. That's the normal warehouse expectation. But let's say that your business is different than others and you provide a customer warehouse that's built on site. You know, it's kind of a like a temporary storage house that can be built on site of the customer who needs storage and warehouse storage on site, which is very different than shipping product to the, to the facility. Having a picture of, you know, material and a warehouse being built, or, you know, some kind of imagery that conveys customization or custom built is a completely different type of message. Even though your ad copy might say it in the headline. Having imagery that reinforces that custom on site, you know, provided on site, you know, on job, on site type of warehouse storage. That's a, it's the same kind of service, but there's a subtle difference in the imagery. Can set your ad apart and make it obviously different from everyone else. So highly recommend images not for their conversion, necessarily their conversion value, but more about the ctr. The click through rate. It can improve the click through rate, make the ads more distinguished apart from others because, you know, you're showing something concrete, you're showing something different. I highly recommend avoiding generic images. You know, try and be as precise and clear in your images as possible, showing wide shots of things. I highly discourage the use of that because of course, many, many times people are searching on a mobile device of some kind. So the image is going to be small. You need to be a well lit, well defined image that looks very clear and understandable and is very distinct from what you want them to know about your service, your product, whatever it is that you're, that you're selling on Google. So thanks for your question and one last question from Eric which we're going to talk about display. I have a specific question coming in from Eric about display campaigns, about building awareness, getting clientele through display campaigns. Before I jump to Eric's question, I do want to remind you optio.com PSP for AI integration power tool that's no longer just recommendations. Multichannel platform where you can chat with your data, get account performance, edit your audit your ad copy, generate reports, all kinds of things to be able to get real interactive data from your account. No longer just recommendations, but it's now interactive and produces answers for you on the fly. Try it for free 28 days optio.com PSP all right, here we are. Last question of the episode. Let's read it here. Hi Chris, I listen to your show every week and since you did the episode about the struggles of home service businesses, I've been thinking, do you think home service companies could improve or retain their market share by using a display campaign for brand awareness in a geographical area? I'm a real estate agent, but many home service, many home services serve geographic areas. If we used a two mile radius of an area that we served and used a display campaign along with our search ads, do you think that would be a good addition to help convert actual clients? And it goes on to say that he searched up old episodes and the last time I talked about this was like five years ago, so it must have been a while. So thank you for the suggestion, I appreciate it. Eric. I think this certainly deserves a relook because the many things have changed in display campaigns as I'll discuss here in a second. And I do think that I could probably devote multiple episodes to this topic if people are interested, which you can always email feedback to me paid searchpodcastmail.com to let me know if you do have topics that you've heard me mention that you want me to cover. Let me know. Happy to hear back from you guys and tell me what you want to hear about. So let's get to the to the core thing just to directly answer your question. Yes, I do think a display campaign can provide more leads and more clients for you or you, anyone I think potentially can get There is A chance that you can get more leads, more clients, more sales from display campaigns. Because I've seen it. I've seen successful display campaigns do very well, sometimes outperforming search campaigns, which is wonderful. The advantage of a display campaign is that it's very cheap traffic and the capacity at which that you can run these is, you know, there's just thousands upon thousands more opportunities to show on a display campaign. But the only, let's talk about, you know, where I've seen success. The only time I have seen successful display campaigns is whenever the company has made highly targeted display campaigns. They have removed all the fluff, all the other automatic placements and many, many things that are you just automatically put in whenever you create a display campaign. You know, so whenever, if you were to create a display campaign, I would say the ones that are successful have cut out 98%, 99% of everything else and going after a small sliver of what it is that they want. So they're not just running on wide, broad topics. They're not just running on wide, broad audiences. They're doing specific things specifically think. Some of the most successful that I've seen are using placements. They're specifically targeting placements. A placement is when you say, I want to show up on this page, I want to show up on this domain, I want to show up on this segment of this domain. Right. And I mean, if you went back and listened to old episodes, you'd hear me talk much more favorably about display campaigns. Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore. There is a. There was a point within the past five years, I think it's closer within the past three or four, potentially. I think now when Google decided, hey, hey advertisers, we're going to take away your ability to target compound scenarios. So compound targets are no longer allowed in Google Ads display campaigns, which is baffling. It is incredibly frustrating that we've lost that. So essentially, and if I do a dedicated episode of this, I can discuss it more. But essentially gone is the ability to distinctly target this audience, but only when they're looking at this page or you know, this particular topic. You can't do compounded targeting where it's an audience plus a specific content target. Highly frustrating. I think it is caused Google to be able to get tons and tons more clicks and impressions and it's robbed advertisers the ability to be able to specifically call out. I only want to show for people in market for a home that are on a page about mortgage rates. Right. I mean that, that could be an amazing combination of target for you but, but you can't really do that anymore. There's no way to precisely make sure that that is targeted. So you know, since then I'm not, I don't find that it's very useful. I think if you were, if anyone were to pursue display, I highly recommend you make very selective choices in what you want to show up for. The vast majority of things that you're automatically going to be placed for, you don't want. Most of the default settings you don't want, they will lead to mobile apps, games, kid, kid, YouTube channels and game or, or, or now in 2026 what we get a lot of are these entirely fake websites that are just spam. I mean they're just AI written, they're, they're articles that are written by AI. They're absolutely just mind numbingly like worthless, boring. There's nothing to them. They are merely there to generate ad impressions and get paid. Now I mean something like that, stuff like that's been around forever but it is so much easier now. You don't even have to write the content. You can have AI write it for you. So great. Thanks AI. And that's where your image ads are showing up. You know, that's where your video ads can show up. Absolute junk and clutter. So yeah, I would say, I do think, because I have seen success, I do think it can work. But proceed with caution. There are, I would say the Google Ads display campaign universe is one giant pothole and when you fall in, I mean it's, there's no chance, you know, so, so maybe if you very carefully, you know, pick a path, perhaps there can be success. But I, I find that it is pretty rare. So as I said, I might do a deeper dive into that at some point if you guys are interested. Otherwise you guys can reach out to me if you'd like some personalized recommendations and coaching. I can also provide management of Google Ads and help you out. However you need. You can find me chrishaefer.com My friend Joey who was on earlier, you can find him@joeybidner.com otherwise you'll find me here next week. I'll see you then.