← 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
When Automation Fails: Broad Match vs Manual Control in Google Ads (Episode 475)
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Chris Schaefer
Foreign hello and welcome to the fadesearch Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about growing Google Ads automation and what happens when it fails. This is a heavy topic that people are very interested in because as Google moves more into focusing on tools to help you succeed, they're going to take more control, they're going to automate more, they're going to want you to allow the system to do more. What happens when it fails? Well, I have a story to tell you about what an account looked like before and after automation and you know, what happened in between what those two campaigns looked like and what the results were. I think you'll be very interested to see the difference between the two. Also, I have a story from a listener who talks about a scammer who almost got access to his clients accounts and and caused massive damage. And I want to share that story because it is something that individual managers, agencies and just business owners with their own account might have a problem with in the future because this could cause massive destruction and leave you with a suspended banned account that you now owe Google thousands of dollars. So stick around for that. I'm going to share that here at the top of the show. Before we get into the meat of it, uh, before I jump into the topic, I do want to remind you about my sponsor, optio.com PSP if you would like to try the fastest growing, most engaging tool to help you jump into your account see data in a dynamic way that you've never seen before, this tool is what you should try out. I talk about it every week because it is the best tool, I believe, to get more done in Google Ads in a shorter amount of time. We all have a lot of hats that we wear. And whether you are managing your own account as the business owner or you have hundreds of accounts as a large agency, this tool scales to what you need it to be. It brings you to your most critical points of failure in your Google Ads account and points out, hey, did you notice this keyword is way underperforming compared to everything else. Did you know that this particular landing page has a much worse conversion rate than everything else? You know, these are important things that you may never notice because it requires, you know, doing all kinds of spreadsheets and data distribution across all these different segments that you may never do because you wear a lot of hats. So get the tool that can help you get more done in Google Ads at a much faster pace and be more successful. You can try the tool for free for 28 days at opteo.com PSP that's O P-T-E-O.com PSP use the chat box on their page to let them know that you heard about it here on the podcast and they'll give you that special offer with no strings attached. It's an amazing offer. Take advantage of it now. Optio.com PSP okay, so let's change gears a little bit here. Gets a little somber because anyone who's been hacked or had an issue with something like this before knows that this can be a devastating problem to have when you get hacked. It feels very personal. I have a story from 15 years ago. You know, new in Google Ads. You know, been working in Google Ads five years or something like that. And my Google Ads business website, Chris Schaefer.com was hacked. It was some people from Saudi Arabia. They got access to my website and wanted to, you know, have me pay them to restore the site. They destroyed the entire site and basically a blackmail ransom kind of thing. So, you know, I have personal experience with that. Luckily, I haven't had experience like this. Joe from the UK sent me this story and I asked permission to share it because it is a very specific scam that particularly those of you who are managers on other people's accounts, you have your own mcc. You know, you have multiple accounts in your mcc. You are potentially at risk for some very damaging scams that could affect your clients. And who's responsible for that? I mean, it's tough to say that you're not responsible because it was your email and your account that went in and made those changes. So it's. It's pretty tough. Let's go through it. Joe sent me a breakdown, and I'm going to read you the bullet points of what effectively happened. So the very first thing that blew my mind that brought my attention to this is this scam happened through his website lead form. So Joe is a manager for Google Ads accounts over in the uk. He had someone fill out his web form on his website saying, I need help with Google Ads. Can you help me? Great. I get those every day. You know, Joe gets them every day. Every manager gets those. Those are important. New leads, new sales, new customers to help with Google Ads. Great. Obviously jumped right on it and said, you know, sure, I'd be happy to help you. And the person that reached out to them said that, hey, instead of connecting your MCC to my account, I'm just gonna invite you with your email address. So Joe said, okay, sure. The scammer invited Joe to His account, his Google Ads account. He, Joe received this email and then as usual clicked Accept Invite, logged in with his username and password. So everything seemed pretty normal at this point. You know, when you are invited to a new Google Ads account, you accept that invite, you log in to confirm and a two factor authentication will pop up as well. So definitely, I mean this seems pretty legit. The text showed up on his phone, he put the number in and as soon as he hit the number and confirmed his identity with his login, there was just a blank page. There was no, there was no, it did not forward him to the new account that he was supposedly linked to. Some emails passed back and forth between him and this scammer. Of course, Joe doesn't know it's a scammer yet. But Joe got an alert, a separate email from Google notifying him that his mcc, his manager account had been linked to a different manager account. And it turns out in just the few minutes of trying to figure out why his email invite was not working and all this had happened, they had taken that email address that he had given and password that he had typed into this scammer's site and logged in to Joe's account without his knowledge and then proceeded to switch off all notifications. They happened to miss one notification in his account. And that's why Joe had received this notification about a new linking to the mcc. Joe quickly realized what was happening. Luckily he was able to remove the scammers from his account, changed his password and no actual damage was done. But ladies and gentlemen, this could have been horrible. This could have been awful because I have had situations like this happen where I was not, not to me, but I was around the issue when it happened. Other people have contacted me about things like this. Typically what, what happens if the scammer would have been successful? What they usually want to do is take these accounts from the manager and direct the traffic to their scamming websites. They want to send massive amounts of traffic until they, until the account gets banned and the resulting Google Ads account gets suspended. They are going to spend as much of their free money on sending traffic to their scam websites. And of course this is devastating. I mean, this is your clients now paying for traffic to this scam website. And when it's all over, you're left with a suspended account, you know, disapproved ads and you know, all these issues that happened because it was going to these junk spamming, hacking accounts or websites, I should say now you're left with angry clients who owe Google potentially thousands of dollars. I mean, this is a real threat. You may be left with the weight of angry clients who you've now lost. They've lost their account and they're looking at you like you need to somehow make up for the the lost spend on Google. Terrifying. So I wanted to share this because there's a specific thing that you should check here. Number one, is this the only hundred percent safe way of adding an account to your manager account? You know, only safe way of managing an account in Google Ads is taking their Google Ads ID number and putting it into your MCC and connecting it directly to your mcc. So to those business owners out there who are managing their own accounts, when you reach out to someone or someone reaches out to you to help you with Google Ads, the only legit way that a real manager should connect to your account should be that ID number that it is 10 digits. It looks like a phone. US phone number is what it looks like. It's 10 digits long and they'll want that ID number. They should not have to request access via email. They should not invite you to anything. They it should be an ID number to connect your account. That is the only secure way. Because when you get invited to an account, what happened to Joe is the email address that was shown of course looked legit, but it actually came from google mail.com not google.com so very easy to miss. But the email looked legit. It was built out to look just like a real account invite email, but it came from Google mail, not google.com okay. So for extra security, I recommend whether you are a business owner working with an agency or think you're working with an agency, they should be connected through their mcc. If they're not, ask some questions, be suspicious. That's the only way I connect to accounts. I absolutely refuse to connect to any of my clients outside of an MCC number request. That is it. Now the next thing is when that Accept invite button was clicked by Joe, what it took him to was a different website. It was not actually google.com or ads.google.com it was site Google. So this was a page built by the scammers specifically to look like a Google Ads invite, except page, but it was a site google.com so site.google.com is a subdomain of Google that can be owned by anyone. It is not official google, google.com content or pages. These are individual sites, kind of like a WordPress site or you know, a blog from back in the day. This, this was the old school kind of Stuff that Google had long time ago. If you wanted a webpage you could, you could build your own website, you know, your own blog@site.google.com you know, this is of course been changed and a little different nowadays but it is critical that you understand that emails that come in should come from google.com and sites that you go to should be google.com. they shouldn't be anything different than that. So I hope this maybe saves one person from falling for this scam because it is, it is easy. Certainly those other managers out there just like me. When you get an email invite, when you get something from someone, you know, like wanting help, right. I mean this is, this is a lead, this is a new job opportunity for you. Of course you're going to jump on it. But keep in mind there is a reason to be suspicious if all things don't seem to add up. So thank you Joe for sharing that story and I'm very glad that you did not fall for the their attempts to scam your account. So now let's move to the main part of the show. This is a, yet another story I'm gonna share. This is a real story. This one is from me and I'm gonna talk about a client of mine that I have worked with for a while and I'm gonna explain a situation of when automation fails. Fails. This is a broad match. Automated campaign versus manual control in Google Ads. I'm going to give you the before and after picture. I'm going to share some numbers, I'm going to share as much detail as I as I can and give you an idea about what the clearest picture I can give of what full automation looked like and the results of that and what look what it looks like moving away from that. So here is an overview. Essentially I have a client that I work with that's in the H Vac industry. So you know, they repair air conditioners, they do air conditioning repair. And of course this is a very hot time in the United States. So this is gonna be a very critical time. There should be a lot of searches, a lot of leads, a lot of very desperate hot sweating people that need assistance right away. So there should be plenty of reason for an automated system. Automated bidding, maximize conversions, target cpa, you know, any of those automated bidding strategies out there should have plenty of data to work with, plenty of searches and it should generate some conversions. Okay, and I'm going to share this story for first about what the automated campaign looked like because here's what happened. We started for months with this automated campaign and then moved out of necessity to a manual control campaign. Manual bidding, very different type of keywords. And I'm going to give you a picture before and after of what this looked like. Alright, so in this automated campaign there was a variety of keywords, lots of keywords. The number of keywords really doesn't matter. It really matters what keywords were getting clicks, what keywords were getting the volume. And here it is. The top keywords with their conversion rates. Right. So this is what's getting the most clicks and what their conversion rates are for each of these keywords were phrase match, air conditioning repair that had a 17% conversion rate. Phrase match keyword, air conditioning repair. The next most clicked keyword was air conditioner installation with a 6% conversion rate. And the third was new air conditioner with a 20% conversion rate. Okay, those were the top three keywords with this automated campaign. So very strong conversion rate. The overall conversion rate of the entire campaign was about 15%. So pretty strong, Pretty strong. Doing quite well. Now let's compare that to what the manual campaign looks like. So this is the after. The after looks like this. The top three so far have been exact match ach near me. Right. So immediately there's the near me qualifier and its exact match. Okay, I don't have conversion rates for you. It's still newer. But we'll just go with the drastic difference between the types of keywords that I ran on one versus the types of keywords I ran on another. Another top keyword from the manual campaign was mini split AC installation. Okay, now the equivalent to that was air conditioner installation. Right? Except the mini AC split installation keyword was exact match. So very targeted, very specific. And the last one also was exact match home air conditioning repair. Alright, so that's what the keywords look like before and after. The automated had phrase match and a lot of broad. Mostly broad. The manual campaign has mostly exact match and a little bit of phrase no broad zero. So here is the results. The most important thing that I can share about these results is this. The automated broad match campaign mainly brought in searches like H vac plus a city name, a geographic location of some kind. All right, so this was very difficult to qualify. What kind of lead? It was just H Vac plus a city name. Another example was AC repair plus a city name. There was also a lot of unqualified searches like, like this one. Jiffy Lube AC recharge cost. If you're here in the U.S. jiffy Lube. That's a Car Jiffy Lube. Now, of course I added that as a negative keyword, but that kind of stuff like that was popping up a lot. It was like the little kid game Whack a Mole. You know, I'm trying to, you know, slam my hand to stop this one over here, but another one pops up over on the right hand side, you know, so no matter how many I squash, there's always more popping up. So the other, the other beast that rear its head constantly was competitor names. So many competitor names. Sometimes there were so many that I started to question, you know, is this a competitor? I mean, I'm having to search and spend a lot of time just finding out if these are specific competitors or not. I mean, it was, it was, it was quite frustrating. So that's the kind of search terms, that's the kind of actual searches that I was getting in this automated campaign. Now let's change gears. What did the manual exact match phrase match campaigns look like? The search terms for that Air conditioning repair plus city name AC repair near me. Mini split AC installation. These are very specific services. You know, typed out Air conditioning repair plus city name. Great search engine AC repair near me. Now that one little broader. But you know, the last one example I have mini split AC installation. These are very specific types of terms, not just mini split ac. Notice the difference about what I like about this search term. Mini split is a bad search term. If I'm trying to find people that I want to do an installation service for. I don't advertise on mini split. I don't advertise on mini split ac. I advertise on mini split AC installation. There is no question what this person is looking for. They're either looking to do it themselves or they're looking for someone to hire to do this for them. Very likely they're looking for someone to hire. And the result of this. So you say, well, well, Kris, you know, you don't really know how qualified these searches are. You know, you can't really tell for sure. I mean, those don't really sound that drastic to me. Well, here's the difference. All of these are google.com and the cost is for these clicks is about the same. The cost per click for the automated, the fully automated broad match was about $95 per click. Pretty expensive. Very expensive, obviously about almost $100 per click. The new manual campaign so far is about $80 per click. So both very expensive clicks. So when you're paying that much per click, spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars per day the quality of those clicks, the fact that I'm not seeing competitors, the fact that I'm not seeing Jiffy Lube stuff pop in, you know, the fact that I'm 99% sure that these people are looking for a home installation or home ac repair is critical. So here's, here's the key point coming up. I'm going to, I'm going to share conversion rates. I'm going to share why the automated completely crumbled. Why, what was the, what was the critical part about why it all crumbled? And what was absolutely the final pin that made the whole tower just tumble down. I'll tell you that in just a second. Remind you real quick about optio.com PSP I appreciate the many people that have told me they tried it out and love it and they do it just because they love this show. And I had a gentleman just yesterday tell me that he did that specifically because he supported the show. And I thank you guys. Optio really gets a great response from my listeners because they are engaged, focused people who are really looking for a software that does more and helps them progress. So I appreciate you guys signing up for that. Optio.com PSP okay, so here's where we get into the meat of it. Conversion rate. The conversion rate for the automated campaign. 15%. 15% conversion rate. The conversion rate for the manual campaign. This is the exact match. Very tight targeting, manual bidding. 5% conversion rate. 15% on the old one, 5% on the new one. Okay. You might say, wow, that's, that doesn't, that doesn't seem great. Well, here's the difference. The typical conversion coming from the automated campaign was a call from ad people just picking up, clicking on the phone number in the ad itself from Google. They never actually even go to the client's website. They call directly from the ad. So what did this lead to? What was the end result? Even though the ads were showing about the same absolute top, they're both about 57% absolute top. So they're showing pretty aggressively in top position, number one position, very often. So, you know, the $80 bids are getting about the same positioning as the $95 bids. So here's the key difference, and hear me on this. I'm trying to tell you, I'm not talking about the magic potion was the manual bidding. I'm telling you that the magic potion was automation. Not the bidding, but the traffic, the targeting of the keywords, the quality of the traffic. That was the key point because the automated campaign actually was getting a Higher cost per click, $95 cost per click, whereas the manual was 80. So I mean, obviously there's something going on there. But they're just, they're both very expensive cost per clicks. It's not that big of a difference in the cost per click. The definitive difference was that the 15% conversion rate was coming from unqualified searches, junk searches that led to junk leads that never converted for the client. They got more leads, they got a wide diversity of traffic. But it led to two things, mostly two things in the quality of leads that they got. They got people that were calling, thinking they were other companies. They called and they said, is this, you know, is this Robert's AC Repair? No, it's not. No lead, no sale. They're not even interested. They're like, oh, that's who I was trying to call. Okay, bye. That happened a lot. The other chronic issue that led to failure after failure on phone calls, their closing rate was pitiful. They couldn't get their guys sent out to any of these houses to do the work because these people weren't interested in the work they were interested in. Just, just give me the price over the phone. How much does it cost for you guys to come install an ac? Any homeowner, anyone who has any experience knows that this is impossible to gauge. I mean, I don't know what your house looks like. I don't know. I don't know what you know. There could be duct issues, there could be all kinds of things. These people didn't want to hear it. They just wanted to say how much. I just need to quote how much. I don't want anyone coming to my house. I don't want to give you my phone number, I don't want to give you my address, my. Just tell me the price. Tell me the price. I'm not interested in someone coming out and actually looking at my place. So they're, they're not really qualified. I mean, these price shoppers, these give me the price and hang up kind of calls were devastating to the closing rate of this client. So lots more conversions, 15% conversion rate, lots more conversions. But that does not matter if it comes from junk searches, from junk leads, from junk clicks, unqualified stuff. So hear me now. The important part between automation and manual bidding or, you know, very hands on approach, is not just the bidding strategy. I'm not saying that I was able to bring success when there was failure because I use manual bidding. That is not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the core issue here is that I was able to control. So the main story I'm trying to tell is that when automation fails, what you may be dealing with is a lack of control. Not just because you just change the bidding strategy for crappy keywords and you have success. No, largely will not happen. You don't just change your keywords with automated bidding and have success. Probably won't happen. Those two things don't fit together. Those are two square systems that don't mesh well. If you want something that fits into the right box, that goes into the right slot, that fits well together, you approach it as a holistic thing. You are now taking and saying and forcing Google to give you the traffic that you want. How do you get Google to give you the traffic that you want? You manage based on risk, you manage based on the quality of traffic that is most important to you. So for this client, they wanted people who were looking for repair, installation of some kind of AC for their home. And so I focused on, number one, making sure that that traffic was coming through and number one and number two, making sure that they showed up first for that. As much as I can, as much as I can afford to do it now, they. This is not always the case. I'm not insinuating that everyone show up first all the time, that that's the success point. But the, the point is, is this was a very hot season in the us Very critical time for them to generate a lot of, spend a lot of interest, a lot of very desperate people who need work and help now, very emergency kind of things, you know, 90, 90 degrees, 100 degrees kind of situations where they, they need this. They just got home from work and they realize their AC is out. I need someone here tonight or in the morning. So I think the main thing that you must understand about when automation fails is, and I think I said this last week or two weeks ago on, on the podcast, is that changing your bid strategy is not a magical solution to fix. When I talk about automation, I am not just talking about maximize clicks, maximize conversions, target cpa. I'm not talking about strictly the bidding strategy itself. I'm talking about the automation that we, the permission that we give Google when we apply automation to our accounts. When you give it broad match keywords, you're giving it full permission to show for any searches within the spectrum of that keyword. That is an automated choice that Google can make for you. Instead, if you use exact match keywords, there is a very narrow lane from which you are going to show those searches for so the automation flexibility is extremely low. We're never gonna be able to get exactly what we want, exactly how we want it in Google Ads anymore. That's gone. It's gone. We had a funeral. That's dead. It's very sad. But that's no longer the Google Ads that works. So what do we have to do? Well, we have to work within the bounds that we currently have. And sometimes that means taking the steering wheel back entirely, using exact match keywords, using manual bids, fully divorcing yourself from the broad match AI automation that Google pushes. And although the reports look great, although the reporting looks like it's a very strong campaign, it is in fact generating high numbers of unqualified traffic. So when, when automation fails, there is never a push button solution. You must approach, approach it in a way from top to bottom. How can you address the quality of traffic first and then apply the proper bidding strategy that fits along top that? Okay, so I hope this is helpful to you. If you'd like to talk to me about your struggles with automation in your Google Ads accounts, you can reach out to me. Chris Out Shout Schaefer. Com is my website. I'm available for live coaching services as well as full management services of your Google Ads account. Otherwise, I will be here as always next week to talk about how to get more out of your Google Ads. I'll see you then.