← 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
Your Paid Search Questions Answered (Episode 504)
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Foreign. Welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today I'm answering questions from listeners. I have several questions that people have sent in from their Google Ads account that they want answered. Paid searchpodcastmail.com is the email address if you'd like to send me an email and get your question answered. So I have multiple questions. They come from all over the world. Really awesome to get questions not just from the US but all over the world. Will. We'll go through those in a moment. Before I get into that, I want to tell you about Optio. You hopefully have heard by now there is big news in Optio. They have leveled up. They have moved their tool from what used to be just a simple recommendation tool. Wasn't really simple. It was still phenomenal tool. But now they've leveled it up into a system that can now become a power tool. No longer just recommendations and a guide, it is now a power tool across multiple channels. LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft there's all kinds of areas that you can use this tool on and it's not just for getting data, but now you can interact with your data. Let's say you can essentially chat with your own Google Ads data, your own LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok data to get answers. Account performance audit your ad copy. You can generate ads. You can do so much with this. It's a much more advanced tool. And if you haven't tried Optio, if you're not in, this is a great time to get in because this is a special offer to get into this exclusive invite to the listeners of this show optio.com PSP that's o p t e o.com PSP you can try it before anyone else. I'll tell you more about how the tool works a little bit later in the episode, but for right now, go sign up optio.com PSP all right, so first question comes from Grimmy. Hope I'm saying that right. Grimmy writes in and says, hi Chris. I enjoyed the podcast the last few days, having just discovered it digested probably 10 or 15 episodes in one day. My question is what's the best method to introduce a number of new ad groups into a somewhat matured target CPA campaign. I'm keen to get the new ad groups running, so I'm a little torn if I should just make a new campaign with max clicks to get it going or introduce the ad groups a bit more slowly into the existing campaign and give them a higher target CPA bid as they would be getting higher value traffic Anyway, okay, so great question. My suggestion is do not create a new campaign. That is definitely an easy one there. I do not suggest creating a new campaign. If you have a mature Google Ads campaign running with Target cpa, all of that great, you can absolutely introduce new traffic here. And the good news is is that you have Target CPA already enabled. It might be a little more risky if you were doing something like maximize conversions. That might be a higher risk. But even if you were, I would still recommend the same method. I find that people are apprehensive. They find that these automated bid strategies that, you know, these campaigns are somewhat mystical, magical. You know, you don't want to, you don't want to poke it the wrong way or it might crumble and fall apart. I assure you that these campaigns are pretty structurally sound when they've been running for a while. You can't really break them as easily as people think. You can certainly do some things. Some things. But introducing a new ad group and testing it, sure, absolutely. I would say, you know, create the new ad groups, give those ad groups a little bit higher target CPA bid. So if you're, let's say your target CPA bid is $100. For everything else, these new ones might be 150. So what that'll do is it'll allow that ad group to run at a higher bid threshold and will accumulate traffic a little bit faster than everything else. Now of course you need to quickly assess whether this is going to be the right traffic or not and you might need to make some quick adjustments. You might need to lower the target CPA back down if you find that the CPCS are too high, the bids are too high, it's too much traffic too fast. But since the campaign is already using Target CPA and I assume pretty stable, I think you should be totally fine to be able to use these new ad groups. So great question. And there's one more question that was asked and I'll read it here. It looks as if you once offered a three hour online course which is no longer available. And I wanted to comment about that because I do get questions. Yes, I used to have an online training platform but that's no longer something that I offer. If you're interested in learning about Google Ads, really the only thing that I offer now is my coaching service which is a one hour live service where I can discuss and go through the campaigns with you live together. Those can be booked to my website, Chris Schaefer.com so thanks for your question and let's on. Let's move on now to Dirk. Dirk, who writes in and says hi Chris, I'm a longtime listener to your podcast. Your podcast helped me to offer Google Ads consulting services around the globe in the past five years. My my main channel internationally is Fiverr, where I delivered more than 700 orders with revenue in the six figures. Plus I built a healthy network here in the German speaking world. Hey Dirk, that's awesome. I'm glad to hear that. I somehow played a part in that. That's an honor, so I'm glad to hear it. Dirk also adds, the best thing you taught me is your skepticism with everything that Google offers. I am glad to hear that the one thing that people should absolutely hear on this podcast is that it's your money and the decisions that you make in your Google Ads campaigns are yours and yours alone. That's actually the 10th principle of Google Ads. When I came up with all my 10 principles of Google Ads, that's actually my 10th and final principle is account management. Make your own decisions. Only you are responsible for your account. So yes, you absolutely should be skeptical because no one's going to care about your clients or your campaigns as much as you. Especially if you're the business owner doing this yourself. Definitely no one is going to care more than you. So very important. Okay, so Dirk writes a lengthy email, but I need to boil it down and get to the to the main point. Dirk talks about using portfolio bid strategies in order to set a specific max CPC bid limit while using Target cpa. And he discusses the fact that the impact on his accounts after implementing this new strategy is no impact on the loss due to budget, the search impression, share, the click through rate, the conversion rate and the cost per conversion has gone down. So basically Dirk's making sure that, you know, people realize that this is an option. And I thank you for bringing this back up. I will use this opportunity to bring up what is portfolio bid strategy. You know, what is that and why is Dirt even talking about it and saying that it's a good thing? Well, if you're not aware when you're using Target cpa, there is no way for you to set a cap or a ceiling on your cost per click and this could be a really bad thing in some instances. I have seen clicks cost hundreds of dollars just for one click and this click was not even a conversion. There might be a daily budget of $150 and one click spends $200 and the whole budget is gone in one day. So this is a great tool to use something I have mentioned before and I'll use the opportunity to tell you portfolio bid strategy is something that you set up at the account level. There's actually a. You go to Tools and then within the Tools section there is an option under the shared library, I believe it's called shared library, where you can actually see and create bids and budgets. Shared bids and shared budgets. And you can create these portfolio bid strategies and then assign them to your campaigns. Some people will do it just for one campaign, the advantage being the fact that they can cap their cpc. They can cap and say, I don't want clicks over $35. So you would ensure that no matter what bid Google's using, it's not going to go above $35 for one click. Another opportunity you could use portfolio bid strategies for is to apply the same strategy across multiple campaigns. Now this I have to tell you, you should use caution with. Because. Because anyone who is just without caution applying new bid strategies to well established campaigns, this could be very dangerous. So I want to caution you there. Just because there's a new tool in your toolbox does not mean you should just throw it out and just try it for everything. Be very cautious when applying bid strategies. But. But it is an option. So I would proceed carefully, test it, see how it works, and then go from there. But as Dirk described, he had good results, no loss to any of his critical metrics, and wanted to share it with everyone. So I absolutely recommend it for mature campaigns. If you have a campaign that seems to be working well, it's worked well for months, possibly years. Great. Try portfolio bid strategy in order to cap those CPCs. See what happens. I do not recommend it for new campaigns. Right off the bat, capping your CPC and applying a target CPA all at the same time could be a big handicap to the performance of your campaign. Adding too many restrictions. Maybe you set an artificial $50 target CPA. Then you also set a $20 cost per click cap with this portfolio bid strategy. That might be more than Google can handle and you may not get the traffic that you want. So be very cautious there. Okay, so next question comes from Gage. Gage writes with multiple questions. I'm going to answer two of them and maybe we'll get to the other ones at some other time. But he says, hey Chris, I've been listening to your podcast for almost a year now and has been a huge help to our agency. Basically, we wanted to start running Google Ads for our clients, but no one on the team had experience with that field. I Took it upon myself to learn and quickly found your podcast, and it definitely set me on the right path. Your client, our clients are very happy with the work that we've done for them. And that is awesome. Again, super cool that I played a part in that. I know that, you know, these little success stories sound small, but in reality, what Gage is talking about, and this is why managing pay per click campaigns is so satisfying. Because it's not just conversions and clicks that you're getting people. What you're doing is you're creating jobs, you're creating wealth, you're creating opportunity for businesses. These are real people, these are real employees. This is real, real life. I mean, just because it's digitally on a screen and it's a digital product that we're offering, this provides real clients, real sales, real revenue for businesses which create jobs and creates opportunities and, you know, so it's wonderful to be a part of it. Gage, I'm glad that you were able to do that even better with, you know, with the podcast. So Gage's first question is, all of the campaigns I have set are some type of automated bidding per your new Google Ads user advice from an old episode that you did. I started with max clicks, and then once I achieved quality traffic, I would transition it to target cpa. I'm very interested in the idea of manual cpc, but I'm not quite sure how to go about that transition and if it's even recommended for someone who only spends a little bit of time in Google Ads, as I have a whole web services department that I also manage. Okay, great question. I mean, you. You immediately got my attention because you brought up manual bids. Manual bids is a big favorite of mine. It's something that I've used all the decades of Google Ads that I've been managing. It's a favorite and it is a default for me to use pretty much everywhere for every new account that I'm building every time. So let's answer your question. Let's talk about it a little bit. How practical is it? Manual bidding, I think, is worth it when you have a complicated search target. And I'm going to explain what I mean by that. I'm going to illustrate what that means. But let's get to your point about, you know, someone who spends very little time in Google Ads. I would say even if you have a little time and you have other jobs and you have other hats that you're wearing, I think in some instances manual bidding is worth it. It's something that you should do rather than Automated bidding rather than max clicks. Because in the end I think it'll save you time. And I think this illustration that I'm going to share explains why it actually saves you time, even though it takes a little bit of a learning curve to understand, can save you time in the end. So here's why I think manual bidding is worth it for some situations. And here's the situation. Manual bidding is, is, is great for complicated accounts, complicated campaigns. And what I mean by complicated is imagine you're balancing on a very thin rail, okay? And falling on either side. Not something you want to do. So to apply this, you know what I mean, is if your click needs to hit precisely on target and being off target is immediately wrong, right. The line here between wrong and right is not just, it's not just wrong when it's to the right of the target. It's also wrong when it's to the left of the target. When it's above the target, it was below the target. Anything outside of just the target is wrong. I'll explain what I mean. So let's say that you have a client that only does repairs on fences that are iron fences, okay? And let's say this is a new campaign, new account, okay? If you run Max Clicks, you'll probably end up getting a lot of fence repair or just fences near me or fence company or stuff like that, right? Because max clicks is going to incentivize low clicks, it's going to low cpc, low bids. It's going to try and get you as most, the most traffic as possible without necessarily qualifying the value in relevance to the keyword itself. So you end up getting a lot of kind of off topic things. Maybe it doesn't even have the word repair in it, maybe it doesn't have the word iron in it. It's just, you know, fences near me or just fence repair. No, it needs to be iron metal fence repair. In order for this to work, you might have to use exact match keywords. You might need to be very precise in what you're targeting. So now, in order to get that traffic, anyone who started a new campaign with exact match keywords knows that you may very well get zero clicks, zero impressions. It may sit there and never do anything, which is really frustrating. So really, this is a situation where manual bidding is very appropriate. You need to bid aggressively. Otherwise you'll get no traffic, you'll get nothing out of it. So manual bids, you could set a bunch of exact match keywords, bid very aggressively. You can always bring those bids back down but bid very aggressively and get stuff moving. Start adding negative keywords like, okay, iron, fence repair. Yep, that's what I'm looking for. Fence repair, no, blocked. You know, so that's, that's an example of when manual bid is really the better direction to go rather than automated, because you can't, you can't ease into it. You can't kind of just feather your way into it. You need to hit top ranking aggressive bids on these very specific things, because if it's not that specific thing, everything else is wrong. So there you go. Good, good question. Always happy to talk about manual bids. Let's get to Gabe's Gage. Gage's other question. This one is, by the way, Gage is a web developer. As he said in his first question, he has a whole other web service department that he manages. So he says, as a web developer, are there any strategic advantages I have in terms of what I can do for our clients? This is another great question. I really like this question because absolutely there is something that is critical to Google Ads and, and anyone who builds the websites, the landing pages, has a distinct advantage over someone who doesn't, and that is conversion tracking. If you build your website, your landing pages, whatever, with conversion tracking in mind and, you know, getting conversion data to Google Ads, you are immediately going to have an advantage over someone who doesn't. For example, let's say there's a client that has a webpage and the only method of conversion is clicking on their email and then it pops up a native email software, right? A native email program for you to write that email in. Right? So that means mobile apps, you know, mobile traffic may not work because when you click that phone or that, that email, it may not pop open the app properly. Or, you know, some people may not want to email directly from their email address for whatever reason. And maybe the other option for conversion is some long form, some, you know, really long form that has multiple required fields. And it takes several minutes and a lot of details, a lot of thinking to get that done. But okay, so that's client A. This person has basically set up a very high hurdle for a conversion to come through. Maybe that's what they want, but they're really shooting themselves in the foot because client B, let's say, does the same thing. But they have a phone number, they have a short little contact form. They have a, you know, another button that, that, that, you know, signs people up for something. They have another button that allows people to book a meeting. You know, multiple conversion actions are built into this page. And what your advantage is is now you're feeding conversion data more frequently to Google Ads. This is the end game. This is where you want to get to. Anyone who's managed Google Ads really appreciates conversions and happening. You know, when these conversions have you multiple conversion options, you track all those options and you build these pages that make it easy to track them. And in the end your advantage is you have more conversion data that you have a now a better chance of success with rather than that other advertiser who gets basically no conversion data. Maybe you get, you know, multiple a month, a week and you have something to work with. You can start leaning towards automated bidding once you reach that capacity of being able to do it properly. So huge advantage. I would definitely take advantage of that. So great question there. And anybody who's interested in getting an advantage over other Google Ads accounts, that's the secret. The secret is to make sure you build towards conversion tracking and not just make it an afterthought. All right, so I have one more question from Daniel, really good question. You'll want to stick around because it is talking about how to fix broken campaigns. How do you address a broken campaign? How do you fix it? How do you approach it? I'm going to get into that in just a moment. Tell you one quick thing about Optio that I hinted at at the beginning of the show. There's some amazing stuff that you can do and when I talked about chatting with your data in Optio, you can say things like, why is my CPC increasing? Why was my cost more? Or why did my, you know, why did my click through rate go down? You can interact with your data. So previously it spit out a ton of information and you kind of had to read through it and make your own decision based on how you're computing the data. Instead, now we can have this AI system kind of provide the information to us in small segments, you know, based on specific questions. This is a whole new way to process data and it's all done right there in Optio with your accounts. So you can try it for free. As I said, opteo.com PSP for a 28 day free trial. All right, as I said, Daniel's got the last question here and he writes in Chris, what is your system for addressing accounts that need to be completely reworked? Accounts with rampant broad match and unaligned automated bidding strategies? Ideally, I'd like to start from scratch and rebuild whole campaigns, start over. But sometimes I face clients who prefer that I keep the current campaign and simply optimize that campaign. Alright, Daniel, good question. This one really hit home because anyone who manages Google Ads accounts knows that you're going to be coming across campaigns that are a total disaster and the client is extremely apprehensive about ditching it and starting new. So if you're asked to optimize a trashy campaign, a campaign that is not working, and it's terrifying because it seems to have no organization at all, let me tell you what I do. First of all, start. And this should be very approachable because I know it's very overwhelming when you have a situation like this. You're like, where do I even start? Oh my gosh. That's why you want to start over, because it's such a mess that you rather just burn the whole thing down and start fresh. Well, well, you may not be able to do that. So what you start with is really basic. Start with the search terms, start adding negative keywords. Do it week after week, day after day if you have to. Adding negative keywords. Start blocking terms that are obviously unrelated, unqualified things that you do not want the client paying for or you don't want to pay for. And this is a big part. This is not a quick fix. You don't just do this one day, one week, and it fixes. This might be multiple weeks, multiple months, it might be six months before you really start to get this thing turned around. But I absolutely have done this. It has to have a little bit of patience. But you can mold a campaign into the kind of traffic that you want using negatives, just using negative keywords. Okay. Now sometimes beyond that, beyond the search terms, you might need to go into the actual keywords and change the match type or remove some of the least relevant keywords in the account. So there might be some keywords that are just, they're just soaking up so much spend, so much impression volume that you have to change them to exact match or just pause them outright. So look for some of the higher spending keywords and consider addressing those. You might need to just, just cut those out entirely. But don't do it so much that you're causing some kind of integrity issue with the campaign itself. You know, be cautious about this, but that might be a more drastic option for you. Okay, so while you're doing all of that, start a new campaign, use a small percentage of budget. And I know you're gonna say, well, Kris, aren't you competing against your other campaign? The answer is no, you're not really. Because in this situation, the original campaign let's say, is getting tons of really dumb traffic, traffic that's not really on track with what you're supposed to be getting. So if you build a campaign that actually does get you that traffic, you're not really competing because the other campaign's not really doing it right. It's not even accomplishing the traffic that you want. So I wouldn't even really call it that much of a cannibalization or competitive bid issue because one is kind of just going broadly across the entire spectrum and you're trying to narrowly target specific things where with your new build. So build a new campaign that provides better quality traffic and hopefully gets better results. Slowly add budget to this new campaign after you start having success and shrink the old campaign. Right. So slowly move, you know, pour budget from one bucket to the other and in the end you might shut off the old one or you might run them both indefinitely to together. But that's fine. I have situations where I run the new stuff and the old stuff together. They each have their own kind of niches of what they accomplish. And the client's happy. I'm happy. People are making money. That's the way it's supposed to be. So hopefully that's an approachable way to try and get more out of your Google Ads without nuking the whole thing whenever it's a mess. Sometimes you feel you just need to burn it all down. But that is sometimes a very dangerous thing to do. So I hope that's helpful. Thank you all for your questions. If you'd like to speak with me, I am available for coaching or Google Ads management. Been doing this for 23 years now. You can reach out to me to get help. There's hardly anything I haven't seen in Google Ads at this point, so I'm certain I can help you. You can reach out to me. ChrisHaefer.com is my website or otherwise you'll catch me right here next week. See you then.