Podcast Episode 6: Strategies for Optimizing a Google Ads Campaign
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[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from Seymour Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyber Punk Geeks, marketing mixer. Each week we get on here and we talked about something search marketing like Google.
[00:00:18] Or seo, Social media marketing. From Facebook to TikTok or website marketing. If you're a marketer or aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're gonna share the best seo, search, social and website strategies. We share tips and hacks. Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current market.
[00:00:41] Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing and here we are. It's us. The team of the marketers that work together, live together, play together cuz we're fortunate. Indeed. I don't know if I'm fortunate, today we're talking [00:01:00] about how to optimize Google ads cuz this is what we do in our.
[00:01:05] So after you create a campaign, you have to optimize it. And so many people think that you can just create Google adss account in a campaign and it'll run itself. It'll run itself a ground. If you do it like that, did you like that? I thought that was good. Fair. Yeah. We're gonna jump right into the thick of it.
[00:01:23] So this is all about optimizing Google ads different than optimizing Facebook ads, right? Very much. Very much. There's, you'd almost say there's too many dials to optimizing a Google Ads account, right? And we're talking text search campaigns, or are we talking like, All different types of campaigns. So we're most of the tips that we have, and some of them are stuff that we found while researching.
[00:01:46] Some of them are ones that we use all the time. We figured it's a good excuse to learn about both. Yeah, exactly. And most of it pertains to text ads, but really the principles are, Gonna be the same if you're doing any YouTube [00:02:00] or display or not shopping cuz shopping's weird and does its own weird things.
[00:02:05] And optimizing strategies change over time, right as Google changes. What they're doing to optimize related to a match type of keywords. Now, if you don't know inside Google ads, you have three different match types. You used to have four, and the three are broad match, exact match and phrase match. We might be using those terms in this conversation.
[00:02:26] So first wanted to talk about what does it mean to optimize Google ads. I know a lot of clients. Proposals and they'll be like, What do you mean when we say optimize? And optimize means going in and trying to wet cost the client less and get more conversions. So it's not about clicks, it's not about impressions, although, you know those metrics are.
[00:02:54] Nice to see. It is about click through rate, and it is about [00:03:00] conversions being leads, forms filled out, email link clicked, phone numbers called, and so when you optimize, you're going into an account weekly, daily, sometimes, and you're doing different tasks that help you broaden and narrow the campaigns at the same time.
[00:03:17] Yeah. I also think of it as like your goal is that you're trying to do when you're optimized is taking that funnel and making sure that the whole way through, there's no leakage. It's less of a funnel, and you want it to shape more like a pipe where it's just basically someone clicks on the end and goes straight down to convert.
[00:03:32] And that's not always gonna be the case, but that's your goal. Oh, that's the dream. And the funny things is, one of the things that happens inside Google Ads is you wanna also check analytics because people's conversion path. Aren't always so linear, right? You're literally maybe going to an ad, then going to their site from organic and then going from Facebook.
[00:03:56] Like people are all over the place, right? And [00:04:00] multiple people visits. Yeah, exactly. We've definitely seen that with, even when you have Target landing page, they don't come back to that landing page, but they do search you again and then they fill out the form on your regular contact form on your website instead of the special one you had.
[00:04:14] And so it's a little bit, it can be a little bit annoying to, but it's definitely very important to keep an eye on that as well. I find that you can get lost in optimizing and every Google Ads person is different. You have to realize there is. One course that you can take Google Ads classes, however, they don't teach you the fundamentals of really optimizing that happens over time with skill and connecting with other ads people and talking strategy, which is probably one of the fun parts.
[00:04:45] But, so let's go through our list of how we optimize and then what we saw, some new recommendations because with Google ads changing so much, you have to change how you're optimizing things because, Some things have been taken away from you and some [00:05:00] things have been given to you. So I think last year, or the other fun one is definitions of things like what is exact?
[00:05:07] Just a little bit They're exact. Yeah, exact ish. When we are optimizing, we are not looking at clicks. Really, And we're not looking at impressions. If we're getting a lot of impressions and no clicks. There's a. So that's the first thing you look at, right? If your ad is not getting any clicks means your ad's, something's not working with your ad.
[00:05:30] Yeah. If you're getting lots of clicks, but then nobody is filling out the forms, so that's different. That's conversion rate optimization, and that's updating and adjusting the page. The other thing you look at inside Google ads with that is your quality score, which is a metric that relates to the ad, the keyword, and the landing page.
[00:05:51] Yeah. So basically you're always looking at different components inside and with Google ads, cuz you're looking at the landing page, you're looking at the ads, you're [00:06:00] looking at the click through rate, and then, On the other side, we spend a lot of time with our search term report and optimizing that way.
[00:06:09] So we have a huge negative keyword list. Oh, and a negative keyword is when you don't wanna show up for something. Yeah. And the, and also the negative keywords. Can also match to those three match types that you had. So you can have a negative broad keyword, you can have a negative phrase match, you can have a negative exact match.
[00:06:27] So that's one to keep in mind is you can also do certain strategies like that as well. The other thing I like to think of is just honing what you had said was like, Think of it like you're starting off with that funnel where it's like impressions. Are we getting impressions? Yes. Are we getting clicks?
[00:06:43] Yes. Are we getting conversions? Yes. And then if there isn't one of those, or there's a huge drop off in one of those areas, then you should focus on that part of it. And so that kind of goes off. And so it's an easy way for you to work your way through. And definitely the quality score, definitely one where I think that you should really spend a [00:07:00] lot of time to make sure that.
[00:07:02] Add relevancy and your landing page experience are really strong. I find that a bit of a challenge sometimes because you know you're getting the landing page from the client and to tell the client, Hey, can you like just add these keywords to the landing page? Oftentimes you might wanna duplicate the page, update it, then show the client and then direct traffic to that.
[00:07:25] I think we've started doing that. We use lead pages for some of our clients actually, cuz that really. With conversions. Yeah. In practicing and using that with Google Optimize as well. That's something we're doing more Google Optimize. Now, what is Google Optimize Fay? Google Optimize is a ab, it's a landing page test application, so it's really powerful.
[00:07:49] It's also, it gives you, personalization is another thing, so you can just straight AB test, like I wanted to change the my h. Like my big title that's on the page, I wanna [00:08:00] change that. So it, 50% of the time it says this other 50% of the time, it says that you can also do things where you can personalize it.
[00:08:08] So you could do connected to your Google Ads campaign, and then you could say, Hey, for this ad group, change it so that when they, when traffic from that page comes, I want them to see. Keyword in the H one, and so you can make it more targeted to the specific ad that they clicked on. Now that is pretty advanced stuff.
[00:08:28] I think we teach. Oh yeah. Google Ads at the end of our Google Ads class. But it is just something to know, there are so many free tools. That we get as marketers that, or you get as a business owner for your website that can help you with your ads, with your figuring out what people are doing on your website.
[00:08:45] And the tools are out of the box from Google, right? Man, we should just one day list all the tools you get. Google Optimize is a really good one. When we're optimizing a Google Ads campaign, as I said, you can get lost, so you wanna do it in our [00:09:00] chunks, maybe two hour chunks, depending how big the account.
[00:09:03] We use a strategy with our Google ads that we might actually be changing, where when we create a campaign, we have a Google sheet we created in because. Each of our ad groups negatives out the keywords of the other ad group. And I know that might sound really confusing, but basically it's a in-depth strategy and we've got a Google sheet that helps us just do things outta the box, and we paid somebody to make that Google sheet for us.
[00:09:31] That being said, we might be changing our strategy. I talked to a Google Ads person yesterday that I'm friends. And they've changed what they're doing. They were doing the same thing and they're seeing some good results. So you do have to stay up to date with different strategies that are happening to try things.
[00:09:48] Cause you know, back in the day there used to be these things called scags. Huh? Single keyword ad group. Ad group, right? And so now you can't really do [00:10:00] that because Google's changed how it views exact match. It's almost exact match now, right? Yeah. So the other thing to optimize for is your ads. Now that Google has taken away the expanded text ads, we have responsive search ads.
[00:10:19] Inside responsive search ads, we get three, right? We get, we can, You can make up to three responsive search ads. It's probably overkill. Yeah. In that I would maybe max out two because in each ad you had 15 headlines, four descriptions. But the cool thing to optimize in there is the location keyword in dynamic location keyword insertion.
[00:10:39] So if I type, if I'm in Victoria and I type Victoria in, the word in the ad would change to where my location is. No. Yeah. For example. Yeah, so like an example would be like carpet cleaners in Victoria, or it'd be carpet cleaners near me if it, if say your name was too long of the place, like Vancouver was too long.
[00:10:58] So just say near me as this [00:11:00] default setting. Yeah. Which, yeah, which we, you dynamically do that. So Google ads is, can be so much fun. I would say it's a great full-time career. I'd say sometimes it feels really overwhelming, because things change. You gotta stay up to date, but cuz you're constant. The great part of the career is that you're providing like an outcome for a client.
[00:11:20] Like you're actually, your focus is generating business for them, and that's pretty cool. It's just stressful when it's not working. It's or not working well enough and so some other ways we optimize failing. You do different things than I do. So I know you do the search term report and make negative keywords, but what else?
[00:11:40] What else do you think's a great idea? So that I do, whenever I'm optimizing an account, it's definitely I've. I spend a lot of focus on that quality score, like just to circle back to that as like a big focus of mine that I like to have the key, like the ad relevancy to be of at least average, if not above [00:12:00] average, because I want it to be targeted and I want it to be, it seems like a waste if you're bidding on something and you're not even getting, like your ads aren't relevant to the thing you're bidding on.
[00:12:09] So I'd like to make sure that those are in alignment. Also, landing page experie. At least above, maybe at least average to above average. That's another big one. Oh one thing to say about the Google Optimize. If you do try to op, you can't use Google Optimize to improve the quality score on your ads because Google scans the page as just raw H two L, so it just.
[00:12:31] Checks the words. So if you're using something that is a little bit of code that comes in after and changes it, then it doesn't register that because the code never fired. So just keep that in mind. You can't use that as a little cheat to get your quality score to work out really well for every page.
[00:12:47] Want to know more about seo? We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses using the most UpToDate search engine marketing optimization [00:13:00] techniques and tools. Find out [email protected]. And there's some other things like the, so there's impression share and you can check.
[00:13:12] Now, some people think that's a vanity sort of thing. Impression share means like how many. How often is your competitor showing up? How often are you showing up? Are you showing up higher than that? Yeah, it's for all the auctions in the area that you are in and you're bidding on, how often are you showing up?
[00:13:31] And then you could also do like absolute top meaning how much did you show up as number one? And then also top, which is like the top three. And yeah, generally you're gonna find that's gonna be a vanity metric, especially if you have any competitor that's basically enterprise who has deep pockets cuz they're just gonna bid on everything and you, it's better for you to narrow your account so that you're focusing just on what matters.
[00:13:53] That's one, especially if you've got a small budget, don't worry about search impression because really what all you're after is I wanna show [00:14:00] up for that keyword and I wanna show up absolute top of it when I do. That's one thing to really bear mind. And there is some often you can lower your budgets and your bids and that can actually have a positive effect.
[00:14:15] I think we just saw in one of the accounts we work on and lowered the bids or lowered the entire budget, and we had a cost per acquisition. Lower So a cpa, so some people optimize for that. To be honest, it gets pretty in depth. You can actually go into Google Ads and change your columns, and so you can do comparative from last week to this week.
[00:14:39] You can see how much were you paying last week for conversions. Like you can look at things over like an extended period of time to see are there keywords that are not converting at all that have never converted, that are just costing you money? Wanna get rid of those. I was gonna say another one that off of that, that I know you are a big fan of is [00:15:00] optimizing for hours.
[00:15:00] So you set up ad schedules and so that's one you turn on ads. Yeah. So it's a better way to. To get your bid so you're not actually like blowing up your account by like just stopping it at certain times and then turning it back on. So there's ways to, because if you use the ad schedule, you can, you're telling it ahead of time, Hey, I don't wanna show up for these moments.
[00:15:20] And so it knows, Okay don't get them lumped in. Not just, I was expecting you to be there and now you've turned it off. And so I don't know what to do with you. Yeah. And the it, I think it's really interesting cuz. Go a little step further and you can optimize for hours for an extension, like for the call extension.
[00:15:37] We learned, I learned that this year. I think the best thing I could say about Google Ads is if you want a career where you're constantly learning, you know you will learn things. There's, what are they? The developers have made the dashboard quite intensive. So if you. To like the meat and bones of campaigns, right?
[00:15:59] And you're [00:16:00] optimizing in there. There's so many buttons and levers that sometimes you like, I did not know you could turn off your call extension at certain times, right? So if you have a call extension and nobody answers the phone after five, why would you want that to? So optimizing that way. So not only turning off ads at certain times, if you're not open on weekends or you don't find, you get leads in between 10 and five in the morning, which is something we often turn off ads cuz that saves you money, right?
[00:16:31] So the idea of optimizing is to save money. And get more leads. And that's your whole goal. And Yeah. And so for conversions, which you optimize for over time and you have to make sure they're working or running, and sometimes things break. I don't know why things break, but they do it. It happens, right?
[00:16:50] It's just the nature of doing stuff online is sometimes there's an update and turns out that someone forgot to carry the one and now all your stuff's blown up. Yeah. [00:17:00] and the keyword strategies for optimizing, adding keywords. So if you use a broad match type, you can Yeah. Find new keywords, right? To like, so you use broad match and you're pulling in lots of keywords for your broad match term, and then you're gonna negative them out if they're not working, and then you add them to different ad groups, right?
[00:17:24] And over time you'll probably create new ad groups. It's quite an interesting. Overall interesting thing. Yes. Lost in it. I can get lost in it for hours. Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely one that you reminded me of is that don't just do pure broad, you wanna do broad and then add an audience on it that's targeted to your business or whatever.
[00:17:46] Because if you just let, if you just do a broad campaign, you will find a lot of weird stuff and Google will throw some weird stuff. The audience on top of it, especially in market audiences, are definitely gonna be really helpful for you. [00:18:00] Or similar audiences, which are kinda like lookalike audiences.
[00:18:03] Those are one of those two is really helpful I find. I would say test it though, right? You can get a list audiences, you can track all your audiences then at all possible, which we do. And then you do ob observation first before you do that targeting, because you don't wanna go too narrow. Too quick, right?
[00:18:24] Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely one, this is like when you're at the point of like your campaign's working, but you feel like you could get more keywords out of it. Get more. Get more, Yeah. Without spending money, extra money. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so it's definitely one you have to watch out for because if you just tell Google, Hey, I'm gonna bid on this broad keyword, like they will spend that money really quickly.
[00:18:48] Oh, that's why you turn off your ads too. The other thing is creating a display campaign after. Yeah. Which helps you with retargeting. We just saw, we just created a display campaign for one of our clients just as an add-on bonus, [00:19:00] and they got a conversion couple days. I'm noticing the display campaign. So what a display campaign is, it's a square ad.
[00:19:07] I'm sure you know if you're a marketer, but if you don't know, just an aside, like in Google ads, you have text ads and you have like picture ads. You can do video. So the picture ads are, we call them display, right? Yeah. And when you do a display campaign for some reason, when you do a display campaign on top of your search campaign, your text ads, it seems to make the text ads run.
[00:19:31] Even, And we optimize. So we make sure we click off of everything that we're. That will spend extra money for your client. So there's a bunch of tabs in there that Google's don't touch, that you don't wanna touch that it won't work for you. And they're lying so far. Maybe that'll change in the future.
[00:19:51] Yeah. The track record's not the best for them for what they think. Yeah. Or they're. Also, you have to bear in mind that their suggestions are for [00:20:00] what's good for Google, not necessarily what's good for you. And so they might suggest something like, you should do targeted search impression, which never do that.
[00:20:07] Never ever. Or you should add. So we separate display campaigns from text campaigns, right? So there's two networks, the display network and the search network. Text ads go on the search network pitcher, ads go on the display network and that's, we keep that pretty separate so we can, cuz it's all about tracking and seeing the numbers and when they come in and when you add those extra things into your search campaign, it's not as clear cut.
[00:20:33] We have tried having it on for a couple clients who say that they get leads from something like, what is it? Craigslist, at bottom, there's sometimes an app and those are the display network. News Victoria. I think those ones are technically the search partners. When I was reading through who counts is Ka Gigi and Craigslist and Duck Go and they count as search partners because you searched at the top and so that's how those ones come.
[00:20:59] I [00:21:00] believe that's my understanding on how those work. There's definitely, there is one exception, which is apparently shopping campaigns you should turn on search partners. Not display network, but turn on search partners because it shows up for Bing and duck dot go. A shopping campaigns are much more in your job is to negative things out rather than affirmatively say, I want these though.
[00:21:20] There was one, one strategy that we found for search ads that definitely make a lot of sense for shopping ads, which is using in-market segments in Google Analytics to define audiences. So you're, what you're doing is you're saying like, if someone. So in market means that they've gone to Google and they've searched about a specific, a topic.
[00:21:43] So maybe they're into gardening, maybe they're into wedding planning something like that. And so they've actually affirmatively told Google, I'm interested in these type of topics because why would you Google that if you were interested? And so what that means is that you can then increase or decrease your bids [00:22:00] based on those in-market segments.
[00:22:01] Yeah. And isn't, it is interesting cuz you can, like when you go into Google, if you get with hours, you just, when you have the hours when you're optimizing, if you get a lot of conversions at a certain time of day, you can actually bump up your bid. At that time of day or, Yeah, bid like a percentage more.
[00:22:20] So it's a lot of fun. It's a I think I've been doing ads for 10 years now. Failing. How long have you been doing Google ads? Easily five, maybe six now. Yeah. Yeah. Has it been that long? I started at Reach Local in 2010, I think. That was good. That's good. But I was in sales so you only learned the very surface of it all.
[00:22:43] So it takes a lot more. I did hire an expert to teach me, and I think that is one of the smartest things I did for my Google Ads career. Yeah, for sure. What there was one you just mentioned, Oh, one others. One metric that if you're feeling like you've really got your stuff super [00:23:00] advanced and really figured out that you can work on, is figuring out.
[00:23:04] Cost per acquisition and your lifetime value of your clients, they're very difficult things to calculate, especially if you're brand new or you just started. But if you can figure those out, Google can do some really amazing things, especially with your cost per acquisition, your cpa because they can find, and you have to figure out for how many.
[00:23:25] For every dollar that I spend, how many do I actually get in conversions? And it's definitely one where figuring out is requires a lot of data and it's, but it's worth it, especially for Google, cuz they really like that number. Yeah, I think there's always gonna be people better than you or worse than you in a field.
[00:23:43] I'd say having. Some math skills when you get to that level is super helpful and you do here and there, bash your head against O Wall about what can I do, what should I do, how do I do this better? We also use the Google AdWords editor and that [00:24:00] it, it is advanced tool. For making lots of changes to a campaign or duplicating a campaign.
[00:24:07] They say never change a campaign really that's working. Do your optimizations, but don't drastically change anything. You'd wanna duplicate that campaign and then do it, but that again, creates mass problems because Google ads never deletes anything. So yeah, everything you've ever done, it's always.
[00:24:27] Be there, whether or not you can use it as another story, so you might be able to see it. You can't, might not be able to turn it on if things are deleted. It's pretty interesting though, I would say. So if we're gonna sum it all up to how to optimize Google Ads, make sure you're using additional tools.
[00:24:45] Google Analytics, Google Optimize, Google Search Console. Tag manager tag, manage specifically to set up and check conversion tracking, and then you're gonna go in and at every level. So at the keyword level, at the ad group level, [00:25:00] at the ad level, at the campaign level, you're gonna be optimizing, right?
[00:25:05] I would say that the minimum number of hours that you spend optimizing a Google Ads campaign a month is probably two. Minimum, I would say four would be better to make sure you're checking it. Then that can just be a half an hour check. And the other thing I would say that's really important to do is have people you follow, or Facebook groups you go to, or Reddit, or the communities on Google for Google ads to keep learning, right?
[00:25:34] Cause that's the only way to get really good. And that's what you wanna do. You wanna make yourself shine so you get 46 review. in Google. Yeah, that's right. Okay. We have some news because it's the last minute and 30 seconds. I thought I'd bring this up if you're with us. Just so you know, we're launching a podcast and we got a couple in the bank, but if you can't get here and watch the [00:26:00] lives on YouTube or in the Facebook group, you can always go over to our new podcast.
[00:26:06] It's called Know How Marketing Lab. It relates to our course, so there is extra stuff in there that we talk about weekly failing, and I get on there a lot and talk lots of search stuff. Yeah. And then the Geek Speaks are on there as well. We will let you know where to go if you wanna sign up to follow us on there.
[00:26:25] And we'll be promoting this every week because you know we're marketers, right? Feeling? Yep. Definitely. Do you have any last thoughts for how you would optimize a Google Ads campaign? Now that I've told everybody or no, other than I'd say, start off with your quality score. If you want one place to start there.
[00:26:45] Oh, interesting. Now, how would you find your quality score? Got 20 seconds. So if you go to your keywords and then you'll, you might need to click on columns in the top right hand corner. Of all your listed keywords and then [00:27:00] find, there's gonna be a section that'll open up in the columns called quality score, and you can click it there and then you need to check quality score, landing page experience.
[00:27:08] Expect it, click through rate and add relevancy. Make sure all those are turned on, and then. Okay, That was about you went overtime, you got excited. If you wanna learn more about Google ads or you feel like you just touched the iceberg here and yeah, you wanna learn more, we do love talking Google ads, and we do have a course actually in Google Ads, but more on that later next week.
[00:27:30] We are getting on here it is. All four of us talking about the marketing update, so you're not gonna wanna miss that. Join us live in the Facebook group, Cyber Punk Geeks Marketing Mixer, or you can find us on YouTube and we will see you next time. Okay, bye. Okay, bye.
[00:27:47] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks. Join us at facebook.com/groups/cyberpunk geeks to ask your questions, meet new friends, and [00:28:00] learn even more about search, social and websites.
