Podcast Episode 11: Google Ads Settings That Save You Money
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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, Cyberpunk Geeks, Marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk. About something. Search marketing like Google Ads or seo, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing.
[00:00:24] 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. Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current market. Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing.
[00:00:47] My name is Rena Little from Little Works Indian Media, and today our topic is actually one of Fallon's best topics. It is called Google Ad Settings that will save [00:01:00] you actually its time and because it saves you time, it saves you money. And FA is from Seymour Digital Media , and this is his topic. So I'm doing all the introduction and then I'm gonna just ask a few questions in between because I really don't know anything about Google Ads.
[00:01:15] I work with Fallen and Pip on and another contractor on Google ads. And Fay, do you wanna take it away? Yeah, just jumping off cuz I know it's a big one as a lot of people have been moving to Google ads and so there's definitely, there's been a lot of changes to it. Been a lot of changes and so we wanted to cover over some things, little hidden parts of Google Ads because it's pretty complex platform that will be very helpful to you to save you a lot of money and to make sure that you're getting the most outta your budget.
[00:01:43] So I just have a quick question. So last week I was on with Pip doing Google Ads. If you missed that session, jump back into our videos in Facebook or on YouTube, or depending on where you're watching from. And we were talking about the Google Ads editor. So are [00:02:00] these tips that you're gonna give us today applicable in both the editor and the online platform, or is it just.
[00:02:05] Yeah, they're gonna be in both platforms. They're probably gonna be easiest to find in the web platform for the most part. And just as a jumping off one is just even being able to set up an account and not set up a smart campaign. Cause they definitely have you going down a primroses path of Oh, tell us a little bit more about your business and what's your goal for your business?
[00:02:24] Then before you know it, you've Oh, I've set up a smart campaign though. Do you not like the smart campaigns then? Is that what you're saying? I. Like them generally, and the reason that I'm a little nervous about them, is they just don't tell you enough about what's going on. Like where are you showing up?
[00:02:40] What are like the keywords that are converting, it's a bit of a black box. My joke is that they looked over at Facebook ads and they were like, Wow, you really have a nice little black box where people just put in a little bit of details, write some ad copy, and then. Take their money and then you don't really tell them much about where they're showing up.
[00:02:56] Like some demographic details, but they don't tell you the [00:03:00] minute detail that you get out of the regular Google ads. Yeah, generally I've heard of people doing them. If you're in a very standard. Business, like a moving company or a plumber where you know what you're expecting out of a campaign.
[00:03:14] Like you the keywords are not gonna be that different. The ad copies probably gotta be pretty similar, no matter which location you're in. Those kind of companies, I've heard that it can be good. I'm just always nervous about anytime Google's Oh, it's a smart campaign, and it's I'm my gut instinct.
[00:03:30] Always just, yeah. Sometimes wizards, Wizards have the tendency to do that. It just takes out all the complexity and sometimes you want complexity. Sometimes that complexity gets you way better results. Yeah. So what's your first tip? A Yeah, so my first tip is when you first create the account, don't just start clicking the big icons that they have at the top.
[00:03:50] Look for at the bottom you'll see a little blue hypertext, and it's like you. The smallest font they could possibly get away with. And it just says switch to expert mode. And [00:04:00] then, so you'll have to stop, look at the bottom, and then look for switch to expert mode. And then they'll still want you to set up a campaign, but it'll be a regular campaign.
[00:04:09] And then at the bottom right hand corner, there's gonna be a little spot saying, set up an account without setting up a campaign. So that way you can get in. And what's useful about that is you can start using the keyword planner. You could do a bunch of other stuff that you may, maybe you don't wanna jump into just doing a campaign, right?
[00:04:24] And so you might want to do some research, figure out if this is gonna be the right situation for you. And this is a way that you can access that without having to set up the set up a campaign. . Great. Okay, so step number one, set up your account first using the expert tool at the bottom. Yeah. All right.
[00:04:41] And then do we want to set up our campaigns by using that expert tool too? Do we have to find the expert tool again? Okay. Once you've switched over to it it, it completely changes the look. Once you're there and you don't have to stress about it once you've switched over to that mode.
[00:04:56] And then I would say the next one, that is when you start to create your [00:05:00] campaign, turning off search partners and any of the display network, if you're doing a search ad. And the reason is because this Google will say Oh, you get so much more reach and it's, you will always get, Yeah, you'll get a lot more reach.
[00:05:12] But I've never. Convert better. I've never seen a click through, so you're just wasting your budget being on an auction that you're not gonna get a click for. And so it's why would you spend that money? Because most people, their budgets are getting tighter and like you need to make that every ad dollar go as far as it can, and this is just a really good way to make sure that you've got as much capacity for things that actually get you clicks and conversions.
[00:05:36] Okay, so I have a question about that. So in my experience on Facebook, when I open up the. Audience, super broad. I get a much lower click through rate, and so it looks like it's really good, but then most of that traffic falls off or is not interested, and it actually pushes up the cost per conversion rate, which is really what I wanna look at when I'm looking at ads.
[00:05:59] Is that [00:06:00] the same case for Google Ads. Yeah, it's same concept is in this case what you're doing is you're showing up on like Duck Go and you're showing up on like different platforms. And so what you're doing is like most people that are, or if you see like anytime there's an ad on YouTube that's like a text ad, like cuz there's some that kind of show up in like the, it's a banner inside of it and like most people aren't clicking on those.
[00:06:25] They just, I'd love to be proven wrong, but I've just never seen them do the kind of converting that you really need. Yeah. And especially like you said, you might even get clicks, but like they're just not gonna convert. Yeah. Which actually does, I've realized, just lead me into the next part I wanted to say, which is the third point is gonna be turning off apps.
[00:06:45] If you do display, Cuz display is really useful for really doing some top of funnel. Like just getting eyeballs on it. But if you anytime you've seen like Candy Crush or Te Teris Gaming and you see a little ad at the bottom, [00:07:00] people click them all. Do they click them all the time? I've seen if you don't turn those off, you will see your placements cuz you can go contents.
[00:07:09] Inside of it, inside of the, your display ads. And then from content you can see where my ads being shown. And if you don't turn those off, you'll see just all of it is like translation apps and like Candy Crush and all the it just will fill it all up. Is that right? Because I, Yeah, I do the same thing in Facebook.
[00:07:28] I turn the in apps function off too, mostly from my own behavior because when I'm the middle of playing a game, I don't wanna ruin my game. To get that ad you have to stop playing your game in the middle . Yeah. Yeah. Usually be time for something and yeah, exactly. Yeah, so that's good.
[00:07:47] I wanna know if anyone in the audience. Hits ads when they're playing apps or when they're in an app, do they hit an ad or are they busy doing what they're doing in the app? ? [00:08:00] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Or if you did it intentionally, I think that's the adjective that, Did you do that intentionally? Cuz I'm gonna bet that a bunch of people accidentally do click on them all the time.
[00:08:10] But it's accidental and that's, Yeah. And to Facebook and Google that click it. Clicks. Better way to serve up ads in apps. . Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just gotta, It's also, it's a great spot for them to just get their ad budget to go out there. Yeah. We cut accidentally from someone on in the Facebook group and yeah, it's done it accidentally. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's definitely one. And especially, yeah, just by and if you click it and you back out right away, like that's gonna hurt your quality score as well, cuz it's oh, they just bounced and it's, it just hurts you all across the board.
[00:08:50] So it's just better to just, everybody everywhere is running to their ads and removing that placement on both Facebook and Google, right? That's what everybody's [00:09:00] doing right this minute, . Yeah. That's what everyone definitely should be doing if they're not, Cuz it's definitely when the I've and I've just seen my budget just get burned out immediately with like apps and then Oh, you spent all your money for your display.
[00:09:12] I like wasn't even running for an hour. How did you guys burn through all that? Yeah, it's definitely, yeah, it's just little subtle things that you wouldn't know unless you had someone to talk through it with you is it makes sense when you hear it, but it's definitely one that their Google's not gonna tell you.
[00:09:32] Hey, the other thing that could tie back to last week with the ads editor is once you've. Done it cuz it is a bit of a labor intensive. Like you have to check off like 180 different check boxes. It's quite annoying. But once you've done it, then you could go to the ads editor and just copy and paste it.
[00:09:48] Yeah. And so it makes it super fast to just oh, you've done it once, and now you just go into the ad or go to negative app placements and then just copy paste, and then you never have to do it [00:10:00] again. It's the way that I do it with any new campaigns that I'm building. That sounds awesome.
[00:10:05] All right. What's your next tip? Yeah, so going also to save your budget, especially with display is ad schedules. Ad schedules are your friend, What is that schedule? I don't exactly know what that is. So it's instead of, cuz you're basically like your daily budget will reset at midnight. And so what they do is they go, okay.
[00:10:24] Turn it on to display ads. And so it's gonna be, again, if you don't have an ad schedule and you have it, and you also have app placements turned on, so just think of it as like it's midnight. Someone's playing Candy Crush, they're falling asleep, and then they click on your ad and you'll see like big sharp spike and then nothing.
[00:10:41] And most people, when they're seeing an ad at like midnight to anything before 8:00 AM they're probably not in the mindset of Oh, I really need to know about the service or product. I don't know. I'm a late night shopper myself. I'm a late night online shopper. But yeah, you definitely [00:11:00] wanna look at your numbers for sure.
[00:11:01] I've never thought of that. So in my ads that I do I leave it because I figure if somebody's up late and they're. Looking at something and the ad converts, then that works fine for me. But I've never actually looked at it in detail to see like what the action is, how long that particular stays online.
[00:11:19] Are we able to go into Google Analytics and figure that out? Figure out if they stayed. Like we can only see the averages of time spent on site, right? And we can't see when conversions happen and we can't see which visits stay. There's no timestamp for any of that analytics. So there, so for like hour of the day, that one's gonna be a little more complex.
[00:11:43] Yeah, I think that there is a way to do it, but you'd have to, I'll post in the group, I'll post a link to, there's a Google script that is really cool that sets up all these UTM parameters that are all variable. And so once you have those going, great. And so you could actually start to break it down [00:12:00] that way.
[00:12:00] But it does take There's no way out of the box. They're not very good at that part of it. Actually, I never thought about a variable utm. That's really good actually. I like that. Yeah, it's honestly, it definitely made my Google Analytics experience with Google ads. Like it definitely brought it to life because you can set the UTM parameters and it fills it in for the campaign, the search term.
[00:12:20] The ad group, and once those are in your Google Analytics, then you can really break down like, Oh, this, like this key word was the one that did the converting, or this was the first step on a journey. And so you can break all those parts down and it's definitely very powerful once you break it down.
[00:12:37] Even the ad schedule, they don't allow you to see conversions, which is a. It's not my favorite part of it. They, for some reason, another thing about Google Ads is that they're like, Hey, there's a table. Yes, this data's available, but you can't correlate these bits of data. I, You'd have to go to Data Studio, now look, Studio is the name of it and you'd have to compare. [00:13:00] Yeah. That's one we're gonna talk about next week as well as a little preview, is what's happened with Data Studio and how it's been. Molded with a new system called Looker, which was a business intelligence app that Google bought in 2020 and they finally fully integrated it.
[00:13:18] And there's a bunch of stuff with that as well. But yeah, I think you can correlate, like you could in Data Studio, you could actually take which hour of the day gets a conversion and I think that data's available. But you have to intentionally, I want to compare these two things and. Yeah, they're not very good out of the box to just be like, Oh yeah, we're gonna tell you.
[00:13:38] It's annoying when they do that and they're like you have to put it in a bunch of extra work when it's like you guys could easily just code it in, put this by conversion and then you could see it in the ad schedule. It's, yeah, I definitely come back to the ad schedule thing and like ours, because of most of our stuff, it's kind of service based, so we generally don't think that most people are like, Oh, it's midnight.
[00:13:59] [00:14:00] I need to really think about my duct clean. Most people, it's not like the first thing that they're gonna be thinking of. And so that's why we keep it, especially if we're doing display that it's cuz it's much more top of funnel that I want someone that's alert when they're seeing the ad and they're like, Oh, I hadn't thought of cleaning my air quality based on my duct cleaning.
[00:14:20] So I should probably think about that. Yeah. Yeah, so that's our use case for it. The other one that is even cooler for it is you can do an ad schedule for extensions. So when you're setting up your call extensions, so when their phone, they can call you, you can set it to be like nine to five because if no one's in the office and what's the, That's really more sense.
[00:14:40] Yeah. That I see. That I see. Yeah. And that one even you could do for your regular search ads, right? Because you, you're not gonna want to have the call extension, even if they're typing in, searching it, because yeah, have them fill out a form if you're not trying to get, if no one's in the office, but if you're, they're calling you, you definitely want have [00:15:00] someone at the phone cuz then yeah, it's a bit of a waste.
[00:15:02] And so yeah, that's definitely, I found that to be a pretty useful one. Personally, the, and we've used it a couple times, it's been nice for call extensions to have. Time set that they're only gonna show up for. 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 up to date search engine marketing optimization techniques and tools.
[00:15:29] Find out [email protected]. The other one. That we did. So I think Pip and I had a bit of a debate about this one. They've changed it. They used to have this thing called auto apply ad suggestions, and it was, Oh yeah. And it was opt out by default. And now they've changed it to opt in. So it is turned off by default because a lot of people complained that they didn't even know that this was turned on.
[00:15:59] And it [00:16:00] also seems a little unfair to just be like, Oh, we're. Tweak your ads every two weeks and you're not gonna know about it. Oh, I see. Okay. Yeah, no, that doesn't work very well. How can you actually track what's working ? Yeah. Or give like consent to be like, Yes, I want that language in my ads Or I want a bid on this keyword.
[00:16:18] Stuff like that where it's just, it opens up too many Pandora's boxes for Google to and their AI to be bad and think that they've turned it off by default. So you can turn it on. I strongly do not recommend it. It's definitely one that I found to be the, one of the more dangerous ones that Google's, because I can really ruin your branding if it's got the wrong messaging or misleading if it, it seems to mislead people.
[00:16:45] If it says that you offer one thing when it's closely related to what you do, but it's not exactly what you do. Yeah, exactly. Or you're bidding on keywords that are like not what your service you offer. It could be a related field, but [00:17:00] it's not like that specific service and you're bidding on it all of a sudden and it's just it's just a little too, like it makes me nervous just thinking that's like a possibility that's out there. It's just I don't like losing that kind of control. Like I'm to an extent I'm willing to let Google do some AI stuff, but for the most part, That. Tell me what that, that feature is called again.
[00:17:21] So it's called Auto Apply, Add recommendations, and you'll find it in the campaign setting. So each campaign is gonna have its own settings. It'll be on the left hand menu, and then you just go into it and then it'll be one of the, there's only a few in options available in the campaign settings. So it's definitely one that is, yeah, is it's one that I would just make sure that it's turned off.
[00:17:45] It should always be, but like just. To make sure you guys are aware of it cuz it's a weird 1 0 1 other one that when you're in the campaigns one, and you'll be, you can set this up when you set up the campaign, but it is add rotation, [00:18:00] that's the name of it. And so what it is that, because now Google has got, you've write like 15 headlines and three descriptions and it's making all these different combinations to see which one is doing the best.
[00:18:11] But what you want to do is have it indefinitely, rotate them, not optimize for the best right away because. It will, The way AI systems work is they over Correct for one ad combination that's working. And then what they'll do is they'll find the path and they'll be like, Okay, this is working, but they won't try different combinations.
[00:18:29] And so you wanna run through all the different combinations, see which one's working and which one needs to get punched up for ad copy or whatever. Okay. And yeah, I, Is it Facebook? They're much more limited. I remember like ads are generally a lot narrower for the amount of headlines. The amount of descriptions I can't really compare because I don't really know Google Ads at all. But there's definitely multiple places. What basically what you could do is instead of actually putting it all into one ad, [00:19:00] you can create multiple ads under the ad set. And that's how I usually test and organize different Oh.
[00:19:06] What works best. And then I work my way to the best ad rather than, And then I would have multiple ads for multiple ad sets. So the best ad for one ad set that kind of. Yeah. Yeah. That's closer to how it used to be with Google, with a thing called expanded text ads that was much similar, where you would have multiple ads and you would have a lot more control over the ads themselves.
[00:19:29] Yeah. Now they're just like, Give us a bunch of headlines. Give us a bunch of descriptions. Yeah. Tell us what page you're going to, and I definitely had on the last one campaign that I set up the other day, there were definitely three headlines that I could put in and I used all of them. I filled them all in to see what would work.
[00:19:44] And it doesn't really tell you what works, so it doesn't really matter. Do you know what I mean? Like I actually think it makes way more sense to create separate ads for separate headlines to see which headline actually. Yeah. Oh yeah. No I would absolutely [00:20:00] love if they had left to expanded text ads, but unfortunately Google, I went, Yeah, this is the first time I've tried the multiple headlines and when I went back to look, it's Oh I can't tell.
[00:20:10] Anyway. I'll just leave it, but on the next campaign for sure, I'll be doing separate ads. See what's working and what doesn't. For sure. They do tell you inside of, they're called responsive search ads. They tell you like, Oh, this combination performed the best. They don't tell you. Oh, good. Yeah.
[00:20:27] So they do tell, but they don't give you any numbers. They just said, This one's the best. This one did the worst. Oh, so you don't know by how much. Yeah, they're, And you're taking their word for it, that they're just like, Yeah, that's not parti and best in what way? ? Yeah. Did it get more, did it get longer time on the site or what?
[00:20:45] How is it working better? Yeah. And how many times did that one show up? Is it that you showed this other one a hundred times and you showed this one that did the best 10 times and you got five clicks? Yeah. Is it like they don't give you any data to actually [00:21:00] like compile what is best clicks?
[00:21:02] The last data, Yeah. When they pulled the data away from you. It's always annoying. It's always. And leaving nice clearly to find words like best or worst or good. On quality control, like we get a quality score on Facebook and sometimes as a strategy, I'll use an engagement campaign when I'm really sending people to the website and it'll say that I've got a poor quality.
[00:21:28] but it's the best. I think we talked about this last week. It's the actually the best performing ad that we've got running, But if you don't know any better and you just leave yourself open to however Google or Facebook tells you're doing, then you don't really know , yeah, exactly.
[00:21:44] You don't know what criteria they're judging the ad on. Yeah, for sure. It's definitely, yeah, when they're just Oh, take our work for you. This one did really well. And they give you the overall numbers of just Yeah, this is how many impressions. It's like not individual combinations.
[00:21:59] Yeah. [00:22:00] I remember arguing with the client on that. They said, Oh, your ads are doing terrible and. It's are you kidding me? Your sales are way up. I can see it. Yeah. So it's Would you prefer to listen to what Facebook says or would you prefer to listen to what Google Analytics tells? Tells us because I'm in camp Google Analytics
[00:22:16] Yeah. Yeah. And also like just at the end of the day, like which one is literally putting money in your bank account? Are you like independent of the ads platform? Yeah. I'm not here to have Facebook tell me I'm doing great all the time. Like it's, That's not useful. Right on. So how, we've got about five more minutes.
[00:22:32] How many more tips do we have? The last one that I just remembered, I forgot to leave a note about was the locations, which is, there's a cool feature cuz I remember we were talking about locations and they've done a lot of tweaking with the locations that you can't do. The microtargeting we had talked about, right?
[00:22:49] Yeah. And so there is a little toggle that when you're setting and you're picking your locations, that is something to keep in mind as well, cuz it can cause some issues for you. And it [00:23:00] is not. You pick not only residents, but interest in that location. you're picking say you're advertising for Tino, which is like a a summertime getaway.
[00:23:12] You are also gonna want to get people that are interested in Tino, that maybe they're in Vancouver. And they want to do a weekend getaway versus people that are specifically in that, like that region that you're picking. So what happened with us, just as a funny side story, was we were trying to set up a campaign for someone in Victoria, which is, if you're not familiar, Victoria is south of the 49th Parallel.
[00:23:37] So a lot of, if you do a radius, it all hit the United States. And so what we had to do was. We had to pick people that lived in the area because we hit a policy violation, that we weren't allowed to do any targeted advertising to people in Washington about this surface. And so you had to like, Pick it. So it was like specifically there in that area and people [00:24:00] living there, not people interested in that area cuz it would set off little distinction between like where they were and where they would like to go.
[00:24:07] It set it off that we had a policy violation, we were tearing our hair out, trying to make it work and it was definitely annoying. Yes. That would be annoying. Yes. And I actually never thought of that about Victoria. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. It's definitely one where you're like, you want to do a nice broad area and then you're immediately, Cuz also ing out locations.
[00:24:29] And Google Ads does weird things as well because again, like maybe they're a person that is living in Victoria and they go over for the day, they go to Washington State. I still want to advertise to them. So yes, they're in that location. They're not in the location I want, but they're technically still interested but they're not there.
[00:24:46] So it does all kinds of weird things where they have to like, because it's negative out, they can't show the run the ad there. Do can you do really narrow radiuss and then pick lots of like suburb names and [00:25:00] close. Yeah, so the location targeting is actually pretty cool. For Google Ads I gotta give it to them that you can pick like postal codes, but for anyone who's not in Canada, the first three letters in the postal code are an overall area, and then it subdivides onto like roads.
[00:25:17] And so the first three are actually for us. The first three is like all of couch and. So it covers a huge amount of people. So rather than just picking like the city of Duncan, I can actually pick like a whole area based on the first three characters in a postal code. So they'll let you do that kind of target.
[00:25:35] Okay. Interesting. So it seems like Facebook and Google have really borrowed from each other a lot. . Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Facebook ads literally hired, I think the top senior engineer for Google ads. Like the guys . Yeah. So it's that bad. And that incest, just that they hired those guys and then I think TikTok hired all the Facebook ads senior team.
[00:25:55] Oh, you're kidding me. Yeah. So it's. Yeah, so they just they've all [00:26:00] been curbing from each other's notes pretty hard, right? Yes, that is indeed the case. All right. I'm just looking at what we've got happening next week. It's uh, no, I was just gonna say, I do know it's next week cuz it's the end of the month and so we're doing what in the world of marketing.
[00:26:16] Right on. If you're finding us somewhere, you might wanna know that we are actually in a Cyberpunk Geek Marketing Mixer Facebook group. That's where we live and where we stream from, and we re stream in lots of other places. So please join us there if you like, and join us next week at the same time, 11 to 1130 when we will be giving you the roundup of what's been going on in the last month in market.
[00:26:44] Yes. Right on. All right. Bye for now. Bye bye.
[00:26:49] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks. Join us at facebook.com/groups/cyberpunk geeks to ask your [00:27:00] questions, meet new friends, and learn even more about search, social and websites.
