Get More Quality Leads with Google Ads Search & PMAX

I've had to say those words really, really carefully. If someone was to come in and have a look at this account, they would think that we've totally ruined this account.

You're putting garbage in, you're going to get garbage out. It's that simple.

All right, what we're going to be doing in today's video, many of you would know Johan.

He's our lead lead generation Google Ads expert at Define Digital Academy.

So Johan, pleasure to have you on the camera here again.

And, uh, what we're gonna do today in this video is we have done some live reviews before, but we're gonna take a low spending lead generation account and then a, what we'd call a moderate spending lead generation account. So what we're gonna do in both cases is I'll quickly do a quick introduction of the account, give everyone some specifics of it.

Then me and Johann will talk about it.

I've got some questions about it. So the first one we're gonna look at is this account, and this is local service business in America. Yeah. Only operates in one city and it's not even a large population city.. And when they, when we started reaching out, they were only spending $20 a day and we've now got them up to $110.

But the big thing that we really, really want to highlight here, when we actually go through and have a look at it, it's a simple campaign setup.

So what we're looking at from here, we've got one campaign and one ad group. That is it.

One campaign. Yeah. One ad group.

Yeah.

And what I want to show you in from here as well is you can see we've been able to scale pretty effectively within that. What I'll also just show before I pass it over to you, Johanna, is that you can see in through here as well.

We've had to hide these keywords for privacy, but we've got two broad match keywords which have four words in them. One's got three words, one's got four words, and then we've got a collection of exact match keywords. So probably the first thing I'd really like to ask there with you, Johanna, just go through and explain why we're remaining on search at the moment and why we're not even thinking about PMax.

Right now?

Yeah, yeah. So right now we're just trying to build a foundation for the account and getting good quality conversions, making sure that we actually are getting good quality conversions. I think that's the number one step with any account is like, first of all, nailing the conversion tracking, making sure that we're measuring the right thing in the inside of the business and then making sure that those conversions that do come through hold a good quality for the business and make sense for them, not just like quality-wise, but also like unit metrics or unit economics-wise as well. And when that foundation is set, we need to run that probably for 2 to 3 months at least. Then after that, that's when we can start considering perhaps introducing things like PMax or something like that. So you really need to set the foundation first. In this account example, they have plenty of room to grow their search campaign, and we're gonna do that first before we even consider introducing a PMax.

Yeah, the one thing I would add in there too is that this campaign, we're only targeting one of their core services. So we could also go out to other services and they're actually only at 30% search impression share. But one thing I would like to point out there as well is that we're big believers and we're basically driven by the data, not driven by Google's releases, is utilizing and reaching out into broad match keywords. And I know there's a lot of pushback on this that people have got a bad experience with it, but even just in the last week of this time recording, Google just released another update to say that, and they're starting to use this language, which is that keyword targeting doesn't exist anymore. It's all about keyword signals. So I think that's something that, especially for local businesses, you really, really need to get your head around, that broad match is essentially what we're— I'm really doing it. You've got to do it. You can't not use broad match keywords.

Yeah, yeah. Google have made it very clear that if you want to be part of the AI reviews and the ads that they're rolling out there, you just need to have broad match keywords in your ad groups. You just need to have them. It's as simple as that.

So in that, Johan, if you just want to talk through what guardrails you put in that, like in terms of negative keywords, where obviously big proponents of you want to be having broad match keywords that have at least 3 or 4 words in them, ideally more if you can. But yeah, apart from like how are you structuring negative keywords in there, if you probably just want to give some extra ideas around that.

Sure.

So with negative keywords in the last, I would say 6 months of, you know, AIO reviews becoming more important, important. And, you know, with the fact that Google is starting to roll out more ads inside of the AI Overviews, uh, we are being more restrictive or conservative with the negative keywords because we do want to be part of like the symptomatic searches and the, you know, when people are asking questions inside of their broad match, you know, search terms that they appear for. We do want to be part of those. Now, if we go back like a year or two, we were way more aggressive with negative keywords, excluding everything from competitors to how-tos to do-it-yourself to all those kinds of symptomatic and how-to kind of keywords. But right now, considering how AI overview is responding and helping people find the answer, we want to stay top of mind already in that search sequence for people. So when doing negative keywords, I would recommend that as long as people are searching for questions in regards to your service that you're trying to offer or advertise, it's perfectly fine to show up. When it comes to competitors and completely irrelevant things that you don't offer as a service or product, please feel free to like exclude those. But like questions, symptomatic searches, how-to searches, all that kind of, you know, those, those kind of themes, I would try, try and, you know, keep those as much as possible.

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Yeah, so let's keep this discussion going on negative keywords, and that's the big thing that I think we've really found there's change, especially over the last 6 to 12 months, is we're not being as aggressive on our negative keywords as what we used to be. The way that we explain this and what we're— this is really just coming back from data, from what we're seeing— is it comes back to is obviously Google is being by default more broad. We've got AI overviews and AI mode coming into the mix. So yeah, so essentially I think we probably talk about it internally about more setting up guardrails. And I think you mentioned it before too, Johannes, you're blocking out if you're appearing for searches services which are not relevant, so they're related but you don't offer them, we would exclude them. And it can even be the case if you're dealing, say for example, you've got a product that can be for both men and women and you may only provide it for men, for example, so you would then block out the women's searches, correct?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I would say that's the best, best approach right now is to, I mean, be, be, be like conservative. Don't be too aggressive with the negative keywords, just to just exclude that really, really obvious stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And the other thing too is we're seeing sometimes people— and it was old school, and I know that's what you— the way that you would do it is sometimes people are like going through and blocking a negative keyword and then actually going, look, how much is this actually spent? And sometimes are they blocking out negative keywords and hasn't been even clicked on, it's just shown up. And, and that's not a practice we want to go down.

No, no, no, that's not an issue either. So I wouldn't bother with those anyways.

So yeah, I think the biggest message we really want people to know when you are starting with Google Ads now is it's really important that conversion data is more important than actual keywords. And that's, that's probably the big thing that we would say regardless of whether you're dealing with a small account or a large account, the conversions happening inside of Google are far more important than keywords.

Yeah, I mean, if you're putting garbage in, you're gonna get garbage out. It's that simple.

Yeah, yeah. All right, so talk to me, uh, with this account where it's 30% search impression share, they've gone from $20 budget up to $110. What are the steps? When do you think you'll start doing Performance Max? Is Performance Max on the roadmap? What if it is? What are the core metrics that you're looking at?

Good question. First off, we just introduced Target CPA. That's also something that people are sometimes too aggressive with adding. First, we want to learn the algorithm, what a conversion is, and get the conversion flow coming., and then when we see that, you know, conversions getting stable at a certain cost, that's when we introduce the target CPA. So that's the, like the last step in terms of introducing smart bidding that we're doing in this campaign. Now we're going to let it run, I would say for a couple of months more at least, and start, you know, increasing budget to get that impression share up and get just more conversions out of the same campaign. When we're starting to hit the roof, when we're seeing just more expensive conversions when we increase budget and not necessarily more conversions, that's when we start to introduce a PMax or the discussions around a PMax.

Yeah, you bring up a really good important point there and the last thing you want to do is you need, obviously for lead gen we're talking target CPA, that can actually hurt your performance. So if you're seeing like your conversions go up, like so one week you're getting 10 conversions, then the next you're getting 15, then the next you're getting 25 and your cost per conversion is skyrocketing down from like 100 through to, you know, let's just say it starts at $150, then the next week's at $120, the next week's at $100. The worst case scenario, because Google will start recommending set a target CPA at $100, whereas you can get that ceiling down to $50. And you really want to add in a target CPA when you start to see— well, we talk about a 20% variance over a 4-week period. So you're getting like, yeah, $55, $52, $48, $51 on a weekly average of your Exactly. Yeah, exactly. All right, talk to me again about— you sort of mentioned something that you will be adding in Performance Max, but you still want to grow firstly with search. Rephrase that again, when you would look to add in Performance Max.

Yeah, so we would look to add the Performance Max when we are sort of saturating the search campaign first, when we're seeing, you know, the cost just getting higher when we increase more budget, we're not getting more conversion, we're just getting more expensive conversions, essentially. That's when we're sort of hitting the roof on the search campaign, and that's when I would seek to introduce the PMax as a second channel to, you know, further expand our reach within this theme of, of searches.

And I guess the big message we just really want to give here is that if you can't get your campaign to convert on search, Performance Max is going to make a difference.

Okay, now let's look at another example.

This business, same sort of time frame, they came into our on-demand program in August, started in September last year. These guys were spending $15,000 a month. Now they're only up to $17,500. But the big turnaround, and this is what we want to talk about, is we're going to show an example of PMax being engaged incorrectly. Johann, then you, you'll talk about the steps of what we did and went from there. But before we get there, I do want to show a bit of a screen share with this just so people can have a bit of context of what we're talking about here. What I want to show in from here is that This is the Google Ads dashboard, and if someone was to come and have a look at this account, they would think that we've totally ruined this account because when you look at it through here, cost is sort of staying the same. As I said, it started at $13, it's gone now up to $17. We came in in September. We're going to explain that because Johann actually turned off the Performance Max campaign from there, and we'll explain the reasons why. And when you look at the conversions from here, it looks like we've done an absolute rubbish job. We've more than halved the conversions and the cost per conversion's gone up, but When you actually look at the actual business, you can see from here. So if we look in April and we stitch these together, when we're looking at them in April, they were getting 336 conversions a month. Whereas with here in November, when we're getting the peak of the performance, they have dropped into some seasonality. Now they're only getting 257 conversions, nearly 100 less conversions. But when we look at November here, November was their best month on record. In the business running for 6 years. And in November, the reason they reached out to us is because basically she was going backwards. They needed a baseline of 20 regularly to make this work. So what I'd really like you to talk about now, Johann, is the reasons firstly why Performance Max wasn't working for that business previously and why you turned it off and what you did before you re-engaged Performance Max again.

Yeah, good. That's a good question. So I mean, this account is a classic example of garbage in, garbage out. If you're measuring the wrong things as conversions, you're not gonna get what you're supposed to be getting, which is, you know, new clients or new customers to your business. And with that PMax that was set in place in this account, they were measuring the wrong things. They were feeding easy conversions to the PMax. And therefore it's also gonna go down the path of least resistance and give you those easy conversions. And they're gonna be just thin air. So in this account, we just turned it off. We fell back to relying on search campaigns for a while. Because they were like more laser targeted. They were, they were giving the good conversions. And then what we did was to actually implement offline conversions for this account because that was going to be the next sort of driver in learning the PMAX, what to target and what to go down to get those, you know, better conversions essentially.

On that, I'll just add a note. I don't want to get too sidetracked down offline conversions because the last time you were on, we actually did a whole interview on that at the end of this. Yeah. I'll show people where they can go to that extra step. 'Cause they don't wanna go down that rabbit hole, but keep going down your current path and just on high quality data coming to the account.

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, high quality data is gonna be key for performance max campaigns and not everyone is gonna be able to be eligible for offline conversions. So there are ways around that. You can think about like multi-step forms or like people having to do like an appointment, anything that requires a little bit more kind of effort from the user in terms of becoming a, you know, form submission or whatever it is, that's going to be enough for the PMax to not be as easygoing in getting those conversions and therefore have to work harder, and that's going to give you better conversions.

Yeah, the way that I like to phrase it is that when we're talking to customers is that we want to go, you want your conversion data to be the lowest quality conversion that gives you good business. And I know I've had to say those words really, really carefully because the risk can be is that you can set the bar too high. So what you want it, you want that bar to be as low as possible while still giving you quality conversions. Uh, because exactly, yeah, if you go too low, it's just, it's rubbish. But you need to have that bar set. Now the reason for why that becomes important is because obviously the more conversion data we can get in an account, the easier it is going to be to scale. And that's what I want to talk about now. This business, they're actually in the process of putting on some extra practitioners so that they can actually increase their spend. Let's now talk about the role between Search and Performance Max, because a common question we get is what happens with the overlap between Performance Max and Search, because there is going to be some overlap there and we have to be okay with it. But, but how do you— because how do we rationalize and then how do we know where to put budget?

I mean, uh, when it comes to Search versus Performance Max, it's good to understand that if you're only having if you're only having broad match keywords in your search campaign, it's very easy for the PMax to sort of take the upper hand of that. But as long as you're building out your keyword themes with exact match keywords as well, you do still have that guardrail with the search campaign capturing conversions for you as well and being there to capture those conversions that maybe the PMax is like forgetting about or not prioritizing essentially.

Yeah. And there will still, even with exact match keywords, we are starting to notice a trend that it will still happen. And there's a couple reasons for it. Obviously you got to think about the target ROAS between the two campaigns if you've got a budget that's gone out. But the other thing to think about as well is the power that we see in still having search there is Performance Max. And you will sometimes see it follows a theme, and when it sees a lot of conversions, and it could be a keyword theme or it could even be a location theme where it goes. So I know with another account that you've been working on is that we've broken out state-based campaigns to enforce spending. So we kept the Performance Max at the top and we've added in, layered in some state-based campaigns where we've seen that Performance Max and search weren't reaching before. So we said, let's get search in this area.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. And also it's important to consider like the overall, you know, training or the data collection for the account. Like your conversion data on the account level. If you have those core search campaigns that drive good, you know, baseline conversion quality, PMAX is going to learn off of that. Yeah. And that's why you shouldn't start with the PMAX because PMAX doesn't have any good like foundation to sit on.

Yeah. And I'm really, you know, I'm really open with— so I really go, I don't mind whether it's Performance Max or search that's converting. Obviously we just want to make sure inside of Performance Max that it's mainly focused on the search network because that's where we see the most data that's coming in. If that Performance Max starts leading too far down the display YouTube avenue, we know there's a we know there's a problem there. And what the problem could be is that we just need to maybe pull the budget back on Performance Max or back on search because it's, it's basically going, well, there's not enough conversions in there, so I've got to look somewhere else. So I'm, I'm okay with that crossover, and I don't want to use the word cannibalization because it's not. It's, it's, it's more just ultimately, if it's giving us good conversions, it works. But the other thing to remember is that sometimes you can scale through adding in extra search campaigns that are more targeted. If you could sort of explain a little bit you mentioned about account-level conversion data and why that's so important and why we're starting with this smaller account strategy, because that's the— I think the biggest thing is as well is that more campaigns doesn't mean better results, and you can only add enough campaigns that your conversion data allows you to do. So I don't know if you want to explain that a little bit.

Sure.

I mean, when we see especially new accounts, they don't have any conversion history on the, on the account level. For example, that smaller account that you showed in the beginning, they actually had a smart campaign when they started out and that smart campaign was just bidding for everything and not having any like conversion tracking at all. So it was just bringing random traffic into the account. So the first thing we wanted to do is just build a history of quality conversions for at least 3 months because that is far, that's as far as, you know, conversion tracking data goes into the account. So we wanna build that foundation first first. And then when, when that is done, that's when we can sort of make it easier for a new campaign like PMax to understand what it should start with and what it should bid for, because you have built up that audience and that data mass that it can use to just for, for its bidding purposes.

And I think the biggest lesson that we can take away from this secondary campaign that we went through as well, your offline business data is always far more important than what you're seeing inside of your dashboard, and you really need to layer So for businesses who don't have a gauge, and this is one of the things that we do work on with businesses when they come into any of our management or on-demand programs, that we're very much talking about what's success for your business because we need that data. Otherwise, you can— an agency or something can be going, oh hey, look, we're getting better results, but if the underlying revenue in the business isn't increasing, we're wasting our time.

Yeah, for sure. You really need to align your data input in your conversion tracking with what you're actually trying to achieve with the business. If you're not doing that, you're just feeding the wrong data to Google. So how is Google supposed to know what it's supposed to target if you don't know what it's supposed to target? Yeah, it's just simple.

And then that's why I'm a really, really big proponent, especially when businesses, when they're first starting, if they can be as involved as possible in the management of Google Ads, or even if they're not running it, if they can be like feeding in, hey, this week we had better results in business than what we did previously. Because even if that tracking's not working and you need to get— the tracking might not be 100% accurate, That's going to be the biggest tell. Hey, we spent an extra $100 on Google, I've got an extra 3 phone calls. The next week we spent another extra $100 on Google, we got another extra 3 phone calls. You're starting to get a real direct input of what's happening in there.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

All right. Hey, Johan, as always, massive, massive pleasure coming on, and thank you for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom in this area.

Of course, Samwise, always a pleasure. See you, bye.