Google Ads Ask Me Anything (October 2024)

Hey, if you randomly stumbled upon this video on YouTube, you might be thinking what the heck is this? My name is Austin LeClaire, I am co founder of an agency called Grow My Ads. I have a free community, we've got a few thousand people in there called PPC Launchpad. The link to that will be in the description below if you're interested. Each month for total, like for free, I just do this. I answer any question that someone puts in the thread which is what this video will be is just questions and then my answers and I do this video response to it. So if you're interested in asking a question regarding Google Ads and you would want a video response from me, go join the community. And once a month I post a thread where it's ask me anything. And so November's will be coming up towards the end of November. Usually I start the thread towards the end of the month and then I'll film the first week of the following month. So go check that out if you're interested. Otherwise let's dive into the questions. Okay, so first question, I'm. I'm actually not going to read if a question's super long. I'm going to try to condense it to to save time. Otherwise these videos get really long. So you can read this if you want. Pause. This will obviously be pulled up on the screen. But basically the question is how to track what's app conversions better because this current client wants to just track WhatsApp clicks. Okay, so there actually was some really great responses from others in the community. One solution that I can think of is adding another step to the WhatsApp contact button. Use a plugin, like a buttonizer plugin. I actually am not familiar with that and I don't, I don't actually believe we have any clients where it's fully WhatsApp clicks. So I don't really know too much. I do know if WhatsApp doesn't have an integration with Google Ads in having a proper conversion tracking setup, it gets tricky. So I did a little research for you. There's also this blog post guy named Pete Bowen. I have no idea who he is, but he's got a pretty good post on how he's doing workarounds to track WhatsApp conversions. I will put this in the community a response to your question, but check this out. This is not something I have done. And so again I've never actually, I don't think we have any clients that rely fully on WhatsApp clicks. Probably because we wouldn't Take them as a client. Because then usually what happens is in those cases, clients will be like, hey, performance is down. And we'll be like, well, your WhatsApp clicks are fine. So you know, if you don't have clear tracking, you run into that. And I always hate that. So I always. Usually we won't take a client on unless there's full clarity of the performance that we're providing to them. And if they are unable to allow us to do that or there's technical difficulties, you know, usually we just say we're not the right fit for you. Cause otherwise the LTV on those clients is not very long because they will have a bad month. And then they blame you for that bad month, when in reality it's probably not your fault. But because you don't have that proper full clarity and tracking, you can't really go back to them. It's just kind of what they're feeling in those situations. So I again, I'll put that blog post in there. Thank you to everyone who's responded and provided feedback. This is excellent. I love seeing this. This is like a true community here that's going on. So excellent. I appreciate everyone who did that. Okay, I will read this fully because you're going to need the context. I have a problem scaling our lead gen based account. We are around 1000 Euro ad spend per day resulting in around 20 leads per day which works quite well. We are also buying leads from a comparison portal which also uses Google Ads. Our goal is to get rid of the portal and generate all leads on our own. Meaning we need another 20 to 30 leads per day. So 40 to 50 total on average. CPA 90 days of data is around €50 which is also the current TCPA for the account. So their bid strategies sounds like is set to get €50. If I increase the budget, basically nothing happens. We stick around the cost of 1000 per day. Removing or setting the TCPA higher results in the budget being spent but not increasing conversions at all. I tried using broad match keywords to get more volume but still it doesn't lead to more conversions neither to more budget being spent. How would you approach this problem? Number one, I would look at my impression share metrics. Okay, so for your keywords do this at the keyword level I would look at my search impression share, I would look at my search top impression share and I would also look at impression share lost due to rank and budget. You really could just look at one of those metrics and then you can figure out the other. So if you lost 80% due to rank, then you know you're probably not losing out on, on budget much. I, why am I looking at that? I don't know your account, I don't know your market. Okay. Because I don't have that context. But what I'm looking for is, is my search impression share lower high. If it's high. So like 80% and I'm in the top spots a high percent of the time too, let's say greater than 70. And you know, I'm, I'm not losing out due to budget, I'm actually losing out due to rank. That tells me a few things. One, if I'm high, trying to squeeze for the additional maybe 20%, 10% is extremely hard. And in fact I don't even know if Google wants you to do that. Like if you look at your brand campaigns, your brand campaigns are probably going to have close to 100% impression share. Right? Or at least you're in the high 90s for the most part. That's because it's your brand term, right? Non brand. It's really, really hard to be in the 90s or high 90s for search impression share. And part of that is I don't know if Google technically wants one competitor to dominate. And, and this is just my own thoughts. So there's no like supporting facts on this or statements by Google. But they want, they don't want to just have one like happy advertiser for a set of keywords that they dominate everything and they're, they're the happy advertiser and everyone else is not able to, to, to win. So I do believe they probably, especially with smart bidding, they know what you want, they know what your comparison, the comparison portal wants that you guys are buying leads from. I do believe they probably divvy up some of the converting traffic to make more advertisers happy versus a few that get gets most of it. Right. That's my own conspiracy. So I look at my search impression share there. It is possible that if you're in the high search impression share and you're in the high like top search impression share and you're really only losing a small percent. Like let's, let's, let's say it's 20% or less, you may not be able to gobble up any more of that 20% without extreme cost or extreme CPAs where it would, it would no longer make sense for you then in those situations I'm looking at, can I expand further? Are there other keywords I expand There was a comment here that talked about that. I did hit the like button there. I really again. But guys, I love how there's this community back and forth. I really do appreciate that. So looking at search terms, can is there any additional keyword expansion that we can go into? Otherwise I look at yeah, basically can I do I go top of funnel a little more? Is there, is there a strategy there that ultimately will give us more leads? So maybe that's with meta display. Maybe that's or video ads on meta does really well. I again I don't know your market so it may not make sense. Or maybe that is going top of funnel on Google. Google top of funnel sometimes isn't my favorite though. Sometimes I'll yield to Facebook. A lot of times when I start going to like more colder traffic. But yeah, at this point you're gonna have to start expanding a little further in your reach. Now if you look at your data and your search impression share is lower then look at why it's not budget because obviously it can't spend your budget. If it's rank though, let's say you're getting 50% of the search impression share but you're losing 50% due to rank. Then I would be looking at your Auction Insights report, see what your overlap rate is and outranking share is of your competition. I have go on our YouTube channel somewhere there is a video I have in regards to competitor analysis. So I walk through how to use the the Auction Insight reports. If you're not familiar but if you're losing out a decent chunk or a percent due to rank, then that indicates you might not be competitive enough at this €50 per day CPA or sorry €50 CPA goal. And so then you have to start analyzing some of that data and making decisions there. Can you go up why are competitors able to maybe operate a bit higher? So I, in this case I'm, I'm, I'm actually investigating those metrics first. Then I'm looking at what other campaigns or keywords can I do to try to expand my reach because I may have tapped out what I'm currently bidding on. Hopefully that makes sense. Okay. Is there a way to set up custom experiments in Google Ads Editor? I have tried and failed so far. Ooh, I'm sorry, I actually don't know. I've not set up a custom experiment in Google Ads Editor. Usually I'm, I will when I'm doing an experiment like that, I've done it inside of the actual Google Ads interface. So sorry if Anyone El knows. Feel free to respond inside the group on that. But yeah, apologies, I. I do not know the answer to that. Not right now at least. Okay. In late July, I took over my own Google Ad account for my e commerce store from an agency who has been running it the previous year. Since the beginning of April, my shopping campaign ad spend has been decreasing. T roas was set to 355 with an actual ROAS being hit of 275. When I took over, I lowered the roas troas to 290 and then further to 275 to try and get the budget to spend. Was only spending €50 per day with a €500 budget. This increased the ad spend for a few weeks, but then it dropped again. Now I'm in a situation where the actual ROAS 225 and the budget is still not being spent. This campaign has spent 160,000 out of 270 ROAs over the last two years, but is now barely profitable. How would you revive this campaign? Okay, first I would look at what is. What is down, right? So you more than likely have top sellers or top selling product categories. So I would be reviewing how are those performing today versus how they performed when you had good performance back in maybe April or before April. So I start investigating usually like the 8020 of the account, where is most my money being made or most of the conversions generally being made, how is that performing today versus how it performed when it was doing well? What's, what are the Differences in average CPCs? What are the differences in my conversion rate on those? Right. Like if you sell, you know, I'm just going to have an iPad right here. Right. So if you sell an iPad and that specific iPad has done really well for you and now when you're, you have this low performance, you know, okay, actually iPad sales, especially that model, have done really well. What's my iPad sales look like right now as my performance is down and what's my conversion rate on that iPad? Right now? If conversion rate's down and performance is down on the iPad, which makes up a good portion of your sales, then I start looking at, okay, what's my competition doing? I'm looking at auction insights report, like is there any big changes in competition? And then I'm investigating, you know, my offer is my pricing maybe higher as a competitor doing something cheaper. So I don't start with tactics, I start with research. And I think that's what a lot of people and so I may not have the perfect answer for you to, to, to solve this right now. Sometimes these questions are really hard because technically I'd have to audit this to really understand. But I'm just gonna give you my thoughts. Right, but this is where the learning lesson here for a lot of people is start when you have, you know, performance issues in the account, everyone wants to tactically change things, which is fine. Like your bid changes. Actually, I agree with, to, to give the machine learning a little bit of love because it was unable to hit your 355. But I actually, I don't try to do too many tactical things. I'll do that, like bid changes and things like that. But I start researching and I look, am I missing something? I'll give you an example. We, I had an account where things were like trending down and we just were like, what's going on? You know, and then you, you ultimately want to kind of start blaming things, right? Well, could be this, right? It could be the election, it could be, you know, whatever, some outside force. But the reality is we started doing research and we found out a competitor, a new competitor started advertising. Okay, that changes the game a bit. So we had to, we had to do some research to figure that out. And then we figured out what this competitor was doing and they were blitzing ad spend at that time. And so, you know, we had to counter that with some things. But it really, it wasn't like a bid issue, it wasn't a tactical campaign issue, was really just a market force of a new competitor. So do the research there first. I think you've done some of the right things, but yeah, I think you, you actually, you need to go deeper. You need to investigate before and after metrics here and then investigate your competitor insights there as well. Because listen, if all things stayed the same and there was no variable that changed, right. Tactically, you haven't done a whole lot different, right? From good performance to bad performance. So you have to figure out, well, why the heck am I not getting the performance I had, right? Because if everything stayed consistent, you would probably have some consistency. Something has changed there and you have to figure that out. So I would look at the research there. Start with your top products and product categories, look at the before and after, investigate further, and then hopefully you find some information that will help you then determine what tactics you need to do. Because it doesn't appear right now that it's just you lowering the T row as goal is going to get you increased sales again. So there's, there's probably another outside influence going on that, you just have to investigate and find out. Okay. I'm running identical PMAX campaigns for two neighboring countries that speak the same language. One is doing well, the other is not. Do I combine them into one campaign? Would I be able more or less just copy asset groups over? There's no way of geotargeting just one asset group, is there? No, there's not. Your campaign setting is what dictates where your geo targeting is. No, do not combine them. So I'll give you an example in for the U.S. right? A lot of people will try to mix Canada in the U.S. sometimes it's fine, but then a lot of times I'll look and I'm like, you guys are just wasting money in Canada. And like, then I'm like, what's your overall sales in Canada? And they'll look and they'll be like, oh, it's like 2%. Like who? What are you doing? Like, don't even focus on that 2%. And why, why even mix it into your ads? So some people think, oh, I'll just, we'll just add can Canada and then we'll increase our sales that way. It's usually a little more complicated than that for international or expansion or expanding to other countries. Even as simple as Canada and U.S. sometimes it's fine, right? Here's the reason. I don't like mixing it. When you mix, even though they speak the same language, these countries, usually the countries will behave differently, right? So maybe there's different time zones and then now you're mixing them into one campaign with those, with those mixtures of time zones. There's usually a difference in competition in those areas, etc. So there's a lot of these variables. I prefer to segment them. Really what you should be doing is why is one country doing better than the other? What's the competition look like in that other country versus the country you're doing well? And what are the offers like in that other country versus the country that you're doing well in? That is more than likely causing why you're not doing well. For whatever reason there's a competitor in that other country that may be better, I don't know. But it's not as simple as, hey, I do really well here and just because they speak the same language, I'm just going to go blast all those other countries. But mixing them won't do anything for you because the, the smart bidding still is just going to have to try to figure out that country and it's not going to do well. You'll actually then dilute your performance from the high performing country. So let's say you have a goal of 500% ROAS. I don't know what your goal is. Right. But what it will do the smart bidding, what will do is like it knows it'll be able to get like good return from the good country and it will use that good return in order to shave off and spend some money impressions and clicks on testing the other country that doesn't do as well. So it knows hey we could probably hit 5 out of 100% and it, it does that takes that revenue that it's able to generate at a 500% and then it's able then to spend a little there on that other country which then minimizes what you're able to get from your top performing country. So I believe if you mix those two together in the short term, you're definitely going to impact the sales that you're getting from the high performing country that you're currently in. So don't mix. I try not to mix. Sometimes it works, but most times it's best to segment countries out like that. And in this case what you should be doing is figuring out why am I doing well in one and not the other. That comes down to actually similar to my, the last question I answered, you just gotta dig in, do some research, look at competitors, look at the offers, look at the differences maybe in those countries. And more than likely it's not a tactical thing, it's, it's probably something outside force influence that you just are unaware of right now. All right, Jamie, I'm working with a real estate client trying to get them leads of people looking to sell property. In the beginning I had one ad group targeting bottle funnel keywords like real estate agent Quebec or real estate agent C Quebec. So geo targeted. These are great terms, right? Super bottom of the funnel as well as one ad group targeting middle of funnel keywords like property valuation. First AD Group didn't get any conversions after spending 300 so I turned it off. Second AD Group is now spending 50 a day and getting consistent leads at $60 CPA which is within KPI. I would like to scale that the campaign further but the valuation ad group is already at 75% impression share. Would it be worth increasing the budget? If not, would it be worth it for me to improve bottle of the funnel and try to get it working better to scale that way or start targeting more top of the funnel keywords? All right. I actually answered a question earlier, right. In regards to looking at this. So this is very good information you provided me. Your, your campaign that's doing well. Right now you're at a 75% impression share when you're at this level. So you're, you're almost at 80. Right. That additional 20% can get very expensive to try to get go after and so yeah, you could try spending more but ultimately what you may find is your CPA goes up. This is something you're going to have to just test. Right. And I would be, I would be looking at also then like what your top impression share is, et cetera there. But you're, you're already pretty high and you are in a narrow, like it's not like you're going after a country, right. This is a, just a area in, in Canada. So you're not, you know, it's not a massive place and obviously it's a decent sized city. But it's not like you're, you're targeting a huge, huge audience in this case. So 75% at your KPI might be it. So what do you do? Because I first I would test trying to go a little further. I always do that. I just try to figure out what is the actual ceiling. You're just going to have to understand your CPA may go up in the short term to try to figure that ceiling out. But more than likely you're not going to be able to get much gain for this additional 25% of impression share out there without seeing an increase to CPA or. But I would still try to test a little bit and push the boundaries then. So what do you do? Right. Well you've just got to figure out why is that working and what other, what other terms can we go after or how do we get bottom of the funnel to work. Right. I will say bottom of the funnel for real estate agents is very tough and expensive and justice from my experience there. So here you're not going to probably get $60 CPAs when for real estate agents terms it's an expensive play by the way, most of from what I have seen real estate wise you need to be using like a website like real geeks. This is, I forget what they call it, IDX or something but you need to have. Yeah IDX websites. You need to have a website that's idx. This converts, this is for real estate agents. This converts way better. Really? Like what? A lot of the top performing real estate accounts that I've worked with or analyzed or like did audits for, they're using an IDX website and I wish I could find like a, I wish I could just hear example websites. There we go. Give me visit website. That's broke. Let's. All right, so this, this guy's in Emerald Coast. I don't actually even know where that's at. But what really works is like people who are looking because most people are looking just for a house, right. So they're just starting to look for homes. So they may be looking for homes in that area and I don't really want to do. So he's in Florida. Destin. We'll just do this. We'll do Destin. Okay. Boom. So if I'm looking for this 5 million dollar coastal beach house here, you see this? Boom. This pops up. This is what a lot of the top real estate accounts. I know this is what they're running and it's, it's IDX websites that are capturing your information on houses that you're trying to look for. Then the back end is where they're getting, you know, conversions or people to work with them as realtors or whatever. So I don't know what they're doing but that's probably it. It can't, it's, it can't just be like hey, I'm a realtor and fill my form out for me to contact you. Most there are people who are looking for that but actually where, where most of the volume and and lead flow can come from is just trying to target people looking to looking at houses. And you just have an IDX website to capture that. But maybe that's going beyond what your. Your question really is. Yes, I would be looking at first trying to increase budget see if you can get more out of that. More than likely you won't for unless you want are okay with a higher cpa. Then the next is figuring out can you how do you get bottom of the funnel to work or can you target other top of the funnel keyword strategies or even investigate other channels like meta if they're not doing that. So you're at this expansion stage now and now it's just further testing on that hope that helps. Dave, there isn't a magic formula to determine what your ad spend needs to be to give it the best chance of success. However, you were working with a new or growing brand. Is there a strategy to estimate a budget to build to. Is there specific data? We're spending 40 a day in shopping ads and I know that's not enough to get a meaningful return. What information can I use to make an Educated guess what budget needs to be to get a solid assessment of the campaign. Our average order is 4 or, sorry, 80 and our CPC is $0.55, which sounds pretty good. Yeah, it's not bad. Yeah, actually, yeah, starting budgets are always tough. A lot of times if I'm talking to people and I, I, and listen, you can make small budgets work a lot of time. If I'm talking to companies who are like just starting out and I'm like, listen, if you don't have 3 to 5,000 per month to invest in Google Ads and not make money right away, it's probably not for you right now. You know, go do guerrilla marketing tactics to get, you know, some revenue and have some cash then to invest. That doesn't always mean you can't spend lower because I know companies that will spend a thousand a month and they're, they're killing it, but they're in, you know, a local market or something in a unique niche industry. You at $40 per day with 55 cent clicks, it's not bad. So you actually should be getting enough volume coming in to at least have a little bit of momentum. Now the more you spend, the more, the more data you get quicker, right? So you can start making judgments and analyzing the data faster. The, the one thing that a lot of people will do that they screw up is they spend too small, they don't get enough data, and then they burn out after a month, a couple months. Right? Because they're like, oh, this Google Ads just doesn't work for me. Well, it probably does for some of your competitors. So why is that? So that's why sometimes I'm like, if you can't, if you don't have enough to invest, maybe it's not there. I think you're, you're probably going to get enough data even at $40 per day with shopping ads at 55 cents a click. If I were you, I'd really just focus on top sellers and try to utilize Most of that $40 per day on those top sellers. But yeah, I mean, if your clicks were, if you were like a search, if you were running search campaigns and you're not E commerce and you're, let's say your CPCs were $10 on average and you're running $40 per day, I would say you have no shot, you must spend more or you will not make this work because you won't get enough momentum. But, and, and I do usually say you want about 10 clicks per day. So actually there was a comment here where they Talked about getting, you know, using the first top of page bid times 12 and then times that by 30 to get a monthly spend 10 clicks per day. Yeah, yeah. So. And they were utilizing 12. This isn't a bad an. This is a pretty good answer. Not bad. But in your case, you know your bids are like 55 cents versus for shopping right now. So I think you're okay at 40 per day. If you have more to spend, then put a little more into it. But really what you want to be focusing on is, is are, are you targeting your top sellers? Because this is going to give you the best chance early on to actually start getting some sales data coming in and utilizing that full daily budget on some of those top sellers products or product categories. Right. Or brands or what. I don't know your business. So whatever that may be, you will, you'll know. Focus your, your money and clicks and CPCS there, get some momentum there. Then you can start to try to start expanding further. I talk about this in some of my videos on the YouTube channel in regards to like new account builds, new account E commerce strategy, new E commerce strategy. There's a video on our YouTube channel regarding that. So maybe check that out. That framework might help you a little bit as well. But I do think you have enough to start as long as you're focused on the right products there and then keep an eye out on the search terms and what's showing for you. I'll try to link that E commerce new strategy for new E commerce accounts. I'll try to link that in my response here for you. Hope that helps. Hi Austin, I would like to know if it's a good idea to use performance max campaigns for lead generation and if so, what recommendations could you give me to make it work in the best possible way. I'm not a massive fan of using PMAX for Legion. It can work. The issue is a lot of times it does generate some spam and I just cannot. I hate that. Right. What we have found and I'm going to be making a YouTube video about this eventually it's on my list is we have to do like a honey pot and so let me give you an example. One second. Okay. This is one of our landing pages for ad funnel. We have URL will be blocked so people, random people watching this don't go in and start filling this stuff out. But this form fill here, right. For if we were running performance max to this which we're not and it wouldn't make sense for this specific funnel that we're running. But if we were, what we would do is create a honey pot. Okay, so you and I see these four, four fields, right? Full name email. Are you currently running Google Ads? What best describes your business? That's what you and I see on the front end. A honey pot, there would actually be another field. It just would be hidden. So it's on the back end but not on the front end. Right. Well, why do we do that? Because a human being who's real is only going to see these four and fill those four out. So that will that we have that to fire. Conversion a bot, which bot is traffic, is what's causing a lot of that spam. A bot just crawls the back end. So it just sees, oh, there's five fields. So we're going to fill all five out. If that honey pot file field, the one that's hidden on the front end gets filled out, we know that's bot traffic. So then, and it's spam. So then we do not fire a conversion for that. Ultimately what we're doing then is training the machine learning back on only human being conversions and not the bot conversions. It's totally insane that Google can get away with just firing bot traffic like that. But it happens. I mean it a hundred percent happens. We see it on the back end. So Performance Max for Legion is prone to some very spammy low quality leads. So you have to hack it like that. And so yes. Does it work for Legion? Yes, it can do. I like using it? Not normally. I usually try to get standard search to work first. But if you want to test it, just know you may have to do some hacky tricks like that to the actual landing pages and form fields. If you do get a lot of spam, but I don't know, give it a shot. That's why I always tell people just test. I mean sometimes I've met and done audits on accounts where they're killing it with Performance Max with Legion and they're not doing what I'm doing with this honeypot stuff. It just somehow worked for them. So always test and see what happens. But just be cautious and on high alert. If you start getting a lot of low quality spammy leads, it's more than likely coming from Performance Max. My other tip for Legion with Performance Max, send it to a dedicated landing page. So the only traffic that goes to that landing page is Performance Max. It allows you to track the quality coming from Performance Max Better if you're running one landing page with lots of different campaign traffic running to it you'll second guess a lot of it. So I always like to run a dedicated just to have one dedicated page for that Performance Max campaign for lead gen. All right. Several questions here. Actually a lot of this was answered, so that's cool. Again, I appreciate that everyone who's responding to some of this stuff, especially if I have videos that answer some of it. So how do you structure shopping campaigns, et cetera? Go watch the shopping campaign videos on the YouTube channel. I go step by step in a lot of that. Do you turn off standard shopping campaigns if you switch to pmax? I still usually will run a catch all and a lot of times I'm running hybrid methods. PMAX will be a lot of times bestsellers over time and then Standard Shopping will be my low to mid performers. However, things have changed. Right. So I have a video on Performance Max updates and Standard shopping and Performance Max now are equal in regards to priority. So highest ad rank wins. Highest ad rank in that scenario is going to be the highest bid. That's changing the game a little bit. So the way standard shopping plays with pmax is a bit different and so I'm doing some experimenting there. I think this actually gives a little more power back to standard shopping campaigns which I'm. I'm okay with and a fan of. So yes, I my catch all, like if I'm running a catch all standard shopping campaign along with a PMAX campaign, PMAX is more than likely going to win the ad auctions now because my, my bidding here is going to be higher than my catch all. Catch all usually is going to have a low bid set to it there as just a safety net. So no, I don't turn off all standard shopping campaigns if I switch to PMAX in that case and I go through a lot of that in the Performance Max course. Course and as well as some of those shopping videos. Just know though, if you're running overlapping products and you're trying to optimize a standard shopping campaign while optimizing Performance Max campaign and you're bidding them very like in a similar way or one's a little higher than the other. You just know how they behave today and it's based off of Ad Rank. So watch that recent video on the YouTube channel. It's called Google Ads Update. This changes performance Max. I talk about that. There's. Go check that out. Just so you know how the Standard shopping and PMAX behave together, how do you determine best roas? I don't. I talk to the client about that. That's not My decision now I've had, I have people who come to us and they're like, we want, you know, 1,000% return on ad spend. We're only getting the two. And I'm like, and I do, we do the analysis of their market competitors, CPC, etc. Conversion rates. And I'm like, you're not going to get a thousand, so just give up on Google Ads at this point. But, or here's the reality, here's the data, here's what it would take to be competitive, here's what you know, conversion rates would need to be, etc. Here's more realistic return on ad spend goals. Is that a reality for you? Yes or no? Can you do that? And if you can, cool. If not, then this isn't for you. So I consult with the clients on that because ROAS is really going to be determined about what that company wants, where they're at in the stage of their company and what's their margins and if you're lead gen, what's the close rates, what's the average lifetime value, et cetera. So you got to look at a lot of that. So it really is, it's a consultation with the client in order to best set roas. If it were me, right, if this were my business, how do I operate return on ad spend? So for E Commerce, because that's predominantly going to be a ROAS driven play, I actually would spend all the money I could at break even because I'm playing the LTV game usually. So I don't, I don't need to make profit to acquire customers. What I need is to make sure I'm getting a large percent of my customers that are coming to me on that first purchase. I need to get them coming back over and over again. That's how you really grow, right? So trying to squeeze as much profit on that first order will hinder your growth. So you've got to play now. It also depends on your financial situation, cash flow, etc. Your margins, everything else. But if it were my E commerce business, I'm trying to actually acquire as many new customers as possible. The more new customers I can bring into my business, the more repeat business I'm going to get quicker, right? Which means the faster I can grow now you've got to be able to manage every other variable involved there, right? Staff, capacity, cost of then ordering new product, etc. So it gets back, that really dives into the finance side of the business. But taking all of that aside, let's say had you Know all the money in the world I would go acquire at break even. Do you prefer tracking by GA4 or a Google Tag Manager? I prefer using Google Tag Manager or Google Ads tag. GA4 will under report by 5 to 10% because you're the way it does the attribution and then you're imported into Google Ads. So always use the Google Ads tag for your conversions inside of Google Ads. I run GA4 still as an import. I set it to secondary. I just do that to kind of cross reference the data between the two. But I'm always, always using a Google Ads conversion tag whether it's E commerce or lead generation. How do you determine the budget if the client told you to specify the budget you want? I just care about sales. What is the factor do you look at? I look at CPCs in the industry and I look at, I need to get at least 10 clicks per day minimum, bare, bare minimum at the camp at one campaign level. So yeah, if a lawyer, like so I'll give you an example. Lawyers come to us sometimes and like I want to spend 5k a month or they're only spending 5k a month and I'm like, you're a personal injury lawyer. Terms are going to cost you 2, 3, $400. 5k isn't going to cut it. So if you want to play in the game, you're gonna, this is what you're gonna need. You're gonna need, you're gonna need a couple thousand dollars, you know, potentially a day. I mean the top, the best personal injury lawyer accounts that I have all spend big money. Those that try to hack at it with 5k can get lucky, but they'll never have consistency. And by lucky I mean they'll have like a couple good leads that just randomly trickle in and then they'll have big deals from those and then you know, it pays for more than the ad spend, etc. But like you'll never have consistency. It'll be very, very hard to ever scale. So I think there's usually a lot of other channels and things that would be better for those people who only have like 5k a month in a very expensive industry. But in short, look at the CPC cost. Look at, I need 10 clicks minimum per day just to get some momentum going and then go from there in order to determine budget. Love the free PMAX course you put together. See much better results not paying a small fortune for an agency. Awesome. Will you be releasing a paid in depth course and usually how far can you scale your free course before you need to start doing more advanced tactics. Currently spending 5 to 6k. Okay, so here's the plan. The free community I launched I think at the beginning of this year or maybe towards the end of last year so it's not even a full year old. And I used to like participate and answer all the questions that were in there but that's when I only had like maybe 100 or 200 people in there. There's over 2,000 people in our group now. I literally can't keep up. I'm busy, right. I run, I run an agency here at grow my ads. I have consultations with, I've got companies that pay me one on one for like one on one work consulting them. So I'm busy and I just cannot do, do. I can't go in and answer questions anymore. There's just too much like I've got, you know, I don't know if you can see my little icon. I've got your guys's questions pulled up but you know, I've got 99 plus just notifications there. I get messages every single day in here. That's not including all the email flow I have and everything else. Right. So I just, I, at first I wanted to be like, to be able to provide a lot of feedback to you guys for free and be like this value to everyone within, with, with Google Ads questions because there was a time when I didn't know anything about Google Ads and I had all these questions and I, I, I wanted someone that could answer that. Well, what I ended up doing back in those days is I paid a guy named Mike Rhodes. I was a part of Mike Rhodes community and I think, you know, I paid, I forget maybe it was like a hundred bucks a month or something and I, I was a part of his sort of mastermind group and I could ask questions in there and he would answer or someone else on his team would answer and he would do like monthly sort of Q&As and stuff and stuff like that. So that's how I was able to learn. And he would produce of course content and stuff over time too. So I have to give a lot of my. Yeah, a lot of what I've learned, at least in the beginning, was from Mike Rhodes. Mike Rhodes has the PMAX script too by the way. So he's still in the game. I think he sold his agency but he's still in the game. The goal is I'm working on a community that will be on school but it will be a paid community. And in There I'm going to do these AMAs weekly so you're, you're going to get the chance to talk to me once a week. And by talk to me I mean you're going to ask a question, I'll do a video response for you. I'm going to do this weekly, the free group. I'll continue to do it monthly for free but in the paid group there's just gonna be more access to me and asking questions. I will have courses in there or further course material in there. The reality is, and I'm, I'm very upfront with everyone about this, you can learn everything you need to learn about Google Ads from YouTube videos. And just like watching some of my, all my YouTube videos, some of them will probably be better than what I can do in the course because I'll take one topic and make a 30 minute video about it. And so I'm very upfront with everything you don't need to pay me to learn. I'm doing it a lot on, for free on YouTube. However, the community, the reason it'll be nice is you'll have you know, a nice easy way of reviewing material because it will be structured from point 8 to point Z. Right. So here's fundamentals of Google Ads and here's advanced optimizations, et cetera. A lot of the course material is actually going to be YouTube videos. I've already done like, I don't, I've like the keyword research video for example and Google shopping product optimization. I look at those videos, I'm like man, I spent so much time making that video, I don't know if I can rep, I don't want to like redo that just for the course. So I'm just going to be using some, for some Topics I'm using YouTube videos that I have out there for free that would be just a part of baked into the course. So yes, I will have more in depth training that is paid coming and it will be very affordable. I think maybe a hundred bucks a month or something is what the community will cost. However, I'm being very upfront with everyone. You can go on YouTube and learn everything for free. And in fact a lot of my, some of those topics I may do a better job on the YouTube video versus in the paid community. But in the paid community you're going to get more access to me, you're going to get my answers more often in the free community. The only thing I can do right now is this monthly AMA which already takes me, you know, a Long time to do. But I'm going to do this once a month in the free community, still paid. You're going to get more access to me, more Q&As. I want to bring guests on. I want you guys to ask me a question. I'm just going to do a video on it too. Too. Not like the AMA style, but like give me like, hey, let's. I'll do an audit for someone and video it. Or, you know, so there's, there's gonna be a lot of that. So that will be coming. That's where you're gonna learn the most. Core stuff is good. But like you'll run into situations and you just have to understand what to do in those situations. And it's so it's not like how to push the buttons, it's just when, when, when do you do certain things? Right. You'll learn that by being able to ask me questions more and get my feedback on some of that. So courses are great. Just learn some of the fundamentals, learn what some of this means. But the reality is the true learning is going to come from continuing to ask questions and learning from that. And I'll be able to answer more questions if I'm getting paid to do it. So I will have a paid community coming out. Yeah. If you guys are interested in that, maybe just let me know in the school group and just, you know, maybe reply or even in the YouTube comments. This will be on YouTube. Just comment, you know, paid community or something. Interest in the paid community. So that way I kind of know what the interest level is. But that, that is coming. Thanks for your free course. It was excellent. Thank you. Question, does Google consider conversion value when you're using a maximized conversion goal or only when using maximize conversion value goal? I assume the ladder. Okay. So technically, no. Usually if it's max conversions, Google's just going to try to go get conversions for you. That's why sometimes if you're on a MA conversion bid strategy and let's say you sell $1,000 products mixed in with $10 products, you're going to see more sales coming from $10 products. Max conversion value is going to try to yield to getting you the most revenue as possible or the most value. Right. Usually I'm running a max conversions if it's legion and I'm running max conversion value if it's E Commerce. Now if this isn't doing what I want it to do, then I'll switch over to max conversions even if it's E Commerce. Ideally Though I'm not. I'm not fully operating on max conversions or max conversion value long term. Usually this is just a stage I'm at within a campaign to generate volume or be more like, be more aggressive. But eventually I am on a cap of some sort to govern the smart bidding. So. But yeah, I, I know it says AMA factor in conversion values. They probably do a little bit, but just maximize conversions I think will usually look for just getting you the most amount of conversions and maximize conversion value. Will look at getting the most conversion value. Again, max conversions. I typically use Legion max conversion value E commerce. That's a simple way of looking at it. Also, do you recommend using negative keywords PMAX campaigns? Yes, I do. I believe they're gonna have a feature where you can easily add negative keywords to max campaigns, but otherwise there's workarounds to doing it. That's in the free performance max course if you want to check that out. Okay, this question is in regards to. They sell on Amazon, all right. And they want to get more people to buy, but they're selling on Amazon. So basically, what are your thoughts on running Google Ads with links that direct to our Amazon listing page? I have not seen a cut, I don't know of a client that has ever done this successfully because you're not going to get good attribution. Button clicks is not my favorite to track. And you're going to pay Google Ads for CPCs, right? And then you now are paying Amazon for commission that they make. Right. I forget what the percents are. I think it varies by industry. So you're paying Amazon to just be on Amazon and then now you're paying Google to also drive traffic to Amazon. So it gets very complicated. I don't know many companies that I've ever succeeded successfully have done it. I'm sure they exist. What I usually recommend in this case is actually utilizing Amazon's paid ads and continuing to grow your Amazon paid ads. If you're trying to grow sales on Amazon Marketplace, if you're running, if you have products that you could buy on your website that's different. Right. Then you Google Ads is fine for that. But trying to run, hey, our website only directs you to buy on Amazon. That gets very tricky and it's something I just generally do not recommend and I would just stick with Amazon paid ads to your Amazon listings in that. In that case. So yeah, and again I've seen a lot of companies try to do it. I just don't know of any have done it successfully and continue to do so usually they, they give up on it after a while and should be because that attribution piece is missing. And then you're paying Amazon and Google both for basically that transaction. So it gets really tough to ever scale that. Is it okay to change my campaign conversion goals? I have a campaign running for collecting leads. The goal of the campaign is to submit lead form but I want to add phone call leads to it. Would that be okay or what? Yeah, you're actually okay to add phone call leads to, to that one, right? What you wouldn't want to do is like hey, I was tracking leads but I want to remove leads completely and only track phone calls now. That would mess up the smart bidding, right? Because it you're taking away everything it learned from and you're adding something new it doesn't have. If you're adding two and in this case it's fine. You want leads now and you also want to track calls. If you're adding just layering on another conversion action to something that the campaign is already tracking, which is the form fills and you're adding that phone call in there, you'll be fine. Doing that shouldn't mess anything up. So this is very easy to add with no, you know, risks or too many risks involved I guess. Hey, Austin can talk about no impression campaigns. I started a new search campaign with phrase match keywords for a pool building business. But there is no impression so far. The bid strategies max clicks with a cap of 7 still no impressions for some reason some niches max clicks doesn't work. I was wondering, I don't normally see that. I would first off I would take the cap off then. So run max clip. Run max clicks with no cap and if you still don't get anything, review ads. Review making sure there's no actual disapprovals of anything or technical issues there. And then if it's not, then try a manual CPC bid at the highest, absolute highest cpc you can go according to the keyword research tool. So let's say top of page bids 20 bucks. I would put 25 on there. You're not long term going to be doing that. But what you're doing is you're just trying to like almost bulldoze your way into forcing some clicks and impressions right away. But first test removing the max click cap that you have on there. If that doesn't do it, then go to manual CPC super high bids. Then hopefully that starts getting you some impressions and clicks. Then you can work your bidding from there. Hello Austin, what is your recommended process for testing products in the high ticket retail space, I hear it's best to separate your PMAX campaigns by price. If a lot of your products price varies, it can be yeah, if you have high ticket so thousand dollar plus and then you have low so you know, $20 or less or something crazy. Usually you don't want those mixed together and so in those cases, yes, it's best to split. I know eventually I want to move Peanut to pmax, but would you use PMAX to test? Here's my current structure for each brand and you're doing a keyword sculpt structure. I would stick to this until you feel like this keyword structure or keyword sculpting structure. I love. I talked about it in one of my videos like how to optimize shopping campaigns. It's one of them. I would continue to do this until you feel like you've really maxed out your results there. Then I would be testing moving some top sellers to performance max. But there's don't worry about moving to performance max right now. Get this really, really dialed in. You're running a good standard shopping structure. So that's why I try to, I try to kind of max out there first. Then I do, then I see if pmax can get me additional lift because it's going to tap into those additional ad placements. So yeah, I think you're doing the right things right now. Don't worry too much about moving to PMAX right away at this moment if this is working for you. Okay, Todd, our question for the month. We're E commerce. We sell stuff. So obviously conversions means purchases. Questions 1. We need to get to the magical 30 plus conversions in 30ish days to really start getting traction. Correct? Yes, the conversions can be any event, meaning add to carts, new leather, etc to get to the. No. Ideally you get 30 purchases. But in the case of, you know, there are companies that struggle with that or like if they're in a complicated industry of some sorts, then sometimes you have to go and do something like add to carts. However, and I have a YouTube video on micro versus macro conversions. If you give too much micro conversions and add to cart, you would think oh, if I get more add to carts, I get more purchases. That is not the case. You just end up getting more people who are less likely to buy. You get more cart abandoneders. Yes, it'll trickle in some more sales but it will not be a scalable thing to do. So I, if I'm E commerce, I'm always focused on Just getting purchases and I'm working on how do I get 30 purchases in a month. I don't really care too much about this add to cart stuff just yet. Now if you're in an industry that's super like technical or maybe your products are very very expensive, thousand dollars plus. Then sometimes you have to try to hack your way doing what I call micro conversions. Like an add to cart. But newsletter signups, all of that. Nope, doesn't matter because Google's just gonna if you train the machine learning on newsletter signups, it's just going to find more newsletter signups which ultimately aren't usually buyers. Right? So what you want to train it on is high converting traffic and then that is what you want to train the machine learning on to get you more of that high converting traffic. So E comm. E commerce. Ultimately your goal should just to be to get enough volume of actual purchases. And only as a last resort. Do you ever want to result to going to like an add to cart. Forget newsletters though, get rid of that or any other other micro conversion. None of that even matters. You would want to get as close to the purchase as possible which would be like checkout or add to carts. But do not start there. That's like last resort in very complicated situations. All right. I was wondering if I am running feed only for 600 products for budget around 2 to $300 for three campaigns. My two TRO's I set to 100 or 130% for all of them. Should I just remove troas from all of them and keep it at max conversions? But all three of them have got me more than 100 conversions. Super confused. Setting a TRO AS doesn't spend all budget doesn't keep me that profitable. Just break even or maybe 10 to 20 dollars in profit. Okay. Yeah, it's. So this is tough, right? You're asking for a row. You set a row as but it then it's not spending your budget and then you're asking should I just remove that? So in your and I would have to have more context here, but in your case, listen, if you tested max conversion bid strategy, right? And you're more profitable doing that because that's what the performance is actually getting for you. Then do that. The T roas strategy that you're setting, the reason it may not be able to hit the budget is because Google doesn't know how to spend all that money and hit your roas target. But that might not matter in your case. If you're saying hey, if I run max conversions, I actually am better off. Well then just do that. That wouldn't be my advice universally, but in your case at least to this question, I would just don't feel the need to set a cap if the cap is actually hurting you. So remove the cap, run max conversions and manage it based off of your budget for now. But that would be Again, it's not my anyone else listening? That's not normally would be my response, but in this specific situation with the context that I have, that would be my recommendation. How can I track in store visits for my clients brick and mortar store? There is a store visit conversion you have to spend. I forget the amount but you have to have enough data and then Google will automatically have that. It's not a conversion you can create, it's a conversion Google basically gives you. Take it with a grain of salt. I don't rely too much on it. But yeah, if you don't see it in the conversion like if you go to goals inside of your account and then your conversion actions, if you don't see see it in there, you may not have the spend levels yet or data for Google to give that to you. So.