Google Ads Ask Me Anything (September 2024)

Okay, this is September's Google Ads AMA. If you randomly came across this video on YouTube, you might think, who is this guy in a black Nike hat and what is this Google AMA about? My name is Austin LeClaire. I am co founder of a Google Ads agency called Grow My Ads. This is obviously our YouTube channel where we talk about Google Ad stuff. We have a free community called called PPC Launchpad. And in there we've got free courses, we have a performance max course that's totally free, many other free resources, and once a month I do an ask me anything about Google Ads and I record video responses to it totally free. So if you ever want to ask me a question and get a video response, I do it free in our free group at PPC Launchpad. So check that out in the description below. This video is me going through those questions and answering them. I do this for the community, but obviously it makes sense to also record it and put it on YouTube for other people to watch and learn. So if you're not in that group and you like what you're seeing here, go join. Ask me a question for next month's ama. All right, so first question from Tammy. Yes, I would like advice on something that no one is talking about, which is conversion slowdown. Everyone is saying it is because the economy has slowed, but that is not it. And that's. And the reason why I know that is because organic leads are surpassing Google Ad leads and that never used to be the case. I believe the target CPA is rising because of the extreme increase in Google Ad CPCs. So even though I raised my target CPA, the account never seems to function as well as it did. And these are accounts that are three and four years old. They have produced hundreds of conversions. This is also happening across various industries, not just home services. Something is definitely going on and I refuse to believe it's just happening to my accounts. I'm seriously considering starting these accounts over and doing Maximize Click or manual. I really need to get some guidance on this. Yeah, this is, this is a big first question to start with. So I will say I do believe that the economy is softer. So I think yes, in most industries there is a macro piece that is involved. Okay. Now it's going to depend on what where you're at in your company stage and what industry you're in. So if you are in the furniture business, like I know very well, due to some clients that are very big in that industry, you're getting slaughtered right now, but you're getting slaughtered compared To Covid years, Right? Covid years. Furniture skyrocketed. That was not natural. That's an outlier event that took place in human history, right? And so everyone was locked down and decided, I'm going to remodel my house because I can't take vacations right now. I can't go outside, so I'm just going to remodel my house. We're going to buy furniture. So we, like, got five years of sales in, like, two, basically within that time period. Now it's a bit of a reversion back to the mean. And so in those scenarios, you have to look at where were we at in 2019? Where are we today in 2024? Take out Covid. What would the percent growth look like if we were just naturally growing at the same rate we were before COVID In our case, it looks very like a very natural curve. We just captured, like, years of that up front. And so now when we look at results, it's like, wow, we're getting slaughtered. But the reality is we can't recreate that climate that we were in, nor should we recreate a Covid climate, and people are just less likely to buy furniture today. There's data points, though, within the industry. There's Data. The Wayfair CEO came out, said sales are down 40% or 50% within home decor and furnishings category for them. And Wayfair is obviously very big, so it's going to depend on your industry. I am seeing, though, a lot of companies not get like, they're not bleeding, but it's starting to slow down. And yes, cpcs are up. Okay, so here's an article right now. Google Search CPC up 13% year over year. This came out in April of 2024. And if we look within the past five years, CPCs are up 40 to 50%. So, yes, CPCs are up in Google. Google also quietly increases ad prices to meet targets claim executives. So Google's in an antitrust lawsuit. There's been some whistleblowers in there who basically said, so in the auction, there's floor prices, right? So let's say you want to bid on anything within finance, okay? Like mortgages. Google sets a price, they're going to mortgages. Floor price is going to be X amount of dollars. Doesn't matter how many competitors are on it. We're going to charge X amount of dollars for that. Click. They said they actually would increase those floor prices without anyone knowing in order to benefit themselves on their quarterly reports. Right. Think about it. Google owns not only the ad auction. They are the auction, right? They are the search engine. They know the advertisers, right? And now due to smart bidding, they know the advertiser's goals. So they know, hey, we've got 10 advertisers on the keyword mortgage loan, Tampa, Florida and this advertiser A wants a cost per acquisition of 100, advertiser B wants a cost per acquisition of 50, you know, etc. I, they know all that data. So what goes on behind the scenes there? Is it a true, is it a true auction based off of what they claim? Probably not. Now again this is going to go, that goes down rabbit holes. But in not to make this an hour conversation in regards to your question, look at Google's revenue. I mean this is their annual revenue from 2011 to 2023, right? And a majority of the revenue comes from the advertising side of things. So yes, Google is going to always look out for Google. Yes, CPCs are up. Yes, Google's doing shady things probably behind the scenes that have caused those increases. Yes, there's probably some increased competition due the influx or due to the influx of buying online during COVID All of that takes into play. It can't just, it's not just one thing. Now does that mean go turn off all your campaigns and switch them to max clicks? If that's something you want to test then fine. I, I have yet to find and I've tested some stuff on small accounts where we move away from smart bidding, we go back to manual bidding and I have yet to see a positive impact from it. There's a video by a guy named John Moran. I'm sure many of you who are watching this video probably have heard of John Moran. John Moran is a wizard of sorts within the Google Ads world. Used to be a part of a company called Solutions 8 which is an agency and they have a YouTube channel as well. I'm sure many of you have seen John Moran came out with a very controversial video saying, you know, he was, he took off his conversion tag from his campaigns and basically showed how Google's price fixing and he was able to lower CPCS and they were just tracking sales on the back end. Listen, that takes a lot of sophistication to pull off. I think it's a short term gain that you get from it, not long term. I think long term you lose. And I do know people who have been testing that specific theory of his and their results aren't so good. I am not going to tell you to start your accounts over Nor I would never recommend that to anyone. I, I just think you've got to play with what you've got to play with. Now if you want to test this, that's on you and if you get good results, please report back to the community. I just can't. It's hard for me to say yes, that's a good idea to go do because again we've tested it on some accounts and I'm not seeing positive influence from it. In fact I've, in some of our cases we've actually seen the negative drop because we took, we took smart bidding away which is getting us conversions because it knows our converters and then we went to manual cpc. I do believe Google has a favoritism towards the smart bidding. And so when you're using manual cpc, I do think sometimes you're getting maybe like some of the scrap traffic. That's a rabbit hole conspiracy theory there because Google's goal is just to make every advertiser happy, right? Because they're going to get more money from everyone. So they don't want someone coming in and dominating search impression shares, stealing everything. And yeah, and so I don't, I don't. There's no hack so far that I have found that has magically increased accounts that are, that are suffering some decreases. In short though, this all varies. I have companies and clients that are killing it right now, but they're in different industries and they're startups. They're not like these mature businesses that have had, you know, consistency within their companies. So these are businesses that are newer and they're growing and they're, they, they're innovative, etc. So their, their before and after looks different than a before and after of a, you know, 50 year old company that's been around forever, you know, pre and post Covid and pre and post Google Ad changes within the CPCs. But yes, I will say even with all the automation and that's why everyone's afraid of AI with Google Ads and all this stuff. I think I've been in this a decade. I think the game is harder. I think the, I think we all were lazy because we wrote a bull wave. I mean you could launch ads, anyone could launch ads if they just did it correctly, right? If you just knew a little bit about Google Ads, you could launch an ad and get sales right away. You could run alpha beta and skags and just absolutely dominate. Those days are over and now you have increased cost, in many cases increased competition too and you've got a softer economy it's just a tough, it's a tough arena to be a plane in right now. I think a lot of businesses and this is, so this is why you need to be a strategic advisor to your clients, not just a Google Ads media buyer. One of the conversations that I'm having with my clients, this is what I'm telling our team to have with clients. You can't be siloed into thinking Google Ads is going to save your business. Google Ads is a customer acquisition tool. If Google Ads gets harder, you got the cheese moved. You got to start moving and figuring out other areas of opportunity. Where there's a lot of opportunity within businesses today is working on their business, their offer, their brand, their customer experience. There's so much within small businesses that is always terrible and yet everyone just thinks, well, I want to throw more money at ads. When in reality I'm like, use some of that money to have a better website experience. Work on some CRO. Your checkout process is terrible. You barely have any reviews, views going on. You know, there's so many things that are hard that people want to avoid doing and really that has some of the biggest impact on your business versus complaining about CPCs and you can't get what you used to two years ago. So Tammy, sorry for that long rant. I probably didn't even answer your question. But yeah, the game's tough if you, I don't, look, I don't know of a tactical hack right now. John Moran apparently does if you want to look into that and test it. But, but I, I have not seen the positive impact that, that John Moran did. You can look into that, test it again. Just watch you search John Moran, Google Ads, CPC hack or something. I'm sure, sure you'll find it. And, and again, John Moran seems like a wizard of a guy. So I, I don't think he's spouting anything that's maybe incorrect or he's lying about his results. I just have not seen those results from other people I know who have tested it and I don't know of a hack that has produced really any sort of like positive uptick by trying to hack bidding or campaign changes right now. Now that's if, if and I'm sure, Tammy, you're running really good accounts, really good account structures based off of, you know, you've doing this for many years and so I'm assuming you have well optimized campaigns already. I do audits all day long and I still see a lot of really bad accounts out there where there's just so much low hanging fruit because they just. They're just running terrible account structures that are wasting a lot of money for them and decreasing the maximization of where they could be making money. So again, hopefully you got some value from that Long winded answer. Okay, question number two. No. All questions related to lead generation businesses and hospital clients for new accounts, old accounts with conversion data. Should we use pmax for lead gen businesses especially service based or hospitals? Currently I am only running search and they're working great. They are getting served on both search and maps. Excellent. When I add location extension. Here's example scenarios. I have one dental client with good conversion currently running only search. Can I start with PMAX for that? What's your suggestion Path instead of. I think you so all right. With pmax for local lead gen there's a few things. One, I still yield to search campaigns. I still see better quality from search campaigns. You. Does that mean pmax doesn't work for lead gen? It's gotten better than when it first came out. When it first came out it generated a lot of junky spam leads. You just have to test. So I would just do a small test. You're probably going to get you know at least some other. Some potential remarketing there that you might be missing. And then we like to run to dedicated landing pages for those for lead gen. For performance Max I only will run to a dedicated landing page that I only. That I know only comes from that performance Max campaign. And so we, we make sure no other traffic is going to that landing page. It's again it's a dedicated landing page for that and then we, we are checking the quality that's coming through for those leads because we have to be. You have to be very cautious with performance Max and lead gen. But just test it if search is doing well for you now. Yeah, give, give some money to pmax. Don't turn off your search. You can run both and then if pmax produces a bunch of junk you're going to know right away. But yes, just, just go ahead and test. I usually start the campaigns with max clicks and wait for it to get at least 30 to 50 conversions before going to max conversions. But with very low budget clients, I'm not able to get anywhere close to 30 per month. What should I do in that case? Can I use manual CPC when the hands. Yeah, this is a super good question because it's really hard. Small budget accounts are hard. You're not going to usually get 30 to 50 conversions. Now there's some issues there, right? Sometimes I'm like then does it even make sense to run Google Ads? That's a bigger question. What I have found a lot of times is yeah, I'm running for small budgets. I'm running a lot of exact match and a lot of manual CPC where I have to just control everything tightly because there's only so much budget that they have. Max clicks is probably even too aggressive. In that case, if you're never going to hit 30 to 50 conversions and you know that based off the math, then stick with manual CPC and usually I stick with tight, tight high intent exact match keywords. Sometimes I'll open it up with phrase and just manual bid that. Now I will at times. Then once I have let's say I had 10 conversions in a month, there are times I will. I'll take a gamble and I'll flick it to max conversions and see what happens. Every once in a while you do get a boost. Now I let the client know beforehand. We know this could get bumpy. We know that if it doesn't work we could go into a lull period. But in that case, you know, do your due diligence but test it can sometimes work. Then about keyword match types. Almost always I use the exact only because every time he's afraid abroad keywords are getting out of control, etc. Even though I have big negative list still there. So useful keywords. What message should I be using if it's small budget and local, kind of like what you're running. Exact. I like exact a lot. It's going to be expensive but usually high intent and you can control it especially when you're not able to to get the high conversion volume that 30 to 50 like you were talking about. Phrase can work very well too. Especially if you have a tight negative keyword Broad. I just don't. I did a video on our YouTube channel. It's. It's broad match keywords, when to use them and when to avoid them. You can go watch that. Basically broad I only use when I have dialed in campaigns. I bake them into those campaigns into the ad groups I already have where I'm running exact and phrase. I bake them into it and it amplifies the campaign because I'm getting more scale now. But I usually don't run it until I have a campaign already with good conversion volume and I'm using smart bidding a TCPA or a T Roas at the point. Okay, does running campaigns on to Google Ads accounts for two stores, two different domains but with the same product range make sense or will competition between the stores cause more harm than good? I never recommend it. I do know companies that have bought other companies in those same industries. Technically you're not allowed. If you're the same company, you cannot be advertising on the same keywords within the same industry. So let's say you're a mortgage company and you like, like, oh, I'm going to launch five different mortgage websites and then try to dominate the mortgage terms in my area. That's what Google wants to avoid. I know companies who do get away with double serving. Like they actually own two companies for very similar terms and their ads do show twice at a time. And it's not, Google doesn't want that happening. They claim that you could get suspended for it. I never recommend this. And so no, I don't think over time you get a competitive advantage unless you acquire like a competitor or something by doing that or I have seen cases, you're in the same industry, it's the same terms but you have two different offers for two different audiences that, that I've seen take place as well. So yeah, I don't normally recommend this. Rob. Rob. Hey man. I appreciate your, you, you always have good comments to people in the group. So I appreciate, I appreciate the feedback you give. Rob. You obviously know what you're doing, so thank you. What does your reporting communication look like with clients? Does it vary on service level or ad spend? Well, I couldn't publicly say that, could I Rob? No, I'm kidding. So reporting minimum we like to do once a month. We're doing hopefully a call with them. If they don't want to do a call, we're doing a loom. Video reports will vary by client. I like to keep reporting very simple and then if clients want more, we will tailor that to their needs. But instead of like a lot of people want to go too complex, they want to give the client way too much data at the end of the day. Like you know, listen, I hire companies, right, like to do work for, for us, for my business here, grow my ads, right? So I don't have time to read a 30 page report on a bunch of like data. I want you guys to just do your job and I want to know, I'm paying you X. What am I getting back in return? Where's the value? Where are we headed? Right, So I just want high level boom. Where am I going to go with this and what kind of value am I getting currently? That's how I usually go with reporting for clients, keep it high level, keep it focused on what's working, what's not, where we headed for the future and making sure they know what value they're getting for paying us too. And then if they want more and I have clients that are like, well, what about can we see this? Can we see that? Fine, we'll start adding that. But I don't start there. So we start simple and then we'll expand if we need to. 95% of clients will be okay with simple. And then you provide the value within the communication piece. Communication's big communication again. I try. I make sure we're doing at least one call a month. If we can't do a call, we do Loom. I teach my team if back and forth messaging gets to a point where you have to really type out like a long paragraph, don't send it. Send a Loom video. Articulate what you're trying to say in video format. It goes a long way. So we use loom. I think we're in the top 1% of loom users. I use loom all day long and the team does as well. So we're always sending a lot of Loom videos. And communication is key retention of clients sometimes isn't actually from the performance is from relationship and it's from communication and it's from value now, not always. Right. But that communication's huge. And so this does differ a little bit for some clients over others. Like obviously newer clients, there's gotta be more touch points with than someone who's been working with you for a couple years because they trust you. New clients don't trust you. So the amount of communication in the beginning is going to be a bit higher than what it may be for a year. Rob, I'm assuming you've been in the game for a while based off your knowledge. So probably my answer, none of that's new to you, but hopefully you got a little value on how I operate. If you have further questions on that, you know, feel free to ask me. You can DM me or something. We can chat about that if you want. Okay. My team and I are concerned about broad match type keywords because they are draining our clients budgets with low conversion rate. We're considering some quality criteria to choose among the broad match recommendations. Google when limited by search volume, the main criteria we have today is the search volume of the keyword. Indeed, if keywords have high traffic is higher. Thanks for letting us know. Yeah. Hey, I just. Because this video could go, you know, for hours I don't want it to. I did a video on our YouTube channel. Go to the YouTube channel. It's. It's called broad match keywords. When to use them, when to avoid them. It will literally answer your question all within that video. So hope that helps. Hello Austin, I have a client that I'm having trouble with setting a conversion value for. I'm getting calls and form submissions. However some calls can be a $50 part or a full install costing up to 2k. Any advice to set this value is greatly appreciated. Thanks. He only has a small budget of 20 per day. Okay, so. Well if you're using like call rail or call tracking metrics like a third party call solution, you can actually push values back from close call deals. I believe they actually have an API integration that will auto do that. If not, you can set up offline conversion tracking to make that happen. And so that is what I would recommend. If you're not using call tracking in a case like that where calls are obviously highly important, looking to call rail, looking to call tracking metrics, look into being able to push the values back and then if you can't do it automatically, you can do it through offline conversion tracking. So take a look at that question. If you were setting up two campaigns, one for brand keywords and the other for non, how would you allocate your budget amount of each? Would you start them off with the same amount and adjust as the campaign progresses? Well, usually I'm like if you're gonna run brand, just run it and you know, whatever it cost, it costs cause it's your own brand terms. And so no normally like I would just set a brand campaign up and we just see what kind of spend it takes in order to you have that exposure. What I wouldn't recommend though is giving most of your budget to it. Let's say you have a small budget and then you give most of it to brand and then only a little to non brand and then you never get any non brand from it. You're never going to grow because brands brand is not always going to be repeat customers or people who know you. It will, it will help. There is some lift there. But in the beginning I would be focused more on non brand because you're looking at how do I start acquiring customers, new customers from Google Ads. That is what I want to make first. Brand's going to be there to protect my brand, right. And then also capture some of that traffic that is googling for my name later on in the customer journey. So yes, focus on non brand as much as you can in the beginning, get that to work because that is more than likely going to be new money, new customers for you. Hello, how to use the right bidding strategy and display remarketing campaign. What parameters can be taken into account for budget and cpa? Boy? Well, I have a full bid strategy video on our YouTube channel. It's not specific to display remarketing. Display remarketing though, a lot of times we will start it with max conversions just to get it going and then over time we'll just dial that into a goal of ours that makes sense for the client whether it's a troas or cpa. Or we will bid it manually and not run smart bidding and work more off of, you know, impressions and clicks just to see if we can get some conversions there. I will say display remarketing. If you're in lead gen it's different but for E commerce it's been rough because performance max eats up most of that now. And so I remember years ago I would run display remarketing. Very sophisticated, crazy display remarketing campaign structures with like one day visitors and seven day visitors and 14 day visitors and we would exclude, exclude the one day from the seven day and yada yada, go crazy with it. And that doesn't just seem to be the case anymore. So with that, your bidding strategy really should just come down to what your overall goal is trying to achieve with Google Ads. And then with remarketing you have to remember, hey, these are customers you probably already paid for to remarket. So you know, should you be operating this at the same sort of margin that you're operating your other campaigns off of? That's usually a discussion with clients. But normally we're going to operate at a tad higher because we've already paid money to probably get most of that audience pool. Okay, regarding additional campaigns alongside a successful pmax, what do you generally recommend for E comm with account spending? 15 to 30k. I understand your second PMAX trader. Thank you so much. Yeah, so with PMAX I'm still trying, you know, the bread and butter basically, especially in E commerce it's going to be search. So pmax then. I'm running search still. I see a lot of companies still, they just think pmax is everything and they give up. They don't even run any search ads. That's crazy. Run search on converting search insights that you see inside the PMAX campaign. I believe that there are the search categories that they get labeled under in the insights tab. Start bidding on Those manually in your search campaigns. By the way, an exact match keyword overrides pmax according to Google's rules. Now you have to be careful now with search themes that you add to your audience or to your asset groups because that actually can now behave similar to those keywords in a standard search campaign. But a exact match should override the performance max campaign. So I run still and make good money in most of our big spending E commerce accounts with a lot of search. And I feel like a lot of people are getting lazy and they're only focused on performance max campaigns now. And there's still a lot of money to be made with, with search. And with search we're still running standard search campaigns and I'm still running DDSA even though PMAX will contain DSA. And if it, if it gets volume and works, then it does. It gets volume and works and if it doesn't, it doesn't. But I'm always just testing. Same with remarketing again. I think remarketing gets eat up. Like remarketing is actually really like harder. It feels like with pmax with E Commerce, I, I just mentioned that in the last question too. But I still will test it. So I still test now the campaign types that you don't see me run a lot. Demand gen, I don't run. I've. We've tried demand gen with so many companies and just can't seem to get it to work very well. And I think there's just a lot of garbage placement on it. YouTube, we do run for specific companies and YouTube's going to be hard because it's not going to show a lot of times a, a really high return inside the Google Ads platform. So you have to be tracking back in business metrics and then tying some of the back into, you know, your YouTube ad exposure. But I do like YouTube ads. You do need to be really good with the creative. It's about the, you know, the hook and then the story that's being told within the ad itself. But YouTube ads can do wonderful things. Now if you sell a $20 product or a $50 product, it gets a little tougher. But it does work with high ticket products. In E commerce it works wonderfully if you're in the info business. So if you sell courses, guys who are, you know, selling $5,000 courses, $3,000 courses, those guys do really well with YouTube. I like to always say I still think Facebook meta ads is better than YouTube ads. There's going to be YouTube guys who disagree with me on that, but I just, that's what I still believe. And you in meta's targeting for cold traffic, like that's totally nuts compared to what Google's able to provide. YouTube ads though. Like if you're, if you have meta ads that are working for you, especially video, then I say test it on YouTube. Like you just give it a shot on YouTube still. And so there's still a bit of a blue ocean there within the YouTube ad space. So hopefully that helps answer some of your question. Selling art that is very local. Austin Canvas Art. 1. Would you create a campaign that targets people in Austin only first, then expand to Texas State, then US or go broad in the first place? Selling art very local. All right, so if you, if you're like, if this is a brick and mortar, you know your art is in Austin and you got like a brick and mortar spot and like a lot of your purchases are people like coming into your store, then I would start with Austin. Yes. If it's like E commerce online, that's different. You could probably focus on Texas but then also add Austin as like a location in there. Even though you're going to be, sorry, focus on the US then add Austin as a location just for the insights to see how Austin behaves. And if a lot of your conversions are coming from Austin or a lot of them are coming from Texas, then you might be able to back back your geo targeting down. So yeah, this, this actually just would depend on what type of business you are. If you have multiple versions of Austin art with each having different art styles, would you throw all of them into one campaign for testing or create one campaign for each piece art? Example of many variations for one piece of art. Size, color, frames, maybe 160 skews per piece, $15 per day. Stick to one campaign for now. If you were selling art and then you also sold keyboards, that's different but you've got art. And I'm assuming the price points, they may fluctuate, but it's still, it's art and it's Austin art. Stick to one campaign right now. Figure out find heat within that one campaign and then go from there. I would like advice on running experiments. I haven't run one since they changed the process. I have now created experiments that have been in progress for over two weeks. One is for max conversions versus max clicks. One is a landing page experience. These are set on two different campaigns. I have followed a few different tutorials to check these and I think I did everything right. But neither has shown any impressions. I Have submitted a support ticket and haven't heard back. Is this normal not to have impressions? What can I. Yeah, I. Boy, I'd have to see that, I guess the settings, because, yeah, we run experiments just fine. And you're going to see your experiment. You're going to see as like, it'll look like a little campaign. It usually has like a lab like icon next to it when it's enabled. But you're gonna. Yeah. And then you're splitting the traffic. So normally you're saying, hey, like split 50, 50 or 80, 20 or whatever you set it to. So you should absolutely be getting impressions and clicks to it. I, I would, you got to check. I would check those settings again if you're not seeing anything there. But it should, it should run and Google will split the traffic as you tell it to based on what experiment you're running. Is it worth keeping a campaign running with low budget when there is less need for leads and keep optimizing it so when the need increases, the campaign can hit the ground running or just pause and start again? I would just keep it. Yeah, I would keep it running with low budget if that's acceptable. I, I do believe that when you pause a campaign, it's harder to get back. I'm like, if, if it's longer than like, let's say a week or two. I. So when we have clients, like, hey, we need to pause a certain campaign out for like a couple days, something weird happens, right. We want to actually pause them. I go in and I put a penny on it. So it's just one penny. And believe it or not, there's been times that we've created sales from like a penny. It's bizarre how it's worked. But I don't, I'm. I. So in the Google Ad system, it's saying that campaign still enabled. And then when I, I'm ready to ramp spin back up, I just put the spin back up. I have this belief and there's no public statement on this, so I could be totally wrong. This could just be me being a weird person. But I have this like suspicion that when you pause and then let's say you give it a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month, several months, you're like restarting almost. It's almost like it has to warm back up again. A Google engineer could tell me I'm an idiot and say, that's totally false. Austin. That's not how it works. I, I just, that's how it feels to me. Anytime I've ran into that. So I do a weird thing. I call it the penny trick. And I'm not the one who created that. I learned that many, many years ago. I forget from who, but instead of pausing a campaign when I know I have to have it off for a while, I just set it to one penny. Hi Austin. Regarding fashion products with variant colors, do you think it's better to create a single product and add variant colors or create different products for each color? Some of our colors are year round, while others have seen a seasonal shelf life of two to three months. I'm considering keeping all in one product, deleting the variant colors when they are out of stock, and then adding new colors as they come. I look forward to your thoughts. Okay, let me, let me just think of this again. So regarding fashion products with variant colors, do you think it's better to create a single product? Fashion product with variant colors. Do you think it's better to create a single product and add variant colors or create different products for each color? On this one, yeah, these are always tough because like fashion and the variants. So normally what I found, let's say, because I work with a lot of existing advertisers, right? So normally what I have found is let's say you've got a shirt, a skirt, jeans, whatever it may be, hats. I'll use my Nike Golf hat I wear in all these videos, right? This black Nike Golf hat, let's say there's like 10 different colors. So if I'm looking at most advertisers, existing advertisers, I may find the black Nike Golf hat actually does the best, right? And if you look then into the queries, maybe people are just typing in like Nike golf hat or men's golf hat or golf hats, et cetera, right? It's going to capture a bunch of different terms and then you'll see like pink might not do as well and white might do not do as well. And these are different actually item IDs that are in the feed. Well, what you, what you do there is you just operate them as they are. So if pink doesn't do well over time, you're just going to weed pink out. And if blue doesn't do well, you're going to weed blue out. Now there are times though that you'll find what does really well is like certain colors, black Nike Golf hat. That's actually what we convert the most on. And so having the SKU set individually and then in the title, it's men's Nike black Golf hat, whatever, right? It does well because I just typed in Nike men's black golf hat. So I just look at the data first and I don't want to kill off anything that that isn't doing as well. There are cases though, we're bringing it down to a simplified feed and then yeah, running like variants inside of how you have your feed set up. Usually using some sort of feed tool in a lot of cases can, can help. I'll give you an example. One time I worked with a company and they actually have like an insane amount of variance because they do custom cut metal, right. And, and so the variance there could, could be like a hundred different variations of these sizes but it really is just like hey, I need a steel beam. Well, we went from a simplified feed, it was steel beam, that's all we advertised on and we were able to get away with doing that. And then we went to hey, let's go and run all the variations because we thought a lot of people would be typing in the exact custom cuts, the sizing that they would want. Well, guess what happened? We like 10x or a hundredx our feed size. It was totally insane and we killed results. Now this was four years ago, we had a revert back and I think that we just gave. Basically what happened is I think we gave Google way too many SKUs all at once. We went from like a hundred to you know, thousands and it just shocked it and the smart bidding didn't quite know what to do and basically we just saw a nose dive down. But I also do believe in that case a lot of people were searching just for generic steel beam terms, custom cut steel beam, etc. So they weren't exactly like oh, there's my exact size. Now it gets like for shoes and things, right? If I'm looking for A Men's Size 10 Nike Free Run shoe, well if I see a size 8 in my Google search, I'm not going to, I'm probably not going to click that. So it gets tough. I would say whatever your feed is now and if you have historical data, review that data and then make a judgment call from there, especially maybe on specific products. So sorry, I know I'm not probably giving you a full answer here where you have the blueprint to make this decision, but it depends. And, and so yeah, I think it's going to be based off what your historical data is showing and then you can, you can feel comfortable making a decision from there. Company doing ads for B2B2C we service both businesses and their clients for lead generation we're going after both businesses and clients. If a client lead is generated, we pass it to the closest business. Any advice on the ad side for this type of scenario? So Google doesn't get confused on what audiences they should be looking for. Any way to split the audience for tracking? I have the tags and conversions split up. Also, how to best handle where a large amount of traffic to our site and ads are recurring users. Both the businesses and clients have logins to our site. I have a feeling a good portion of our spend is going to recurring users to just get to our site and want these individual individuals to get negated. I know there's a setting for bid for new users only, but I don't want to not bid for people that is coming back for a second time. Is this, is this where I would need to do the new user setting? All right. For that, you know, you could just. You upload a customer match list. So these are like customer emails, names and everything else you have and you literally exclude it from your campaign. That way no customer sees your ads. I don't normally advise that or run that but in certain scenarios you can. You could go crazy and just exclude your all site visitors list. That's going to kill off though anyone has been to your site. So I don't normally advise that either. You. So in those cases you'll have to test. I will say like I don't think you want to go too crazy with trying to negate some of those people. Now in regards to doing ads for B2B2B C, we service both businesses and their clients for lead generation, we're going after both businesses and clients. If a client lead is generated, we pass it to the closest business. Any advice in the ad side for this type of scenario so Google doesn't get confused on what audiences they should be looking for. Boy, I don't. I'm a bit confused. I wish I kind of knew what you were doing and servicing. It's very hard. I may not be able to answer this because I, I guess I would have to know like wait, who what? Who are the businesses, who are the clients and. And vice versa. If you're running all through the same company and yeah I would assume then your campaigns and your keyword targeting are going to be different for your B2B versus your B2C. Um, and then if not, then what you end up doing. How. How do you get more of B2B and how do you get more of B2C? Sometimes I get this question. Sometimes they're going to be searching the same thing. It's really about the conversion data you're passing back to train the machine learning. So the better, the better quality you give it, the better you're going to train the machine learning on that. I'll give you an example. So mortgage, I'm going to use mortgages. Again, people who search for mortgages are low credit people and high credit people are going to probably still be searching the same thing. Like home loans near me, home loans, Tampa, Florida. Okay, well you know, like I want more of the high, high quality guys. I want more of the people with good credit and big income. Okay, well Google doesn't know that. So pass that information back to them. And so how do you do that? You do that through the back end. You do that through your form submission, you do that through your sales funnel. And so if someone is bad credit, you don't count them as a conversion and you do that through how you would, you know, go through your actual sales funnel for us. Grow my ads. If someone says they're not currently, because we run our own ad funnels. If someone comes to our landing page and says they're not currently running Google Ads, I do not count that as a conversion. And so you can set that up and fire a conversion on what you want to fire conversion on through the back end. And so again, a lot of people just run basic landing pages, basic form submissions. Treat everyone the same. You shouldn't you want to. I, I always give this stupid example. It's like a diet or it's like your body. The better quality food you give it, the better you're probably going to feel and your body's gonna be right. The more junk you give it, the more junky you're going to feel and the junkie you're going to be. Well, same with your, with Google. If I just keep giving it, hey, here's, here's what I want. I want. These are the good quality conversion data points, right? These are, this is what a converter looks like to me. And that's what I feed it. That's what it's going to continue to go find because that's what I'm training it on. It's kind of like how LLMs behave, right? An LLM is only as good as the data that's been at that it's been given. And so, you know, for a very small scenario, let's say you gave an LLM just a bunch of lies and it doesn't have access to any other data. It doesn't know that that's, that's false information. So with Google Ads, smart bidding, machine learning, all that, it's all about that data that you provide back to it and train it on. So hopefully that answers a little bit of that. All right. Hey, Austin. I've been running a first shopping campaign since August 15th for, for a D2C clothing brand, dresses, undergarments. Budget is 40 a day max click bid strategy. We generated 15 purchases in the first 21 days and only 3 and 25 days since. Average CPC 68 CTR is 1.1 and we average 59 clicks a day. I need to get this moving again. Should I change troas? Even though we haven't hit 30 do. And also I'm currently advertising only on one of the three product lines we are, which is a new line has fewer product reviews. Google's main recommend is targeting all eligible. Should I add another, Should I add more? Another line with more reviews? Do you have the budget to do that then? Yes, I would do that. Just get some data going on that the products are similar enough. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and do it. If you got the budget and you don't, you're not like constrained to this crazy, like, I need to hit profit with a small budget scenario. Yeah, open it up. Get data. In the beginning, it's all about just getting that data. What happened? We generated 15 conversions in the first 21 days and now only 3 and 25 days since. What happened? All right, we'll do a before and after. How many clicks did I get on the products that sold? How many clicks did I get on the products that sold after? What type of search queries did I have? The before. What type of search queries did I have after? If everything looks fine and it's just like, wow, this is bad, then A, you can wait it out or you could test. I wouldn't go to a T roas. I would just go, well. And it's shopping. So you have to. So yes, you could test a T roas on. Take your historical roas that you got within this 46 day period and then set it even, even a bit below. So you're saying, hey, I'm willing to go aggressive. Let's say you hit like a 200% in this time frame. If you want to test her, then I would set it to like a 180. And maybe that's not your like, well, I don't want a 180. Who cares? What you want is sales back up. And so you're trying to get aggressive. And try to spark that back up so that that's how you could try to go about that. But look into the data, look into before and after. Look into the products that were clicked, what sort of search queries they were, what happened in the first 21 days that happened in the last 25 days. Just to make sure there isn't another issue there and it's not just you know, Google thing that's happening. Okay, how to optimize for purchases if you are only getting add to carts? Well yeah, you're gonna need to get purchases first and so this seems like a volume issue right now. If you're not getting purchases but you're getting add to carts and you're getting lots of add to carts, then this is something I'm looking at as like all right, what's going on with the checkout process? Why am I not getting purchases? But yes, in order to optimize for purchases you're gonna have to get purchase data coming in. Okay. Hey Austin. We are running Google Ads for our business spending more than 500,000 per month across eight different countries. But now we have reached a point where we are unable to scale our best selling products further. Currently we're using demand gen PMAX, YouTube, YouTube shorts, display ads. Can you share some strategies or different approaches we can take to scale our bestselling products? Can you also suggest different practices we can implement to better utilize remarketing audiences? Boy at that, at your guys spin level I don't know what your obviously products are. I would assume I would be looking at what your market share is. I would be looking at your impression shares. I'd be looking at like, like what, what are the lot like what are the largest scalable platforms? Well, YouTube ads would be huge, right? Because usually YouTube ads like once you crank, crank that you can, you can scale if you've got YouTube figured out now I'm assuming you're tied to a goal there. So but with search and you know, shopping and whatnot, you're going to be able to know what your impression share is there. And so if your impression share is high, you may ultimately not be able to get any more from Google. Like there's only going to be so much like, you know, like there are companies that we have there, let's say they're in you know a market and they, they're already spending millions of dollars per year on Google Ads. Throwing more money at Google Ads doesn't always allow you to scale further. Like sometimes you, you really are, you're, you're taking as much of the market as you can at that point from Google Ads within that industry. So in that case, you know, you've got to go to other channels, you gotta expand to those channels. You guys are already doing a tremendous job it sounds like within the Google world of, of marketing campaign types, right? YouTube and YouTube shorts and demand gen and all of it, right. So there it's going, it's tapping into those other channels. What are you guys doing on meta? What are you doing on TikTok? What are you doing on, you know, whatever else there is and expanding further, getting your reach further. Also going further up the funnel and Google's usually not the best play for that YouTube it can, YouTube shorts it can. But meta again this is usually the better route. Let's say you sell. And I learned this from a guy named Ezra Firestone. He owns a cosmetic company and it's cosmetics for older women. And it's not like anti, you know, everything's anti aging. They're like no, like, you know, you're, you're beautiful and yes you are older but you're a beautiful person. So there's not anti aging, it's just, it's, I think they call it pro age or something but they look, not everyone's ready to buy their product just yet. So they, they do like campaigns that are literally advert value to that market. So it's like the top 10 beauty tips for women over 50. They're spending money on that but they, they, they've set it up in a way that they use it as a filtration system. So if I'm a woman and I'm over 50 and I see this Facebook ad or Instagram ad, It's like top 10 tips for women who are over 50. I'm probably going to be interested then based on my behavior on this article and on that article. They have provided lots of value but they bake in their products there. It's on their website. Right. And based on your behavior then you're going to go down different remarketing funnels. And this by the way is going to start answering question number two. So if I came to there and I only spent 10 seconds on the website, they're going to probably not remarket to me if I was on that article for 10 minutes, I showed intent. This is someone who is interested in what we have. They're just not ready to buy. Like they, they just clicked an ad about, you know, learning more about these top 10 beauty tips for women over 50. But they're interested. They're in our market so we're going to start just remarketing social value to them. Maybe customer testimonials. I'm not even going to try to sell you anything yet. Then if you were on that that page and you added the product, you actually click the product and you added it to the cart but you didn't buy, I'm going to try to sell you that product. So now you go down a different remarketing funnel where I'm pushing maybe a discount or I'm pushing that product back in front of you. I'm not going to try to really probably push too much social value yet. I like you were almost there. I just got to get you to the finish line where someone who didn't click that product didn't go to the shopping cart. They just spent time reading the article. I know they're probably in my demographic and I just have to kind of build my awareness and my social value to them. So that is how you can really expand your remarketing and better utilize it versus just like blasting everyone with the same message. Okay. Hi, I'm running over the over three years Google search campaigns for our business. A mobile tire fitting company with 30 pounds per day max conversions without CPA and our goal is to get more quality phone calls. Until two to three months ago everything was good but now is worse. I set up a new search campaign, same budget, broad match, max conversions without CPA and in the first two days was excellent. After that again started to have around 10 clicks. Only two to three phone calls, low impressions around 200 per day. What can I do? What is wrong with the campaign? Should I set up another type of campaign? No, I don't think you should. Which one is the best to get more phone calls? What? Bitch. I that's a lot. I can't really actually answer all of that. Here's what I'd recommend we I have a video on our YouTube channel called how to set up the search campaign the right way. I do recommend you checking that out and then how to optimize a search campaign the right way. I would be looking at all right, what has historically converted for you keyword wise I would be running those definitely an exact match and trying to get you know, what's my search impression share on those, et cetera. How do you get more quality phone calls? That is going to come down to what is considered a quality phone call. If your phone call Right. So if you look at the standard call tracking 60 seconds usually is what triggers like a Conversion for a phone call. How do you get more quality calls though? Well, I always ask businesses how long's a, what's a quality phone call? How long does that normally last? Well, it's gonna be a few minutes long. Then you gotta work your way up to only tracking a few minute long phone calls. You can't do it right away cause you'll probably kill volume. But over time you go from 60 seconds and you might go to 80 seconds or 120, whatever it might be. Right. You want to continue to increase the call duration that fires a conversion over time. What you're doing is weeding out the low quality calls. Those are no longer being counted as conversions. What are you doing? You're training Google's machine learning on only quality calls. That's how you end up getting more quality calls. In regards to your account structure, you've got to just probably focus on the top converting terms. If max conversions 30 per day max conversions up until three to four months ago, everything's good but now is worse. By the way, check Auction Insights report. A lot of people like get in this situation like Google's doing something funny. It's like not working anymore. I'm like well did you see that the competitors running a sale right now? Like you got to look at your competition. A lot of times everyone wants to blame Google and again I'm, I'm, I'm not standing up for Google by any means. But everyone thinks like something's going on voodoo wise in the background of Google. Like it's not always that. So in some cases like is there a new competitor that's advertising? Is a competitor advertising a better offer than you right now that's changed. Like they're making changes just like you're trying to make changes. Right. So what happened? There's a variable there but in regards to structure. Watch my video. And normally in this case I'd be looking at what are my top converting terms. If you're on max conversions without a cpa, I would be running, I would be running mainly exact and phrase. You can run broad there a lot of times I don't like that though. Again I have a video on broad match keywords. I've mentioned it a hundred times on this video that I would recommend usually when I have CPA goal added or a T roas goal added. So yeah, hopefully that answers some of that. Hi everyone. Do you guys use any third party tools that help with your campaign optimization? Well, we're actually building out our own internal tool for like budget tracking stuff. Mainly just got a lot of clients in regards to software that I've used that I don't mind but like I don't use most of it because we don't, we don't necessarily need to. Optimizer has been pretty good. A guy named Ed Leak owns something called Ad Evolver that's more affordable. It's pretty good. Adalys by Brad Geddes I believe is his last name. Brad's a wizard and veteran in this world. That's good software as well. Then there's tools like that can be used for feed management. We use Data Feed Watch. We have enterprise level clients usually on Feedonomics. So yeah, there are tools out there that can be used. Here's the thing, if you run one account for yourself and you're not an agency or a freelancer with lots of clients, you don't need tools. Maybe feed management if you're E commerce but you don't need tools to be successful. I, I ran as a freelancer before I even owned an agency. I was running lots of accounts and I didn't even use tools and made lots of money doing that. So you don't need tools. Tools are that just there to make you more efficient. But once you, once you know how to optimize accounts a lot of times you actually don't really need that. And with AI now like Claude or Chat GPT, you know you can do some data analysis stuff sometimes with that. But yeah, the software just makes things a little more efficient or the tools do and sometimes it can, you know, spot patterns in data quicker than maybe you now is it worth you paying what they want? Sometimes it's not and so ultimately just depends what type of account you have, how many accounts you have, what your needs are and what your sort of budget is for managing those accounts. So but there's a few there if you want to go check them out if you haven't heard of any of them. Okay, one last question. Hey, we have an extremely niche product budget split between PMAX and search small spend 100amonth, 1000amonth sorry running 9 for 9 months. ROAS and Search has been much higher and getting close to profitability. But ROAS tanked by nearly a half in first week of September without any changes having been made for previous three weeks. Any ideas? Okay, when this happens I check what, what is there anything with the competition. I look at Auction insights, I look at. I literally Google search the terms that I historically have been converting on. I see what my competitors ads are again is pricing Change with one of them. Has offer changed. If that. If there's nothing there, you find then I get into the weeds of the technical stuff. But start, start with like competitor landscape. A lot of people forget about that. They always think it's like some weird technical thing, when in reality it's like, I've seen accounts, I've seen accounts tank and they're like flipping out and they think a technical issue happened. I'm like, dude, your competitors running a 50% off sale on the products that are down 50%. Okay, of course they're gonna win that. They're gonna win that every time if your product is higher and they're running a sale. So I always check there first and then go back to the campaign itself. In those cases, sometimes you've gotta readjust some maybe bidding. If you have continued low conversion volume after like a really bad week or something, you gotta get maybe more aggressive to try to drive back up some clicks there. So hopefully that helps. There you go. There is September's AMA again. This is something I do for free each month in our group, PPC Launchpad, which is a free group that is in the description below. If you're not in that group, go join it. Lots of free resources in there. And you can ask me a question on next month's ama, which I will answer again for free in video format like this. So if you're not in there, go join and I will see you next month's ama.