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Show notes:
Google Ads was going great. Month after month you’re producing tons of conversions and your Google Ads campaigns are going great. Then all of a sudden you experience a massive drop in conversions and performance. We’ve all been there. This can be a very stressful and difficult situation. Here’s a 5 step plan to fix your Google Ads campaign when conversion performance starts to get worse all of a sudden. This 5 step plan should help you get your Google Ads campaigns back on track! Thanks for listening and enjoy the show!
Please leave us a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, please share the show with your friends, and join us for the after show every week on Patreon! It’s just $2 or $4 a month and we do an after show every week.
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Transcript
Jason Rothman:
Hey, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast about pay per click and Google Ads. My name is Jason Rothman. As always, I’m joined by the great Chris Schaeffer. This is the Paid Search Podcast. This is episode number 170. Yes, yes, welcome back to the Paid Search. Chris, I don’t even have to ask you how it’s going today. I’m just going to tell you what I want for lunch because you look like a waiter. You look like a [inaudible 00:00:38]. You look like a waiter on a smoke break, tuck in that shirt, button that top button. Roll up those sleeves. No, I’m just kidding, Chris. Chris, as I told you before the show, you look great. You look stunning. You’re in a button up.
Chris Schaeffer:
I’m an eye candy.
Jason Rothman:
Were you out meeting clients today? What’s going on, buddy?
Chris Schaeffer:
Well, Jason, as I heard from my marketing director for this podcast, who is you, I’m celebrating by wearing this super fancy shirt with a collar, which I didn’t know all shirts didn’t have sarcastic logos or text on them. It turns out sometimes there’s buttons and collars on them and looks a whole lot more professional. So I put one of those on and celebrating that we’re ranking 24th in the U.S. for marketing podcasts. And I thought it was a good-
Jason Rothman:
Apple Podcasts.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, Apple Podcasts. So we’re professional, Jason. The people have spoken. We are professional so I’m dressing like it now. That’s it.
Jason Rothman:
Well, it only took you 170 episodes. So I appreciate it. I appreciate that a lot, Chris. But yeah, we’re moving up in the rankings. The reason we’re moving up in the rankings is because you guys are leaving reviews and ratings on Apple Podcasts, and we appreciate that. So it’s working.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, yeah, well, let’s get into this episode. And before we jump right into it, I’ll tell you what. We have a fire episode this week. Jason has a lot to share. We’re going to get real. You guys got to stick around because this is going to get real but before we jump in, I want to tell you about our favorite PPC optimization tool opteo.com/psp. That specific URL can get you access to a six week extended trial to a tool that can provide recommendations, alerts, giant flashing light to say, oops, you messed up, something’s wrong with this ad, something’s wrong with this site link, something’s wrong with this keyword, something’s wrong with this negative keyword, things that you may just let hang. There’s a lot to look at in Google Ads. And this tool is designed to help you make better decisions about big picture stuff and small picture stuff, like one little keyword has a really high cost per conversion compared to everything else and you’ve just been ignoring it. Stuff like this, you’re interested in getting little tips like that right in your inbox, opteo.com/psp, opteo.com/psp, six week trial for free, check it out. We like it, we know you’re going to like it.
Jason Rothman:
Thanks, Chris. Yeah, I’m looking forward to today’s episode. First, just some housekeeping, and then we’re going to read the Apple Podcasts review of the week. But first before the review, Chris, we have the archive. We’re getting the 100 episodes up there for sale, paidsarchpodcast.com/archive, add them to your cart, buy them. Listen to them, the audio versions, most of the video versions of the episodes are on the YouTube channel somewhere out there. But we have the audio of the first 100 episodes available for sale at paidsearchpodcast.com/archive. We also have a forum on our website, forum.paidsearchpodcast.com.
Jason Rothman:
Something new to the forum this week, Chris, you’re going to love this, we added a new kind of sub forum in the forum called Industries. And Industries, you don’t know about this because you haven’t seen it because you don’t visit enough. And we’ll get to that in a second. We have a subchannel called Industries. And that forum is going to have one thread per industry. So I started a thread called Orthodontist. We have another thread in there called Accounting and CPAs, another one called Books Nonfiction. And each thread is going to just be a repository of questions and information that people have about each industry. So if you get on there, and you have a question about orthodontists, you go to the Orthodontist thread, you go, “Hey, I saw this search come through, do you think that’s a good search?” And people will answer you, or if you want to know, “Hey, why am I not getting any traffic with my accounting and CPA campaign? What keywords am I missing?” People will answer it in that thread. And we’re going to house everything in one thread per industry and I thought that’s just going to become a great repository of information.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.
Jason Rothman:
So do you like that idea, Chris?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, I think that’s great. Some of the most popular episodes we do is, I just saw on YouTube, people were commenting on our old episode about car dealers, car dealerships. People love verticals, because there are sometimes special little tricks that you could apply to a vertical that would not necessarily be the thing that would come up in a normal discussion of a PPC campaign for other industries. So yeah, I like it, great stuff.
Jason Rothman:
Yeah, I also encourage everyone to check out the Louis-ville part of the forum. It’s the off topic discussion. Two weeks ago, a forum member asked Chris how he winds down from his day of pay per click advertising. What video games he likes to play? And we’re all still waiting on a response from Chris.
Chris Schaeffer:
Did they really post that?
Jason Rothman:
Yeah. Yep. And Chris hasn’t been in there yet. So maybe he’s been too busy playing those video games.
Chris Schaeffer:
Sorry, guys.
Jason Rothman:
Just a little bump on the shoulder.
Chris Schaeffer:
Or punch in the back.
Jason Rothman:
I’ll threaten to quit this show if you don’t get on my forum, Chris. I’d like to see you in there more. I don’t need you in there for hours a day. We just need you on there to check in five minutes a day.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay, I’m getting a note. Okay, I’m going to write it down. This is forum, okay, I’m going to go check it. Forum check. There it is. I wrote it down. I’m going to go check. And I’m going to get on to the Louis-ville and talk about video games because that’s what everybody’s here for.
Jason Rothman:
I guess you were writing down a note in front of me genuinely. I guess that’s really, you’re doing that to remind yourself later, but it felt very condescending and it was not a good communication tactic. So I don’t encourage you to carry out your interpersonal relationships that way.
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s how I tell people.
Jason Rothman:
Very condescendingly writing down notes in front of people.
Chris Schaeffer:
When I’m talking to a client, okay, if you’re talking to anyone, if you’re talking to a doctor, you’re talking to a guy who mows your lawn, you say something to him, and he gets out his notepad and starts writing. Don’t you feel important? Doesn’t that feel like wow, he’s listening. He’s going to follow up on that. It’s a compliment. That’s all I have to say.
Jason Rothman:
You back me into a corner where only an unreasonable person could disagree. So instead of agreeing, instead of giving it up-
Chris Schaeffer:
What are you going to do?
Jason Rothman:
I’m just going to take a deep breath and move on. So I want to thank Brent from Chi-Town on Apple Podcasts in the great United States of America for leaving us this week’s Apple Podcasts review of the week, five stars. Yes, the PPC podcast, my only PPC podcast. I was looking to level up my PPC skills and stumbled across Jason and Chris several months ago. I’ve tried other PPC podcasts, but none of them are as practical and hilarious as this one. Since then, I’ve made more money for my clients and for myself. This is only, is he so excited, forgot a little grammar out there in Chi-Town, but he said this is only podcast I get excited to listen to every week, and the Patreon after show.
Jason Rothman:
I don’t pay for the video feed for the Patreon show but I imagine Jason and Chris slipping on Egyptian cotton robes, lighting their cigars with $100 bills as they wax eloquent about the business of PPC management. Thank you both for enriching my life and the life of my clients. P.S. I don’t even listen to podcasts with iTunes but I wanted to show you guys some love by leaving a review where you’ve asked me to for the last 50 episodes. P.S.S., hire Chris for Google Ads consulting, I call him at least once a month. He’s like a personal PPC coach, well worth the investment. P.S.S.S, I’m putting in a French drain in two weeks. P.S.S.S.S., keep up the good work. Brent, find some more money because apparently the French drain didn’t get the job done. We now went back and dug a trench into the side of the estate, the 15,000 square foot house on the estate. And we dug the trench and that is where the water flows now. So Brent, thank you for the review.
Chris Schaeffer:
I think that’s called a moat for rich people. I think that’s called a moat. You literally have a moat now. Wow, first world problems.
Jason Rothman:
So you like that review Chris? It was very-
Chris Schaeffer:
It was very specific. Yes, absolutely. And he’s right about consulting. It is a good investment.
Jason Rothman:
So last week, at the end of the episode, Chris, I freaked out a little. I yelled. I threw a pen.
Chris Schaeffer:
Normal day.
Jason Rothman:
Two weeks ago, I freaked out a little bit at the end of the episode. But luckily, the YouTube stream messed up or whatever. The video messed up during my screaming and it wasn’t caught on camera. But last week it was and I went back, I watched it back. I don’t like the person I saw in that video, but I have excuses. And my excuses are I was under a lot of pressure, Chris and David Bowie wrote the song Under Pressure. And he basically wrote it for me 40 years in advance, he knew it was coming because I had a rough, rough couple weeks fixing something.
Jason Rothman:
We’re going to talk about that on today’s episode. I had a plan to talk about a very cool quality score thing you and I were discussing.
Chris Schaeffer:
It’s in the works.
Jason Rothman:
And I didn’t have time to plan out the episode because I was so busy fixing something. So I’ll just briefly tell everyone what happened, then we’ll get into it. Big account, large account, very important account, very long time account, very successful account managing it. It went south. It took me a week, a full week to fix it, literally working early in the morning to very, very late at night and it shouldn’t have taken that long. It’s just I was under a lot of pressure. And so I came up with six things, five of them we’re going to talk about on the show. The sixth, dumb people are going to make fun of me. And because of that, we’re going to hide it over on Patreon.
Jason Rothman:
But we’re going to talk about the five things today that I identified as the areas where what you need to do when a really good campaign just all of a sudden, a good account just starts going bad. I’ve identified five things. So next time, I don’t have to freak out and yell at my podcast partner, and all that kind of stuff because I’m under a lot of pressure. I just go down the list of five things next time. Instead of working like crazy for a week, it will just be Boom, boom, boom, a couple hours, five steps, and we’ll fix it. So that’s where I was Chris. And I’ll let you take it from there.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay, well Jason, I am certainly no stranger to campaigns going south. And I think this is often when people pay the most attention to a PPC campaign is when things are going south. You don’t get the calls that say, “Hey, we had our best month last month. So I’m ready to hire a manager.” You don’t ever hear that introduction. It’s usually, “We’ve been going great for the past two years, something happened. I let someone look at it, they made some adjustments and things are now really bad. Now I need you to fix it.” That’s usually the goal. So I think this can be critical for a lot of people because fixing issues and having a system in place and seeing an example of how someone else handled it, I think will be very valuable to people.
Chris Schaeffer:
So let’s go through the steps, as you said six steps, five that are before the paywall. So we’ll start with number one. Jason, what’s the first thing that you want to do with this patient of yours? This campaign? How do you approach it first? What’s the first thing that you want to conquer?
Jason Rothman:
Okay, so I guess first of all, we just need to throw out a caveat out there. There’s a lot of people with problem accounts. This is not like, “Oh, we were running for a couple weeks. And we’re not getting any impressions today, what’s wrong?” So it’s not like we’re talking about approval issues. We’re not talking about limited by budget or anything like that. So I just want to rule that out. So just rule out those issues. Obviously, that’s the first stuff you check for. This is for accounts that have been great for a long, long time. And then all of a sudden, what happens is your lead count drops, conversions drop and your CPA goes up.
Jason Rothman:
So my first step here is to just calm down and have a goal. Your goal when something goes wrong, when a great account goes wrong, instead of getting it back to where it was where it was great, we’re not trying to do that with this emergency work, this stop the bleeding work. We’re just trying to stabilize the patient. So the way I look at it is a person who’s shot up or whatever bleeding comes into the ER, the ER doctors are not trying to get them into run a marathon shape that afternoon. They’re just trying to stabilize them. They’re just trying to make them, keep them alive.
Jason Rothman:
And so that’s what I’m trying to do with a great account that goes bad. My first goal is to calm down and to realize I’m not trying to get the CPA back to an all time record. I’m not trying to get perfect, perfect search terms, like we usually focus on. All I’m trying to do is stabilize the patient, get it back to just an okay level and stop this bleeding. So I think if I would have gone into this prior week, where I was spending all week trying to fix something, instead of trying to get it to where it was, if I would have just gone into the mindset like, okay, something’s very wrong. All of a sudden, our CPA is up 50%, and that really matters for this client, our conversions are down. And it’s a big volume. So it’s like very obvious something is wrong. Instead of trying to go, “Oh, we got to get it perfect, where it’s been for the last couple months.”, I should have gone, “Oh, something’s very wrong. We’re in damage control mode, I need to stabilize the situation.” So stabilize the patient. So that’s my first step is having that goal, stabilize the patient.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay, so before we move on to step two, here’s my question, because I get this a lot and I often struggle with this. I mean, I have a client right now I’m thinking of that has a campaign that has changed, things have changed for them. What do you consider to be the point when you say something’s wrong? Because some people like last week was bad, right? And they think, panic mode, change something, something’s wrong. Other clients will email me and say, “Hey, the past two months, we’ve gotten almost no calls.” So it’s almost as if we have very different thresholds on considering what’s wrong. Do you think that it’s wrong for people to move after one week or is there there some kind of threshold that you consider?
Jason Rothman:
Client screaming down your throat, and it’s hard for me to say because this is not like a $1,000 month campaign that brings in a few moving jobs, and it pays for itself and it’s one piece of the pie. This is like the pie and it’s very important. And it’s just more of a gut feel thing, like I know how this account should go almost every single day. I know what to expect in terms of cost per conversion. I know what to expect in terms of volume of leads. If we go, well I’ll tell you this. My breaking point was we’re in September 26. My breaking point was about two and a half weeks into the month.
Chris Schaeffer:
Here we go, okay.
Jason Rothman:
So like two weeks into the month, I knew something was off. And I’m only human. So two weeks into the month, I’m going like well, maybe the markets change. Maybe it’s just temporarily a drop in performance. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, maybe it’s this bit adjustment, maybe it’s that, but by the middle of the third week, so two and a half weeks in, I was like, okay, whatever I’ve been trying to plug the holes with is not working. Something’s very wrong. And we never go this far into a month with this drop in performance, I need to freak out a little bit. I can’t just continue to try to plug the hole. I need to go something’s very wrong, we have to change something. We have to do something, instead of just like a normal optimizations, this negative keyword, that bit adjustment, whatever. It was more like nothing I’m doing normal was working. And I got to fix it because this is unacceptable. So that’s how I came to that point.
Chris Schaeffer:
This is the next question, I say. So once you’ve determined we’ve passed threshold, we’ve passed the line, moving into step two is going to be what has triggered this concern. I mean, I assume for you it was not just cost per click increased, or it was not just the conversion rate changed, or it was not just your position changed. It was a lot of things. So what combination of things really brought this to your attention?
Jason Rothman:
So step number two is the most important step in this list, because step number three, four and five are things that I found to be problems that are not obvious, that helped me turn things around. But other people in other accounts and other campaigns are running, they might find other problems that they find out fix things and turn things around. But a universal step is this step right now. So what change? Step number two is identifying what changed and where people go wrong is everything changed. Everything changes all the time.
Jason Rothman:
One of the great things about Google Ads is that there’s so many options for columns and data. One of the problems with Google Ads and where people slip up is that they focus on way too many things and they focus on the wrong pieces of data, because it’s all available. So sticking with a doctor metaphor here, my step number two is to figure out what changed, slow down and act like a doctor and their motto is do no harm. So that I think the doctors’ first rule is do no harm.
Jason Rothman:
So here’s where you can go wrong. You can go, “Okay, something’s wrong. Something’s screwed up. Something’s totally wrong. Oh, it’s average position. Oh, it’s search terms. Oh, it’s this keyword.” Here’s a great example. Chris, I know you’ve heard this from clients. “Well, everything’s getting worse, it’s getting worse. We need to pause all broad match modified keywords now and only run exact phrase match, or we need to close down the hatches, we need to only run exact match keywords. And maybe they’ll do a filter like show me exact match cost per conversion, show me phrase and broad cost per conversion. Phrase and broad’s a little higher in the last month and they go, “Pause phrase and broad.”
Jason Rothman:
And then they don’t think, “Wait, what if my top producing keyword that produces 20% of my conversions, that has a great cost per conversion better than exact match happens to be a phrase match but other phrase matches are influencing it?” And they pause their best keyword. So that’s where people go wrong. And that’s why I say in this step, slow down and do no harm.
Jason Rothman:
So because there’s so many options, there’s so many ways to go crazy and do wrong and totally change things up and do irreparable damage. You can’t repair some things where you change a bunch of keywords, you change our words and keywords, whatever, you get rid of great ads, do no harm. So how do you do no harm while also finding the prong? You focus on just three things, Chris. So the problem is conversions are down, leads are down, cost per conversions up. But the only three things that can play a role in that are search term quality, so you check your search term quality, cost per click, look at cost per click this month versus last month, look at cost per click this month versus the previous six months.
Chris Schaeffer:
Or the previous year, same time previous year.
Jason Rothman:
Or the trend of customer or the previous year conversion rate. Same thing, look at conversion rate this month versus last month, this month versus prior six months, this month versus month last year. And that’s it. That’s all you need to focus on to get started are search terms, cost per click conversion rate. Notice I did not say look at your cost per conversion column to fix things. Cost per conversion is the problem. Lead count conversions is the problem. Those are the symptoms, but we’re looking for what’s causing it, and bad symptoms can only be caused by search term quality, cost per click, conversion rate. So that’s where you get started. That’s where you slow down. That’s where you do no harm. So look at those three things. Do you think that’s important? Can you see people going wrong there doing a bunch of crazy things in their account? Not running on Mondays? Oh, now we’re going to take out Fridays. We only run Tuesday through Thursday. Oh, the two o’clock hour is great. So we’re going to increase our two o’clock bids 50%. There’s a lot you can do wrong. So do you like my three things to focus on?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, I do, I do. And I think it’s a very good idea to narrow to specific things, because two things in what you said. Number one is the example that you gave was where someone says, we should pause all of our broad keywords, show me the broad keywords and the exact keywords and the phrase keywords, show me the cost per lead for those, you’re essentially, you have a hypothesis in your head, you’ve already decided what the problem is, and then you’re finding the data to back up your reasoning. And that’s the wrong way to do it.
Chris Schaeffer:
If you approach it in the way that you’ve done it here, you’re going to find the problem rather than assuming the problem first, and then finding the data to back up your hypothesis. So I think that’s a great point. And number two, I want to just restate and then I’ll get to step number three. I want to restate what you said about search term quality number one, cost per click and conversion rate.
Chris Schaeffer:
I think two of those could be restated in a way that would make some people’s minds suddenly click into place here. Search term quality is a phrase that we use a lot but just to encompass 100 episodes, let’s say it this way. Consider the funnel of the keywords. Don’t just look at the fact that one of them may say near me, consider the funnel in a level at which that person’s searching. So you can’t just look at the word. You have to consider where that person is coming from. Search term quality is going to mean some continuing terms in all of the searches, you’re getting a lot of competitors. Is there a lot of qualification terms that are showing up? And then number two, cost per click, you say cost per click, but let’s define it in a different way. Cost per click means bidding, reconsider some of the ways that you’re bidding, perhaps there’s some data to show that you need to reassess your bidding.
Chris Schaeffer:
And I think looking back a year ago, looking back six months ago, you might realize that you’ve pigeonholed your keywords, and you kept bidding up and up and up on a lesser and lesser number of keywords. So you’ve gotten to the point you’ve increased your CPCs by 50% and you have 75% less keywords. You’ve forgotten to broaden your horizons with some other keywords along with increasing the successes. And so eventually, you end up being in this tiny little pigeonhole where you can’t go anywhere, you’ve buried yourself into a corner. So just to kind of restate there. Essentially, just another way of saying what you were saying, but branch out a bit further. So all right, step three. Jason, you’ve looked at these three points. Where is some of the first issues that you have? I assume we’re going to go to keywords first.
Jason Rothman:
Yeah. So for me, what this checklist is for, it’s for great accounts, longtime accounts that have been awesome for a long time, that all of a sudden really tank. So what I found with this account, and what I’m going to check for on this checklist going forward when a really great account turns bad are loose keywords. So the problem with this account is that we were doing great and the mindset was to grow, grow, grow, always grow. We’re getting a great cost per conversion. So let’s get more conversions. And let’s make more money and grow, grow, grow. So how do you do that if you’re targeting a market, if you’re running all day long, if you’re running all week long, if you’re running on all your keywords?
Jason Rothman:
You’ve got to loosen things up, you got to find different ways people search for things. So what we ended up doing is we ended up adding a lot of what I call loose, broad match modified keywords. On these ones, we were only modifying two, or sometimes just one word in the keyword phrase. And so sometimes we weren’t even modifying the correct word. So like say, we’re not correcting the most relevant word. So say, a keyword is like long distance movers, we might broad match modify the word distance. And that’s the only word in the phrase or say we do moving companies in Dallas, Texas. We might broad match modify only the word Dallas, just to see what the rest of that broad keyword brings in.
Jason Rothman:
There’s two reasons these ones were sneaking up on me and really hurting the quality. Number one, the first, there’s two reasons, the first was the clue. The clue was from the client. Right around the time things went south, I started hearing a lot of feedback about the quality of leads that were coming in and how they’ve never seen quality this bad. And I’m like the first couple weeks of the month, I’m like, “Hey, all I can do is show up on the keyword. Have you ever heard of the Paid Search Podcast? We’re ranked number 24, so please don’t tell me about quality. I’m targeting keywords, I’m getting you conversions. And I’m bringing leads. If you don’t like the leads, that’s your problem. That’s your people’s problem.”
Jason Rothman:
So that was two weeks of my life. And then I thought, “You know what, there’s a 1% chance I’m wrong and 1%’s happened.” So now I’m just kidding. But yes, the clue of them complaining about quality for the first time in a very long time, quality of leads at the same time, as things going south told me, I’m not seeing it at first glance, but something could be wrong with the quality. So the reason these broad match modified keywords are sneaky is because each one of them might get one or two clicks a month. But over hundreds of keywords, they add up over the course of the month. So every day, when you’re checking your search terms report, you’re going down and maybe at the very bottom, there’s one click, one impression search term that wasn’t the greatest, you add a negative.
Jason Rothman:
And then the next day, there’s one at the bottom, you add a negative, then there’s two, then there’s three, then they’re back to one. But they’re at the very bottom and it’s only one click and you’re like, “All right, two bad search terms out of 80 clicks a day, that’s a pretty good ratio, we’re okay, I’m just catching them, I’m adding them.” But well, you’re not seeing and then you’ve checked for prong keywords, you sort by cost over the last 60 days. And you look at your cost. And you’re like, “Okay, are any keywords getting a ton of cost and no conversions or a bad cost per conversion?” And you’re not catching it because one broad match modified loose keyword might have, say you’re going for a cost per conversion of 20. It might have spent $15 and no conversions. And then the next one might have spent $3 and no conversion and the next one might have spent $22 and no conversions.
Chris Schaeffer:
Spreading it out.
Jason Rothman:
You’re not catching it-
Chris Schaeffer:
You can’t catch it because it’s diluting the amount of destruction that it’s doing in the campaign, because it’s spreading out across-
Jason Rothman:
On each singular loose keyword, but because there’s hundreds of loose broad match modified keywords, you’re not seeing it. So that’s where the problem was. And so I figured that out, and what could be causing that? Well, it could have been happening the whole time or I could have raised bids on them at some point and now raise their ad rank score. And now they’re showing up more, and showing up on more stuff or people talk about similar intent or same intent or whatever Google says with like, okay, now when there’s an exact match keyword, we’re going to say it can also show up for this search or when there’s a broad match modified keyword, we’re going to say it can also show up for this search, because it’s similar meaning or whatever that term is.
Jason Rothman:
Chris, my point is, I don’t even remember what that meaning is, similar intent, same meaning whatever they call it, because here’s the deal. I don’t think about that when they come out with a press release saying they’re changing it. I think about that constantly. I am under the assumption that that black box mystery machine algorithm, what causes an exact match to show, what causes a phrase match to show, what causes a broad match modified or broad match to show, I’m under the assumption that that changes all the time and I never know when it changes.
Jason Rothman:
So one theory I have is that broad match modified loose was working three months ago, six months ago, a year ago. But I have a theory at some point, they change, they tweak something. And now I’m showing up on more crap. And I can’t prove that. I don’t know that. But I’m just going to be under the assumption that at all times, all things can change. And so I just made the decision, it could be that, it could be just there’s so much a deluge of traffic going to these broad match modified loose keywords, and each one is just getting a little bit of it, I’ll never really be able to know what the cost per conversion is from these keywords because it’s going to take forever for each one to get to my threshold.
Jason Rothman:
So I’m just going to tighten up the loose broad match modified keyword. So what I did, and you got to use editor, I used editor and I filtered for active ad groups, active keywords. broad match is the match type, includes the word say mover with no plus sign, but does not include the word mover with a plus sign. And so what that showed me is all my broad match modified keywords that don’t have the word mover modified. And then I found and replace and I replace mover to mover with a modifier. And I did that on my keywords in the keywords like the main words that I wanted to make sure are included in the search anytime we show up. And I just tightened up my broad match keywords and I also use the keyword word count, just to double check my work and make sure there’s no super small two word keyword phrases. And if there were, I checked their performance, and I pause them in a lot of cases, like two word broad match modified, some of those were bringing some really bad stuff.
Jason Rothman:
And I was able to find that because of your beautiful filter you told me about in Patreon last week, the keyword word count. So those are the two ways I use editor and clean things up. I know that’s a lot. But it’s just hard for me to explain this loose broad match modified check, because it’s not intuitive. It’s something I really had to come to.
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s beautiful. I like it. I mean, that’s something I’ve never considered is the masking of the negative impact of modified broad keywords that you have, maybe with one plus in them, or that they’re more-
Jason Rothman:
This account has lots of campaigns, thousands of keywords and it was just diffusing the pain. It was like bleeding to death by 1,000 cuts or whatever that saying is. I wasn’t catching it. And here’s the thing, at some point, it was working better, it must have been working better, because I’ve had loose BMM, loose broad match modified in there for a while. But all of a sudden things started going south. And so again, let’s go back in the checklist. What’s item number one? Stabilize the patient. So yes, Chris, maybe someone could argue, “Whoa, don’t turn off all those loose broad match modifieds that you’ve built up over the months and years, because that’s a lot of great keywords, and you need to look at those one by one and make sure you’re not turning off a great keyword.”
Jason Rothman:
Well, I’m saying, “Yeah, I probably am pausing or changing around a loose broad match modified. There’s one or two gems in there that are bringing in a lot of leads at a great cost per conversion. But I’ve got to stabilize the patient here. So if I’ve got to give up a couple great loose BMMs to pause hundreds of them or change hundreds of them to make them tighter, I’ve got to make that call right now because it’s about stabilizing the patient.”
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay, so I think that’s great. I like the idea, so loose keywords. And then step four, we’ve got two more steps here. Step four is going to have to do with ad groups. So we talked about something very specific when it comes to keywords. Keywords are directly associated with search terms. When we talk about ad groups, what we’re talking about is theming, grouping topics. Tell me about isolating specific topics and adjusting bids for these ad groups for step four.
Jason Rothman:
So there’s two things I think about in life now, Chris more, now that I’ve been working with you for three years doing this podcast. Number one, I constantly think about how frustrating it is to carry the load to do more work than your so-called partner, and then to split the money. So that’s something I’ve just been very frustrated by and never had to think about before, because I worked on my own totally. But now in this aspect of my overall work, I work with you. And I’ve just always thought for the last four years how excruciatingly frustrating it is to work with a partner. So that’s one thing that’s changed in my life. And you’ve kind of confirmed for me that I did make the right move to work on my own and run my own company and be self employed. Because working with someone else is so incredibly frustrating. So I think about that a lot.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay.
Jason Rothman:
Was that on the list?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, sorry. That’s not number four.
Jason Rothman:
People don’t like that awkwardness. Let me smooth it over. I’m sorry, Chris. I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it.
Chris Schaeffer:
And don’t worry. When I cry, it’s off camera and in a corner. So it’s fine.
Jason Rothman:
Okay, good. The second thing you made me think about a lot is ad groups. I had a total disregard and disrespect for ad groups until I started talking Google Ads strategy with you. God forbid, I’m going to admit this again because I haven’t brought it up in 30 episodes. I am a former [skagger 00:34:45]
Chris Schaeffer:
Skagger, tell them.
Jason Rothman:
Hi, my name is Jason and I skag.
Chris Schaeffer:
I used to skag, that’s right.
Jason Rothman:
I used to skag. And you changed my ways. And I’m telling you, Chris, I had a total disrespect for ad groups, house ads and keywords. Great. That’s all I thought about them. But the truth is, ad groups are crucial, because what I had to do on this account that is targeting many different types of things, and so I needed to isolate the cost per conversion in different topics that we’re targeting. So how do you do that with tons of campaigns and thousands of keywords?
Chris Schaeffer:
You can’t.
Jason Rothman:
You can’t because you can go, “Oh, I’m going to filter keywords by this word. And that means it’s hot topic.” Well, I’ve got other topics that also include that word. So it doesn’t work doing it by keywords.
Chris Schaeffer:
There’s always a crossover.
Jason Rothman:
I have to become a total-
Chris Schaeffer:
There’s always crossover.
Jason Rothman:
Yeah, there’s always crossover. And it’s too much to manage. Okay, so here’s the thing, someone could put out a zip file, Excel sheet, do a Pivot Table, find something really cool with a keyword data and go, “Oh, I’m going to adjust bids by the keywords and manage the topics by the keywords.” Well, good for you.
Chris Schaeffer:
Thanks, nerd.
Jason Rothman:
You know what’s a more effective strategy? Managing things by ad groups.
Chris Schaeffer:
There you go.
Jason Rothman:
And I’m telling you, Chris, what I did is I isolated the topics we’re targeting, through different filters at the ad group level. And here’s where manual bids come in. I had to stabilize things, dude. I had to stabilize things. So how are you going to do that if you don’t use manual bids? Now, here’s the thing, you can be doing automated all you want. But if things go south and you isolate at the ad group level for the different topics. And then you need to make the bids a certain thing for each of those topics, that’s what I did. I said, here’s a topic, this is what it’s worth to the client. Here’s the topic, this is what it’s worth. This is what the current cost per conversion is. This is what it is now. It’s not what it used to be. Things have gone south. This is what it is now.
Jason Rothman:
I don’t like that I’m having to lower the bids. But you know what I did? I lowered the bids. I lowered the bids at the ad group level, and I did it with manual bids. And that’s how I stabilize things.
Chris Schaeffer:
So what are you telling me?
Jason Rothman:
Isolated ad group level manual bids.
Chris Schaeffer:
But the beauty of this that you didn’t straight out say is that you went from an area of more complexity where you have keyword bids in place, to an area of less complexity, where you’re essentially just wiping these tons and tons of keywords bids, and just going with an ad group level and starting.
Jason Rothman:
So here’s the thing, I have become such a believer in ad groups, that primarily I bid at the ad group level.
Chris Schaeffer:
There you go.
Jason Rothman:
Okay, primarily, and I keep it that way. But over a large account, thousands of keywords, many months, many years, things happen. And you’re like, “Oh, there’s a great keyword, we got to get a little more of it.” The client goes, “Hey, I want to show up on this keyword.” And you’re like, “Dude, that’s not a good idea. But it only gets a few searches a month. So I’m just going to appease you. I’m going to jack up the bids on this one keyword.” But then Google changes the meaning of same exact match whatever. And that one keyword now starts showing up on more stuff. And so stuff like that happens. So what I did is I literally Chris, put my mouse on the filter button for keywords, all keywords. I checked it, I hit Edit, I hit change bid. I left it blank, I hit save. And it reset my keyword bids to the ad group level. And then I filtered my ad groups for the different topics and set them at conservative lower bids by topic.
Chris Schaeffer:
Ain’t that wonderful?
Jason Rothman:
And I’ve stabilized the situation. And here’s the deal, I stressed out for a week but now I have a checklist. And that’s such an easy move. That’s 10 minutes.
Chris Schaeffer:
So I mean, again, I said it and I’ll just say it a little bit different. Simplicity, I mean, you went from looking at this thing where it’s like, “Oh, this keyword’s a little higher than this.”, and you start looking at cost per click at individual keyword level.
Jason Rothman:
A lot of pressure by the way.
Chris Schaeffer:
Now you can just say, “Okay, clean slate.” Obviously, the world has changed for this PPC campaign, I have to address it differently. I cannot continue to do the same thing that I used to do. I might as well wipe these bids and start fresh. I think that’s it.
Jason Rothman:
I’ve got to stabilize the situation. And I’ve got to be conservative. I’ve got to lower the bids and build back up. And people go, “Well, what do you set your bids at? What do your set your bids at? Well look at the data. What is the average cost per click for that set of ad groups you’re filtering for? What do you want it to be? Maybe what do you think it’s going to be based on what it has been and just go a little lower, and then you’re all set.
Chris Schaeffer:
I love it. Okay, I feel like getting deep here. We only have one more step before we get into the just beautiful paywall where Jason’s going to just show his glory to everyone. And you’re going to miss out if you don’t have it, but $2 a month for Patreon. By the way, guys, I’m kind of playing that up really. We’ve given you the entire steak. And Jason’s going to cut the tip off and do it in Patreon. So I’m just playing with you guys. Okay, so step five, ads and talk ads. We’ve talked about search terms, keywords.
Jason Rothman:
This one’s too good. We need to put it out there. Should it go on Patreon? But this one is too good.
Chris Schaeffer:
You don’t want to share it, do it.
Jason Rothman:
Okay.
Chris Schaeffer:
So, Jason, I want you to take all the knowledge that you’ve gathered over this excruciating week and I want you to take it and give it away to everyone. It’s what you should do.
Jason Rothman:
Okay. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I’ll do it. So I call this step number five that you’re looking for. Again, this isn’t your run of the mill good campaign struggling. This is your very rare, great campaign built up over years or great account, and all of a sudden is doing horrible. So these are out of the way things you have to check for that wouldn’t be obvious because they were obviously fixing them already. So what I call this is deceptive ads. And here’s what was happening, Chris, good CTR, but horrible conversion rate ads were, and I use this word very purposely, I meant to use this word. They were destroying me.
Chris Schaeffer:
Wow.
Jason Rothman:
Okay. So over the past month, month and a half, two months, a client was like, “Hey, we need to try out this ad copy.” And I was like, “Dude, I see other people doing that ad copy. That’s good ad copy. That ad copy works. I think that’s great ad copy. We’re going to try it out.” And we rolled out this section of ad copy to thousands of ads. And intuitively, it made sense to me why this would be a great piece of ad copy. I saw other people doing it, social proof. Okay. And then they got great click through rates, confirmation bias.
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh boy.
Jason Rothman:
I thought that’s great ad copy, pleasing the client, I see other people doing it. And it’s getting a great click through rate, which is primarily how we’re trained to judge ads. Awesome. Let’s run it. And we ran it on everything. Great CTR, I thought it was working great. But what was happening is that the conversion rates with ads with this particular copy was horrible compared to ads without this copy. And I had a ton of data to back me up. But the problem is finding that data. So if you’re looking at one ad group, even if it’s your most high volume ad group, and you’re like, “Okay, this is that ad with the new copy, and it has a great click through rate.”, like you, Chris, I’d probably go, “Okay, I first look at click through rates. And then if I can’t make a decision judging ads in an ad group on click through rate, I’ll sometimes look at conversion rate.”
Jason Rothman:
I don’t do it that often. But I’ll sometimes look at it. And maybe I could have caught it on one or two ad groups. But we had rolled it out to everything. And there’s no way inside of Google Ads to go, except for editor. But there’s no way in the account to go show me ads with only this copy and show me the performance versus ads without this copy. So I finally, just because I’m great at what I do, I finally had the intuitive hunch to go, “Something’s wrong. Maybe it’s this copy.” And so what I did is I downloaded all the ads with the data for over a big time range. And I went into a Google Sheet and all I did was have the ad copy, and then a column of clicks and a column of conversions.
Jason Rothman:
And I filtered the ads for without that copy. And I said, “What are the ads without that copy clicks, and what are their conversions?”, and I divided conversions by clicks. And that’s my conversion rate for ads without that copy, and then I changed the filter. And I said, show me ads with that copy. And then I added up the click column for ads with that copy and added up the conversion column, and divided conversions by clicks. That’s my conversion rate for that specific ad copy across all the ad groups, wherever we’re running that ad.
Jason Rothman:
And it turns out, I was right. And the conversion rate was drastically worse on those ads with that copy compared to not having that copy. But the click through rate was fine with them. So I would have never caught it unless I’m going through this. So what I did is I went in, I got rid of that copy, changed it to not only that, Chris, but I was able because of this process, I was able to find ad copy that gives a great conversion rate. And so what I did is I just ran ads that only have that great copy. And then all of a sudden, my conversion rate went up. So this deceptive ad thing really did matter. It really was causing a problem.
Chris Schaeffer:
It has to do with the intent. What the person sees is all you have to consider all these keywords that we’ve been talking about, all these bids, the only thing that the person sees is the ad copy that you write. And if they like the ad copy, they will spend your money, done, they click, they’ve spent, it’s over. At this point, you’ve invested, you cannot get that click back. Either they’re going to convert or they’re not going to convert. I mean, that’s what it comes down to. Either it’s a good or bad. And when it comes down to ad copy, if the intent of the person is based on the ad copy that you’ve written, that is not the intent that you have on the landing page, you’re going to lose it, it’s going to be over because you’ve already invested in this person coming to your site and if they have the wrong idea about what they’re going to find, you’ve done yourself a disservice. They don’t care. They only last moments of their life by clicking on it. It’s nothing to them, but you’ve spent your money, and yeah, it’s huge.
Jason Rothman:
It matters. The clicks matter, they matter. And the joke I thought in my head was like, all right, if Chris is doing a plumbing search, and then a roofer didn’t have good keywords and showed up on a plumbing search, but had ad copy that wasn’t relevant to roofing, but said how to set your personal CrossFit PR record, Chris would be doing that plumbing search, get distracted by the CrossFit thing, click the ad, see that there’s a CrossFit site on the roofing site, wonder why he’s on the roofing site when he should have been looking for a plumbing site, and then go back to Google but the advertisers pay. So obviously that’s an extreme example.
Jason Rothman:
But what I was promising the search user with that ad copy, it really was not what we were delivering. It was telling them something we had. It was just different. It was confusing them. They were not getting what they were expecting. And so they were clicking, but they weren’t converting. So maybe someone goes, “Well, what if it was just the ad copy and not the broad match modified keywords? Or what if it was the broad match modified keywords, but it was just the base but you don’t have to mess with your ad copy? And what if your ad copy was good?”
Jason Rothman:
It’s about stabilizing. It’s about kind of hitting the reset button. And then you can go from there. So Chris, if this happens to me again, and it will, I’m going to go to this episode, I’m going to go down my five item checklist. I’m going to take care of this over one hour. I’m not going to ruin a week of my life. And by the way, I really did wake up super early in the morning, work super late at night, not get enough sleep. And I’m too old for that. My body can’t, I used to be able to do it. I can’t do it anymore. I got sick.
Chris Schaeffer:
65 is, you can’t do that.
Jason Rothman:
It was super stressful. But this is how I did it. This is how I did these five steps.
Chris Schaeffer:
All right. Well, Jason, that is beautiful. Thank you. I like that. I don’t think that we would have come up with such a poignant step by step discussion if you hadn’t suffered. Suffering is a beautiful thing merely for the change and the metamorphosis that happens after. I want to thank you for your suffering because it’s made us all stronger. So Jason-
Jason Rothman:
That’s what I’m here for.
Chris Schaeffer:
For those that are suffering out there, there is hope, opteo.com/psp, that is your suffering pill, take it. It will help you. It is an online tool to help you with your Google Ads. Once you go through this list, you get things stabilized, it can help you take it further. It can help you get it stabilized, because maybe it will save you from getting your whole campaign screwed up. Go check it out, get a six week extended trial. We thank them for their sponsorship of this podcast. And we’re about to jump into the Patreon show where Jason has a couple more things. I have a couple things to share. And before I let you guys go, because, hey, Jason has talked the whole time. And I have one thing to say, Jason, I just want to say extremely good content here. I appreciate you sharing it because essentially, you wrote this whole thing and said, “Chris, shut up and listen to me.” And I said, “Yes, sir.” And it’s been great.
Jason Rothman:
I said, “Chris, shut up and interview me. Shut up and ask me questions.”
Chris Schaeffer:
Shut up and ask you questions. So one thing I want to say is, one thing you got entirely wrong is you said, CrossFit personal PR record. I just want to say PR stands for personal record. So redundancy in personal PR record isn’t credibly embarrassing. Please don’t say that again. It’s your PR. So your squat PR or your deadlift PR. So I am entirely embarrassed. I’m going to, I have to think about whether I want to continue with this show. But until then-
Jason Rothman:
We really have to think if we can have you back at our gym. We’re going to think if we’re going to have you back at our open air garage where we lift the door and take pictures per incident because we work half inside half outside. It’s like an indoor outdoor thing. We got a great deal on the rate, and that’s the thing about CrossFit.
Chris Schaeffer:
Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you guys next week.
Jason Rothman:
You don’t need a big box gym experience.