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Show notes:
We’ve all been there. We’re running a great Google Ads campaign for a client or employer, we’re getting them great results, and then they say those three little words, “it’s not working.” This can be very frustrating. You’re getting them great results, but they’re not getting it or understanding the value you’re providing. So what do you do? We’ve broken this problem down into three scenarios, based on how many conversions are being reported, and we give advice for how to convey the value in each situation. We hope this helps, and we hope you enjoy the episode!
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. Yes, welcome back to the Paid Search Podcast, the number one podcast about Google Ads, pay-per-click marketing. My name is Jason Rothman. As always I’m joined by my co-host and partner here, the great Chris Schaeffer. Chris, how is it going today on this beautiful Thursday as we record this?
Chris Schaeffer:
Summer is coming to an end. I had a very wonderful time. We’ve got some rain. It’s very nice here in Texas. When people ask me how I am, I immediately ignore that question and just talk about the weather. I think that says a lot about how much I want to share. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed that, but most of the time when people ask me how you are, I don’t ever want to actually tell them because I don’t care about them and they don’t care about me, but they just ask that question. So I don’t know. Happy day to you, Jason.
Jason Rothman:
I would say I do care how you are. We talked a little bit-
Chris Schaeffer:
Well, not you.
Jason Rothman:
… before the show.
Chris Schaeffer:
Right.
Jason Rothman:
Well, you still gave me the weather thing.
Chris Schaeffer:
I know. But billion people are listening, that’s why.
Jason Rothman:
And a billion people are listening and some just tuned in now. So everyone reset here. You’re listening to the Paid Search Podcast. No, Chris. I would say I talked to you before the show. I would say you’re doing better than average. You’re having a good week. You’re having a relaxed week. Everything is running smooth.
Chris Schaeffer:
It is.
Jason Rothman:
Your trains are running on time.
Chris Schaeffer:
If you looked at my to-do list right now which I keep on the right side of my screen and it’s always there, it’s completely empty right now, completely empty. So it is a wonderful day actually, and the weather just makes it even better. So let me tell you how you guys can have an even better, day, week, month and year because your Google Ads will start kicking butt. Finally, you can have some success with opteo.com/psp. This is called opteo.com/psp. This is the tool that you can use to get that little idea in your corner. You’re like, “I don’t know what to do with this. I need some help, I need some tips, I need some analytics that look fresh that show me a new perspective.”
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s what this tool can do for you. It shows you metrics and graphs, and ideas, and tips and recommendations that go beyond the typical Google Ads recommendations. These are some really cool things developed by an independent team of people, and we think it’s a great tool, you should check it out, opteo.com/psp. Tell them you’re a PSP listener on the chat. There’s a little chat there, you can click it and say, “Hey, can I have an extra two weeks of the free trial?” They’ll give it to you, just because you said you’re a fan of the show. So check it out. Get a six week extended trial and try the tool out for yourself.
Jason Rothman:
Thank you, Chris. And I want to start off today’s episode which we will be talking about how to convey the value of Google Ads to pay-per-click clients when they say the magic words, and we’ll get to that in a second but I want to start off with our Apple podcast review of the week.
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, yeah.
Jason Rothman:
This one comes from Neil in Connecticut in the great United States of America. He appreciated those very flattering words I said about our country a few weeks ago, and I save those words every day, especially every day when I wake up, every day when I go to bed. I love this country.
Chris Schaeffer:
Will you say the Pledge of Allegiance right when you wake up with the flag over your bed and everything?
Jason Rothman:
When I start my day, yeah.
Chris Schaeffer:
Absolutely.
Jason Rothman:
Five stars, entertaining and informative. “I’ve just recently started a Google Ads campaign for my business and this podcast has been my go-to resource. Jason could probably have a second career as a stand-up comedian. Chris, well not so much, but he balances his dry sense of humor with endless knowledge. Keep up the good work.” Neil in Connecticut in the great United States of America. Neil, my fellow American, thank you for that review.
Chris Schaeffer:
Did you add anything to that? Is that really… Because I’m not looking at the review. [crosstalk 00:04:07]
Jason Rothman:
No. I’ll send it to you. I didn’t add any.
Chris Schaeffer:
You didn’t add it? Because I’m not even going to click the link because I’m that lazy, but okay. Wow.
Jason Rothman:
No, I promise you, yeah.
Chris Schaeffer:
Neil, obviously listens because he knows that my humor is not that sharp, but it is very dry.
Jason Rothman:
What I like about your humor, Chris is you take shots with your humor, you take some deep digs sometimes, and sometimes they connect and they’re funny, and all that, and people laugh. And sometimes they totally miss everybody’s humor and they just come off as like in a very angry offensive, just blunt statement, and that’s what you never know which one you’re going to get.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. I believe I sent you that screenshot yesterday of one of those that I just love Facebook. Not for the advertising, not for the content, not for the networking, but because I can leave snide remarks on people’s posts.
Jason Rothman:
Yup. Well, Chris, we’re doing a lot of great things at the Paid Search Podcast. One of interesting things going on, so first of all on our website for all our listeners, the first 100 episodes are not on the podcast feed, but they are full disclosure. Most of those episodes are somewhere on YouTube, on our channel probably, most of them, but if you want the audio experience, we set up a store, store.paidsearchpodcast.com, and right now it has 11 or 12 of the first episodes on there. Eventually we’re going to get to all 100 over the coming days and what you can do is you can select out the exact episodes you want, add them to your cart, buy them and have them, and listen to them, and if you prefer audio to YouTube.
Jason Rothman:
So I want to let everyone know about that. And then I also wanted to let everyone know about the forum, forum.paidsearchpodcast.com. It is picking up. Everybody’s invited. Come on in. We’re talking Google Ads, we’re talking Bing, Facebook, pay-per-click, the business of PPC. And just this week, Chris, someone was on there and he was asking about how to find keywords for his very specific industry. He was advertising. Like very specific. And we had some great posts in there and he got some great ideas, and now he’s going to improve his campaign.
Jason Rothman:
So that’s the whole point of it. And so come on there as people, your pay-per-click questions, and also give advice to people. So I want to share that. Now, Chris, I also want to tell people, call into the show 214-810-1355, leave us a voicemail question or the contact page of paidsearchpodcast.com. Leave us a question. Every few weeks, we do Q&A episode, and so I want to encourage everyone to do that. So Chris, with that said we are getting into the tender meat of today’s episode.
Chris Schaeffer:
Medium rare.
Jason Rothman:
And let me just start it this way, the magic words every Google Ads freelancer agency person has heard from a client or in-house employee has heard from their boss. I don’t think Google Ads is working. Those are the magic words and today we’re going to give you some jujitsu, a very tactical strategy for how you can put their complaint, their concern I should say into one of three buckets, address their concern and fix a problem, and prove the value of Google Ads. So Chris, a client tells you, “I don’t think Google Ads is working.” Please clarify for the audience today are we talking about Google Ads is not working? “Yes, you’re right, client,” or are we talking about, “No, I think we’re actually doing a great job on Google Ads, it’s just a matter of conveying it to you and helping you understand what’s going on. Which bucket are we falling in here?
Chris Schaeffer:
Right. So today it’s a bit different because we’re not talking about how you can improve it. That’s what we do 99% of the time. We’re taking a step out of that role and today we’re saying, “Actually, hang on, client. I’ve been working on this for six months. I’ve been listening to the Paid Search Podcast. It is working. Let me show you how it’s working.” So this is our way of conveying how we communicate to our clients. Just to be clear, I have my clients, Jason has his. We don’t work together but Jason I both agree that this question is asked a lot, and this is how we approach it.
Chris Schaeffer:
And when you approach it you’re going to fall into one of three categories. Situation number one is going to be there’s a lot of conversions on the account. I mean, that’s it. I’m not talking about any other details, but they say it’s not working and you look at the account, and there’s a bunch of conversions. You can define what a bunch is for you. It might be 15 a month or it might be 300 a month. It depends on the client, the type of lead you’re getting, but there’s a lot of data.
Chris Schaeffer:
Plenty of data for the money you’re spending, okay? That’s situation number one. Situation number two, there’s just a few. I mean, there’s a moderate amount of conversions and you’re still convinced that it’s doing well so we’ll talk about how to approach that question, how to defuse that situation if there’s just a few conversions because it’s a little bit harder to show value when there may not be quite as much proof and movement in the campaign. And then number three, I would say more of the tactical jujitsu. This is going to be more complicated because you’re basically going to have to convince someone when situation three, there’s no conversions. You don’t have any conversions.
Chris Schaeffer:
And this happens. I don’t want to act like this is your fault. Jason, I have plenty of campaigns that are running great and have a big fat zero on the conversion, and I’ve had them for years and they work well and clients are extremely happy. So I don’t want to talk like this is some failure. There are plenty of situations when you just can’t track it. They don’t have the means to track the forms, they don’t want to change their phone number and you basically just have to ping them and say, “Hey, how are things going? The lead is working for you? You’ve been getting good stuff?” And they’ll give you the answer.
Chris Schaeffer:
So that happens all the time. So we’re going to go through each one of those situations, and here’s the thing. This is particularly useful for freelancers, managers, agencies but it’s also useful for people who are running their own accounts. They don’t necessarily have a client, but they’re running their own account either in-house or they’re a one-man shop and they’re doing it themself.
Chris Schaeffer:
So you’re going to take this information and process it through your account and figure out, okay, what is it that I think, or my client thinks, or my boss thinks that’s, quote-unquote, “not working”, and let’s apply this filter through it to figure out what the answer might be. So it should be fun to talk about, Jason. I know you’ve you’ve heard it plenty of times. Maybe less than me. Maybe less than me.
Jason Rothman:
Well, one thing. That was very validating with the forum this week is someone posted some interesting data there and the conversion rates were like 20%, 35%, 40% on multiple campaigns and I was like, “Oh, yeah.” You like that Chris? All of us great freelancers out there getting the 30s, the 40s.
Chris Schaeffer:
40s.
Jason Rothman:
And I could hear you in my head, “Yeah, yeah but what kind of conversions are they?”
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. What’s the [crosstalk 00:11:17]?
Jason Rothman:
Yeah. I mean, I do get great conversion rates, but I also hear this from time to time including this week. My back is up against the wall to be honest. I’m battling. We had some accounts go south on us. I don’t know if it has to do with similar meaning or anything like that, but some things change on broad match modified, and my friend, I would like to get that off my chest and run that by you, and get some advice-
Chris Schaeffer:
Let’s do that.
Jason Rothman:
… and tell you what I did on Patreon.
Chris Schaeffer:
Let’s do that, yeah.
Jason Rothman:
I’m the best in the game. Chris is right up there. I’ve got a 15,000 square-foot house.
Chris Schaeffer:
Mine is only 14.
Jason Rothman:
That’s a funny joke. And I don’t hear it often, but you know what, Chris to be clear to people, best in the game, highest on the mountain. I hear this all the time too. This, Google Ads is not working, quote, “magic” words from clients. Even the best in the game hears it a lot. The reason is because people spend money on Google. They see the money going out all the time and some people are just not good at business. They can’t conceptualize like, “Okay, a lot of money is going out but as we get those leads and as those leads turn into revenue, and the revenue flows through the business, it pays for itself and more, and multiple, but a lot of people get hung up on the money going out.”
Jason Rothman:
And when they’re looking for something to attack that credit card getting pinged every day is a nice place to grab their attention. So I hear it a lot too. Now, Chris, first bucket. A client comes to you, “Hey, Google Ads isn’t working,” but you know as the person managing it, “No, it is working.” First bucket, you’re reporting a lot of conversions, a lot of conversions are getting reported. What happens at this point? How do you go, “Hey, we’re getting conversions”? How do you show them… And maybe they know they’re getting conversions because they get their report too, but they’re still telling you, “Hey, it’s not working.” So what’s the problem.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. So for something like this, if someone says it’s not working and I have a lot of conversions, the very first thing is there’s a disconnect between conversions and value. So just because I see numbers on my screen, doesn’t mean that every time there’s an increase in that number means that they’re seeing anything on their end. Now, this is not necessarily going to be true for some people that run e-commerce stores that literally have values assigned to every conversion they get.
Chris Schaeffer:
In reality, I’ve worked a lot of e-commerce, it’s the minority of e-commerces that can show a super positive e-commerce return every time they get a click. This is a white tiger type of situation. You have to really work to get into something like that. So today what I’m talking about is when you have that disconnect between exactly how much value one conversion is worth and you’re looking at the search terms and you see plumber near me, or divorce attorney. That’s the search.
Chris Schaeffer:
But they’re saying I know that was a conversion, but my phone is ringing, but my books aren’t showing more clients signing up. It seems like I keep getting phone calls but I don’t have more clients than I did a year ago when I wasn’t doing Google Ads. So for me, the big thing here, and the way that I lay it out for them I say, “Well, look at this.” I show them the leads.
Chris Schaeffer:
So there’s lots to look at. I break out the leads into different categories and say, “Look, there’s divorce attorney and then there’s marriage and family attorneys. And then there’s family law in Burlington, attorneys something like that. So you get more and more specific different types of ways that people search. It might be 15 of these, 12 of these, 16 of these different categories and I say, “What is it that is more valuable to you? What do the calls sound like when you hear this?”
Jason Rothman:
That’s a great move. If I’m hearing you right, you tell them, “Hey, yeah. We’re getting a bunch of conversions, a bunch of leads.” But you the business owner is saying those leads aren’t turning into enough revenue, enough new business for you. So let’s not freak out, let’s not stop advertising. Let’s figure out where our leads are coming from and maybe get more of the leads from people in the top 20% of income, get more of the leads from people searching father’s rights, attorney, divorce attorneys because that’s your most profitable client, that kind of thing.
Jason Rothman:
You’re a mover. Instead of getting leads from office, from long distance, from residential, hey, let’s just get from office and long distance and spend our AdWords money on our biggest revenue jobs. Is that where you’re going?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, because this is not an e-commerce store, divorce attorney might actually be worth $10 elite because it takes 20 leads to get one client for them. They’re very general. You have no idea, the quality of person that’s searching divorce attorney and then clicking and converting. Yes, they converted but then there has to be a phone call, there has to be a follow-up, there has to be sign on the dotted line kind of stuff and divorce attorney may not work. But father’s rights, I mean it’s a very good example. Father’s rights divorce attorney or criminal law attorney specializing in drugs, stuff like that is much more specific and if they say, “Yeah, I’m really good at those.”
Chris Schaeffer:
Basically, everybody who calls me I can close it. Now, you’ve found the disconnect. Perfect. I’m going to basically divert the budget and even though… And this is the hard part. This is where you have to bite the bullet for me. I have to pause a keyword like divorce attorney that might have a 15% conversion rate, and push the money into something that has a 3% conversion rate. That sounds crazy, right? It’s hard to do, but the fact is you have to do it because there is a difference between the value of one lead and the value another, even if it’s a black and white difference between conversion rates on what you’re seeing. You can’t just go after the lowest hanging fruit.
Jason Rothman:
It’s a great point. Like you’re saying, it’s difficult to do as a person who’s in Google Ads accounts all day long, laser focused on most conversions possible, laser focused on lowest cost for conversion. So what happens to me sometimes is I have clients like talked about with the movers, they do different kinds of niches in their overall service, different types of clients come in.
Jason Rothman:
And one client might be worth a cost per conversion of 40 and one client might be worth the cost per conversion of 200. And as the Google Ads person there every day I’m like, “Oh, look at all these juicy $40 conversions versus the $200 conversions.” I’m going to flow the budget to the cheaper costs per conversion, get more conversions overall, but then that’s where the Google Ads isn’t working, it’s not profitable. Well, let’s think outside of Google Ads. Let’s think offline in the real business, what leads are we getting.
Jason Rothman:
Maybe those $200 leads even though they’re five times more expensive, and it makes my Google Ads data look worse, they bring in a lot more revenue for the client and one of them is more valuable. So it’s either the amount of value that comes with a lead from a different service or a different search firm, a different person or the close ratio how many of those leads it takes to turn into an actual revenue paying customer or client. So I think that’s a great way to look at it Chris.
Jason Rothman:
The only thing I can add to situation number one where there are a lot of conversions in the account is sometimes showing people visually what those conversions look like helps convey the value of Google Ads. So what I mean by that is instead of having one line item that says conversions and then a number 30, I like to show people the phone call report from the call details and it shows them whoa, here’s 30 phone calls that came in this month. Here’s seven of them that lasted at least five minutes. And oh, we missed three of them during business hours. Why did that happen? When someone missed the call are we following up?
Jason Rothman:
Seeing those conveys the value and then taking that one step further is a whole another conversation, but tracking exactly who called in, exactly who filled out the form and then the business owner being able to see that list and go, “Oh, yeah. That person became a revenue paying client. Oh, that person became a moving job.” That person became a divorce client, whatever, seeing that those conversions that don’t mean much to them as a business owner actually did become paying customers.
Jason Rothman:
Sometimes that can cross the bridge and they can go, “Oh, yeah. I spent $1,000 on Google Ads this month.” But I know just that one divorce attorney client brought in $3,000 to my firm this month. We’re up 2,500. And that’s just one of the leads. So it’s showing them conveys a value. So I think that pretty much covers it for when there’s a lot of conversion, Chris.
Chris Schaeffer:
One thing, I’ll say. Just one last note on this, let’s swap the table and let’s say we’re not speaking to the manager, we’re talking to the business owner, the person making the decision that’s asking that question and say that’s me. And I don’t know how to have that conversation. One of the things I see the most that happens, I do a lot of consulting. I do consulting work, training, online with a lot of companies that don’t want to do management, they just don’t want to do consulting.
Chris Schaeffer:
I see this a lot. I just saw it this week, where I jump into a campaign, and they say we need help. And I jump in and I see amazing numbers of conversions, and I see a huge complex number of campaigns, keywords, ad groups, and it just looks like wow. I mean, this is… I’m not going to be able to help these guys. They’re obviously at a super high level of precision. Then I jump in, and I look through, and this is all I do. I go to the entire campaign level, I click search terms, and then I sort by conversions, and I look and surprise, surprise 80%, 70% of their leads have their brand name, that’s it.
Chris Schaeffer:
So of course they see a ton of conversions, situation number one but essentially it conveys no value. Their books are not up any more than they were yesterday because basically only 20% of the leads they’re getting are actually new customers. Everybody else is just searching their name over again.
Jason Rothman:
So when they think their cost per conversion is say $40, it’s actually five times that.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, exactly.
Jason Rothman:
because the brand ones were mostly “coming anyway” problem?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. I mean, the brand people are going to find you anyway, and you shouldn’t be tracking that. And what happens is it turns out they have a super sloppy set up and there’s broad keywords, and the broad keywords of course are picking up broad searches for their brand name, and that’s it. It turns out to be… Even though the complexity is there, it turns out to be a super a job that’s basically being maintained by brand stuff and that would be a situation one instance.
Jason Rothman:
Throwing that bucket of course like, okay, what are the conversions? Are they soft like newsletter, signups or are they hard?
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s a good one.
Jason Rothman:
Five-minute phone calls, lead forms, that kind of thing. So I think those two last categories would fall into, “Oh, you actually thought Google Ads was working, but it actually isn’t working at least the way you think it’s working when you looked under the hood and explored it. So if you’re the business owner, I guess our advice is like don’t just look at that top level conversion, ask yourself what do those conversions mean, where are they coming from? And that can guide you on whether or not it’s doing as well as you think.
Jason Rothman:
So Chris, situation number two. There are only a few conversions in the account.
Chris Schaeffer:
It gets tougher and tougher.
Jason Rothman:
And the client is saying, “Hey, it’s not working,” and you’re going, “I think it’s working pretty good.” But this one sounds harder to have that conversation because you don’t have as much ammo. You don’t have as many conversions to prove it to them. So what’s going on here?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. So, Jason, into the second one, I think it is significantly more difficult in the second situation where we have less conversions because it’s almost as if it’s showing a lot coming in and less coming out. Situation three is no conversions at all which there’s nothing to prove there, it’s just not working, right? There’s no conversions, and so you can… You have a pretty good case that, “Well, we’re just not tracking, but it’s working really well for you.”
Chris Schaeffer:
But if there’s less conversions, it is working, but it’s doing very little of the working, of the conversion numbers. So it’s a tough situation to prove. And this just comes down to, I think, the best time to use something like this is when we talk about search terms, right? Chris and Jason’s favorite thing to pick on because it comes down from-
Jason Rothman:
Our most popular episode ever, Chris by downloads.
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, yeah.
Jason Rothman:
Search terms and manual bids, my rant episode on those two topics. That’s the most popular.
Chris Schaeffer:
We broke down the core thing of what you need to do to get every campaign working really well is to focus on search terms, and then just manage those bids independently. And that’s exactly what you have to point to, to say here, look at your search terms. Is this what you sell? Is this what you do? And if it’s not then oops, great opportunity for you to fix that, right? But go through with them the account of the search terms and say is this valuable to you? Is this valuable?
Chris Schaeffer:
And most of the time, if you’ve gotten it half right, they’ll say yes half the time, right? So now you have somewhere to improve, and you’ve proven value for at least half of it and you probably haven’t lost your job yet because you say okay great, I’m going to take these items, push less on them or block them completely, and push more on the things that do drive value for you.
Chris Schaeffer:
Just a quick tip, Jason before I’ll let you comment on this is one time I had a client who just wasn’t buying it. They’re like no. I don’t know if it’s good or not. They just are like well, so what. What’s that matter? We get 10 million people coming from… Not 10 million, 10,000 people coming from organic, I think.
Jason Rothman:
The funniest thing is that they called you to do Google Ads.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, they hired me.
Jason Rothman:
They wanted to do it. And then it’s like, “Chris, we don’t think there’s value here. We don’t know if we want to…” You called me.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Right. Well, here’s the thing. What I did is I pulled up their Google Analytics and I looked at the organic. Jason, they’re right. They got a lot of organic traffic, but do you know what that organic traffic was? Say it with me, brand, brand, brand, brand, brand. And that’s all it was. It was just the same thing, people looking for the same brand keywords over and over again, and then I put that side by side next to my search terms, which are no brand, which are actually just product searches of people who have never heard of them looking for their solution, their product, their service whatever and it is a stark difference. There’s your value. Way to go.
Chris Schaeffer:
You are getting the lowest hanging fruit with your organic, while paid traffic is getting the real meat, right? It’s getting the stuff of people looking for what you actually sell. So just a little tip thereon as far as search terms goes. If you do run into a brick wall.
Jason Rothman:
Yeah. So if only a few conversions, that usually means for whatever reason aren’t able to get conversion tracking setup in all places or at least reliably or whatever. So that’s my same approach, Chris is just conveying to the advertiser just how much is under our control. Number one, search terms are under our control. We can only show up and get clicks when someone’s searching for exactly what you offer. How do you beat that and that’s got at least to be producing something, and by the way your budget is 100% controllable anytime.
Jason Rothman:
So if you only want to invest a small amount and see how business does, you can do it. And your bids, and cost per click are to a large extent under our control, and if you think those search terms are worth the $10 cost per click, then we can get that. If you think they’re worth $7 cost per click, if we can get the 10 we can probably get the seven and probably spend your full budget. If you think they’re only worth the three dollar cost per click, all right, we may not be able to spend the full budget, but we can see how well we can go, and get you to a place where you’re comfortable.
Jason Rothman:
It’s all under our control. So that’s the search term/control, focus area of it and trying to get people to buy in that way. The other option is to flow the budget to what you can get conversions on. So if it’s an advertiser who has a phone number that is some kind of known phone number and they are so against tracking numbers, and all this kind of stuff, they’re never going to let you track phone calls.
Jason Rothman:
What you can do is you can go, “All right, if we’re not going to be able to do that, but you still want to see proof, you want to see conversions, let’s send it to the website and track lead forms. Let’s send it to a landing page with no phone numbers and track lead forms.” Conversely, if you can’t get the tracking code on your website for lead forms, let’s track calls from ads, let’s run call only ads, let’s try to get phone calls, let’s set up a landing page with no lead form and only phone call tracking.
Jason Rothman:
So you can direct the budget to spend where the conversions are coming in. That’s something you can do. So those are my two roads that I go down there. Search terms and control over everything. And also with that, Chris you can make estimates. So you can be like, okay, we are getting 5% conversion rate calls from ads. We’re not tracking calls on website. We’re not tracking lead forms. That’s due to you, the advertiser. But if we’re getting 5% on calls from ads and it’s reasonable to assume these perfect search terms would get another 5% of conversions calls from ads and lead forms.
Jason Rothman:
Let’s be conservative, call it 7, 8% conversion rate 10% overall and let’s look at what our cost per conversion would be if we were getting that data, and just estimate things that way. So you can go down that road or you can try to flow the budget to areas you can get conversion, tracking on. But, Chris, I would agree situation too is the most difficult because it leaves something there with some conversions, but it doesn’t give you all of them.
Jason Rothman:
Situation three, they’re spending a thousand a month, they’re spending 5,000, they’re spending 500 or whatever, and they come to you saying Google Ads is not working, and you see that conversion column and it says zero. And you’re not getting any conversions. So what happens there?
Chris Schaeffer:
So of course, you could say, “Well, we’re not tracking conversions and we need to do that.” And if you’re bringing that up for the first time that’s bad. So you should have brought that out probably at the beginning because you will eventually come to this conversation. If you’ve never bring up conversions they will always ask, “So tell me how what the campaign is going? I mean, how many of calls have we got?” They want to know those things and if you can’t provide it, oops, you probably should have at least breached that topic. So assuming you’ve brought that and there’s some inhibitor for that. There’s some reason they don’t want to do it, you’re not able to do it, website issues, whatever, technology.
Chris Schaeffer:
Now, we’re left of course with search terms, but we’ve already discussed search terms. So I’m not even going to put that into this third situation. Let’s go beyond search terms. Let’s get even more creative, okay? One thing that I always jump to is I have to show that people are reacting to the ad first. That’s click-through rate, okay? People are responding to it so it seems… This is a pretty weak argument, but you’re getting a good click-through rate.
Jason Rothman:
Which shows relevance.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, it does. It’s not your strongest, but don’t ever start with your strongest anyway. And the number two, get into the fact that hey, we’re beating the competitors, show them auction insights, search impression share, stuff like that. I know you may not think it’d be working, but all your other advertisers are out there doing it, and look at your position. You’re beating them on these kind of searches. That’s a little better. And then number three, assuming you’re doing a good job, your analytic metrics are going to be good. Your bounce rate. Hopefully, have a bounce rate that’s below 70. If you have a landing page that’s going to be-
Jason Rothman:
Yeah, search campaign.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, if you’re going to have a landing page that’s going to be a tough call because they’re going to be on the site just a few seconds. It’s going to be like a 99% bounce rate.
Jason Rothman:
Are you saying a website that’s a great looking website where people can flip to their page of choice and learn more about your company might be a better option in some situations than one page, that looks like everybody else’s one page? Are you saying that?
Chris Schaeffer:
I’m telling you, I become less and less of a fan of this landing page movement.
Jason Rothman:
Squeeze.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, the squeeze page. The drip marketing.
Jason Rothman:
I don’t like to squeezes and I don’t like to be squeezed. I don’t like to drip. I don’t like being dripped on. I don’t like to get squeezed from anywhere.
Chris Schaeffer:
Drips and squeezes.
Jason Rothman:
I like options. When I go to a business website and I’m thinking of doing business with that person, I want to read their about page. I want to read their blog. I want to get to know them.
Chris Schaeffer:
I’m about to spend money on this.
Jason Rothman:
But, hey, that’s just me. That’s just me.
Chris Schaeffer:
You know what it is? You know what our conflict is? Our conflict, I’ve always felt for me is professional versus personal, right? Professional me says I would love to squeeze these conversions right down through this trackable system so that I can see this amazing report with all these leads.
Jason Rothman:
Drip, drip, drip.
Chris Schaeffer:
Right? It looks great. Every call they get, I track it and it looks amazing on my report. But personal me says, as soon as I land on a page like that, I freaking click off. I’m done. I’m like, nope, no or I delete the URL and I retyped their actual URL, and go back to their home page and start there. That’s what personal me says. So personal me starts to win out over professional. That’s usually my thoughts.
Jason Rothman:
Did we do a great debate? I think we did a great debate.
Chris Schaeffer:
I don’t know if it was a debate, but I think we did a topic.
Jason Rothman:
I think we might have debated. We might have.
Chris Schaeffer:
I don’t know. I know you have a feeling for debates coming up soon.
Jason Rothman:
The longer this show goes on, the older we get, the worse our memories get, and it all just becomes hazy.
Chris Schaeffer:
You’re listening to the Paid Search Podcast on the internet brought to you by opteo.com/psp.
Jason Rothman:
I mean, that’s how the conversation would go with a client. You start trying to tell them about analytics, and they’re like, “Dude, I’m spending $5,000, and you’re telling me about a 70% bounce rate.”
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.
Jason Rothman:
That said some clients are going to see the value their people spending three minutes and 50 seconds on average on their website when they come from a search click versus some other methods of traffic. You know I like to talk about them. I might say one second. Some people might see the value there and some might not, but I do agree with you, Chris. Showing them the analytics data and good analytics data especially time on site, I think that’s a big one. I approach situation three where there are no conversions as I do as a business owner advertising for myself.
Jason Rothman:
I run a lot of remarketing campaigns. Some of them which I’ve talked about in the past, get direct leads, great conversions, and then some of my more general remarketing, I don’t know why. They don’t get any conversions. I’ll put it this way. At least reported conversions. But the interesting thing is two things. Number one, just like you said you would tell a client as a person spending my own money advertising, I do go into Google Analytics that’s linked to Google Ads and I look at my remarketing campaign and I look at time on site, I look at pages per visit, I look at bounce rate.
Jason Rothman:
It really does show me value when I see a good bounce rate and a good time on site and many pages visited or per visit when I’m spending money on especially display. And also sometimes on search, I also judge it that way. So I do buy into that. The other thing is overall business. Say you’re not getting any recorded conversions, and again I run a lot of remarketing. Sometimes it doesn’t bring in any conversions, but I’ve talked about this before I don’t know why. I have theories why, but I can’t really verbalize it.
Jason Rothman:
But when I spend money on remarketing business goes up. I get more calls. I get more leads. I get more business. I get more people filling out forms on my website, want to work with me. Chris, if I’m running remarketing and you know what I do with my frequency limits, I don’t have frequency limits. And someone sees me 50 times that week and they’ve been on my website in the last 30 days, it’s not about someone. It’s about thousands of people seeing me 50 times a week, a couple of them is all I need.
Jason Rothman:
They’re going to come to my website organically. They’re going to come to my website after being on the Paid Search Podcast, other business properties online if you have talking to business, the advertisers out there. They’re going to come from your social. And just some of them are going to get in touch with you if you run a store. Some of them are going to come into the store and maybe they never clicked on your remarketing ad. Or maybe they clicked on it once 29 days ago, but something about overall business just picks up.
Jason Rothman:
So what you can tell the advertiser is “Hey, blankety-blank, look at your revenue this time last year. Look at your revenue now. You’re only spending a thousand dollars on Google Ads. Your revenue is up $50,000, $35,000.” Is it because of the $1,000 you spend on Google Ads with these great search terms on this nice great remarketing campaign? Probably not all 30,000 growth is not from that 1,000. But something is. Something seems to be working so let’s not screw it up.
Jason Rothman:
It’s just a little bit of your overall revenue. Throw it in to Google Ads. I’ll protect you with the search terms. I’ll protect you with the remarketing looking at the analytics data. And as long as the overall business is doing well, it’s one piece of the puzzle that’s probably helping things, and let’s not get too caught up on this column in Google Ads that column, this conversion, that conversion. You’re a freaking business owner. You’re employing people. You’re dealing with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands dollars. Why are you looking at your account all day long? Don’t you have something better to do?
Jason Rothman:
Look at your overall business statement. In some nicer words, I think that conversation can help show the value of what you’re doing in Google Ads even if for whatever reason. We’re not getting a lot of, or any reported conversions. Do you buy into that, Chris?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you got to throw down the gauntlet on this no conversion because I mean you’re basically at the bottom here. You’re saying, “Listen, I’m delivering something for you. It’s an invisible product. It’s a virtual product that you can’t actually see numbers on, but there is value, so you got to throw everything at the fan here and hope that something sticks.” And I think those are all very valid arguments because in the end, just to be clear, I’m going to wrap this up here, opteo.com/psp. We want to thank opteo.com for their sponsorship of this podcast.
Chris Schaeffer:
They help you with your Google Ads campaign. They send you email alerts about things that are happening. Oh, you accidentally forgot to check your account for two weeks and it’s stopped running, and you didn’t realize it because there was a budget issue. Don’t worry. They actually emailed you one day after they noticed, oh, the ads stopped. Boom, there’s your email alert. You got it in your inbox. You just saved yourself from getting fired because two weeks in an alternate universe you lost your job because you didn’t have up Opteo.
Chris Schaeffer:
So sign up for the six-week trial, you’ll love it, we love it. All right. Now, Jason, I want to say we probably should have said this at the beginning, but we are not Kahneman and we’re not saying that you have to convince people that Google Ads has value.
Jason Rothman:
Because you’re talking to the stupid listeners, okay? I talk to the smart listeners. I don’t know what that percentage is, probably the ones on the forum, probably the ones on Patreon, those are the smart ones.
Chris Schaeffer:
Those are the smart ones, yeah.
Jason Rothman:
There’s probably more stupid ones that I would like to-
Chris Schaeffer:
Some people are going to think.
Jason Rothman:
No, you’re talking to the stupid ones, Chris. We specifically, and explicitly, and fundamentally said at the top of the episode, I think I was going to have to throw a pen today, but I wore a tie, I was trying to keep it nice, but you fired me up, Chris. You had to go there. You had to talk to stupid people. I explicitly, fundamentally said at the top of the show, clients or advertisers tell you it’s not working, but it is working. We did not say this is to convince them that it’s working when it’s not.
Jason Rothman:
We explicitly, and fundamentally, and directly, and loudly, and clearly said this is when you know Google Ads is working, and it’s proving, convincing the value of what is working to the advertiser to help them. So don’t go down the road of, “Oh, you’re just convincing people when it’s not working. Don’t go down the road of, “Oh, you’re trying to show people it’s working.” Those are stupid people, Chris. I get on here and I talk to the smart people. And we all try to make each other smarter and when you bring those stupid people into the conversation, into the room when you try to have a dialogue with them, they fart on your head, Chris. So why do you even go down that road?
Chris Schaeffer:
Wow, fart on my head. Okay. Well, Jason, save some of that energy.
Jason Rothman:
I’m going to take a minute. I’m going to take a minute, you said what you need to said, I’ll see you back on Patreon. Close this out here. I’m going to take a minute. I’ve been told that’s good for me. I’m going to take a minute.
Chris Schaeffer:
He’s going to save that energy.
Jason Rothman:
Why is he talking to people like that? What is he doing?
Chris Schaeffer:
I can feel it. All right, guys. We’re going to jump into the Patreon show. Two bucks a month if you want to join us there. Super valuable stuff. We share a ton here, but we also share just a little bit more behind a paywall. He threw something across the room. It’s entertaining. You guys should see this from my point of view. It’s always fun. But anyway, we’ll catch you there. See you next week.
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