Please support our sponsors, they make the show possible!
Free AdLeg Software Suite trial
Show Notes:
Welcome back to the PSP! This week we’re doing part 1 of a two-week questions and answers episode. We answer lots of great Google Ads questions and we thank you for sending them in. 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.
Patreon after show
First 100 episodes
PSP Forum
YouTube:
Transcript:
Jason Rothman:
Jimmy.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah.
Jason Rothman:
Would you like some turkey, some stuffing, some cranberry sauce, some marshmallow, sweet potatoes, some stuffing for lunch today?
Chris Schaeffer:
No, thanks. We’re going to have that on Thursday, but for now I’d like to listen to the Paid Search podcast and [inaudible 00:00:36] please I’m not very hungry.
Jason Rothman:
Okay, Jamie, thank you for letting me know. Hey everybody. Yes, welcome back to the Paid Search podcast, my name is Jason Rothman. As always, I’m joined by the great Chris Schaeffer. Chris, how’s it going today? Late November here.
Chris Schaeffer:
Jason, one thing up front, we just plan the entire day. We’re so planned and I’m going to throw something at you real quick. Name one thing you’re thankful for on Thanksgiving, and it can’t be corny. It can’t be like, “My job or my girlfriend.”
Jason Rothman:
I’m thankful for my brain, and my personality type, and my intelligence, and my work ethic, and all the material things it’s gotten me in this world of capitalism, competition, and winner-take-all, and it’s good to be a winner. That’s what I’m thankful for. Pass the gravy.
Chris Schaeffer:
Love it. That’s a good answer. That’s very honest. I know you well enough to know that is a very honest answer. Yeah. That’s good. Well, I’m-
Jason Rothman:
What about you?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh Jason, I’m thankful for my family and my health. That’s all.
Jason Rothman:
Those are the most important things. You take away the money, you take away the material things, it’s really about family and health. That’s what it’s about.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yup, so I win.
Jason Rothman:
I agree.
Chris Schaeffer:
I win the humility contest this time, because that’s what it’s about. All right, well thanks guys for joining us on this very special week here at [crosstalk 00:02:12]-
Jason Rothman:
Yeah. Tell the people what we’re doing here Chris. Let’s just be honest about it. We’re going our separate ways next week.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yup, yeah. We are about to do a, I believe in the sports world they call it a doubleheader where we are going to record episode after episode and this is a doubleheader of Q and A. We’ve let these questions build up over the past mini weeks and we have a lot of them and we’re going to answer them. We have some really good questions, some very creative responses from people and stuff. We’re going to get into all that. You got a show on Thanksgiving week and you’re going to have another delightful question and answer show the next week, first week of December, so look forward to that. Again, if you want to send questions in, paidsearchpodcast.com. Click the contact button and you can send your question, and we’ll get to you next time.
Chris Schaeffer:
Before we jump into the wonderful Q and A session, we’re going to talk about opteo.com/psp. You hear me talk about it. I talk about it all the time. They’re a faithful sponsor of the show for a long time. We really appreciate their support. If you are a user of their software, you really appreciate them covering your butt because that’s what they do. They help you get your campaign performing in ways you can’t consider on your own. We all have human brains. They have incredibly smart software. They have an email alert system, they have an active performance metric, calculus, complicated, wow type of thing that goes on, and essentially they help you get stuff done faster.
Chris Schaeffer:
They help you see things in the account that you wouldn’t see otherwise and if you want an extended free trial, this is a six-week trial. For all those guys out there that don’t listen to the show they get four weeks. You get a six week extended trial for free. Go to O-P-T-E-O opteo.com/psp. O-P-T-E-O.com/psp. Tell them, “Hey, I’m a listener of the show. Can I get a special six-week trial?” They’ll say, “Hey, absolutely,” and they sign you up and you get to try it out. You’ll like it, we love it. Thank them for their sponsorship of our show.
Jason Rothman:
Thanks Chris, and I want to thank Kyle Sulerud’s AdLeg Software Suite for also sponsoring today’s episode. Kyle Sulerud made an awesome group of software tools called the AdLeg Software Suite. It’s for Google Ads managers, and it’s tons of different tools to help you speed up your work, be better at Google Ads, and be more efficient. It’s awesome for listeners of the Paid Search podcast. Not only do we talk about the human knowledge side of things and try to get better and better at Google Ads as Chris was saying, but when you combine it with these tools and these softwares, you can just really get great results and really manage campaigns efficiently.
Jason Rothman:
A couple awesome tools in the AdLeg Software Suite, Negative Keywords Pro. We’ve all been there. You start a campaign, you get a bunch of bad search terms, you’re adding negative keywords and trying to catch up as you start running, but a better way to do it is add tons and tons of negative keywords before you even start the campaign. Hundreds of negative keywords. Well, how do you find those? Negative Keyword Pro. You just enter in your keyword and you’ll get hundreds of negative keyword ideas based on actual user searches. You can copy and paste those into your campaign as negative keywords.
Jason Rothman:
Then I also want to tell you about the Vid Hoarder. The Vid Hoarder tool is amazing to me. The best part of YouTube advertising is direct placements, knowing exactly what videos you’re going show up on. The problem with that is finding those hundreds or thousands of videos that you want to show up on that are super relevant or even just the handful that are amazingly relevant. How do you find them? Well, that’s what the Vid Hoarder does. You type in your keywords, your topics, and then it’ll show you a list of super relevant YouTube videos. You copy and paste the URLs, you paste them in as direct placements, and then you can target them directly. Kyle Sulerud is offering a free seven-day trial for listeners of the Paid Search podcast. Get the AdLeg Software Suite, Kyle Sulerud’s, AdLeg Software Suite at software.adleg.com/psp, and we’ll have links to both Opteo and AdLeg in the show notes.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay, Jason, they have questions and we are full of answers, and let’s get to it. All right. Amy leads the show today. Amy from South Carolina. She says, “How do I organize my campaigns with all facets of my website and targeting where they’re covered but not overlapping. I currently associate my campaigns with either membership or catalog.” She’s talking about people that are looking for certain type of service or people that are looking for a particular product, but they seem to get muddled when I split them out into search, display, remarketing, shopping, audiences, targeting, dynamic blah, blah, blah all that stuff. How can you help clarify her situation and help her to have less confusion and more organization in her campaign?
Jason Rothman:
Yeah Chris. When I’m talking about a structure, to me there’s a couple things you want to keep in mind with structure. First you need to understand the Google Ads structure. You have your account and then under that you have your campaigns, under that you have your ad groups, and under that you have keywords and ads. When I’m thinking about campaigns, the way I’m differentiating campaigns, it’s all based on-
Chris Schaeffer:
Jason-
Jason Rothman:
… a good looking guy with a guitar. What’s going on here Chris?
Chris Schaeffer:
I’m going to let you finish, Jason, but Amy also sent in one little other thing that I just love too much and I have to add it to her question. She said we had asked for a 25-line review or a limerick. Jason, Amy provided a limerick and I’d just like to perform that real quick for her or for you guys, for you. “There once was a podcast so fine, with Jason and Chris, Jimmy who whines, they teach us new tricks to get Google clicks, Paid Search my commerce lifeline.”
Jason Rothman:
Wow Chris, I didn’t know you had that skill. Thank you for that. Thank you so much. He’s very pleased with himself. He’s putting his headphones back on. I’m just telling everyone how this is officially a holiday episode now that, it’s like when you’re eating the meal with the extended family and then someone whips out the guitar or someone walks over to the piano and starts to play, everyone circles around. Next thing you know, a bunch of uncles and aunts from the 60s are singing, Let it Be by the Beatles, and they’re really singing it. Thank you for that. Chris, talking about campaign structure. Amy was talking about shopping and audiences and targeting and dynamic and all that kind of stuff, and display.
Jason Rothman:
The way I always think about it is, and I want you to tell me if I’m wrong or right in this thinking. But I always think about, how do you know what campaigns you need? How do you know what ad groups you need? It’s very simple to me, very simple. Campaigns are based on your budgets needs and your settings needs. Those are the two things you do different at the campaign. If someone’s out there and they’re going to pick this apart with shared budgets… Chris does this sometimes and it kind of makes me angry, he tells people to stop listening to the show. But if you are going to pick this apart and tell me about shared budgets, just keep listening to the show, but maybe you can just hit play so we get the download and then I don’t want you to listen. Because I’m not talking about shared budgets here, I’m keeping things simple.
Jason Rothman:
Chris, budgets and settings are what differentiate campaign. If you’re doing a display campaign, yes, keep display in its own display campaign. If you’re doing shopping, that’s a setting. Keep that campaign in its own campaign. If you’re targeting different locations, that can be different campaigns. If you’re targeting different schedules, that can be different campaigns. I look at campaigns based on the budget needs and the settings, and then ad groups are dictated by keywords and ads because that’s all ad groups are. What ad groups go inside of a campaign? It’s keywords and it’s ad. If someone’s searching for nice dress shirts, that could be its own ad group, and if someone’s searching for polo shirts, that could be the polo shirts ad group. You want to want polo shirts and dress shirts in the same ad group because they’re different keywords and they’re different ads and different landing pages for those two topics.
Jason Rothman:
That’s how I look at it without getting into a specific account, just keeping it general for everybody. Campaigns dictated by budget and setting needs and differences, ad groups dictated by keywords and ad needs. Then also Chris, you always got to think long-term. Those two rules, you can be as complex as you want, but think long-term, think about practicality, think about managing things over the long-term, and control your desire to make things complex. How does all that sound in terms of advice for structure? Does it get any better than that?
Chris Schaeffer:
No. Well, maybe a little bit better because I have one little thing to add, but no, that’s it. You’re exactly right. When it comes down to it-
Jason Rothman:
What do you have to add?
Chris Schaeffer:
The only thing I have to add is this, what Amy’s talking about, and what’s important, is the initial structure of the campaign and the ad groups. There’s a whole nother discussion we’d have to decide on for the optimization process. What is the problem most people have is when they’re initially building the campaign and sorting out the ad groups, that’s when you need to make clear decisions. But further down the line, six months down the line, perhaps you need to break a campaign out because you need something different that sets aside not necessarily just budget and location. What we’re talking about here is initial setup in building.
Chris Schaeffer:
The other thing I’ll add to it is this. The thing that probably gets most people into trouble is, they leave out one of the most common ad groups that most people need. It’s the general catchall terminology-
Jason Rothman:
Bucket-
Chris Schaeffer:
… that could apply to anything. There’s a general term that, if you wanted to, it could fit in every campaign, every ad group, but you need a separate ad group just for that. I usually call it my core or my main ad group, core term, something like that.
Jason Rothman:
Sometimes we call it generic. It doesn’t look good if a client’s looking at that, because generic, it’s such a weak word it sounds like, “Oh, what’d you do? Just generic?” But that’s the way we think. It’s like generic way someone would search. We’re building out a weight loss clinic today. We have a main generic ad group, weight loss clinics or weight loss centers, stuff like that.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, exactly. I think if you sort everything based on topic and category, everything Jason had talked about, and then have a generic all in your initial setup, you’re going to find very easily ways to break all of that out and have it very segregated and organized so that’s very easy to review once it’s going.
Jason Rothman:
Yup. Chris, next question comes from Jamie from London, England, and a little behind the scenes for you guys. Chris, for whatever reason, he just acts like he’s on speed during the Q and A episodes, even though we’re only doing five questions for this one, and we can take our time.
Chris Schaeffer:
Can you tell him I’m not editing-
Jason Rothman:
Yeah, he highlights a very little part of the question where the exact question is, he doesn’t give it any flavor. I just can’t look at someone saying, “Hi guys, I watch your podcast all the time and think you’re great.” I just can’t not read that, so I like hearing that from Jamie. “I have two years experience with Google Ads and have tried and tested every bidding strategy. The best results I get are from Manual CPC,” Really? Wow, “But Google continues to try to get me to switch to Target CPA. I believe humans are better than machines.”
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. This-
Jason Rothman:
I’m not going to read the rest of that. That is-
Chris Schaeffer:
No, don’t read the rest of it. Do not read the rest. There’s a reason that’s not marked.
Jason Rothman:
Yeah. I don’t know if this guy is trying to say this with like legitimacy or if he’s trying to bait me, but if anybody doesn’t want me to take the bait and attack them, it’s Chris because this would have me very mad at Chris right now. But anyway, “Do you think that someday soon we will be able to use smart bidding and the option for Manual CPC will totally fade away?” What do you think Chris?
Chris Schaeffer:
First Jamie, thank you for the question. No, I personally do not think we will ever see smart bidding control the Google Ads system entirely without any ability to use manual bidding. I think that because there are bigger players in the system beyond just me and Jason. Believe it or not, Google probably doesn’t even know who Chris and Jason are. There’s big names out there, big corporations, that would have a whole lot more to say about it. I think those exist, and I think that for the huge, high-spending campaigns, they would need something beyond automated bidding because there are not always conversions that can determine. It’s not always about clicks.
Chris Schaeffer:
Sometimes you just can’t automate something until you test it, and the best way to test it is to use your intellect, your human aspect on the campaign and choose your bids. No, I don’t think that we’ll ever get to that. If I’m wrong, I think that there will still be a way around it, but it won’t be obvious. I mean, like right now most people don’t realize that they can switch to a non-automated bidding system because it’s buried under a couple different clicks. We’re living in that world already, but I don’t think it’ll ever completely disappear. Jason.
Jason Rothman:
You want my opinion?
Chris Schaeffer:
No, Jamie does. I don’t care about your opinion.
Jason Rothman:
Well, thanks. I mean-
Chris Schaeffer:
Were you listening? Do you even remember?
Jason Rothman:
Yeah, of course I was listening. No, of course I was. I just don’t know if I want to put out there what I’m about to say because it would really screw me.
Chris Schaeffer:
Then don’t say-
Jason Rothman:
But it’s interesting, but it’s true.
Chris Schaeffer:
We’ll just have to get it edited.
Jason Rothman:
But it’s true. It’s truly my opinion. No, I’m not going to edit it. I mean he’s asking if we think Manual CPC would go away. I’ll put it this way. I just hope it doesn’t. I hope there’s always a place for it because the system is, they’re so big and there’s so many options it’s just nice to have that control. All I know is, I love Manual still, I rely on it completely. I think we have another question about when we use automated bids later on, so we’ll save the rest of it for that. But yeah, I hope it stays in. Like you’re saying, Chris, from a management perspective, there’s always a need for it so it should stay in, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing how to do both. I think that’s the-
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s a good point.
Jason Rothman:
… best approach. Know how to do both.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, that’s a good point. Just to be clear, new listeners, we never advocate that people should only use manual bidding. We don’t take a stance as absolute as on manual bidding. We just prefer it for certain situations and there are plenty of campaigns that I personally have on Maximize Clicks, CPA, ROAS bidding. There’s a lot of stuff that I use.
Jason Rothman:
ROAS.
Chris Schaeffer:
Just to be… Hey.
Jason Rothman:
Love saying that.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. I’m part of the lingo man. I’m in the crowd. Okay. Next, we are going back across the pond to James-
Jason Rothman:
UK heavy.
Chris Schaeffer:
… from the UK. Since you like to hear the compliments, I’ll read the first part of the question here. James from the UK says, “I started listening to your show at around the 140 episode mark. I chose you guys because of the nursing home build you did, and I thought an example build would be perfect for me to learn. I have since gone on to listen to your shows daily when I go to and from work. I’m hooked and I’m pretty much caught up now and will start listening to the pre-140 shows.” Old school stuff. He’s going to get into the first build we did eventually in about 70 more episodes, so that’s cool. Glad that was useful. James’s question is this, “I work at a company that services and restores classic cars. We work on Aston Martins, Jaguars and other cars from the 60s and 70s et cetera. I’m trying to run a campaign and I was told by Google not to use names such as Aston Martin and other terms that are copyrighted,” and that his ads would be blocked. He asks, “Is this correct?”
Jason Rothman:
Yes Chris. Thank you for the instructions after the question highlighted in different color answering my own questions. I appreciate that. Thank you so much for that Chris. Chris, we get this question quite a bit lately when people were asking us a few weeks ago about competitor keywords, but it all has to do with trademarks. I’m getting away from saying that we’re going to link tpo articles in the show notes because I’ve listened back to episodes and stuff and I think I’m missing about like 27 links over the last like 30 episodes. I’m like, “We’ll link to that in the show notes.”
Chris Schaeffer:
And you don’t do it.
Jason Rothman:
I’m just going to tell James to Google this for himself. But if you Google, Google Ads help, and then specifically after that, help for trademark owners. There’s an article, a Google Help article about help for trademark owners. Then if you go down to the middle of the page, there’s a section called Authorized Advertisers to Use Your Trademark. Here’s how I think about trademarks. You differentiate, just as Chris told me in the notes here, between the ad copy and the keyword. On keywords, as far as I know, there’s no, or not, many restrictions on targeting keywords that are trademarks. If someone has a trademark term, you can still target that as a keyword where your ad shows up on.
Jason Rothman:
Now, the question is what can you put in your ad? We talked about competitor bidding last week, or a week ago, or a few weeks ago and we were like, “Don’t put other people’s trademark names in your ad because number one, that’s just not good. Number two, you’re not going to get approved anyway because it’s someone else’s trademark.” The rule is, you can’t use trademarks in the ads. You can target them as keywords but you cannot use them as ad copy. Your ads will get disapproved. However, there are some situations where, if someone does work on a particular car brand and they offer parts and services for that car brand, there’s nothing wrong with saying that in the ad, like just a hypothetical. It’s not like a competitor bidding or anything like that.
Jason Rothman:
Another place I’ve run into this are where insurance agents, Chris, offer all kinds of insurance and they want to target a certain kind of insurance brand. Then they want to have that brand in the ad telling people in their area, “Hey, we sell this kind of insurance.” Then their ads get disapproved because it’s someone else’s trademark. The workaround, if you wanted to do it, if the trademark owner wants to do it with you, is you can go to that section of the help article that says, help for trademark owners is the article. Then if you go to the section, authorize advertisers to use your trademark, you can authorize advertisers to use your trademark by filling out the authorization form. Someone at that car company, Chris, could fill out that form and tell Google, “Hey, this Google Ads account is allowed to use our trademark in their ads and we approve it,” and then you can get approved if you work with the trademark owner.
Jason Rothman:
That would be one way to do things if you’re in touch with that company. If you’re not, you can just target them as keywords, and then in your ad copy you can use generic stuff, just telling the search user what you do, trying really hard to get them to your website. Then on your website you may have those brand names or pictures of those parts or whatever. Chris, have you gone through that process or are you familiar with that process where a trademark owner can authorize a specific Google Ads account to use our trademark in the ad copy? Have you seen that?
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, there’s a couple… I’ve done it with big car companies, I’ve done it with smaller software companies, and I found two situations. One situation is where it’s a very common brand that many people need to use, very national worldwide brand, and Google will have the contact information of that copyright holder, and they will put you in touch with them, or request on your behalf. The other option is they won’t have that information-
Jason Rothman:
Trademark.
Chris Schaeffer:
Right. Sorry. Yeah. Trademark. They can get it approved. What they basically need is your ID number. They just have to list your Google Ads ID number as an exemption on that trademark and you can run ads, no problem. The other instances, they won’t have any idea, they won’t be able to help you, and you’ll have to dig through emails and maybe call. You’re going to have to find some random person within that company that knows what you’re asking for, because it’s a very specific thing, and then get them to approve it. Here’s the thing, I’ve done that before. What will happen is, it’s actually not managed by that company. As with most instances, their Google Ads and their trademark stuff is managed by an agency. Now you have to go contact that agency and get them, “Hey, can you get me approval on this.” Sometimes it can be really tedious, but the first step I would say is, contact Google Help. See if they have a way to get you in touch with them if they have it on record, something like that, and then dig in from there.
Jason Rothman:
But Chris, would you say it’s good advice to say, “In the meantime, don’t let this hold you back?” And run ads with copy that does not try to use the trademark and just… If you’re doing car repair, or car servicing, or whatever, or parts and someone’s searching for a particular brand, you can’t use a trademark in your ad until it gets approved. In the meantime, can’t you run an ad that says, on that brand name, when someone’s searching for parts or service for that brand name, you can run an ad that says, “We service all major foreign brand names. We service all major Italian car companies, brands,” or something like that. That way you can tell the search user, “Hey, we’re not saying the name of that brand right now in the ad, but you can get that, we mean that,” enough to where you’re motivated to click the ad and either call in or go to the website. Would that be good advice to at least try to start running with some kind of ad with generic copy?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh definitely. I mean, I’ve done the same kind of thing-
Jason Rothman:
[crosstalk 00:25:52] way to be a showstopper.
Chris Schaeffer:
One thing that makes a big difference for me is WordPress. I have clients who have applications and premium plugins that use WordPress and they need to use WordPress in their ad copy. Instead what I do is I just [inaudible 00:26:07] WP. I can’t use the word WordPress and they’re not interested in allowing it, so I will have two sets of ads. I’ll have ads that have WordPress in it. There is not 100% exclusion on the WordPress term, so sometimes I will show the WordPress ad and then on other ones I just have WP.
Jason Rothman:
You know what else is weird? I don’t know if I’m misremembering this, but I know with medical content, sometimes you get that approved, limited status medical content and it’s like, “Okay, what does that mean? I’m still getting impressions and clicks, so I’m just going to leave it alone.” I don’t know if you can get that with a trademark or not, but I feel like I’m remembering I [crosstalk 00:26:50]-
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah you can.
Jason Rothman:
I did.
Chris Schaeffer:
You can get limited. There’s two different levels of it. There’s eligible, limited, and then basically just disapproved. Flat out, you’re not going to get anything-
Jason Rothman:
Disapprove, okay.
Chris Schaeffer:
Limited is is okay. It’s like a yellow light. You don’t know where your limitation is, but you won’t get 100% coverage on that term, but in some instances you can show it. Limited doesn’t mean stop, it just means accelerate really fast.
Jason Rothman:
Chris, all these questions. I was going through the questions that you so nicely laid out, prepared for us today and I’m getting Google Ads manager PTSD because I’m going through all these situations, like we’re going to talk about one later on about claims on the website and all that kind of stuff. Then this is about disapproved for trademark and it’s like, I’m remembering all those accounts where I had to deal with this for weeks and weeks. It’s no wonder we’re getting questions like this because this is the tough stuff that you got to deal with sometimes.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. There’s not usually a solid answer out there. Everybody believes that they have a unique situation, but in reality most of it is not particularly unique. It’s just the same kind of situation, just a different batch. Okay.
Jason Rothman:
This question comes from Tiffany from the United Kingdom and she says, “Hi both, your podcasts have really helped me as I am fairly new to digital marketing. The thing I’m struggling with at the moment, because of lack of resources in Google Ads.” Tiffany, a lot of people are mad at me right now thinking I can’t read a question but I’m going to-
Chris Schaeffer:
Tiffany wrote it.
Jason Rothman:
[inaudible 00:28:28] tango Tiffany here-
Chris Schaeffer:
It’s written perfectly. It’s entirely Jason. I’m looking at it right here and it’s perfect.
Jason Rothman:
I’m going to scan this and the read it in my own words. But I still will start with, “Hi both,” because I like that.
Chris Schaeffer:
I like that.
Jason Rothman:
“Hi both, your podcasts have really helped me as I am fairly new to digital marketing. The thing that I’m struggling with at the moment is the lack of resources with display ads. Do you do any display ads? If so, what is the best way to optimize them? Thanks, Tiff.” Tiffany, thank you for the question. All the way from across the pond in the UK.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, it seems to be a theme of the show. Tiffany, thank you for the question. I know we’ve done dedicated episodes on this, so I would say, you could either go to our website, look at purchasing some specific episodes where we’ve done display builds and talk about optimizing and getting the best out of Google Ads, or you can go to our YouTube channel and find those as well. There’s definitely going to be tons of times we’ve talked about the display network, but-
Jason Rothman:
Google, YouTube Paid Search podcast display.
Chris Schaeffer:
Display, yeah. Short answer is this, there is a very distinct difference between search and display. There are a lot of big differences, but the true distinct difference that makes a difference in everything you do is the amount of volume available, the amount of inventory available of the display network makes everything different. That’s why the CPC is low. That’s why you can get clicks on things that nobody’s searching for, that nobody has any idea about. Things that are not interesting at all, and otherwise would get no traffic on search. You can get tons of traffic on display, and that’s because you can show interesting ads, you can show ads that are appealing, ads that drive some type of special call to action in the ad copy that would otherwise not be enticing for search.
Chris Schaeffer:
Now that we have that established, the point is, “Well, how do I optimize? Now that I know I have tons of inventory, how do I improve the campaign beyond just getting a lot of traffic?” Because traffic is not quality. In order to get better quality, what you’re going to have to do is essentially segregate the campaigns into different ideas, and topics, and tests. I mean, there’s a lot I could talk about on this because my brain is just overflowing with how to explain this quickly. But essentially the idea is this, try the different ways of targeting. There’s in-market, there’s remarketing, there’s people who are interested in certain-
Jason Rothman:
Placements.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, there’s specific targeted placements. There are people that are interested in, if they’re looking at a certain page that’s about a certain topic. Then it gets even more specific, time of day, device, location, whether they are on a certain mobile phone, because you can actually target different networks. Whether they’re on a mobile phone and they’re on the AT&T network or Verizon or something like that. I mean, who-
Jason Rothman:
Or, really-
Chris Schaeffer:
… knows what you’re advertising? Yeah, I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to dissect it.
Jason Rothman:
Why would someone do that?
Chris Schaeffer:
Well, I assume it’s because, like mobile call plans and stuff. I mean, I don’t see why you would do that unless you had an app that maybe only was available to Apple.
Jason Rothman:
You’re telling me they took away average position-
Chris Schaeffer:
But they kept that-
Jason Rothman:
… but we can still target different networks.
Chris Schaeffer:
Hey, you said it.
Jason Rothman:
All right, all right. As I’m going to follow my rules, you got to let that one go, so I’m not going to complain about it. Had to let it go in the first hour so it’s not a complaint, it’s just a question.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, just… Yup. That’s the way it is, Jason.
Jason Rothman:
Chris, can I butt in here?
Chris Schaeffer:
No, I’m almost done. Almost done. I swear. One second. Okay, last thing. Break it all up and when you do it, I’m going to suggest putting it into different ad groups. Assuming you don’t have a ton, assuming you start with like five, six, seven, eight different ideas of ways that you can reach people, I’m going to suggest ad group segregation and try some topic stuff, try some placement stuff, try some display stuff based on audiences. Display based on, maybe a set of keywords, custom in-market, custom affinity. There’s tons of options. All right, I’m done.
Jason Rothman:
All right, thanks Chris. Appreciate that. Tiffany, Tiff.
Chris Schaeffer:
Tiff.
Jason Rothman:
I’m going to lay out the display network for you and give you some overall thoughts on it. I think it’s going to be very clear, very direct, and guide you. If I’m ever over in the UK, I’d like you to take me to a pub, buy me a pint, and tell me how this display advertising went. The way I would break it down, Chris, just as simple as you can get is, there’s three things I’m going to focus on. Number one, remarketing, because I do include that in the display network despite this whole little elitist thing we do on the show where we act like remarketing is not part of display. I’m going to say it is part of display and your first thought should be remarketing versus all the other forms of display. That’s the first area I would go down, and I’m not going to… We can’t get into all the different thoughts, but this is just an overview of where to go. That’s the first thing I would look at. Remarketing verse all the other forms. Definitely start with remarketing in most cases.
Jason Rothman:
Number two, there’s a middle gray bar of sections in Google Ads that used to be the tabs at the top, now it’s like this gray bar on the left side of the page. On a display campaign you’ll see sections in there in the middle. Keywords, audiences, demographics, topics, placements. I would Google those terms with the word display, Google Ads after them, I’d look at the help articles, and I would thoroughly understand all my options there.
Jason Rothman:
Then the third section of understanding what to do with display is Google Analytics. Link Google Analytics to the Google Ads campaign. Look at your traffic. How many conversions are you getting? If you have conversion tracking, that’s Google Ads, but if you have goals set up in analytics, how many goals are you getting from your different types of display advertising. Time on site, bounce rate, pages per visit. I would look at all those things when it comes to the display traffic because in general I always get a lot less conversions most of the time on display and I’m really judging that traffic quality and what kind of quality it’s bringing in in terms of bounce rate, time on site.
Jason Rothman:
Then sometimes with remarketing you can get a lot of direct leads and sometimes with placements you can get a lot of direct leads. But those are the things you have to understand to know how to optimize it. Remarketing versus all the other forms, and then understand the forms, keywords, audiences, demographics, topics, placements, and then understand how Google Analytics can help you judge that traffic quality. Thank you Tiffany.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay, next we have a question from Aaron from Virginia Beach, and Aaron left us a voicemail.
Aaron:
Hello Chris and Jason. This is Aaron from Virginia Beach. Here’s my question. I have a pretty successful roofing campaign going on. I have all of the keywords in place, roofing company near me, roofing contractors, roofing company, whatever, all of the good keywords. But I’ve recently added broad match modified keyword, roofer just by itself. Now, the quality score on roofer is like two points higher than all of the other keywords with roofer in it like, roofer near me, or good roofer, or affordable roofer. Should I pause all of my other keywords that have roofer in it since the single keyword roofer has a higher quality score? Today I had impressions for roofer and clicked roofer and I had impressions and clicks for roofer near me, and I don’t even know how that could happen because [inaudible 00:36:45] I’ll just go to roofer. Any suggestions or advice you could give me would be greatly appreciated. Thanks. Bye.”
Jason Rothman:
First of all, Aaron, don’t you ever get near my girlfriend Cynthia ever. Because I was listening to this voicemail in the kitchen earlier preparing for today’s show. She doesn’t care at all about this show, you know what I’m saying? I never get questions, and then all of a sudden, “Who was that? Who called in? I just love his voice.” She specifically said, “Where’s he from?” Please Aaron, take that as a compliment to your voice, but stay away from Cynthia.
Jason Rothman:
Aaron posed a very interesting question Chris. You’ve got great keywords that we always promote near me, geo keywords, all that kind of stuff. But then he throws on a broad match modified, roofers. Just the word, I’m assuming with the plus sign on it. Nothing wrong with that. It’s good to experiment, but then he looks at his quality score and his quality score is two points higher on that broad match modified and he’s like, “Okay, that roofers one, I could still show up for roofers near me, roofers GOG or whatever with that one broad match modified keyword with the higher quality score. Should I just pause the other ones because that one has a better quality score?” This is something we brainstormed internally about, Chris, a few weeks ago. Just talking between us. We were like, “Wait, if two keywords can technically show up on the same search, but one of them has a better quality score, are you hurting yourself by running the lower quality score keyword with a higher bid?” When we were brainstorming ad rank. There’s a lot of interesting things going on there.
Jason Rothman:
There’s a few things to think about though. Number one, plus roofers, Chris, broad match modified. Yeah, you could still show up on roofers Virginia Beach, roofers near me, but you could also show up on a bunch of garbage searches, potentially, because it’s a lot looser keyword. How’s that going to affect things? That’s one thing to look out for. My answer to Aaron is, it’s a very interesting idea you have here. It’s a very interesting thought you have to pause the more better looking keywords and go with the higher quality score one, even though it looks a little bit looser.
Jason Rothman:
What I would do in this situation, I would set up an experiment, in the experiment, pause the higher quality looking keywords and go with the broad match modified keyword that’s getting a higher quality score and see what the difference is. But here’s the kicker. You got to have conversion tracking. You have to know what these keywords are bringing in in terms of leads because the broad match modified roofers with a plus sign, it’s got a better quality score, so your cost per click might go down, but you might be getting a bunch of garbage searches along with it. But it still could be better because the cost per click is so low compared to the other one because the quality score is lower.
Jason Rothman:
You don’t know that though unless you’re doing conversion tracking. You got to have conversion tracking. Then I’d set up an experiment. In the experiment draft campaign, I would pause those near me in geo keywords and I would let the broad match modified keyword dominate. But I would probably only run it 20 or 30% of the time in terms of how often the experiment runs just because it is such a change.
Jason Rothman:
That’s what I would do to gauge if this theory would be worth pursuing. But you know what else is not a bad idea Chris, is just throwing in that broad match modified keyword in there and getting conversion tracking in place and going with a lower bid on it or a bid that gets you a good cost per conversion. I’d say there’s nothing wrong with running it alongside the other higher quality-looking keywords. You don’t have to do the experiment, but if you’re really curious, you could. Do you think that’s okay to do?
Chris Schaeffer:
Jason, I think this is a perfect situation to explain why manual bidding is superior because the Max Clicks and the automated system has two reasons to push the heck out of this one keyword, high quality score modified broad match keyword. I mean it has high quality score on it and it’s only one word. It can match to any-
Jason Rothman:
[crosstalk 00:41:02] it’s a [inaudible 00:41:02] volume.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Imagine if some of these synonyms, they started matching roofers to roof, which is not a stretch. That could happen, especially with a really high quality score. You could start matching to things that didn’t include roofers, it could match to roof, especially if you put a high bid on this. Let’s say you put a Max Clicks with a $10 cap on the Max Clicks, you start getting stuff paste on roof. I think manual bidding is a good choice for this, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with testing it. I think it’s an excellent question. It’s a really good case study which essentially means that you need to pull the bids down just like Jason said on the modified broad and see what you get with it.
Jason Rothman:
Now that I think about it, Aaron’s question and focus on quality score, it’s just so different than my approach. My approach is what’s quality score? I don’t know what that is-
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Jason Rothman:
Because as we talked about… I think we talked about it. All I know is I do everything I can do to get a good quality score, do everything I can do, good websites, good ad copy, good keywords. We talked about it before, there’s stuff we don’t know about, blah, blah, blah, and I’m doing everything I can do to get good quality scores, and they just are what they are. Sometimes they’re just lower than I want them to be, therefore I don’t even focus on them.
Jason Rothman:
I focus on conversion tracking, Chris, and conversions, and cost per lead. To me, it shouldn’t be a question of, should I target this, or target that and turn stuff off and all that kind of stuff. It should be, “I had the thought to put a broad match modified one-word keyword in the campaign to get more volume and see what happens. Okay, I did that. Is it getting me leads? What is the cost per lead? Is it too high, because I’m showing up on too much stuff because it’s such a loose keyword but I’m still getting some leads because it’s so high volume? Okay, lower the bid manually, control things, and lower the cost per conversion.”
Jason Rothman:
That would be my mindset and all this other stuff about quality score experiments, it’s just not the way I do things. The way I do things is focus on cost per lead, focus on individual keyword bids, and manage those bids to get your goal cost per conversion. Whether it means it’s a low volume super high quality keyword with a high cost per click and you have to bid a lot, but the conversion rate’s higher, or it’s a looser broad match modified keyword and you lower your bids because the conversion rate is lower, but it’s still all about hitting that cost per lead goal. That’s how I’d approach the situation.
Chris Schaeffer:
Well said. All right, Jason, say it with me. O-P-T-E-O.com/psp. You knew that URL because you’ve been there, but those of you who haven’t, we know a large percentage of our audience checks out the tool, they like it, they use it, join the crowd, checkout opteo.com/psp, get a six-week extended trial. Enjoy the tool, try it out, and you’ll find that it’s nice to have a safety net. It’s nice to have a system that alerts you about changes to your campaign that you may not otherwise see. It’s nice to have a graphical interface to be able to see things that you would have not seen otherwise. Who knows? Maybe even a quick screenshot and you send it to your boss, you send it to your client, and they’re like, “Oh wow. That’s a really great report, thanks for sending that.” It’s all because of opteo.com/psp.
Jason Rothman:
Thanks Chris. I want to thank Kyle Sulerud and Kyle Sulerud’s AdLeg Software Suite. It’s a group of tools for Google Ads advertisers, and managers. There’s some great tools in there, a couple that I want to talk about today, the Negative Keyword Pro Tool. You type in your keywords and it’ll give you a list of relevant negative keywords that are relevant to that keyword that you could possibly show up on that you wouldn’t want to show up on and you can block them ahead of time before you even start your campaign and be able to start a campaign off with hundreds of negative keywords before you even get your first click.
Jason Rothman:
Then also one of the tools is the Vid Hoarder. You punch in a keyword, a topic, and then it will give you a list of relevant videos. It also shows you how many views they have, and you can get links to those individual videos and then target them as individual placement videos where your YouTube ads show up. To me, placements is the most effective, most relevant form of YouTube advertising. The problem is, how do you find what videos to show up on, what placements, Vid Hoarder helps you do that. Go to software.adleg.com/psp, get a free seven-day trial, get instant access. You can also see videos of the tools being used and how they work. Software.adleg.com/psp, free seven-day trial, instant access, Kyle Sulerud’s AdLeg Software Suite.
Jason Rothman:
Chris, we’re going into the next episode because we are taking off as people are listening to this Thanksgiving week and we’re not doing a recording, but we’re going to double up this episode, do another set of questions and have that second episode coming out next week. But we’re also going to do Patreon episodes, paidsearchpodcast.com check out the link to Patreon, $2 a month. We do an after show every single week, and I believe we’re going to answer some business questions in there. Next week you’ve got another Q and A coming out, another Paid Search podcast, and both weeks you’ll have companion Patreon episodes where we answer questions about pay-per-click.
Jason Rothman:
With that, I want to thank you for listening. I want to thank Chris for being my co-host and partner on the show. I want to thank Chris for being such a great guy. I want to thank Chris for keeping me interested and entertained with his fashion selection every single week. I want to thank Chris for being an older guy than me and guiding me in all parts of life, Google Ads, business, family, everything, spirituality, knowing my body, knowing me inside of me, politics. The guy guides me on everything. He shows me how to live. I’m so glad I called him four years ago and said, “Hey man, want to be my friend?” And he said, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for your call.” As he said before, I’d been in my silo. “Hey Jimmy, get off the show now.”
Jason Rothman:
Okay, so with that we’re going to close the show. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Chris, don’t you dare hit that stop recording button because we’re going to keep going. I know you’re about to hit it. We’re going to chop it up in post production. Thanks for listening everybody. See you next time.