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Show Notes:
Welcome back to the PSP! This week we’re doing part 2 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!
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Transcript:
Jason Rothman:
(Singing) Jimmy, yes. I just wanted to come over here with a cup of tapioca and thank you for treating your stepfather and his extended family with respect over the Thanksgiving holiday. I know it’s not easy for you, but it’s not easy for him. It’s a new situation for all of us, but I thank you for understanding and being a respectful young man. Yeah. No problem. Can I get that tapioca now please? Yes.
Chris Schaeffer:
I think that one might be my favorite. I think I’m going to, I’m sorry. Do your intro.
Jason Rothman:
Hey everyone. Yes. Welcome back to The Paid Search Podcast. My name is Jason Rothman as always. I’m joined this post Thanksgiving week by the great Chris Schaeffer. Chris, how was your Thanksgiving?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, it was amazing. Jason. I decided to fast for one week and I look amazing. I feel amazing and I’m just going to continue to fast through December and maybe all of 2020. You know what they say? 2020 no eating.
Jason Rothman:
Chris how were you as a teenager? Speaking of family, speaking of teenagers, speaking on Thanksgiving, were you a well behaved young man?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh, Jason, I have always been a rule follower. Probably always will be. Yes. I’m incredibly well behaved. My sister was the terror of the family and I was successful in all of my studies, successful in my many girlfriends and successful in my French Horn studies, which I excelled in and amazing. Really just phenomenal.
Jason Rothman:
Well, I was in the bell choir.
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh wow.
Jason Rothman:
In seventh and eighth grade-
Chris Schaeffer:
private school.
Jason Rothman:
And I was mostly a well behaved young man. I was very, just let me do my thing. I’m not going to bother you. You’ve laid out the rules. I will figure out every little angle I can, but I will not break the rules and just please just leave me alone and let me do my thing and-
Chris Schaeffer:
Let me play my bell.
Jason Rothman:
Soon I’ll be back in class.
Chris Schaeffer:
Please, just let me play my bell. Well, I played the guitar last week, we’re going to get some bell action today?
Jason Rothman:
No, because I don’t have my gloves. You can’t play bell choir without the gloves.
Chris Schaeffer:
Without gloves. Yeah.
Jason Rothman:
Chris, let me ask you a question. You had these, was it four high school girlfriends?
Chris Schaeffer:
Uncountable. I mean there’s no one knows.
Jason Rothman:
Who broke it up with who? Did you break any hearts or you get your heartbroken. Because I knew some guys in high school Chris, they did what you did. They dated the older girl. They got ruined for a decade or for that break-
Chris Schaeffer:
Decade. Wow.
Jason Rothman:
For decades. They got ruined. It was very emotional.
Chris Schaeffer:
The older girl, she just stopped talking to me. We never were official. It was just, I think I was a side guy before there was side guys, you know.
Jason Rothman:
Side guy my side guy. I’m going to start calling you that. All right. That’s all I needed. That’s all I needed. I got some gold for the show as always. I’m joined by my side guy Chris Schaeffer.
Chris Schaeffer:
Excellent. I’m so glad I supplied that for you. Okay, well let me talk about my sidekick and partner in Google ads that I appreciate. opteo.com/psp pronounced Opteo is a wonderful tool that can help you excel in your Google ads. Whether you are managing it yourself or you’re managing it for multiple clients like Jason and I, we have many clients and we use tools like Opteo to get things done and we like Opteo a lot because it provides email alerts. It provides an interactive, colorful, very informational interface to give us information about our campaigns in ways that we may not have otherwise understood. You want to look at the clicks over time.
Chris Schaeffer:
You want to provide some really cool looking reports that you can take a screenshot and pop into an email, lots of stuff like that, lots of cool stuff that you’ll love. You can get a six week extended trial and try it out for free. This is for our listeners, opteo.com/psp hit them up in the chat. Say, hey, I’m a listener of the show. Can I get a six week extended trial? They’ll say, sure, here you go. Done. You’ll love it. Thanks for checking them out, Jason.
Jason Rothman:
Thanks Chris, and I want to thank directorconsulting.com. Directive Consulting specializes in digital marketing for enterprise and B2B advertisers. There’s all kinds of different advertising going on Google ads, SEO, Facebook, all that stuff. There’s tons of different advertisers, small business, medium sized businesses, the different businesses, but it really is different in terms of management and skill level and what an agency can do for you when you’re running at an enterprise and B2B level. If you run those campaigns, I recommend going to directiveconsulting.com they do it all SEO, pay-per-click, conversion rate optimization, landing pages, content, social media, digital PR. They do it all. They figure out what gets the highest quality leads and then they help you scale that program. Look at their case studies on their website, look at the big names they’ve worked with, look at their content, and most importantly, get a free custom proposal @directiveconsulting.com
Chris Schaeffer:
As we did last week. We have answers to your questions and Jason, I have great news. We are going international again, we have a plethora of people from around the world that I’ve never been to pretty much anywhere around the world I’ve never been to. I’m a very untraveled person as you are Jason and today we get to visit some of those places and hear from people, even some of their beautiful accents. You guys stay tuned here. Jason, you ready to jump in with the first question?
Jason Rothman:
Yes. Elias from Athens, Greece says very straight forward here. “What is the optimal number of ad groups per campaign and keywords per ad group?”
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s a great question. I have two points and I’m going to make and then Jason please fill in the places that I missed, but I’m going to start with the ad group question. How many optimal ad groups are there? I have a particular issue with that question because there is no optimal number of ad groups. There’s no such thing. You can have a successful campaign and I have them, I have a ton of them. They’re everywhere. You’ve never seen a better campaign than what you see on my screen. Every one of them. And some of them have one ad group, some of them have two, some of them have 20 and the number of ad groups is not related to the success of the campaign. Okay. Now that I’ve said that, the next part of your question is how many keywords per ad group that I think is important?
Chris Schaeffer:
I think that there is an optimal number and I’ve quoted it before. I’ve said it before. In fact, I mean you could go back to like episode three, four. I mean we probably talked about it back then. I mean I’ve always said this one number. It’s not a number that is documented anywhere, it’s just a number from my experience and people like solid advice so I give solid answers and my answer is 30 I like 30 I think 30 is the max number, but 10 is fine, 20 is fine. 40, 50, 60 I start to have a problem and you say, okay, why 30? Because that’s the next way you’re going to have to go. You know what I’m saying? Okay, thanks for the answer. Now explain why you chose that. The answer is this, the reason I like 30 is because if you start going past 30 you start to deviate from the actual topic or theme of that ad group.
Chris Schaeffer:
Let me explain. Every ad group has a set of ads in it and those ads speak to that issue, that symptom, that problem that the person is searching about. Okay. They’re looking for something, looking for a service. They’re looking for a product and those ads speak to that. If you have 60 if you have 100 if you have 200 keywords, you’ve probably gone past that theme symptom. There’s probably something inside of those that you could pull out and break those into separate ad groups and have more specific ad copy based on the symptom, the theme, the problem, the solution that the person is looking for. That’s why I picked 30 because it’s usually hard to go pass 30 and maintain that theme and you say, well no, not if I change the keyword around 50 different ways.
Chris Schaeffer:
I could have 50 keywords. And then the final thought there is why do you have so many keywords? You’re only getting clicks on 5% of them. You don’t need the other 200 even though they all fit the same theme, you’re only getting clicked on 2% of them. You don’t need that, they’re not doing anything for you. They’re not helping. They have low search volume, that’s it. That’s my very thorough long answer to a very short, precise question.
Jason Rothman:
Yeah, of course. I agree. I think how many ad groups you have is how many fit inside of a one campaign with the settings, how many services, how many themes, and that depends on the advertiser and then what’s the number of right keywords? I would agree with you most of the time I wouldn’t put a minimum on it. You can find with one or two you can be fine with five or six but I would say once you start hitting 20 to 30 then you’re probably asking yourself what you’re doing. However, I just looked inside one of my most successful campaigns, 590 keywords in one ad group.
Chris Schaeffer:
Wow.
Jason Rothman:
Here’s the kicker though, Chris. I have a reason why I’m that high. I have a reason why I’m past 30 the reason is because I have just implemented a loose broad match modified strategy. Volume is down, the market has gotten more competitive, the cost per clicks are up, the cost per conversion is up and we need to get things right again. And with this account, and I’ve talked about in the past, I had some broad match modified issues and things were coming in too loose, I shut down the broad match modified, but then things are getting too expensive, so I’m going to reopen a significant amount of broad match modify keywords. This just happened to be the ad group that I threw a bunch in just two days ago and I’m running it and seeing where the volumes coming in, what keywords it’s coming in on, and then I might prune that down or move things around eventually.
Jason Rothman:
But my point is there’s nothing wrong with having 100s of keywords inside of one ad group as long as they all fit ad as long as they all fit the theme. And as long as you have a reason why you’re doing it and in this case I’m trying out a bunch of new BMM broad match modifiers, but in general I like the 30 keyword threshold. That’s a good in general thing.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay. All Right. Cool. Good question. Thanks for sending it in. All right now Jason, don’t jump on the boat yet. Don’t jump on your plane. We’re going to stay over across the ocean and now we’re going to go to Scotland. We have Phillip from Scotland who has a question that he is sent over the air into the data verse on my phone.
Phillip:
Hi Chris, hi Jason. This is Philip calling from Scotland. I’ve been listening to some of your shows on YouTube and I have a question regarding location based keywords. I have a business that does business all over the UK. But often I see such times where people think they need my time for business, near them. I’m in Scotland and I see such terms that say such and such in London or near Oxford. Now, I don’t want to build a website with a page for every city. And you’d say, is it doing damage or is it crushing my ads performance? If ads goes [inaudible 00:13:22] specific keywords search to mine ad groups. I pop up, but I’m not immediately local. Is that a contradiction? Is that bad news? Look forward to hearing what you have to say about it. Thanks guys. Keep it up. Bye.
Jason Rothman:
Thank you for the question Philip. It’s a good question. Scotland is a place I’d to visit. Sounds like beautiful place. Chris. The answer is obvious. The answers, I don’t know the answers. I don’t know. I’m just messing with you Chris.
Chris Schaeffer:
Killing me.
Jason Rothman:
I’m just messing with you. The answer is I don’t know because that could go either way on this. If someone’s searching for a specific service, we’re going to use, so hard to come up with a term because I’m so focused on local things. But let’s say yes, you do business all over the UK. Someone searches for specifically London for that service. But you do service London and people in London, but you’re not running. You don’t have those pages on your website. Does that person doing the search for your service and the word London in it or other cities you don’t have pages for when they’re looking for those specific cities, are they going to be good traffic or not?
Jason Rothman:
My thought is they could be, I’ve run into this before where you’re like, huh, does someone searching for that term? Even though we’re located in different city, but we business in that city, does that mean they would be turned off by us not being headquartered or located in that city? The answer is I think it depends. I have had situations where I leave those terms running and we can still show up when they include, in this example the word London in the search, but I have had campaigns and clients where we’ve added a signal with this example, the word London as a negative keyword and we only showed up where people typed in that service and not that service with one. It depends. I think it depends on your conversion tracking. You need to know if people searching when they include London.
Jason Rothman:
I don’t care if you’re going to have to explain it to them over the phone or on your website or something that you do service London. What I care about is how many of those London clicks turn into leads, turn into conversions, and if it is a lower rate because you don’t have a London dedicated page on your site, that’s okay. You just need to lower your bid and account for that lower conversion rate and watch your cost per conversion. To me it’s all about having tracking in place. It’s all about letting the data guide you. The one thing I will say in terms of the website or landing pages, you don’t need to build out a page for every single city, but you could on your landing page or website, make it very clear that you do service all of the UK with a map, with a list of cities all on one page.
Jason Rothman:
That’s a good way to tell people, hey, we do both. And then for your ads that run in London, you could, if you wanted to have ad copy that says we service the London area, you could have call outs or a structured snippets that list out the cities that you do business and there’s ways you can do it in terms of conveying that data to people that are conveying the information that you do service all the cities around the UK without building out individual landing pages. That’s one aspect. The other aspect is have conversion tracking in place and let the data guide you and let the data tell you if it’s a good decision to keep showing up when people search those cities and let the data guide you and tell you, okay, do you need to adjust bids on those or do you need to just bought them all together? Those terms, what do you think about that, Chris?
Chris Schaeffer:
Jason, I’ll tell you what people dislike the most is people that are not definitive people that are in the gray area. I think that was a great answer and I’m going to jump straight into a solid answer. Phillip, you can go with this or ignore it, but I’m going to say absolutely not. I’m going to say, do not put, I know I’m going to be, I just, I like to be that guy.
Jason Rothman:
But no. That’s so …
Chris Schaeffer:
So bold. I think that’s the word you’re looking for. So bold and so strong.
Jason Rothman:
No, Chris. No. Because what if he’s struggling to spend his budget? What if his budget is $50 a day and it’s not a super common service and it’s a very niche service and he’s only spending $20 a day without those terms and he needs to try to try it and see if he can get leads at the end. Another thing, you don’t know what if getting one new client pays for his whole year of business, you don’t know the situation tomorrow.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay. Let me clarify. When I say don’t do it, I mean the landing pages do not set up the landing pages.
Jason Rothman:
Why do you spin me up? You could have said that from the start. I agree with that. You don’t need the landing pages to make it work.
Chris Schaeffer:
Absolutely. Do not do the landing page.
Jason Rothman:
Why would you spin up like that?
Chris Schaeffer:
Because you’re fun to watch boil. All right.
Jason Rothman:
You were saying something that was so out of line.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah, I know.
Jason Rothman:
I thought you were saying definitely [inaudible 00:18:36].
Chris Schaeffer:
I thought you knew me well enough to know that of course we’re together on this, but I guess you didn’t feel me out, but let me explain.
Jason Rothman:
[inaudible 00:18:45] surprise.
Chris Schaeffer:
Let me explain my solid reasoning on why you should not cross this line. Let’s go down the road-
Jason Rothman:
of the landing page.
Chris Schaeffer:
Of the landing pages. I’m totally in favor of the keywords. Right, that makes sense. Sure. I mean that would be contradictory to say that you’re leaving something on the page by not targeting some geographic area that could get the search and you could have a great-
Jason Rothman:
[inaudible 00:19:04] track conversions. See how it does.
Chris Schaeffer:
No problem. But let’s go down the line of Phillip setting up pages for 20 different towns and they all have their own landing pages-
Jason Rothman:
And pages mean ad groups.
Chris Schaeffer:
Right? Pages mean ad groups and you know what? You know what that also means? It means making determinations on keywords and ad copy. This one ad group has a town, A. Okay, let’s say town A and it is only for town A. Let’s say you go so far as even to add negative keywords to block everything else. Now you have another one that is town B and let’s say there’s a situation where someone puts both those words in their ad copy. You just missed the search because you’ve made definitive definitions-
Jason Rothman:
In the search.
Chris Schaeffer:
They have to either be a or B, they can’t be both or they can’t be misspelled a certain way because you won’t catch it because you have everything else blocked. Somebody who services this but not London, or blah, blah, blah. There’s lots of ways they could do that and you would essentially block your own ability to show them ad copy and-
Jason Rothman:
You could also make mistakes.
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s exactly what I was going to say, now let’s say you don’t do the negative keywords and you’re saying, okay, I just won’t do the negative keywords, it won’t be a problem. Now imagine someone does a search and for some reason they see an ad that is not for their particular area or you put the wrong ad in with the wrong landing page and now you’re delivering someone to a page that says you serve as town B but they’re in town A. There’s so many things wrong that could work here and in the end I’m only interested in ad copy and then sending them to a page Jason described, send them to a page that says we service everything here. Take your pick.
Chris Schaeffer:
If you’re in this area done, we got it covered. I think that’s the only the reasoning that was-
Jason Rothman:
And by the way, Phillip’s got a business to run.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah [inaudible 00:20:55].
Jason Rothman:
He’s not a Google ads nerd like us trying to make it the most optimal thing. If Phillip can get his campaign 90% of the way there and get leads and fill up a business and get work from this campaign and not have to spend that much time on it, getting that last 9% if he has to spend two hours a day on it, probably not worth it. I agree with you. I’m so against the need to build out 30 city pages just off the top now that said, Chris, if he notices he starts getting a ton of traffic from London and he hears from people in the calls, Oh I didn’t know you do London, but I thought I’d call in any way.
Jason Rothman:
If he starts hearing that, then he can create one page, you know, for London just one and not have to create 30 not knowing that the 30th city’s not going to get any traffic at all. Let the data guide you, let the business guide you. There is room for this individual page thing at some point. But let the data make that decision for you. And you may only end up needing one or you may find the techniques we talked about get you there anyway.
Chris Schaeffer:
All right Jason, Let’s stay overseas one more time.
Jason Rothman:
Yes, Chris, truly an international show today. Next question is from Michelle from Melbourne. “Hey guys, love the show. I’m an expat from London in Melbourne.” Just kidding. Chris I used to do Australian impressions all the time.
Chris Schaeffer:
You got yelled at-
Jason Rothman:
Of lost-
Chris Schaeffer:
You got yelled at so much about that. It’s wonderful.
Jason Rothman:
I’ve lost. Michelle from Melbourne. “Hey guys, love the show. I’ve got a problem that is making me want to throw my computer through the window. I have a client who runs a few gyms. My Google ads keep getting disapproved for misleading content when they are not misleading.” And then she goes on to give examples of what Google is seeing on the website in terms of different claims. But the claims look very vanilla. They’re very straight forward. If you sign up for the gym, you get this in terms of the membership. Her problem is she keeps getting ads disapproved for misleading content.” What do you do Chris, when ads get disapproved for misleading content?” I have a very good answer for this. I’m shocked that you’re the one to answer this one, but let’s see if you’re up to the task.
Chris Schaeffer:
I’m certain my answer-
Jason Rothman:
I’m coming in hot with a good answer after you just know that no pressure.
Chris Schaeffer:
Now I’m terrified. Well I’m basically going to say the experience that I’ve had and then I’m going to let you follow up with some solid advice. I’m going to speak to everyone except for Michelle and say hello everyone. The experience that Michelle is talking about is essentially something that I’m sure many of you will have, happened to you if it hasn’t already happened and here’s the usual process you’re going to have to contact Google support for something like this. You could try the chat, they have a chat thing where you can talk to people live, you can call or you can send in an email. And the problem is this, and this is usually what people run into. You’ll get a note about a policy issue and it doesn’t give you specifics. It only gives you general policy information.
Chris Schaeffer:
And what Michelle is talking about with health, anything having to do with health or personal fitness or gyms or training or weight loss or anything like that. Usually there’s promises that are being made that can’t necessarily be appropriate for everyone, you’ll lose 10 pounds or live much healthier, stuff like that. Usually the answer to this is to put a disclaimer, these people in pictures may be, well of course I’m not going to say it in the appropriate language, but essentially what it is saying is the people in these pictures are not necessarily clients. These may be models and also not all results are guaranteed for everyone. That’s usually the disclaimer that can get you from, you put that on the site somewhere and you can get you from having that issue. And from my experience, you send that over to say, hey, it’s on the page. There’s disclaimer, we’ve removed some of these issues and you can get approval from Google. But I’m interested in Mr. I’m coming in hot. What you have to say.
Jason Rothman:
Yes. Just like on the last episode where you gave decent advice and then I came in with very clear, this is what you got to do, this will help.
Chris Schaeffer:
I know.
Jason Rothman:
I asked for [crosstalk 00:25:34] when I go over to England. Michelle, if I’m ever in Melbourne.
Chris Schaeffer:
You won’t be because Jason [crosstalk 00:25:41] everything’s Jason never leaves his house.
Jason Rothman:
Take me out. Give me a great dinner. Show me around Melbourne because this answer is going to help you a lot. You’re on the right track, Chris. You need to contact Google my preference is to call them. Just get started. Call them. Let’s not go back and forth on emails and chats initially, at least. Call them. Number one, put yourself in a very patient mindset. It’s going to take some time. You got to be patient. You tell them that you’re getting this disapproval in your ads and for misleading content. What you need to do, just like Chris said, you need to probably put something on your website or remove something. But here’s the difference with what I’m saying. You need to get Google to send you an email telling you exactly what needs to be added to what page or pages or what needs to be removed.
Jason Rothman:
And you need to just get very specific instructions for them. What do we need to add to what pages? Please email that to us or what do we need to remove from what pages? And then they can give you their options or their advice and then you have it in an email and you can send it to the developer of the website to the client who owns a website, whatever. And then they can do it. And then you can call Google back and you say, hey, this is what you sent us. We did it, it’s on these links now. And then they can get it approved. And that’s my big difference with my advices. Get specific instructions on what to what you need to add or what you need to remove to overcome this misleading content. Then do it. And then you can tell Google you did exactly what they said and then you can see if you can get your ads approved now. That’s my advice. That’s my experience. That’s what I do. Thank you for the question and I’ve got this cohost, the side guy.
Chris Schaeffer:
Am sorry.
Jason Rothman:
Laughing the whole time during the question. Are you laughing at me or are you laughing at what I said in the next one?
Chris Schaeffer:
I just read your answer to the next question and I’m sorry I did not-
Jason Rothman:
I thought I had something on my face-
Chris Schaeffer:
No.
Jason Rothman:
Or something or I wasn’t answering right, but isn’t that, but we’ll get to that comment and trust me, we’ll break it down what I said. But Chris, do you think that’s good additional advice on top of what you said that?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh yeah.
Jason Rothman:
No, don’t make up your own disclaimer. Get them to tell you exactly what they want you to add and that way you don’t have to go back and forth so many times. Is that good advice?
Chris Schaeffer:
That is excellent advice that I have never done. I’ve never been so bold to say, okay, great. What you just said, send it to me an email and I will get that done and we’ll get approval. Bam, bam, like that. I’ve never approached it that way. I think that is excellent. That is coming in hot. That is solid and heavy. That is good stuff. That is a Stanley Steamer of an answer thank you. Next we’re going back to the United States. Finally, we’re back here, Jason back home and we’re going to hear from Aaron. Aaron from Gurnee, Illinois. He says “Of course as everyone does, listens to the show, loves it, changed his life.” Absolutely is going to name his first child Chris because that’s the best name he says, “Answer my question. I was wondering when you guys choose to use target CPA or maximize conversions for your bidding strategy and when you choose to just stick with manual CPC bidding” And Jason, I want you to read what you typed out word for word and go.
Jason Rothman:
You don’t want me to read that because we want to keep being able to do the show. Amongst some other things. Yeah, I got pretty fired up on this one, Aaron. Just in terms of target, CPA or max or maximize conversions versus manual bidding? When do I stick with manual bidding? Always, always do manual bidding. That’s always my default. That’s what I do probably 90% of the time. Here’s my rule of thumb. When do I go automated bidding? It’s when I’m having an issue and manual bidding isn’t getting the job done. Let me give you an example. It’s been a couple months now of a client. In a small area there’s low population and because there’s low population for this topic, also low search volume for this topic, I did not expect it to be this slow and we’re not spending the full budget consistently. And then when we do, our cost per click is insane because I’ve built it up so high trying to get that volume.
Jason Rothman:
When a click does come in, it’s just way more than I want to be paying. In this situation I am not having success with manual bidding, now I’m going to try to maximize clicks or something like that because I didn’t have success with manual bidding. I’m going to try it out. But most of the time I like manual bidding cause I like full control. I like being able to bid different things for different keywords that get different conversion rates at different, get different cost per conversions and be in total control. It works for me. That’s what I do. But when will I use automated bidding? It’s when I’m struggling with manual bidding, I use it as backup option to try something new. That is my outlook on bidding these days.
Chris Schaeffer:
Okay. It’s a great question because I think it’s a very-
Jason Rothman:
Isn’t that reasonable?
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh Yeah, I think so.
Jason Rothman:
It’s not-
Chris Schaeffer:
Ideologist.
Jason Rothman:
It’s not-
Chris Schaeffer:
Ideological. I that it?
Jason Rothman:
It’s not. I’m not a zealot.
Chris Schaeffer:
There we go.
Jason Rothman:
Is what I meant to say. I’m not subscribing to a certain ideology manual versus automated. I’m not saying one is worse than the other. I’m just saying manual works for me. I like it, I prefer it, but I’m not opposed to automated. I do it when manual doesn’t work for me in those 10% search situations. That’s what works for me. But whatever works for people, do what works. That’s my outlook.
Chris Schaeffer:
I would say, just to put a contrast on it, if Jason does it, maybe 10% of the time I may do it 20%. I’m basically with Jason, except I don’t necessarily do it if something isn’t working. I actually, most of the time I tend to use it is when things are going really well and I think-
Jason Rothman:
Why would you do that if things-
Chris Schaeffer:
Because I said-
Jason Rothman:
Are you kidding again?
Chris Schaeffer:
No. I’m not. Listen. Experiment. I set up an experiment and I’ll think, can this trim off another 10, 20% off of the cost per acquisition and sometimes it works really well, sometimes it fails, awful and I end it and it’s over and I break up with it forever. Other times it works and let me say as well, he also mentioned in this question maximize clicks. I believe you mentioned basically automation of other kinds and I do like maximize clicks. If I’m working with a client that has no way of controlling conversion tracking. They just don’t have a system. Maybe they’re delivering everything through a third party system. Their CRM does not have a system that can push that information back into Google ads. That’s going to be a system where I rely entirely on quality of traffic, bounce rate, time on site, search terms, a click through rate and let’s say all of that
Jason Rothman:
And you would rather have max clicks bidding on there. Then beautiful manual and you could go, oh, what was my absolute top impression share? Oh it was 99% and so I want lower bids and see if I can still spend the full budget and get more clicks. Overall, the beauty manual bids. You prefer having a maximize where you don’t even have that option.
Chris Schaeffer:
If the experiment that I set up can get me more clicks at a lower CPC and still maintain those metrics, yeah, I’ll do it. Now. Keep in mind, I never go straight Cold turkey from manual to maximize clicks, conversions, CPA, whatever. I don’t do that because that’s just asking for a total destruction because you see a man cry, you spend, six months working on manual bidding. You change it to maximize clicks. It fails in the first month and then you change it back and all of your bids are changed. You can’t go back.
Jason Rothman:
You lost everything.
Chris Schaeffer:
You lost everything. Absolutely. That’s a big disclaimer there. Don’t Cold turkey. Don’t wipe everything out completely. All right. Hey we can still be friends. Look, I’m not, don’t act like I’m disgusting to you. Tell me I’m beautiful.
Jason Rothman:
I tell you all the time. You’re fricking hot.
Chris Schaeffer:
Thank you.
Jason Rothman:
And it’s attractiveness that it’s not like, Oh, he’s going to walk down a runway attractiveness. Unless it’s like for a denim line or something like that. I can see you in a denim vest with denim jeans.
Chris Schaeffer:
Am a denim model?
Jason Rothman:
Squared or line dancing or whatever. But you have a great business. Look dude, you have such a good look for business. It’s amazing.
Chris Schaeffer:
Wow.
Jason Rothman:
You look like a stock image in real life.
Chris Schaeffer:
That is the best compliment I’ve ever heard. That’s amazing.
Jason Rothman:
Well yeah, there was a freeze frame of you like leaning over someone’s shoulder or like sticking your hand to shake the hands to make the deal or reviewing a contract or something like that. And a stock image or just looking at digital ads on the internet or on the computer. You look like a stock image in real life. It’s amazing.
Chris Schaeffer:
Wow. That’s a really funny [inaudible 00:00:35:38].
Jason Rothman:
Congratulations.
Chris Schaeffer:
I love it.
Jason Rothman:
The funniest part about what it is, you know, I’m not wrong.
Chris Schaeffer:
I don’t know.
Jason Rothman:
You look at other people and then you look in the mirror and you’re like, I am better than looking [inaudible 00:35:48].
Chris Schaeffer:
Self reflection is not something I do well on. I have no idea if it’s true or not, but my wife says that I’m average and there’s not a whole lot of men that are better looking than me. That’s all I need. Jason, let’s get back in our boat and cross the country across the ocean and across the world to go to somewhere.
Jason Rothman:
All right, but first, what happened to America? Where are my American questions, Chris? We had like one out of 20.
Chris Schaeffer:
I didn’t feel like we were representing well enough with our international listeners, which we have a lot of. We have a lot.
Jason Rothman:
A lot. All over the world.
Chris Schaeffer:
Oh yeah.
Jason Rothman:
Don’t get that twist in anybody all over the world.
Chris Schaeffer:
All over the world.
Jason Rothman:
It’s amazing.
Chris Schaeffer:
We’re going to answer a question from Ivan, from Croatia. I’m so unfamiliar with where Croatia is and exactly what’s there that I don’t even know. How do you say the name of that city? I don’t even …
Jason Rothman:
I think Zagreb.
Chris Schaeffer:
Zagreb, grebe.
Jason Rothman:
Zagreb.
Chris Schaeffer:
Do I have to roll my eye. Is that a thing they do? I don’t even know.
Jason Rothman:
You want to.
Chris Schaeffer:
I’m going to say I’m going to call it Zagreb. Okay. Ivan, he says, “Hi guys. First things first. I love your show. Listen to it every day while driving from work really makes the commute, something to look forward to.” He basically discusses how he’s very new at Google ads, only been doing it for six months. First of all, Ivan you found a great resource. You’re going to be a great manager by the time you get through our 200 episodes, congrats on that. He basically says, since I’m only starting out and I don’t have much experience or expertise in Google ads, is a viable freelancer a career option for someone like me possible as a beginner, getting straight to the meat here. Does he have a chance?
Jason Rothman:
And you didn’t want to do this on Patreon where we talk about the business of PPC.
Chris Schaeffer:
It’s a great opportunity to advertise about the Patreon. This is the stuff he would get. What if we gave them a sample Jason? A taste. It’s Christmas Jason. Thanksgiving’s over. It’s Christmas.
Jason Rothman:
Oh yeah. I don’t know. It’s a big question, Chris. It’s a big question. I want to get your thoughts on it two. The BS answers. Oh, it’s great. It’s going to be great forever. Jump on in the water’s nice.
Chris Schaeffer:
No way.
Jason Rothman:
A lot of people online would say that I bet. But I’ll just be honest with you and give you my thoughts on it. The water’s nice right now, but there might be sharks in it. That’s basically the way I look at it. There’s a lot of money to be made right now, but there’s threats on the horizon. There’s sharks in the water. One of the threats is that technology, and I know there’s people that say, oh, there’s always going to be need for human, all this stuff, but you don’t know that. And I’ll give you an, I’m not even going to name the program, but there’s going to be certain, if more and more parts of digital marketing just become business owner, gets on the computer, flips the light switch and turns on the campaign and there’s nothing to do or no controls available to the advertiser like there are today, then what are we going to do?
Jason Rothman:
There’s nothing to do. If it goes down that road, that’s a threat and there are signs that it goes down that road to some extent. The other threat is people. Right now, this is the wild West. There’s a lot of pathetic criminal, disgusting people in this industry Chris. And I’m being real about that dirt. There’s people in this industry that are just horrible people and they jump around from hot industry to hot industry to hot industry and treat and then they fail because they’re horrible people and they jumped in the next one. The reason why is because there’s not a lot of barriers to entry right now. If you want it to become an accountant and do someone taxes, you have to become a certified public accountant licensed by a state. A state has requirements. You have to go to school and basically go for five years.
Jason Rothman:
You have to take a test, all that stuff. If you want to say, I’m going to manage your ad account on a digital marketing platform, you just say it. And there’s a lot of, there’s just a lot of not a good people in the issue. Now that’s a two edge sword. Because there’s not good people in the industry, it makes good people shine and people flock to them. And there’s a lot of opportunity. But if more and more people get into this industry, more and more people get good, there’s just going to be more competition and the profits are going to be narrowed and there’s just going to be idiots and they’re going, Oh, for $21 an hour, I’ll make your campaign great. And all this stuff. Those are my two threats, the technology and also the amount of people getting into it.
Jason Rothman:
That said, that’s not happening tomorrow to the extent that it’s undo able as a business or a career. But the way I always look at it, Chris, is I know that any moment in five years from that moment, this career might not exist and I’m going to have to do something else and I’m going to prepare for that moment that may be overly paranoid and may be under paranoid. But that’s how I think of it. I just know at any time, and I say five years and to be honest with you, dude, I’ll be straight up honest with you.
Jason Rothman:
I look at it like every fricking day. Everything could go away the next day and this opportunity of a career might not exist now. I might go for 25 years and the end never happened and it was just a great career, like accounting career. You just know you’re going to have work for 25 years, but I don’t look at it that way. I look at it, it’s so fluid. Things could change anytime. Do you want to jump into that as someone new? It’s up to you. But those that’s a way someone who’s very established still thinks about it.
Chris Schaeffer:
Yeah. Jason, I thought that was a great answer. It’s the truth.
Jason Rothman:
Are you as negative as me or do you just, or you are and you don’t think about it, you don’t care. That’s how I think about it. I set myself up correct. I know it could all go away and I’m okay with that. I don’t really worry about if that makes sense.
Chris Schaeffer:
I don’t think that it will completely go away within any short amount of time. I think it’ll stick around for a while, but the control in the size of the search market may not be as strong after a certain amount of time, just like billboards are still relevant. There’s still things that people buy, people buy magazine ads, but it’s not as familiar. It’s not as the first thing people think about, but there are still people that need that, because that is the best place for people to see certain things. I think that there will be an industry, I’d say there is probably going to be an industry for 25 years, I would say, there’s going to be something like that, but I don’t think it will resemble the dominance and the percentage of spin that it has had all this time.
Chris Schaeffer:
I don’t think it will continue to grow forever, but I still think it’ll be a viable solution for a lot of people. I mean pending any type of major international political stuff. Having to do with Google and stuff like that. I mean things like that can throw a monkey wrench into it and change things significantly. Breaking things up and making it difficult for the search industry. Google ads to maintain its dominance. But apart from that, no, I think it will always be a place. And Ivan, I think you should, if you like it, if it’s fun, if you enjoy it, if you’re good at it and you’re having success, absolutely jump in. I mean there are, why would we even do this show if we think that there’s no value, why would we do the Patreon which we’re about to do, where we talk about agencies, business owners, freelancers who want to do this. And do it as a career. We wouldn’t do it if we thought it was a worthless thing to get started on today.
Jason Rothman:
I know, but I’m just a paranoid entrepreneur. That’s the way you got to be. And I have dark thoughts.
Chris Schaeffer:
I like it.
Jason Rothman:
I prepare.
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s why I like our relationship so much is because-
Jason Rothman:
You know what? I would honestly advice. I would give a child of mine. I would be like, look, listen to the market, if there’s money to be made, go make money.
Chris Schaeffer:
Learn to code. That’s what I’d tell him.
Jason Rothman:
But don’t have this idea that you’re guaranteed to make money doing this for 30 years. That’s not the world we live in right now anymore.
Chris Schaeffer:
No.
Jason Rothman:
I would say just listen to the market. If you’re able to get clients and make money and you like doing it, do it, but you’re in technology space. It’s very fluid. You know what am saying? That’s the way I think about it.
Chris Schaeffer:
All right. Well, you guys ready to hear a secret weapon? osteo.com/spp it’s a secret weapon. It’s a secret weapon you need to get things done in Google ads. You have the Google ads interface, right? Everybody knows it. They changed it and now it’s completely different and now you know that new one and it has the same stuff, but now you can use optio.com/spp to see a new light on the same data. Colors? You like colors? They’ve got colors, you like graphs, you like email alerts, you like, hey, something’s wrong. Red alert, red flag. They got that. They’ve got lots of great tools to help your life be a little bit easier in. Isn’t that worth trying out for six weeks for free? I think it is. You should try it out. opteo.com/spp thank you.
Jason Rothman:
Thanks Chris and I want to thank Directive Consulting. Director Consulting offers online marketing, SEO, pay-per-click, conversion rate optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, landing pages, and they specialize in enterprise and B2B campaigns. If you’re an enterprise advertiser out there, if you’re a B2B advertiser out there, I know you’ve had multiple agencies that you work with, maybe freelancers. You’ve been frustrated with the accountability, lack thereof. You’ve been frustrated with the communication, lack thereof. Directive is different. Directive delivers directive consulting.com get a free custom proposal directive consulting.com
Chris Schaeffer:
Jason, it’s time to say goodbye and then say hello again and Patreon because that’s what we’re going to do. We have another question. We have a great question, Jason, and guess where it’s from. It’s not the United States. That’s right. It’s from the UK. If you are in the UK, you sent a question. It might be your question. Join us paid search.com look for the Patreon.
Jason Rothman:
paid search.com what are you doing?
Chris Schaeffer:
I am sorry, Jason. It’s been a long parotideomasseterica.com thank you.
Jason Rothman:
Oh, you’ve talked for an hour. It’s been a long day. parotideomasseterica.com there’s a little picture, there’s this picture click it. Sign up $2 a month, 50 cents a show. I should slap myself every time I remind myself about that pricing. Get [crosstalk 00:47:02].
Chris Schaeffer:
25 cents each Jason, 25 cents each.
Jason Rothman:
25 cent each.
Chris Schaeffer:
That’s it.
Jason Rothman:
[inaudible 00:47:09] All right.
Chris Schaeffer:
All right, thanks guys. We’ll see you next week.