Is My Display Campaign Working? (Episode 165)

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Show notes:

Jason and Chris conclude their Google Ads display advertising series this week with a wrap up conversation focused on how they judge their display campaign results and determine if a display campaign is working. The answer to “is it working” depends on the reason why you’re running a display campaign. Define your goal first. Are you running display to generate branding and awareness, are you running display to get engaged traffic, or are you running display for direct leads and sales? We cover the reasons to run a display campaign and then we talk about his to judge success for each of those goals. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show!

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News:

Google Ads to remove accelerated ad delivery – Search Engine Land

YouTube

Transcript

Jason:
Shut the door. Shut the door.

Jason:
Yes. I’ll explain that one in Patreon, Chris. Hey everybody, I got a story for you. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Paid Search podcast or as I call it now the Polarizing Paid Search podcast. Chris, Cynthia has been editing the videos, all that kind of stuff. She’s been looking at the feedback on display and she’s like, “Man, some people do not care about display at all, and then some people absolutely love it, like their rodeo clown, and they’re at the rodeo.” I’ve found that display has been polarizing.

Jason:
People are like, “Oh, if those won’t work, I’ll never do it,” or people are like, “Whoa, works better than search if you put the time at it, can’t beat the volume, can’t beat the cost. Here’s all the things I do to make it work.” Have you found that, Chris?

Chris:
I feel like that’s part of the reason I’m here. I need this show just as much as everyone else because most of the time, my opinions are chiseled into rock, and I don’t change them. Then I come on here and I’m like, “Okay, I should give X a chance. I should do this or this.” That’s why we’re here. That’s the Paid Search podcast. That’s why we’re here, because otherwise, you’re going to keep doing the same thing, and guaranteed, you’ve run a campaign long enough, Jason. You know you keep doing the same thing forever.

Chris:
It will eventually start to trend down. It won’t go up without making some adjustments, some changes. That’s why we’re here. That’s why you’re listening to the Paid Search podcast, and we appreciate your patronage. Let’s get into a great tool that you can use for your display campaigns. This tool, opteo.com/psp, O-P-T-E-O.com/psp. That is a special URL you can use to get an additional six week or I should say an additional two-week, a six-week in total trial for this amazing tool that you can use to optimize what we’re talking about today.

Chris:
Display campaigns, these are great tools. Well, this is a great tool that can send you suggestions, recommendations. It can send you email alerts, alerts in your email. You’re looking at your campaign. You’re thinking, “What do I do now?” Opteo.com/psp, it will give you the hints that you need to make improvements.

Jason:
Thank you, Chris. I want to thank everybody for sharing the show with their colleagues, sharing the show with their friends, and very importantly leaving us a rating and or review on Apple podcast and all the podcast platforms out there. When you do that, it sends a signal to the algorithms that we’re doing something interesting here, and they share it with more people and we’re able grow the show. We like to read those reviews. This week, Chris, we are back to the United States of America and back to five-star reviews. It feels right.

Chris:
Yes.

Jason:
We are up to 199 ratings in Apple podcasts.

Chris:
Wow. I remember when we celebrated 50. Do you remember that? We celebrated 50.

Jason:
I remember when you posted the first one as yourself-

Chris:
Let’s not talk about that.

Jason:
… and forgot to change the name. I was like… I didn’t know you very well. I was like, “Oh, this is a guy who does that? Okay.”

Chris:
I know. I really wanted the number to start going up. I did what I could.

Jason:
I feel you, man. I feel you. I feel you. I do remember when we got our first review. It was someone with a… He put the name of his business, and it was some fishing company or Minnesota or something. We were like, “Well, how did he find our show? Was he eavesdropping on us? Did he hack into our conversation?” Then we’re like, “Oh yeah, we did put it out there for people to find it,” but really quickly, someone found the show on Apple podcast, and that was cool.

Jason:
This week’s five star review from Matthew, five stars, “One of the best podcasts out there. People who have no interest in Google marketing, listen to this podcast because, well, I don’t know why, but they do I’ve heard by the hosts.”

Chris:
It was one of the best, but he doesn’t know why they listen, but the hosts tell them.

Jason:
I know it’s funny to say that.

Chris:
Nice. Obviously a long time listener and fan. Thank you, Matthew. All right. Well, hey-

Jason:
Chris, make a sound with your mouth. What do you got? You got some news?

Chris:
Let’s do the news.

Jason:
It sounded like you had some breaking news. Yes, Chris, another week, another feature of Google ads that they are taking away. As time goes on, they’re whittling away at everything we do. August 19th article on Search Engine Land, we’re going to link to it in the show notes. Google ads to remove accelerated ad delivery option next month by October 1st.

Chris:
Gosh.

Jason:
That was not a sound effect put in post production. That was Chris’s natural disappointed reaction.

Chris:
I saw this. A warning popped up in one of my feeds, and it said, “You need to change your feed settings.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” It’s never recommended that. I looked. I was like, “Wait, nothing currently active is set for accelerated.” It was one of my old campaigns that have been paused what it was warning me about, and so then I clicked on the ad or the warning and read through and just sighed and then said, “Yes sir, Mr. Google,” and then continued with my work.

Jason:
They say, “Advertisers typically opt for accelerated delivery when the goal is to drive as many conversions as possible within the target cost per conversion.” No kidding. That’s why we do it. “This is particularly common for e-commerce, blah, blah blah.” Then it says, “However, Google says the way that accelerated delivery works can make it an inefficient option. Obviously, if you do not have a capped daily budget, choosing the accelerated option can mean your ads stop serving well before the day ends.” For example, if your budget is $100 a day, if the market shares $200 worth of market that you could show up on in your accelerated delivery as opposed to standard, boom, they’re going to spend it as fast as possible.

Jason:
You could spend that hundred in the first few hours and not be able to run the rest of the day, but it says, “But Google also notes this method can increase CPCs due to increased competition early in the day.” I think that’s something both Chris and I have seen. Early in the day, there’s a lot of advertisers and the cost per click can be higher or unintentionally spend most of your budget in the earlier time zones. They say standard delivery has now been improved to be more predictive. That’s about it.

Jason:
There’s not really much to say except we are down for the count with accelerated delivery. Maybe we’ll talk a little bit about our opinion and editorial and Patreon. How does that sound, Chris?

Chris:
I have some thoughts. I have some thoughts to share on that. We will save that for after the show. Patreon.com/paidsearchpodcast, join us there. In a couple weeks, we’ll be doing our very popular questions and answers show. We do answer questions that come in through our website, paidsearchpodcast.com.

Jason:
I changed it. I changed it. I changed the order. I saw real estate agents, and I thought, “Chris will… He might murder me if I have him do display five weeks in a row and then jump into real estate agents,” so I made the editorial decision to move Q&A up. Actually Chris, good news, it’ll be next week.

Chris:
Well, next week, so get your questions in. We will be answering those questions. We try and get through all of them that are in the document that we saved. You can also send in a voicemail at in the U.S. 214-810-1355. You can call that number, leave a voicemail, and we will play your voicemail and answer it. Save your fingers some typing. This week though, let’s talk about this week. This week we have done, I’d say Jason, an epic journey. I’ve gotten some comments when I do training like, “You guys have been talking about display a lot.”

Chris:
Let’s spend this hour talking about display, and I said okay, and so we go through it. People are always interested in exploring it because like you said, it’s usually something that people don’t try because it’s not part of the usual process. You don’t think about, “I’m going to go to Google to show off of Google, right?” I don’t go to Google AdWords… Google ads to show somewhere other than Google ads. I want to show on Google, but it’s out there. It is a significant part of lead generation for many, many advertisers. I know I use it for some of mine.

Chris:
The question is you’ve gone through, you listened through all these episodes. You’ve been running it for a few weeks now, maybe a month if you started along with us. How do you judge the results? We’ve talked about how to target audiences and placements and topics and keywords. We’ve talked about all the different types of ways that you can mix and match that. Is it working? That’s the question we’re going to answer today. What does success look like? What is the metrics that you should be looking for, and what are some red flags?

Chris:
Jason, start us off here.

Jason:
I guess, Chris, I think it depends on your goals. With search, I mean we’ve obviously heard people get the idea to do it and some people run search campaigns for brand awareness, but for the most part, search is about getting leads. Everyone mostly has the same goal, but going into display, there’s a lot of different things you can do with it. I think the success depends on your goal. What were your goals going in? Was it to get direct conversions leads straight from those pure display clicks? Was it two, to get engaged traffic?

Jason:
That’s what I call traffic with lower than 90% bounce rates, larger than few seconds time on site. Multiple pages like good analytics data, that’s what I call engaged traffic. Thirdly, was it to get branding and awareness just you think you know who your audience is? You think you know where they are out there on Google, or excuse me, on the display network and just blasting them with a bunch of very low cost per click, tons of impression display ads and building up your awareness and just getting messages out there to them.

Jason:
What were your goals? That’s where I first start with it. Chris, do you think that’s a good way to start judging by success based on first looking at what the goals were? Then if so, break down what success looks like for each one of those goals.

Chris:
I think so. To say, first of all, if your goal is to get conversions right off from the beginning, the goals for something like that are going to be very tight, I would say. I mean, it’s not going to be nearly as much of a conversation of, “Did this work or didn’t it work?” Because if your goals are conversions, I mean, we’re talking about a couple of columns in here. We’re not going to take into account-

Jason:
Are you saying it should be obvious if it work or not?

Chris:
I think, what success looks like for number one, which we’ll say is conversions, sales, it’s fairly simple. What does success look like? It means that you have brought in more value than you’ve spent. It doesn’t mean that you’ve brought in 2000 clicks or that you’re getting clicks for three pennies or three pins as my friends in the UK, I’ve learned this week. That’s not a factor. That could be a factor if you’re talking about engaged traffic, bounce time or time on site, bounce rate, things like that.

Chris:
When it comes to conversions, I think for me it’s pretty cut and dry. I mean, if you’ve spent $300, and one sale for you represents $25 of value, you’re already under water there.

Jason:
Even if one sale is worth a $300 value say revenue, but then your profit margin is only 50%, then what are we talking about here? With conversions, Chris, I’m looking for two things if you’re looking for conversion straight from pure display, number one, the CPA. Like you’re saying, the cost per conversion, how does that compare to your value of what you sell? Then another question I would ask, how does that compare to the CPA I’m getting from search? Is it better? Is it worse? Is it comparable? That would guide the decisions on where the budget should go. If you’re doing much better and getting a lower cost per conversion on display, maybe you move some of the budget over from search to display if you don’t have budget to add.

Jason:
If it’s doing worse, maybe you only give it a little budget. If it’s doing the same, maybe you split the budget, or if it’s doing really good and you can, maybe you just add on more budget. The second question, Chris, and I think this is crucial with conversions because I tell you my cool display strategies, and you’re like, “It sounds cool, but in the real world, that’s like seven weeks of work, and even if the business owner is doing it themselves, it’s not worth the effort.” The question is what kind of volume are you getting from this hard really searching through the forest for a few trees display work that takes a lot of talent, a lot of judgment, a lot of experimenting?

Jason:
What kind of volume are you getting with your conversions? Did you get a great conversion this month? It was a great cost per conversion, but it was only two conversions, and your search campaign gets a 100 conversions a month.

Chris:
Good point.

Jason:
Why are you spending all your time digging through the weeds here where you should just be spending more money on search or opening up a new location across town and adding a campaign to a new part of town or something? It’s like you got to ask yourself, “Is the volume you’re getting with conversions from pure display worth the effort that it takes to figure out pure display? I know that one hits home with you.

Chris:
I mean, I think for the next metric that is possibly a success, it gets so mixed up with the conversion ideas. Conversions, you’re focused on conversions. Sometimes, it’s very tempting to mix up engaged traffic or just traffic in general as a measurement of success. You may think, “I’ve only gotten two conversions, but I’ve gotten 3000 clicks. And I’ve only spent $300.” I mean, it’s pretty amazing. I mean, here’s what I hear all the time. “My analytics has shot way up.” They look at these graphs in analytics.

Chris:
I’ve seen clients send me screenshot, “Hey, what happened? My clicks have dropped to nothing. I’m getting nothing, and I shut off a display campaign that wasn’t working.”

Jason:
Just stop wasting your money on display.

Chris:
You’re welcome.

Jason:
My clicks are down, but my graph is down. We stopped wasting your money on display, “But my clicks are down, Chris.” That’s what you hear.

Chris:
Yeah. Often, your graphs and the visuals that are very much now a part of the Google ads interface, these visuals are dropping off and just have giant hills gone. It looks scary, but in reality, that’s not the goal of conversions. What could be a goal is engaged traffic. That could be valuable for you if you’re getting lots of clicks. For something like engaged traffic, you’re going to look at analytics. This, for me, honestly…

Jason:
Google analytics.

Chris:
Google analytics. Honestly, if I don’t have Google analytics, I don’t think this is a measurable [crosstalk 00:15:45].

Jason:
You can’t credibly say that you’re going to go into pure display with the goal of engaged traffic if you don’t have Google analytics measuring what that traffic does.

Chris:
Even if you have landing pages, in the landing pages, you can’t say I have engaged traffic, and I’m pointing them to a email sign up that is two pages of text, and no links. It doesn’t go any further. It’s either fill out the form or leave, and call that engaged traffic.

Jason:
That’s bad strategy. That’s bad strategy. You want this pure display traffic to come to your site and read about your about page, and read about the history of your business.

Chris:
Watch your videos.

Jason:
Maybe they don’t feel… Watch your videos. Get to know you. No, they don’t fill out the form that day. They don’t call them that day, but you know what? When the next time someone on Facebook goes, “Hey, I need a roof, or does anyone have recommendations?” They remember, “Oh, I read about this interesting site. Let me just share that with them and tell them, “Hey, I didn’t use this company yet, but they looked legit. Check them out,” word of mouth. Maybe they’ll use you in a few years. That’s what we’re talking about with engaged traffic. Chris, just as a business owner who does this, it works.

Jason:
I run display campaigns. I look at trying to get a low bounce rate. I look at trying to get multiple pages per visit. I look at long time on site. I know that’s not leading to direct immediate conversions, but I do feel a pickup in business. When I see those stats, it does feel like I’m doing something good. Getting my name out there. Getting people to learn about me.

Chris:
Let’s give the people what they really want. Let’s give them some practical numbers. I’m going to throw out a number here. Jason, I’m sure that you will undercut me and say that your bounce rates from display campaigns are way better, but I’m going to give a real world number. I’ve learned my lesson about throwing numbers out, because you’re like, “What? That’s what you get.” Here we go. I’m going to say bounce rates from display campaigns. I’m usually pretty happy if I’m below 80 and maybe in the 80 to 70 range. Now, that’s not for search. If I’m in search and I can get people engaged, and I’m hoping for 60, 50, something like that that, that would be great.

Jason:
50, for sure.

Chris:
The display campaigns, if I can get 75, I’m liking it. That seems pretty good. Time on site, if I can get a minute, I’m really liking that. If I can get anything over a minute, I’m like, “Whoa, this is excellent.” Engagement as far as number of pages per session, anything over one is good on average. That doesn’t mean everyone’s viewing one page and leaving. That means the average is more than one page, 1.4, something like that.

Jason:
I mean, so the key word there, Chris, is the word average, average bounce rate, average pages per visit, average time on site. What we’re really looking for are super engaged users. What I do is I sort in analytics. We have an episode on this. Just Google Paid Search podcast Google analytics. You’ll see the episode, or look for it in YouTube. What I do, Chris, is I’m looking for those super engaged users, so if I have an average time on site of a minute 10 seconds, I think, “Okay, that’s pretty good for display,” but just on paper, I’m not super excited about an average of 1:10, one minute 10 seconds.

Jason:
What I am excited about is say I got 50 clicks that month or 100. I’m excited by double filtering that data and looking at the cities to try to basically replicate individual users. There’s probably better ways to do it. I just can’t think off the top of my head right now, because if you do LA or New York, there’s probably multiple users if you’re targeting the whole country high population. If you double filter like Google ads campaign or ad group and then on top of that cities, what you’ll see is that if your average is one minute 10 seconds in the 100 clicks, there might be four of those users that spent 25 minutes on your site.

Jason:
That’s what really gets me motivated about engaged users. Those four users, they spent 25 minutes on your site. That’s a long time. They know about you now. Maybe you spent 30 bucks that month on display. Maybe you spent 50 or 100, but you’re getting something for it. Maybe there were a handful at five or seven minutes and the most of them were zero, but the average comes out to 1:10. That’s why we say average of one minute is pretty good. Bounce rate, Chris, I agree with you. 80%, that’s looking good. Really Chris, to me, it’s not about what looks good. It’s about what looks bad.

Jason:
Really anything 90% or over, that just feels very negative. Really, over nine out of 10 people who come to my site, over 90 out of 100 are just purely bouncing, so I’m really trying to keep it under 90. You’re right. If you get under 80, that’s a very, very good sign. Some people are going to listen to this, Chris, and they’re going to run campaigns, and they’re going to see 7% bounce rate from pure display.

Chris:
Good point.

Jason:
You’re going to see 3% bounce rate from pure display. What that would mean… Go ahead, Chris. What does that mean to an experienced eye like yourself?

Chris:
This is a good point because you can’t think that you are… You probably somehow cracked the code and you beat everyone at the display game, and now you’re generating amazing traffic that never bounces. The fact is what you probably have is the issue with your code. Most of the times, what I find is there’s two analytics code on one page. You have a Google analytics account with code underneath another Google analytics code with a different account. I don’t know why that happens, but I see that all the time.

Jason:
Because they work with multiple website companies, multiple Google ads managers, and people keep adding code to the site. Google tag assistant in Chrome, Chris, Google tag assistant, it’s an extension. It’ll tell you how many analytics codes are on your site.

Chris:
Yep. Good point.

Jason:
It’s useful.

Chris:
Thanks for bringing that up because that is what’s essentially a red flag, which we’ll talk about here in a second. That’s one of those, “Hey, something’s wrong here. I don’t think that’s one thing that… There’s quite a few more.” Let me talk about and introduce my favorite, one thing that I pitch a lot as far as the value of display. It’s a combination of two things. What I think is really cool, and I was just telling someone just this week in training. They were like, “Is this worth it?”

Chris:
I was answering the question for them that it was worth it when you combine display plus remarketing, two separate campaigns. Jason, imagine driving somewhat qualified traffic for $0.03. I have one client who’s getting traffic for $0.03 to a super long engaging page with a very low bounce rate.

Jason:
$0.03 per click?

Chris:
$0.03 per click U.S., and then $0.01 worldwide.

Jason:
What are you bidding? $0.10 or $0.05, and it comes in a little under?

Chris:
No, I think I’m bidding $0.20 or something like that.

Jason:
You’re just getting it cheap.

Chris:
I’ve been pulling it down, but it’s one of those high funnel informative type of things. It’s a service that they offer, and people are trying to learn how to begin this business thing, and this tool can help them at that level. What I love is that we’re bringing 6,000 visitors a month for this person with a very low spin. We’re just throwing a little bit of money at it. I’m then-

Jason:
6,000 and $0.03, you’re spending 200 bucks a month for that?

Chris:
Yeah. Nothing, because it’s a multi thousand dollar campaign a month, things like 2,000 or 3000 a month. 200 is nothing, 10% of your spend. Then-

Jason:
Gotcha. 2000 account and then that one campaign is 200.

Chris:
Right. Thank you.

Jason:
Got it. Got it.

Chris:
Now, imagine what’s happening to my remarketing campaign. I have a separate remarketing campaign, and now, my remarketing list is blowing up. I’m getting thousands every month added to this remarketing list, which costs me very little. I can now serve them ads for the next several months, and they can remember that they’ve been to this site. This tool is still available. This is something that I like, and this is number three possible metric goal that you want to hit is branding awareness.

Chris:
Honestly, I don’t put a lot of stock in the other argument of use display to get your name out there, because when I think of display, if display were standing in front of me, it would be a bottomless black hole pit of infinity. You can throw money into it, and you’ll never hear the coins hit the bottom of the well. You’ll never reach it, but you’ll never impact the display impression share that’s out there. It just won’t happen. What I like is combining remarketing with display and bringing in traffic.

Jason:
Just the flip side of the coin there is sometimes pure display can screw up your remarketing list because you have this nice remarking list of actual users who have been to your site, who found you naturally or organically or through great search ads or whatever. Then you throw in thousands of pure display clicks on there. It can screw up your remarketing list. One thing you could do is that page you’re talking about, that informational page, that could be its own little slash whatever page. Then you can set up a custom remarketing list that says, “Okay, only users that have been to this specific page.”

Jason:
Then you can call that your display remarketing list or something. What are you seeing from that remarketing traffic that comes in after they’ve gotten added because they came in initially from pure display?

Chris:
It doesn’t happen often, but we do get actual click conversions, not view through conversions but actual click and convert, which is not a purchase but it’s a signup for the client. I mean, it happens and that’s-

Jason:
I don’t know if this is possible, Chris, but you do pure display, creative remarketing lists from that just based on people who viewed the page or whatever who came in from that traffic. I don’t know if there’s a way to do this, but if there is, it’d probably be great. What if instead of doing that, you said, “Okay, people who’ve come to this specific page and who spent two minutes on it.” I don’t know if there’s a way to do that, but then the remarketing traffic you would remarket to would be people that actually took some interest or were on the page for 30 seconds as opposed to people who bounced.

Jason:
I don’t know if there’s a way to do that, but I was just thinking.

Chris:
There is. What you have to do is you have to essentially create a goal in analytics to say if someone has been on this page over X time, put them in a conversion goal, and then you would actually create an audience from that goal to say, “This is my audience.” People that have “converted” reached the two-minute time period on this page. Then they can become an audience. This a creative idea. I like that.

Jason:
[inaudible 00:26:44] some do it. What’s fun about display, the flip sides of it, is well, like we said the top of the show, is it worth the effort? If you’re going for conversions, what’s your volume like? Because there’s a lot of effort here, but the reason there’s a lot of effort and the flip side of that is it’s fun because you’re working with so much volume usually on pure display that it just allows for a lot of possibilities. By the way, that’s a great time to tell people analytics metrics, time on site pages per visit.

Jason:
You can create those as goals in Google analytics. Import them into Google ads as conversions, and then get conversion data that way. I call those soft conversions as opposed to hard conversions where people fill out a lead form, but that gives you possibilities. Just to wrap up… Chris, here’s the question. That’s a good strategy for branding. We’ve talked about in earlier episodes using keywords, using topics, audience, all that kind of stuff to get branding out there.

Jason:
How do you measure those goals? To me, the only thing I can really think of is just looking at the placements that you show up on and seeing if those placements make sense to the kind of audience you think you’re trying to get in front of. I think, but then again, if you’re using audience, then placements don’t really matter. I guess it’s a tough question. How do you judge results of branding? I mean, is it overall sales of your business and just having a gut feel? It’s hard.

Chris:
When it comes to branding, I mean, I like the remarketing spin, the fact that I can get 100,000 impressions, and I didn’t pay for any of those impressions until 0.1% of those people clicked on the ad. That’s the only ones I paid for, but I still got 100,000 impressions for free. That’s usually what I think is valuable not because I got impressions, but because-

Jason:
Impressions per dollar?

Chris:
Exactly.

Jason:
No, no, you’re saying deeper. You’re saying deeper. You’re saying it’s not just impressions per dollar. You’re saying it’s [crosstalk 00:28:42].

Chris:
I’m saying it’s not necessarily just because I like impressions. It’s what I like is the fact that they’ve been to the page already. They’re already familiar with the product. If I liked impressions, I could throw ads on mobile apps.

Jason:
You should run that pure display forever.

Chris:
That’s not what I like. What I like is the fact that these people have already been exposed to my client’s website, product, service, and now they’re getting remarketing. They see the logo.

Jason:
Well, that’s a reasonable branding goal. You’re not just looking for impressions. You’re trying to do something with that branding. You’re creating a bigger remarketing list. The branding goals are, I mean, is pretty advertiser specific and what your goals are. Chris, let’s talk about red flags.

Chris:
Before we talk about red flags, let’s mention again Opteo, O-P-T-E-O.com/psp. They send you email alerts. I talked about this all the time. It’s a free tool that helps you run your Google ads campaigns. Manager’s out there. If you have 6,000, 7,000, 70,000 like Jason has, you have so many clients. There’s not even a number for it. You need a tool like this, O-P-T-E-O.com/psp. You can get a six-week trial of this tool where they help you be creative with your campaigns because hey, everybody needs a little help.

Chris:
All right, so let’s talk about red flags. This is something I’d… When I look at a display campaign, these are some of the first things I look at before I even look at success, because I do a lot of audits. I do a lot of training where I look at the accounts and people are looking to me to help them save money, curb some of their waste. When I see display campaign, the one of the first things I look for is I go to the placements and then I click on where ad showed. That’s where a lot of this is going to take place, honestly, because this is essentially the same thing as doing an audit on a search campaign.

Chris:
Instead of looking at the search terms, we look at the placements. We see where this showed. Number one for me, I sort by impressions, or I sort by maybe clicks, one of those two, and I look in the top 10% of the listings. Is there something that’s spending a significant amount and has a 60%, 20%, 50% click through rate? I just did this just this week. I copied and pasted… I went to the details, looked at the placement, copied and pasted and put that into a browser. You know what it was? It was the weirdest site that took over my whole screen, and it started doing some kind of-

Jason:
You’re like naked people, and they were like press play. They were like, “Chris, thanks for coming back to our site.”

Chris:
No. Welcome. Here’s your members… No, no, no, no, no.

Jason:
It was the weirdest thing.

Chris:
Weirdest thing. Welcome back. No, no, it was the weirdest thing.

Jason:
It took up my whole screen.

Chris:
It was such click arbitrage because they were forcing… If you wanted to engage with the site, no matter what you did to click, it was going to click on an ad and open up a new window in this. It was-

Jason:
Also, they’re trying to generate revenue off the ad inside their own site that they’re bringing traffic to from ad clicks.

Chris:
Right. Right.

Jason:
Arbitrage, get clicks for 20 cents. Get 25 cents from the revenue.

Chris:
It’s click arbitrage.

Jason:
It’s dirty, dirty revenue.

Chris:
It’s dirty stuff. In the end, not the content. Let’s clarify. Not the content of the website. Jason, I don’t want to start any rumors. It was not dirty, not the content of the website. What’s dirty is the click arbitrage. I can see that on YouTube.

Jason:
I know. I want everyone, no matter what country they listen to where English is their first or their 10th language, everyone got that context, and then you freaked out about it, which you made you look more guilty than you already were.

Chris:
I know. That’s true. I should pass by it. I shouldn’t have even looked. Anyway, high click through rate, if you see high click through rates, red flag. I know, Jason, we have seen that before.

Jason:
People are going to say what’s high? Number one, look at a big date range. You got to look at a big date range, 14 days, 30 days, something like that or longer. People always used to say like 1% click through rate on search was the threshold of quality, below 1%, little low quality, higher than 1%, higher quality. That’s such-

Chris:
No way.

Jason:
… such a rough metric and things are so different depending on your position and all that, but what I’ve always equated that to, and I think I’ve heard it from people, Chris, is on the display network. The 1% on search equates to 0.1%, a 10th of a percent on display, but that doesn’t mean a 1% click through rate is bad. It doesn’t mean a 100% click through rate is bad if there’s only one impression.

Chris:
One impression, one click.

Jason:
It’s all about you have to have a lot of impressions to make this judgment, but if you’re getting into the hundreds of impressions and you’re on display in your click through rate, Chris, I’m going to say is double digits 10% or higher, is that a red flag over hundreds of impressions?

Chris:
Sure. Yes, especially if it’s-

Jason:
Now, why is that a red flag, Chris?

Chris:
Well, because most of the time for me, if I go to it, it doesn’t have any particular industry or content focus. It’s just a crap site. It just has ads everywhere. Stuff’s flashing on your site. It tries to take over your screen. It pops up and all this weird stuff. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what makes it a red flag to me. I don’t have any interest in advertising on that and that’s something I want to block.

Jason:
When people click on a pure display ad, Google gets revenue. You’re paying Google, but publishers of those non-Google owned websites, regular websites and all that apps, they get revenue when people click on that, so because they’re incentivized to get people to click on the ads, some people take that in a good way and make great content that thousands and millions of people would want to see. A percent of those people naturally click on the ads that are relevant, and they make money and everyone’s happy. But some people try to game the system with way too many ads on the site, blending in the ads to make it look like the website and all that kind of stuff.

Jason:
You get into the double digits, and even Chris, I don’t know, 5%, 6% on click through rates. Not to say that it has to be bad if those are the click through rates over a lot of impressions, but I’m at least going to check out the site and see what’s going on.

Chris:
Check out the site. I mean, at least be aware.

Jason:
An unnaturally high click through rate is something to watch for. Now, mobile apps, Chris, I just put use your own judgment. We’ve talked about it a lot. You just gotta use your judgment. Do you think that app is a place you would want to show up? What percent of your traffic is coming from apps? There’s a lot of volume out there with apps.

Chris:
How much spend is happening on mobile apps. If you were to, you know, look through everything that has a mobile app on it or a mobile app impression and click, how much of that are you spending? If you sort by cost, is most of your screen filled with just mobile app, mobile app, mobile app, especially the mobile apps like a toddler coloring app? I have a two-year-old, and she doesn’t make good business decisions. I’ve asked her what I should do about my prices and my business, and she just constantly has bad ideas. I wouldn’t recommend.

Jason:
She just poops?

Chris:
She’s like, “I got a popo.”

Jason:
Chris, I mean, we sound so defensive right now because the next red flag to look for is weird amounts of clicks and impressions at odd hours of the day. The reason we’re on the defensive here is because you have to have your guard up with display because of the high volume potential. You’re not just showing up on keywords. You control in a small little metro you control. If you are targeting multiple states or a whole state or the United States or a whole country, and you’re running different kinds of display strategies, there is a potential for tons of volume.

Jason:
Number one, keep your budget cap under control. That’s just common sense, but secondly, because the volume could potentially be so high, you might turn that sucker on at midnight or it might come on for the next day, and you might get a bunch of clicks and impressions. The volume is just so high that it can’t control it and even it out through the day because the volume is just so high. Just see if you’re wasting all your budget at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning when you probably don’t want that quality of person.

Jason:
You want people sitting at their desk making business decisions. Yeah. Is that what you’re thinking of Chris when you talked about odd hours?

Chris:
For some reason, it’s like my sister back when I was a kid. When she got her allowance at the first of the week, she immediately went and bought a gumball and wasted half of it. That’s the same idea when I see what happens with display campaigns. It’s like midnight, “Oh look, my bank account is full.” Google immediately starts getting tons of impressions and then starts to even out around 2:00 AM. It’s like, “Whoa, wait a second. I could have used that extra $6, $7 around noon. I would rather spread that out rather than have a giant lump there.” That’s the idea.

Chris:
Last, I’m going to leave this one to you because I love your note.

Jason:
I’m going to leave it to you. I’ve been talking. You go ahead. I’m just going to say it. 99% bounce rate, one second time on site. Those are red flags if that’s the analytics data you’re getting. Those might be referred to some people in a jokingly way called Facebook metrics.

Chris:
I was wondering if you’re going to say it.

Jason:
I’m going to say… Nevermind, we’ll leave it at that, Facebook metrics.

Chris:
If you’re getting Facebook metrics on your display campaign, that’s a red flag because even display campaigns beat Facebook. I’d love that. All right, well that’s it.

Jason:
Hey, no, no, no, no. It’s not funny because 99% bounce rate, one second time on site. That’s not what you have to fully ask yourself. You need to go back into the account and see if you’re getting engagement, because if you’re getting engagements-

Chris:
Look how many likes, guys. Look how many followers a business has on Instagram. All right, we’re gonna jump into our Patreon show where we talk about-

Jason:
Join us on Patreon. Chris, what is wrong with people? What’s wrong with us, number one, for charging two bucks a month? Then what’s wrong with a percent of people going, “I wish they didn’t put stuff behind the pay wall?”

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