Surfside PPC Podcast

welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast go to surfsidepppc.com to join Surfside PPC premium and ask your questions thanks for listening and please subscribe what's up everyone welcome to episode 8 of the Surfside PPC podcast today I'm going to be going over Performance Max for lead generation Performance Max for e-commerce and basically the way that I look at creating performance max campaigns asset groups targeting all of these different things and whether or not it even works so I'm going to be going over some of that every single podcast is now going to come with a bonus podcast that will be added to the premium section so the bonus will be a video version of the podcast now it'll be a completely different recording because I can't kind of just use the audio for my video recordings because I kind of know saying "Oh look here look here." And I don't I don't want to release a podcast where I'm referring to a screen that you know clearly you can't see if it's just audio only so will be two separate podcasts basically but a video component to this where I actually go over here are the actual things I'm talking about so be a little bit more descriptive and those will all go in the bonus section on a weekly basis so having a lot more content come out as the Google Ads course is available for $34.99 a year if you're trying to learn Google Ads may do a few more courses with like recurring type payment things where so if you're interested for a year you're learning about it if you have a business of that type you can kind of keep up with everything so I'm going to try to do a lot more of that so let's get into today and basically what what I'm going to be going over is my strategies as far as performance max for lead generation so questions are kind of just you know kind of basic today we'll still put them in there but we're going to start with question number one do you use performance max for lead generation does it work to drive calls and leads for a business what are some best practices to make it work and drive quality leads okay so question number one Performance Max for lead generation do you do it does it work this is a really good question and it's one of those things where it works but it requires a lot of control and it requires a lot of having the right settings the right you know conversion settings the right data going into your actual account i always talk about data and it's really like the way Google Ads operates is if you can feed in like tons of sales and conversion and revenue data then it just operates a whole lot better for you you know from like a return on ads return on ad spend perspective it's hard to do that from a lead generation standpoint because it's hard to perfectly connect leads to sales and also like Google ad spend to sales all the time because there's people that may click on an ad at one point and end up converting later so basically to to start all of this the more context you can give Google ads about what's actually coming in from your advertisements and what's actually valuable to your business so performance max for lead generation does work it's just one of those it requires a a few controls first thing is the conversion actions that you optimize for if you optimize for the calls from ads conversion you just need to keep in mind that performance max has the potential of driving you really lowquality phone calls competitive phone calls so one of the things that you can do is say we're going to make our calls from ads conversion be 90 seconds 2 minutes so we're not getting some of these just confused phone callers that's one of the things that I do if I'm getting a ton of phone calls for some clients like phone call volume is just one of the things they deal with and that's one of those where you really have to lean on the client and you know what their kind of expectations are in terms of phone call quality but if you're running like a medical office or even like a local service business at times you might find that it's like all right we're getting a ton of competitive phone calls and usually it just ties right back to performance max because performance max naturally goes after competitive keywords so the the other part of this is negative keywords like when you're running performance max for lead generation you have to build a huge negative keyword list it's like build an account level like build a negative keyword list share it among your search campaign your performance max campaign it's actually a really good strategy overall to run performance max and take all of these like what broad match would essentially match and add them as negative keywords find a bunch of one-word negative keywords and you can really kind of optimize your entire account with it the other thing is performance max works really well if you're like "All right we're going to send in a lead form." As long as the lead forms that are coming in on the website are quality like if Performance Max says it drives 30 lead forms and your client says "Well we we got about 30 spam lead forms last month," it's probably per and something that they don't usually get it's probably performance max now vice versa if you're getting good form leads it can continue to drive good form leads it's one of those things where it works when you feed in good conversion data once performance max drives good conversions it generally continues to drive good conversions so it's one of those where it does work pretty well it's just you you need to have the right conversion actions in place so the way that I usually set it up is I optimize it for mainly like the lead form that's coming in it the way performance maxes works the absolute best is with a qualified conversion action this is why performance max we'll get into our next question has always worked the best for e-commerce because you can actually file in a purchase and you can say we're optimizing for purchase conversions and revenue so once Google ads starts to get some of that purchase conversion and revenue data then it's able to actually use that to its advantage and you know you're able to actually see context in terms of oh okay this lead came in as a phone call we counted that initial lead you know that was a a twom minute and 45 second phone call so that's the first thing that I want to track those phone calls that last that long this is where actually call rail can be a little bit better because with call rail you can set some of these controls a little bit easier and you get more accurate call data in terms of some of the mobile calls that are coming in from your website the mobile clicks to call conversion if you follow me you know you know what I'm talking about but basically the conversion action that tracks the button click of a phone call button on your website so very common conversion those anything button clicks outbound clicks clicks in general performance max just drives those conversions but they're not real doesn't really make a whole lot of sense it's just one of those like So the workaround is you could say okay mobile clicks to call when the session on your website lasts for longer than 60 seconds that's kind of one workaround where you know it can it can generally work a little better the other thing is just saying you know mobile clicks to call two minute plus sessions then it really makes it more something that somebody has to be on your website for a little while and generally if somebody's calling from your website they're going to open up their phone app opens the website stays open so they'll be on your website for a session longer than that so that's one of the workarounds the other thing that you can do so I always say desktop phone calls basically call forwarding so calls from ads those conversions when they last 60 seconds or longer and you know one of the good things to do is put that threshold up a little bit higher for performance max so you really just need to keep in mind are are the conversions being reported by conver by performance max actually translated into leads and revenue now switch to a Shopify website this will bring us into our next question i switched to a Shopify website but let's get into question number two so we'll put in question number two basically for question number one performance max for lead generation definitely works as far as targeting goes you know search themes kind of match my exact keywords that I'm targeting on the search network audience signals I try to incorporate as many of my own your data audience signals so my website my YouTube channel my customer lists any of that information that I have are the things that I really want to focus on because that's that's the information that you're feeding into Google along with your conversion data that they're ultimately going to use to to optimize your campaign so audience data search teams and then when you're building out your assets just use good ad copy create good advertisements that's really all you're trying to do so that'll wrap up performance max for lead generation kind of a quick answer but the video component will go into a little bit more detail about you know overall strategy and things like that next is going to be performance max for e-commerce so let's do question number two do you use performance max for e-commerce how can I use it to increase my return on ad spend does it work well for an e-commerce business okay question number two and yeah every question is read by some AI voice that I generate so try to do different voices but so you don't just get stuck with my voice for a whole episode but basically for question number two performance max for lead generation i mean performance max for e-commerce excuse me you know that's kind of really where it first worked is performance max and that's kind of where I learned that it's it's ultimately just you need to feed in revenue data into you need to just feed in good conversion data into performance max to make it work now there there is a case to be made that performance max sometimes just causes you to spend a lot of money on your brand keywords and then drives conversions that way that does happen in a lot of accounts but it's also one of those things where that's kind of how Google Ads is now because if you are an e-commerce business and you search a brand name you're going to see those ads you're going to see competitive ads so you really from an e-commerce standpoint like your brand competitive brands you really want to target it all because there's no there's no real downside in targeting your brand unless you're just like "Okay we're bringing in way too much you know we're spending way too much on this." So that's one of those things where you always want to kind of take out that data and say "Here is what our brand return on ad spend kind of looks like." And sometimes you might want to set up separate search campaign shopping campaign performance max campaign that are a little bit more on the branded side and incorporate more branded keywords and focus on a really high return on ad spend and then non-branded campaigns can actually be used to kind of build more people into like your funnel let's say so you know that's kind of the thing I try to do i look at the account level when it comes to e-commerce performance Max though those campaigns are you know where I spend the majority of my budget when it comes to e-commerce there's I still run standard shopping campaigns because they just you still see like the keywords and standard shopping campaigns so I think having brand and non-brand in your Google Ads account and obviously the more budget you have and you know the more that you can spend and kind of you know how you're budgeting things can definitely make a huge difference so that's also the other thing that you want to keep in mind is is where your budget is can also dictate your strategy i think from a very simple standpoint creating one performance max campaign separating out asset groups the same way that you would add groups so if you have five different product categories you know if you're selling I don't know five different I don't know five different widgets basically just five different types of products for example so let's say you sell a bicycle a scooter you know etc etc basically an asset group for each of those things a scooter asset group that targets scooter for sale keywords obviously the more similar to the type of scooter you're selling you know if it's a $200 scooter versus a $2,000 scooter depending on the you know electric versus manual but but ultimately what you're trying to do is you're building asset groups to say this asset group I want to go after this specific customer i am going to incorporate some of my brand data within my performance max campaign and that brand data is going to basically figure out the funnel to my conversion so I you know I say somebody might start with what is the best scooter for under you know $2,000 oh well you guys have a $1,500 scooter here's all the benefits so it may start with a click research watching videos going through like all of your business data i mean I always think about before somebody contacts Surfside PPC I don't think it's like they watch one video they're like "Well I'm going to contact this guy." It's like no they watch probably a few videos and then they probably read some of my content they probably you know there there's probably something that makes them go "Okay yeah this this is who I'm going to contact." But you you need to have all of that to to really drive conversions so that will wrap up episode number eight of the Surfside PPC podcast again join Surfside PPC Premium you know get my Google Ads course and then just subscribe to the podcast YouTube channel and get some free content this will wrap up the episode if you have any questions of course always send them in and thank you for listening thanks for listening to the Surfside PPC podcast go to surfsideepc.com for management or consulting options or to get my course or join Surfside PPC premium through my YouTube channel my school page or my Patreon please subscribe