Surfside PPC Podcast

What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast. This is episode number 21. Now the Surfside PPC podcast is brought to you by my free Google Ads training. So if you go to surfsideepc.com/pages/training, you will find two free Google ads training videos. They are about an hour and a half long of really good content. Basically, if you're just getting started with Google Ads, a great way to get started. So go get my free training videos. You'll find them when you go to my website. There's a big link at the very top of the page. So very easy to find and definitely something that I would recommend signing up for and getting. So, let's get into our episode today. Today, we are going to be going over optimization in Google Ads. Now, if you are just listening to this, this is a video, basically a video podcast. It's really just lessons. Now, I'm going to be doing a lot of Google Ads lessons. Today's lesson is Google Ads optimization. So, basically, how we can optimize our Google Ads campaigns to give ourselves better overall results and really the best practices that we need to follow to make sure that we're giving ourselves the best results that we can. So number one is going to be pretty obvious, but it's going to be conversion tracking. And I put advanced conversion tracking here basically because I think the most important thing looking at the example here is a dentist makes a scheduled appointment a primary conversion and leaves contact page view as secondary. So bidding learns from real patient demand. So the most important thing you can do is set your conversions as the most qualified actions you can. There is a caveat there. If your qualified actions are you, you know, if you're a B2B company that is trying to land huge clients. You know, for example, like if I'm running Google Ads management ads where I'm like, I need people to be I need more Google Ads clients, then basically what I'm going to be doing is targeting keywords like Google Ads Management, Google Ads agency, what can be challenging is really optimizing for new clients that we're actually getting. If I said, I'm just going to use my CRM and just send back new client data. Really, what you want to do is any good qualified lead is going to be something that you want to use as a conversion. Anything that results in a sale, you want to use that as a conversion. So really, you always want to start with did this drive us revenue? No. Is it something that is really important to driving us revenue? And if that answer is yes, contact page views are not, then it is something you want to optimize for. So really simple way is just go into your conversion tracking. So conversion summary here. And as we scroll down, you'll see you have the different conversion options here. Purchase, add to cart, obviously more e-commerce. Then you have your submit lead form, your phone, call leads. So the using the example that we have right here essentially dentist making a scheduled appointment the primary conversion we have this example which we'll use for a few things today know nothing about them but essentially you could say okay urgent dental care today book an appointment or call this number and when you click on book an appointment like this actual button click it brings you to a third party software you want to actually track when people are filling this out and completing the form and then you can maybe redirect them back to your website as a booked appointment confirmation page page, track that page. If it's a contact us and a form that goes to a thank you page, you can track that as well as a conversion. Unless it's just you're getting a lot of spam, then take it out of your conversions and make it secondary. But ultimately, you want to track the most important things to your business, which in this case is probably going to be phone calls. And then also booked appointments so that you can actually look back and say, "Okay, we spent $3,000 last month and we drove 40 phone calls and we drove 12 lead forms. Here was our cost per conversion." So, gives you an idea of actually optimizing your results by understanding what comes in. So that's number one. Number two is going to be negative keywords. Probably the most important thing. Really basic example, a tree service adds negatives like tree jobs, DIY stump removal, chainsaw repair. So the budget goes towards emergency removal and trimming leads. So if I come in here to Google ads and I start searching or Google, not Google ads, and I start searching how to become a dentist, that's not something you want to bid on. So the how-to is something that you want to get rid of. It could also be something like how to relieve, you know, tooth pain. And that's something where you might say, you know, this person's not actively looking for a dentist yet. So, until they say, you know, tooth pain relief doctor near me or something like that, I'm really not trying to exclude too much, but I'm trying to exclude the searches where there's just really no intent towards the services or the products that you're offering. If I'm selling some type of equipment that helps people get better abs, I don't want to try to sell to people who are looking up pictures of abs. I want people who are looking up exercises, tools, equipment, all of those different things, and not people that are just saying, "Can I just see what these look like?" Because they're not interested in buying. They have a completely different search intent. Even if the word abs is in the search. So, with negative keywords, essentially, you're looking for these exact examples where, you know, I I start targeting a thing like tree company, and then you start getting things like tree company jobs, get hired by a tree company, how to get a tree service job, how to get a tree service certification, tree service permits, tree company permits. So, you start finding all these things where you say, "Okay, let's remove that. Let's remove that. Let's remove that." So, they always have on level negatives for the intent killers free DIY cheap job salary wiki now repair if they don't fit your offer it just depends on what your offer is so next is going to be phrase match plus smart bidding so this is always the challenge initially is where do we start with getting the best results there's a lot of different options and essentially it comes down to do you want to waste a little more in the beginning and get things on track maybe a little bit quicker the best way to do that is probably using more of a maximize conversions and a phrase or broad map strategy and just being really intent with negative keywords. To me, I prefer to start my campaign off spending more for clicks, using an exact match negative keyword or exact match keyword strategy, adding a lot of negative keywords to start with things that I just know are not going to work for me, making sure that my conversion tracking is working. And then kind of the most important thing is let's see what searches are actually coming in. So, if we start with phrase match and maximize conversions, what may happen is your campaign does nothing because you have no conversion data. So, sometimes phrase match and using something like a manual CPC or exact match with manual CPC is truly my favorite way to start my campaign. But to actually optimize your campaign, it's phrase match and smart bidding. Then what you want to do is get to a C target CPA strategy or a target return on ad spend strategy. And that's when I start adding in more broad match keywords. So this is like a a Dallas HVAC company starts with AC repair near me as a phrase match keyword, then starts targeting broad match keywords. Same thing, AC repair near me, air conditioning repair Dallas. One CP PA target is more stable. It's one of those things with broad match. You just have to understand you're going to have to be in the account. I'm not saying broad match is the way to optimize everything. Phrase match and smart bidding generally keeps the accounts on track pretty well and you don't have to make tons and tons of changes for them to actually continue to work. Broad match and smart bidding is really if you're looking for more volume, you're looking to spend a little bit more, you want to be in more auctions, then broad match will give you really more volume overall. But phrase match smart bidding works really well for me. Responsive search ads Essentially, this by itself is not an optimization, but what you want to do is make sure that you have multiple responsive search ads per ad group. I would say at least two and usually you can do three and combine it with a landing page test. So, landing page experience, landing page testing. These are the different ways that we really want to optimize our landing page. But essentially with responsive search ads, when you're in your actual Google Ads account, you want to make sure that in the ads themselves, so we'll use commercial pest control as our example, we have one ad in here. We can create a second ad with completely different headlines and description lines. We can also duplicate this ad and send people to another landing page. So, combining these two here, essentially responsive search ads and landing pages. I look at it as a let's try to throw more things at the wall and essentially see what sticks over time with our testing. If you're spending a lot of money and you're running three responsive search ads per ad group and you're running multiple landing pages per ad group and you're doing good AB testing, what's going to happen over time is Google's going to learn which ads, which headlines, which assets, all of these different things are going to basically help you convert more cuz they're going to show those things to people more often. So, we look at landing page experience. We look at responsive search ads. Essentially, your site links, callouts, structured snippets, and image assets, and your business name, and location, like all these different things. You're not testing all of these. There's only so many things you can test. But essentially, what you're doing is you're saying, "Here are a bunch of assets. I want you to figure out which combination of assets performs the best for me. Here are some different landing pages we have. Let's just say, you know, instead of sending people to one page, if I said for the emergency dentist example, if I said, okay, we have emergency dentist Charlotte, urgent dental care today, you know, good overall page here that that probably converts just fine. Why don't we do one that is emergency dentist Charlotte, get, you know, call us right now and we'll get we'll get ready for you, you know, type of thing. And then maybe having more of this geared specifically towards urgent dental and just only phone calls, no book an appointment, just get people in on the phone because if it's urgent, you don't even want you want to go through the whole book an appointment for me. You just give give your dentist a call. So, as far as the advertisements themselves, so part of that is just using ad copy that probably more likely to convert. So, this one plumber uses headlines like emergency plumber, same day service, licensed local team, get a free estimate instead of just repeating one offer. So, it's good to use different types of offers. And if you do have actual promotions or selling points, then you definitely want to highlight those within your responsive search ads. But, responsive search ads, landing page experience. Last but not least, incorporating more audience signals and and also using audience signals for exclusions. So my previous video I actually just went over Google Ads customer match list. Essentially, you upload customer data. Google matches that securely to Google accounts. You have very targeted advertising. So a combination of using your customer list, website retargeting, YouTube retargeting. So you'll see here customer match, website visitors, inmarket segments. So these are just some of the different audiences that we and target. But essentially what you can do is when you're running your campaigns over time, so if we're a pest control company and we're running ads, we essentially say, "Okay, let's come into our audiences, keywords, and content all of our targeting." And then let's make sure that within our audience segments, we are actually targeting. Go to our campaign here. We are actually targeting within the observations section here. And you can see we have a bunch a lot of home and garden ones, which makes sense for pest control. These are all in market. So if you're in market for home cleaning services, probably decent chance you're somebody who might end up needing pest services. Same with home inspection, lawn and garden. We actually have the pest control service audience here. So, you can keep it really a little bit more limited, especially if you're using more demand genen and performance max and try to target some of these audiences a little bit better. However, the other thing you could do is just say, let's browse, let's use my data segments, let's use my customer lists, let's use my YouTube visitors, let's use my website visitors, let's use this custom combination that Google builds for us, and let's combine all of this data to essentially say here Google here's 5,000 to 10,000 people that have been our customers that visit our website that watch our YouTube videos that interact with our advertisements and all of these people I want you to use as essentially an audience signal so we're targeting the right people so what you can do over time as far as optimization is if I'm first launching as Surfside PPC I'm like I have no data in my account over time I start getting conversions maybe I'm tracking calls But I'm getting calls. I'm getting leads. I'm getting people signing up for my free training. I'm getting people actually purchase consulting from me. I'm getting people purchase management on my website. And I track that back into Google Ads. And then I upload my customer list of all of my high-value customers. Then I upload my customer list of everybody who's ever purchased from me. And then I upload my customer list of all of the people that are giving me their name and email through my, you know, through my email list. And then I connect my YouTube channel. And basically what Google's going to do is find, hey, here is the best audience for this customer and his goal is to drive more Google Ads clients. So, we're going to use this audience to essentially find people that are similar to others in this audience include in addition to people that are probably in that audience and then make sure that we're driving really relevant highquality traffic that's more likely to convert based on every single signal that we have on the internet. The other thing is exclusions. So, getting rid of people that have already converted. Always good if it's a one-time conversion type of conversion. So, if it's something where you are You know, for me, like a Google ads, I might say, "Okay, once you convert, I want to take basically take if you hit my thank you page over the last 30 days, I want to take you out of my campaign cuz there's no reason for me to continue to send my ads to you." For this one, the example is a roof replacement company uploads past high-value customers as a signal and excludes recent closed leads. So, ads focus on new homeowners who still need estimates. So, these are six Google ads optimization tips, secrets, tricks, however you want to call it. This is Surfside PPC podcast. Episode number 21. To quickly recap, it is our conversion tracking, which is where I always start. Negative keywords, really important kind of daily, weekly uh optimization, phrase match, and smart bidding. So, over time, you just want to adjust what keyword match types you're using, what bidding strategies you're using, and and run twoe tests, see what works, responsive search ads. So, essentially, you figure out what works by testing a lot of different responsive search ads and landing pages. And last, but not least, adding audience signals to actually improve approved to make sure that you're getting targeting the best audiences in addition to the keywords you're targeting. So, any questions about any of this, please leave them in the comment section. Thank you for watching my actually, thank you for listening to my podcast today. Very similar to my video tutorials, but thank you for listening to my podcast. Make sure you subscribe. Please leave me me a review. I got like no reviews, I don't think. But thanks again for listening and I'll see you at episode number 22.