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 5 of the Surfside PPC podcast Today I'm going to have a couple tips for Google Ads and then I have a question for you So kind of a a different episode We're not going to focus on one specific topic I'm going to do a couple different things here As always this is presented by Surfside PPC So if you need any help with Google Ads we are offering more in terms of meta ads My Google Ads course will be out February 11th 2026 So the way my Google Ads course is going to work it's going to be a yearly subscription So $34.99 a year Gives you yearly access and you will get the yearly updates when my new course comes out So plan is to keep you know new courses coming out every single year You pay a yearly fee for the new course That's how it's going to work Anybody who purchased the old course got grandfathered in So yeah they got they got lucky with with having the course for life So if you're interested in asking questions if you want some of my bonus content then either join my Patreon my YouTube membership or my school page All of my bonus content will be posted there So you'll get access to everything by joining any one of those They're all the same price so there's some yearly discounts on some of them But basically if you join any of them then you'll get access to my bonus content wherever you prefer to get your content So let's get into our questions Questions as always come from subscribers So if you want to ask your questions that's a good way to do it So the very first question somebody just asked me for a Google Ads tip And I actually thought this is just an interesting question Just kind of a do you have some type of Google Ads tip you know something that is useful to you that might be useful to others So basically let's let's put the question in now Do you have a random Google Ads tip that would be helpful i'm interested in ways that you look at your Google Ads account and how to optimize results Okay so I thought this was interesting because sometimes I like just having a a general overview tip of something that's hey here's something that you can do that's going to help your overall results Now this might not be the greatest tip for everybody And if you're like great at reporting and and kind of going through all your reports and already have that very down and organized then this is not going to be helpful for you But a couple different things that I really like to do is at the end of the month I like to every single month So you know January turns into February Let's go to last last month's results Got a little list there Let's go to last month's results And we I'm going to look at the overview screen And basically just going through the entire overview screen Google Ads is giving you more ways to customize it So you can actually look at things you want to but it just helps me kind of look at if I have different campaigns what's performing well I like to look at keywords that are performing well Few different things I like is just like the days and times that my ads are showing some of the demographic data that's going to show And then the the thing I really like looking at is words searches like things that I'm appearing for the most because it's a good way to find quick searches words that you can exclude It's also a good way to just make sure that you're targeting the right people that you want to target The other thing I like to look at are some of the insights and auction insights So we'll go over that a little bit but I like looking at the overview screen on a monthly basis just to kind of make sure that you know look at a highle overview of the data in your account Sometimes when you're just looking at numbers so campaign level performance and you see clicks impressions costs like there's not really much context to that It's just okay this is what we're doing But with the overview screen then kind of going through like where your ads are showing devices they're showing on words searches it'll it'll show your ads like your ads that are appearing the most So just a good way to just kind of give you a quick overview audit of your Google Ads account and what's happening in there on a monthly basis So my my first Google Ads tip is overview screen at the end of the month I think it's a very very useful tool that will give you kind of a quick look at an account Like literally it takes 5 to 10 minutes You could even you could even take a a full screenshot of the page you know copy select all select all copy and paste it into your favorite AI tool I've been using I'm basically just on Google Gemini now It's the best one in my opinion But you could do that with you know copy paste get a complete insight here Here is everything you need to know about your account in you know 20 bullet points and it gives you quick things where you might be able to find ideas that you know you might be overlooking So that kind of goes into the second tip which I just mentioned and that is taking sections of my Google ads account So going into the insights going into the auction insights going into my search terms report and looking at like my top 500 my clicks my impressions the keywords that I'm targeting basically going in and looking at every last piece of data that I can all the different reports that they have there So in the insights and reports ad group level ad level just looking for hey here are some pieces that we see where you can probably improve your overall account And the more context you give the better So if you say "Hey I'm working with this company that does water damage restoration." We do water damage restoration and fire restoration and those are huge services for us We also provide mold remediation which is a a big service but it tends to be something where you know we can get leads at a little bit of a lower cost than maybe water damage restoration might get So we want to separate out some of those campaigns So you can give the context to Google saying "Hey we're willing to spend you know $200 for a water damage restoration lead." Like we're happy with that number That is a good number for us because we make thousands of dollars on a job So we for mold remediation we'd like that number to be closer to a hundred So you can kind of look within your account and give context to Google and just kind of say here's my goals Here's what I'm seeing You know give me some some ideas and some advice for things that are happening in my account You're not going to be able to get as much as and I would take things that Gemini says as far as keyword targeting and things like that with a grain of salt Still think there is a major art to keyword targeting I know I said on my previous podcast that you know the death of the keyword but you know I think there I I don't think that's necessarily fully true I don't I don't think that's really going to be true And if it is it's not going to be anytime soon And it'll probably just be that AI Max ends up playing a bigger role as we continue to to run our advertisements and and figure out what actually works on Google Ads So basically my my two tips are going to be using that overview screen and just giving a highle overview of your account on a monthly basis and then monthly bi-weekly even weekly if you want Go into Gemini copy and paste portions of your account into it you know search terms And what I like to do is build a dashboard So go into your your insights and reports your dashboards and basically just build a big dashboard with all of this data Landing pages ads you know what are the key things you're looking at ads landing page keywords all in any data you can as far as quality score as far as you know the click-through rate data that's coming in the conversion data that's coming in what conversions are coming in and then give context to things So if you say hey here is my qualified lead conversion This is number one this is what we care about That would be kind of your your idea is that okay that's what we really want the most of How can we get more of these what is actually driving them now it's it's hard to see that right now with with Google ads I think there's a lot of reporting that's just like behind the scenes And I know people have always thought to get deeper reporting and insights to figure out every single conversion path which I think is starting to happen a little better But yeah my tips basically wise sometimes it's hard to really dig into an account I think the overview screen is really helpful I think using AI tools to put your actual the actual data from your account Give it to Google Gemini and say give me a rundown you know 20 bullet points of what's happening in my account There are prompts for this So you know it could be something where give me three bullet points about my ads three bullet points about my keywords three bullet points about my search terms three bullet points about my conversions you know and basically give me tips and and ideas and things that you're seeing and things I should double down areas where I might be wasting my budget So that's really what you're looking for So that that's going to be question number one So we're going to get into question number two now It's also going to be part part of our reporting And it's a question I've gotten a few times And it's one where I would say my answer isn't isn't perfect It's related to auction insights It's just one of those where auction insights can be very hard to interpret at times So I'm going to go over how I interpret it and then things I look for and what what I'm kind of going after So question number two let's put it in now Okay How do you use the auction insights report is it important that I try to optimize for impression share top of page impression share and absolute top of page impression share i wonder if it is something I should use and if I should be focused on increasing my impression share Question number two is about auction insight So just just a few different questions related to auction insights top of page so absolute top of page impression share impression share top of page impression share and then some of the other statistics that are in there overlap rate So there's a few different statistics The ones I really care about So when you go into an account the ones I really care about and and it for impression share I think a big thing is is going to really matter is going to be the overall like the overall number of impressions that's available in the market you are targeting with the keywords you are targeting And you really need to have an understanding that if I'm targeting the United States with broad match keywords really your impression share is probably not going to be high unless you're spending to the like you know American Express can target best travel credit card as a broad match keyword nationally and they could probably get their impression share high but it's going to cost a lot of money because there's a lot of available impressions within broad match keywords on a national basis Now for the local tree service that is serving I don't know De Moines Iowa So for that local tree service basically there is a set of a total share of impressions available I am targeting de mo Iowa with tree service keywords Tree service near me tree removal near me tree trimming near me tree trimming de mo So I have my set of keywords that I'm targeting Basically your impression share is going to be the total number of impressions on those keywords you're targeting in that local market which it's going to be a much more reasonable number and something that makes more sense for you know what you're trying to accomplish Now if you're a national company for example that's let's just say you're providing let's just say you're providing you have some type of software for medical companies and you want to target you know companies with hey we provide this billing software you know medical billing software whatever it might be If you're a national company and you're targeting medical billing software you know that kind of which I would kind of consider to be a pretty broad keyword because I'm sure you have dental billing software and you know all sorts of chiropractic billing software I'm sure there's all sorts of different things I would assume medical billing software does most of them unless it's a specialized service But basically what you would want to do is target those keywords and basically say what is my impression share for those keywords and you know if you're profitable and you're seeing really good results then you want to maximize your impression share if you don't want to maximize your impression share at the cost of you know raising your cost per conversion and making your results more inefficient So there's kind of a balancing act that you're that you're doing with it but there also needs to be context for total available impressions for what you're targeting within the market you're targeting it So there there's a lot of ways to kind of constrain your total impression share There's a lot of ways to to to map to make it a a huge number So I would say if I'm working with a local company local tree service de mo Iowa let's use that example you know this could be a local orthopedic in de mo Iowa So really any any business that you have you know in a specific market you're targeting keywords in that market you're targeting people in that market So you really want to maximize your impression share there So for that tree service my goal is basically finding efficient conversion results first and foremost I can get efficient conversion results where we say "Hey last month we got 40 leads We spent $80 per lead We're seeing good results Leads look good You know we're driving pretty good jobs with the leads." That's kind of your first goal And then you're kind of looking at impression share Okay what is my impression share right now with what is you know with my total efficiency what's my impression share you go into your report and you see an impression share of 30% Let's say that means there's more meat on the bone for you You can raise your bids you can raise your budget there's more impressions available out there You can also see this in the forecasting tool So within your actual where you set your daily budget if let's say you have your daily budget set to $200 a day you'll have a little graph there that you can click That will be your budget and bid simulator Your budget and bid simulator will give you an idea of okay how many additional conversions can I get if I increase my bid and I increase my budget And does it make sense because sometimes you might see it and you might say I should probably decrease my bid and budget by 10% and I'll probably see the same exact results except slightly more efficient So within that bid and forecasting tool that also helps me guide me with you know what I'm trying to do with impression share So with impression share my goal really with a local company is achieving efficient results and getting my impression share around 70% or above In some local markets it's it's more difficult to get your impression share higher It just depends on overall level of competition Depends on how how high you're willing to spend per conversion If you have three or four companies in your local market that have a huge budget maximize conversion set or a huge target CPA bid a huge budget set that they're kind of open with yep we'll we'll overspend to get our conversions but you know with the understanding that we're getting a few more leads than our competitors are and and maybe we get a few more lifetime customers than our competitors do So there's different approaches you can obviously So my goal is getting efficient results 70% plus impression share Goal number one is always efficient results And then I am trying to increase my impression share The thing I do look at sometimes is top of page impression share And then I think absolute top of page impression share is important too Getting those numbers high If you're in your local market you know dentist near me I'm just going to keep using my de mo Iowa because why why use a different market we'll use a different one next next episode But you know even if it's dentist Nashville if you're like I want to be you know I have I have x amount of locations around the Nashville area When people are searching dentist Nashville I want to make sure that they are seeing one of my ads for one of my locations depending on where they're located You know I have four locations around Nashville then within your account you really want to have a high impression share for those keywords If your goal is I want to be the leading dentist in this market I want to have the most new patients coming in I want to have the most calls coming in and I want to get the most amount of people coming in who are looking for a dentist If you're a pediatrician you know a pediatric dentist and you say "Okay pediatric dentist near me We want to dominate this keyword We're just going to focus on dominating this keyword." Now the next part becomes match types You can go exact match it'll be a low it'll be easier to achieve maximum impression share You can go phrase match there's a little more impression share out there You can go broad match there's way more impressions out there So if you go as you kind of expand your keywords you can definitely see that you're going to increase the total number of available impressions which is going to decrease your impression share My goal is getting the best impression share for the best searches that I possibly can It's hard for that Hard to know that you're actually doing that But honestly if you see within an a campaign results look good you talk with clients the leads look good you're seeing qualified leads come in your your targeting within your search terms look strong and you know your clicks well on your keyword targeting looks strong Really what you know what I'm trying to do next is let's get our impression share up because ultimately we want to be the leader in the market and the only way to do that is achieve efficient results maximize impression share So that's kind of the way that I look at it So that will conclude episode number five Thank you for listening and make sure we tune in for episode number six Get all your questions by joining Surfside Premium and then you can purchase my 2026 Google Ads course $34.99 a year for access and you will have yearly access to it and all my yearly updates You could always cancel your subscription and just have access for the year and that is perfectly fine So let's let's let's see you on episode number six Thanks for listening to the Surfside PPC podcast Please go to Surfside PPPC options or to get my course or join Surfside PPC premium through my YouTube channel my school page or my Patreon Please