Surfside PPC Podcast

welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast go to surfsideepc.com to join Surfside PPC premium and ask your questions thanks for listening and please subscribe what's up everyone welcome to episode 9 of the Surfside PPC podcast so for every podcast that comes out now we will also have a premium video that comes out with it as well so if you're part of Surfside PPC Premium then you will also be able to watch videos i'm actually going to go back and create videos for all of the podcast episodes for so for the previous eight and just make sure we have just premium videos podcasts coming out every single week so it's kind of the same topics and you know we'll kind of have a consistent publishing schedule the other thing is I have two free training videos out if you sign up for my newsletter so you go to my website you'll see links on the very top of my website to go get that training my course is available $34.99 a year my Google course may do a couple more course like content so look out for those but today we will get into a question which is going to be so I got this question from a subscriber and I I probably won't have it perfectly said and we'll do an AI voice that reads it but the question is about cost per click being really high with maximize conversions fitting and basically not being able to get any activity with manual bidding which common you know common issue that I also deal with so I will we'll put in the question out and then we will answer so here's question number My cost per click is very high for a new campaign i need to get clicks in but manual bidding seems to not get me any activity what is the best way to approach this maximize conversions bidding is leading to clicks that cost several hundred each please help get my cost per click down okay so question number one so mentioned it before but basically cost per click really high have a high budget set high you know using different types of keywords and basically can't get any activity from using manual bidding and can't quite get maximized conversions bidding to make any sense as far as costs so this is a pretty common issue and I thought I may have mentioned this on another podcast episode i'll repeat myself a lot I'm sure but there was time where I I worked with somebody they had a high budget set maximize conversions bidding and basically what Google did with the first two clicks was just go through this massive budget and it's like sometimes if Google sees like Google ads you have a high budget set your maximize conversions bidding strategy is almost going to over bid to say "Oh we we're willing to spend this much." But it doesn't really make sense from a cost per click and a you know click volume standpoint this is one of the issues with Google ads right now is getting good click volume and driving enough clicks and driving enough conversions and even getting enough impressions in some cases can really be a challenge so when you're first launching and you're in you know it's it's easier to do this when there's a lot of volume out there if you're like a national company and you're targeting you know so you're targeting keywords that there's a lot of people searching for it it's much different than somebody who's providing like a very specific type of service in some specific type of market and so it's easy to kind of say "Oh well we could just go on to Google Ads and and drive a ton of results." But what's really challenging is if you're not getting a lot of conversion volume like if you're not getting a lot of phone calls if you're not getting a lot of website forms if you're not getting a lot of purchases it is hard to optimize your Google Ads campaign so ultimately what I would say is when you're first getting started to you know when you have these high cost per click and it's it is competitive and you're trying to break in and be competitive with other companies I have found the best way to do it is exact match keywords and I like using manual CPC bidding and just looking at what the estimated first page bid is the estimated top of page bid and using that to guide my initial bidding strategy so if you're if you're doing keywords or you know if you're an electrician for example and you're an electrician in a competitive market it's going to be expensive your clicks are going to be expensive regardless of who's managing your ads you can have the best Google ads manager in the world and your clicks are still going to be very very expensive so really what my my first strategy is how do I get in relevant clicks and you know I'm just going to have to bid up for those relevant clicks initially because I'm trying to get relevant clicks as fast as possible because that will help me drive conversions so what I would do is find the best high impact keywords you know if you're an electrician it's going to be electrician near me it's going to be electrician you know the locations that you're in take the different types of services that you're providing that people are regularly searching so any type of electric keyword that you know create landing pages for target those keywords exact match this is where having a bigger keyword list does help because you have more opportunities to actually target different types of searches if you're using exact match keywords set manual CPC bidding you can also use maximize clicks like I always say maximize clicks and exact match manual CPC and exact match they can still work i don't think they're the best strategy to use but initially in high cost perclick industries in in really any type of you know I'm I'm currently running some ads for Google Ads Consulting just to kind of see what happens and it it's one of those things where the clicks for the actual searches like Google Ads Consultant are very very expensive so it's like when you get one of those clicks and it's like 30 $40 $50 and it's like can I get clicks like that for four $10 it's like probably not so sometimes when you're initially getting into it you really do just have to bid really high on these keywords and sometimes you might be like I have to bid $50 per click but there's companies that are paying 30 $40 $50 per click that have been running ads in your market that have things very optimized and working and good quality scores so your goal is start targeting keywords exact match and I try to get my quality score as high as possible relevant ads relevant landing pages you know landing page experience is kind of the actual the actual quality score term that that Google uses but you know trying to just create really organized campaigns as best as I possibly can and ultimately that's what what's going to help you in the long run so I think you're just trying to get conversion data in initially and instead of spending you know $300 per click or $400 per click if you're able to get your first 10 or 15 clicks in for $400 then it's a lot easier to kind of get things on track and start optimizing your campaign so my approach manual bidding exact match keywords if you keep really close controls on it you can do phrase match with manual bidding i would say broad match and manual bidding does not work whatsoever and when you're using maximize clicks you have to kind of consider that Google's going for generally if you're just trying to drive clicks and traffic it's different than trying to drive leads when you're trying to bid for leads you're saying "Okay I'm willing to pay more per click because I feel a lead is more likely." The whole point of maximize clicks is can I get more clicks in on the same keywords that I'm already targeting so this will kind of wrap up the episode make sure if if you want to join Surfside PPC Premium I'll do a video component to this episode but ultimately that's it's it's not an easy thing to get your initial conversion data in but if you set your budget really high if you have keywords with kind of a wide search intent and more expensive keywords then your initial clicks might come come in really expensively so even when I switch over to maximize conversion bidding I still try to manage my budget because sometimes there's like this let's set our budget to $1,000 let's use maximize conversion bidding if you don't have good conversion data Google just over bids just you just kind of spend a lot of money when you don't necessarily have to so that will wrap up our episode make sure you you subscribe to the podcast subscribe to my YouTube channel subscribe to my newsletter so you'll get all of my content once you do that and I will see you on episode number 10 thanks for listening to the Surfside PPC podcast please go to surfsidepc.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