Awesome. So everyone greatly appreciate you joining us today for this webinar on how to build powerful Google Ads Search Campaigns. As many folks out there may know, at Propellant Media, we work with quite a number of digital ad agencies, and we with many direct brands across many verticals. And our claim to fame as an organization has been this entire world of programmatic display, geofencing advertising, that’s really what we’ve been doing since the impetus of our organization. But we have a lot of clients that we do a ton of omni-channel advertising for, from paid social, to paid search, to Facebook, LinkedIn-advertising, the whole gambit. But just knowing how many enterprises and organizations that are out there focused on Google Ads, and frankly, the breadth and confidence that I have both in our team and what we’ve done over the last several years, I thought it would be nice to talk about this in a little bit in depth.
And so I want to try to punch as much stuff within this hour as possible, if we got to stay over just for a little bit, that’s totally fine. But I think you all are in for a treat with some of the things that we’re going to talk about for today. A couple housekeeping things. If you have questions, put them in the Q&A section of your zoom chat bar, not the chat section, but in the Q&A section. If you would, I’d greatly appreciate that. That would be great. And yeah, I’ll do, we’ll do our best to get to just about every single question that gets answered, or every question that comes out, excuse me, we’ll go from there.
Table Of Contents For Google Ads Paid Search Campaigns
So, first thing I’m going to talk about a course that we developed for both media planners, folks that do Google Ads, as well as our white label partners. We’ll talk about that course for a second. We’re going to go into how to develop strategy for Google Ads search campaigns. I personally believe that’s actually one of the more important sections down on top of the Google Keyword Planner section, where we talk about how to really fine tune and focus on those keywords relevant to your campaigns. We’re going to go into how to limit the waste when you first launch a campaign. A lot of times we build campaigns, but you got so many different things going on, that you just want to make sure that you put, not maybe your best foot forward, but close to your best foot forward when you’re building that campaign. So we’ll talk about that. Some tips and tricks on how to improve your click-through rates. If you don’t feel like you’re getting enough out of your ad spend, we’ll go through that conversation.
Out of everything I’ve discussed, this is also another really important area. Why conversion tracking is so crucial to set up across all your campaigns. So I’ll talk about that. We have another section where we’ll go through more around conversion rate optimizations. A lot of times people just focus on the Google Ads side of things, but they don’t think about the website and the website experience. So we’ll talk about that. And then lastly, we’ll talk about how we, here at Propellant Media, how we actually perform Google Ads audits for different brands and what have you. And then we’ll go from there.
I think everybody can still see my screen. I believe, I just want to double check, just to make sure, just put in the chat if you can. Yes? Okay, awesome. Perfect. All right. So first thing, I know that out of everyone that’s out there, whether you are working inside an agency, or you work inside an organization, or maybe you’re an owner of an organization and you manage, some of you manage Google Ads campaigns.
Some of you are uninitiated, and some of you are incredibly initiated. And there are a lot of courses out there that just talk about, “Okay, this is how you build a campaign. This is how you focus on single keyword ad groups, and da, da, da, and all that jazz.” But I think when I consider the work that we do here at Propellant Media, it’s important that A, we focus a lot on education, our mantra here is, “Always be learning.” And so how are we building a foundation for our sales team, our account executives, to have the intelligent conversations that need to be had with clients, so that everyone’s on the same rhythm, and having the same best practice conversations that’s vital to any campaign. So we actually create this course, it is free to our agency partners, as well as our direct brand clients as well.
Google Ads Media Planning Course
So if you are a client, or an agency partner, and you don’t see this in your dashboard, in the academy.propelllant.media dashboard that you have access to, let us know, we’ll make sure that it’s added. But if you’re not a client, then that’s a different story. There is a cost, but that’s really not the intent here, just to make sure that no one’s just gaining free access if we’re not working together. But the course is really important, because it really talks about the whole concept of Google Ads, and being an effective media planner. So you’re able to do a much better job, both in terms of sales, but also developing strategy when you’re having conversations with clients, or also looking at what you’re doing within your own organization, and holding the right people accountable for a lot of the campaigns and the things that you’re doing from a Google Ads standpoint, we have about 17 different modules, plus some bonus material that we make available. This is the link. Again, I’m going to be send this out to everybody.
And I guess the one thing that I did not do, is let me see if I can click this. I’m going to see, one second. I’m going to copy the link, go [inaudible 00:05:39] to I put in the chat, so y’all can take a quick look, see if you’d like. But that’s the course right there. Just want to put that out there. Again, the course has a lot more to do with media planning. It’s not about how to build the clock. It’s more so how to be an effective media planner in the context of Google Ads, that does include understanding the platform, the ecosystem, but is not as inundated as those 30, 40 hour courses that are out there, around how to build a Google Ads campaign. So if you could save your questions for the end, that would be great. But one more time, if you do have questions, put it in the Q&A section, and we’ll be sure to get those answered closest to the end of the discussion.
Keys To Developing Google Ads Paid Search Strategy
I appreciate that. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about google ads strategy. A number of folks that we’ve worked with, conversations that we have with different brands, this, quite frankly, is probably the most important conversation, at the very front end. There’s a ton of key questions that we ask, some open dialogue that we typically have, but these are some important ones, various lines of business, categories related to, but could also represent irrelevant traffic. And I’ll talk about that, and what I mean by that in a little bit. We want to know the customer journey, and the path to purchase for your customer, for your client, for your prospect. We also want to know what your average customer value is as well. For those who don’t know, we also have a ROI calculator on our website, at propellant.media. You can grab it from here.
Let’s see if I can copy that. No, I can’t. No big deal. And so if you want to check that out, if you’re trying to just get a sense of what your ROI could or should be for a Google Ads campaign, you can use that calculator, it’s very useful. Key conversion that matter, to measure for performance, who your true search competitors are. And I’m not just talking about competitors within your market. I’m all also talking about those that you compete against in the search world if you’re currently running a Google Ads campaign effectively. So I want to put that out there as well. That’s really important. And then lastly how business is locationally structured? Do you have multiple locations? How would you like to view your data? Do you want to see campaigns, or breakout campaigns at an individual geographic level? Or do you want to just lump all your locations into one campaign, and you can just view it that way.
That’s important because there are times when we’ll have different franchisees, that need separate accounts, or they need separate campaigns. So they can see the data a whole lot, much more quickly. That could goes into campaign infrastructure and design, but ultimately, and I don’t want you all to think that these are just the only questions that you would ask. There are sure more that we do go into with a client, or internally with different brands that we do work with. But all of this context gets put into a big bow, and helps you get a sense of, “How am I going to build out, or at the very least have an intelligent conversation with my build team?” And how to build these campaigns out properly.
So earlier I was talking about categories related to, but represent irrelevant traffic. And here’s the great one. You also want to think through the context of your ideal searcher. I’m go through this example a little bit later, but you have what’s called, there’s people that offer what’s called a spray foam insulation service versus people that are looking for the spray foam insulation can to purchase at a location.
So contextually, if someone typed in, “Spray foam Home Depot,” that’s not really a term that we want to go after. So we might make the word, “Home Depot,” as a negative phrase match, or as a negative exact match, or most in this case, a negative phrase match, so that we never show up for anybody that types in, “Home Depot, Lowe’s,” any of those types of terms. Whereas if I’m a service, and I’m offering spray foam as a service, “Spray foam near me,” maybe some individuals that are looking for a spray foam can that they can buy. But more likely that’s someone that’s actually looking for the service. So in that context, you really want to understand the context of the ideal searcher that you want to go after.
You also want to understand the timing of your media plan. So the specials that you’re offering, if you’re an institution, like a school, what are your application deadlines? The seasonality, the specials, the promotions that you are offering. That goes into both your campaign design, as well as when to turn budgets up and down, based on your media planning from that standpoint. Your keywords that are service lines, and benefits, and specials, and promotions. A lot of times, when we’re talking with brands, and we’re doing our keyword strategy, we’ll really getting deep into not just the keywords, but the benefits and all the nice things that are being offered by that brand as well.
So we can use that as part of both our ad copy, as well as our ad extensions as well. One other thing that I think gets missed a lot of times in these discussions, is not just the new media plan and the budget, but how does that measure up against goals? Sometimes folks will say, “You know what? I want to spend $1,000, but I want 50 leads.” And that’s a lot of times it’s like, “Hey guys, that’s unrealistic.” But I think a healthy conversation around goals and objectives is helpful, and is useful. If you’ve never ran a Google Ads campaign before, then sometimes that gets thrown out the window, and you just have to do an incredible job setting up your conversion tracking on the front end. And then measuring performance and the improvement of that performance over a period of time.
Reduce 50 – 70% Of Waste Before Launching Google Adwords Campaigns
You also want to visualize and have a discussion on how you want to visualize that data. I was saying earlier, you may be a franchisee, or let’s say you’re a franchisor, and you have multiple franchisees, multiple individuals, that are running Google Ads campaigns, but they need to see their data at the individual campaign level. That’s when that planning really takes shape, and really makes a difference on the front end for any campaign. This one around understanding what’s being measured, again with a lot of the AI opportunities that are available on the Google Ads platform, I can’t tell you how important this part is.
It’s not just, and I’m going to talk about this a little bit later, but it’s not just about measuring those big picture macro-conversions like leads and form submissions, and chat bot engagements, and all that. It’s also about understanding the journey that individuals are going through. So you may want to see what percentage of individuals watched at least 15% of your video, or what individuals clicked on a certain button. Those types of things actually matter. We’re definitely going to talk about that. All of this goes into the strategy implementation that you might do for any campaign. And everybody that’s on the call, everyone here, has at least some perspective in the world of marketing. So obviously we do a lot of this as well, but this level of intelligence both allows you to build great strategy, but also hold your team accountable as far as what the goals are when we’re building out the entire infrastructure of a campaign in Google Ads.
So again, just a reminder for everyone, if you have more questions, you can put them in the Q&A section, and we’ll be sure to get those answered. I know some people will put them in the chat, and that’s fine too. But just want to put that out there. This part also is really important. And so sometimes we talk to other digital agencies that say, “Oh, we put our best foot forward in the front end, and then we try to improve ever so slightly throughout that period.” I personally believe that is absolutely vital to really adhere to your best practices on the very front end of a campaign, and try to limit as much waste as possible before you launch a campaign. And so what does that look like?
We talked earlier about that brand discovery, and those key contextual questions that you want to ask internally within your organization, or ask a client, or ask a brand for that matter. But this is the order that I look at. First, you absolutely, positively must have conversion tracking set up within the Google Ads platform. I don’t care whether you are tracking just a phone call, a button click, people have visited three or five pages on your website. You need something that’s conversion, that you are tracking. Both because you have the ability to measure conversions relative to all your keywords, your ad copy, and your campaigns. But also you’re able to leverage a lot of the different bid strategies that are out there, whether it be target ROAS, CPA bid strategy, max conversions bid strategy, or even just the max CPC bid strategy. That CPC stands for costs, I’m sorry, costs per click.
All of that, are very vital. You have to have this set up, because if you don’t, that’s going to make it even more difficult, even on the front end to limit the waste when you first launch your Google Ads campaign. Next, you want to review your ads even while you’re building your ads. So let’s say, you’re going through the process. You have a 100, or 200 ads, you’ve launched it through your Google Adwords editor, you pushed it over into the Google Ads platform. And you’re getting all these different strength scores. You might get a poor, an average, a good, or an excellent. You want to go to the ones that are showing up as average, and especially the ones that are poor, try your best to get those up to good and excellent as much as you possibly can.
You’re not always going to be able to accomplish that, but that also improves your quality score, your ad rank, and that will ultimately lower your cost per click across the board for many of your campaigns. And it’s also going to improve your click-through rates as well. For those who don’t know quality score, we actually did an ebook on that, on what quality score is, but quality score is essentially the quality of your ad relative to the keyword. So the keyword, let’s say, “Spray foam insulation,” as long as that keyword is relevant within the copy, along with other things, that is one of the metrics that they use to determine the relevancy and the effectiveness of your ads, essentially. And I’ll talk a little bit about more about that in a second.
Full ad extension, I’ll have an example and a couple slides on what full-on ad extension is, but it’s essentially what it is. It’s an extension of your typical Google search ad. So you may see traditional text, but then you also might see someone’s … If everyone went to your, if you have a second screen, you might go to a browser and do a search for, “HVAC near me.” If you scroll down, you’ll see a phone number at the very top. And go to google.com, that is. You might see a phone number at the top of an ad. You might see some other things such as call outs. You might see a location extension, so someone’s location. All those things are considered extensions of the ad itself. So having full extension of those ads also has a tendency to improve overall quality, but more importantly, click-through rates of your campaigns.
A lot of times when we’re building out campaigns, folks will have the Display Select Network turned on, and sometimes they will also have search partners. My preference typically is to have both of those turned off and only the Search Network Turned on initially. There are times when I will then turn on search, sometimes the Search Partners Network, if I’ve expanded my reach quite a bit on the search network. But usually, in my experience, the Display Select, even when you’re using CPA and max conversions bid strategies, the search network still performs better in my experience. The quality is better. The click-through rates are better, all that makes a difference. So when you have those turned on, it’s also more difficult to discern performance if there’s a portion of your budget going towards Display Select, and Search Partners and not the Search Network. To better explain that, the Search Network is anyone that goes directly to google.com to do a search. That is the Search Network, everyone.
Holding Google Ads Agency Teams Accountable For Results
Also within your campaign settings, and again, I just want to repeat this for everyone that is a little uninitiated. I want you to look at what I’m saying right now, as ways to both hold your teams accountable, but also just as great reminders to spot check and ensure that you’re adhering to some of these best practices when you’re building campaigns, but also having lively discussions with some of your teams internally. So for us, when it comes to building out campaigns, in most cases, we want to target people that live in a location versus people that have just expressed an interest in a location and live in that location.
We’ve noticed there are times when someone that lives in Charlotte, they do a search for HVAC repair Atlanta. For me personally, if I’m an HVAC repair person in Atlanta, I only want to target people in Atlanta. I don’t, even if you did a search that include the word “Atl HVAC repair in Charlotte,” I just want to target people in Atlanta. So you have to make that judgment call. But at least when you’re starting out building a campaign, start out, focus on the people living in your location.
These other parts are really important when we’re doing keyword research. Not only do we start with a phrase and exact match, but we also do a really, I think, we do a pretty good job on the front end and try to weed out as many of the negatives. A lot of those negatives will both come from the conversations that you have with the client, or within the brand internally. So having those internal discussions on what keywords you absolutely do not want to show up for. But it also goes down to the keyword research, and then picking out those keywords that you should not show up for as well. So that’s really important.
You also want to handpick all of your keywords. So when you do your keyword research, you want to literally take it down to a spreadsheet level, and handpick every keyword that you believe is pertinent. That’s going to ensure that you’re going to really hone in on those keywords that are most pertinent to the brand. And then last but not least, let’s say, if a client, or if a brand starts off at, let’s say, a $100 a day, or $500 a day, you can start off at one fifth or half of that, let’s call it, so that you’re not spending too much of the budget on the front end, but trying to figure out, “How can I limit as much waste as possible within the first day to two days?”
How To Perform Quick Google Ads Search Audits
And then you can ramp up, and have that budget normalized across the next 30 days, and then the next 30 and so forth. That’s one thing that we do to ensure that we’re not spending too much on the front end, but trying to get as much waste out, as much as we possibly can. There are a lot of folks out there that like to do google audits. For us, we do, we have a 30 minute audit that we’ll do from time to time. We also have our more formal audits that we do, that we’ll talk about at the very tail-end of this conversation. But I’m going to try to breeze through this as quickly as I can, because I think there’s some other good meat that’s in this deck.
First, as I always say, get context from the brand. You also want to know campaign goals, other media that they’re spending, how they measure success, understanding the sense of strategy and execution from their perspective, is really important when you’re doing an audit. Also, this too is very important. There’s some folks that measure conversions directly within Google Analytics. There’re other individuals that measure conversions directly from Google Tag Manager. We do both from time to time, but you need to double check, and make sure that they’re all working. I don’t care how you do it. You got to make certain that your conversion tracking is absolutely in place, working properly, and also makes sense. And so that comes down to both naming conventions of what you call your conversions. But it also comes down to ensuring that things are firing properly, and you’re measuring the levels of success that you expect for a client that you’re working with, or within your own individual organization.
So this is the fun part for me when I’m doing an audit. After I’ve done all those things, next, I’m going into the campaign overview. And so this is a typical dashboard of what a Google Ads platform traditionally looks like. You can see these are individual campaigns, you’ve got clicks, impressions, average click, cost per click, et cetera. This little doohickey right here, is called Segment Data. And within the segment data, you can actually see individual campaign performance, ad group performance, I believe also keyword performance, at each of those different segments. So that in includes your network. So if you’re targeting Search Partners and Display Select, you can see if they actually had that turned on, both in your campaign settings, but also from a data perspective.
You can also segment by way of device. So mobile versus desktop, versus tablet. You can see conversion action. So all the different conversions that are driving leads, or whatever that might be for you, from a conversion tracking perspective. Day of the week, time of day, ad destination. So whether the conversion took place on your website, or whether the it took place under call, those are also really important areas that you can take advantage of.
I want to pause for a second, someone raised their hand? Let’s see here … Tackling no Ray, this is hope you do understand, this is a little bit more blocking and tackling if you’re still here with us. So yeah, just wanted to make sure that you’re following us a little bit here. So that comes down to when you’re doing an audit, those are the things that you want to look at, when you’re looking directly into a campaign.
Next thing that we typically do, and I think all of you should do it as well, is you definitely want to check your settings. You want to look at your settings at the campaign level. Once you’ve looked at your settings, everything matches up to a best practice standpoint, then you want to look at your ad groups. So you want to make sure that your themes for your brand, or for your organization matches up to both the keywords as well as the ad copy. So let’s say, for example, if you are a HVAC repair company, you want to make sure that word, “HVAC repair,” matches up to the theme around repairing an HVAC unit like AC repair, HVAC repair, things of that nature.
You also want to review your keywords. So some folks like to start off with broad and phrase an exact. Personally, I like to start off with just phrase an exact, and then if you absolutely feel like you need to expand out to others, you can certainly do that. So I’m going to, think someone keeps raising their hand. Lisa, do you want to ask your question? Lets see here? Just trying to make sure that everyone is being taken care of. Okay, all right. Maybe she was just probably raising her hand unintentionally. Let’s see here. Okay. Right. Cool. [inaudible 00:24:46] there.
Sorry everyone, so search terms report. So it’s one thing to pick the keywords that you’re targeting. It’s another thing to see the keywords that are actually showing up across the board. So for us, we actually like to really look at our search terms report. And that way you can pick out both the winners and also look at the losers, the ones that are just bad traffic. But also the negative keywords that you should not be showing up for. We typically like to pull data for the last 30 to 90 days.
Typically, if you pull it for an entire year, an internal brand or whomever, they may have already weeded out a lot of keywords. So you don’t want to look at that data. Look at over the last 30 days, I think that’s a good benchmark. And that will tell you a lot of the keywords that are not irrelevant. [inaudible 00:25:36], if you have a question, can you put it either in the chat, or in the Q&A section? I see you keep raising your hand, but I’m unable to get your questions just yet. I appreciate that.
And then last but not least them, we also look at a location report. So you if you’re targeting all the United States, or let’s say, you’re targeting an entire state, sometimes you want to segment and look at your data at the individual city level, or zip code level, or even state level, that’s where you can go into the location report, in order to view that information. So that can be very helpful as well. And then lastly, Google actually does come up with some pretty good recommendations. I don’t take all of them though, because there’s some of them that just doesn’t make sense if you’re pretty initiated in the world of Google Ads.
There are some that do make sense. One example, being a set to a target CPA, that’s cost per action bid strategy. Sometimes when you set things to a CPA bid strategy, you unintentionally don’t show up for enough impressions, because the system is trying to bid lower for your keywords relative to the user. So there are some times when it makes sense to have a CPA bid strategy. Whereas in other cases, it makes sense to just keep it as a max conversions bit strategy. Sometimes you do want to focus specifically on a target ROAS strategy as well. So you definitely have some options there, but wanted to give you all some perspective from that standpoint.
And as I was mentioning, this is the actual platform itself. Again, this isn’t for folks that are just constantly building out campaigns. If you are, I think this is an incredible, this is a really good refresher. But if you’re just a media planner, it’s nice to just have a sense of what the UI looks like. So on the left hand side, it always starts off with campaigns. You can look at your auction insights, those are the competitors that are within your ecosystem, within your [DMA 00:27:26]. And also relative to you, the keywords that you’re targeting. You can look at your ads, your ad extensions, landing page performance, your keywords, search terms reports. A lot of good stuff is in this UI. But as I was mentioning before, when it comes to the audit, if you are trying to do a quick audit yourself within your own Google Ads campaign, the first thing that I would do is absolutely check your conversion tracking within the Tools And Setting section.
You can see what conversions you are in fact tracking. If you’re not, you must absolutely get that turned on in some way. It’s very important to your campaigns. Next, you want to go down here, and see what your average cost per, where your average conversions are. If you are a tracking conversions as well as what your average cost per conversion is. And then one thing I want to mention, is search impression share, really important metric. The reason why, at least for me, that’s important, is because it tells me out of every 100 impressions, how many did I actually show up? And so there, if I’m at like a 20 or 30% impression share, but I’m getting an average cost per conversion at, let’s call it, 20, or 30, or $85 in certain instances, and for me, my goal is to always be under a 1.50, for me, I’m more than happy. At least in my experience, I’m more than happy to try to add more budget in order to get more out of my campaign effectively.
Google Ads Keyword Planner – Performing Stellar Keyword Research
And then last but not least the Segment section, this is where you can go in to see overall performance at the individual level, in terms of those different segments, like network, device, conversion, time of day, click type, all those different things are very important as well. So again, as far as the course I was mentioning, if you want, if you’re a partner, or a client, you can certainly gain access to it. But we did a video on how to use the Google Keyword Planner. I just want to tell everybody out there, I don’t want you all to think that just because you’re not building campaigns, you can’t use the Google Keyword Planner.
Yes, you do need to have an account set up within Google Ads. But once you have that, you can actually use the Google Keyword Planner. And it’s really helpful from a media planning perspective. For us, this is the things that we look at. I mean, this is a little bit more of a condensed version, but the first, is you always have to go back, making certain, both internally as well as within your organization, you’re having those discussions around your strategy, the strategy of the campaign, what the overall goals are, all that. Next, you want to conduct your research. And once you’ve thought about those five to 10 keywords that would serve as the core of your business and your brand, you want to actually do that research.
So a great example here is I might do a search for, “Car accident attorney.” I might also do a search for, “Car accident lawyer, car accident lawyers near me, auto accident, attorney,” all those different terms. Maybe not a ton, but enough where I’ve expanded my reach to understand a little bit more around the keywords that I’m showing up. When I say doing those searches, I don’t just only mean doing it in Google, I mean doing it within the Google Keyword Planner itself. This is really more of the example that I was going to share with everyone in a second. You want to take notice of your core keywords, as I mentioned, but also some of those related terms. Again, as I always suggest, you always want to start off with exact phrase match. Hold off on broad, at least in the very beginning, before you decide to expand your campaign a bit.
Pull out the negative keywords as well during the research phase. So don’t wait until for you to just start getting traffic. And also, I think here internally, we have a list of keywords that we always use as negatives. I think everyone within your agencies, as well as direct brands, you should always just think about the terms that you do not want to show up for. You also need to ensure that those critical keywords are also pulled into your ad copy. Great example, here, “Car accident attorney,” you can see a couple of ads here. They have the word, “Car accident attorney,” in the headline. They also have, “Car accident attorney,” let’s see here … Interesting enough, the one [inaudible 00:31:39] chamber, they don’t have it here. And just so you know, I did not click on any of these, because clicks for an attorney in the PI space is incredibly expensive. It’s 400, $500 a click.
Other spaces, it’s a little different. But you can see here that they don’t have the keyword in their ad copy, but this person does. So they probably have a better ad rank, even though they’re showing up a little lower, they may not be bidding as high, if that makes sense?
I was talking earlier about ad extensions, this phone number at the top, that’s an example of an ad extension. These two are what’s called site links. Those also are ad extensions as well. Just an FIY. And so this is an example of how we would break out, and how I think you all should think about how you break out the core themes of your campaign. So if you’re in a legal space, don’t put all of your services into one campaign. Put them all into separate campaigns.
So you may be an accident attorney, but you do things within trucking, motorcycle, as well as car accident. All three of those should have their own campaigns, in my judgment, in our experience. If you’re a hospital system, most folks wouldn’t do this, but if you’re a hospital system, orthopedic gets its own campaign, air, nose, and throat would get its own campaign. You could all almost make the argument that ear, nose, and throat, but if some … Or let’s say orthopedics, someone that may be thinking about they had a hand industry, like, “I need to get my hand fixed,” or let’s say, “My shoulder.” You may even go deeper within the orthopedic space, and have separate campaigns built out that way. It really just helps you visualize the data, visualize how things are performing, but also allows you to build out incredibly relevant ad copy, relevant to those keywords within each of those campaigns.
And a last example, would be HVAC repair. So you have H, heating repair, AC repair, duct repair, AC replacement. Those are all separate services that a brand offers. I personally would put those in separate campaigns. So you can view the performance and measure the performance with more specificity, and also manage the ads with more clarity as well.
So then lastly, consider your SKAGs, [inaudible 00:34:00] single keyword ad groups, it’s something that we favor. We don’t always do it, but a lot of times we do. A single keyword ad group is when you have one ad group per keyword, or one keyword per ad group. Sometimes you might have two keywords per ad group, but you do get the gist. For us, it gives us more control. Particularly with some of the changes that has happened within Google’s platform. It allows us the potential for higher ad rank as well, because we control our ad copy relative to the keyword that’s also within the ad group itself.
It typically promotes a higher click-through rate in our experience. Again, that probably has a little bit more to do with the control, but that’s been our experience. Then it also allows us to spot check data and performance much more quickly. So there are going to be some times when you do want to just put them in the themes, and you may have five, 10, 15, 20 keywords within the themed ad group, and that’s okay. But just know when it does make sense to pick and choose whether you wanted to do single keyword ad groups versus full themed ad for your campaigns. Yes, there will be a replay. I appreciate that. There will be a replay. If you have questions, because you continue to bring them, then we’ll answer them at the very tail-end.
This is the Google Keyword Planner, very powerful tool. I know folks out there use Semrush. There’s a couple other ones that folks use, Ahrefs. I personally go to this one all the time, because that’s the core data that’s coming directly from the platform. Example that I gave earlier was, “Spray from insulation.” So you may have several different terms that you utilized, this pulls data for the last year. So that’s helpful. So you can see the overall trend of those performance, or of the actual searches. What’s nice is those are the actual searches that happen, for that actual keyword, “Spray foam insulation,” so very powerful keyword. That might be one we can pick out.
“Expanding foam,” we’d probably give it a shot, see what kind of conversions we can get from that. But one that I may not do, is, “Great stuff foam.” That’s either a competitor, or a can that’s sold out there. So we may decide that, “For this client, that’s more of a service-based business, we don’t want to go after someone that’s contextually is searching for a spray foam can, or DIY, or do-it-yourself, or Home Depot or Lowe’s. We want someone who is looking for spray foam insulation near me.” Maybe, “Spray foam insulation costs,” but you get the gist. You have to play around with it.
But what’s also nice here, is that when you do your search, you can see all the other keywords that might be somewhat relevant to what you searched for. And so it gives you some more ideas to expand your thinking from a keyword research perspective. Again, out of all the tools that’s out there, I personally believe Keyword Planner is the best. Again, you can use Ahrefs, you can use Semrush. Those are other Google keyword tools that’s out there for those, I can put those in the chat when we get a second. But Google Keyword Planner for sure is the best one, my judgment.
Improve Your Click Through Rates Via Google Ads Campaigns
Okay, improving the click-through rates for your Google ads campaigns. We did a video on this one, but I wanted to just give a little bit of a highlight to this one in particular. So I did a stylized example for, “HVAC repair near me.” As I mentioned before, I’m a big believer in single keyword ad groups. Again, you can use themes when it’s appropriate. That’s okay. But single keyword ad groups really makes a difference when we’re trying to check performance, but also improve click-through rates across each individual ad group, that’s getting the most impressions and the most clicks. We like to separate our campaigns also by brand, as well as non-branded campaigns. So if my client was Ragsdale Heating, Ragsdale Heating would have its own brand campaign. And then very similar to what I was saying earlier for this one, if they were offering heating repair, AC repair, duct repair, AC replacement, those would also be four separate campaigns relevant to the non-brand campaigns if you will.
Another important piece around measuring, but also improving performance. So you can, with more specificity, not mistake the fact that you’re getting all these branded searches, and you have a high click-through rate, and you think that your campaign’s doing really well, when in fact your non-branded campaign, or your non-branded keywords are not performing as well. So that’s why it’s important to separate those out into both separate ad groups, but more importantly, separate campaigns. I think for everyone that’s out there, when it comes to creative, things of that nature, you want to have numbers, benefits, sense of urgency, deadlines, really good call to actions, things specific to your brand, having your brand name in your ad copy also is really important as well. I think everyone here has done a good job. These are local service ads, so they had to go through a little bit of a verification process, but those are getting quite a bit of clicks, and they’ve got a lot of reviews, which is great.
But if you come down here to the text ads, you can see they got some numbers in their ad copy. They talk about how they were founded back in 1987, no hidden fees, 24/7 emergency service. These are in their site links, a lot of good stuff. They even have a March special that’s in their ad copy. It just has a tendency to draw the eyes to the ad copy. They’re also using title case versus sentence case. That’s when every first word, or first letter of each word is capitalized. Really helpful from that standpoint. So also, as I mentioned before, want to have your keywords in the ad copy, always improves your ad relevancy scores and all that. Also, you want to have full ad extension usage as well. So that too is incredibly important.
There are going to be cases where you can’t use all of them. And so you just make that determination. So for example, if you really want to send someone to a very singular landing page, with one particular message, and you don’t want to use site links that would send people to other landing pages, you don’t have to do that, but at least use things like call-outs, rich snippets, those types of things, that are really helpful within the platform.
Search terms vigilance. So what that means, is downloading your search terms report over the last week, over the last two weeks, over the last 30 days, and weeding out the negative keywords that are irrelevant. That is also going to both improve your quality, your conversions, but it should also improve your click-through rates for your ads.
And this is a small one, but it’s one that a lot of people miss out on, which is higher bids. Sometimes, even whether you’re doing a max cost per click bid strategy, or a CPA bid strategy, or a max conversions bid strategy, if you don’t bid high, the higher you bid, the higher chances you have of showing up at the top. The lower you bid, the lower you show up within the Google search rankings, within the Google Ads platform, specifically, in the search results, I’m sorry. And so the lower you bid, you’re still going to show up for that impression, but someone may not click on your ad. So that too has a tendency to lower your click-through rates. A lot of people don’t really think about that. So you have to create a balance between when to bid higher, but also knowing that you’re trying to drive as many phone calls, leads, purchases on your website, whatever that core metric might be, essentially.
Conversion Rate Optimization In Google Pay Per Click Advertising
All right, everyone, so this is something that’s really me personally. I know that this conversation has really been about the Google Ads platform, how to be a more effective media planner, so you’re managing your team better, but also just know how to talk the talk a little bit. But this [CRO 00:41:32] part is really important, because a lot of people say, “Oh, I know we built out this great campaign. It’s awesome, but we’re not still not getting leads. What’s going on?” And a lot of times people don’t think about the website. They don’t think about the website, they don’t think about the conversion metrics around the website. So I just wanted to … There’s some folks out there that says, “Man, I got to spend thousands of dollars on …” Look you can make really good, vast changes to a website, and be spending 200, maybe $500 max per month to make improvements. There are some large organizations that are spending five, $10,000 a month just on conversion rate optimization, because it’s that important.
If you think about if you’re spending $20,000 a month in Google Ads, and let’s say you’re converting at a 1%, but you improve that to a 1.2%. You’ve improved the effectiveness of your ad campaign by 20%, you’re getting 20%, 25% more out of your ad spend. Not just that, all of the direct, branded folks that are coming to your site, all the other media that you’re doing, this part’s super important. So I’m going to put this out there as well. Number one, this is something that we’ve done here at Propellant Media, it may look a little incessant and a little crazy, but it works. We like to actually put a form, even if it’s a short form, on every page, or the majority of the pages on our site. Because it gives a more opportunities to get leads for us, here at Propellant Media. But I think a lot of other folks do that as well.
So that’s also a recommendation. If you have a mobile version of your site, maybe you don’t have many more than three fields, like first name, email address. Don’t try to get 20 fields of information, because most people aren’t going to fill that out. So you want to think about that path to purchase, that path to getting a lead to come in and reach out to you. Very important. Also in terms of location of those forms, it’s really important to have them at the very top. We also like to use what’s called forms for pop-ups. There’s a lot of folks that don’t use pop-ups. Pop-ups are incredibly effective, and they are cost effective at as well. I mean HubSpot is a little bit more of an enterprise platform, but there’s other platforms like Opt-in Monster that cost like 50 bucks a month.
And if you think about it, for all those people that left your site, or was scrolling down, it just gives you more opportunities to get their contact information. And for everyone who may think that, “Oh, I don’t want to be inundated to the person that comes to my site,” If you don’t ask, you’re never going to know, number one. And number two, if you always look at it from the perspective of how can you bring some level of value to the person before they become a customer, it’s not going to be as big of a deal when they do go to your site, and they see a pop-up every so often. So that’s that.
One thing that we’ve done as well, is we’re just trying to humanize the brand, Wistia is a great video management platform. You can use Google, that’s free, obviously. I’m sorry, not Google, YouTube, excuse me, to host your video content. But a lot of times what’s nice with this Wistia, is you can actually gate the video. So someone can watch two minutes of the video, but afterwards they would have to, in that moment, enter their first name and their email address. So that’s something that can help with conversion rate optimization, getting more leads that’s coming into your brand as well.
Also there’s a lot of different platforms. We have an internal creative team, but there’s also folks that may need to use a platform like Fiver, to get eBooks developed. Again, we have a lot of eBooks here just to bring value and more education to the space. This part, offering this as for free, but still requiring someone’s contact details. Again, it really makes a difference. There are some cases where you may decide to get your pricing. A lot of times people want to know what your cost structure is, or how much it costs. And so, “Okay, if you want the pricing, then you need to give me your contact details.” Now if you’re an eCommerce brand, obviously that’s different, right? You’re not going to gate your pricing, but you just have to pick and choose when it’s appropriate, and when it’s not appropriate.
Some of the same tried and true ones, case studies, testimonials definitely want to have that. We use HubSpot and we use a chat bot through HubSpot. It works incredibly well. It hands it off to one of our team members. It’s not perfect. It’s not a perfect system, but it does the job. And so you can use that. I think CallRail just came out with one, there’s another really cool platform, called Jivochat. I think they’re also like 50 bucks or so. They have both a live chat as well as a chat bot. Really good stuff. You add the code to your site, get it set up, really powerful platform as well.
If anyone is having issues with adding questions to the Q&A section, just put them here in the chat too. And I’m okay with that. I’ll try to get those answers to you as well, just FIY. Last but not least, there’re some folks that don’t like to put a lot of content, or long form information on their website, or their landing pages. I think for us, you have to just think about the business itself. So if it’s something that’s incredibly urgent, you just want to show that you are an authority in that space, like an HVAC repair company. So you don’t want to be an HVAC repair company with just one landing page, a couple images, two services you provide, and you don’t even have anything else that’s there.
I think there’s other cases like in the world of geofencing, what we do, we believe that we had to really do an effective job educating the space, educating those out there, who don’t know about geofencing marketing. For those who don’t know, geofencing gives you the ability to serve ads to people in very precise areas. So you can literally build a geofence around the contours of a building, and serve ads to the individuals inside of that building. So very good in terms of car dealerships, a lot of different use cases, but that’s the way we looked at it, in terms of how we educate the space, bring value to individuals who don’t know about it, and then build that relationship through the sales enablement process on the backend, through HubSpot, whatever software you might be using, might be HubSpot, maybe ActiveCampaign, MailChimp, whatever it might be.
And last but not least, I didn’t bring this up, but having the phone number both at the top and the bottom, is really important. A lot of people do not, or in our experience, a lot of individuals are unable, or will not go to the very bottom of your page. So having it at the top ensures that you are giving yourself more chances to get more phone calls. And we use [inaudible 00:47:53] CallRail to measure a lot of our calls. That’s been our experience. It works out really well, gives us some great data on what’s working, what’s not. So that’s so that helps us incredibly well too.
So let’s see here. So CRO lessons, again for our site, this is just a quick example. This is actually HubSpot pop-up, where you can download an eBook, and then you can see here, we have our email that’s at the top. We also have a phone number. We have a pricing page that turns into another pop-up. Sometimes it does look a little inundating for some folks, but it’s effective. It works. And as long as you come from the perspective of how you’re bringing value to people, you’re going to be in a good place, in our experience.
Last but not least, when it comes to how you measure both micro and macro conversions, as I was mentioning earlier, you want to always set up macro conversions as your testing measures for your conversions. But I think it’s also important to be able to measure what we call micro conversions from time to time as well. So micro conversions might be button clicks, it might be page scrolls, people that have been to three pages or more, those are more micro conversions. But we may not necessarily count those within our conversion metrics, but we still want to know what’s working from that micro conversion standpoint. So we’re then able to measure other things beyond that effectively.
And then last but not least, we also want to … Bottom line, it tells a bigger story in terms of what’s working, what’s not across all of your campaigns effectively. Something that I think for, if you’re a brand and you want to an effective job holding your team accountable, these are the things that I would suggest that you all do within your own organizations, or if you’re an agency, you’re doing within your own teams, effectively. First, you need to have 24/7 reporting. This is a sample report that we utilize, that has a little bit more data that’s on here, but you can see your reporting at the individual Google search level, Google display level, Google YouTube level. You can have a report that pulls all the data together, but you want to have 24/7 reporting. So you can constantly go in, or go in whenever you want, to check and verify how things are performing. Versus having to get a report every 30 days from a client, or see a report every 30 days. That part is very useful.
Also your ability to track goals. If you have had those discussions around goal tracking, and maybe it’s connected to a CRM, or some sort of lead center, that part is very important. That goes into seeing how things are performing that gets pulled into your reporting infrastructure. You also want to confirm the optimization cadence, both with the agency, but also internally, within your brand as well. So are the optimizations taking place twice a week, once a month? What does that look like? Maybe you’re spending a certain number of hours through that optimization process. That part is very important.
One thing that we do often, is we look at a change history report. There’s a report that tells you what changes have been made. And just to note, just because changes haven’t been made, doesn’t mean that changes should have been made to a campaign. Sometimes it just needs a set of eyes, or you just need someone to just check and make certain that things are performed the way that you expect. But that part is also important. Also, as I was mentioning, the Google, the keywords, the Google Ads Media Planning course, again, I’m not trying to get people to buy the course per se. I just want to put it out there that if you’re an existing brand, or an agency partner, you do have access to it. Just ping us if you don’t see it. But if that is the case, then there are a couple free previews that are in there. But more importantly, it’s like you just want to become a more effective media planner. You want to be able to hold people accountable to performance and results.
Deep Google Pay Per Click Advertising Audit
And if you don’t know what you’re looking at, then it makes it a little bit more difficult to hold individuals accountable for performance across your campaign. So yeah, that, doing your monthly check-ins obviously, and then always just trying to innovate and share new ideas of things, that can make a difference long-term. For us, this is a sample audit that we do. I mean, we usually have a 60 point checklist that we typically go through. We look at campaign settings, structure, ad structure, ad group structure, keyword coverage, ad copy, ad extensions. And usually we look at the category best practices, so that brands know what the best practice is, whether you’re doing it, or not doing it. And then we have some notes that’s here on the far right, that you might see. But in a lot of audits that we do, we’re providing immediate recommendations, long-term recommendations, additional observations. We’re looking at the competitive landscape, implementation process. And we also pull the data into our standard reporting infrastructure. So you can see the data from that side of the fence as well.
So I know this was a long chat. I know everybody’s like, “Man, it’s a lot of stuff.” But I think for me, my hope is that everyone’s, at the very minimum, gotten some perspective on how you can do a better job with improving overall performance, including improving your click-through rates, making sure that you’re getting the most out of the media planning part at the very beginning, versus just asking a couple key questions, and leaving at that. If you’re an account executive, or if you’re in sales, or let’s say, you are an owner of your own business, you now have more tools to hold people that are doing this for your business a little bit more accountable, and more importantly.
Google Adwords Blueprint Audit For Agencies & Brands
So I just want to say I know we do a lot of audits here. I mean, if there are folks that are interested, we can’t do a 100 audits within a month, that’s a little crazy. But I just want to offer this to anybody that does want us to do an audit for them. We can only really offer that to the first 10 people that do reach out. The only thing we ask you to do is either reply to the original webinar email, or email us at analytics@propellant.media. Just put in the subject line, “Google Ads audit,” and in the body, let us know a context, the industry, what your current monthly spend is. You don’t have to tell us the actual client, or give us the website, unless you feel comfortable with that, then what your overall paid search objectives are. And these happen to be a lot of the different industries that we currently work in as well. And one more time, that’s the course, for those existing brands and agency partners that we do have a relationship with.
So, as you all can imagine, I have not had a sip of coffee just yet, throughout this last hour. So I’m going to take a quick sip, but hopefully this was helpful. I’m going to try to get to some of these questions, and I will send out this slide deck to everyone as well, or our team will rather. But let me get to some more questions, and let take a quick sip of Joe. Yeah, I appreciate that. I hope this was helpful, everyone.
Google Adwords Paid Search Webinar – Q & A Section
So first what I’ll do, excuse me. What I’ll do, is I’ll get to the question [inaudible 00:55:03] … Let’s see here. Yeah. I’ll get to the questions in the Q&A section, and then I’m going to get to the questions in the chat. So we’ll go through that order first. Larry, “When you can pick keywords, is there a tool that generates keyword lists?” Yes, so I was mentioning earlier that it’s the Google Keyword Planner. Now you do have to have a Google Ads account in order to leverage the tool. It’s highly recommended. It’s free. You don’t have to actually do any ad spend on the platform.
Justin Croxton (00:00:00):
There are other tools that do cost some money. You have other platforms like Semrush, Ahrefs. And so let me just put that here in the chat, semrush.com. There’s also www.ahrefs.com as well. Those are two other platforms that you can tap into at any time. We have access to both of them. I think for us, Google Keyword Planner’s the best one though, it just provides the more accurate data. But you can still get some really good data that pulls from Google Keyword Planner also from Ahrefs, and also Semrush as well.
Good question, “Do clients have access to the Google audits?” As I was mentioning, if you’re running campaigns right now, then it’s really just being offered to the first 10 that reach out to us. So that’s more around the audit piece, but as far as what I was talking about, if you want to do your own audit, and you’re running your own campaign, if you look at the replay, you’ll see the process, and you’ll see the best way to accomplish that for sure.
Awesome, save my questions until the end. Got it, I appreciate that, Larry, “Will the replay be available?” Yes, it will. Got you covered there. Alfonso, “So safe to say that if I have a client and offer this white label?” Yes, so we are able to white label pay-per-click advertising for agencies, for brands as well. So that’s, I mean, not just our geofencing programmatic, but we also do it on the paid search side as well. Good question, Alfonso.
“Would you explain SKAGs a little bit more?” So a SKAG, which I know sounds bad, but it’s really not. A SKAG is a single keyword ad group. If you think about an ad group, so you can have a campaign, and within a campaign, you may have your ad groups, it’s literally different ad groups themselves. Within those ad groups, you can have up to three responsive ads per ad group. But within an ad group, you can also have five keywords, a 100 keywords, a 1,000 keywords. In our experience having one keyword per ad group is a good best practice.
So one keyword per ad group. That’s why they call it single keyword ad group, SKAG, rather. So that’s what that means. It helps improve performance, spot check the data a lot more quickly. [inaudible 00:58:06] performance across the board at the individual ad group level. You don’t always have to do that. It’s not always the best practice, but it’s a really good one. And don’t think if you’re running a campaign in which you have themes, like your campaigns are specific to themed ad groups, don’t feel like you need to change everything to a SKAG. I don’t want you to think that. If it’s working, don’t break it. And that’s our philosophy here. If it’s working, don’t try to fix it, essentially.
[Lori 00:58:34], “So in your example of hospital ads, can you build one campaign for orthopedic, and separate ad groups for shoulder, knee, hip, et cetera?” Yes, absolutely, you can. You can absolutely do that too. In our experience, I still sometimes think it’s nice. It just depends on the business itself. If you’re a car accident attorney, I would absolutely break out motorcycle accident, to trucking accident, to auto accident, because each of those individuals is a different search. They really are a different consumer, if you think about it. But if you’re an orthopedic care center, then you can have, in this case, one campaign, non-branded campaign that takes care of shoulder, knee, and hip. But you, what I would suggest if I were you, Lori, is do that search for “Shoulder replacement,” “Shoulder repair,” “Knee replacement,” “Knee repair,” “Hip replacement,” “Hip repair.” See all the other keywords, because you might see other terms that might actually force you to turn your ad groups into individual campaigns.
So can measure the performance better. And remember, if you have 10, 15, 20 keywords within an ad group, it’s very difficult to build out individual ads that’s incredibly micro-targeted to that individual keyword, if that makes sense? And so that’s why we really promote single keyword ad groups. But if you’re an orthopedic care center, if you got ad groups in each individual, in one particular campaign, and it’s actually performing well, then don’t break it. Let do what it do. But one thing you might decide to do, is take out some of the winners within those campaigns, and pull those into their own ad groups, to see how those might perform. Just making those optimizations all of the time, Lori. Great question.
I know we’re at a little over the one minute mark. I’m going to stay on and answer more of these questions, everyone. So I appreciate that. “Did Google Ads for a new Medicare business, called a company called SEM? Are they the same?” Yes, Pete. So SEM, search engine marketing is the same for pay-per-click advertising. It’s the same for paid search, same as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Bing Ads, all of that’s using the same naming conventions, nomenclature. Absolutely. Pete, Sorry, I didn’t clarify that at the beginning. Thank you for that. “Can you send that 24/7 reporting sheet please?” Oh yeah. Actually, what I’ll do, is I’ll do that right now actually. So let me go to the report. We’ll put that here in the chat. So y’all can see what that looks like. Absolutely.
Let’s see here. Let’s skip back to questions. Okay. Here we go. Perfect. Yep, appreciate that, Hank, “Is there any benefits to selecting keywords based on Propellant geofencing campaign, where the fence is a city?” Oh, okay, so Oscar, I think your question is a little bit more centered around geofencing. I guess I can answer that live really quickly. We don’t suggest doing a geofencing campaign, and then layering on top of that a keyword campaign on the programmatic display side of the house, because it really vastly limits your reach. We just, we’ve ran those campaigns before with many clients. They rarely perform well. Every once in a while, you might get a few clicks and a higher click-through rate, but it depends on how many … Look, if you’re a national brand maybe that might be a testing environment, but if you’re a smaller brand, we would not suggest that approach, in our experience. It’s still a good question. It really depends on how big of a campaign you’re running though, Oscar.
Shannon, “How can you set up proper conversions on the backend of your site without a tech person to help?” Well, I mean, if I’m being honest, you would have to, quite honestly, you’ll have to hire an agency, hire a data person, who’s able to get into the backend of your website, set up those conversions, so you’re measuring them with more specificity. You can set up Google Tag Manager, figure out what your core conversions are, and then set it up that way. I mean, again, for those who are business owners, for those that are more account executives, media planner, big picture, don’t think about it as that being your job. Your job is to do more of the big picture stuff.
There’s a lot of other teams that’s out there, that’s able to set up those conversions. But now you know, Shannon and everyone else, that’s something that needs to be done. And if it’s not done, then you need to hold those individuals accountable for getting that done, so you can measure those conversions across your campaigns. Once you look at it for more of that perspective, don’t feel like you need to teach yourself how to set up conversions and all that, if you will, Shannon. There’s also a lot of YouTube videos that’s out there too, if you do want to learn yourself, but that’s just another conversation.
“Is there a way to find out what keywords your competition is going for?” Yes, there is. And so Semrush is actually a really good tool for that. They’re able to tell you what keywords other folks are bidding against. Also, when you go in, get into market across your keywords, you can actually go into your auction insights within the Google Ads platform and see, well, not just the keywords, but also your all your competition, and what they’re going against as well. So that too can be pretty helpful as well, Larry.
Joseph, “How easy it to have multiple SKAGs, single keyword ad groups for multiple clients? Example it’s Friday and restaurants are all having specials for the weekend.” Great question, Joseph. So I’ll say this, it may not always make sense that I was saying earlier, to build out a single keyword ad group from a campaign management standpoint. You may need to instead have themes. If you’re doing like more of a promotion, or things of that nature, you need to just pick and choose when it’s going to be appropriate.
But if you have multiple clients, and they’re all running different specials and you know that someone’s performing a search based on that special, it just may not make sense in that moment. So you just need to make that judgment call. And that goes into both the media planning at the very beginning, determining when you do or don’t need to utilize single keyword ad groups, and then pushing the rock forward and going from there. It’s a great question, Joseph. Very good question. There’s no perfect answer, but at least it helps you frame it up, and figure out when it’s appropriate to utilize it and when not.
Oscar, “Can Shopify or WooCommerce be used to achieve the level of specificity of change to [inaudible 01:05:10] call to actions, et cetera? Or do you need custom sites built?” No, you can literally use just the Shopify for the eCommerce side, on the Google shopping network side of the house, or WooCommerce. You don’t have to build out new, and I wouldn’t suggest that. I mean, for everyone, that’s out there, minimum viable product, that stands for MVP, minimum viable product. Don’t feel like you need to start building out completely brand spanking new websites here. We’re talking about making slight tweaks and improvements, but also leveraging what you currently have going well for yourself, and how you integrate that into your Google Shopping campaigns, your Google Ads campaigns, and then just testing and improving performance over time. You want to look at it more from that standpoint, Oscar.
“Do you have an opinion for Semrush or Yoast SEO?” So Yoast SEO is great. We use it both on our site, within WordPress, which is great. But actually I like Semrush more. It’s a lot more detail, a lot more specificity from an SEO, but also from a keyword standpoint. You can look at your competitors really nicely, really powerful platform. We always suggest people utilize that. If I were to pick one of them, I’d pick Semrush. Great question, Victor.
“Is there a minimum ad spend a day to get Google, to learn about?” Yeah, they typically say like no less than three to $5. I mean, you can spend less if I’m not mistaken, but I think if you were asking me what I would suggest, if you’re all saying, “Hey, Justin, I’m super uninitiated. I need some context on what I should be spending?” Depending on your industry, very minimum is $1,500 a month, in my opinion, maybe 1,000, in terms of media spend. So you can get some learnings. It depends on your industry though, because you can’t just spend … If you’re a PI attorney, there’s no way that you’re going to be able to just spend $100 a day, I’m sorry, $5 a day, or $10 a day, or even 30 or 40, for that matter. Because the cost per clicks for a PI attorney is 200, 300, $400 in certain cases.
So when you’re working with, if you’re doing the research yourself, you need to be able to go on to the platform, and see what the average cost per clicks are. And that will give you some [inaudible 01:07:19] determination of what you think would be a healthy budget in order for you to learn a little bit more, and just check overall performance. Thanks Joseph.
“Are there specific reports for a campaign with goals to make sales?” Yeah, no, we have reports too, but I think if you’ve been able to successfully tie in your sales into, and set those up as conversions, and tie it directly to your Google Ads platform, you can also see the performance there directly within the UI. But then we, I mean, I think there’s a lot of agencies out there that have great reporting. I think we also have our own reporting as well, where you can actually see sales relative to keyword sales, relative to all those. Oh, also our [inaudible 01:08:02], sorry. Yeah. SpyFu is another great platform. But again, I still like Semrush more over both of those. We actually also utilize SpyFu from time to time.
Joseph, “How can you plug this into a third party data site like Wix?” I don’t know what that’s in reference to. I will say that I do have some issues with GoDaddy as a website builder. They’re terrible when it comes to Google Tag Manager, I think Wix and Squarespace is a lot better, but it’s really not as challenging to pull in conversions and data, from that standpoint, from a Wix or a Squarespace, particularly if you have Google Tag Manager enabled and installed on someone’s website effectively. Hope I answered that question appropriately.
“Where do you find what the average cost per click is per industry?” Y’all going to laugh at me. Type in, go to Google, and type in, “Average cost per click by industry.” I promise you will find some great infographics, you’ll find some blog posts that gives you the average cost per click by industry. For sure. That’s what’s been my experience. “Since Semrush gives intent for keywords. Do use it for campaigns?” We do use it for campaigns from time to time. We also look at it from an intent perspective. I still believe that the Google Keyword Planner is the best tool that you can use. That is the data coming directly from Google.
Perfect. Let me go to the chat and see if I can get some more of those questions answered. Let’s see here. I’m still scrolling down. “Will you make this available?” Yes, I will send this replay over. Got you covered. Let’s see here, y’all have access to the academy link. So that’s great. Also I sent you the calculator. Ray, I hear what you’re saying. Hopefully this was of good value to you. If you left, then you didn’t see the blocking and tackling, but I felt like we were going into a lot of the blocking and tackling on this conversation.
[Artie 01:10:03], “Is there specific data metrics to target when the goal is to make the sale?” Sending that question directly to me, I’m not fully, I don’t think I’m following it. Also, “The last time we ran any campaigns was years ago on Facebook. You need to spend perhaps a few hundred before you get Facebook to get to know and learn.” That is correct. I’d say for anybody, just try to budget 25 to 50 bucks. If you’re really uninitiated, 25 to 50 bucks, bare minimum, I think is a good, healthy place depending on your industry, particularly on the Facebook platform. I know this isn’t a conversation around Facebook, but we would suggest that for sure.
“Do you give more weight to say commercial and transactional intent?” Oh 100,000%. And as I was saying earlier, if you look at the, “Spray foam insulation,” example, “Spray foam cost,” is different than, “Spray foam near me.” So you may decide to bid higher for, “Spray foam near me.” But if you’ve been measuring conversions over a period of time, the system is going to naturally note when to bid higher for, “Spray foam near me,” versus, “Spray foam costs,” or, “Spray foam DIY,” in those kinds of terms. Great question. “Apologies Q&A not working. I’m unable, heading geographic, viewing Justin’s screen, blocks is blocking.” Sorry about that. Stacy, if you have questions, just shoot me an email, and I’ll get that answered for you personally, unless you can put it here in the chat.
“Has geofence … By iPhone?” They’ve been effective a little bit. But it hasn’t been as vast as everyone thought it might potentially be. So we haven’t seen any huge drop offs in our experience. Just to answer your geofencing question. “Did you say that we will be sending out the slides?” Yes, we will. “A nice presentation.” I really appreciate that these things actually do take time. Perfect. Trying to go through some other questions. “Where is the giveaway link?” Mark, there’s no giveaway link. Just shoot us an email. So if you go here to just email us, again, it’s the first 10 folks. So email us to Analytics, or reply to that webinar email that we sent out, and then just provide this context. Google Ads, audit, any context, the industry, monthly spend that you’re currently doing, paid search objectives, and we got you covered.
I’m going to go back to the [inaudible 01:12:26] the chat. Appreciate that Joseph. Let’s go back down. Geez, I mean … [Inaudible 01:12:31] change to share with everyone. I just, oh, funny, y’all have an internal deliberation. That’s good. Got it. “Got to go,” okay, great. “Do use custom audiences for targeting?” Victor, absolutely. That’s more of a Google Display conversation. That’s a little bit more advanced. Also use that for responsive search research campaigns as well. So if you just want to reach people that did the search, came to your site, left, and then target them again on Google? We do use that pretty frequently as well. Just depends on the scenario. We also use it for Google Display campaigns. But if you’re going to use it for Google Display, depends on what your marketing objective is. If your marketing objective is brand awareness, or clicks, then you just need to know what your objective is, ultimately.
But if it’s CPA, or max conversions bid strategy, then you need to always check the quality of those leads. Because sometimes I have seen that the quality of the leads on the Google Display, even if you’ve had seen a conversion come in, sometimes they just aren’t as great quality in comparison to the search leads that you might be getting for any of your campaigns. Great questions.
Man, that was a lot. Any other questions? Anything else? Awesome. All right. Y’all, hey, this has been great. I know like, man, it’s a lot, but we certainly enjoy putting these on for everyone. Hopefully this has been of great use, of value. Again, I want you all, I’ll take this perspective, use it for your own media planning, use it for your own internal campaigns. If you’re not doing any campaigns, totally get it. Hopefully this was a great value. If you’re an existing client, you work with us currently, let us know. We’ll make sure that you have access, or full access to the Google Ads meeting and planning course, for sure. Outside of that one, this was fun everyone. Really appreciate it. And we will see you all in the next one. Thanks so much. Take care.