Justin Croxton (00:00):
All right, everyone. So you have, let’s call it your $5,000-per-month accounts. We ran plenty of those in our days here at Propel Media, and then you have accounts that you run where you’re spending close to a hundred thousand per month. A lot of times individuals, yeah, you may be running a hundred thousand dollars account, but it’s just so much. It’s so much to manage and you’re trying to figure out how can I do a better job managing a hundred thousand dollars per month or more account effectively. And so this is really what this conversation is all about, how to become both well organized, but also how you do some setup on the front end. So we’re going to go through some of these recommendations and hopefully, this serves you all really well.
Justin Croxton (00:49):
So the first thing, I know it sounds simple, right? I know that everyone that’s out there, you probably do do some of this, but I can’t tell you how many folks just create a campaign, just let it ride. Start with a plan. And I want to say that, a well-structured plan, when you’re consulting with the client if you’re a brand manager and you’re consulting internally within the organization. You want to think about what are the services? What are the products that we’re promoting? You want to think about the timing, the infrastructure, maybe there are certain deadlines that you have to think about out. All of that needs to go into your plan. Because a lot of times, if you’re running a, call it a hundred thousand dollars per month account. You’re probably going to have at least five to 20 campaigns that you’re running because you’re trying to get as much out of that ad budget as possible.
Justin Croxton (01:42):
And the way you get as much out of that ad budget is by having very singular and very targeted campaigns, as well as, single keyword ad groups and ads and things of that nature, of course, but got to create a plan. It has to be a full media plan. That’s in an Excel document, whatever document system you use that gives perspective on spend, on what’s going to go to each line item of your campaign. All of that’s really going to matter, and you have to do that from the front end. So that’s the first thing. Second, this actually matters just as much as the first point, your naming conventions needs to be impeccable. Don’t create a naming convention infrastructure that just says, campaign FB, underscore start date, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You need to have your campaign naming infrastructure, make sense.
Justin Croxton (02:36):
So when you’re looking at reporting, when you’re looking at how your campaigns are running, you’re able to spot-check stuff a whole lot more quickly. Then having to figure out, “Well, what’s this campaign about, or what’s this for?” So if you’re a personal injury attorney, you’re spending $200,000 a month on PI attorney stuff, and you got motorcycle, you have let’s call it personal injury attorney. Is more of a branded term, right? Maybe you’re also doing car accident, truck accident. You want to put truck accident in the campaign name and all the keywords that’s associated with trucking accidents. And a single keyword ad groups can then go into that campaign. But you need to make sure that you’re doing a good job with your naming conventions. Sometimes people just put random acronyms and it just does not serve you well when you’re trying to manage effectively a hundred thousand dollars per month account or more.
Justin Croxton (03:32):
So that’s really important. As I was mentioning earlier, I said, start with a plan, but also work from a media plan that you can reference on a monthly basis. For many brands out there and one that just comes to mind is higher education. We do a lot of work in the higher education space. We always have a monthly media spend that’s being associated with those different departments. And so, if you’re able to then tie in the media plan back to your campaigns and your campaign naming conventions, you’re able to make comparisons as to how you’re pacing. How your spend is going from that standpoint. So that’s super important as you’re going through that process. A lot of folks rely on scripts. I personally do not. I think scripts can hurt you long-term because it causes us to be lazy and not inject the human element in managing Google Ads campaigns.
Justin Croxton (04:28):
So there’s a lot of different scripts that you can create if your click through rate is over 5%, then split test this other thing. Or if you’re click through rate falls below 2%, pause that ad. And then inject this new creative or copy into this ad. All types of scripts that you can create. And there are some that actually are really good that we do recommend from time to time. And maybe we’ll do a separate video on that, but in this case, if you’re running a hundred thousand dollar per month account. Do not initially rely on scripts. Maybe you wait, let’s say two to three months to inject scripts, but don’t start with scripts. It’s really a bad idea because you don’t really know the performance or how the campaign is running if you do that, but do take advantage of alerts.
Justin Croxton (05:25):
And so there are different alerts that you can create, where if you go over a certain budget, or if you see a keyword that’s really kicking butt, or if you see an ad that’s performing really well. You just want to have some alerts that are set up, some ones that are really important, that inform you of some actions that you need to take over the next week or over the next few days. There’s a lot of different reporting systems that have alerts, but also directly in the Google Ads platform, there’s plenty of alerts that you can set up. So you receive that heads up on how things are performing. So I can imagine that if you are a PI attorney, just kind of going back to the personal injury attorney example, there is no way that you are not measuring conversions.
Justin Croxton (06:08):
Whether it’s phone calls, chatbot engagements, form submissions, maybe some micro-conversions. Button clicks or someone that may have watched 50% of your video. You need to track all that and you need to assign values to each of those. And the reason why that’s important is if you’re measuring a lot of different conversions, you want to put yourself into position where you can assign values to each of those conversions across all those campaigns. Not just phone calls, not just form submissions, even if you’re doing button clicks, measure all that stuff. Because eventually when you’re trying to segment performance and look at campaign performance. You’re going to want to see which ones are giving you the highest value and that’s why we discuss that part of it. And why it’s so important, is you’re trying to manage many of those different types of campaigns.
Justin Croxton (07:02):
So that’s super important. As we mentioned before already tightly well-structured campaigns based on product service or category. As I was mentioning before, if you’re an accident attorney, you may have trucking accident, let’s call it motorcycle accident. You may also have personal injury. Those are three separate campaigns. And so if you’ve done a good job with the naming conventions, and if you signed dollars per day that’s gets spent across each of those. Now you’re able to see their performance across each of them. Versus I create one campaign, I put all of my keywords in. Even if they’re single keyword ad groups, I still put all of them into one campaign. That’s not a best practice. Don’t do that. You need to have in this case, if you have a hundred thousand dollars per month account, there are certain cases where it does make sense.
Justin Croxton (07:56):
But if you use that root of product service and category, then you’re going to naturally have to build out at least four to 20, campaigns and it really depends on the scenario. But you’re going to have to build out a number of campaigns, but it’s going to give you so much more control and put you in a position to create really well-structured campaigns that are spending over a hundred thousand dollars a month. One thing that we also do is that within the whole conversation around different campaigns, we’ll have a brand campaign, a non-brand campaign, and then also a competitor keywords campaign. So up here, I think I did a Google search. Yeah, here we go. So I might have, how do I say it?
Justin Croxton (08:48):
I might have a competitor’s campaign that targets these keywords, like Mount Lincoln Associates, for the people,
Justin Croxton (08:55):
Morgan and Morgan, those kinds of terms. And then I might have a brand, if Morgan and Morgan is my client. Morgan and Morgan, would have its own brand campaign, but then we would also go after these others. And then for those non-branded keywords, like personal injury, accident attorney, those kinds of terms would fall into sort of the non-brand bucket. If you will. We do that often. We’re trying to put ourselves in a position to manage our campaigns with quicker velocity. With not making a ton of mistakes. And when you do that, you’re able to see the overall performance of your campaigns much more quickly than you would have if you were lumping a lot of things into just one campaign. Effectively. Let’s see here.
Justin Croxton (09:39):
What else? Keep track of impression share. Super important as well because if you know your impression share, and again, that’s for those who don’t know, think of it like a market demand or a market cap type of situation. That will tell you out of a hundred impressions you showed up for, you were eligible to show up for 50. So that means you’re at a 50% impression share. You want to see the performance of impression share on a per campaign basis. If you did that in just one campaign, where we lumped everything into that, just one campaign. It would not be good in terms of tracking. And so you can then share with the client that if this one campaign is doing really well. Your cost per conversion is super low and your present share is like 30%. You can tell the client, “Hey, we could actually double our budget here and still perform at par or relatively well.” There’s some nuances there, but that’s why when you’re trying to manage these large accounts. Have them broken up and looking at the impression share at each campaign level, is really important.
Justin Croxton (10:46):
As I’ve mentioned. The other thing too, if you’re managing a hundred thousand dollar per month account. We like to throw in one or two Google Display campaigns. So you may have one where you’re targeting people who are in market. You may also have a retargeting campaign. All of those initiatives are incredibly important, but again, make certain that your naming conventions are proper. So that’s super important as well. And then last but not least, tap into bid strategies often. Back in the day, just managing manual CPC bid strategies was fine. Google has gotten way better over the years and their ability to target the individual user based on their intent. So normally for us, we’ll start off with max conversions and for those who don’t know what I’m referring to. I might have to make a couple tweaks, but typically we’ll go to max conversions, then we’ll switch over. Here, let me try to go back. We’ll start off with max conversion bid strategy.
Justin Croxton (11:59):
Let me just remove this. And then we’ll switch over to a max conversion value from time-to-time, then we’ll move over to a CPA bid strategy. And then finally there are opportunities where you can leverage [Roaz 00:12:12] as a bid strategy as well. All of them have their own use cases, but you cannot do any of that if you’re not measuring conversions. And that goes in with having a strategy around measuring your micro and your macro conversions. Getting at a high level, that’s how we manage campaigns. I could talk about single keyword ad groups. Go into your search terms reports, on a daily basis and just doing an effective job. I mean, that’s just standard blocking and best practice type stuff, right? But if you want to do a really good job managing a hundred thousand dollars per month account. If you’re doing those things and you’re checking it daily on a regular basis, making the proper tweaks, you’re going to be off to the races. But man, those naming conventions, I can’t tell you how important that is.
Justin Croxton (13:01):
So everyone thanks for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Hope to talk to you soon. Take care.