Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Stacking Growth. My name is Sam Keanley, and today I'm joined by a handful of team members. We've got Ryan, Bob, and Kyle, and today we're going to be doing a deep dive on all things paid search. So, fellas, welcome.
Excited to have this brain trust here. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah. Should be good.
So to kick this off, one of the reasons that I thought it would be interesting to get us all together was we'd had some questions come up lately, just in comments on LinkedIn and other places, but one of them was related to bid strategies in Google Ads, and someone was saying, should we do performance max? Like, you know, I know we all have certain thoughts around what happens when you let the people over them do its thing. So Kyle, I know you had a few thoughts around just like bid strategies in general and performance max. So I'd love to hear, like, what's your take up somewhere where to say, should I go to performance max right now?
How would you approach that? I think a lot of things in Google Ads, the simplest answer is it depends. From what I've kind of been hearing and reading about in the PPC community is performance max tends to work better for B2C type clients like e-commerce clients as opposed to B2B. And it also tends to work better when you have a very high volume of conversion.
So pretty much my thoughts on when to use automated conversion based bidding in general is if you have a lot of conversions and you're giving Google a lot of data, you're likely going to be seeing better results. I wouldn't want to say, hey, you have a fresh account, no conversion data, should you start with performance max immediately, I would be very hesitant because you have no baseline, you have nothing that you're telling Google to use historical data on my account to optimize. I'd rather start with a little bit more control before truly diving headfirst into automation, especially with performance max automating everything across multiple networks within Google Ads. I think one thing that's interesting within there, I think one of you would share this during the internal conversation we're having about it was you're talking about, you're talking about the quantity of demos or whatever it is.
But when you set up a conversion within Google, Google looks at all conversions equally more or less depending on how you set it up. So that's another thing where I think if you set up the three different conversions, you book download, demo request hand raiser, and then like visits, features page, something like that. What would happen if you have all three of those conversions set up and Google Ads and you're running something like performance max? Google is going to optimize for conversions unless you're trying to tell Google optimize for a conversion value, like a target ROAS-esque.
In that case, you'd have to go into advanced settings and tie a specific conversion value to each of those different conversion actions. Like you said, it's just if you have a newsletter sign up and a demo request and just a general contact without any advanced settings, Google is going to say each of those is weighted equally and I will optimize for conversion for conversion sake. I think that's really one of the things with a lot of our clients in the B2B spaces. We have to optimize things for down-functional performance, not just in platform performance and Google for the most part, default settings is only going to know in platform.
All those conversions are going to be treated equally. Yeah, that's a big one of people. See, look how low are cost per conversion. It's like, well, depending on how you set up that conversion, yeah, I could make it really as good as you paid visit.
So that's a good question. That's a good question. Yeah, seriously. I've gotten in arguments with agencies about how much you branded search to do.
So I mean, that's not, yeah, you can get a great return on ad spend and our low cost per click and low conversion and all that. So it's like, but at the same time, is anybody else bidding on my name? Do I need to bid on my own name? If nobody else is there, are you showing up number one?
There's a lot of checks you've got to do first. It's a cows point. If you've got the data to prove that you do or don't need to do something, test it out first. Yeah.
So that's a good point on some of the branded search stuff. So that's something that clients will ask, prospects will ask is, you know, branded looks great. Should be doing it. So you mentioned a couple different things like our competitors bidding on it.
Where we showing up organically, like what's a short checklist that you run through before you start to say, like, do we need to be investing in this channel or sorry in this campaign at all? Or like what's the appropriate amount we should be putting towards it? Since I threw that out there, I'll jump in. I mean, part of it is more than just your single brand name.
Like, think of like, all right, what do you do? What's your service or product? I mean, type that in. Type in competitors.
Type in your brand and reviews. Obviously you want to exclude stuff. People looking for jobs and careers unless you're hiring hardcore or need that. But yeah, look at all the different keywords that are going to drive that branded search.
I mean, you can use tools like Search Console to figure out what kind of brand terms you're already showing up for that you may or may not need to bid on. And then of course, yeah, go do the search and see if anybody's bidding on your names. A lot of times, especially in B2B, you're going to have company XYZ software. And especially if it's a specific type of product software or something like cybersecurity software.
Okay, we're company ex-siber security software. It's like, all right, well, people are probably bidding on cybersecurity software, may or may not be bidding on your brand name. So I mean, that's where there's differentiation to split out those campaigns and make sure your ad text on the bidding is correct there. Ideally, your brand campaign should be really tight for that.
But look at all those different options. You can figure out what kind of budget you need based off of the keywords. I mean, there's different estimator tools based on search volumes and everything else out there. But yeah, just do the research first.
I mean, yeah, don't rely on Google to tell you. Do your own research first before setting things up. Yeah, I love that. So don't let Google do everything for you.
Ryan, one thing I'm always curious about is, you know, like every time I log into Google, I've got a new recommendation or a suggestion for me. When you log in, when you see that on all the different accounts that you're working on, what's your thought process when you see those pop up? Like, shouldn't you following those or what would your recommendation be? I usually just dismiss them all and watch my performance score go all the way to the roof.
No, but so it's good to look, right? There's always going to be things popping up constantly. What I see a lot of is connect GA4, get the app for your phone so you can manage your Google Ads from your phone. I don't know if anyone in here has ever looked at Google Ads on their phone.
I can't. Oh, Bob, Bob, Bob is that guy? He's in the photo beach on Google Ads on his phone. That's right.
That's dedication. There are a couple of recommendations to look through. One thing that I look through is are there any, are they finding any redundant keywords? Or any keywords that are maybe negative here that you have in some campaigns?
Sometimes these accounts get really big, really gnarly, and Google is pretty good at saying, hey, like, yeah, this here, you know, you want to be consistent. So that's a great one to see. Oftentimes it's asking you to automate your strategy, even though that might not be your larger goal. So if Google feels like you have enough conversions to go to a maximum version strategy, it will always tell you to do it.
Despite the fact, you get three conversions a month, and you're not even sure of the quality of it. And so you're sitting there thinking, you know, how do you even know to tell me to do that? So I feel Google is very aggressive in trying to push on its own other strategies when it suits them. And not that statement before you get into things like bidding in audiences.
So one thing I'll also add is, and I see this in a lot of accounts, and I know Bob and Kyle have two is it'll recommend audiences. Recommend garden and, you know, lawn care. Recommend all these different audiences. You put them in the bucket, and you end up having, like, 50 to 90 audiences in your Google Ads account.
And you can't really optimize for that. It's super fractured, super segmented, and it ends up not helping you at all. So you definitely have to be pretty careful when it comes to applying recommendations, and also, turning your recommendation, your auto apply off. That is probably step number one before you're doing it.
Let's just make sure auto apply this off. I think that's a big one that a lot of people overlook when first setting up account are taking one on. I'm sure that, I mean, three of you have seen that almost every account would get the auto apply is already on. So that's launching new ad variations.
It's adding keywords, it's updating budgets, which, and quickly derail things. And that's your in there every day. I know a lot of organizations have one person that's trying to run search, trying to run social, trying to come up with their messaging, trying to get an email campaign out. So they don't have the luxury of being in Google Ads every day for hours to understand what changes have gone into play, because, like, you said, it'll add those, you know, a new ad or something, and it won't tell you.
It's just going to show up in the platform unless you see it to catch it. That might throw things for a little bit. I definitely agree with Ryan in his thoughts on the recommendations. I feel like the ones that are the best to kind of look through a little bit more closely are the account specific ones.
The ones that are actually saying, is Ryan mentioned, hey, you may have ever done in keywords across the account, that's blocking a keyword you're trying to bid on. Those are the ones that are actually using account data. I feel like the ones that are more wholesale, where it's just, and Ryan alluded to this, the ones where it's just say, hey, use Target CPA instead, or switch to Broad Match, like convert your keywords to Broad Match. Those are the ones that are going to exist on every account, because Google is, they want you to use Broad Match, they want you to get more traffic, because they want you to increase your ad spend.
They're the ones that are actually more focused on your account and your structure. Those are ones that kind of better go through, but completely agree with Ryan that you should not just outright accept all the recommendations. You should be really analyzing this and saying, okay, it was a recommendation, but let me add the human element to the AI. And should I actually apply that?
Like, definitely read it more as less as you should do this and more as should you do this. Here's an opportunity for you to review. Don't just blindly accept it because it's a recommendation. Yeah, that's a great way to frame it up.
I think that ties in with something that Bob likes to say all the time. So Bob, what's your quote that you always go to in the, how would you try to do it? My go to quote, you can see it in my LinkedIn profiles at Technology Without Human Intervention is a waste of technology. And Google's come a long way from their Don't Be Evil mantra when it was formed.
I mean, I forget when they got rid of that, but not to say they're potentially trying to be evil, but they're trying to make money. I mean, that's where, I mean, that's their end goal. They got to make money. Yeah, switch to Broadmatch.
Switch your audiences. Add more audiences. Add more keywords. They want to spend your money.
I mean, they're going to try to make it work for you, drive leads, drive sales, whatever it is. But when you leave, when you just hand the keys over to them and let them drive, like you don't know what's going on. If you're not, if there isn't a human there, I have to be able to pay attention to what's going on. I was just doing an audit for a client where, I mean, yeah, it's probably a web developer, some engineer, like, hey, you're in the website, yeah, you go set up Google Ads Force.
We got to do search. Okay. And these automated recommendations were coming in and kept adding keywords and keywords and keywords. Unfortunately, the only goal they had set up was a calling extension.
So naturally, Google says, oh, well, you're getting phone calls and that's your goal. So we're going to now 90% of all the traffic was going to mobile and they were getting junk phone calls and all these keywords that were getting added were not relevant to what they were doing. And they had in a lower year, they had added over 20,000 keywords, all Broadmatch. Thankfully, it didn't, I guess if you're ever going to auto apply recommendations, make sure that Google can't change your budget, which I think is a default that Google won't do that because otherwise, yeah, your money could just fly out the window literally.
But yeah, with those recommendations, I mean, I can definitely concur with what Ryan and Kyle said, like, yeah, they're good to look at for those account based ones that hey, might have value. If it is, I mean, hey, we see a lot of conversions, maybe switching to a conversion bidding strategy might help. Well, go double check. I mean, yeah, now get into your CRM and see how valuable those conversions actually are.
And I mean, if the conversions that Google sees are actually turned into sales on your end, then it could be a good strategy to implement looking for those negatives that are kind of blocking keywords and everything else, making sure that account structure is good. Because sometimes, hey, we miss it to the right point that these accounts as they grow and get all the you get ad groups and campaigns all over the place. So it can be daunting unless you're using a third party manager to kind of figure some of that stuff out too. I think he illustrated a good point, Bob.
And Kyle touched on this as well. It's this idea of, especially B2B, where we do a lot of our work, the quality of its legs, its days, its weeks, right, a book demo, maybe it's a day later, two days later, one week later, that gap in time is detrimental to Google's algorithm, right? You know, you talk about the phone calls. Google knows instantly the phone call happened, right?
So Google gets that data and you can optimize, optimize. However, with B2B, the demo, you know, the quality gets put in the CRM a couple of days later, a week later, two weeks, Google can really only see the front end. So Google really has no idea of the quality of these leads. And I remember when we first started talking about this, it was for two at this time because I just had somebody turn out a performance max campaign get a dozen leads in like five days and turn it off instantly.
Because as soon as they saw the demo quality scores come in, they knew it was all garbage. And so that's the big danger of these other strategies. Excuse me. Not anxiety to think about, but I'm very glad that people like you.
They can help educate these things to look out for. I mean, one thing I was thinking about when we started the whole performance max, I mean, Google's been trying this for decades at this point. I mean, they had, I've done a lot of work with small businesses. So their budgets are small and they were trying to set this stuff up and Google first launched like their smart campaigns, which, yeah, it makes it easy.
And Kyle, you've probably got a lot of experience with that too with your background. It makes it easy for somebody to just go sign up and start running ads. I mean, you plug in your website and they're going to just pull keywords off of your website and everything else. But I mean, when you name something, a smart campaign, it takes away all controls.
It goes back to, I mean, yeah, insert the Homer Simpson meme where he's at the controls and reading the manual like he doesn't know what he's doing. I mean, that's where it's like, you got to have somebody paying attention to all the different settings that are available and don't just like Google do it. Yeah, first there's smart campaigns. Then I remember when I had clients at WordStream at my last job, they were clients who'd have accounts and only had smart campaigns trying to convert them over to regular traditional campaigns.
Google then referred to it as switching to expert mode, just have the actual ability to like manually toggle settings and run an actual account. Now smart campaigns are done and now it's performance max like flashing new title. I think Facebook recently changed, I know today's Google, but Facebook recently changed their audience expansion to Advantage Plus. So they've rebranded their automation within their platform.
So I think just because it's titled something doesn't actually mean that's what's going to happen. Performance max isn't going to maximize your performance. It's really just a fancy way to say we're going to automate a lot of stuff and we're going to run it for you. Some good advertising messaging from them because you take smart campaign, but you look at smart campaigns just like how automated it can be.
Oh man, one other topic that comes up all the time. Every person you talk to has their own point if you want to is quality score. There's so many factors that go into it. Kyle, I know this is something that's near and dear to your heart.
I love it just here. Like your thoughts on quality score in general, things to look for, what you recommend, all things along those lines. Yeah, when I was a consultant in the past, this was a conversation I had probably at least once with every client and I've written on LinkedIn about it. Quality score, yes, it absolutely plays a part in your ad rank.
It's bidding quality score is how the ad rank is determined, but for the most part, it's more of a vanity metric than any indicator that your account is successful. Like the quality score measures is you have relevance to your keywords and your ads and your landing page, but it doesn't actually indicate if you've got good results. Like a strong quality score does not guarantee a strong click-through rate. It does not guarantee a strong conversion rate.
And I think a lot of people don't truly know what impacts a quality score. Like you can break it down to the three components, but actually looking at what impacts the quality score metric and how much it impacts, like you can change your ad, like change your ad copy very quickly and improve your quality score, but because you can do that very quickly, it also has the lowest weight. Like you can go through review the actual like low average, average above average and see how your quality score changes, but ad copy is going to be one thing, but at the same time, you can just keyword stuff your ad copy and Google is going to give you an above average score, even if your ad reads like a robot, if it's not a very engaging ad, but because you wrote it to optimize around the algorithm, it says above average. So the things in quality score that are going to have the largest impacts are more of the user experience type of issues.
Landing page experience is going to have a better, a stronger impact on your quality score. So if you're actually trying to improve your page load times or have relevant content when someone searches for your keyword clicks on your ad and goes to the landing page, that's going to have a stronger impact on quality score than just writing an ad around an algorithm's best practices. And even then, I've seen ads where non-branded keywords getting 8, 10% click-through rates, very strong for non-brand, but the expected click-through rate is still really low because Google's historical data says, hey, this keyword typically doesn't perform well while I'm outperforming it, I still haven't expected click-through rate. So I'm essentially at the mercy of Google's algorithm, despite my performance, my performance metrics in my account being strong.
So to me, with quality score, real results, Trump expected results 100% of the time, like the real results that you're seeing should absolutely take precedence over what the quality score says you should be doing. And one thing you said, Kyle, ad score is different than quality score. Yes. I know you're almost implied differently because you can affect your ad score, like you see that instantaneously when you're changing your ad copy adding headlines, like that's a big Google recommendation.
Oh, put more keywords in your ad headlines. I mean, yeah, Google wants to see that, but then the copy comes out as Google shuffles it around in its responsive manner, it shuffles around and the headlines don't really make sense because it's just keyword stuff. So yeah, that's a common thing that gets convoluted there too, is you have an ad score, which is a part of your total quality score. Again, Kyle's one, like your keywords, your ad quality, and then your landing page are the main three factors among other things.
So Kyle, one thing I'm curious about, you touched on the user experience on the page. So what are a couple things you said, like page load time? Are there other things that people should be looking into to get a sense of how they can improve it, whether it's like, should they be looking at like time on page metrics, or they'd be looking at bounce rates, or like what are those different things that will help someone understand like how is the user experience on the page? Yeah, and this is something that will help the paid efforts.
It'll also help the SEO efforts as well. They're tied together and I think that's where focusing on the user experience is going to be the best course of action because it's having improvements on multiple different efforts. So yeah, I think like what you said, you should be taking a look at the keyword to content relevancy on the landing page. You should be running page speed insights on your landing pages to see how quickly is my site loading on desktop and mobile.
A new client that we're onboarding, we took a look at their current landing page. Page speed insights is a 0 to 100 rank. Their desktop score was like a 70. Their mobile score was like a 19.
So like very low. Their mobile score was like a 19. So there was a lot of opportunity there. Your page is loading slow, 40% of your traffic is coming from a mobile device.
Like you definitely can go through and try to speed up your website to make it so your users who are clicking on your ads can actually get to your content that you want them to see more quickly. And then going a step beyond that, looking at Google Analytics, your time on site and your bounce rate are absolutely going to be important. But misleading. Because potentially misleading.
But you still want to cut down on your bounce rate. And it's even separate from user experience, like landing pages, dedicated landing pages, for instance, they're honestly designed to limit off page navigation. So you're going to see high bounce rates there. That's where you can trade off and do an A-B test, a dedicated landing page versus sending someone to your main website.
See what's performing better, see what's leading to better conversion rates. Yeah, I think anything that you can do to serve more relevant content and get that content to your users more quickly is going to provide an overall better user experience. Okay. There's a lot there.
So no, that's helpful. I think a lot of people, they look at quality, they're like, well, what do I do to make this better? How can I help it? So I think that was just the masterclass in itself for giving people just like, where do I even go?
Where's start? So really appreciate that. Another big topic often comes up, Ryan, really curious to get your thoughts here is competitor campaigns. Do you recommend them?
Should we be running them? When's the right time to run them? So how do you approach that when it's either something that a client is asking you or if it's going on saying you should get started on? Yeah, no, this is really interesting to have it because I really like this very industry by industry.
I think we've all had the experience where there's some industries where it's a good piece of work with the competitors, all right, converting into customers and you find some where it just doesn't. So it's certainly not the first thing you want to do. We really want to go after competitors. If it's one, if you have the budget, and this means that you've done the due diligence on your brand, you've done the due diligence on your high-attent campaigns, and then, you know, does it make sense to go after these competitors?
If you have a lot of competitors, you know, we only go after tier one or we only go after tier one, tier four. Do we compete on people who do exactly what we do or people who do an aspect of what we do? So there's a lot of little nuances in there. You're also going to want to check search volumes just to see what the potential is.
If all your competitors are getting, you know, 10 searches a month, you know, it just might not be worth the squeeze. So, you know, after your kind of value, and then of course, you'll get your own option inside, so who's putting on your brand name? You might get a little emotional and want to come back at them. So I've put it on them.
No, I'm joking. So, going after competitors can be worthwhile. Oftentimes, people are considering multiple services or software for their problem, and it's easy to get into consideration sets by kind of drifting off of someone else's brand. There's some kind of slight nuances to it, and I'd be curious on Bob and Taylor's thoughts on this as well.
When it comes to generic landing pages versus, you know, X versus Y pages, I personally like to do X versus Y if there's enough search volume because I feel like the relevance is very high. But at the same time, people can get a little bit scared off doing that's why, hey, am I actually promoting my competitor? Do I want to name my competitor? What if, you know, I can't compete on every single aspect against this competitor?
Do I really want to create this page? So I'll take that off for Bob and Kyle. I'll take to see what they've done. I mean, I think with competitor campaigns, I mean, yeah, boils down to intent.
Since search should be demand capture, I mean, make sure you're focused on the keywords that are demand capture asks. If somebody's searching for your competitor name login, you don't want to bid on that. I mean, just like your own brand name. So make sure that people are looking for that competitor reviews, competitor pricing, competitor software.
Yeah, you might want to bid on those if there's in the following because they're shopping that around. They're looking for that service. They're looking at that competitor. So that is the potential to steal them or at least get your name out there.
Let them know like, hey, check us out too. As far as the landing pages go, yeah, I'm all for it to put the competitor out there, even if you're not the best in every aspect. I mean, be honest, I mean, build trust with that person that's on your page. Let them know like, hey, we do better at X, Y and Z.
Our competitor might be a little lower priced, but at the same time, yeah, we've got a lot more option. Maybe you can customize it more. I mean, your software can handle more seats or has more features. So you can always talk that down.
But I mean, if you're honest about it, instead of belittling your competition, if you got to be trustworthy, if you just show that you're better in every aspect than competitors, does that end user actually believe it? Those pages, the comparison pages can be a double edged sword if you're not fully truthful. So make sure that it is kind of honest in your reviews there. Yeah, I'm 100% agree on that side.
Like if you're doing X versus Y type of landing page and you are both cheaper, more features and everything is better. Everything your competitor does is terrible. Like that comes across as disingenuous and doesn't build trust. If I were to click on an ad, like intentionally looking for a brand and I get an X versus Y and it's just focused on we are better than this other competitor, I'm going to be like, maybe not because they control that messaging.
I had a client in the B2C space who very high volume e-commerce campaign and they were sending users to an OSP versus them. And they were not the least expensive. They were in fact one of the two or three most expensive and they were giving credit. Hey, our competitors, these are pluses for their product, but they still were highlighting their own features and why they essentially argued collectively, our price and our features are better than buying one of our competitor's products.
They had great conversion rates off of that because they had a lot of trust or they were building a lot of trust through that particular landing page. But I do agree with Bob and it all relates to intent. You want to search for someone who isn't just getting every single search related to a competitor, definitely don't want the current customer of the competitor because right now they're just looking to log in. Their intent in their search is not to look for alternatives to their current solution, but when they are competitor alternatives, competitor reviews, that means they're either in the research phase or they're looking to get out of who they're currently using.
But being on that intent is now you have both context of the competitor and the intent behind that search as well as opposed to just bidding on anything related to competitor. You bring up a really good point there. To simplify, usually we see four campaign types. Brand, high intent, non-brand, low demand intent, non-brand and competitor.
If you have a limited budget or if you're setting up a new account, how should people think about prioritizing? Which campaigns should we be launching first or which ones should get the highest amount of funding relative to others? Because as you say, it could be easy to start a competitor campaign. We've got these five competitors that go run against it, but the intent is different on those than any of the others.
What would your recommendation be if someone were asking, where should we get started on this? I would say start with brand and high intent non-brand. Brand because it is inexpensive. You can easily control the messaging and the bids.
Your quality scores, I know it talked about earlier, your quality scores are going to be high. It protects you from competitors bidding on you. You can do that research and say, oh, there may not actually be a lot of competitors on me. In that case, your actual cost per click is going to be very inexpensive, but the advantage there is you get to control the messaging.
You don't have to worry about long-term or difficult SEO efforts. You can write an ad, bid on a keyword and control the messaging exactly how you want to write it. You're protecting yourself from future competitors bidding on you if they're not already. It's very inexpensive on that side.
I would say even then starting out with a potentially small budget, no more than 15% to 20% should go towards those branded keywords because you're just capturing someone who's already looking for your brand name. You're not able to, if you put too much towards brand, get solution or problem-aware users who aren't brand-focused just yet. That's where the high intent non-brand is going to be the most important for long-term growth because even if someone doesn't convert right now, and honestly, even a 5% conversion rate is good for non-brand keywords. You still have the potential to educate the 95% who don't convert just because they didn't convert at that time.
Ryan mentioned it earlier that especially in the B2B space, users may not convert on day one. It's not as simple as searching for a product and being like, oh, I like this price, I'll buy it. You may have somebody who's still doing research. High intent non-brand, their solution-aware, their problem-aware, even if they don't convert right now, they still might in one, two months time when they are ready to buy.
That high intent non-brand allows you to bid on both something contextual to your product as well as the intent that they are looking for a third-party solution, a software platform, to solve their needs. That's going to help drive long-term growth. The reason why I would say at least 75% to 80% of the budget should go towards those high intent non-brand, A, because of the reasons I just mentioned, and B, they are more expensive keywords. You need to make sure that they are properly covered with a healthy budget.
Bob, Ryan, thoughts? You know, Calipity mentioned the other right there. I think one thing I would caution people against is once you move off a brand, it's kind of like where do we go from here. We have a lot of different ways we think about ourselves.
We have a lot of fun and nuanced problems that we solve. Sometimes just take the first simple straightforward path. I'll often tell clients, okay, what do you classify it on G2? What do you classify it as?
CRM? Okay, you're going to have to jump into that pool and see if you can compete there. You can go down a lot of different alleyways. You're going to have to be cognizant of spreading a bunch of tooth in.
I think what happens is they go where ABCD EFG, and they spend 10 bucks a day. They come in very slow, keywords don't get proven out, and you're kind of caught in this middle of, is this working? I can't. The data's just not coming in fast enough.
So there is something to be fit for concentrating efforts on. Really, this is what we do. We're going to go after this one. I know there's some terms of the wings we can go after, but we need to prove this one out.
If it's a yes, great. If it's a no, that's also good. A no is also good. Because then you can move that budget.
It's not proven out of the keywords. So making sure your focus on high intent is very important. I got a really important point. Somebody brought that up.
Two more topics. Curious to get everyone's thoughts on here. So there's a big difference between Google Analytics audiences and Google Ads audiences. I would love to hear some of your thoughts around what are those differences?
Why are people getting them confused? And any other experience or recommendations around that? Yeah. I've had this conversation pretty recently with a new client.
I was doing it on their campaigns, and the past agency added in market segments that were B2C focused, whereas obviously my client is in the B2B space. So that is essentially, it's muddying up the data when you're trying to match up to a audience segment that is in market for a software, but also you've got that and you are matching up to the B2C side of things. You don't have the correct audiences. And I think the thing that not everyone immediately recognizes is Google Ads and Google Analytics report on audiences differently.
Analytics is going to have data on a user and will sign every attribute. If you've been recently shopping for cars and you are someone who loves coffee and you are someone who travels for work, Google Analytics is going to sign that when you visit the website. All of those different affinity in market segments are going to be reported, whereas Google Ads, one audience per impression per click per conversion. So if you've got too many extraneous audiences that don't make sense, you're just clouding your own data as to the relevant audiences.
So to me, if I'm getting on a type of B2B software, whether someone is a social media enthusiast or travels for business or reads the news or if they're looking to buy clothes that has no bearing on whether or not they're going to buy a B2B software. So only adding in the relevant audiences. I usually stick to a handful of about 8 to 10 in market segments. Remarketing lists add those there as well.
Just add the relevant ones. That way you can see, OK, who has recently been searching for things around this business related search or who has been on my website and is also typing in my non-branded keywords as opposed to adding in every audience and not letting Google Ads properly attribute an audience segment. Makes sense. Thank you.
That was a lot I know that's something that people definitely get confused a bit, so definitely ends up being late there. And then final question, in B2B, we spoke about bid adjustments and other things along those lines. We just spoke a little bit earlier about brand campaigns, high intent on brand campaigns. One thing that I find a lot of people gravitate towards is things like should we be day parting, should we be doing device type bid adjustments?
What's your experience been with those? Are they worth implementing given the approach and how you're setting up the campaigns or what's your take on those? And whoever wants to take this? Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you first.
I think that's where it comes down to intent. I was going to jump in earlier with talking about the high intent keyword campaigns. You know what that person's searching for. So that's what you want to search.
That's what you want to show up for. You want those people that are in market ideally looking for what you have to offer. As far as day parting, I mean, that's really a strategy I'd implement if your budget can stream, if your budget can't handle it, then we can look at, all right, well, let's focus on the times that are going to be more beneficial. But I mean, if there's some night owls, especially in the B2B world that somebody's crunching numbers late at night at two in the morning and they're searching for this service, I want to show up for that because I mean, especially if they hit that high intent keyword, I mean, that can be valuable.
I mean, you can look at analytics data. I mean, a lot of my clients like, yeah, Monday through Friday, high visitors and then a weekend it goes down. I mean, I don't want my search engines to run just because the overall website traffic's down. People can still be searching for that.
So if they're matching your keyword intent, then yeah, it certainly show up for it. Yeah. That's a great point. I've seen that on a handful of different accounts where I think that's a little bit of the old days versus a new one.
It used to just go after broad keywords, you know, okay, well, people are more likely researching their business hours. But if you're going after high intent, someone wants cybersecurity software to mount, like you should show up, whether it's 3PM or 3AM, like if that's the need, you know the keyword, you know that it's exactly what you serve for. Go for it. Yeah, Bob alluded to it.
I think if you had a low impression share in your historical data says you typically can convert better between 8AM and 6PM, okay, you can start restricting your ad schedule down from 24 hours to something closer towards those hours. But you have the budget to run your campaigns 24 seven on your high intent. Yeah, I agree with Bob. If you can do that, users, when you're bidding on that high intent, they are typing in something contextual and intentful.
We don't want to miss out on that. On a roundabout from the device bit adjustments, I feel like it'd be to be we typically see stronger conversion rates coming off of desktop, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should be the lower on a mobile device, especially on, again, this high intent non-brand. I think if anything, if you're noticing a low conversion rate on a mobile device, that instead presents an opportunity to reevaluate your mobile website. What is the mobile experience when a user is on their phone searching for your high intent keyword and clicks on your ad and goes to your landing page.
Do you have the right copy of that first on screen above the fold? Is your mobile site loading quickly? I think that is something where if you're noticing low conversion rates, don't just bid lower in order to try to stretch out your budget further and improve your CPA. Fix your mobile experience.
See if there's anything else you can do to improve that because if you put a negative bit adjustment, you're just going to bid less. You may lose ad rank, which is now just going to impact your click-through rate, whereas you should be evaluating your conversion rate on site performance, as opposed to just, hey, we're not converting strong. Let's bid less. Look at yourself, Kyle.
There's so much traffic coming from mobile these days that the easy route is just to, you know, turn down bids 100% mobile, right? That's the easy one, right? But like you said, paid speed, make sure the content loads in the appropriate way. You know, a lot of times desktop pages filled with, you know, spinning banners, auto-playing videos, a lot of really heavy things.
So really taking the time to optimize for that mobile experience can more get you on any page that people actually scroll through when you'll be able to see the metrics and analytics might even have a hard drive on that page. And it'll allow you to better compete for, you know, that large share of mobile traffic that is still searching that turn that you know you want to bid on and win on. So it's the harder road, but it's the better road. Fully concur there, too.
I mean, just like responsive search ads on Google, don't rely on the responsiveness of your website builder to just make your page mobile-friendly. Higher developer that can actually format the page for mobile and not just rely on whatever response it comes in from WordPress or Real. I think one last thing with the bid adjustments as well. I've noticed on some accounts that I've taken on that there are little micro adjustments, like a certain hour or devices, like minus two minus four percent, even like up to minus five, it's not really moving the needle.
Like if you have a $10 bid and you're dropping it by 2%, oh, you're at $9.80, such a lower bid than $10. Like you should be looking at a larger data set. And if there's a significant difference, put a larger bid adjustment. Like when I mentioned audience, audience targeting before, I will often add to like a remarketing list on my search campaigns, I'll bid them up like 40 to 50% because the historical data says, yeah, they already got their awareness.
They convert better. I want to be extra visible. I want my ad to be very prominent when they search. I'm not going to just go through and be like, oh, yeah, they convert twice as strong, plus five percent.
It's not going to move the needle with little micro adjustments or just they're not going to have large impacts. Look at the wider data set. And if there is a truly statistically significant improvement or difference on that audience, how strong are bid adjustments? I usually don't like to put less than like a plus or minus 15% to start.
Then I'll like go up or down from there. But yeah, just putting like minus two minus three minus four plus five, it doesn't really move the needle. You definitely got to pay attention. You definitely got to pay attention to what your average cost per click is.
And cage it off of that. Yeah. If it costs for clicks 50 cents, I mean, a nice B to C, like 2%, oh, you drop it depending. What's that doing?
So good. So good. All right. Well, this has been an absolute masterclass in itself.
I mean, I wish I had this when I was getting started in my career. So I'm so glad that y'all could share your wisdom here. I'm sure that there will be follow up questions. Anyone listening or watching?
Definitely. You have questions. Send them over. Ryan, Bob, Kyle, you all are active on LinkedIn.
I know I see your posts all the time. So you can find any of them on there. Send us questions. Let us know if there's anything that you want to hear more from these guys about.
All three, really appreciate the time. And this was fun. We'll have to do it again. Anytime.
Thanks for the invite. Appreciate it.