Welcome back to Stacking Growth Snacks. I'm Stephanie and I'm here with Ryan Alestero, Senior Performance Marketing Manager at Refine Labs. Ryan, we are talking about running a paid search audit, and I am very excited to learn from the best here. Thank you so much for having me on.
Super happy to talk about the subject and love the podcast. So I'm just happy to contribute. Awesome. Well, we're going to start with some easy questions here.
So Ryan, what was your favorite childhood snack? Favorite childhood snack? I would say the snack from my childhood, I don't see it anymore. Maybe I'm just going to the wrong gas stations, but do you remember Mombas came in four different flavors and they're these two e-gummies.
I love those things, but I don't see them anymore. So I don't know if they were taking off the shelf for some reason, but love those. What a great flashback. Yeah, I do remember those.
That's so fun. Okay, let's get into running a paid search audit. So let's start at the very, very beginning. We're building the foundations.
Can you walk us through just the basic steps of running a paid search audit? Obviously, the first thing you have to do is to establish with the conversion point is I work with a lot of clients who they might have had a different strategy. So they could have said, hey, we don't really believe people convert and ask for a demo on paid search. So we do get a content, we do page views, we do conversions that are some of the states and our site for a minute, someone goes to three different pages.
So there's a lot of these little different conversion points. And so what I like to do is level sense, say, okay, what have you been doing now? Or what have you been doing? And what are we going to be doing when we change up your strategy?
Do we find that strategy is pretty straightforward in that? We only really want to use paid search to find people who want to talk to your sales and want your solutions. There's lots of different ways to educate people. We choose paid search to really for transactional purposes.
So making sure that conversion is set up and it's properly and it's the primary conversion, not a secondary conversion. It's usually where I start. And then from there, everything kind of flows down from that. So you have your conversion point.
Great. Do you have a tracking template that will tell you the campaign and the keyword and the ad group that led to that conversion? A lot of times this is pre-populated, but it might not work. Salesforce is famous for kind of not having it work out of the box.
It's about as much easier. Are you getting the conversions we want? Are we tracking what we're bidding on? What we're buying?
What we're paying for to conversion? So that's where I started at first. And then I move on to the campaign levels. At the campaign level, big things I look at are, is there any structure to discount?
A lot of times we talk to the clients and the people we work with. You know, what was the thought process behind this? And sometimes it's straightforward. Sometimes it's just we had all these keywords.
We threw them into one campaign and we let it run. And you're like, okay, cool. Like good first attempt. I'm glad we have data maybe, but we really strive for creating the structure.
And when you look at the account and you kind of think about, okay, the product, the keywords, the lady pages, do these make sense. Is there anything in here which is like weird? A lot of times the big problem is broadness. People think in Google advocates for this.
So you can't hold this against anybody because Google literally says, no, go broad. That's where you're going to get your money. And it's the worst advice ever. It's usually really broad.
They're like, yeah, I sell invoicing software. So it's invoicing and broad match. You're grabbing everything. And what it does is it kind of takes you out of control.
It gets you into all of these other options. You don't want to be in where you're spending money. If you're getting a little bit of success from it, it's almost like rewarding the negative behavior where, you know, it's like, hey, I'm getting a few conversions on this. Well, you're spending that time to get it.
And there's better ways to kind of tighten these things up. So structure is really important. And giving Google structures really important because ultimately, Google wants to put your money where the search volume is. If there's search volume, Google wants to push you there.
If there's 100,000 searches for that keyboard, Google's like, let's go. We go, no, I want to go with the intent is I want to go where I win the most. And that is not, in fact, I would say rarely ever the case that is the highest volume and the best company. That's very, very rare.
From that point on, I would say when it comes to auditing, there's just a few kind of add many things that I always find search partners. Do you want to peer on Google or do you want to peer on random searches networks? Ask cheaves is like the famous. Ask cheaves still exists.
I'm sorry. I didn't know that that was still a thing. It is still a thing, apparently. I had a conversation with another agency and he goes, I haven't even able to search partners.
Just want to know. And I go, because those are garbage leads. That's why I haven't done it. And so search partners are just a bunch of these kind of second tier low rate search engines.
No one uses seriously. Another one is search location. So if you said it, it's more interest. It would be like this.
I think you'd appreciate this. If you wanted to bid on people who lived in New York City, you'd say presence in New York City. If you wanted to bid on Broadway tickets, you would say presence or interest in New York City. Because someone in Texas might want to go to New York City to Broadway.
And you want to bid on that person because you're selling those tickets. Right? So that's where interest comes in. Right?
It's like, hey, I want to go there and do this thing. I don't care where they are now. They'll travel to me. Right?
Unfortunately, what happens is that companies go, I want the United States or the Canada. Persons are interest. There's a lot of people in Latin America, Africa, Asia, India, who want to come to the US and who are interested in things in the US. And so you end up burning a lot of money on countries that can't really even buy from you at all.
So those are the two biggies right there when it comes to location and just what search engines you actually show up on. We continue that structure from campaign to ad group to ad. And we like to use themes, right? So what's the theme?
But the theme is like, what's a word that I could draw a line in the sand that you can't cross. So let me give you an example, sales software, sales productivity software. You can bid on sales productivity software. But people might be searching pipeline software.
Or they might be searching revenue software. You're able to kind of negate keywords to keep them all in their lanes. So then you can see down funnel, hey, when someone's looking for sales software, they're not really getting through. They're not really qualified to too many small businesses, any coaching, they need, you know, a one or two day trainer.
But if they type in pipeline, now they're kind of looking for this solution to, you know, pushing the deal from stage one to close one. And that's where we win more. Or if they search revenue, they're kind of searching for this. So you have to kind of draw those lines using language.
And that gets filtered down to the ad group. So, you know, if it's, if they're talking about sales or pipeline, it's, you know, pipeline analytics, pipeline intelligence, pipeline optimization, you know, things like that. How can you bucket these things? You don't want to dice things up into little tiny pieces because your search volume is going to be small here.
And it's not going to tell you a whole lot. Things are going to kind of mix together. What's the difference between analytics and intelligence, right? Like that's very kind of nuanced.
A whole normal part is tricky. You pull it apart where it seems fit and then the keywords reflect that, right? So keywords fall under the structures of the candidate groups, negative keywords and not separating out campaigns from each other. And particularly in your brain and particularly your competitors.
If you do not do this, you're going to say, I'm winning. I am crushing on this pipeline campaign. Like this is, and then you look at the keywords. It's like, your company's pipeline software and you're like, oh, okay.
I guess it just knew me. It's like, yes, I guess they did. So that happens a lot. And also competitors sneak in there as well, not even direct competitors, but into direct competitors.
So for example, working with like a website monitoring software that monitors for website errors, you know, they have direct competitors, but they also have like Google analytics, which is not the same thing, but similar. It monitors web traffic, but it doesn't like it doesn't do website monitoring, but it monitors the traffic. So you can get a lot of these indirect competitors in there as well. So you have to constantly go in and just make sure you're not going after competitors until you want to.
And you're also not being pulled into some weird options that don't apply to you. That's great, Ryan. Like that really breaks down the steps of it super clearly. And the why, you know, you want to eliminate those redundancies or the overlap or the things that, you know, we don't need to ask Jeeves because nobody asks Jeeves anymore.
So it sounds like level setting and getting everyone on the same page is really important. Who should be involved in this process? If you're trying to get everyone on the same page for what they want out of their paid search, who, how many people, what roles should be involved in this audit process with you? Who should be involved is the point of contact of person who's ultimately reporting on marketing, that could be the CMO, VP, because they're going to want to make sure that the paid search lines with the strategy, they're going to want to make sure they understand it, they're going to want to make sure that if we're changing something fundamental about paid search, such as going from more of a brand awareness plate to a conversion focus campaign that they're able to set expectations, both to the people above them, but love them.
Classic example is you change the strategy and now you no longer appear as the number one ad for sales software and someone from the board or the owner, someone from sales or whoever is like, hey, I don't see our ad. What's going on here? Right? You're going to want to make sure that the person who's overseeing the strategy feels good, feels confident, understands and can make that argument and say, research on mobile, we're not bidding on mobile, because conversion rates there are garbage and we do not want to pay for garbage.
So having that person is extremely important, having the person that used to run it's extremely important as well, they can usually tell you of the traps that they've fell into along the way. So if there's a problem with tracking, they'll tell you about the problem with tracking. If there's problems with keywords, they'll tell you about the problems with keywords. Like, I know you think we can go into this theme, but we tried it and we just had a bunch of garbage.
Now, you can look back at it and say, you know, there's some issues out of the fix, we test again, but that gives you a good indication of, okay, like, they've tested out some pockets here, haven't quite found the groove. Where does it make sense to invest out as it makes these new experiments? Ops doesn't necessarily have to be in the first meeting, but ops is going to have to be involved at some point for tracking. They just sit in the meeting, we connect with them regularly.
I was just in the meeting last week about form tracking on a website. It's a single page application. Ops bot is not tracking this form that's on the page, so we don't have the parameters. And so we had to do the meeting together and get that going.
So if you know you have websites issues or like back end, things are just kind of convoluted, having ops in the meeting would be really good as well. It kind of spans the gamut from philosophy, strategy to tactics to actual like measurement. So you kind of cover off those kind of big groups, you get them all in one row. Nice.
So you've got your team, you've got your process. My last question here is why is it important? And I think that based on what you've said so far, it's just eliminating waste, right? Eliminating a waste of money, eliminating a waste of measurement that is an actually representative of what you're seeing in conversions.
I really love you don't want to pay for garbage. I think that's a really great kind of summary of why you do this paid search audit. Is that pretty pretty on the nose for it? Yeah, that's pretty on the nose.
And here's the thing we have to remember a lot with paid searches. Who's going to try to make it self look as good as possible. And if you just rely on Google, Google's going to say, yeah, things are great. Don't worry about it.
Like, just give me more money. Things are only going to get better. That's why you really need that apps and you really need that structure in place. Because otherwise, Google is going to say, everything's coming up roses.
We should double our spend. All right. So next episode, we're going to get into what you actually do with those results and insights and how you take those into next steps. So we'll see you all then.
Looking forward to it. Thanks, Stephanie.