Question 1

Why don't my ads appear at the top of the page when I search on Google?

Accepted Answer

First page, top of page, first position CPC bid can be very expensive in competitive industries. A high CPC and low budget would take a while to make a conversion (get a click, make phones ring). So, shut off more expensive high quality keywords that you want to test now or later so they do not eat up your budget early on.

Start by aiming for a lower position (say #2 spot) with keywords that are high quality (related to ad relevance, landing pages, click through scores, etc.) but have lower CPC. Over a few weeks, you will learn and gather data on the quality keywords with good conversion rate and CPA.

Then you can begin to optimize. Bid more aggressively on quality keywords for top of page position and shut off keywords that have not been producing results. Reallocate that money to keywords that are producing results which will gain those type of conversions more quickly.

When you use a low budget and spend less than what you believe you should bid because your campaign has good quality score, good ad relevencey, good landing page experience and good expected click through rate, you pay a lot less than everybody else would to get a good spot and generate leads. Taking this smart approach allows you to see how things will progress.

As you test more aggressively, use Enhanced CPC which will help increase conversions. Enhanced CPC tells Google to enhance the bid (that it can spend) up to 150% of your current bid to get a click. So a $10 bid will turn into a $25 click if Google sees a conversion can come from it.

You could see your max bid is set at $10 'enhanced' but your average CPC may be $18 and you are getting good conversions and placement. Take your $10 bid and turn it up to $20 and you will get to see a predictive indicator of where to start to spend more money/increase bids without increasing the budget.**

So, start small, generate leads, see where conversions come from without asking for more budget or stretching too thin in the right amount of time.

You can get more aggressive by adding more ad spend to accelerate the process (get phones to ring and buy data) and then you can start to back the spend down in line with a targeted monthly spend.

Summary:

Start with lower price and page listing
Shut off expensive waste
Get click then that's a great keyword to use as a predicitive indicator to more aggressively bid
Start to scale
Optimize
Convert quicker

Why wait to do SEO until after Google Ads Campaign?

Question 2

Why is Google Ads reporting different numbers than Google Analytics?

Accepted Answer

Google Ads and Google Analytics handle the same data very differently. And for good reason: The two platforms have very different focuses.

Google Ads is focused on tracking 100% of the people who interacted with it and attributing those interactions to a sale.

Whereas Google Analytics, on the other hand, is simply a tool that has been developed to show you what's going on on your website...This means it's more focused on tracking where users came from immediately before converting.

Google Analytics doesn't care that the direct traffic will be high -- and that many of those conversions attributed to "direct traffic" could have interacted with Google Ads at some point on a previous session/day/week/month.

Google Ads does care about that. Because Google Ads wants to show you ALL of the conversions that it helped convert.

The reality is, before a customer converts, they usually go through multiple sessions first – they might click an ad, come back to your site the next day, and purchase on a different day.

Because of this, your conversion data can & will look differently depending on the platform you're using at the time.

Think of the platform like a lens for data interpretation: Google Analytics cares about sessions and Google Ads cares about ad interactions.

Google Ads and Google Analytics show different data because their purpose is different:

Google Ads is trying to show us which ads are profitable, when, why, etc.

Google Analytics, on the other hand, is trying to show us the most straightforward picture of what exactly happened on the site and when.

If you'd like to understand the technical details of how this works, read on...

The Two Platforms Use Different Technology To Keep Track

The two platforms have different levels of tracking capabilities to recognize the same user across different channels, devices, etc:

Google Analytics measures session data using browser cookies. This is all it needs, since it's only looking at data that happens within a single session.

Google Ads measures session data using browser cookies, too. But it also uses IP address, session ID, and even WiFi. It also can recognize Google users if people are logged in on their phone or their Chrome browser and connect the dots that way.

With that said, Google Analytics’ method of storing data can often cause about 15-25% decrease in conversion value compared to Google Ads. In other words, Google Analytics drops data.

The Two Platforms Attribute Conversion Data Differently

If a user clicked on an ad, didn’t buy, and then came back to the site directly the next day to purchase, Google Analytics will likely mark that person as “direct” traffic.

Even if the user clicked your ad, the credits would still go to “direct” traffic because it’s the last action the user took before converting. Why? Because Google Analytics uses the Last Click attribution as its default attribution model.

Depending on which settings your ad manager chose, Google Ads can use several different attribution models.

If a user clicked on an ad a month ago but only converted today, some or all of today's conversion will appear a month in the past – it all depends on the attribution model used.

As you can see, the two platforms almost always end up attributing conversions based on different rules (and attribution models).

Keep this in mind when using Google Analytics:

It is a tool that has been developed to show you what's going on on your website. It only sees where users came from immediately before converting, which means its direct traffic will be high since many people who interact with a paid ad will come back to the site directly when they're ready to convert.

If you’d like to explore this further, here is our chief account strategist, John Moran, on the subject:

Question 3

Why is my cost per click so high?

Accepted Answer

Having a high CPC (Cost-Per-Click) usually stems from competiting against many other competitors going for the same targeted keywords.

We can break this down for you by going to your "Auction Insights" and showing you what competitors are targeting the same keywords you are, and where they are on the SERP (Search Results Page) relative to your position.

Generally, here at Solutions 8 we aim to give you the highest ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) possible. This means we target keywords that are most likely to lead to conversions (Phone Calls, Purchases, Form Submissions, etc.).

If these profitable keywords also have high competition and high CPC, we need to "play the game" and bid competitively to appear near the top of the page to attract the most likely to convert customers that are looking for your products & services.

Our initial strategy is to start with targeting the bottom of the page until we can gather enough click-through data and conversion data to identify patterns.

Once we have a sense of which keywords are going to be effective, we might decide to bid competitively one a handful of them to appear at the top of the page, since we'll have the data to make us confident that it will be worth the risk to purchase those expensive clicks.

Question 4

Why is my profit margin becoming thinner as we scale?

Accepted Answer

When you increase ad spend, it's common to see an increase in your CPL or a decrease in your ROAS. Here's why.

Increasing our ad spend means we are targeting a larger audience. These are people who aren’t ready to buy––and it takes more clicks and longer time to convert them.

Simultaneously, we are competing with big players who have enough money to over-bid on keywords. This brings our CPC up.

The more we expand the audience size, the less certain Google’s algorithm will be when they show an ad. That’s because we’re pushing the algorithm to go into uncharted territory––it doesn’t know who to target yet.

If our low-hanging-fruits are composed of only a small portion of our audience, it’s hard for Google’s algorithm to determine who will go for the click.

So we need to warm up our audience and add “brand awareness” strategies until the top-of-the-funnel audience gains familiarity with our brand.

For example, we can run a display ad that targets a proactive (not remarketed) audience. This might not get many clicks but we’ll get views that can increase our brand awareness.

How do we spend more without diminishing profit margin (i.e. lowering ROAS or increasing CPL)?

It is nearly impossible to increase your budget without thinning your profit margin, at least for a short time.

To balance it, we recommend temporarily “leaning out” your account when trying to scale. This helps you preserve your profit margin while waiting for the algorithm to adjust to a higher ad spend.

Here are a few of ways to do that:

Pause brand awareness campaigns like video shopping
Scale back brand campaigns by reducing budget and or changing bids
Find brand keywords that are taking money in the other search campaigns

When a campaign isn’t limited by budget, we can often increase the spend without lowering ROAS by much at all.

But what if your account has maxed out its spend and reached its entire market/audience?

Use lower-spend outbound campaigns. These are campaigns like YouTube or Display that help increase your brand awareness and introduce your offer to a new audience.

Start running these campaigns with a lower budget and analyze how they affect your overall campaign performance.

You will sacrifice your ROAS with these new outbound campaigns. So it’s best to keep the ad spend low in the beginning.

As a result, your main campaign conversion driver should become more active.

You’ll be able to increase your outbound campaigns’ budget incrementally.

Question 5

Why is the conversion rate higher when leads come from paid ads vs. organic?

Accepted Answer

The paid campaigns are always going to bring in higher quality website traffic than organic search results because:

Ads have headlines and descriptions - vast amounts of them - that have been optimized for click-through-rate by us and by the algorithms.
Organic searchers aren't always going to be sent the correct page. When someone does a search on Google and finds your website in the results, they might not get to the landing page/homepage. They might end up on a blog post, etc. In fact, you can see what percentage of the website visitors enter your site from the landing page/homepage by going into analytics.google.com, clicking on Aquisition, then Search Console, then Landing Pages on the menu on the left.
You're also getting a higher percentage of people who are motivated to buy. Many people are looking for information and will end up on an article on your site. The people who do click on an ad are looking to explore your brand/product/service from the perspective of someone who is considering pulling out their wallet.

Conversion rates from paid ads tend to be 6 times higher than conversion rates from organic searches.

Question 6

Why is there a discrepancy between Shopify & Google Ads?

Accepted Answer

When you're viewing your Shopify report called "sales from marketing" (not available with all levels of Shopify) to see the total revenue from Google Ads, you'll likely see a lower quantity than what Google Ads reports.

It's not unusual to have a 20-30% loss in conversion value when in Shopify's marketing report when compared with Google Ads.

The lost conversions can be attributed to two things:

Shopify uses UTM parameters, which are often dropped, whereas Google Ads uses a robust tracking algorithm.
Shopify removes conversion value from the reporting if the customer made a return, whereas Google Ads doesn't know about the return so it doesn't get removed from the dashboard.

Here's a video Kasim made on this topic -- Although the video talks about Google Analytics reports rather than Shopify reports, it's still the same phenomenon, because Google Analytics also uses UTM parameters:

Question 7

Why isn’t the Facebook remarketing campaign running?

Accepted Answer

It's common for Facebook remarketing campaigns to struggle to acquire a large enough audience in order to run. Facebook says their minimum audience size for a pixel-generated audience is 1000.

This means the Facebook pixel on your site needs to be able to match at least 1000 website visitors to Facebook users.

What factors into this?

Match Rate - Facebook doesn't reveal their average match rate (the rate at which website visitors can typically be matched up with Facebook users), and this likely varies greatly depending on the type of user who visits the site (do they tend to have Facebook accounts? Do they tend to reset their cache & cookies often?) as well as a number of other factors.

Pixel Age - The pixel is only able to see website visitors in real time, which means it can't see people who visited before the pixel was added to the site. So, if you've had the pixel on the site for 6 months then it will have 6 months worth of website visitors to try to mach to Facebook users (as long as the settings inside the Facebook ad account are set to look back 6 months, which is the maximum amount of time Facebook allows a pixel to look back).

So, the best thing to do is get the Facebook pixel onto the site early, make sure the settings inside FB pixel area are set to look back 6 months, and consider sending more people to the website with proactive (aka not remarketing) ad campaigns in order to populate that Facebook remarketing pixel audience.

Question 8

Why shouldn't I judge the performance of each campaign individually?

Accepted Answer

It is tough to look at a single campaign's performance. Our team views account performance holistically. This is because campaigns often interact with the same leads/customers and depending on the attribution model, those conversions can get divided up in a way that makes one campaign look worse than it really is.

Question 9

Why shouldn't I show an email address on my site?

Accepted Answer

If Google Ads sends someone to the website and that website visitor copy & pastes the email address into their inbox, then we will never know we got a lead.

So, the algorithm won't have that conversion data point and neither will the ads management team.

Not only does it hurt the learning & optimization process, but it also makes it impossible to calculate the CPL.