Question 1

What if a campaign is not spending all of the budget?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes businesses would rather gain more impression share than hit a super high goal because the goal might be more profit than they really need and they want volume/scale.

For example, if you are targeting ROAS, then the campaign prioritizes that ROAS over spending all the budget, which means you’ve reached audience capacity and your options are either:

Find a new/wider audience with different keywords
Lower the bid strategy goal

Question 2

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 3

Last Steps Before We Launch Your PPC Campaign

Accepted Answer

After a campaign has been built, but before it launches, we like to schedule a time with you to review the campaign before it goes live. This is to ensure that your initials goals are being strategically implemented, and allows everyone who's a part of the process to voice any concerns.

Below you'll find a list of topics and items that we will be reviewing during our discussion. Once we have reviewed the campaign with you, made any changes needed and have received your full approval, the campaign will go live!

Ad Budget

While we're confident in our abilities to successfully deliver and manage PPC campaigns, but it never hurts to double check things, especially the budget.

Campaign Schedule

The campaign schedule is the time of day and days of the week that the campaign will run its advertisements.

This is important because you may want to receive traffic to your website during the night, but also want to have traffic, plus phone calls during the day.

Geography

It's important to make sure that we have the proper geographical settings in place prior to launch.

If you are a business that is running advertisements to people who live within a 25-mile radius of your physical location, it would be inappropriate to have your ads set to run outside of your targeted market area.

Structure

The structure of your campaign is essentially another way to refer to the overarching goal of the campaign.

For instance, someone who is running a campaign to maximize conversions defined by email signups will have a different campaign structure than someone who just wants drive clicks and traffic to their website.

Ad Copy

This is a crucial step because the ad copy is going to be the first experience a potential customer has with your business.

It's important that we have proper ad copy in place that is relevant to what you are offering on the other end of your advertisement. We also want to make sure that the ads are relevant to the keywords that they are attached to.

Relevant ad copy is something that shouldn't be overlooked because the higher the relevancy is to people searching on Google, the higher your ad's quality score.

A higher quality score can help in the bidding process to lower your Cost Per Click, increase your ad rank, and increase overall campaign performance.

Negative Keyword List

There is nothing negative about negative keywords. In fact, compiling a list of negative keywords is a great thing!

Negative keywords increase campaign performance because they eliminate a lot of bad traffic and irrelevant clicks.

For instance, say that you run a business that sells luxury jewelry. The last thing you would want is for people clicking on your ads who search for "cheap jewelry".

The person who is searching for "cheap jewelry" isn't likely to buy luxury jewelry, and if they click on your advertisement you get charged for that irrelevant click.

The great thing about negative keywords is that if we add "cheap" as a negative keyword, your ad will never show for people who use the word "cheap" in their search.

This, in turn, saves you money on the campaign that can be used for more relevant clicks.

Ad Groups

Ad groups contain a collection of advertisements and keywords that are relevant to the overall goal of the campaign.

For instance, if your company offers a wide variety of services, each ad group should reflect that service. This offers much more in the way of scalability and control when wanting to expand your marketing around those specific services.

Keywords

A keyword is essentially a word or phrase that people search for in Google.

Keywords are the beating heart of each campaign. If the keywords don't match with the products/services you're advertising, it can cause problems.

We also focus on keywords and keyphrases that generate the type of conversion you want. By adding keywords and key phrases to your campaign such as “buy”, “for sale”, “near me”, etc., we can generate a conversion much more frequently.

Bidding Strategy

There are a few types of bidding strategies that you can use in an AdWords campaign. Depending on your business goals, some bidding strategies will be better suited for you than others.

For instance, if your business is trying to maximize the number of clicks to the website, a "Maximize Clicks" bidding strategy might be best. If your business is trying to capture conversions at a specific cost, then "Target CPA" bids might be best in that scenario.

It's also important to keep in mind that as your campaigns evolve, the bidding strategy used will likely evolve along with it.

In Summary...

If for any reason we have left one of your questions unanswered, you can always request another campaign walk through!

Question 4

What are some high-level recommended campaign bidding strategies?

Accepted Answer

Bid Strategies

Step 1:Non-Shopping Campaigns: Start with manual CPC with eCPC enabled (because eCPC is the option that uses a bit of Google’s automation, but is mostly manual). This is nice because you can control the bids, but it’s not very scalable because it’s high maintenance, and because a machine will do it better than a human ever could. After you have around 100 conversions with high frequency (like a sale every other day, for example), at this point we’ve given the algorithm enough data for it to pick up where we left off and make it better. Now you can switch from eCPC to a smart bidding strategy like Target CPC. It leverages the data that you’ve already provided.

Shopping Campaignss: Start with a regular Shopping campaign before switching to a Smart Shopping campaign, because regular Shopping campaigns are inbound (meaning people are searching for the product when the ad appears) whereas Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning Google will try to show it to the type of people who might be interested), so the Smart algorithm can’t do outbound well, and therefore will never prove ROAS, without plenty of data. So, start with Shopping campaign using Manual CPC (usually w/enhanced enabled unless you have super low profit margin and you're trying to prove concept)

After 35 - 45 days of gathering consistent conversion data (aka converting at a normal cadence with a reliable pattern), then pause all shopping campaigns & replace it with a new Smart Shopping campaign using Maximize Conversions (which is the only bidding option). After 35 - 45 more days if the campaign isn’t hitting an acceptable ROAS, you can turn on the optional ROAS goal within the Maximize Conversions bidding strategy.

You don’t want to start off with a ROAS goal because it won’t get any conversions because it doesn’t have enough outbound data yet. Once you've given it that data, turning on the ROAS goal will restrict it to only spend when it thinks it can hit that goal, so spend starts to decrease, the campaign gets less activity, you get less clicks per day, but you should get a higher quality click and conversions that are making your ROAS.

One additional strategy is to spend more $/budget to force Smart Shopping campaigns to go find new markets by removing the Target ROAS goal.

Step 2:

Step 3: Now that your ROAS is high, you can begin to give it more daily ad spend to see if you can increase the amount of conversions. So now, instead of spending $100/day and getting $300, you can try spending $500/day and getting $1500. Just make sure the ROAS doesn’t dip.

Display Pay Per Conversion - This is a new type of campaign/bid strategy in which you only pay for a conversion, and it’s only when the conversion doesn’t go above what you said you would pay. Begin with a super high CPA and then decrease it slowly. The idea is to get the CPA as low as possible (at which point you'll just turn off any regular Proactive Display campaign and just use this one). These types of campaigns can get lots of fake conversions generated by bots. Captcha prevents the bots from submitting forms and wasting ad spend.

Question 5

How can we get the product rating stars to show up on the ads?

Accepted Answer

The product ratings will begin appearing on Shopping Campaign ads whenever your business and the product itself qualifies for the program. Google is a bit vague exactly how to qualify...The rule is to gather a minimum of 50 reviews across the store before submitting the form to apply to participate in the program, but that is where the hard & fast rules end. In this article they say, "Reviews and star ratings may not always show. We’ll show star ratings when our system determines that the information is accurate and relevant for shoppers’ needs." Which means they are leaving it up to an algorithm and the parameters are left a mystery.

The only way to get reviews that aren't made directly in Google to appear in the ads is with a reviews aggregator app. Here's an article explaining this and offering a few alternatives. And here's Google's comprehensive list of approved 3rd party aggregator apps.

There is a section of your Google Ads account where the seller rating stats will begin to populate once the ads are showing the stars. The only way to know whether the ratings are showing is to occasionally check recent dates in this section. Here is how to get to it: Click on "ads & extensions" and then "extensions" and then scroll to the bottom of the screen and choose "automated extensions." The "Seller Ratings" row will populate with data on days when the ratings appeared in the ads.

If you aren't receiving enough reviews to qualify for the program or to keep the stars actively appearing on your ads, here is a tip: Use your review app to create an automated email series that asks customers to review. Schedule a large amount of emails and be very direct about wanting a review. Make sure to set up a trigger inside his review platform to stop the emails as soon as the person leaves a review. The automated emails have to be sent out of his review platform to do this, of course. He said he sends emails that say things like: reviews are so important, we're a family owned business, your voice matters, if you can’t give us a 4 or 5 start review please let us know so we can make it better, and even "we’re not going to stop asking until you review." Sounds pushy, but effective!

Question 6

Should I use search with my e-commerce business?

Accepted Answer

Shopping campaigns are way more effective than Search campaigns when you’re targeting a wide audience. This is because search campaigns require search terms to run whereas shopping campaigns use Google’s 70 million signals to determine whether to show the product to someone. The former is inbound and the latter is outbound.

However, always build both Search and Shopping campaigns for your eComm companies, because:

Shopping Ads and Text Ads (from Search) have different formats and they do appear in different placements/properties throughout Google network
Being different, there are instances when both shopping and text ads can appear at the same time. This increased exposure is beneficial.
In most cases, shopping ads do perform better but this is no guarantee so you also need to, at least, test search ads.
There are accounts where the reach for the shopping ads is not sufficient to spend the monthly budget. Thus, you need to supplement shopping with search.
Aside the above reasons, presenting a setup with search and shopping ads (and explaining the differences and the performance projections for each ad format) is better than the alternative (not having Search ads and wondering "why not").

Question 7

How can we make use of my existing customer base? / What is "customer match" used for?

Accepted Answer

If you have a large customer list, and if your Google account is eligible for "customer match," then you can implement some cross-selling and retargeting campaigns.

Because the audience size is limited and much smaller than an audience found on Google, we won't need a large budget for this strategy.

After about a month or two of gathering conversion data, we can also create a "similar audience" based on the customer list. Similar audiences are often effective, and we will incorporate it into our proactive targeting campaigns.

Question 8

I Googled a keyphrase for my campaign but I don’t see my ad—why?

Accepted Answer

A: Ultimately, the answer depends on your unique campaign—but there could be a few potential reasons for this:

You are in a competitive industry and/or have a limited budget:

You can bid to be at the top of the page (in which case you may spend your entire budget on one click per day)
You can opt for more selective bidding, resulting in more leads

Setting a lower budget allows only the right people to find you, instead of paying a lot of money to claw to the top of the page.

You have other keyphrases that have proven to convert

Low search volume

Where did you Google from (physically)?

From here, you have a couple options to get to the bottom of why you aren’t seeing your ads:

Question 9

How do we rank for organic Google searches?

Accepted Answer

Make sure your website can rank organically
Continual content creation (unique and about one topic. Doesn’t have to be long, 600 words is fine.)
Buy backlinks with a company like seo.co

Question 10

What are Cart Abandonment Campaigns and Cart Abandonment Audiences?

Accepted Answer

If you see significantly more product value being added to the cart than what is being purchased, consider adding a Cart Abandonment Audience to a Remarketing Campaign to try to get those hot leads back.

Use Display Ads so that any other websites they visit, like competitor sites, they will see your ad saying, “Finish your checkout and you’ll get 10% off with coupon code x”.

(***Make sure to only add new audiences to the Remarketing Campaign after the campaign has proven that the ROAS is there or else you will simply be putting budget & effort into something that converts at a negative net profit.)