Question 1

Should I Always Listen to Google’s Suggestions?

Accepted Answer

* Google’s suggestions don’t take the entire picture into account. 
* They are usually focused on making more money for Google, and focused on hitting the high-level bid strategy’s target (which it perceives as the campaign’s main goal) at all costs. 
* There can be consequences to overstretching in one area in order to hit the bid strategy target.
* Here is a video explaining a campaign’s “Limited by Bid” message & suggestion. The video explains why it’s best to ignore it in this case.
	* https://youtu.be/t55f59kx3UY

Question 2

Should I run LinkedIn ads?

Accepted Answer

The Social Media Examiner says proactive LinkedIn Ads (to cold leads) are only a good fit for:
* High LTV ($15k+) B2B
* White collar recruiting
* Higher education recruiting

With remarketing it is a whole different story, since remarketing is essentially the same as adding one more place/platform/channel to display the exact same ad that we are already running with Google remarketing (Google has a very wide reach with lots of places/platforms/channels, but they can't deliver ads on platforms they do not own/not in their ecosystem like LinkedIn or FB or Reddit).

Question 3

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:

1. Ads have headlines and descriptions - vast amounts of them - that have been optimized for click-through-rate by us and by the algorithms.
2. 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.
3. 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 4

When should I consider using Remarketing?

Accepted Answer

Hold off on remarketing in the beginning to test the quality of the traffic in the campaigns, and if a campaign isn’t performing well then you don’t want to limit the ad spend by pushing customers back.

Question 5

How do I use landing pages?

Accepted Answer

It used to be standard practice to create a designated landing page that would “squeeze” people into a sale because it focuses on one product, there’s no menu, no distractions, no alternate buttons, etc.

This is not recommended because on average people view 2.8 pages before converting.

So, this means a new visitor who lands on the website’s product page, might also view other products or view the homepage or the contact us page before going back to their original landing page to purchase/convert.

Question 6

How do campaigns affect my overall account?

Accepted Answer

This is a useful perspective that will help as you learn about the various algorithms working with or against each other. Campaigns have their own history (some have gathered accurate data with patterns and some haven’t had the opportunity), they have unique competitive environments they’re working in, and they are going after different markets (some have an easily identifiable niche audience while others are working with vague audiences). As you get to know the campaigns, this will shape how you treat it. Here’s a 1 minute video explaining this:https://youtu.be/3UIqObOLEeg

Question 7

Is there any spillover from paid ads to organic search ranking?

Accepted Answer

On average, you will see about a 10 rank jump in organic search rank after you start running paid ads. Part of this is because Google counts all traffic to the website as “traffic.” Which means anyone who clicks on an ad gets points towards traffic. In [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about) (in the “Performance on Search Results” report) you can see organic search performance for the site. Compare the last 3 months with the previous 3 months to see the difference in average position, average CTR, total clicks, and total impressions.

Question 8

What impact does running PPC ads have on my brand?

Accepted Answer

Brand Recognition is a by-product of running advertising - Companies that run PPC ads consistently receive more organic, more post ad click calls, & more direct traffic as a result. In fact, Google even takes some data from PPC ads and factors it into Organic rankings (like time spent on page, click through rates, etc.) This is anecdotal, but there is always a correlation when you look at the amount of money spent on ads and compare that with organic traffic to the site. Take this into consideration when you are calculating the impact running PPC ads has on your business.

Question 9

How do I grow/scale quickly?

Accepted Answer

Trying to Scale/Grow Quickly - [Training Video Here](https://youtu.be/1sgBk50qHZA)

Sometimes the ROAS will plateau, so you need to take a risk and apply more budget into the smart shopping campaign, turning off the “Target Roas goal” (this is an optional goal that lives inside the bidding strategy of “Maximize conversion value” inside of Smart Shopping Campaigns) temporarily in order to see if we can force the algorithm to “tap into” new audiences.

Question 10

How do I access search terms report for Smart Shopping?

Accepted Answer

This report can only be accessed by sending a request to Google because the terms in the report don’t accurately represent the search terms that would be good to target.

Since Smart Shopping is outbound (meaning the algorithm shows the ad to the type of people they think might be likely to buy, rather than the keywords most closely related to the product), there are usually 70 million signals to decide to target that person, and their search term is just one of them.

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