Question 1

How do the ads get switched over during a site redesign or a new website with a new domain?

Accepted Answer

If it's the same website that's getting a re-design, setup tracking on all the new landing pages & forms during the week before the switch over takes place. If not, the only way to do it would be to pause the ads for a few days while you re-setup tracking.

Make sure you/your developers to make sure the same Google Tag Manager code and Google Analytics code get copied & pasted into the new design.

If it’s a new domain, then it’s considered a new website. It will need a new Google Tag Manager code and also a new Google Analytics “property”. Both sites will need to be up for about a week while you are switching over the tracking.

Question 2

How To Share The Facebook Pixel with A Business

Accepted Answer

In order to share your Facebook pixel with a business, you will need to already have a business manager. If you don't already have one, you can set one up [here](https://business.facebook.com/overview/).

Once you've done that, go to [Business Manager Settings](https://business.facebook.com/settings/).

Next, go to “Pixels” under Data Sources.
![2020-11-23_14-30-22.jpg](https://malcolm-en-gb.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/instances/MpD6OKc9u8/resources/8yrNvndYcJ/2020-11-23_14-30-22.jpg)

Select the pixel and click “Assign Partners.”
![2020-11-23_14-32-21.jpg](https://malcolm-en-gb.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/instances/MpD6OKc9u8/resources/kKkXeRoxXZ/2020-11-23_14-32-21.jpg)

Enter the Solutions 8 Business ID: 915738658498354
![2020-11-23_14-32-46.jpg](https://malcolm-en-gb.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/instances/MpD6OKc9u8/resources/WEI1lgheyd/2020-11-23_14-32-46.jpg)

Question 3

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 Campaigns**s: 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: 
Now you can begin to step the ROAS goal higher. For example, if the campaign was at 300% when you first turned on Target ROAS, then try for 325%. If the campaign hits that or surpasses it, then try for 350%. At some point, you will hit a ceiling. Once you know how high the automation can go, get it back to the top and keep it there steady.

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 4

How are you different from other agencies?

Accepted Answer

**Our Qualifications and Experience**:

* We’ve been successfully at this since 2006
* Google Ads certified 
* Hubspot Certified Partners 
* Digital Marketer Certified Partners 
* Google Ads Partners 
* Our Ads team is a Google Ads Premier Partner 
* Forbes Agency Council Members
* Named one of the Best Digital Marketing Agencies in Phoenix by Expertise  
* We are digital marketers; however, we specialize in PPC 
* ...and get a load of our case studies

**Our Tracking and Reporting Methods**:
* We only use Google Analytics and Google Data Studio 
* Monthly reporting and tracking methods are easy to understand
* We never use proprietary reporting or dashboards where data can be manipulated or hidden

**Our Communication, Pricing, and Transparency**:
* You always maintain administrative ownership of your accounts 
* There is always a primary contact in charge of your campaign (i.e. a dedicated client manager) 
* We have clear communication schedules 
* We are clear on the work you need to contribute (and what your time investment will be) 
* Our fees are transparent and there are no long-term contracts

**Our Strategy, Setup, and Tools**:
* We have a rock-solid onboarding process 
* We take the time to understand your business before offering a solution 
* We offer a marketing strategy in addition to tactical, campaign-based recommendations 
* We are clear about the tools and software we use 
* We don’t use automated tools to manage our campaigns — everything is done manually

**Our Culture**:
* We work with clients who reflect our values and work ethic 
* We have the brand recognition necessary to pull in (and retain) top talent
* We care. A lot.

Question 5

How should we prepare for the holiday season?

Accepted Answer

It's best to get a head-start on any promotions you are planning for big holiday seasons (like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, etc.).

For Black Friday & Cyber Monday, specifically, we recommend chooseing a site-wide discount. Your competition will be fierce, so it's a good idea to choose as steep of a discount as possible. If you need to temporarily hit a higher ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) in order to make this discount profitable, then we can easily do that.

Make sure any promotion you are offering in Google Ads is also offered in your other marketing channels. It's best to keep things synergistically across all platforms.

If your business is eCommerce, then you are probably running shopping campaigns. Shopping ads can promote discounts, special offers, free gifts, etc. right on the ad.

We can also promote the special deal directly in the text of any search ads that are running.

It can also be beneficial to create some images to support the promotion. We'll use these in the display campaigns to remarket to folks who visit the website during this time periot. A square version and a 19:1 ratio would work best, but Google has a long list aspect ratios they support, so more sizes means we are eligible to appear in more placements and therefore give the algorithm more opportunities to show the ad.

Google and all other ad platforms always experience a large increase in traffic during November and December. It can be a good idea to be flexible with the budget around this time -- meaning, if the audience size suddenly increases dramatically, then we will likely be able to spend more on the ads while continuing to meet a high return.

Question 6

What does "Proven ROAS" mean?

Accepted Answer

A campaign that has proven ROAS means that it’s ROAS is or was at whatever number you need it to be at in order to make a profit.

For example, a 100% ROAS means you spend $1 on ads and get $1 back.

This is never a large enough number because the business will undoubtedly have other expenses beyond just ad spend, so this campaign has not proven it’s ROAS.

400% ROAS is a general rule of thumb for the minimum number you should be aiming for if the business doesn’t know it’s exact costs & you therefore can’t calculate an exact ROAS metric.

This is because 400% lets you break even if the business has a 25% profit margin. You get to make at least 4x your money back to break even. If you want to cover an agency fee, then they’ll have to get to 450% ish.

Find current ROAS: All conversion value / cost

Find minimum, break-even ROAS: If 60% profit margin, figure out how many times 60% goes into 100% (60/100 = 1.7). Then, add two zeros to turn that into a percent and you get 160% break-even ROAS.

***Pro tip: If you are an e-commerce company, set up a custom column in Google Ads to display ROAS in a % format (fyi, if you don’t set this column up, you can look at “conversion value/cost” column which gives you the same ROAS number but in decimal format).

Question 7

What is PPC?

Accepted Answer

That's a great question that deserves a great answer. [Read more here](https://sol8.com/what-is-ppc/).

Question 8

How do I determine my ad spend budget?

Accepted Answer

**Brand New Campaigns** *Should Be Free to Spend* - When launching a new campaign, we often set the budget extra high so there is no risk for a limitation in reach in the first few days when the matching algorithms start their learning process. Overspending in the first few days can be compensated down the road.
What To Do About The Ever-So-Present **“Limited By Budget”** Message - When Google gives this message in the status column, you might choose to  act upon it or wait. This decision depends on the timing and the ROAS of both the campaign and the overall account.

**Why It Matters** - When a campaign doesn’t have enough ad budget to show the ad enough, it can have a compounding negative effect on campaigns. For example, when someone first clicks on your ad but doesn’t convert, the campaign might not have enough budget remaining to show the ad to them the next time they search, which is often the time that they’re ready to buy. Limited by budget can also be detrimental to your conversions per cost ratio, because how much you are able to spend per click affects how far up on the page you’ll be. For example, a smart shopping ad might be hidden by the “view more” button, or the search ad is showing at the very bottom under all the organic results. So, raising the budget slightly can often act as a catalyst for raising ROAS.

Increasing the budget almost always has a compounding effect on the ad performance: As the ad begins to appear more frequently, it "snowballs" into a handful of other phenomena, like leads viewing the ad more than once, the machine algorithms honing in on the number of impressions needed before a conversion, etc. So expect the cost per lead to decrease after adding more budget."

**When To Act** -  While limited by budget can be harmful, *raising the budget can also be harmful if it doesn’t manage to raise the ROAS*; This is because a campaign that doesn’t have a proven ROAS is essentially losing money with every dollar that it spends and so, in that case, more budget will just mean more money lost.

*If the ROAS is already proven* and you can see an accelerated conversion rate in Google’s recommendation (click on the “limited by budget” error message), then this is a no brainer: more budget means more profit.

*If the ROAS isn’t proven*, you may want to see if an increased budget can help it get there by removing the compounding negative effects that a limited by budget campaign is struggling with. You can still consider increasing the budget as long as the account’s overall ROAS across all campaigns is proven. Optimize everything else first, because throwing more money at a problem as an experiment to see if it will make the problem go away is a risk, so it’s best to get the account to a good place first to avoid jeopardizing the whole account too much.

Question 9

What Can I Afford To Pay For A Lead From Paid Ads?

Accepted Answer

If you’ve been using Google Ads or other paid advertising platforms to generate leads, you probably noticed that among all of them, Google tends to have the highest cost per lead (CPL).

Why?

Because the conversion rates of those leads are usually higher. Google understands the intention of its users and uses their algorithm to actively seek out users who have shown an interest in your product—those who are ready to buy.

According to [Unbounce](https://unbounce.com/ppc/seo-vs-ppc-infographic/), “50% of people arriving at a retailers site from paid ads are more likely to buy than those who came from an organic link.” Click-throughs from PPC results convert 1.5 times more than organic search results ([Atomic Reach](https://blog.atomicreach.com/ppc-statistics)). Meaning, in terms of getting higher bottom-funnel conversions, PPC beats SEO.

To make sure you have a well-optimized PPC campaign that generates revenue, it’s crucial to gather conversion data first. Sure, [it might take some time](https://help.sol8.com/faqs/how-long-will-it-take-to-see-results). But it’s one of the most important elements in building high-performing campaigns that give you a huge return for every dollar you spend in advertising.

Question 10

Is my website ready for PPC ads?

Accepted Answer

In order to satisfy Google, there are a few of their policies that we must abide by as advertisers in order to gain the full scope of the platform's capabilities.

Google's primary goal is to keep its users happy, and Google has a plethora of people wanting to advertise to Google's users. In other words, Google gets to pick and choose which ads they present to their audience.

The bad news is that we have to compete against those other ads. The good news is that Google doesn't discriminate as long as you follow their guidelines and rules.

### Individual "Thank You" page For All Forms

Essentially, this means that after a user has completed a desired action on your website (e.g. a purchase has been completed, or someone filled out a form) a "Thank You" page needs to be displayed.

### Mobile Responsive
This is a big one. Have you ever visited a website on your mobile phone? We're positive you have. Have you ever visited a site on your mobile phone, only to have the end result be some "zoomed-in" portion of the main website?

Pretty annoying, right?

Google actually pays attention to these kinds of things, and classifies these seemingly minor things as "user experience".

Basically, the better the user experience is on your website, the higher your quality score for your advertisements. This, in turn, leads to happier users and better ad ranking for your advertisements (which oftentimes means more sales).

### Site Speed
This is another factor that Google looks at heavily. According to a study done by the website Hubspot, if your website makes you an average of $100,000 a day, a 1-second decrease in page load time can increase your sales by about $7,000.

It seems like such an insignificant detail, but in the hustle and bustle of today's environment, people want things and they want them now.

Moreover, if your site takes too long to load, you run the risk of people bouncing off of your site. That means that they click on your advertisement (you pay for that click) and then they leave the website before it fully loads, before you have a chance to sell them your offer, all because it took just a little too long for the site to load for them.

Again a minor detail, but it has huge consequences.

If you would like to check your current site speed and get suggestions on how to boost the speed, check out [this article](https://faq.sol8.com/faqs/how-important-is-it-to-have-a-fast-website-and-does-that-affect-ads).

### Privacy Policy
A privacy policy is a requirement that indicates to your website's visitors how their personal information will be stored in your system. Things like website cookies, email addresses, credit card information all fall under this category.

Don't worry, you don't need to pay a lawyer the big bucks to write you one of these. You just need to explain to the website visitor, in a transparent way, where their information is being stored (if at all) and what is being done with that information.

### Have A Physical Address On Your Site
This is something that Google looks for to see that you are a legitimate business and not some scammer who's claiming they're in California but really on the other side of the planet.

The benefit of this is that it satisfies Google, but it also makes your website visitors feel more at ease when they are considering purchasing your products/services. It instills trust in your website visitors, and often times more trust equals higher conversions and more sales.

### Your Phone Number On Your Site Should Be Coded Text
This is a bit of a more technical detail. Google is very smart, but sometimes it needs some help. Having a phone number on your website is another thing that you can do to instill more trust in your website visitors, and possibly boost conversions.

However, from a technical standpoint, Google can't recognize that phone number if it's in an image and not coded onto the page.

If you have a web developer, they should be very familiar with the difference.

### Have An Email Address Listed On The Site
Just like having a phone number and physical location, Google wants you to have a way for website visitors to reach you by email.

Again, just like a phone number, this needs to be coded into the webpage and not an image so that Google can read it.

## eCommerce Websites
These next two points are specifically for eCommerce websites that sell physical items.

### Have A Published Return Policy
A return policy is standard practice for physical stores, and it should be no different for online stores.

Just like the privacy policy, you don't need a lawyer to create this for you (although, by all means, if you feel more comfortable having a lawyer write it for you, have a lawyer write one for you).

A return policy can be very simple. It just tells the user what to expect should they want to return their item or get a refund. Questions that could be answered include: How long do I have to return my item? What's your policy if my item arrives broken?

### Have A Published Shipping Policy
People want to know how long it's going to take for their item to arrive from the moment that the order is placed.

It's always a good idea to set expectation ahead of time. So be sure to tell your website visitors in your Shipping Policy how long it takes to process an order, and what kind of shipping speeds your business offers.

That was a lot! Don't worry though...

These are all seemingly minor things, but the devil is in the details. Not only are you satisfying Google's guidelines by having these things in place, but you are also boosting trust with your website visitors.

Higher trust with your visitors means higher conversions, which means higher sales.