Question 1

How important is it to have a fast website and does that affect ads?

Accepted Answer

Your ads are greatly affected by your website speed.

Google will throttle your ads if it decides your "landing page experience" is bad. And the largest indicator of landing page experience is speed.

If your competitors have a faster website than yours, it's likely they'll be able to get better placements at a lower cost-per-click (CPC) than you can.

Slow website speed will also impact the bounce rate on your website (since cold leads are finnicky and just came from search results with a pile of options, so if they are struggling with your website then they might decide to go back and click on the next result from the search results). This lowers the conversion rate.

Here's how you can test your website speed in the eyes of Google's crawl bot:

Use this website speed analyzer tool.
Enter your website URL.
Click "Start Test"

Ideally your score should be in the green. If the load time is 3 seconds or less, you are in the clear.

Once you fix your website load speed, you will notice a drop in CPCs as well as a slight increase in CTR (due to better placements) and Conv. Rate (due to lower bounce rate, as well as higher-intent users who clicked at the top of the page where your better ad placement is).

Question 2

Do you do Bing search campaigns?

Accepted Answer

Yes!

Typically, we wait until we have maxed out Google Ads. But in some cases, if your target audience is older, Bing can be a great channel to reach them.

Bing has about 10% of the traffic compared to Google, but it is very inexpensive and full of high-quality leads.

Question 3

How to use Local Campaigns to drive traffic to your physical store

Accepted Answer

If you have a brick and mortar business and you’re running a special offer or a promotion, you can use Google Ads to drive traffic to your local store.

By using a “Local Campaign” in Google Ads, you can promote Google Maps listings and track conversions every time someone looks up the driving directions to your store or shares the location with a friend.

Here’s what you need to do:

Update

Update your Google My Business account first. This includes updating information like:

Your cover picture and mention the promotion so people can see the sponsored listing in Google Maps.
Your GMB listing. Add imagery, maps, hours, phone numbers, and relevant links.

Optimize

Talk about your promotion in your ad copy and extension.
Set your keyword targeting to anything around your main keyword (e.g. if you’re selling shoes, keyword target should be “shoes”)

A few things to remember

This campaign tracks conversions differently than the rest of the campaign, which means it will skew the average ROAS for the overall account.

Since the local campaign has its own separate budget, it will make the ROAS look lower than it really is.

But don’t be alarmed. This simply means that the campaign is spending the ad budget without bringing in conversion value that Google Ads knows about.

So our team has to calculate the ROAS manually. Here’s how we do it:

ROAS = conversion value / the total cost from all the other campaigns

For more information on how How To Use Local Campaigns in Google Ads, check out this video:

Question 4

Here's What You Can Expect Now That You've Been Onboarded As A Client

Accepted Answer

Now that you have been onboarded as a client there are just a few technical things that we need to set up for your website, in order to properly track calls and conversions in order to better understand what optimizations need to be made.

This is a guide for you to know what these tools are, why they're important, and how they're paramount to the success of the campaign.

Don't worry. You don't need to do any of these things (that's what we're here for).

We might need to request access from you for some of these tools. If that's the case, we will reach out to you and make the process as easy as possible.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) Installation

Google Tag Manager is a tool that we use to track specific actions and events that happen on your website, such as conversions.

This tool integrates with Google Analytics, and allows us to see how your website visitors behave on your website.

By setting this up, we can track things like which forms a user has filled out, who has visited the website (important for remarketing), what links users are clicking on, etc.

Similar to how video cameras work to see what's going on in a physical store, Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics allows us to replicate that in a digital environment.

Call Tracking Metrics (CTM)

Call Tracking Metrics is important to set up, particularly if your goal is to have leads call your business.

This feature allows us to track conversations that leads have with your business. Our team will be listening in all of the phone calls to gauge the level of quality conversations that are being had. If lead quality is excellent, Call Tracking Metrics allows us to identify what campaign generated that phone calls so we can increase the frequency of calls from that campaign.

Conversion Tracking (Google Analytics)

Conversion Tracking helps us as advertisers to see when a user completes a desired action on your website, e.g. filling out a form, completing a purchase, etc.

Conversion Tracking utilizes Google Tag Manager in order to track actions and conversions.

Pixel Installation (Facebook)

Should your business goals require advertisements on Facebook, we will need to install what's known as Facebook's "Pixel".

The Pixel is Facebook's version of Google's "Tag", and it accomplishes many of the same functions that Google's Tag does.

Competitive Analysis

It's important to understand that other businesses in your space are likely advertising on Google as well.

Part of the process of creating a successful campaign is to see how your competitors are advertising. We uses a myriad of tools to identify what your competition is doing, if it's working, and how we can improve on it.

Ad Copy Creation

The Ad Copy is what a potential customer is going to see on Google when they type in their keyword to the search bar.

Every ad that we create will be relevant to the product/service that you sell and will be specific to the group of keywords that best describe your product.

Campaign Creation

Once we've received all the information relevant to your campaign, we can start the process of actually building out the PPC campaign. This is a complex process that involves taking the information that you filled out in the on-boarding process and translating that into keywords and advertisements.

Having the proper keywords, key phrases, ad budget, ad schedule, ad groups, landing page destination, etc. in place make sure that your ads are being shown to the right people, at the right time.

Also, depending on what your campaign goals are, it's at this stage that we configure the campaign to fit your desired customer actions, i.e. increase quality phone calls with potential customers, eCommerce transaction, contact form completions, acquiring customers for a particular cost, etc.

After The Campaign Has Been Created, But Before Launch

After the campaign has been created, we will schedule a time to review the campaign and discuss what has been created, why it's been created in that way, and the expected outcome.

Question 5

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 6

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 7

What to Expect With Competitor Campaigns

Accepted Answer

Competitor Campaigns:

These campaigns tend to have a shorter sales cycle.
They are also known to drive more branded search (because someone shopping a competitor’s site, might come back to Google after not finding what they were looking for, remember your name, and type that in).
Don’t expect to have a high quality score on campaigns like this because the content on the site will never have the keyword (the competitor brand) in it.
It is almost always a trademark violation to put your competitor’s business name into your ad copy.
If you do not have a direct/obvious competitor, some nuance needs to be taken into consideration:
- For example, you might want to target a big brand who steals most of your business, but since the big brand sells more than just the products that you sell, you will need to target keywords that include both the competitor’s name and the product.
- Sometimes this is the case with smaller competitors, as well, in which case try both strategies (target just the competitor’s name and also the competitor + product as keywords).

Question 8

Is it possible to run an e-commerce campaign but built as lead generation?

Accepted Answer

It doesn’t always make sense to setup e-commerce tracking in Google Ads.

Instead, we can just assign a static conversion value for the order form submission (average order price) and use that for tracking ROAS.

Question 9

How long should I wait to see an accurate Performance Report in Performance Max?

Accepted Answer

According to Google, whenever you make any changes to automated bidding, strategies, and budget, you have to wait for at least 14 days (plus your conversion lag) to view accurate and complete performance reporting.

Conversion lag is simply “the delay when people click an ad and when they perform a specific conversion action (for example with, install, purchase, add-to-cart, etc.)”

What happens is the system will optimize towards what we tell it to do, so you must wait to make any changes for 14 days when Google can accurately assess performance.

Making any changes prior to that learning period will reset the account back into the learning period. This means, you’ll have to wait for another 2-3 weeks.

Question 10

Why can't we just turn on tROAS & leave it on?

Accepted Answer

Every time we apply tROAS, it stops the algorithm’s learning process and prevents us from infusing more spend into the campaign. While the tROAS setting is applied, the algorithm "muscle" atrophies.

Often times, over-pacing to force the algorithm to learn and grow, and then pulling back on the spend to allow the ROAS to shoot up, is better than simply applying a tROAS goal - it’s like telling the algorithm to “only use the knowledge you already have to try to spend the budget and hit the goal.”

Doing this causes problems because the knowledge it has doesn't update with the ever-shifting market of new users, which causes the algorithm to not be able to spend the full budget, and ultimately causes us to fall behind on spend, and lose valuable time in the learning process.

We only apply it for short periods of time, and we have to sync it up during a portion of the month when we want to push the algorithm in that particular direction (high return), but it's not a long-term solution to achieve high performance.