Question 1

Is my branded campaign stealing all my traffic from organic search?

Accepted Answer

In some instances, yes.

If you have a good organic ranking and good organic traffic, branded campaigns can steal your organic traffic. The way to subvert this is to bid very low ($0.05 per click) so it's not costly.

**But, the pros far outweigh the cons: **

First, running a branded campaign protects your brands from competitors.

The first four spots on the Google search engine results page are all Google Ads listings. So, competitors who bid on your name can show as the first listing.

And because the highest you can rank organically is #5 on the page, all your organic traffic in this case would end up seeing your competitors first.

Let’s keep in mind that the #1 spot on Google has an average 20% click-through rate. So, competitors who bid on your name can be detrimental to your brand.

Suffice to say, you should always want to be #1 on Google for your brand name.

Next, running a branded campaign gives us the ability to see what keyword a user searched to get to your site (before leaving and coming back to search your brand name next).

This allows us to bid efficiently on keywords that introduce your brand to the masses, and also brings them back to the site to convert.

Question 2

How do I grow/scale quickly?

Accepted Answer

Trying to Scale/Grow Quickly - Training Video Here

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 3

When is the best time to run Facebook Ads?

Accepted Answer

Start with a Remarketing campaign only for this first month until the pixel has picked up enough matched users and conversion data in the performance history. As a side note for e-commerce you can do Dynamic Product Remarketing which pulls products from the feed much like a Google Shopping campaign.

Keep in mind that Remarketing campaigns will not be able to spend much ad budget because the audience is made up of a percentage of people that visit your site (Facebook isn't able to match 100% of site visitors back to Facebook users). Start off with $5-$10/day for this campaign and adjust from there based on the frequency of the ads being displayed.

Once you have a good audience size and historical data then you can create a lookalike audience form your existing converters and show proactive ads to that cold list in order to build awareness.

People tend to view FB ads and then convert without clicking in FB. This can happen with Google to but it is more common with FB so it's hard to directly attribute sales and judge the performance of FB campiagns. Some of the people who convert on FB might be the sample people who are converting from an ad on another platofrm like Google. Without an attributuion tracking model it is impossible to know the exact path of conversion.

Question 4

How to share passwords with Solutions 8

Accepted Answer

These instructions will help you add confidential login information to Dashlane, a trusted online program that allows you to securely share login information with us. We use this tool so we can keep your information secure, rather than exchange sensitive information via email.

Go to dashlane.com and click on “Get Dashlane”.
Allow the app to make changes to your device.
Log in or create an account. Be sure to create a really strong password!
Follow the prompts or skip the prompts.
The Dashlane dashboard will pop up.
Click on Password on the lefthand panel.
Click the green “Add New” button at the top.
Enter the information you’re sharing.
Click Ok to create the record.
To share this record with our team, go to the sharing center and click “Add New”
Find the items you would like to share in the drop down menu.
Add solutions8ads@gmail.com to the Recipients box. Be sure to click “Full rights” before sharing.
Click send.

Question 5

Can I show my product ratings in my ads?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can. However, we don't have a process to check for product ratings on our accounts with shopping campaigns. And here’s why:

We haven't seen a measurable performance boost by adding product ratings to the ads.
We don't recommend showing the ratings unless the average review capture is high.
The 3rd party review aggregator apps are expensive (popular ones like Trustpilot & ShopperApproved charge about $200/month.) We believe that money is often better spent on ad spend pulling in sales.
Google doesn't show the reviews if they are less than 30 per month (they don’t mention this in their help articles.) So most clients get frustrated when they pay for an expensive app that doesn’t even show reviews for that month.

Question 6

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 7

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:

Check out the “Ad Preview Diagnosis” tool in Google Ads. If an ad isn’t showing, this should tell you why—or, it may tell you that your ad is, in fact, showing up in Google search results, but you just haven’t seen it yet.
Still feeling uneasy? Just reach out. We can give you the reason why you aren’t seeing your ad; but chances are, there is a strategy behind it—and we’re happy to go over it with you.

Question 8

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.

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

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.