Question 1

What if I have a small budget of $500 monthly?

Accepted Answer

Accounts with small budgets (~$500) can be extremely difficult to optimize because there’s often not enough data to recognize patterns.

For example, if a keyword got 1 click last month and 1 click this month, should we increase the bid for that keyword? Well, 1 click is not enough information to make an educated guess.

In this case you may need to manually edit the budget twice per month because you want to spend the majority of it in a short amount of days and then pull back.

Do not turn on monthly budget because then it will spend that money evenly throughout the month, which isn’t ideal.

Question 2

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 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
The first step prior to your PPC campaign launch is to ensure that we have the proper daily/monthly budget in place.

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

Should I include Bing/Yahoo in my PPC budget?

Accepted Answer

Why Bother with Bing/Yahoo? - Consider testing ads with Bing. Even though the traffic is light, it’s worth running. You will need to allocate a budget.

It is not recommended to use shopping ads on Bing for e-commerce.

30% of all search traffic happens on these search engines.

The average Google user clicks on 4.3 ads, and the average Bing user clicks on 2.5. Half as clicky, so half as many competitors.

Audience tends to be older and more affluent. (Tend to be an older demographic because it is the default internet search engine pre-installed on Microsoft computers, and some people never change it.)

Question 5

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 6

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 7

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 8

What are conversion action triggers?

Accepted Answer

Conversion Actions - To be able to track a conversion, we would need a "trigger" for that conversion action.

A trigger can be one of the following:
* A thank you page that only loads after a successful submission/optin.
* A code that runs after a successful submission/optin.
* A unique event that is only executed upon a successful submission/optin. For example, CTM sends a "Calls" event once a phone number is dialed.

Question 9

Why do you charge a 10% fee?

Accepted Answer

Nearly all of our costs are based on how much we spend (this includes click fraud prevention, vendors, and software and monitoring tools, such as [Google Keyword Planner](https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/), [iSpionage](https://www.ispionage.com/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIr8C8oKHy5wIVDfDACh11eAdMEAAYASAAEgJl5PD_BwE), [SpyFu](https://www.spyfu.com/), and [SEMrush](https://www.semrush.com/)).

So, we simply cannot scale profitably without a benchmark set against spend.

More to the point:

**The larger a campaign gets, the larger the workload to manage.  **

As data-driven marketers, everything we do is based on data-driven optimization. Every dollar spent is a data point and every data point requires action.

The more you spend, the more work involved in managing and optimizing the campaign.

The benefit to both of us is **you'll never choose to spend more without a high-performing campaign**. So, the system ends up being meritocratic in construct.

And, because we charge a base, plus a small percentage (unlike many high-end agencies that simply charge a much larger percentage across the board), **our campaigns become more profitable as a percentage as you grow**.

As far as the agencies that don't charge a percentage fee…

They're actually showing their hand in doing so.
They've completely limited their ability to service the campaign.

In fact, we would bet every single one of them is using automated bidding tools to attempt to manage your campaign through the use of "AI" — without the expenditure in human capital.

Still concerned about the fee? [Let’s talk about it](https://sol8.com/contact/).

Question 10

How do you track phone calls (leads and sales)?

Accepted Answer

Tracking phone calls is incredibly important for accurate reporting. Any calls that come in from your campaign are recorded using a tool called [Call Tracking Metrics](https://www.calltrackingmetrics.com/).
 
Here’s how it works: 
 
First, a lead calls from an ad extension or from your website. 
 
When this happens, we can see some really useful data:  
What page of your website the individual was on when they called
What keyword they used to land on your website 
Which campaign generated that user 
Then, a member of our team manually scores every call. After listening to the call recording, we manually import the quality conversations and the associated data into Google Ads.
 
Most agencies use a time threshold to determine lead quality (for example, any call over 45 seconds is automatically recorded as a conversion); however, we ensure lead quality manually, which makes for far superior data.