Question 1

How long will it take to build my campaigns?

Accepted Answer

10-12 business days.

Question 2

How long will it take to see results?

Accepted Answer

Technically, you'll start to see results right away; however, it takes time for a campaign to "normalize" to the point of understanding how it will perform long term.

You're probably aware that we are very transparent about how long it takes to see results from your PPC campaign. Our goal is to provide you with realistic expectations, rather than selling you the moon. This is for the benefit of both agency and client to ensure both a highly effective and professional working relationship.

Important update to the "90-Day Rule of Thumb"

In the past, our rule of thumb was 90 days for a campaign to be fully optimized. This meant that after 90 days, we would typically have enough data to know whether or not the campaign would work long term.

With the introduction of Performance Max, the 90-day guideline no longer applies in most cases. Instead, it takes roughly 45 days just to see what we've built and how it's going to work.

Essentially, Day 46 is now Day 0.

This new campaign type is seven campaigns in one—Search, Shopping, YouTube, GSP, Discover, Display, Local, and Remarketing—and all of them are being optimized at the same time. Once Google has gathered and analyzed the available data, then we can start to see how the foundation we've put into place will perform over time.

Put simply, it takes time to successfully optimize a campaign and position it to scale. But more often than not, being patient during that initial learning period pays off in the long run.

How do we "Optimize" the campaign?

When you hear the term "optimization" that means that we are going to work towards generating more conversions for less cost per conversion. These results will be more frequent the more data that we collect.

We work off of a base 100-point data set when performing optimizations. What this means, is that when there are 100 points of data for an action, whether that be impressions, clicks, conversions, or simply the most appropriate data point for a particular campaign, we make a decision on what to do with that asset.

For example, if we see a group of keywords in an Ad Group that all have 100 impressions, we are going to look to see what has the highest Click Through Rate (CTR) and place more spend towards those higher-relevant keywords. Then, once each keyword generates 100 clicks, we are going to look to see which keyword resulted in the most amount of conversions, and place more spend in the keywords that have generated the most amount of conversions.

There are many more data points that are taken into consideration when talking about optimizations, but this will help you understand how optimizations work in the most basic form.

We also listen to every phone call that is generated from the campaign to ensure that when the phone rings, its a relevant person ready to talk to you on the other end. The results of these phone calls, directly affect the optimizations of your campaign, since we manually count those as conversions so we can identify which campaign is generating the most amount of relevant phone calls.

What You Can Expect In The First 90 Days

Within the first few days of the campaign launch, you will experience real results, however, it will not be the most optimized results. The conversions may be a bit more expensive in the beginning, or they may not be as frequent as you may like them to be, but rest assured, with each passing day, the campaign is going through changes to see those results increase. The first second month will be better than the first and the third month will be better than the second.

We will be reaching out to you very frequently and checking in on the quality of the conversions, plus giving you insight as to what optimizations have been made and what future optimizations we are planning to make in the near future.

Each month, you will receive a detailed report, extracted directly out of your AdWords campaign that we will review together. We review all data together so that you can offer your feedback regarding our strategies. There may be times where we rely on you as a subject matter expert and we truly value your input.

In Summary...

While there are very few campaigns that launch perfectly optimized, we do need time to assess where the conversions are coming from and make changes to the campaign to spend more ad spend in the Campaigns and Ad Groups that are performing well.

Our goal is to deliver to you a very high performing campaign within the first 90 days.

If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, please feel free to click on the chat button in the bottom-right corner of this screen and reach out!

Question 3

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 4

Can we spend more money on a specific product or in a specific location?

Accepted Answer

Begin with $50 per day (or an amount that makes sense to you). Try to split the Smart Shopping campaigns to two different geographical locations, then allocate the ad spend to each campaign based on performance.

So two identical smart shopping campaigns.

1: All of (ex: Country), excluding (ex: State)

Whatever ends up being limited by budget, or having the best ROAS, gets the most ad spend.

Since they both will have their own dedicated daily budget, you will want to balance that on how each of the campaigns performs.

Question 5

What is a Good Conversion Rate?

Accepted Answer

Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Ideally, you want to break into the top 10%.

Source: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/03/17/what-is-a-good-conversion-rate#:~:text=Conventional%20wisdom%20says%20that%20a,in%20the%20average%20performance%20bucket

Question 6

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:

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 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 (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

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 9

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.

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.