1,700 Hours of Teaching Google Ads, This is What I Learned (Episode 526)

0:19Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris Schaeffer. And today I'm going to tell you what I've learned out of my 1700 hours of teaching hundreds, thousands of people around the world how to run Google Ads, of course, not including this podcast, I'm going to tell you what I learned by talking to those people, looking at their accounts, and giving them advice and hearing what they have to say. So I'm going to talk about that, talk about the, how many is it, eight different things that I've learned that seem almost universal about what people say, what they do when they don't understand in Google Ads, when they have questions about Google Ads, I've learned about eight things that are very common.

1:03Some of them are more new with some of the changes that have happened recently in Google Ads. So I'm going to start right off. I'm going to jump right in it and tell you, number one, the most universal thing that I see is people tend to explore in Google Ads rather than improve. So this seems to be pretty universal, and I'm gonna explain what that means. So when people explore in Google Ads,

1:36Chris Schaeffer: what they tend to do is they set up new campaigns. They, instead of improving a campaign, instead of tweaking a campaign, they just start over. This seems pretty universal because people will create demand gen campaigns. They'll create display campaigns. They'll create video campaigns or they'll start a brand new search campaign. And rather than improving what they have, they just start fresh. And I totally understand why because you don't really know what's wrong. So it's easier to just start over and kind of go with what you've learned so far and try and make it better the second time. I get it.

2:24Chris Schaeffer: I'm not blaming you. But that is a universal truth that I find across anyone who's concerned, worried, confused by Google Ads is you tend to explore rather than improve. So what typically should you do? Well, rather than just creating a brand new search campaign or trying some other campaign type, you might realize that 70 % of your spend in your search campaign is all on one keyword. It's a broad match keyword. It's getting hundreds and thousands of different search terms, many of which may not be relevant at all. It's spending most of your budget and it's causing a huge amount of waste in your account.

3:12Chris Schaeffer: So rather than just starting over, you could learn from that, make adjustments. You could add some negative keywords. You could try additional keywords. But I find that it's very true that people shy away from that. They don't really know what to fix. They don't know how to tinker. Instead, they just build from scratch over and over. And then that's exhausting because whatever success you had the first time may not be duplicated the second time, or maybe the second time it works great. And, um, you know, you think, well, awesome. That's good. I'm going to, I'm going to try this again. I'm going to try it this way this time.

3:51Chris Schaeffer: And then it doesn't work the third time. Um, you know, so there's, there's a lot of uncontrolled, unpredictable results when you just start over fresh, start over fresh, Certainly with Google Ads, how it is now, Google Ads very much relies on historical standards, historical performance that learns and optimizes using some conversion strategies. And if you start over, then, you know, you might end up losing what you had. So that's number one. I'm going to tell you number two through eight here in a moment, remind you why I am here. I am here because Optio makes it possible for me to take time out of my daily coaching activities, out of my daily management, to bring you this message that there is a better way.

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5:33Chris Schaeffer: That's optio.com slash PSP for a additional two-week extension on their usual two-week extension. So you get 28 days for free of their tool. You won't hear that anywhere else. Optio.com slash PSP. All right, we're continuing on now. what have I learned in my 1700 something hours of coaching? And let me qualify what I mean by that. When I, when I say coaching, I'm talking about like what I did just an hour ago with a nice lady who has a business, been running Google ads for years and just had questions. She didn't know what to do. I jump into a Zoom session with her and I spend an hour in her account walking her through it, making adjustments, tweaking things, changing things.

6:28Chris Schaeffer: That's what I mean by coaching. And before I did that, I actually went around the country and taught in person. I've been from coast to coast. One of the coolest places I went was Quantico. I got to do Google Ads coaching for the government, specifically uh like the fbi and stuff like that um i i have some stories to tell from that that was that was quite an experience um but uh but yeah now thanks to the internet i don't have to leave my house so that means you uh can uh get my services for a lot cheaper than they used to be that's for sure because i don't have to fly there and you don't have to feed me which is very nice um okay anyway conversion tracking issues is number two so the second most common issue that i find after coaching so many people in accounts is very many people have conversion tracking issues uh probably number one is they have no conversion tracking they have zero they just it just runs and they can tell when it's broken because their phone stops ringing or they stop getting, you know, whatever.

7:39Chris Schaeffer: It's more of a, you know, just kind of a post click post sale management. And there's nothing in Google ads that, you know, is actually tracking those conversions, purchases, leads, phone calls. Pretty common. Second to that is people that have broken conversion tracking. It worked at some point and it broke. And then third, this is quite common also is the conversion tracking is completely wrong. Uh, it's tracking the wrong thing. I was just looking at an account this week and, um, it looked like this account had seen absolute massive success. And I was like, wow, I don't know why you called me.

8:25Chris Schaeffer: I mean, this is doing phenomenally well. When I dug into the conversions, it turned out that one of the conversions that had been tracking for the past, you know, four, six weeks, something like that was add to cart. So this success that they thought they had seen was because there was more and more people adding their product to cart, but there was absolutely no purchases. They had no idea. The system was reporting tons and tons of conversions, but in fact, it was add to cart conversions. So, um, very common that I see this in, in a lot of accounts. Um, other than that, um, you know, that, that, that's, that's probably the top two things.

9:12Chris Schaeffer: We're gonna move on to number three now. Uh, this one hurts. Oh, this one makes me sad. Most people have some kind of experience with a bad manager. Um, and I don't mean just someone who didn't do well for them. I mean, someone who put like who made them very upset it was an upsetting situation they felt wronged stolen from lied to that kind of severe experience most of the time it was a situation where they found out that the the company was outsourcing their PPC management to someone else it wasn't even that company that was doing it. That's actually extremely common. I do not do that. I know many companies I've worked with that have actually outsourced their management to me.

10:05Chris Schaeffer: So I'm working on accounts that I don't own or manage for another agency. So I've been on both sides of this. I've seen the good and the bad of that, but that happens a lot. And the people who are doing the management are not the ones you're actually speaking to. Another common situation of this, where you have some experience with bad managers is the company does their SEO, their website, their social media, they do all their landing pages and, and oh yeah, and we do PPC, right? They, they, they, they are a collection of multiple services and they just kind of also throw in PPC. And it's so easy in those situations to just kind of throw that into the report and you have no idea what's actually happening.

10:53Chris Schaeffer: And I found that that very often leads to some really bad experiences where people feel cheated because they were looking at their conversion reports and didn't realize it was all SEO or, you know, it was all PPC and there was no SEO results at all. blending those things can be extremely destructive because you don't realize where your actual value is at all right number four this is the most common question that i get after my many many conversations with people they want to know about other people they want to know chris what's a good click-through rate. Chris, what should my cost per conversion be?

11:39Chris Schaeffer: Chris, what is a good return on ad spend? Like what should my number be? Or my favorite, Chris, how much should I spend on Google ads? What should my budget be? I totally understand. They just want to know, they kind of want to gauge their performance compared to everyone else. And there's certainly answers to those. I mean, I'll tell you now, I'm just going to throw out some general things. A good click-through rate is, you know, two, three percent click-through rate. It's okay. Good. Right. An excellent click-through rate might be five, six, seven percent click-through rate. You know, a phenomenal might be above that.

12:18Chris Schaeffer: Okay. So there you go. There's a freebie. Common question. What's a good cost per conversion? That one is impossible for me to tell you. Are you selling a widget? Are you selling, let's say, phone cases that sell for$12 each? Well, a cost per conversion of$12 is very, very bad for you. However, those of you that maybe do commercial vehicle rentals, a$12 conversion is phenomenal for you. So there's really no direct way to answer that. But the third one, there actually is a good ROAS. I can actually tell you because that's actually subjective to what you're doing. And a quick explanation, ROAS is return on ad spend.

13:10Chris Schaeffer: So however much you have spent on Google, a ROAS, a return on ad spend is how much you've brought back from Google, right? How much value has been returned to you from Google. So a good ROAS kind of a minimal is like a 150%, 200%, something like that. You know, like you might be scraping by with a ROAS of about 150, 200, a acceptable and, you know, and good ROAS might be getting into like to 250, 300 range and a phenomenal ROAS would be something closer to a 500, 600, 700 and up. So there you go. There's three of the most common questions asked and answered. Now you might say, Chris, you said budget too.

14:05Chris Schaeffer: What's the proper budget? I am, I'm not answering that. If I say that on the podcast and someone says, Chris, you said X was the right budget for me and that, you know, that was way too much or, you know, I can't believe you said I'm not answering that. That is way too subjective. No, no, no, no. That, that, that depends on many factors. So we're going to move on, move on to number five. This one also hurts. I find number five people accept google suggestions the majority of the time they heavily trust pop-up recommendations so these little pop-up things that says hey you should do this hey your budget's limited you should increase it hey your bids are too low you should increase those hey these keywords seem like good keywords you should add these hey, this is good ad copy.

14:58You should use our ad copy and delete yours. By and large, I find that people take those recommendations.

15:08Sometimes they're okay. They're never great. Sometimes they're okay. Sometimes they don't hurt the campaign. Oftentimes they do. Oftentimes those recommendations, those suggestions hurt the campaign because they add variety. They add volume. They add a distance to your campaign that it may not need. It may not need those keywords because those are extremely wide-reaching, very broad keywords. And in fact, you'd do better if you didn't add those because they're they're not really ideal for the kind of client you're wanting to reach. So, I mean, number five is upsetting because very often it's, you know, it's, it's a damaging aspect and they don't know.

16:01They don't know. They assume that these are good things. And number five always leads into number six, because number six is I often find that people have very cluttered, unorganized accounts.

16:21This seems so much more universal than it used to be. And let me explain my reason for why this seems so much more prevalent than it used to be. I think I have a reason for this.

16:37um years ago back when i started google ads i started google ads in 2003 so you know add five years to that you know 2008 2009 you know the strategies were to add highly structured ad groups with very specific keywords and there was even things you know that were called uh skag campaigns were single keyword ad group where you'd have one ad group and it just had one keyword in it. That was, you know, that was kind of the style. And so therefore, many campaigns were highly structured because that was really the best way to do it. You would essentially micromanage your campaigns. Now, now I find that campaigns are the opposite.

17:27there there's very little separation or testing happening and i think the reason for that is because people just trust that the system's doing the best for them they just trust that hey i'm gonna put this money into the machine and you know everybody says it works so it should work i'm gonna tell you right now that's not the case you're guaranteed nothing other than just clicks. I mean, you're not even really guaranteed clicks, but you're going to get clicks. You're guaranteed no results. The system has no, gives no promises of success. And the amount of trust that people have is a bit daunting.

18:15You know, it's upsetting because, you know, for example, this is what I mean by very little separation or testing. What I mean is there's no, there's no more than just one ad group in the account. There's no more than just one asset group in the performance max campaign. They don't add any new keywords. They just keep the ones they've always had. There's no experiments to test new bidding strategies or to test different structures or things like that. And it's all just kind of thrown in there. So that's number six. Accounts are so much more cluttered and unorganized than they used to be. And I find that that's a pretty systematic thing.

19:05I have number seven and eight. Seven is one of my favorites

19:09Chris Schaeffer: because I'm gonna tell you something that I hear almost everyone say. It's so funny. It's universal. Everyone says this. They say these exact words. which I'm going to tell you in a second. Reminder, please check out my sponsor, optio.com slash PSP. They are an AI integration tool for LinkedIn, Meta, Microsoft, Google Ads, and TikTok. They have expanded their tool to now work with your data and improve it in a much deeper way. Optio.com slash PSP. The link is in the description of this podcast. Number seven. Number seven, your gut is probably correct. That's something I've learned. These are the phrases I hear.

19:58I hear three phrases, and typically they're right. The first phrase I hear is, Chris, I know it works, but it could be better. And largely, that person is right. They're right. It is working. It is decent. It's actually, you know, it's got some good stuff here. Something to work with. There's some successes, some value. Okay, great. It could be better. Yes, there are some things we can improve. So typically that's true. B, right, the second one, 7B is, Chris, something is wrong. Something's wrong. This is broken. This is not working. Something's wrong. They're typically right. They're typically right.

20:46There's probably something wrong with the account. It may have never worked or may have stopped working at some point. Something's broken. They're probably right. And I find that to be largely true. Their gut told them. They have a feeling. They notice something's off. Something's not happening that used to be happening in the past. Something's gone wrong. And then number three on my point number three on point number seven is, Chris, I know enough to be dangerous.

21:22I hear that phrase so much. You might be even listening to this podcast and have done coaching with me and realize you said that to me in an email or a phone call or in a coaching session. You've said that to me. I absolutely know for certain there are people that are listening to this right now that have said that to me. Chris, I know enough about Google Ads to be dangerous. I know enough to be dangerous. That is absolutely true. That's actually one of the probably worst things that you can be in is where you know enough to be dangerous. So what you mean by that is that you know enough that you're not as cautious as you should be.

22:05You know enough to think that you're going to make the right decision. You know enough to be able to go in and what to click and feel confident enough that it's going to be right. And that can very much be dangerous. And people end up screwing some things up. So, yeah, I know enough to be dangerous. That's a good one. And you're probably right. You're probably right.

22:31Chris Schaeffer: So number eight is a new development and it is so pervasive, so universal that it is sweeping the nation. It is sweeping the world. and I find after my 1 ,700 different coaching sessions that I've done, I find that nowadays basically everyone has used AI at some point. They've used AI and I want to talk about that in these last couple minutes

23:15because what I find is they'll take a screenshot of their account or they'll upload a copy of their Google Ads report. And what happens is AI gives instructions but largely misses the big picture. um and this does a massive injustice to um your account and your confidence level knowing that you you know here's what i need to do um because ai is extremely complimentary about what you're asking about um kind of the default setting is that you know you say hey um this is i don't like this and it said absolutely that is bad sure here's here's some things you can do to fix that um it you know it never questions the the the the the query itself because here here's what i found a lot of people that used ai to make changes or adjust things or something like that what they really needed was for someone to tell them hey stop your ads this is all bad this is a waste of money.

24:28I mean, I just did an audit of someone's account. Today, they listened to the podcast, they reached out to me, and they said, hey, could you do an audit of my account? I audited the account, and I told them in a quick little five-minute video, I said, stop spending money on Google right now. Every penny of this was a waste. I explained how it was a waste. I showed them, like, they're like, oh my goodness, you're right, and they coached, they booked a coaching session. So it was, um, uh, a disservice for anyone to, to ask questions about, Hey, how can I do this? You know, they talked to AI and it, someone should have, should have told them to stop entirely.

25:09Um, for example, you tell Google, Hey, I'm not getting any conversions in my account. And then AI comes back with an answer. Hey, change your ad copy.

25:22I'm not getting any conversions and Google says change your ad copy if you don't understand how bad that is let me say it in a different way say it in a layman's way hey AI my car isn't turning on anymore and AI says hey maybe you should try painting your car a new color yeah that's the level of advice that uh that ai is giving here and um in reality those of you that fall victim to this really uh platonic non-committed worthless cheap advice that just compliments everything you do and gives you really just you know kind of simple subtle answers about certain things, about really specific things that in the end misses the big picture.

26:12I think it's highly destructive. I think it hurts a lot of accounts. And I've seen it. I've seen it more and more. So that's it. That's my eight things that I've seen over my 1700 coaching sessions that I've done, at least. I know I've done more, but I wanted to give a solid number. I know that for sure. So if you would like to reach out to me about coaching, you can do so. Chris Schaefer.com. Send over your information. I can do an audit on your account. You can book a coaching call with me. If not, maybe you already have. And we've already talked and it's great. And you're just listening to the podcast.

26:52Well, you will catch me here next Monday, as always. Thank you.