Answering Your Questions! (Episode 537)

0:18Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaeffer and today I am answering your questions. I have people that write me questions and I appreciate your patience. I know I haven't been doing the Q &A as often, but today's the day. I can be contacted if you would like to send in a question for next time. PaidSearchPodcast at gmail.com is the podcast email. You can send your question in and I will try and do these a bit more often. um today's episode i have two questions and they're going to cover some clarifications about things i've talked to in the in the past i'm going to give some very specific details around ad strength and also i'm going to talk a little bit about how i use ai and where i find it to be useful and where i don't find it to be useful um and then at the end of the show i was asked for more clarity around the AI overview on Google.

1:21How does that work? Because I mentioned that in previous shows, and I want to go into a bit more about what that is and how it's going to be affecting your ads. So if any of that interests you, stick around because it's going to be a very informative episode. I do these episodes every Monday. I've been managing Google Ads campaigns for just about 25 years now, and it's all I do.

1:43Chris Schaeffer: So I share my knowledge for free. There's no paid part of this podcast. You get the full thing right here free on paidsearchpodcast.com. So I appreciate you being here. And how I can be here is through my sponsor Optio. So Optio is my favorite Google Ads Management software. Um, it does the thing that I need done the most in that it provides me answers quickly and gives me information to optimize my accounts quickly in Google ads. As a Google ads manager, I have a lot to be responsible for. I have a lot of things that I need to know quickly and get them done. So if you're managing one account and you don't really look at the account very often and you kind of forget, okay, what was I supposed to check?

2:38Chris Schaeffer: And it doesn't become second nature. This will help you when you're new to Google Ads or just a bit rusty. It'll provide information. You'll be able to work with that information quickly and easily. Now, for those of you that manage Google Ads accounts in bulk, like me, this will help you crank through those things very quickly, get more done, get more done efficiently. And the tool has been revamped. It is a brand new tool that is more powerful than ever, and you can try it for free at optio.com slash PSP. You can try this special offer for a 28-day free trial. That's optio.com slash PSP. The link is in the description.

3:18Chris Schaeffer: Tell them you heard about it here on the podcast, and you get that exclusive offer for 28 days. All right, let's jump in. The first question comes from Ben. And Ben's question is, Hi, Chris, big fan of the show. I was listening last week, and you mentioned some things about ways people use AI for managing campaigns and the pitfalls. I'm wondering if you would do a show or mention on one of the shows, ways that you use AI currently to manage your campaigns, or if you do use AI. Well, thank you, Ben. And I will, I will speak a little bit about that now. So I think I'm going to talk about the ways that I do like to use it.

4:03Chris Schaeffer: And I find two areas to be quite useful. And then I'm going to talk about how I do not use it and why I don't use it in those ways. So number one is this. I do use it and I love AI for ad copywriting. Years before, I found ad copywriting to be one of the hardest grinds to writing and building campaigns. It was something that I found to be extremely monotonous. I found creativity in other people's ads, and mine as well, to be extremely boring, very low creativity the same kind of throwaway things that were copied and pasted into ads contact us today you know in business since 1994 you know i just who cares this does not drive anyone's attention this is not unique it provides no depth or context that invites the person to click that differentiates you.

5:10Chris Schaeffer: So I absolutely love telling Google to write headlines for me and, you know, write headlines that are based on this angle. Write me something that is, you know, you, you know, very unique or very edgy or very aggressive or in a much more informational way or write me ads that are kind of a reflective question, you know, looking for X, you know, looking for this, that kind of reflexive question. And all the time, it provides really interesting things that, you know, I might use only a few of the headlines and then write some of my own, but it provides so much more creativity just because of the volume that it spits out.

6:01Chris Schaeffer: And, you know, when you're building building a campaign, it takes a lot of time to do the keyword research and all the kind of stuff, which I've talked about how I do that in the past, but you get to the ads once you've built it all out. And now you're kind of like, oh, you know, copy, paste, copy, paste. And this really breaks that up. And I, I enjoy it. I think it is so much more enjoyable to write ad copy where I have some system that can spit out new ideas that aren't just the same thing. So I might be building a certain type of client's account. And I may not know a whole lot about it, but it can provide insights and ad copy based on the page that I send it to.

6:47Chris Schaeffer: I say, hey, read this page, and then give me some ad copy based on the content of this page. It's another way I love to do it. I can even ask it, the second category of how I use AI to explain this industry to me. Very often, I'm approached by people that do things I know nothing about. That's probably not too hard to imagine because I do one thing. So I specialize in Google Ads. So there's a lot of things I don't know about. But some industries I didn't even know exist. Some terms I don't even fully understand how, you know, this is working and, you know, what this has to do with anything. I was recently working on an account about business valuations.

7:36Chris Schaeffer: You know, people that want to sell their businesses. I have to understand what are these, you know, what is this? What's the mind frame of someone who wants to get a business valuation? So I can use AI instead of reading the person's website. which can be good or bad, or looking up stuff on different things. I could ask it the things I want to know. Like, what's the core issues that someone's looking for? What's their main hangups or concerns when someone's looking for a business valuation service company? I wouldn't be able to... The amount of reading and research I'd have to do just to get those top three, four, five bullet points is so much more work.

8:25Chris Schaeffer: And I can get that information and understand nuances that I had much more difficulty doing before. So you can see I use it as a creative for ad copy. I use it for information, for understanding the industry or different nuances within an industry. Here's what I don't use it for, and I don't recommend that people do this. I do not use it for keyword research. I do not use it to build my campaigns. If you want to know how I do keyword research, I have done probably a couple episodes on how I specifically do it. And I've talked about how I build campaigns. It's based on a relevance. It's based on priority.

9:18It's based on a tiered system, based on what I'm trying to achieve in the account. It's different every time. AI doesn't see the nuance or approach it in the way that I want.

9:28Chris Schaeffer: And anyone who uses this tool to do that, the intimacies of that strategy are lost. Very often I find a lot of inconsistencies or things that just don't really work very well. The campaign, I'm working with an account right now that was built by the person using AI. And it's just kind of a mess. I don't really say I absolutely don't see the structured formula that I would have built it in it's just kind of bulky and a lot of keywords a lot of repetition a lot of stuff that's just fluff and I don't find it to be useful so I don't like it for building my campaigns I don't like it for my keyword research.

10:19Chris Schaeffer: You say, well, why is it, you know, wouldn't it do great at giving you keyword ideas? Here's the problem. AI is going to go after what has the most volume. And if you've listened to me talk about my theory on keywords, volume is not my primary concern. I'm working right now on an account that is doing IV therapy. They provide a IV therapy services. That's the account I was building right before I started recording this podcast. So that's what's on my mind. And when I jump into their account, do you know what I see the most in their old campaigns of what they were advertising? It was just IV therapy.

11:06Chris Schaeffer: It was just the word IV therapy and very short phrases like that. But this was, surprise, not working for them because this is a system based on volume. And a system based on volume is not going to be based on

11:29Chris Schaeffer: someone who's looking to purchase, right? Someone who's looking to take action. The way I see Google Ads is you can focus on volume or you can focus on value. Those two things are not always the same. They're very rarely the same. So instead, when I'm building this IV therapy campaign, instead I'm focusing on mobile IV therapy services. Someone who's just searching for IV therapy, sure, there's a ton of that, but some people are just looking it up. Some people, who knows what their purpose of doing it is, but I would rather go after smaller searches that are more potent in their ability to bring in traffic that converts.

12:17And I don't find that AI knows that, at least not right now.

12:23Chris Schaeffer: There's no system that builds a campaign the way I would build it. And I'll tell you, if you don't believe me, and you say, well, it worked for me. You know, I think it works great. It does build it the way I can tell it to build it the way that I want it to build. I'll tell you that you'll lose your edge. You will not stand out. You won't sharpen your ability to run or manage Google ads campaigns when you outsource to a machine. So I don't advise leaning on that kind of system because if Google Ads is a career for you, if it's a job, ask yourself, are you really providing the service that you need to provide if you're outsourcing some of the core parts of what you're supposed to know about?

13:24what you're being paid for. When someone pays me to build a Google Ads campaign, it's based on my strategy and my point of view. There's a million ways it could be built. I'm going to choose the way that I would do it. And I don't believe that AI duplicates that correctly ever. So there we go. That is a great question, Ben. Very long answer, but hopefully that was useful to you. All right, we have Taylor. writing in.

13:55Chris Schaeffer: He says, Hi, Chris, I hope you're well. I run a small Google Ads agency in the UK. I've been listening to the podcast for a while now. So thank you for everything you put out. I've listened to episode 532 on RSA ad strength. And I wanted to ask you to clarify one point. You made a case that a poor rating directly causes higher CPCs, fewer impressions, lower positions. My understanding, from what Google has said publicly, is that ad strength isn't an input to ad rank or quality score. It is more of a pre-launch diagnostic. So I'd always treated it as something to get out of the poor ad strength, and then it doesn't matter from there.

14:34Is that something you've seen directly in accounts, or is it more that the problems a low ad strength rating are drags performance down? okay taylor great question very very detailed so let me step back because i try and make this podcast accessible for those that are as as well knowledgeable as taylor is and those that are new so let me explain rsa is a responsive search ad that's what that stands for so we're talking about ad copy. We're talking about ads that you build in Google ad search. And what Taylor's referring to is when you write this ad, there is an ad strength, um, kind of a circular chart.

15:21I don't know what to call it. It's kind of a bar that you fill up and you can go from poor all the way up to excellent. And he's saying that perhaps in conflict to what I had said that I made the case that a poor rating directly causes higher CPCs, fewer impressions, and lower positions. That would imply that I am equating add strength to add rank because add rank, or quality score, as he referred to it, is directly responsible for your CPCs, impressions, and things like that. so this is a tiny detail um that in the end it doesn't really matter but that's what i'm here for is to talk about and discuss these nuances um and the fact is taylor i don't remember what i said but you're probably right i probably left the water a little muddy there because you are 100 correct ad strength does not directly affect your cpcs um but here's what i do find that it does if you have poor ad strength across the board um i think the downstream effect of that is that you do have higher cpcs you do have fewer impressions and you do get lower positions it's not directly because of that but it is a after effect of that situation so for example if I look at an account and this person is saying I'm not getting any traffic my CPCs are really low I have poor quality scores and if I happen to see that every single ad is poor one of the first things I would do is, okay, let's strengthen this ad strength.

17:25Let's get this ad strength up to average, good, excellent. Let's improve that. So you can see that it's, I'm, one of the things that I'm concerned about is that this is leading to that factor. Many years ago, when Google first introduced RSAs and ad strength, and we still had responsive, or sorry, we had expanded search ads back when there was just three headlines and that's all you had to write. I fought that a lot. I hated that I had to write an RSA and I couldn't control my ad copy. So I hung on to my expanded text ads for a long time. And do you know what happened? I got less impressions. I started dealing with poor quality scores.

18:20I started dealing with higher CPCs. My campaign started

18:23Chris Schaeffer: stalling out and how I could tell that something was wrong is that my impression share wasn't changing. So my impression share on my campaign was the same, sometimes better, but I was getting less impressions, less clicks. The whole thing was just, you know, you could look on the graph and just see it just going down. I mean, this was really bad. And I think it was Joey, Joey Bidner, who correctly lectured me about, Chris, I found this to be true in my accounts because of the expanded text ads. And I realized that my, the fact that I'm refusing to use these new responsive search ads was causing my accounts to lose their impression volume.

19:16And because the search impression share was the same, I just was literally ineligible to show on some things because of the lack of RSAs. So, Taylor, great question. Hopefully for those of you that aren't Taylor, followed that and that's helpful to you. I think the whole point, the take-home message here, is if you do have poor ad strength, it absolutely can be a factor in the downstream effects of what that brings, higher CPCs and things like that. But it is not an ad rank direct contribution. But it can seem as though it is doing the same things as ad rank. Okay, so great question. I have one more section here where I'm going to answer questions about the Google AI overview.

20:16I'm going to give you some straight answers about what this is looking like, how this is rolling out. And, you know, Google's actively rolling this out in other countries in different parts, and it's becoming more prevalent. So I'm going to discuss that. Remind you real quick, Optio.com slash PSP is my sponsor. how I get this done every day in my busy schedule to sit down, write this episode out, and make sure that I can provide you with something informative. So if you haven't tried them out, I highly recommend it. It is a fun software to use because it opens up a whole new gateway to your data in a way you've never interacted with it before.

20:53Optio.com slash PSP. All right. So the questions that I'm getting from people about AI overview and how it works and how do they get there and how does this whole thing work. So to restate, I believe what I talked about last week or a couple weeks ago, Google is showing your ads from your search campaigns and your performance max campaigns and your shopping campaigns in the AI overview window. So you probably know what that is, but it's the little AI chat thing that shows up that you can expand the window and you see the whole interface right there on the screen. Your ads are showing up there.

21:42Now, people are thinking, oh, I need to do this. I need to do this to show up in this or I need to turn this on or do this. Let me clarify something. Let's get straight to the point. Google has said publicly on their website, you cannot opt out of this. So in other words, this isn't an option. And whether you want it or not, basically no matter what you're doing, as I'll explain in a second, no matter what you're doing in your Google ads account, you will and can and probably should at some times show up in the AI overview. You don't have a choice. You can't opt out. It's now part of the Google experience.

22:28Chris Schaeffer: So I say that up top. If you don't hear the rest of what I say in a moment, I say that up top because you don't need to turn on anything or do anything different from what you're doing now to show up for these. Basically, every Google search eligible campaign type can show up there. So now we're going to go into some of the details about what this is looking like and some of the things that I found to be a little surprising. For example, you can show up twice in your ad, one in the AI overview and one in Google search. This is not unheard of. There are times when an ad can show up both at the top of Google and at the bottom of Google.

23:20the same advertiser can be there twice. Certainly if you hit the show more results, sometimes that can happen. But this is a whole nother system. We are now saying that you can show up in the AI overview, which might be below the sponsored ads. It might be above the sponsored ads. And when you hit the expand button, your ad can be there in that answer. And as I said, search, shopping, performance max, they're all included. So immediately your question is, okay, everything, Chris, is everything included? Basically the answer is yes.

24:04Broad, phrase, and exact can all trigger ads. And it works the same way that search terms work, search queries work. broad gets a wider aspect of search terms and it can show up in a wider array of ai overview answers phrase is a little less than exact is even tighter so you don't have to have broad match in fact you don't have to have um ai max you don't have to have smart bidding you don't have

24:44Chris Schaeffer: to have the text customization or the final URL expansion. All of, if you are running the most barbaric campaign I could think of, let me, let me describe the most caveman-esque campaign I could think of, a manual bidding campaign that is exact match only and has 15 different ad groups and just a couple keywords in each ad group, maybe even a skag, one keyword per ad group kind of thing and it's running. Maybe you even have some old, actually I don't know if this is true so I won't say that, and you have one ad, one responsive search ad in each one of them. even that can show up in the AI overview it's all eligible so if you're concerned about showing up there Google's advice is that you turn on AI max you start using smart bidding you flip those little switches to turn on text customization and final URL expansion I am here telling you you do not have to do that it is merely a game that they're playing with you to try and get you to spin more.

26:02Chris Schaeffer: If you turn those on, you will spin more. AI Max is like broad match, blown up even more, like a nuclear explosion of broad match. Text customization and final URL expansion is an absolute loss of the driving, the steering wheel on your vehicle. You don't even have the ability to point people to the page that you intended, and Google can change your ad copy text without you realizing it. So there's, it's a massive amount of permission that you give to Google if you just toggle these little switches on. So I'm here today to tell you, you can still be there. If you're running the most barbaric campaign, you can still be there.

26:50Chris Schaeffer: And by the way, that barbaric campaign that I mentioned, I run stuff like that all the time for my clients. Manual bidding with exact match sometimes is the absolute best campaign. In fact, I worked on an account just the other day that Target CPA killed the account. They went from phenomenal success with manual bidding, changed to Target CPA, it almost killed their company if they would have kept it up. that will, that discussion will come around in my next, uh, PPC detective series. I'll get more into that. But, uh, anyway, that is enough for me. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast.

27:38My name is Chris Schaefer.

27:39Chris Schaeffer: I do manage and provide, um, audits and consulting of your Google ads accounts. Uh, if you'd like to reach out to me, chrisshafer.com, the links in the description. otherwise I'll see you guys here next week