Google Ads Signal vs. Noise: How to Fix Clicks, Spam, and Broken Campaigns (Episode 533)

0:18Hello and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris Schaeffer and today I'm going to help you diagnose that problem that you're having in Google Ads. There is a man that many of you may know, Tim Allen, who's also the voice of Buzz from Toy Story, but this has nothing to do with that. There is a podcast that I was listening to where Tim said the phrase, the noise does not always point you to the problem and I thought that was quite profound he was talking about cars but I thought that was quite profound because that is very true in Google Ads and that's what we're going to talk about we're going to talk about common problems in Google Ads search campaigns and the noise that's being made you know what the problem is, what the result of the problem is, but we're going to go and talk about where to fix the source of that problem.

1:27I have five common problems that people have. Spam leads, your budget is too low, no clicks at all, unqualified leads, and then last is clicks, but no leads at all. Those are what I find to be the most common problems in Google Ads. And I'm going to go through where a good starting place to fix that problem because the noise is a distraction. If just because you're getting spam leads doesn't mean that it's a simple fix in just changing the way that you get leads. I mean, there's more complicated answers and we're going to go through it right now. So I'm going to start with number one, spam leads.

2:15So spam leads is essentially just leads where people don't answer their email after they contact you or, you know, it's not because it was unqualified. It was just junk. You know, somebody called and hung up the form didn't even have any information on it or you know that you were never able to contact

2:44Chris Schaeffer: them again just basically unusable leads so what is likely the problem in this situation well the problem in the situation is I would say unrestricted keywords and I'm going to use that phrase very specifically because I don't mean you need a specific match type. I'm not saying, oh, it's because you have broad match keywords. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that you have unrestricted targeting in your Google ads campaign. So you're getting mostly generic or high funnel searches in your account. It's, you know, it's all a lot of useless traffic that is not really going to be very likely to convert.

3:38And if it does convert, it's going to be, it's going to be junk. So, you know, best way to explain what this, you know, what this looks like, what the solution looks like is essentially to give you an example. So I was recently doing an audit on an account and the account, great to, you know, to my great frustration, looked like it was doing very well. So I thought, oh gosh, I'm not going to be able to help this company. I mean, they have about a seven, eight percent conversion rate, you know, steady conversions, large amount of traffic, cost per click is pretty cheap.

4:18Chris Schaeffer: But then they shared a spreadsheet of what their lead quality was looking like. And it was about 70 % unusable or spam leads. They were very frustrated. And in this instance, they were trying to get traffic around a term like promotional items. So they're selling all kinds of different merchandise promotional items with company logo or company name or product name or something like that on these items. And largely it was just that kind of traffic. It was just promotional items, promotional branded items, you know, and key in here on the fact that it was just items. So this is an example of a very common term that was driving a ton of traffic.

5:15Chris Schaeffer: And And why do you think that this company was going after the term promotional items or promo items or branded promo items? Why do you think? Well, I'm going to tell you. Because they were advised that the highest volume of traffic are on these terms. said, hey, we did an analysis of your industry, and here are the top highest volume searches out there. Well, you know what? Volume does not equal quality. Volume does not equal value. And just because there's a ton of volume in a specific keyword doesn't mean that it's going to bring you qualified leads. Promotional items sounds like someone who is just brainstorming.

6:08Chris Schaeffer: They don't even know if they want a t-shirt or a mouse pad. And maybe they're going to browse your site, see nothing they like, and leave. Or fill out a form and not really be very serious and never actually email you back or never return your calls. I mean, this is going to be very frustrating. So instead, perhaps instead of going after the highest volume terms, maybe go after something a little more qualified like mouse pads with logo, branded mouse pads, promotional mouse pads, giveaway mouse pads, things like that. But these segmentations of the higher volume searches will, of course, have less, but you're going to have much more focused traffic quality where you can send them to the right page instead of sending them to a page, a homepage with hundreds, if not thousands and thousands of products that will never really catch their eye.

7:10So that's number one, spam leads.

7:13Chris Schaeffer: If you're getting them, hopefully that noise that you're getting, look in that direction on possibly how to fix some of your spam leads. So let's go on to number two. Before I tell you about number two, I want to tell you about my sponsor. How I can take time to record these podcasts is because of my sponsor Optio and all the thousands of companies that they have helped around the world improve their Google Ads campaigns. Let me tell you about Optio because you're listening to this podcast and it's going to be of high interest to you to check out this software if you aren't already using it. You can connect Optio to your Google Ads campaigns and it does a deep dive analysis into your account and presents ideas, optimizations, recommendations on how you can improve it.

8:04Chris Schaeffer: And then it has taken a step beyond that. This year, they've upped the tool and done even more to help you get more out of your Google ads. And you can dig into that data. You don't have to wait for it to provide recommendations. You can actually dig in and ask questions. Of course, it has an amazing AI system where you can ask questions, dig into the data, get all kinds of suggestions about ad copy in ways that you think you can improve. Why is my click-through rate low? Why am I getting spam leads? Right? You can ask it about the questions and the noises that you're having in your Google Ads account.

8:42So try it for free.

8:44Chris Schaeffer: Absolutely for free at optio.com slash PSP. You get a two-week free trial. And this is something that, as listeners of this podcast have known, is only available when you go to optio.com slash PSP. you can take your two-week free trial and up it into a 28-day free trial. 28 days for free, so not two weeks, 28 days. You get double the time if you go to optio.com slash PSP. All right, noise number two. So noise number two is my budget is too low. So you think I can never succeed in Google ads because my budget is too low. Well, this one, I have a solid answer for you. This one, I know for sure how you can fix.

9:37And I just have to change the imagery a bit for

9:42Chris Schaeffer: you to help you understand what your problem is. Let's say you're holding a spoon that is about three feet long. And you're going to try and eat a bowl of cereal. And this is a normal bowl of cereal. I would tell you that the problem is not the bowl of cereal that's too small. Your spoon is too big. So in Google ads, if you think that your budget is too insignificant, well, you're taking too big of a bite out of the targeting that you're choosing. So if you offer multiple services. You need to reduce your targeting to just one service. If you only offer one service, then you need to decide, okay, I'm only going to show Monday through Thursday.

10:43Chris Schaeffer: I'm only going to show on maybe a desktop. Maybe you're a B2B company and you're only going to show on desktops. You're going to show Monday through Thursday. You're only going to show from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Thursday. I haven't even talked about the keywords yet, but you can see I've eliminated 60%, 70 % of the hours of the week where my budget could be spending. And now I've reduced it to a very narrow focus. See, my spoon is getting smaller. It seems like the bowl's getting bigger, but actually every time I dip my spoon in there, Every time I get a click on Google ads, my budget reduces at a slower rate.

11:27All right.

11:28Chris Schaeffer: So there's many ways that you can reduce the size of your spoon. I'll let you kind of think about that. But hopefully that imagery helps you to understand your budget is not too small. I have run successful campaigns. I have a gentleman that I've been working with for, I don't know. I mean, it's probably close to six, seven years now that I've been working with. he has a budget of about$300. He's in the legal industry and he has had consistent conversions for years. Don't tell me that your budget is too small. I have successfully been running this guy's budget. I think he's like$300,$500 a month and it's been running for years and he consistently gets conversions in the legal industry.

12:17Chris Schaeffer: Those are not cheap. So let's move on now to noise number three. Noise number three is, Chris, I'm not getting any clicks at all. No clicks. Well, usually whenever I do a lot of coaching. So part of my job is I coach people who book appointments with me. You can book coaching with me for a one hour session and people have, you know, they bring their problems to me and I try and fix them for them. And one of those is, Chris, we've been trying to get this to run for a while. We're getting no traffic at all. I would say that one of the more common reasons for a lack of traffic is they're trying to do exact match only.

13:04They have decided, Chris, well, they don't say this, but I know what's in their mind. Chris, we're terrified of wasting a single penny on Google Ads.

13:15Chris Schaeffer: We cannot imagine getting a single click that is not exactly an exact match targeted keyword. That's exactly what we want. We are using only exact match. So therefore, they have no traffic. They started off on a very narrow target, and they didn't get the phases of success in the right order. Stick around because I want to tell you this is the last one where I talk about the broader picture on how to fix your Google Ads campaigns. That's noise number five, but we'll come back to that in a moment. If it's not exact match, then it's likely because on the other side of things, you've decided there's no way I can get a lead for more than$25 a lead.

14:05It has to be$25 a lead. So you've set your target CPA at$25. You've set your target ROAS at 300%. Or you've set your max clicks bid at 50 cents or a dollar. I'll tell you, you used to be able to get clicks for that on Google. Only people who are getting clicks for that are either people that have been doing it for decades and they've figured out ways to do that. or they're paying for absolute junk traffic. You know, 50 cent clicks, dollar clicks just don't really happen anymore.

14:42Chris Schaeffer: So in some way, you're being overly restrictive. You're getting no traffic because you're being too restrictive with your keywords. You're being too restrictive with your perhaps geographic targeting. Maybe you're using only zip codes or very small radius targets. Stop it. It's not gonna, you have to get, things set straight. You have to accept that there are phases to Google ads and you have to go through phase one to reach phase two, to reach phase three and phase four. Stick around. I'll explain what I mean by that in a moment, but that is absolutely the problem. You're being too restrictive.

15:23All right.

15:24Chris Schaeffer: Noise number four, you're getting a ton of unqualified leads. so many situations it could be the keywords but i'm going to ignore the keywords and we're going to talk about other places that could be causing this problem um so possible one possible way other than keywords on how to stop so many unqualified leads from coming in is to be much more explicit in your ad copy. And I use the word explicit very specifically because I want you to be precise in your ad copy. If your service costs$1 ,500, then you might want to consider including that in your ad copy. if your services are only for businesses are only for commercial clientele then you probably need to explicitly say that in your ad copy improve your ad copy and what i mean by that is don't improve your click-through rate improve the words that you say in your ad copy focus on getting better qualified clicks by being very clear in your ad copy.

16:50And I recently, I think it was my last episode, I talked about ad strength. I talked about pinning. I talked about my go-to framework for ad copy. Be sure and listen to that at episode three, sorry, 532 to hear more about my suggestions on ad copy. It may help you greatly.

17:12Chris Schaeffer: Another possibility if you're getting a lot of unqualified leads is add more call to actions to your website, not just a phone number, not just a little quick little form. You need to raise the quality of your call to actions. Okay, so and then at some point you might notice that, you know, a lot of your unqualified leads are phone calls. So you might end up removing the call, the phone number on your website entirely. And instead, now you only have forms or you have longer forms. I see this happen all the time. This will of course reduce the number of leads that you get, but the leads that you do get will be greatly improved.

18:00All right.

18:01Chris Schaeffer: And one possibility, if you're still getting unqualified leads is you can add revenue to your lead tracking. Specifically, I'm referring to episode 529. If you go back and listen to episode 529, I discuss bidding and running your campaigns based on revenue. Lead tracking can have an attached value. Value-tracked revenue is something that can make a world of difference in improving the quality of your leads. So that is number four, unqualified leads. So the last one, the most common, Chris, I'm getting clicks, but no leads at all. All right. And before I get into this one, I want to remind you, check out Optio.

18:48Chris Schaeffer: If you haven't done it yet, optio.com slash PSP for a 28 day free trial. The link is in the description. okay clicks but no leads um i would say that this is the most common and the most diverse so the the problem the noise is you know hey we're getting clicks with no leads you know what do i need a new bidding strategy do i need to restructure my campaign do i need to create a new account? The answer is no on all of those. It's likely that what you're doing is you have set your campaign up without identifying the fact that you are going to start in phase one of Google Ads. And you must accept that if you try and leap forward into phase two, phase three, or goodness, phase four, you will fail.

19:49Okay.

19:50Chris Schaeffer: And if you want to hear more about this, you should go back and listen to my 10 principles of Google ads. That starts around episode 385 with the strategy referring to strategic relevance. These are the principles of Google ads. The number one principle is strategic relevance. And the number two principle is phases of success. So if you're getting clicks with no leads, I would lay out my argument for the phases of success. There are four phases. And if you are just getting clicks with no leads, you need to go back and make sure that you are getting qualified traffic. That is phase one of Google Ads.

20:36If you can't look at your search terms, if you can't look at the time of day, the location, the device type, your search terms, you look at your ad quality, excuse me, you look at your ad copy, you look at your landing page. And if you can draw a line and say, okay, people are searching for this. They're in these areas. It's this time of day. It's on this device. They're coming to this page.

21:00Chris Schaeffer: And if all of those connect, and you can say with certainty that these are qualified people that are coming to your site, then you are on the path to getting qualified traffic. if that's breaking at any point if the kind of people that you're getting are largely on the wrong device type or they're searching for the wrong things your your search terms are very generic very unqualified very uh just the the they're they're high funnel mid funnel you know they're they're high volume kind of searches very vague unqualified searches if if there's anything in this process or your landing page communicates to the wrong level of intent.

21:55In other words, someone's looking for a mouse pad, a branded mouse pad, as I mentioned before, and you're landing them on a homepage with thousands of products, right? You've now broken this strategic relevance chain and you're not getting qualified traffic.

22:17Chris Schaeffer: So start your campaigns knowing that you have to begin with qualified traffic. Build your campaigns to get qualified traffic. Don't build them to immediately start flowing conversions in. It won't work. You need to start with the presumption that, okay, first I have to get the right people in the door. If I get the right people in the door, my campaigns will start to convert. They'll start to get conversions. Build that pathway and they will come. All right, so those are the five loudest noises in Google ads that I've found. And hopefully those are some ideas to help you improve and get your Google ads vehicle running a little more smoothly.

23:04My name is Chris Schaefer. I've been running Google ads campaigns for over two decades. I work here in my office alone. I don't have a team. If you're looking to find someone to work in your Google ads account that is not an

23:19Chris Schaeffer: agency and actually is a true expert, well, reach out to me, chrisshafer.com. The link is in the description. You can find me there. Otherwise, you'll find me here every Monday. I'll see you then.