The Google Ads Detective: Solving PPC Mysteries, Part One (Episode 534)

0:19Chris Schaeffer: Hello and welcome to the paid search podcast. My name is Chris Schaeffer. And today, we're going to do a new series that I'm starting right here called the Google Ads Detective. where I am going to give you three cases, as I'm calling them, three real-life situations from recent coaching sessions that I've done with people and looked at their Google Ads accounts. I'm going to present facts. I'm going to present the changes made to the accounts, and then I'm going to present the resolution. And this is going to be a really fun exercise for you to be able to follow along, possibly throw out some ideas.

0:59Chris Schaeffer: is what do you think the problem was? What do you think the solution might be? And then you get to find out. You're gonna be able to practice your Google Ads problem-solving skills, and I guarantee you're going to learn something. So stay tuned for today. It's gonna be packed. As I said, there's gonna be three real-life cases that we're gonna go through. And before I do that, I wanna tell you about my sponsor, Optio. So Optio is an online software to help you improve your Google Ads management. So you want to improve your skills. That's what you're here to do. You want to get better at managing your Google Ads account, whether it's one account or 50 accounts.

1:38This tool is designed to help you get more done faster.

1:43Chris Schaeffer: So they've recently upgraded the tool to make it even better. Now you can work with multiple platforms, not just Google Ads. But besides that, it now has an integrated AI system so you can work with your data. It's a power tool that helps you to work through, chat with your data, and get more done. It's an amazing tool. You can try it for free at optio.com slash PSP. That's O-P-T-E-O dot com slash PSP for a 28-day free trial of the tool. Just tell them you heard about it right here, and you get that offer. Now, this one is for anyone who's been running Google search ads for a client or for yourself.

2:25A federal court has found that Google illegally monopolized search text advertising and used that power to raise prices. The claims being brought argue that Google designed its auction to systematically inflate costs for advertisers. Court records show that Google raised the search price ad price by 5 to 15 percent at a time.

2:48Chris Schaeffer: So rising CPCs that you put down to competition, part of that may have been the platform itself. Because of that ruling, you can pursue damages. And antitrust laws allow up to three times what you prove. But Google's terms don't allow a class action. Every advertiser has to bring their own claim through private arbitration. A Fortune 500 company has a legal department for things like that. you probably don't. Silver arbitration law handles these claims. Mark Beckett runs their arbitration practice. He led an arbitration at Latham and at Cooley, the firm Google used to defend these claims. He has over 30 years of experience in arbitration, over 150 disputes, and he's even taught the subject at Harvard Law.

3:37If you spend at least$10 ,000 on Google Ads, search since 2016. They'll assess your account at no charge. That includes spend on accounts you've since stopped using. And the account doesn't need to be billed in the U.S. Thousands of U.S. advertisers already filed. Your client will hear about this. They'll rather hear it from you, though. And to get your free assessment, go to silverarbitration.com slash PSP. The link is in the description of this episode. Attorney advertising, legal services provided by Silver Arbitration Law, PLLC. Prior results do not ensure a similar outcome. Cases against Google are pursued through an individual arbitration under Google's service agreement, not in court, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google LLC.

4:34Chris Schaeffer: All right, let's jump into what I'm calling case number one. So I'm not going to give details about who this client is. These are all real clients that I have spoken to, real clients that I've worked with. And I do coaching. I do coaching. I've been doing it for years. I've done thousands, I think, of these coaching sessions over the years. And sometimes, you know, there's some amazing lessons that I've learned and some real investigations that I've had to do. So let's go through the first one. Case file number one. here are the facts this is a lead generation account they're doing a professional service and it is a nationally provided account so they're going to be advertising all over the united states fact number one there was a 70 drop in their traffic volume okay uh there was also 120 % increase in their cost per click, right?

5:40So imagine this, right?

5:42Chris Schaeffer: You're getting a certain amount of clicks. Suddenly it drops 70 % and your costs go up per click 120%. This is very bad. Starting off pretty bad. 60 % decrease in spend. So not only are you spending more per click and getting less, you're now just slowing down. The spend has slowed down 60%. You're getting less of everything. The whole thing's just bogging down almost to a stop. It's also getting the same search impression share that it was before. So that makes it quite confusing. How can the search impression share be the same if you're getting so much less? And suddenly, out of nowhere, where the auction insights now show competitors as though they've popped out of nowhere.

6:34Chris Schaeffer: Before, the auction insights showed no one. It showed no competitors at all. And now suddenly they show competitors. Okay? So, that's the facts of the case. Huge drop in traffic. Huge spike in the cost per click. Everything's spending less and less and less. Same search impression share, but suddenly auction insights are showing that your competitors are now on your ads. What do you think happened? All right. So the fun part about this practice is that you can make some guesses and then I'll tell you. I'll give you the answer. But I do want you to think about it. You know, what would cause that?

7:17Chris Schaeffer: And as I teach in this podcast all the time, is that there's only two ways to really think about Google Ads. There's the targeting, there's the keywords, right? There's the content side of Google Ads, and then there's the bidding side. So if you're trying to decide, well, where do I go first? You know, think, well, do I think this is a bidding thing or do I think this is a keyword targeting thing? Well, here's the answer. All keywords at a previous point were changed from broad to phrase and exact keywords. Okay, so there's your answer. It was a targeting change. So immediately the drop in traffic volume, this can be explained by reducing broad match keywords down to phrase and exact.

8:21Chris Schaeffer: But that's not the full story. The account was or the campaign was running max clicks. It was running a max clicks bidding strategy. And it was changed to max conversions. So this is a situation where two things were changed. So I'm digging into this and I'm looking at it, trying to figure out what in the world happened. And here's what we saw after all of this had gone through. The result of this change beyond the bad things of the slowdown in traffic, the higher CPCs. Here's the good news. Here's the amazing transformation that this account made. conversion volume, because they are tracking conversions, is up 300%.

9:11Chris Schaeffer: The cost per conversion is down. Okay, before I tell you this number, let's go back. Remember, their cost per click increased 120%. So their cost per click, if they were paying$4, They're now paying over$8 per click. It more than doubled. So what do you think happened to their cost per conversion? It went down. It went down. Conversions went up and cost per conversion went down. So not only are they getting 300 % more conversions, they're getting cost per conversions that are 92 % less. so I mean this is incredible I mean this is this is this is a case file of not failure but success so here's and each time we go through these cases there's going to be three as I said each time we go to these cases I'm going to explain what the lessons learned from this example that you can take home here so the lesson learned here is the broad match keywords plus the max clicks bidding strategy was spreading traffic across really generic searches, really indiscriminately.

10:29The fact is, is that it was just showing searches wherever it could get the cheapest traffic.

10:36Chris Schaeffer: And because of that, the clicks were cheap. It's not that the cost per click skyrocketed. It's that it suddenly became competitive on the meaningful terms that actually drove conversions. Okay, so the clicks were cheap, and now they're competitive. Okay, so let's answer a couple of these other puzzle pieces that are also a part of it. Chris, you said that auction insights had showed up. That's right. Auction insights had shown zero competitors on these terms. And this is something you have to know about Auction Insights. Auction Insights only tells you competitors that are showing up on your keywords within a significant portion of your impressions.

11:30Chris Schaeffer: So if competitors are showing very rarely or perhaps more accurately, very irregularly, you may get absolutely no auction insights data on your competitors because your keywords are spread thin across thousands, ten thousands of impressions. and therefore any measurable amount of actual competitors that are showing up consistently with you is not there. So there were no auction insights registering because they were not even on the radar of any competitor terms. They were not being competitive on these terms at all. So narrowing the traffic by changing their match type from broad to phrase and exact and changing to automated bidding turned into a huge improvement.

12:30Chris Schaeffer: A massive improvement. Even though they're paying more per click, they're getting so much more out of Google Ads. A huge increase in conversion volume, a slight decrease in spend. For now, they actually ended up deciding to increase the budget now that they realized what was going on once I showed them all of this information. and it's a happy story. Not everyone's going to be happy, but this is a great situation. This is a case of wide generic traffic that ended up driving just an amazing result for this particular client. All right, so let's go on to case file number two, completely unique situation.

13:17Chris Schaeffer: This is also a lead generation client. They are local only, and they're doing medical scheduling, like medical appointments and things like that. So local medical lead generation. Here are the facts. the total conversion volume and the conversion rate in the account is at an all-time high all-time high it is the count is soaring it's doing very well um and the cost per conversion is very low it's not the absolute lowest that it's ever been but it's very low very comparable to previous months. Some months further back, it's doing very well, 30%, 40 % less than it was before. But they let me know that their cost per booking, so the cost that they actually pay, if they look how much they spent on Google and how many bookings they actually get from Google, that cost per booking was very high.

14:35Chris Schaeffer: so there's a contrast here google ads says there's tons and tons of conversions they're saying yeah but the actual conversions that move the needle for us are very rare all right so here's here's some more facts the campaigns are running a target cpa with a very tight goal a very specific goal you know a very low number so we'll just make up some stuff like, you know, let's say their target CPA bidding goal is, you know, like$15. Very aggressive lead generation model. Okay. And then here's the final clue. There are three conversion types. There are call from ads. There is call from website and there's scheduled booking.

15:25okay i've given you enough information to answer and diagnose what the problem is here this one might be a little bit easier hopefully but do you know do you know what the problem has turned out to be well here's the answer the call from ad conversion action was 90 of their

15:48Chris Schaeffer: total conversions. So if they got a hundred conversions in a month, 90 % of those conversions in Google ads were call from ads. That is what the target CPA bidding system was doing to their account. It was pushing and pushing and pushing for more conversions and it was relying on those call from ads. And guess what those call from ad conversions are? Junk. Total junk. Absolute crap. People are calling, you know, they're looking for other medical practices or, you know, other competitors or things like that. They're calling and, you know, they're looking for the wrong kind of service or, you know, just all kinds of, you know, they call it spam.

16:32Chris Schaeffer: It wasn't spam, but it was spam to them. And Google was just killing it. It was just doing great, doing great. So, did you get it right? What would you do? what would you do at this point? Well, I'll tell you what I did. I removed the call asset. I removed the call asset and remove the call from ad conversion action. So I said, okay, Google, great. You're going to continue to maintain, um, you know, an, an aggressive target CPA, um, for right now, you know, we might raise that in the future, but for right now, I'm just going to take out call from ads. You no longer even show a phone number in the ads, and you no longer can even get conversions.

17:23Chris Schaeffer: Call from ads is no longer a conversion goal for this campaign. That's a pretty aggressive change, I'll tell you. Pretty aggressive. Well, the result of this, as you might expect, is the cost per conversion spikes. If they were getting $100 cost per conversion, you know, might go up to$300,$400 cost per conversion. But what happens? Well, suddenly calls from the website and scheduled bookings are now the only conversions that it tracks. The conversion rate drops, the cost per conversion spikes, but the reality is the quality of their leads improved. Now Google was only able to get success signals from the right conversion, not just some crap phone call conversion that was not doing them any good.

18:18Okay, this is a great solution, because now you can manage your quality of lead with a simple change in just saying, okay, all of this and none of that. right so another possible solution to this would have been value-based bidding which i talked about a few episodes back value-based bidding would have been a good solution here but they were not able to do that for various reasons um so this was a simple solution so okay so that is

18:56Chris Schaeffer: case file number two i have case file number three which i'm going to lay out um here at the end of the show. Before I do that, I want to remind you about Optio.com slash PSP, the online Google ads management software that I recommend, the only one that I recommend because it can help you get things done faster from digging into your data to get real answers about what you need, about what you want to get done, get solutions in a way that you've never been able to get them before. That's optio.com slash PSP. And again, I want to tell you about silver arbitration. If you remember, a federal court has found that Google illegally monopolized search text advertising and used that price, used that power to lower prices.

19:45The claims being brought argue that Google designed its auction to systematically inflate costs for advertisers. Court records show that Google raised search ad prices by 5 to 15 percent at a time. So the rising CPCs that you put down to competition, part of that may have been the platform itself. Because of that ruling, you can pursue damages and antitrust law allows up to three times what you prove. But Google's terms don't allow a class action. Every advertiser has to bring their own claim through private arbitration. And a Fortune 500 company has a legal department for that. You probably don't.

20:20Silver Arbitration Law handles these claims. Mark Beckett runs their arbitration practice.

20:24Chris Schaeffer: He led arbitration at Latham and at Cooley, the firm Google used to defend these claims. He has over 30 years of experience in arbitration, over 150 disputes, and he's even taught the subject at Harvard Law. If you spend at least$10 ,000 on Google search since 2016, they'll assess your account at no charge. That includes spend on accounts you've since stopped using, and the account doesn't need to be billed in the U.S. Thousands of U.S. advertisers have already filed. Your clients will hear about this. They'd rather hear it from you. To get your free assessment, go to silverarbitration.com slash PSP.

21:00Attorney advertising legal services provided by Silver Arbitration Law PLP LLC. Prior results do not ensure a similar outcome. Cases against Google are pursued through individual arbitration under Google Service Agreement, not in court, not affiliated with or endorsed by Google LLC. case file number three okay so moving into case file number three lead generation again so all three of these are lead generation this is a very niche service very specific very technical you don't you if i if If I said what it was, you wouldn't even know what that meant.

21:45Chris Schaeffer: And it's advertising nationally. So only very specific terms. Okay, so let's go through the facts. Fact number one, conversions are very inconsistent. All of a sudden, conversions have become very inconsistent. Previously, they were very steady. There was always like a minimum of two or three every day. and it would go up and down, but never a point when there were zero. And now suddenly there are days when there's zero, days when there's one. And then it spikes up and then zero again. Very inconsistent. Not what they had seen before. Fact number two, cost per conversion is down 33%. Huh. Okay.

22:34Chris Schaeffer: So it's a cheaper acquisition cost, but the cost per click has spiked 60%. And the click volume is up 51%. And this spend is up 150%. So you can see spending more, more, more, getting less and less consistency in its process here. and it's paying more per click and the impressions are spiking. So what's happening here? I'll tell you this one. This one's really hard. From the information I've given you, it's really hard. But let's go through it. Do you think that this is a targeting issue? Okay, a keyword issue, right? It doesn't sound like a keyword issue, right? why would the cost per conversion go down, the spend go up, right?

23:42And it's getting less leads. There's less conversions. There are less conversions, but they cost less if they would have gone from phrase to broad or broad to phrase. That doesn't seem to fit. You see how these numbers seem to be inconsistent. so I would point you towards a bidding change. There's something happening with bidding that's causing this inconsistency, and you might say, well, Chris, how can I spot something that is

24:18Chris Schaeffer: a bidding problem versus a targeting issue? And the answer is, when it's a bidding problem, seems more like an engine problem. It's a lot of conflicting things. Things don't follow a set pattern very often with bidding. You know, things are inconsistent, as I mentioned. You know, things kind of stall out. You know, for some reason it was doing this, now it's doing this. Everything doesn't seem to be moving in the same kind of direction whenever it's only a bidding change. Sometimes, that's what happens. So, make your guess. i've given you a hint it is bidding so it was a bidding change so here's the answer the account was changed from a target cpa bidding to a target roes okay this absolutely killed the account the account was getting very steady conversions and suddenly it's inconsistent.

25:21Chris Schaeffer: Like the system's struggling to figure out how can I get more value out of this conversion? How can I drive more value, value, value? It's not shooting for a certain acquisition goal, certain number of conversions per$100 spent. It's now trying to get value. And this value system, this TROAS bidding strategy was a disaster. It killed the account because not only because target ROAS is largely inconsistent compared to target CPA. I've talked about that before. I ranked my favorite and least favorite bidding strategies in previous episodes. You can go back and listen to there about how much I crap on target ROAS.

26:08But what happened is, or what the problem is, is that this particular client, all conversions are the same conversion value.

26:20Chris Schaeffer: They're all the same conversion value. So one conversion is worth 100. Another conversion, worth 100. And then this conversion over here, worth 100. Every one of them is 100. The target ROAS system is trying to squeeze more value out of a hard-coded static conversion action. and the TROAS is looking and chasing after conversion actions, uh, conversion values that might go up as though an e-commerce, you know, when you buy a hat versus buying a car, right? Very different conversion values. Um, that's not going to happen with this client. Everything was a hundred dollar value because it was just a lead is all it was.

27:00So the TROAS was chasing conversion values that were static and would never change.

27:07Chris Schaeffer: so this was an easy one just change it back to target cpa target roas was killing the account it was causing inconsistencies where there was a steady flow of lead volume they need volume and it wasn't happening so changing it back to target target cpa immediately steadied the campaign back out it started running smoothly again and everyone was happy.

27:40So that is the sound of closing the book on case file number three. If you've enjoyed this, stick around.

27:48Chris Schaeffer: You can subscribe to this podcast because I put out episodes every Monday and you'll probably hear this again because I do coaching sessions every single day. I've done them for years. You can find more about my coaching at chrisshafer.com. You can book a live coaching session with me. I don't have a team. I'm not an agency. It's me. I sell my skill, not a team's fluffed up skill and all this kind of stuff. I've been doing Google ads for over 20 years, 23, 24 years now. So that's what the coaching session is really all about. So I hope you've learned something from this. I hope you've worked out your problem solving skills in Google ads.

28:34and if you'd like to learn more about how you can get in touch with me, you can go to chrisschafer.com. Otherwise, I'll see you guys here next week.