Did You Just Break Your Google Ads? 4 Most Dangerous Google Ads Changes (Episode 519)

Speaker A: Foreign. Hello and welcome to the paid Search podcast. My name is Chris Schaefer and today I'm going to talk about Google Ads. Specifically I'm going to tell you about how to break your Google Ads. You probably don't want to know how to, but I can promise you, you want to know how other people have done it so you can avoid those traps. Um, that's going to be at the end of the show. I'm going to start the episode with questions from listeners. I always get really interesting emails from people all around the world. Um, and you can send in your question to me to uh, get in and, you know, have me answer, uh, something that's confusing, frustrating. Any comments you have about the PPC world, let me know. Happy to address it on the podcast. And uh, the email to send those in paid search podcastmail.com that's paid search podcastmail.com to send those questions in. Uh, you can always reach out to me for professional services as well. Chris Schaefer.com the The link is in the description of wherever you are listening or watching to this podcast. And uh, I want to tell you one more quick thing before we get started on this podcast, that there is one reason why I'm able to put time into this podcast every single week for 519 weeks now. Very long time. Uh, and that's because the sponsor of this podcast is Optio. If you're listening to this podcast, Optio is exactly the kind of tool that you need. It is a tool designed for online marketing experts to get more out of their online marketing. It helps you to optimize, find, uh, areas to improve areas to grow your Google Ads, your, um, you know, Meta, LinkedIn, Microsoft ads, TikTok. It does multiple things and it has changed the game in Google Ads optimization and online marketing optimization because now it's become a AI integration power tool. And it's not just recommendations. So previously, all these years I've told you about the recommendation tool of Optio. It is now a power tool to help you analyze, make decisions. Every single screen is going to have an option to analyze this data with AI. So no longer do you need to try and rack your brain to know, you know, how should I understand this data? Now you can have a conversation with your data, which is a whole new level of, uh, optimization, a whole new level of management that you've got to try to believe. So you can try that for free for 28 days. Optio.com PSP that's O P T E O.com PSP the link is in the description. Let them know you heard about it here on this podcast and you'll get that free 28 day upgrade. Otherwise it's just 14. You get 28 days if you go to optio.com PSP all right, let's jump into it. I'm going to start with questions. The first question comes from aj. He, um, has an interesting, uh, point about, uh, some issues they're having with, uh, a PPC agency that they're working with. AJ says hi, Chris, love the show. The PPC agency I work with recommends their analysts use maximize conversions for almost all B2B campaigns. So B2B, that means business to business B2B. So all their B2B campaigns, unless they have a clear marker for T roas, that means they're also using maximized conversions for all their brand campaigns. Does that make sense? AJ goes on to say, since many branded searchers are likely to convert anyway, wouldn't maximize conversions spend more money on clicks? They that would likely come through organic anyway? If the play for branded search visibility is usually defensive and vanity focused, would MaxImpression Share make the most sense? So this is a question I pulled out, uh, from the bag because I particularly was drawn to the fact that, um, AJ mentioned two bidding strategies that are recommended, either maximize conversions or TROAs. Um, so I assume that wasn't a typo because you specifically said troas. Those are two completely different systems. You didn't go from maximize conversions unless you have a target CPA goal. You specifically said TROAS or maximize conversions. This is crazy. If you go back, I actually ranked, um, bidding strategies, and to get to the short answer, one of my least favorite bidding strategies is both maximize conversions and troas. Um, TROAS is a bit better because at least with troas, you have an ability to control the intensity of the ads. You can slow the ads down, but it is near the bott because TROAS doesn't respond in the way that target CPA does. Target CPA? You could set a $50 target CPA and it tends to shrink and, uh, condense the campaign's reach. Whereas, uh, you could set it to a $500 target CPA and it expands the reach. It really accelerates it. Do that same thing with troas, and you cannot guarantee the results that you get. You might go from a 50% troas to a 500% troas, and each time it may do something quite unpredictable. For that reason, unpredictability is really my mortal enemy. In Google Ads, I like to have some predictability, some, some kind of chance of knowing, hey, when I do this, here's what I can expect to happen. I'll tell you what, with T ro as that's not the case. So it baffles me that an agency would say, hey, here, here's the two campaign types that we like. Um, use those. And for some reason this also follows under brand. So getting to AJ's question, AJ, you're exactly right. Brand campaigns are not won and lost based on the number of conversions they're getting. That is a highly misguided, uh, goal. To think, hey, the brand campaign acquired 150 conversions this month. That's up 25% from last month. That person who says that sentence is maybe ignorantly, but they're lying to you, that they probably have other things that, um, you know, that they're gonna tell you that are absolutely not true. I mean, statistics and numbers and metrics can be used in so many different ways to tell a story based on how you share that story. I mean, you can change numbers and change graphs and all kinds of things to imply certain things, but that's not the goal of a brand campaign. A brand campaign should show, um, first position, it should guard your brand. So what a brand campaign does is when someone searches for your company's name or your product, if someone's competing against you to try and steal your traffic, a brand campaign is there to protect that brand, uh, that brand control, not to generate conversions. Many, many, many times do I see companies that have absolutely no one bidding against them and they, and they yet spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars on their brand campaigns and act as though this is an important part of their strategy. They're running a marathon, sprinting, spending tons and tons of money on something. If they were to glance behind them, if they were to look behind them in this race that they're doing, they'd realize no one's there. You're racing against no one. All this praise, all of these amazing metrics, all of these amazing stuff that's, that's showing on, this is showing how you have a incredibly high conversion rate, super high click through rate, very low cost per click, cost per acquisition is, is very, very low. Look how great you're doing. No one's on this race with you. Of course you're in first place. You're by yourself. Every step you take, every dollar you spend in this brand race is a waste of time. Now that's for most people. Now there's absolutely Instances when it's necessary. But I won't make this into a whole speech about that. But that is, it is so common. It is so common and it baffles me. So. You're absolutely right, aj. Not only do they seem to be making very poor decisions in the bidding strategies that they recommend, which have very little control, very little, uh, ability to minutely adjust and tweak and optimize a campaign, they're choosing some of the worst bidding strategies for that. Additionally, they're choosing extremely volatile bidding strategies for brand campaigns. So, yes, impression, uh, share bidding, you know, automated impression share bidding I think is a much better choice. Ideally, I would, um, I would suggest manual. That's, that's what I use. I think a manual bid is a much more, uh, strategic approach. But I know many people are scared of manual. Although I do everything I can to try and make people not scared of manual, I try and make manual a friendly approach. Um, but let's move now to the next question. Uh, Evan Evon, maybe Yvonne, let's say, um, Evon's email was a bit longer, so I'm going to summarize it here. Yvonne shared, uh, frustrations regarding their current company's inefficient meta ad management and their manager's unrealistic lead expectations. So, um, I, of course, I don't get into meta. I don't have anything to do with meta. I don't talk about it here. Um, but I particularly wanted to bring this question to the light because of some of the last segments here. Um, I'm going to read, uh, the email now. It says he wants to hire another ad agency to do paid ads now. Yet I don't trust any ad agency to care as much as I do about the company's ad spend. I feel frustrated. But listening to you hate, uh, on all these ad scammers did help alleviate this feeling. Um, thank you so much, Chris. Okay, so there wasn't really a question, but I wanted to pick up, uh, Yvonne's um, point here that, you know, two things in particular that were said in this message is that there can be nothing more true than someone in an outside company caring less about your success than you will. Even an employee that's working internally will care more about an agency who's working entirely separate and you know, has multiple clients. Now that doesn't mean that they don't care, but they care less. So they care less than you will certainly care less than the owner, the CEO, the, you know, the high up people who are, you know, well, invested into this company absolutely care less than them. So the reason I advocate for this is because I do a lot of training and teaching and showing people how to manage their own Google Ads accounts and take control of the accounts themselves and stop dealing with these liars, scammers. You know, many agencies just, you know, maybe they build websites and they just kind of tack on Google Ads management. They have no idea what they're doing. Especially with AI. I'll tell you what, AI has enabled these lazy people to tack on something and just have AI spit out Google Ads campaign. That is absolute junk. Um, I was looking at an account just today, I was doing an account just today, um, that I had worked with for years and the person I handed it back over to them and they started managing themselves. Turns out they hired an agency to take over at some point and I was shocked at what I had built was such a precise, well oiled, machine and they had taken it to just absolute extremes of trash. Broad match keywords, uh, automated bidding, maximized conversions, absolutely no control and quality of traffic. And lo and behold they reach back out to me because you know, they're, they're having, they're having some issues and I, you know, so I had to help them with that. But um, I mean this is, this is so clear because agencies are paid based on how much you're spending. So even though, you know, there's varying degrees of this, they have an incentive for you to spend more. And the only way in Google Ads you can spend more is if you widen your targeting, you widen, if you, if you open up to more geographic area, you use broad match keywords, you use higher bids, these lead to more spend and thus the agency is going to receive a higher return on their management fees. So I mean I'm not exempt from this myself. I mean I charge based on how much an account is spending, but I try and keep myself accountable to that fact by the very last thing I recommend to a company is to spend more. After I've done everything I can and they still want to scale and they still having problems or you know, whatever problem it is, I try everything under the sun first before I say, okay, now we need to spend more money. I mean I could show you an account I've worked on for probably about a decade. I think I asked the client for the first time in like a decade to increase their spend. Um, you know, it basically came to a point where the market CPCs have increased. You know, things have happened and okay, now after a lot of years, okay, I Would like some more budget to work with. And they're like, okay, sure. I've never asked that before. Um, so the integrity. I try and keep myself at a very high level, but of course, you know, I can't speak for other people very often. I see people working at a very low level of integrity, which is very upsetting. As I've said on this podcast, I hope to bring up the quality of integrity in the PPC world. Um, it's been a long battle, but, uh, I will continue the fight. So Brandon has a question here, a question I don't usually answer on the podcast, um, because most of you may not really care about this, but I decided to answer it. So I'm going to read Brandon's question now. Hi Chris, just wondering if you might have any advice on getting clients. I've been in the PPC space for a long time and I'm transitioning into freelance small agency work focused only on Google Ads for home service businesses. I've tried using Upwork, cold email outreach in niches like landscaping and other service companies, but I'm struggling to get consistent clients. Just curious what works best for you when you were getting started or what you'd recommend to focus on to actually get traction. Thanks so much, longtime fan, Brandon. All right, Brandon. Um, so I was recently speaking to someone that was doing the same thing that you're talking about. I get a lot of questions like this, um, which, you know, it's not that I don't want to help, it's just I've been out of the kind of new startup game for a long time. I'm very blessed to be in a, in a very stable business, uh, where, you know, I have a steady flow of clients. You know, sometimes I turn clients down, which is an amazing privilege to be able to have. Um, so I'm not super versed in what the best strategies are. So what I have to do, I can't give you advice now, but I'm going to tell you one thing that I did looking back that I was shocked about how well this worked and I think it could still work today. Maybe people are already doing it. Maybe, um, you know, maybe it won't work. But regardless, I'll tell you. So back when I started, um, there was a site called Elance, um, long time ago. And it was, it was the big premier, um, site that people, uh, you know, went to to hire people for gig work, as they call it, you know, uh, you mentioned Upwork. Upwork is a, is a post merge of, uh, what Used to be Elance. So elance was a precursor to upwork. So it worked the same kind of way. Everybody would have, uh, you could have a flat rate project you could bid on or you could have an hourly rate that you could show on your profile. Here's what I did. Um, I went and looked for Google Ads managers, uh, in the U.S. you know, just like me, uh, people that had some experience, had some good ratings and I went through their profiles and I looked and sorted based on who's, you know, what everyone's cost per hour was, so their hourly rate to work on a Google Ads account. And I was, I wasn't obviously as experienced as I am now. I get more experience every, every day. But my, my specialty was Google Ads and I would look at these profiles and I would see, you know, they would do landing pages, they do other things and I only did Google Ads. That's all I did. And um, so what I decided to do was set myself apart from the crowd and I raised my hourly bid to the absolute highest of any Google Ads manager on Elance. No manager had a cost per hour as high as me. I think back then it was like $200 an hour, something like that. I mean it was very high. Um, um, I mean with, you know, today's market, I don't know, maybe that's not high. Maybe it is still, still seems pretty high. Um, but I put it at as high as I, as I could to make sure that I was above everyone else. And one of the cool things about Elance was when you're searching for a Google Ads manager, there was an option to sort by lowest to highest and highest to lowest. And to my surprise, a lot of business owners, a lot of people were only interested in quality rather than savings or value. They wanted to just get to the best guy they could find. So you know how they decided based on cost. I can't tell you the number of emails that I received, messages of people reaching out to me. I didn't even bid on jobs. I just changed my hourly rate and jobs came to me. So it was uh, it was quite an experience and I got the same message every time. Hey Kris, I really could use your help. You know, you obviously know what you're doing because you know you have the highest rate. I mean you're at the very top of Elance with the highest rate you have. You know, I had five star rating. I mean everything. My profile was very strong. So I wouldn't suggest this for someone who has a poor rating. You know, on, on their, on their gig site, whatever they're doing it on. Um, so this is only going to work if you have a pretty strong level of, uh, status. But, uh, I had people reach out to me simply because I stood head and shoulders above everyone else, um, because of my hourly rate. And I, I mean, I was worth it. I did, I did a great job. I got some amazing clients and brought me to a level where I actually quit elance. I no longer do any of that stuff because they take a too big of a cut out of my, out of my income because of their crazy fees. And now they do membership stuff. I'm not interested. No, thank you. Um, so I don't compete on that market anymore. So I'll share that, Brandon. And for those of you listening, try it. You know, if you have a strong profile, um, you might be able to stand out simply because you're valuing yourself above everyone else. And it might make you stand out just for that. So the last section of the podcast here is going to be exactly what the title's about. The worst thing that you can do to your Google Ads account. Because maybe you just broke your Google Ads. I'm going to talk about the most dangerous Google Ads changes. I'm going to give you an example of a. You know, this is a bit scary. I hope that none of you experience this, but I'm going to tell you a quick story about a company that absolutely is struggling right now through some things that happen to their account simply because they did one of these things. Um, and, uh, you know, it's definitely a horror story. For those of you in the PPC world, before I tell you the story, I want to tell you about optio.com PSP please try them out. If you have, then it's likely you kept the service, but, you know, if you didn't, at least reach out to them, say, hey, thanks for supporting Chris. Because by supporting Chris, you're helping me. You know, they're doing you a favor by keeping me, um, employed. M here on this podcast. So hit them up on one of their socials, let them know that you do appreciate their support of Chris Schaefer on the paid search podcast. All right, so here we go. These are the four worst things that you can do to your Google Ads account, and I'm going to start with the worst, and I'm going to give you an example of what the worst can do, what the results of doing the worst thing to your account can be. So, number one is pause your accounts. Um, I Could give you many, many examples. If I had ever taken the time to write down all the stories and things that I've been a part of in Google Ads over the, you know, several decades that I've been a part of Google Ads, you know, I'd have many more stories. But this story specifically, um, happened recently, so it's fresh on my mind. I had a screenshot of it. I had taken a screenshot just so I could remember this. Um, a certain company was running ads for years and years and uh, for some reason won't get in, it doesn't really matter why, but they paused their campaigns for, uh, about a week. They paused their campaigns for a week. At the point of pausing their campaigns, all of them, they paused all of them, they were getting a 90 cent cost per click. So this 90 cent cost per click, um, was providing them with a margin of profit that was totally acceptable. They were very happy with what they were getting. And in fact, over several months, you know, it had dropped, um, you know, by 30, 40, 50% at times. And it kind of went up and down. But they had, they had seen a sustained drop, drop, drop. Over and over it had been dropping and getting better and better, making it more and more profitable for them. After one week of pausing their ads, they came back with an average cost per click of $2. Of course, this absolutely destroyed their margin of profit. They were unable to sustain this kind of consistent cpc just um, inflation and it was absolutely killing it to the point that they're, you know, gonna have to shut down the whole account because they were unable to recover the, the success of the account simply because they paused their campaigns. So I'm telling you this, you think, well, it won't happen to me. I'm telling you, I mean this, this account had tons of history. It'd been doing, you know, in only one week. They had years and years of the same campaigns running. They paused it for one week and despite digging through the account, I couldn't help them. There was nothing that was wrong, there's nothing else. They had changed. And as far as I could tell, the market hadn't really changed. Something happened and this is the worst possible thing. They broke their Google Ads account because of algorithm, because of the black box of Google Ads, because of the thing that we can't see. We can't see everything in Google Ads. We don't know why some things happen in Google Ads. We don't know why the CPCs might more than double, but they did. There was nothing they could do about it. So now they're suffering through a very marginally low, uh, productive campaign. And, um, all because they paused just one week. So that is absolutely the worst thing that you can do to break your campaign. I'm gonna tell you another story. The second one is change your website. I had, uh, someone else I was working with and they updated their website, um, because, hey, it'd been years. It, you know, maybe been five, 10 years, I don't know. Which is, I'm not saying you can't change your website, but I want to warn you, I have seen many instances when people change their website and something breaks. Most often the conversion tracking changes. Whatever button people were clicking the most, that button is now slightly different and people don't click on it as much. Or the developer tells you that they got the conversion tracking set up on the new site, but it doesn't work. And guess what? Your automated bidding breaks because your conversions, you know, for the next two, three, four weeks are all zero before you realize what's going on. And now you've lost the momentum of the campaign and you've broken your account. I mean, I, There have been, I mean, anyone who's a business owner knows, I mean, when something like this happens, when it's out of your control and now you. To really break your campaign, essentially breaking your campaign means that you've gone so far that you've snapped the algorithm. You've done something that is not repairable within your measure of control. To break a campaign means that you've broken something in the algorithm. Pausing everything, changing your website that can have an immediate effect in the algorithm. The system behind the system, the thing that we can't really change, things that we can't really see. We only see the metrics of the algorithm. We can't see the algorithm itself. So something's changed. So it broke. Another thing, this runs right along. The third thing is changing your conversions. Um, removing a certain call to action that's worked over years and years and then updating it, uh, you know, changing your. Maybe you've always had a JavaScript code on your site and you decide to upgrade because some, uh, up and coming, uh, web developer decides you should really upgrade your site to gtm, you know, Google, Google Tag Manager, that's a much better system. They do it. Conversions are no longer tracking appropriately. Something's different about it. It's not tracking the same. Your algorithm changes, it's broken. And oftentimes these are unrecoverable. I mean, this, you'll. The campaign will never be the Same. Now, there's a difference between breaking a campaign and breaking the algorithm. And what these examples really fuel is breaking the algorithm, breaking something that you can't see, that you can't change, that you can't fix. There's nothing that you can do to try and get the magic back into your account after these points. And then the fourth and final one is changing your bidding. Just going from Target CPA to Target ROAS could absolutely destroy the integrity of your campaign. Um, if you don't know the difference between these two bidding strategies that you're considering, I mean, it is highly dangerous to consider changing this. Um, you know, people that, that just swap back and forth between target cpa, maximize conversions, maximize conversion value. Oftentimes the Google recommendation system will tell you, hey, get, get, get, point two more conversions. If you swap over to maximize conversions, I mean, what an absolute ridiculous sacrifice that would be for you. If you tried to change bidding strategies without testing it, without doing any experiment, without really digging into what you're doing, you change it and your whole account performance drops and it's unrecoverable. When you try and change it back to the, to the old bidding strategy that you had, something doesn't work. It's not the same. You're getting higher CPCs, you're getting lower conversion rate, you're getting different traffic, you're getting different position metrics. It's no longer the same. It's gone. It's lost forever. So pausing your campaigns, changing your website, changing the way your conversion tracking is, is set up on your website and changing your bidding for no good reason, without the decent research and experiments that would be required to do that. Those four things are great ways to break your Google Ads account. I hope none of you do that. So that's why I tell you, if you have, if you are in dire straits and having issues like this, I'd be happy to help as much as I can. You can reach me chrisha.com I do coaching, management, whatever you'd like. Otherwise you'll catch me here every week. I'll see you then.