Mike Mancini with PPCVideoTraining.com.
Today we are starting with step number one in our 21 Steps to Google Ads Optimization
series, and we are starting right away.
We're jumping into the deep end.
Now, make sure you stick around to the end because we are going to cover a number of
things in this video.
I know in our intro or when we were talking about what we're going to do in this series,
I said we're going to cover kind of one step per video.
This is what I call one step, but it's got a number of different pieces to it, so make
sure you stick around until the end, and also make sure you hit the subscribe button below
so you get notified as we are adding new videos to this series, at least one or two a week
until ... I know it says 21 steps, but I think I mentioned it's probably going to be a lot
more than that.
So, go ahead and subscribe and we'll let you know when the next one is up and running.
All right, so let's get started.
We are in your Google Ads settings here.
Now, some of this information I got to keep private because it is one of our clients,
but this is the number one place that people make mistakes.
This is where you need to go back and just double-check it if you have not done this
already.
I know for some of you that are more advanced, this is like, "Ah, this is too simple," but
there are still ... I can't even tell you how many times, because we set up so many
accounts, that we go back.
We do this before we even launch a campaign, and we go back and we just double-check it,
and we do still find errors because we're so used to setting this up so fast that we
even make errors.
That's why we check it before we launch.
So what I want you to do is I want you to go in and I want you to take a look at networks.
First of all, are you advertising on the search network or the display network?
If you're doing a normal search campaign, what I mean by that is the text ads on Google,
you're going to want to do the search network.
If you're doing graphic ads, like the ads you might see on the side of a news website,
the image ads, those are what would be on the display network.
For most of us, we're going to be looking at the search network.
You're going to be advertising your business, your services, products you might have.
This is the one you want to check.
A lot of people will just double-check.
They will check it on this one, and if you have a display campaign, you need to be running
a display campaign in its own campaign.
You don't want to do these together.
You need to have a search campaign on its own and a display campaign on its own.
They should never be run together.
So for most of us, we're going to be running in the search network.
Include Google search partners.
That's really up to you.
We will typically start a campaign out with that checked, because we have seen there are
some campaigns it works unbelievably great, other ones that it doesn't work as well, and
we'll cover that more on the optimization later, but we'll typically have that one checked
just to start off with.
But in this particular campaign, that works pretty well.
So, we're going to leave that.
We're going to come back to that one later in a different video.
Locations.
This is another big one.
You can click on "advanced search" here and you can see the entire area that the search
campaign is going to cover.
Some people will go in and they will start setting up locations in here, but they don't
realize that they've also targeted the rest of the world or the United States, and they
can't figure out why their budget is used by eight o'clock a.m. every single morning.
This can have a lot to do with it.
This particular campaign we are targeting 70 miles around the Twin Cities, Minnesota
area.
This is a very broad area.
Some of you may just enter in zip codes here.
Some of you may just enter in a city, but also remember if there's an area that you
don't want, all you need to do is if let's just say we wanted to target this whole area
but not Minneapolis.
We could type in "Minneapolis, Minnesota" and we could go here and we could click on
"exclude".
So now when we go to our advanced search, we're targeting around this whole area, but
we're excluding the city of Minneapolis.
Or if we want to exclude certain zip codes, we can exclude that zip code, and if you take
a look in this area, we are excluding Minneapolis and we're excluding this zip code.
So, you see how that works.
Make sure your location settings are set up correctly.
Now, go down here and also check out "location options".
What you should be doing is checking on people in your targeted locations, meaning people
inside that 70-mile radius are the ones that we're looking for.
A lot of people will say, "Well, people in or who show interest in your targeted locations
recommended," but you might have somebody overseas who's typing in something from your
area, and your ad is showing up overseas.
Obviously, not a very targeted person.
If you're a service business, you're not going to be really helping those people out.
So, I would always suggest putting in people in your targeted locations, and then save
that.
Next, make sure you have an adequate budget.
If your clicks are costing you $5 a day and you have a $10 a day budget, that budget is
not going to go very far.
You're not going to have a ton to spend, and if you've got 1,000 keywords in your campaign,
you're obviously not going to figure out what works.
So, make sure your budget is adequate.
You need some money to test.
When you're starting out your campaigns or when you're optimizing your campaigns, you
need to make sure that this is enough, if you do have small budgets.
If you've got a $10 a day or even a $5 a day budget and your keywords are running $2 a
day, make sure you have very few keywords.
You don't want 100 keywords to divide up a $5 a day budget, okay?
So make sure you have an adequate budget or you have very, very few keywords.
The delivery method.
Always stick on standard.
You want to be able to figure out when your ads are going to perform best.
If you have accelerated once midnight hits or whenever your ads start showing, it's going
to go through them very, very quickly.
Bidding.
How are you bidding?
Let's go through a couple of these because these are quite important.
You can change your bid strategies right here.
Now, you can do target cost-per-acquisition, target return on ad spend, maximize clicks,
conversions, yada, yada, yada.
If you are running any one of these, maximize clicks, target search page location, or target
outranking share, I would suggest changing that, and here's why.
These are what we call vanity plays, meaning maximize clicks, Google will use your entire
budget.
They'll try and get you the most clicks that they can within your budget.
The problem is sometimes they're not very targeted.
Sometimes they could be for keywords that are just kind of crap.
So, it's not a great ... Unless you're doing a branding campaign where you want the most
people to see your ad for that budget, that's fine, but the problem is, is that when we
do that, it's usually not very targeted.
The conversion rates drop off a cliff.
Target search page location.
This is when you want your ads to get to the top of the page on the first page of search
results.
This is what we call a vanity play.
Your ads are not always going to convert best in the number one spot, and the reason is
there are a lot of tire kickers that click that first ad that come up.
You'll find over time that certain keywords will convert better in the first, second,
or third position.
So don't always just target just to say, "I want to have my ad come up above my competitor
each and every time."
It's going to cost you more money, especially if your campaigns are not optimized correctly.
There are a lot of times that we have an ad show up in the first position and we're paying
less than the people that are coming up below us, but that's because of the optimization.
Unless your campaign is optimized, you don't always want to be coming up in the number
one position because if it's poorly optimized, Google is going to charge you a lot more.
Target outranking shares; set bids to help you outrank another domain's ads.
Once again, it's a vanity play.
You're saying, "All right, we want to make sure our ad comes up above our competitors,"
but if your competitors are performing poorly, they are paying more per ad, and you're basically
saying, "We want to pay more than they do just so we can come up above them."
I understand that you do want to come up above your competitors, but after you go through
this optimization series, hopefully you'll be outranking them and paying less than they
are anyway.
If it's an older campaign, I would target CPA, cost-per-acquisition, or target return
on ad spend.
For newer campaigns, I would do enhanced cost-per-click or manual cost-per-click.
We talk about all of these in some of our other videos.
We're not going to get too into depth because that'll take up too much time.
Ad rotation.
If you are testing ads, which I highly suggest, meaning you have at least two ads per ad group,
click on "do not optimize, rotate ads indefinitely".
Do not let Google optimize.
The reason is is that a lot of the time the ads that they pick don't perform as well as
the other ones.
This may change in the future, but as of right now we always check "do not optimize, rotate
ads indefinitely".
Now, the last one that we're going to check if you already have a campaign set up, the
last one we're going to talk about is ad schedule.
Now, a lot of people don't realize that when they set their campaign up, they might have
their ads running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
If you are a service business or you want people to call, you do not want your ads,
at least in the majority of instances, you do not want your ads running all through the
night.
In this particular campaign, we know that this campaign is running pretty well between
the hours of 6:00 a.m. and midnight.
However, I do know that we're going to have to go in and optimize that, and we're going
to do that later in this series, but you should not have your ads running 24 hours a day,
seven days a week.
The only time I've figured out to run ads in the middle of the night where it was effective
happened to be divorce attorneys.
The reason is people come home, they're upset.
They might get the kids to bed.
They have a fight with their spouse.
It's late at night.
They have some time.
They go on and they start doing research.
I know that sounds morbid, but that is one of the only industries where we have found
that it's effective to run those ads in those hours of the day.
I can probably tell you that eventually we're going to take this to probably 8:00 a.m. to
start and probably 9:00 p.m. or 10:00 p.m. to stop.
So your ads are only running during those hours.
All right.
So I know it was a little bit longer video.
I know some of this stuff was pretty simple, but it is crucial.
This will save your campaign money.
When we optimize campaigns, this is the steps that we go through.
We go through and make sure that all of these settings are correct.
This is the number one place to go.
This is the first thing that we do, and it's the first thing you should do in your Google
Ads optimization.
All right.
Over here on the side, you should see our next video in our 21 Days to Google Ads Optimization
series.
Go ahead and click that, click the subscribe button to be notified when we do launch new
video for that series, and thanks so much.
We'll see you next time.