How Top PPC Experts Manage Bids for Lead Gen

Episode Description

It’s one thing managing PPC where conversions are immediate and clear. What about #leadgen?

Your choice of bid strategy can make or break your lead generation PPC game. That’s why we got on the mic with Navah Hopkins to talk about the nuances of lead gen (and some #eCommerce too). Plus, our co-founder Geetanjali Tyagi drops in for a discussion on contending with Google’s new limits on data sharing.

This panel covers:

• The best PPC bidding strategy for lead gen
• When to use automated vs. manual bidding
• PPC metrics you should focus on
• How to improve Quality Score
• Search term management now that Google has restricted data

Episode Takeaways

Best PPC Bidding Strategy for Lead Gen

• Prioritize high-quality leads over volume to optimize spend.
• Utilize geographic modifiers to target specific areas for better lead quality. ** **

Automated vs. Manual Bidding

• Use automated bidding for efficiency but ensure accurate conversion tracking.
• Reserve manual bidding for fine-tuning campaigns based on real-time data. ** **

PPC Metrics to Focus On

• Monitor impression share and conversion rates to assess campaign health.
• Evaluate click-through rates to optimize ad relevance and effectiveness. ** **

Improving Quality Score

• Focus on ad relevance, landing page quality, and CTR to enhance Quality Score.
• Regularly revise and test ad copy and landing pages to maintain high quality scores. ** **

Search Term Management

• Adapt to Google’s restricted search term visibility by focusing on performance metrics.
• Utilize broad match modifiers strategically to capture relevant search queries.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m co founder and CEO at Optmyzr and I’m your host for PPC Town Hall. So for any of you regular folks who are dialing in, you may see that I am not in my home office. I don’t have the Optmyzr sign behind me. I actually have the ocean behind me today.

So where am I? Wow. You know, I got to the realization that I probably won’t have the pleasure of traveling for conferences like I’ve been so used to doing for another, maybe year or so. So I said, I’m just going to book a hotel and I’m going to go there and I’m going to pretend like I’m at a conference and I’m going to do PPC town hall from now.

Just to keep things different and exciting because I talk to too many people and they say it’s like Groundhog Day Every day is the same thing. So I am literally across the hill from my house where I live. I live in Los Altos. I drove over the mountain towards the pacific ocean And find a hotel in Half Moon Bay and that’s where I’m coming from.

So hope all goes well and I hope everyone out there who’s listening you tell us in the comments where you’re coming in from and hopefully you’re finding ways to to keep things exciting and fresh in these very strange times. So for PPC, Hey, you know, let’s not talk about Fred. Let’s talk about PPC, right?

So today we’re going to talk about bid strategies, automated bidding, automation versus manual. We’re going to talk more about the search query changes that Google has recently made and we have a great speaker to help us with all of those topics. We’re going to go a little bit about, you know, what’s happening.

What’s the philosophy behind it? We’re also going to try to be very tactical and give you very good advice and things you can actually take away But yeah, we do live in interesting times now for for anyone paying attention to what’s happening outside your doors I think ethics and you know being good and nice Marketers and caring about the long term and the good of the world our topics that we might touch on a little bit as well So here we go.

Today we have NavahHopkins. We’re going to talk about bidding. So let’s get rolling.

All right. And here’s Nava. Nava, how’s it going? Thanks for coming back on the show.

Navah Hopkins: I thank you as always for having me. I forgot about how epic the intro music is.

Frederick Vallaeys: Like the best way to start a

Navah Hopkins: conversation.

Frederick Vallaeys: Exactly. Our spirits right before we get into it.

Navah Hopkins: Yeah, exactly. So

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah. Where are you calling in from today?

Navah Hopkins: So I’m in Rhode Island, and when you speak about what we do for Interesting Times, my husband is an amazing artist, and so he created this very zen office space for me. So I’m sitting in my office, sitting with my pup next to me, and all is well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very nice. Well, good to have you on the show again. Honestly, for a long time for someone who I thought could hold their ground with you as a panelist, when we’re talking about bidding and who’s got the tactical experience as well as the philosophy.

And I had a hard time finding someone. I mean, there are definitely a number of people, but a lot of them just couldn’t make it today. So I brought in someone else who definitely knows a lot about bitmaps. So Gitanjali Tyagi, she’s One of the co founders and Optmyzr and talks to a lot of our customers about what they’re doing for bidding.

We think about bidding a lot. So welcome to the show. Good to Anjali.

Geetanjali Tyagi: Hi, thanks Fred. It’s good to be back and I hope I can hold my ground.

Navah Hopkins: I like that you’re, you’re, you’re buttering me up just, just so that it’s like, Oh, we’ll agree with every, everything that Optmyzr has to say.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I know. Maybe it’s an unfair fight, you know, here with two Optmyzrs.

And you, I was actually thinking after the last session you did that I should bring my boxing gloves. We can be a little bit more civil than I guess other, other debates, I guess.

That’s right. I won’t talk over you too much. They’re looking at myself. I mean, there’s a shade of, like, orange there that I’m not fond of.

Oh,

Navah Hopkins: don’t you dare. That’s, that’s, you’re not being kind enough to yourself. You do not paint yourself in that light.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Definitely.

All right. So anyone who’s watching, we have the comments in the chat section on YouTube and Facebook. That’s a great place to go and put in just a hello or ask any questions that we get into the topics here a little bit more. But but yeah, let’s jump into the first thing that is still top of mind for everyone.

So that’s the search terms reports, changes that Google has made. Now, but you work in a fairly expensive industry, right? Like, what does this all mean for you?

Navah Hopkins: Sure. So as you indicated, I work with a lot of lawyers where the average cost per click can be anywhere from 50 to 500, 900. So when, when the search terms report initially was announced, it was being depreciated.

My response was, And whatever this will be fine. Because ultimately you’re still going to be able to see the the click data or the the keyword data. What your ROAS is. It’s not like you’re getting less clicks. You’re just not getting that transparency on the queries. What I struggle with and where I I’ve actually switched camps from whatever Google’s being Googled to this is actually a problem.

Is that there’s actually been a fairly consistent underspending issue. And, and not being able to see where queries and where budget is being funneled is, is, is really a problem. Combine that with we Wait a minute, let’s

Frederick Vallaeys: pause it. I want to go deeper on that. So you’re saying you’re actually not able to spend enough money?

Navah Hopkins: So in, in certain By the way, what

Frederick Vallaeys: vertical are you in, just so people know?

Navah Hopkins: Oh, in legal. So this, so I have, I have a theory. This is, this is purely theory. So I think this is what’s happening. I don’t know that this was happening. This is, I’m putting this out there as, as opinion. With the launch of local service ads a lot of lawyers jumped on that very quickly.

And so there’s a lot of spend that would have otherwise gone to paid search paid display, that now is being funneled to local service ads. Local service ads come in at a dramatic discount. To traditional paid search and because google did away with the requirement that you have to run paid search alongside local service ads the thousands of dollars That you might spend each day or each month depending on the size of of your Firm, you now could get away with spending a fraction of that on local service ads.

So part of it is I believe I believe genuinely people are are You Not being forced to bid against each other nearly as much or like spend is, is being reappropriated to local service ads. But there’s another piece. And this kind of alludes to the other part of our discussion with automation, the different automated bidding strategies are either underperforming or overperforming or overspending.

So that’s, that’s where I, I struggle with with the search terms is that we don’t have that transparency in underspending or overspending, which is I’m assuming where you are going to go.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. So a lot of stuff here to unpack, I think. Right. So Let’s talk about those local service ads a little bit more.

So the way that I remember those, I was like, if you’re a plumber, a painter, no educate me

Navah Hopkins: in 20, in 2019, it, it rolled out to quite a number of professional services but Google still held them back in mid Q2 of this year, really close to the end of Q2 Google rolled it out to, to, Pretty much every legal vertical that you could imagine CPAs, accountants, things like that.

Introducing a different, a difference between say a Google guaranteed where they’ll back you for 2, 000 if it goes wrong versus Google screened where they won’t necessarily cover the 2, 000 if it goes wrong, but they’re the Google guarantee. You went through a background check, you have the right review star, What have you, the reason why I, I suspect that this is part of the reason why spent has been low is that I have a client that normally spends anywhere between 150, 200, 000 a month.

On leads on local service ads, they actually got double the amount of calls and spent 2, 500 for the month of September on these. And it’s like, I don’t know, A, why, why would you spend money on paid search if you could do this, but the other is that the spends are fluctuating. So you have a lot of people kind of testing and pulling budgets back.

So, but that’s just in the verticals where local service ads. Impact right in these local service ads. And again, forgive my ignorance on this, but they are on the same search results pages, right? I feel like we falsely advertise this and this is turning into a local town hall, but I do think it feeds into the bidding.

So local service ads serve on desktops, tablets. Mobile devices as boxes with the name of the company, the reviews. And they’re mostly focused around generating phone calls. They can be focused around generating messages. What’s interesting about them is that they also have a voice search component.

So if you say, Hey, Google I need a plumber, I need a lawyer, what have you the number one result. In local service ads will serve as the one result for voice search where you get three On a traditional search result page. They serve above traditional expanded text ads So the way the SERP now looks you’d have your local service ads.

Then you have your Expanded text ads or responsive search ads depending Then you might have local search ads that sponsored google my business listing in the map pack. So In in the local space, I actually think some of the bidding issues, some of the spend issues are specifically because everyone’s rushing to try this thing.

That is a hell of an experience to get through. I have never been more upset at Google over this, like the how unorganized they are about this process.

Frederick Vallaeys: But at an interesting point that you bring up, right? So are we bait and switching here on this topic? And we said it’d be about bidding and now we’re talking about I think it’s really important to understand.

Like bidding doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Like you’re bidding something, you’re bidding in a competitive field. And if The competition or the good way Google’s products work changes and that changes the competent competitive landscape. Then yeah, obviously bidding is impacted by that. And that’s what I find so curious when, you know, oftentimes a customer of hours will come to us and say, well, Google does automated bidding.

Like, why do I still need the tool? Like what, what do I do? It’s like, well, yeah, bidding is one thing, right? But it’s half of the equation for ad rank. The other half is about quality score and how do you get better quality score? And you were in some articles that we’ll talk about in a bit here, but how do you boost your CTR?

How do you boost your relevance? Okay. And part of that is ad text. And so how do you optimize your ad text and then, okay, now you’re running on. An exact match keyword, which stopped being exact match a long time ago because of close variance.

Navah Hopkins: I, I’m, I feel, I feel like 2020 is the year where all of my past opinions have come back to bite me.

Like, like the, my, my main pitch that I’ve been putting into all the conferences is, We don’t know anything anymore. None of what we thought was true is true anymore. Just keep testing.

Frederick Vallaeys: How do you feel about SCAG?

Navah Hopkins: So funny enough I still am. I still am very much firmly in the, in the stag versus scag camp or single theme agro versus single keyword agro.

But I’ve been pushing far more broad match SCAG ad groups and campaigns, especially with how much the match types have changed so when, I, I don’t know if, if you’ve seen this, I’m actually really curious because you have access to far more data than I do these days but, That the allocation of budget to broad match and exact match keywords seems much higher than phrase match keywords.

So where I used to be all in on do most of your keywords on phrase match, then you have your proven ones on exact and then you’d have like a random broad match gag. Now I’m finding. I might have that one broad match Skag and then three or four exact match keywords and maybe one mod broad

Frederick Vallaeys: like

Navah Hopkins: that.

That’s where I’m at.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’ll tell you what I think. Catanjali, you have any thoughts from you on that one?

Geetanjali Tyagi: So I think With the whole match types changing with all the closed variants coming in. So people who swear by single keyword ad groups, I think they’re still not completely letting go, but it does change the whole concept. And now I think with the whole search terms change, the whole alpha beta structure where you mine your keywords using your broad match keywords and then move them into exact, I don’t know how well that is going to work anymore because You probably don’t know all the search queries that are coming in. Keywords, whether it’s scag or other. So

Navah Hopkins: one, one thing I’ve I’ve found very interesting, and this is another reason why the search terms report being nerfed a bit is, is a problem, is that I’ve, I’ve always made my decisions on accounts and strategically allocated match types, and I’m, I’m curious what you, ‘cause you guys again, the, the Optmyzr database is, is, is fantastic.

The. The choice to use a match type, the choice to use a keyword was entirely dependent on what I would see coming back in the search terms. Did it match by the rules of exact, exact close variant? Did it match by the rules of broad or broad or phrase or phrase close variant? Like what, how was it matching?

And the fact that we no longer have that visibility truly is, is a bit of a problem. So part of. Where my strategies have shifted on match types and, and SCAGs is I S I still believe, and I still see in, in current, in current account performances. That stags is in groupings of keywords seem to perform better than skags just in terms of delivery but in terms of match types I very much am pulling away from phrase match.

Particularly not just for for how it’s matching But also i’m seeing that those phrase match keywords are actually getting caught quite a bit more often in the The duplicate keyword deliver delivery problem. So, you know how you’ll get this alert of oh There was a better keyword that could match but it it You pause their phrase match keywords and then magically it’s fine.

So I don’t know. I feel like phrase matches is just becoming a dodo I

think you’re muted which is really unfortunate because i’m i’m counting on a counterpoint Okay, there you go. You got your bingo thing again. Fred was muted again when he was speaking but no, I mean, I think you’re right about the so counterpoint Okay. Well, I agree with you, but I think what part of where it stems from is that Match types no longer mean what they used to mean, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: And so you’re talking about, you can no longer see how they match to an actual query, but even aside from that, just the loosening of all the match types. Basically, I think most people cannot figure out what a phrase match achieves that another match type really wouldn’t. And I know I wrote an article about it so we can put it into show notes, but it was so long ago.

And I can’t even remember. I mean, basically what we did was exactly what you suggested. We went to the Optmyzr database and we just started pulling what Google considered to be phrase match variants and broad match variants and even exact match close variants for a certain keyword to try to shed light on what does a phrase match actually mean?

And so historically for people maybe who haven’t been doing PPC quite as long, but a phrase match was supposed to mean that the words that you had between your quotes were supposed to stay together, but that doesn’t actually work anymore, right? So then what is the purpose of you doing phrase as opposed?

What’s the benefit of phrase over broadly, even when everything is basically going down the path of close variance and that and that’s the thing why I think people I’ve just kind of given up because they don’t really know how to tweak it. Now that said, I also know that historically with broad match modified, broad match modified is the one where you put the plus in front of the word that you do not want Google to change.

But when Google introduced that, the number of, and I was still working at Google at the time, but the number of advertisers I saw who would just literally put a plus in front of every single word was like mind blowing. I was like, people, this is not what this is meant to do. It’s like meant to give you some.

Limitations on how broad things get matched, right? So if you are if you do Hawaiian vacations, but you only have condos on Maui. Okay, so you don’t want Google to take the word Maui and change it to Hawaii because that’s kind of broader. That’s not exactly your location. You could put a plus in front of Maui.

But in front of the word of vacations or condos, like it doesn’t really matter because if people are looking for a condo or a townhouse or a vacation, like that’s kind of all the same thing. So long as it’s in Maui, that’s something we can service, right? So that was the whole purpose of it. Put your plus in front of the word.

That’s so critical to what the user is looking for. That if you change it, it really changes your likelihood of being able to close that sale. And so people put pluses in front of. They misuse it. And I think sadly, to some degree, advertisers are causing all of these reactions from Google that goes further down this path of hidden data, more stuff automated, less control over it, because even when they do give us a control You know, remember there’s millions of advertisers and the three of us on this call and the people listening we get it We want to be better right before each one of us There’s probably 10 000 who just don’t understand and who are going to do it wrong and make google go down that path

Navah Hopkins: so one one thing, You mentioned about how we we typically break things. I I think a lot about Aversions to responsive search ads and responsive display ads. And the idea of, of auto adding things into accounts and they’re in net new accounts. And I’ve, I’ve seen this cause I’ve, I’ve had to create some new accounts for folks.

You don’t even get the option to do an expanded text ad. It’s just write a good ad.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, good assets

Navah Hopkins: and group things together and where where I suspect folks struggle is the idea that it should be a partnership. And how much is it a partnership versus is it just. Here’s my money. So going, part of the reason I brought up local service ads, I see local service ads as the evolution where we don’t actually need to think about marketing anymore.

It’s just, here’s money, here’s targets, go, go have fun. On the, on the river, on the other side of the coin is the, Strategy piece of creative and persona mapping and all of that. So it’s I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m torn here because people need some degree of control, particularly if they have lower budgets.

Like when you have a higher budget, it’s you can deal with a little bit of that variation. It’s it’s. Sorry, go ahead. Well,

Frederick Vallaeys: no, you’re going deeper on that point, but I was going to say, well, what do you mean by lower spend? And I think that’s a really important point, right?

Navah Hopkins: Yeah. So the, because if you have, say, 5, 000 or less per month to spend, which I do see as low spend for paid for paid search.

A thousand per month or less is obviously the lowest That we’re looking at, but say 5, 000 per month on ad spend, you’re not going to have the wiggle room to AB test. Really? Like you’re not going to have the room to prove out what variant is the right way of, of, of who’s going to correspond to, to your best prospects.

You’re not going to have the wiggle room for, for creative. It’s going to be, I just need as many leads as possible because I need a positive ROA so I can keep getting budget. So it’s, I don’t know whether it’s a bad thing that control is being taken away from folks that have small budgets. It’s the larger budgets where it’s more of the problem because there’s that that is where there is the wiggle room for for a B testing.

There is that wiggle room for for all of that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And your point is that if you’re getting 150, 000 a month, you’re willing to say like, listen, I’ve got a thousand or wiggle room experimentation budget that I want to like

Navah Hopkins: test creative. I want to test like this way of searching. Like, right. Whereas

Frederick Vallaeys: the premise is that with that 10, 000 hours you put in now, you’re actually going to get to an efficiency that down the line is going to pay off way more than that.

Exactly.

Navah Hopkins: Right. And so for the small for smaller folks, do they need that level of control? I don’t know. Like, do they do? Do they need to engage an agency? Or could they just hand the money over to Google? I don’t know what the answer is.

Frederick Vallaeys: No, I don’t think that’s interesting, too. Because when we look at smart shopping campaigns,

Navah Hopkins: yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: I think they’re a great addition in a way for agencies who are now able to bring in smaller clients and thinking about the pandemic, right?

I mean, there’s a whole bunch of businesses that have to shift. Right. More and more online because they can’t have people coming into their storefront or they’re at 10 percent capacity of what you’re allowed to have inside, right? So you got to go virtual, but those are typically the businesses that are struggling now, so they don’t have huge budgets.

Right. But they also know they need to rebuild business. They need to promote the new way of. Doing business. And so for them, something like a smart shopping campaign or even a smart campaign is kind of, it’s, it’s better than nothing, right? Like it is honestly not that bad. If your alternative is to have no online ads and no new customers.

And so even for an agency, now you may have some of these.

Sorry, Siri keeps listening to me for some reason. But so for for an agency, maybe you’ve been working with a client and they haven’t really done shopping ads and all of a sudden smart shopping campaigns are a possibility for you. And now it enables you to actually sell that service that, you know, that type of advertising without having to have that deep expertise, because there’s not so much to manage and it’s more a question of setting it up correctly.

Maybe having the right. Target ROASs for different smart shopping campaigns and then letting Google’s automation do a lot of the heavy lifting and you periodically checking in and then maybe making some strategic shifts in it. But you don’t have to be in a day, day in, day out to keep it healthy.

Navah Hopkins: Correct. And that, that’s, okay. I think we agree. I’m fairly certain we agree that bidding is one of those tactics that, that you should just delegate out. Like there is no good reason to do, True manual bidding. There might be, though and we talked about this on the last town hall manual bidding when Google is having it’s, it’s various issues can be a way to ensure that it bids enough.

But you still can have a rule run, you can have a script run, you can use an amazing tool like Optmyzr. But, like, it’s, that’s, that’s, it’s, I do think delegating out bidding is important because if you’re sitting there manually changing bids day in day out, there’s there’s so much better use of your time.

But there is something to be said for using manual bidding and creating your own automation versus trusting in the native automations, which I think is the larger point is how much are we trusting in? Max conversions, max clicks, target ROAS, target CPA and even native audiences versus custom audiences.

And then things like that. So let’s talk about native audiences and custom audiences for a minute. So what do you mean custom audiences, right? Basically you, you define your own likely prospect, what they might search for, what websites they may have been on. So how do you leverage that?

So we, we do it quite a bit.

Granted again, I, Hennessy Digital happens to serve a lot of lawyers. So the amount of native audiences that are available from platforms are, are, are fairly limited because it, it starts to infringe on it’s too personal. Or we will actually do quite a, a lot of tactics on display and YouTube campaigns where we’ll, we’ll target folks who are in market.

For auto collision or auto repair and that that I do actually, I like pairing that needed or that native audience within the custom audience insights. And then. This is the plug I’ll give to kind of everybody. Use analytics audiences and import in those segments because you can basically curate from all of your other channels the ideal audience that’s not bound by what one native channel is willing to do.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. I like that. So you’re going beyond the walled garden of the Google ecosystem by basically using Google analytics to pull in what people have done. Broadly on the end. And so when, actually, when you use analytics, like do you get insights from Facebook, what people do on Facebook because that little system that it’s hard to even look within that, right?

Navah Hopkins: Right. But you’re able to build effectively a remarketing list off of the behaviors that people did on Facebook, port that over onto your landing page, port that over onto your organic experience and then pull that segment over and apply it to Google.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I, I love get analytics too, because whenever I look at it, it just seems to have more power in terms of crafting like that niche audience.

And even like, okay, somebody was on this page for five minutes and then that page for 30 seconds, and then they went here and then they played that video. And it’s like, we can get really crazy with the type of a way that you define the ideal audience.

Navah Hopkins: But the other thing is the goals. I actually find that, and this is especially true for folks that have to balance SEO and PPC, if you use analytics goals as your conversion actions you’re really able to have a solid conversion path, and you’re able to paint a true attribution story.

So one of the, my greatest pet peeves, and I see a really good question so I don’t know if we want to address it or, or not, but I want to finish this, this one quickly. Point. One of the very common issues that comes up in lead gen is the question of attribution. Analytics is by default last click.

So unless you apply the model and you kind of look at how The, the, the story weaves, you’re going to almost always see from an analytics view, organic as the winner, the main driver of conversions, but that ignores how social might’ve played in, in the path. It ignores how your European media might’ve played in, in the path.

So by sinking in that analytics goal, you’re able to see how that goal plays out in all of your different channels, not just in analytics, in, in, in analytics. Do we want to address the. Software question or no?

Frederick Vallaeys: The anti fraud software?

Navah Hopkins: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, let’s talk to Dan. I mean, Dan’s a loyal listener from Tel Aviv, so We should answer his question.

Navah Hopkins: That’s all the Hebrew you’re getting from me, sadly. I wish I had more Hebrew. Nah, I, I and I don’t know how you feel about this because you basically turned your knowledge into a software. A lot of the anti fraud fraud softwares are basically Scripts that you could do. You’re, you’re throwing money at the problem that you could do yourself.

So like, for example, click sees, I actually like click sees. I think click sees is great. But it’s basically doing the function of pulling IPs and just blocking them. Um,

Frederick Vallaeys: right. And then at some level, I think software and even optimize, right? I mean, I don’t want to undermine Optmyzr here in any way.

But listen, if you had a tremendous amount of time. Tremendous drive and dedication. You could do a lot of the things that we do as well. I mean, you just pull 15 reports and a couple of gigabytes of data and then you run them through some filters and like you, you write a few scripts, like it’s doable, right?

But the reason that people hire software is because it’s an efficiency, right? So we, we kind of look at best practices and we deploy the technology for those so that anyone can more affordably. Get access to that and as we know google changes very frequently. So just keeping up with those changes Like yeah, you need an engineering team that’s staffing that As an agency, maybe you could have better dedicated to talking to your clients or thinking about marketing as opposed to technology Um, right where i’m not a fan of technology is when they basically take Exactly what you could do in the engine and they just put a different skin on it And then they they’re really flashy and they sell it that way that I hate.

I mean, there’s no reason people should pay for that Um No, but so your point is that to some degree you should be doing these functions yourself, but how much time goes into pulling the IPs?

Navah Hopkins: My point is that,

so my point was that do you want to throw your time or your money at it? Um, so it, that, that was the, the punchline is that if you don’t have the time and, and resources, Throw the 50, 200, 800, 1000, whatever it is per month at the software, because they are going to unlock that much more time in your day to do something that you are infinitely better at in your time based off of your hourly rate that you should know is That’s a

Frederick Vallaeys: great way to sum it up, right?

But, but I think the other point then that we should ask him based on what you’re saying how much does the problem change versus this is a problem that’s fairly well and narrowly defined doesn’t really change that often. And so now if you’re looking at 800 per month. To put a solution in place. Well maybe it would have cost you 10, 000 to build that solution one time.

And it would have actually been okay for the next two, three years, right? So then it’s the, the value of time plays into that as well.

Navah Hopkins: We we at Hennessy do a lot of our own internal products. We, we buy a very, we, we invest in very few softwares. We’re very blessed in, in our engineering team. But the few softwares that we invest in are almost always Attribution conversion tracking related.

So like a call tracking metrics because we’re not going to develop our own contracting solution. But the other ones are actually where the APIs are very frustrating to work with. So, for example, Facebook, Twitter, so on and so forth. We, we will leverage tools on, on that front. I realized that we didn’t really get into, and I, I, since we’re on the subject of tools, we didn’t get necessarily get as much into how do you deal with search terms getting nerfed.

One of the ways I’ve been coping and I’ll, I’ll give this plug keywords everywhere. Is the best plugin I’ve ever found. And yes, it’s like 10 for a million credits. It is the best money you’ll ever spend because what you basically can start to do is you can see volume for the different variants and.

auction price estimates, it’ll also give you that recommended list of queries. So in terms of a cheap solution to bypass how terrible search terms now is I heartily recommend that in combination with using ad preview diagnosis to get a sense of who is on, on your SERPs are they the right competitor, so on and so forth.

Frederick Vallaeys: Interesting. Keywords everywhere.

Navah Hopkins: Keywords everywhere. It’s my I, I use it. I make my team use it. Whenever we consulting with our clients and their in house teams, I make them use it. It’s, it’s, it’s a really good sanity check on what kind of queries could have reasonably resulted from the auction prices that our keywords pulled.

And they have a lot of really nice exportable reports as well. Nice. Yeah, and things that go through Zapier or that let you put data in between systems is always a good one. All right. So Dave, thanks for asking your question. That’s not even a question. I think you’re making a statement here and it’s a pretty good.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s a really good one. Not a pretty good one. It’s a really good one. So Dave saying that the biggest problem with all these automated bidding systems is that when you get junk conversions and yet you’re still calling those quote unquote conversions, then the Google system thinks they’re fantastic job, they keep fantastic job of giving you more junk that you’re not paying for, right?

So so so what do you do about this?

Navah Hopkins: You don’t count them in conversions. Like don’t, and don’t use smart, and don’t use smart bidding if you don’t trust your conversion. So there’s, there’s two things. One in your conversion settings, you can tell Google whether to count it in conversions or not where it will actually speak to TCPA or T ROAS or all that.

The other thing is if you don’t trust your conversions, don’t use smart bidding. Just don’t. I, I feel like a broken record on that one. Cause I’ve, I’ve,

Frederick Vallaeys: You were talking about call tracking software, right? So I think that’s one piece of the equation, but I think the problem is if you put your conversion at the level of somebody just filled out the form and like, that’s it, but how do you track beyond that?

How do you get to the quality of the conversion?

Navah Hopkins: Uh, got it. So one is you have to actually have An infrastructure in place that can track the lead through Pardot is a, is a great way of doing it. Um, UTM parameters to, to track the lead. Also, the analytics, see what the user journey is. I think we talked about last time uploading business data.

We can give a shout out to that again. A lot of it comes down to the client being good about their intake. So we, before we got on this call, I actually had a discussion with a client where we’ve driven them leads. We’ve 1000 percent driven them leads. We actually invested some time doing an audit of all of their leads.

To not leads cases, rather I apologize. We’ve definitively joined the leads. They were questioning whether we’ve driven them cases and we actually went through all the information and showed them definitively. Here are cases that you’ve gotten from these leads. And they, they still were questioning it.

So part of it is having that, that open conversation with clients and helping them build infrastructure so that they can report and they can have that intake system internally. The other part. Is doing the legwork yourself and having tools like call tracking metrics having form fills go to you so that you can kind of check those leads and see lead quality things like that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Makes sense.

Geetanjali Tyagi: I I wanted to quickly add a point to what Noah said earlier. So it’s, especially if you’re using smart bidding, it’s really important to send the right data into the system. And I also think having the right level of attribution because I’ve come across some customers who are using completely automated bidding strategies from Google, and they’re running on last click attribution.

So the system is automatically cutting the queries that would drive off of the funnel conversions. And then they’re wondering why it’s not working. So also going back to the point about delegating your bidding, but you need to know exactly which part of the process you’re delegating. So you it’s you still have to set the right targets.

You still have to Have the right attribution models. That’s the part You can’t delegate to google because if you don’t give the system the right data The system is they’re machines after all so they can’t make the right decisions

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, and that’s a fantastic point. I mean, I see that as a problem that as newer ppc managers come in Who’ve never done manual bid management?

they may not understand what it really means to manage a bid and how the auction works and You and so then they’re like, Oh, cool. While Google says it’s automated bidding and all I have to do is put in a target, but then they forget that, Hey, maybe that target actually depends on your margins shifting and your vendor relationship relationships changing and your promotion calendar, that’s changing pricing, right?

And all of these things weigh into it. And so when I. Have the pleasure of going on stage for an audience. I’m like, guys, when you all were putting in bids, CPC bids, like you didn’t put in one bid and then walked away and figured it was done right. But for some reason, people tend to believe that you put in a bid or a target for TCPA And then you walk away and that’s okay.

And that’s, it’s like, no, that’s not okay. Google is automating the conversion between what the expected conversion rate is and what you’re trying to achieve in terms of CPA and then putting the bid into the auction. But it doesn’t look at anything to do with your business. It doesn’t necessarily know all the things that you know about your business.

Right. I mean, and so for someone like now, but that probably means how busy is your law firm. Right. Do you want to take more leads? Like, are you desperate for more work? In which case you’re probably willing to spend a lot more to get those new leads. Whereas if you’re like, wow, we’re pretty busy. But if it’s a huge case, then maybe that one will take right.

So your priority shift and that should be reflected in your targets. So it’s not just that. It’s the quality of lead and accepting accepted leads versus rejected leads and why they get rejected. One thing I’ve actually found, I don’t know if you’re seeing as much in new advertisers, is a penchant for leaving search partners on and getting conversions.

Navah Hopkins: But then the conversions are just atrociously terrible. And then they’ll, they’ll take off search partners and they’ll like, Oh, I can’t, I can’t believe I took off search partners. My conversions dropped. Like there’s this short term memory of my leads were terrible. I was throwing all of them out, but then quality improves volume goes down, but quality improves.

Is your ROAS better or not?

Frederick Vallaeys: I think it’s great because you understand, like, you can actually look at new businesses evolving, but as an agency, there’s the risk that you have that disconnect between what actually shows up on the bottom line of the bank account of that customer.

Navah Hopkins: So we, what we do we make sure every quarter there’s a kind of a buy in and we ask these main core questions of how many leads are you getting each month?

Where could that number grow to? How much do you make per service vertical? And has there been any shift? Are there any changes coming up this quarter that we need to be aware of? So for for example, if your intake team is so behind that there are thousands of leads that are just not being touched, I am ethically compromised to keep encouraging you to spend money.

Like I can’t spend dollars if you aren’t following up on your leads. Not because you don’t want to, but because you’re so behind cause there are so many. So it’s just, it’s having that transparency.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, there’s that. And then I’ve talked to customers and they say that, listen, we’ve done a fantastic job driving the leads and.

Sorry, I don’t, I think I cut out. So you’ve done a fantastic job driving leads and phone call, but then the person who picks up the phone is not one of your experienced lawyers. It’s like a 16 year old high school kids with no experience who you’re paying minimum wage. Maybe it’s your son who’s picking up the phone.

Doesn’t really know anything about law, never coached the kid on how to properly like be polite, how to take the lead. And then you’re like, well, you know, why am I spending hundreds of dollars on this? And I’m getting no new clients. And it’s like, it’s not PPC that’s necessarily broken. It’s who’s answering the phone and how you’re following up or, or even the voicemail message that’s that people hear when they call in.

Right. And so I assume that’s much less of a problem with the level of clients that you’re talking about when you’re spending 150 grand a month on legal leads. But if you’re a, that’s smaller lawyer and just starting to dabble with PPC, like that is a pretty serious risk that you just forget. There’s more to the big picture than just deletion.

Navah Hopkins: It’s very true. And I think it leads into this question very nicely about the geomodifying ideas. I’m assuming that’s a question that we’re, we’re going to pick up.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, please. The question, we, we do put this out as a podcast. So we’re asking here if it makes sense to add geo keywords like divorce lawyer, Minneapolis, MN, versus just putting in the keyword divorce lawyer.

Navah Hopkins: So I have found that. From a volume standpoint, the volume is almost always on that divorce lawyer or divorce firm, divorce, family law, what have you but quality score. And sometimes quality of lead, particularly ironically enough, desktop leads are better on those, those geomodified terms. I will typically add a divorce lawyer, Minneapolis, and then ironically, when we talked earlier enough or we talked earlier about broad match skag.

That would be the one I would do is my skag because there’s enough terms in there to ground the broad match keyword. And then I would have every other keyword I’m actively targeting as a negative in that ad group. So that I’m protecting my, my I want to make

Frederick Vallaeys: sure everyone really gets this. So which one would you put as the skag?

Navah Hopkins: So the broad match skag would be divorce lawyer, Minneapolis, MN. Because there’s enough terms in that keyword to ground the broad match in what we actually want it to do. And because we’ve added every other keyword we’re actively targeting as an exact match negative into that ad group, we’re able to protect our general service terms, the ones that we actually are expecting to perform.

And then that SCAG is able to do that data acquisition, is able to secure those additional leads grounded by that geo modified service term.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And because it’s grounded by the geo modifier, you actually know exactly what to put in the ad because the user very specifically said that okay, that makes sense that you get higher quality score.

So higher quality score means a little bit less CPC that you have to pay to maintain your rank

usually.

Navah Hopkins: I, I, I, I like that you’re leaving the door open for me to be like, well, quality score, no, I’ve, I’ve, I don’t know. I. I go back to what I said earlier. I, I feel like this is the year where all of us eat slice of humble pie and just admit we don’t know what we know. We’re always testing and quality score could be the next messiah in 2021.

It could also continue to fade into irrelevancy. I don’t know.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And so, okay, here we can have a little boxing match now. So the point is I kind of agree that it’s. Being paid less and less attention to people talk about it less, but it doesn’t take away from the fundamental point that Google makes money on a cost per impression basis, right?

So they they want to monetize the volume of searches they have at the highest level possible, yet they’ve always held that they want us. As advertisers to pay on a cost per click basis. And these two things, they don’t mesh, right? So if someone has an ad and they’re saying, yeah, sure. I’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a click, but nobody ever clicks.

They make no money, right? So the thing that keeps that in balance with the real goal of monetizing search results pages is that not only do you have to put in a high bid, but you also have to draw a decent number of clicks. And so that. Overtime was called, that was called CTR and then it became called quality score.

So even if we’re paying less attention to it, that is still a really core part of the auction and something to pay attention to. And so that’s why I think like just going in and setting a bid or setting a target and then forgetting about. Add text optimization and finding better keywords and just, and having a better offer, having a better landing page, having a better sales process, like all of these things help you be able to set a bid that actually makes sense for your business.

Let me turn this full circle for a second to search terms, right? So people are concerned that Google showing us on search terms that make absolutely no sense for our business. And I’m going to be controversial here, but I’m going to say there’s no such thing as a bad Search term. The only thing that makes a search term bad is that we pay too much for it, right?

And so in many cases, one penny is still too much, right? And then we wish we could get rid of it. But that’s sort of the whole point about everything’s tied together in a way.

Geetanjali Tyagi: That’s what Google is doing. They’re saying you can’t get rid of it because you don’t know what it

Navah Hopkins: is. All right. I’m torn here. Do I go after there is no bad search term or do we go back to quality score?

I don’t know. That’s all right. Great question. I do want to circle back on that. There is no bad search term. I actually was ready to agree with you. Depending on where you went with that, there’s bad search terms. Where did I

Frederick Vallaeys: go wrong?

Navah Hopkins: Well, it’s, it’s that we paid too much for it. I actually don’t think that’s, that is what makes it, Bad.

It’s that we didn’t match the ad correctly. So where I think the majority of the anxiety comes from is not the cost. It’s that we’ve now created, we’ve we who have invested a lot of time in crafting the perfect message to go specifically after the right persona, especially if we layered in audiences know who we want.

And if we are not able to see where our ads are serving and if the click through rate is bad, the assumption is, well, we serve the ad to the wrong user or our ad is not as good as we thought it was, but because we can’t tell what the query is, we don’t know what side of the coin the We fall. So it’s, it’s not that there I, I agree with you.

There are no bad search terms. There are mismatched ones is that we didn’t provide the right message for that.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I think fundamentally, that’s a, that’s the difference between the sophisticated advertiser, who’s actually spent time on audiences and custom audiences and has figured, and RSAs, which give us less control over how to show the ad, but maybe you’ve pinned a couple of portions of it.

So you know, you really, you’ve really thought about this versus the smaller advertiser, who’s just concerned about I got a thousand bucks. I don’t want to waste a penny of this on something that’s not converting. And I think that’s the difference.

Navah Hopkins: I do want to go back to John Ho’s question. And so, so happy to see you here.

I don’t think it’s worth auditing quality score in, in, in search campaigns. I’ve, I’ve, that’s kind of my manifesto, is don’t focus on quality score, focus on quality and look at impression share, look at your conversion rate, look at your click theory, like, look at all the other parts that quality score can maybe clue you in on it, it really depends.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, that’s a key thing. And, and so Sorry to No, go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I think we’re politely interrupting here, right? . So, but what you say is really right. So it’s an auditing thing, right? Like, I think when people get so focused on quality score and improving quality score for the sake of improving quality score, that’s when you go off the deep end a little bit.

Right. You got to focus on business metrics. And that’s where I think too, like when you get, get so focused on let’s improve my, my ROAS, it’s like, but, but why, like, how does that ROAS connect to your profitability? That not the thing you care about? Cause you could have a better ROAS and less. Revenue is

Navah Hopkins: in the toilet because you’re, yeah, you focus on all the wrong parts of your business or there are no margins or

Frederick Vallaeys: exactly.

But so I would need for us to like make a statement like, Hey, quality score, not so important. And it goes like, Oh, nobody cares about quality score. So let’s take it away. Because at the end of the day, it’s still one of those things that’s a bit of dial like the speedometer in our car that tells us how we’re doing.

And I might be pretty good at gauging it based on, you know, having driven a lot, but What does the data tell me? So, so I love still having it, peeking at it, making sure that whatever hat text optimization, keyword optimization, structural organization that I do, that those things seem to be in line with how customers are responding through positive reinforcement.

And that’s kind of what quality score does for me.

Navah Hopkins: One thing. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

Geetanjali Tyagi: I just wanted to add to that. So I think if you have your convergence track properly, you have the right targets. You have your right keywords then What is the next level of optimization you can I think it’s still quality score is a good is a good thing to look at because Even if you are running on automated bidding at the end of the day It’s still google going in and setting a bid that takes you into the auction And then it will be higher or lower depending on the kind of quality you have.

So I don’t think you should prioritize it over your profits. And like you, you want to, your business will not do well. You just keep optimizing your quality score and you let your you don’t have the right Targets because you don’t know exactly what your profit is But I think if you have the basics right with that then it’s a good idea to look at quality

Navah Hopkins: I want to get one point in and then I know we probably have to wrap up soon The thing that I am sad at google and to be fair most ad platforms are taking away is segmentation We used to have so much ability to segment data to see what time, by what location, what location, by conversion action, like there were, we had so much control to be able to see exactly who our people were, and it makes me really sad that we can’t do that without really jerry rigging the system.

And I’ll leave it at that.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s a perfect wrap up almost right there. Right. So we have to Jerry rig the system and that tends to be tedious and that’s why you might need Optmyzr at some point or an in house technology team. And that’s kind of the reality here, right? Is that every time Google limits, some of the things we get.

We look for solutions for crafty people. I mean, we’ve been dealing with change for 20 years now in PPC and every time we somehow figure it out.

And so, you know, I think it’ll continue to be fun. I think it’ll continue to be frustrating at times. It’s really good chatting with you and kind of hearing how you think about things. And thanks for explaining these complex topics in ways that people can actually understand and hopefully take away today and do something useful with.

So we got people thanking us here. So Nava, where do people get a hold of you if they want to know more, if they want your help?

Navah Hopkins: Well, Obviously, you can come hang out at Hennessy Digital where we do SEO, we do PPC, we do social but I definitely would encourage you check me out on Twitter, at NavahF check out PPC Advice for My Puppies HK and Freya at PPC Puppy on Instagram and if you’re gonna be doing anything with PubCon you can join me for PubCon Pro Day.

I hope to it that everyone has a very profitable end of Q3 and a delightful Q4

Frederick Vallaeys: and stay safe and safe,

Navah Hopkins: safe,

Frederick Vallaeys: exactly good. And get on Julie, we find you at Optmyzr.

Geetanjali Tyagi: Yes, you can write to the support team at Optmyzr or you can reach out to me directly. I

Frederick Vallaeys: don’t think you’re on Twitter, right? We got to change that.

I like these whole PPC puppies. How come, how come I didn’t know about this? We should have shown pictures of puppies next time.

Navah Hopkins: Because if you get me on my puppies, we’re not going to talk about PPC. We’re just going to talk about my dog.

Frederick Vallaeys: But you know, now we have a real fight because I’m a cat person.

Navah Hopkins: I have cats.

Frederick Vallaeys: Oh, good. All right. Well, hey, a pleasure. Thanks both for joining and we’ll be back next week. We have David Cetaila and John Lee, John Lee from Microsoft, David Cetaila, the founding president of the paid search association. Navahand I were both board members. I know there’s a lively discussion on what Google’s been doing with search terms, so I’m sure it’s going to continue to be interesting next week on PPC town hall.

So join us for that again. Subscribe and thank you for watching. Have a great day, everyone.

Navah Hopkins: Bye guys.