Money-Saving Strategies for PPC

Episode Description

There’s a good chance you’re wasting some money via PPC even as you’re reading this.

From campaigns that yield little or no return to expensive keywords, our guests have great ideas on how to cut out wasted spend — including a few exclusive to Microsoft Ads. Also included are upcoming initiatives from the Paid Search Association and how to join.

This panel covers:

• Things PPC pros do that waste the most money
• Actionable tips on how to stop burning budgets
• Preview of the next Paid Search Association conference
• Four “money grabs" from Google and how to avoid them
• Microsoft Ads features that don’t exist in Google Ads

Episode Takeaways

Things PPC Pros Do That Waste the Most Money: PPC experts often inadvertently waste money by not optimizing their campaign settings or by failing to stay updated with platform changes that could affect ad spend efficiency. ** **

Actionable Tips on How to Stop Burning Budgets: Implementing strict geo-targeting settings, excluding irrelevant placements, and turning off enhanced CPC can help control ad spend. Regular audits of account settings and using negative keywords or exclusions can also prevent wasteful spending. ** **

Preview of the Next Paid Search Association Conference: The upcoming Paid Search Association conference will be held virtually, offering PPC professionals the latest insights and strategies from industry experts. The conference aims to address both foundational PPC skills and new trends. ** **

Four “Money Grabs" from Google and How to Avoid Them: Avoid Google’s default settings that may lead to overspending, such as enhanced CPC and broad location targeting. Review and adjust settings like ad rotation and targeting expansions to ensure budget is spent on reaching the most relevant audiences. ** **

Microsoft Ads Features That Don’t Exist in Google Ads: Microsoft Ads offers unique features such as LinkedIn profile targeting, allowing for more precise B2B targeting, and integration across different platforms, providing a more cohesive advertising approach compared to Google Ads.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: And welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys and I’m your host today. So we have a great topic. We’re going to talk about four huge money wasting things that you might be doing in Google ads. So this is a really good episode to watch. We’re going to get really tactical with some advice and we’re going to show you how you can use programs like the ads editor to undo some of those mistakes that a lot of people make because Google makes some of these things default settings.

And to add a counterpoint to that, we also have Microsoft on the call today. And we’re going to take a look at what are some of the things that you can do in Microsoft ads that you simply can’t do in Google today? So what are some of the benefits? So I’m obviously ex Google. And for a long time, it was my thinking that Microsoft was basically doing the exact same thing that Google was doing.

But over the years that’s become less and less true. So what are some of those things that are pretty unique and pretty powerful in Microsoft ads? And if you’ve been paying way too much attention to just Google, what is it that you should be thinking about when it comes to Microsoft? So those are the topics for today.

So we’ll get rolling here with our guests and I’ll introduce them in just a minute.

All right. And my guests today, David Szetela and John Lee. Welcome guys. Good to have you on again. Thank you. Frederick. Good meeting. Thank you. Yes. And David we have to do the requisite Bonjour Bon

David Szetela: s.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey John, what’s your t shirt say?

John Lee: Bourbon and horses and Kentucky Derby. I mean, you know, when you live in Louisville, if you don’t wear stuff like this, people think you’re weird.

Frederick Vallaeys: All right. So John, you’re joining us from Louisville. And people on the call watching us it’s always nice if you chat in and tell us where you’re coming in from, how things are going.

All right. And then also use that chat to ask us questions throughout. So let’s do a quick a proper intro here, right? I mean, I said we have David and John, but who are David and John? So David why don’t we start with you here for a minute? So founder and current president of the paid search association. But you’ve got a longer career than that, right? So tell us a little bit.

David Szetela: Well, currently I am spending most of my time managing PPC campaigns for clients and doing audits. Under the moniker of FMB media, and then I’m spending a good chunk of my time, a growing chunk managing. A a crazy band of board members that includes Frederique and John.

And a lot of your guests recently, Frederique, I noticed that on the board of board of directors, and we’re so glad to have them, but so the paid search association is a nonprofit association that is for probably everybody in the audience, people that are managing the search. PPC campaigns and by PPC campaigns despite the slightly awkward name we’re talking about anything that is paid by the click advertising that’s paid by the click.

So that includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. Do you want me to talk about upcoming, Let’s hold up for a second.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s go to John. So John, currently at Microsoft, but that’s also not your first stint in the industry.

John Lee: It is not, no.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right now you head up education education for Microsoft ads, right?

John Lee: To say that I headed up as a, I mean, that sounds wonderful. Not entirely, but I’ve, I’ve been in this industry now, 14 years, which is mind boggling to me, you know helped launch PPC hero blog worked a few agencies, David and I were, were. Working together for a time. It clicks marketing. And so, you know, again, a storied history on the agency side and for the past four years hit with Microsoft advertising, working in learning and development putting together little bits of training right to help people understand our platform.

But just how does it fit into context with the industry at large?

Frederick Vallaeys: And clicks marketing. It’s, it’s like the nexus of everything. PPC related these days. Everybody’s at some point we’re sure that’s right. I heard that from that’s right.

John Lee: right. They just hired Kayla brought her on. And so do you know anything more? I do and you can’t say it. We’ll leave it there. I mean, let’s just say, I mean, her experience with Hennepin was strong, both account management campaign or client management, but also sales. My gut says likely bring her on to grow.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Well, and I know more than I know her most from the, the conferences that they were doing.

So just curious if there’s another conference in the works seems a bit of an all time, of course, to do. An in person conference. And David, actually, you got something to say about conferences, right? So let’s let’s maybe start with that. What’s the PSA doing education wise?

David Szetela: Well it was interesting that in May of this past, actually in March, April of this past year, or this year, this past year, it seems like years of this year shortly after we had formed the association, We all got sequestered.

We all were locked down in our homes and several conferences that had been scheduled, including the, the HeroConf had to fold up. So having this board full of PPC experts Also sitting there with slide decks of their own that they had planned to, to show at conferences like PPC Conf and SMX. We decided to kind of on the spur of the moment and quickly put together a virtual conference. Turned out to be one of the first virtual conferences and went, went pretty well. I mean, we, we were all Practice that giving presentations at conferences. So I think that part helped. So we decided that you know, kind of based on SMXs or third door medias research into plans whether people were planning on attending in person conferences anytime soon.

The answer to that question turned out to be no and expecting and The respondents expecting not to be attending in person conferences for a long time, like into next year. So the Paid Search Association decided that we would hold another virtual conference and that is going to be coming up in January, the 26th, 27th and 28th.

**Frederick Vallaeys:**You heard here first January, another you heard it first, virtual. Is that gonna be something to pay for or free?

David Szetela: It will be free. . , That’s correct. Yeah. It’ll be free. But I also want

Frederick Vallaeys: folks, if you heard it here we might still end up charging you because thing, but it’s like, be free.

David Szetela: It’ll be free. I also wanted to mention one other thing that, that is, is kind of. Serendipity, which is that Ginny Marvin, who has for years done the content. Together with Brad Geddes and Matt Van Wagner for the SMX conferences have done the PPC related content for the SMX conferences. Ginny is on our board, and she’s coincidentally leaving Third Door Media right when we will be putting together the next conference.

So I kind of

Frederick Vallaeys: You’re roping her, right? Already.

David Szetela: I coerced her. Yeah. I

John Lee: Jenny, if you’re listening, you just got voluntold. Yeah, . . She agreed. I I wouldn’t bust her.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’ve never heard of term voluntold.

David Szetela: So yeah, Jen Jenny’s the best and, and she’s gonna be instrumental in putting together the best all right. Agenda.

Frederick Vallaeys: But you know, for as long as we still have Jenny. Working over at SMX and third door media. Let’s read an article from her. So she was posting this yesterday.

It’s never a boring day in the search industry, right? So Google Ads introduces Performance Max campaigns. What have you guys heard about that one?

John Lee: That it sounds like something out of an 80s movie. That was what I read. That’s about as far in the details as I got.

Frederick Vallaeys: So you’re saying that basically that format is going to die because Yeah.

Okay.

David Szetela: I think it’s, it’s another you know, smart smart in Google’s parlance me. It usually means this is for newbies that don’t have time to learn every nuance and the curiosity to poke into every corner like we do paid search.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right.

David Szetela: So

Frederick Vallaeys: towards leveling the playing field, letting The competition, the competition rises, mostly Google’s boat and Microsoft’s too, right?

I mean, like at the end of the day, the more people you have competing in an auction, the more money you

John Lee: will. And I would say like this is another milestone in the trend on the Google side, on the Microsoft advertising side and everywhere else towards more and more automation, particularly when you think about the massive potential scale and reach of SMB.

Right. The small business space is huge and still relatively untapped when you think about client base. And so you see what Google’s doing, their investments we’re doing much the same in Microsoft advertising. Off the top of my head, I’m forgetting the name of it, but Microsoft garage, actually a couple months ago announced it’s like a marketing center.

So it, it is Google Ads, it is Microsoft advertising and it is Facebook ads and I forget a, a bevy of others. Pulling it all together, helping you to automate it and understand based. It’s much like a smart campaign, right? To say, okay, here’s my objective. Now give me the best you know, clicks and conversions possible.

It’s like, there’s a lot of investment in that right now.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s really fascinating. So let’s talk about that a bit more here for a second, because one of the premises or the pain points, I think, in PPC is that you have these walled gardens of Microsoft and Google and Facebook and Amazon, but you’re saying that Microsoft is actually making a play to Sort of bridge that divide.

John Lee: I’m going to get, I’m going to, I’m going to get real deep here for a second. So like this, this device right here should be proof in the pudding that Microsoft can play nice with other companies. This was a partnership with Android, right? This thing is fantastic. You haven’t seen one before. It’s the duo.

And if you think about how Microsoft has changed under Satya over the last, what, five years, six years, however long that’s been now it’s a very different company. And so, yes, there are still walled gardens. Microsoft’s data is Microsoft’s data, and there’s a lot of security and protection behind that.

And they know, we know we don’t live in a bubble and so true partnership and, and working to. You know empower people right as our company mission statement empower people to do to do their best right and so that that means Finding ways to plug into apis right and bring all this fun stuff together into one mean, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: And I love that microsoft’s doing that but the reality at some level too is that we still have governments We’ll see how long that all holds up. Indeed. Yeah, but but yeah, so long as we do there are rules and regulations and GDPR. And so I think a little bit of the siloing of the data is an effect of that, right?

It’s consumer privacy California consumer privacy, privacy act, first one in the United States. Right. And I think you guys are doing some stuff around privacy as well, right? Can you talk for a minute about the audience network and how, you know, how, how we’re Walk that fine line of protecting consumer privacy while still being able to do the things that we as marketers have come to expect around audience targeting.

John Lee: Yeah, for sure, man. You’re just going deep.

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s what

John Lee: curveball questions here. No. So, I mean, there’s a lot of work happening. You know, if we think about the consumer privacy, the future, you know, the quote unquote cookie list world. You know, there’s work happening there, right? And not just by us, but everybody right in this industry, all the platforms who rely on cookie data.

Presently. And what does that mean in the future? So there’s definitely work happening there. But you know, if we talk about M sand for a minute, we just launched a partnership for brand safety. And so it’s not a an add on. It’s not an extra cost. It’s just if you’re running ads on the Microsoft audience network.

You are automatically opted into this brand safety application and I didn’t come prepared to speak to that. But i’m happy Pull some links after the fact and include that here

Frederick Vallaeys: You’re saying you’re opted in by default so microsoft has made that invest and so when we talk about brand safety like david Talk a little bit about what your goal is with the paid search association Because these are obviously bigger topics that the whole industry cares about You you know, some companies will make it a default thing that you get.

Others, you might have to opt in. And we’ll talk a lot more about opt in, opt out in just a minute here. But what sort of the role of the PSA in your mind for helping protect the industry in many ways? And David, we just scored a bingo hit on you being muted.

David Szetela: Newbie. Originally, originally You know, I was attracted, it was I was approached by a guy named Mike Friedman who who had the original idea and he actually got the domain name and I was attracted to the, or by the notion that there really wasn’t one consolidated source of credible, curated information And, and resources for, for PPC managers, you basically had to pick and choose from among homogenous resources like Ginny’s great SMX daily newsletter.

Yeah, you could you could get that and pick the one or two PPC articles out of that and get educated and learn about something new. But there really wasn’t one place, one stop shop for, for the information that people that really wanted to train themselves and, and keep and keep up to date on the developments.

So originally that was the core. Notion or core mission to to serve as a curated source of resources, learning and news resources. And I think that’s still a good core. We, we talked a lot about both of you guys were involved in these discussions about, you know, should we, should we provide some kind of certification so that PPC managers could carry, you know, their PPC, PSA certification from job to job.

And decided that, that, that would be outside of the scope of, of our mission because there were other organizations that were providing it and probably do a better job than we could at keeping it up to date. So so two examples of. What I’m talking about are the conference, number one, and the daily newsletter that we put out.

So every member gets an email every single day with five to eight links to that day’s news and best practices. That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: curated?

David Szetela: Yes.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. Nice. So it’s not a bot that’s just finding whatever has the word PPC in it.

David Szetela: Yeah, it is

Frederick Vallaeys: nice. So people can sign up for that on paid search. org, right?

David Szetela: Yes. Paid search.

org. Yes.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, and Oh, go ahead, John.

John Lee: I was just gonna say, as we think about, you know, future state for, for what PSA could do, and one of the most exciting things that we’ve talked about as a collective is the possibility of like mentoring and things like that. And that’s, that’s complex, right? How do we figure that out?

I, how do we schedule it? Whatever. And there’s a lot of bright men and women on, on the board that are participants there that. We have all been eager to share what we know within the industry with our peers, and we all have a passion for mentoring, which I love. Right. And so, you know, when, when, when we figured that out, you know, I think that’ll be another town hall,

Frederick Vallaeys: directionally,

John Lee: like, where do we want to go?

Right.

Frederick Vallaeys: And for folks who wanted to see that news from John about the brain safety. So here’s that link to the article. So you can check that out as well.

John Lee: And it’s integral ad science, right? So if anybody that’s worked in, in, in native and display knows IAS right there, it’s like, it’s the standard, right.

For brand safety. Yeah. So there you have it. So Microsoft worrying about brand safety. Cool. Let’s let’s shift topics here a bit. So we did promise people we’re going to tell them about the four money wasters. So David, you want to lead us through those?

David Szetela: Sure. Let’s see. Am I sharing my screen?

Frederick Vallaeys: I’ll show your screen.

David Szetela: All right. Okay. So I have Google ads editor up, used to be Google AdWords editor, and I’m going to go through fairly quickly for spots in the campaign settings and, and, ad group settings, where Google by default I’m not going to say steals your money, but borrows more than, than you might want them to.

So the first one is and this has changed within the past week. You used to be able to run a user location report and you, and if you looked at it the right way unless you knew what I’m about to tell you, You would see that your ads were being shown either nationwide or worldwide, even if you were geotargeting a smaller area. When I do, and this is,

Frederick Vallaeys: why is that happening? Explain that a bit more, right?

David Szetela: Okay. So I’m going to show it on the screen. Let’s take a look at this particular campaign and its locations. So

bear with me for a sec. Okay. This particular campaign is targeting Houston, Texas. And by default, the targeting method is people in or show who show interest in your targeted locations. Translated, this means Google show my ads anywhere you want. Because I, I don’t know how they rationalize it. I’m, I’m afraid I can’t explain it.

There, there is no rationalization that I would accept. All I know for sure is that even though I think most people know Nine out of 10, or even more of the campaigns and accounts that I audit have their campaigns set up by default. And I can show the advertiser using a user location report how much money they’re losing by virtue of the fact that their ads are being shown outside of the locations that they’re targeting.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, and so the recommended setting here that people can see on the screen for those listening to the podcast, so basically there’s Three ways here that it shows on screen in ads editor that you can right to location and basically breaks down between Are you interested in people physically located in that spot or who indicates some interest or both of these?

Right and it’s actually a really useful setting right because you know if I live in los altos and i’m in my Office in Palo Alto and I’m looking for a plumber to fix my toilet. It’s actually helpful that Google knows that my house is in Los Altos So I probably might be interested in the Los Altos plumber, even though I’m currently not there but it’s a very valid point if you actually Did not want people outside of your location because there’s just not a chance in the world They’re going to travel that far to come by from you then that could be a waste of money So that’s what you’re pointing out, right david

David Szetela: pretty much except that.

I contend and I can prove this with data that If the if the default setting is accepted your ad might show in India, you know, you might be looking for a plumber in Los Altos for, for your, for your, for your water closet. Yeah. In Palo Alto, but you’re at the show in India,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? And then here, here’s the fun of machine learning, right?

So the machine is trying to predict, well, how likely is it that this person in India actually needs it in Los Altos, California?

David Szetela: Right.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so it says, Oh, that’s 45 percent probability. And then you have Google and Google says, well, so long as it’s 47 percent or better or 40 percent or better, then, then it’s good to go.

Right? So now you’re out with a very low probability. Okay. Still meets that threshold and boom, you’ve got your ad shown in India and I guess you’re saying that was a wasted click.

David Szetela: Yeah, I’ve seen accounts that are spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on clicks outside of the geotargeted area without a doubt.

And, you know, if I had to estimate, I’d say 5 percent on average, 10 percent of the budget is being wasted on clicks from outside the geotargeted area. So cut to the chase here. This is the right or generally the right setting. The people in or regularly in your targeted locations.

Frederick Vallaeys: And that’s actually a bit of a change too.

I hadn’t even really noticed that, but it used to be people in your location, but now they’ve added it regularly in. So I guess the GPS off the phone.

David Szetela: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: And thanks to John’s new Android Microsoft hybrid device, Google knows even more than it did before.

David Szetela: Is, is that a phone too,

John Lee: John? It is, but we’re not calling it a phone.

Okay. It is a new two screen device.

Frederick Vallaeys: I want it. Wait, let’s just go full screen on there again.

John Lee: Nice. This thing runs.

David Szetela: I want one.

John Lee: It is Android. It is Android, yes. But it is been Microsoft, whatever that word would be. It’s normally not this color. I have a skin on it that makes it look like it’s charred wood.

Mm-Hmm. . It’s normally white, but anyways. Yeah. No, it’s fantastic. Very

Frederick Vallaeys: nice. So it’s an Android device, but on hardware made by Microsoft.

John Lee: That’s correct. Made by the Surface team. So if you think Panos Pinay and everything that’s happened with Surface for the past few years, it is the same team. Bringing the mobile experience, but again, hesitating to call it a phone because it is something else entirely.

I mean, I mean, look,

Frederick Vallaeys: pull

John Lee: all the way around. Right? It does a lot of things because of its form factor apps like outlook and teams takes advantage of the dual screen saying okay Here’s my inbox over here and i’m in a reading pane on the other screen True multitasking

Frederick Vallaeys: I’m, i’m a total sucker for technology and gadgets.

So I gotta know more here. So it is android based But it is kind of like a microsoft thing. So does it run word and Excel or is that the standard implementation of those?

John Lee: It is actually, it is a near pure install of Android. So when I said earlier that this was an actual partnership between Microsoft and Google, I was not joking that they actually, that basically Panos flew to California.

I forget the guy’s name, the guy that’s running Android right now. It basically said, look, we want to build this thing, but we can’t do it without your help because you guys know your software better than we do. And so they did just that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Very nice, beautiful. And so it’s a near,

John Lee: a near pure install.

Frederick Vallaeys: Is it for Christmas already?

John Lee: So I preordered mine way early, like as soon as I could and got it the day it was available, which was what September 9th, 10th. It’s a bit on the pricey side, but I’m not selling the duo here. The 256 gig hard drive is pretty good. 1499.

David Szetela: Okay. That’s more than I paid for my phone. Yeah. That’s

Frederick Vallaeys: why we’re not calling in a phone.

That’s why we’re calling. We

John Lee: did something else. And again, like we’re going to go down this rabbit hole. Twice this week, I’ve had major tech issues with my main computer and resulting in this morning leading up to this call, completely redoing windows. So that’s fun. But with a little Bluetooth keyboard, I was able to work.

Take team’s calls and be doing something else while I’m on a team’s call on this little guy. It’s, it is a productivity monster. And if it’s

Frederick Vallaeys: David David likes to go to the beach periodically and pretend like he’s working from an office. So this might be the perfect device for him.

David Szetela: Exactly. Exactly.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey David, you didn’t tell us where you were calling from.

So everyone knows.

David Szetela: I’m calling from Fort Myers Beach, Florida, which is just north of Naples. It’s a, I’m on an island. And if I stood up and looked out my window, I could see the Gulf of Mexico.

Frederick Vallaeys: See, now we’re not jealous. All right. And folks who are watching, if you have like a, a money saving tip that you want to put in, just put it in the chat and we’ll talk about that too.

But David, take us to Number two.

David Szetela: Number two. Okay. Number two is a little less, is a little more obscure. And that is that it’s, it’s about display campaigns exclusively. And by default, Google turns on this targeting expansion, which is Google’s way of saying, we’re we’re going to help you by extending the reach of your ad group or your, your, your display ad group.

Extending the reach in this case means we’re going to show your ads on sites where we think people will convert. Now, a couple things here. If you’re using audience targeting, you don’t want to be placing ads on sites based on any criteria. You want to be following audience members around as they go to any site.

So that’s number one. Number two, Back to my superstition. I’m not sure how Google knows especially early in a, in a new campaign or ad group what sites are going to exhibit conversion behavior. So I always recommend it. I always do just basically disabled this. Yeah. Go

John Lee: to level five, man. Level five.

David Szetela: Yeah. Level five.

John Lee: Yeah.

David Szetela: I

Frederick Vallaeys: mean, it’s interesting. So an optimizer, we way back in the beginning, we had our optimization suggestions and then we’d have a conservative mode and an aggressive mode. And we never, it was really random how we put that in, but a lot of our customers said like, yeah, we love that because we want to be able to control.

The aggressiveness. And it’s actually impressive that Google has at least given five levels of. Right. Because my whole point before was like, listen, it’s machine learning and Google basically sets the threshold of when something is considered good enough or close enough. Can I,

John Lee: can I posit a thought here?

So I, I know that Google, as does Microsoft, Facebook, everywhere, we have similar audiences or lookalike audiences. But is this kind of like similar audiences light? I mean, if we, it’s like, what is it using as the criteria, right? For expansion, particularly when you say aggressive. And now, because if you think early days with Facebook, you’d upload an audience and say, okay, I want to look like, and it was a slider.

I want it as close or as similar to what I uploaded or, you know, Expand on these ideas, right? Go a little bit looser. I feels very similar in nature, but like, what is the criteria? Like, how are they expanding? Right. Well, you know, I started to say no, but then I remembered the, the explanation can’t remember whether it’s in the help or the bubble that pops up, but, but they do say audiences and sites, so yeah, I think they’re doing a similar audience thing, but it’s the sites that scares me.

Well, they’re probably inferring based on what we see these people in your audience is going to here’s another site that’s just like that. So it’s almost like maybe similar sites, if you will.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, and I think the reason that the site scare us a little bit is maybe into your next tip, David. But in many of the newer smart and machine learning based systems.

Your ad might show on YouTube, it might be next two apps. It might be anywhere in the world. I mean, if Google figures out how to like transmit it directly into someone’s brain, that’s what they’ll do. . But they don’t tell us. They don’t tell us. Right. And automated systems. And so we’re just left guessing and that’s what scares us.

David Szetela: Yes. Yeah. But by the way as with a lot of recommendations or best practices there can be a place for this. Like if it. I always reflect on clients who have had what I call warm body accounts. Basically they have offers that, that appeal to almost anybody. Something like some, some insurance offers sweepstakes.

You know B2C lead gen where all they, all they want to do is collect consumer names and

John Lee: email. You could even go a step above that, David, and think about, and you and I even had done this together in the past of it’s a new brand. Nobody knows this brand entity. And how do you build a brand online?

Well, let’s be aggressive. Let’s get out there and let’s learn from the data. Cause we know we can get some quote unquote, free impressions on display. Let’s see what happens, right? Let’s follow the data and start to track that. So I mean, there are use cases here, but I think the main point being, it’s a big wild card.

And if you’re watching, watching the dollars and cents very closely. Maybe don’t maybe don’t gamble.

David Szetela: Good point. Okay. You want to go to the third one?

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s do number three.

David Szetela: Number three

Frederick Vallaeys: Number

David Szetela: three is some sometimes just for for jollies go into your remarketing campaign and go to placements and look at the placements where your ads are appearing and If you unless you have done what i’m about to show you you will see that your ads are appearing on mobile apps And a lot of your clicks are coming from mobile apps You And if you look at the names of the mobile apps, you’ll see you know Johnny learns, learns his first swimming, swimming lesson.

Wait a minute. That’s not a real app. Anyway, you, you, you’re going to see that there are a lot of games, a lot of kids, things, and

Frederick Vallaeys: a lot of accidental clicks that were unlike a lot of fat thumb

David Szetela: clicks. So,

Frederick Vallaeys: how do you get rid of those?

David Szetela: It used to be easy, but it’s Google slowly stamped out the, the means to eliminate ads showing on mobile apps.

John Lee: Absolutely.

David Szetela: Absolutely. That’s what I’m talking about. So I’m going to show you a technique that that I learned about. From reading an article that Kirk Williams, another PSA board member wrote. And you can only do this with, with the Google Ads editor. You can’t do it through the web interface.

So basically, you go to the display campaign at the campaign level. And look at it. Oh, no, no. You go to the display campaign, you go down to where you say keywords and targeting. You go down to, let me expand this a little bit. Mobile app categories negative. And you add to negative mobile app categories.

All Apple apps. And all Android apps, and that’s it. And from then on, you will not see mobile apps in your list of placements. In other words, your ads will not appear on mobile apps.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, and obviously you want to do this for all of your campaigns.

David Szetela: Each display campaign, yes.

John Lee: My only two cents there, the only devil’s advocate play here would be Is if it’s re remarketing, retargeting is maybe watch the data at first, right?

Because you know something about them. It’s behavior, right? They’ve been to the site, they’ve been to your app, whatever that looks like. And so maybe follow them around a little bit and say, okay. Doesn’t make sense for me to be showing. So if I show them this ad on an app, do they actually click through and take action if so great, and now I can just play the whack a mole game that was referencing, right?

Saying, okay, these apps are great. Some of these apps are not so good. Let’s just follow the data and exclude those individually. Versus again, particularly for doing level five aggressive on it and say, you know, an in market or, you know, another type of targeting that might be. Right. Yeah. Okay. Well,

David Szetela: let me, let me respond to that quickly.

I, I have looked at the data in general and found that most of the time, there are exceptions. Most of the time, there are a lot of clicks. But Zero conversion. Yes, standard zero conversion. And, and my theory is what Fred was just saying is it’s fat thumbs. It’s people that hit the ad by mistake. So yeah, you can play whack a mole with the mobile apps, but they come back with insane velocity. In other words, you stamp them out and they come back.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, one thing we put in Optimizer is if you want to play the whack a mole, but at least automate that to your criteria, you can actually look at when something was in app placement, look at the actual numbers, and if it had zero conversions, sure, make it a negative.

But if it if it did somehow convert, keep it. You can do

David Szetela: that

John Lee: automatically.

Frederick Vallaeys: We can do that automatically.

John Lee: Nice. Very nice. That’s sexy. Just putting that out there. That’s awesome.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Yeah, and then the other question I suppose is like attribution models, right? So I imagine if you’re in the middle of playing, even if you fat thumbed it, like you might have actually been that person who wanted to buy it, but you’re like, no, I’m busy.

I want to play my

David Szetela: Tetris

Frederick Vallaeys: later. And then you buy, right? So make sure that your attribution model accounts for Not just last click, right? How do you do this evaluation? All right, let’s let’s take us home with the fourth money waste. Okay,

David Szetela: the fourth one is, is I’m not gonna, I’ve got nothing to demonstrate.

It’s a little bit of a superstition of mine. And I don’t have data. Sorry, Fred. I don’t have data to back this up. But I don’t like

Frederick Vallaeys: the feeling says

David Szetela: this is based on my feelings. I don’t like the fact that by default, when you create a new campaign, the bidding model is enhanced CPC, ECPC. And my feeling is based on my distrust of the ability for the bidding algorithm to know anything about the conversion behavior people.

As it relates to the offer. So Google says, for example, that in order to use target CPA bidding. You need to have 15 or so, used to be 30, used to be 50. Now it’s 15 conversions over the course of 30 days, which I think makes sense because you’ve got some behavior to, to fuel the algorithm, whereas when a campaign starts out with the CPC bidding, there’s no behavior, there’s no data nothing’s built up.

And I, I suspect, and I, there’s a little bit of data behind it behind this, but it’s anecdotal. I can’t, I couldn’t print it out. Oh, Pedro has the same, same feeling. Good. I’ve seen really insanely high CPCs at the beginning of a campaign effort. And my suspicion is yeah, that’s, that’s Google’s automation thrashing.

Remember that term, thrashing in the computer world? Thrashing back and forth trying to It’s attenuate on the on the signal. Let’s say

John Lee: that’s some big words, gentlemen. Yeah, I know.

David Szetela: Geeky words.

Frederick Vallaeys: John, are you playing a tiny violin? Are you responding there too? No,

John Lee: no, I just a weird, weird little nervous tick.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay. I just watched an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David is doing some gestures completely by mistake and there’s a person who’s deaf who watches him and thinks he just said something horrendous.

Oh my god. So Your hand’s under control, John.

John Lee: Hopefully, hopefully I didn’t offend anybody.

Frederick Vallaeys: So, but speaking about Enhanced CPC, right, so, And again, I think it goes to this whole machine learning thing. So Google, even from the very get go, sort of sees these signals and finds that, Oh, these users seem similar to those users.

And for those users, we think they tend to convert on these types of offers. But they have an inkling of what might work. But I think the point to take away here is that, If you have a more limited budget and if you are smart about PPC, you can probably allocate it in places that you know have a pretty high probability of converting and you don’t need to go experimental.

You don’t need to use machine learning at that stage, right? So keep more control in the beginning and then as your budgets start to go up, as there’s more data for Google to base its decisions based on what it sees from you as opposed to the whole world that’s maybe when it makes sense to turn these systems on.

And then of course, safeguard them by putting in place some some smart automations, which, which we tend to call automation layers, right? So put your own automation on top of Google’s and on top of Microsoft’s so that the engines can do the amazing things they do. But because let’s face it, I mean, the types of machine learning and AI that Microsoft and Google have access to, like I’d say, I don’t, it’s not enough money.

Between any of us advertisers to replicate that. Right. So

John Lee: I actually did a training session last week where I talked about the Microsoft advertising recommendations tab. Right. And, you know, just call it, I was like in the past that likely would get booze from a lot of people, but you know, I can’t speak for the Google side, but on the Microsoft side, I mean, just a ton of investment in that recommendation engine, whether that’s.

It’s no longer just a, Hey, you should spend more. It’s a, we think you can spend X amount and that will impact you X number of clicks, X number of conversions, right? So it’s actually showing you potential impact of recommended change. But where I think the machine learning just is magical is. The recommendation engine behind RSAs.

So it’s actually looking at your account, the ads that you’re running and saying, Hey, let’s use these headlines. These, these body copy, and here’s a recommended ad they’re spot on. And it’s, it’s even referencing competitive data sets to say, how are competitors formatting their RSAs that are working well, and what can we learn from that to, to craft a better RSA for you and your account?

I mean, it’s phenomenal, right? And it’s such a subtle thing. And so. I mean, that’s just tip of the iceberg. When we think about what can machine learning and what can the platform side automation to do for you, knowing that you can take it with an optimizer, with a whatever, right. And really ramp that up in a big way.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I mean, and that’s like a topic that we could spend a whole session on RSA versus ETA. In fact, Brad Geddes, Ginny and myself are doing a session at SMX. I think it’s on December 8th. We’re going to talk about automation of your ads, RSA versus ETA, which one is the winner. There’s slight concern that Google is moving away from ETAs.

They’ve made it really hard to have these in accounts. So obviously john for microsoft also says rsas are really good I mean, are there any caveats? Are there any prerequisites that you really see people have to do to get them to perform at the level that you’re talking about?

John Lee: Well, so I mean the data speaks for itself and I don’t i’ve not practiced in the data anymore I was a couple months ago.

Because I was very much in the headspace But yeah, I mean across the board when you think about click through rates conversion rates What we are seeing on the microsoft advertising platform is that rsas Rocking right now. And it’s not the same in every vertical, but the majority of verticals we’re seeing positive performance.

So it would be

when an RSA is present in an ad group with at least one other expanded text ad, what is the Delta right in performance? And so looking at that across a wide data set, And looking at then click through rate click through rate difference conversion rate difference, and CPA difference.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And if you looked at the conversion rate difference, then I sort of get it. Ultimately, you still want to look at profitability, not just, like, conversion rate. But Google often makes the argument that it’s about incrementality rather than just actual numbers.

John Lee: I think it goes back to, like, an argument we’ve all made probably various times in our careers to say, Look.

The ad with the best click through rate may not be the best ad, right? It may not be the message that is landing appropriately to drive conversion action on the website. That’s a big deal, right? And so people get so hung up on click through, even to this day, it, you know, yes, it’s important. I mean, we can’t ignore it, but it is also not the only stat coming through and certainly not the most important.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, exactly. Cool. Okay, john. I know you got some things lined up to tell us about Microsoft that are pretty unique. So

John Lee: yeah let me know when when my screen can be shared. I’m actually go a little bit out of order from what we talked about earlier. So just, you know, this conversation, you know, where’s Google pinching you?

Right? I’m coming in just to say what are what are some things happening on the Microsoft side that are differentiators. And we’ve been talking about Lincoln profile targeting for a long time. I’m referencing it again because it’s fully live. And so like if you were waiting for it to come out of beta so that you could use it, the wait is over has been now for close to a month.

And so what does it mean? Well, Microsoft bought LinkedIn five years ago, four years ago. This is really the first instance of data sets from those two companies coming together. And what it means is whether it’s search, DSA, shopping you know, an MSAN, an audience network campaign, you can layer in company name.

So if you’re doing account based marketing, boom. You’ve got another layer of targeting here. Job function industries, right? And so, you know, bid only targeting bid, of course. So great, great feature here. And if you’re not tapping into the particularly if you’re in the B2B space, although I would argue there’s potential opportunity to think about this outside of B2B, but B2B is the clear The clear winner here any any commentary from the two of you before I change gears

Frederick Vallaeys: No, I mean, I love the whole linkedin integration.

I think to put it in perspective for people It’s really that age old question of how do you become successful in b2b ppc advertising? The problem has always been i’m selling printers, but I want to sell a corporation a corporate buyer Someone who’s going to buy an expensive printer, not a home user who wants to 30 printer.

And that’s always been hard to distinguish, right? Because you’ve had keywords, printers, and then you had audiences. But audiences were fairly broad. They’ve gotten pretty good.

John Lee: Well, and in differentiating between a B2B buyer and a consumer buyer, if they just start on printer. How do you tell the difference?

Right? It’s the same query either, either way. But this is, so, you know, again, I mentioned ABM account based marketing. Like if you know these companies or at least people that are in these industries, right, with these job titles or the ones that are buying that you know, printer ink, Now you have the layers.

Okay. I can safely, comfortably bid on such a general term, but because I’m layering it with this other targeting, I’m isolating it to just the people that are likely to buy. I mean, it’s, it’s pretty special.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, let’s that reminds me there’s another money waster that we were discussing before we went live date adjustments.

John Lee: That’s well, that’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So, and this is another opportunity for that to happen. Yeah. So one of the things I came to the table with, you know, we were talking about ECBC and I’m like, yes, absolutely. And Everyone needs to be really mindful when you’re applying bid adjustments. And so that could be age, gender, location, however many audiences deep you have stacked for particular ad group or campaign location.

In the case of our platform, LinkedIn, profile target, all of these things. So if you have bid adjustments at every layer that can get out of control in a hurry. So Frederick, you, you confirmed that on the Google side, it’s capped at a thousand percent.

Frederick Vallaeys: I believe it’s a thousand percent. Yeah.

John Lee: In the short amount of time that we’ve been on the phone, I’ve not been able to get an answer on on what we’re doing.

I’m I’m assuming it’s something similar. I will I will continue to dig and confirm that, but something to watch for, right? And again, on a Microsoft advertising site, even if you’re using, say, a bid strategy, like target CPA, those bid adjustments still come in at the end. So you’ve got the bid automation that’s happening, and then your bid adjustments are still a factor.

Take care. In your final bid price. And so being mindful of how you’re stacking those and be very strategic in doing so.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I I even wrote a script for that thing. Of course you did,

John Lee: Frederick.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, if it’s a problem but my search engine is not working. Well, I found a thing, but okay. Maybe search engine lens is not working right now.

Anyway, there’s a script out there. There you go. It’ll measure how much you’re stacking your big adjustments because you actually really out of control. And this, this was based on a personal pain point. Like one time a customer was like, why did you bid like 500 on this click? I was like, I don’t know.

Like, and then yeah. And especially in the legal vertical. So we had Nava Hopkins on last week. She’s in the legal space. Great session about bid management. If you want to watch that one, but yeah, you take a hundred dollar bid and you even apply a thousand percent bid adjustments. You’re going to be in a world, world, world of hurts.

And actually I don’t think it’s a thousand dollars. It may not be a thousand percent bid adjustment, but I think it’s a thousand dollar CPC cap that Google puts in a lot of money. Right.

John Lee: Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: Anyway, John

John Lee: All right, let’s talk image extensions. So, you know, for those that have been been doing doing this work for a while, you’ll know that on the Microsoft advertising side, even back when we were still calling ourselves being ads, we’ve had an image extension now for several years, even back when Google had their initial beta and then sunset it, we managed to keep ours.

Well, recently we just added to that multi images meaning that you could have effectively a carousel appearing with your search ads in the search. And so it creates a truly beautiful experience. This is like the beginning of a multi stage process for us. You know, this photo is some, something of a, an alluding factor to what, what may come, right?

So we think about verticals that have very image based products. How do we lean into that within the SERP? But regardless, you know, whatever vertically you’re in, that’s live today, but what I want to fast forward to, and apologies for zipping through a bunch of slides really quickly hopefully I don’t give you whiplash, but I want to touch on that a lot of, a lot of, you know, businesses, you know, You, you know what you’re selling, you know what you’re doing, you’re great at running your campaigns, but you’re like, I don’t have time to go and create beautiful photography for an image extension or say a display ad or an audience ad on the Microsoft audience network.

What do I do? Well, we have solved that to an extent in that a partnership with shutterstock accessed over 300 million. commercially licensed images. That is a lot of images. And those are available to you in the platform today, whether you’re creating an image extension, multi image extension, or creating an audience ad for the audience network.

And I did, I did several tests. I was like, I’m just going to throw in some, you know, some wacky niche verticals and just see if an appropriate image comes up in time and time again. I was impressed. And so one it’s. Shutterstock right opening up in that partnership, but two. Leveraging the Bing search technology to give you an accurate result when you’re doing a search in the UI.

And so if you hadn’t heard about this one this was like, in my mind, one of the most exciting developments that’s come around in a while, but it’s been pretty quiet.

Frederick Vallaeys: I think people got to take advantage, right? Anytime there’s a search engine that just draws people’s attention. I would, I would worry that over time, like I’m going to see all of the PPC agencies taking pictures of happy people sitting around a meeting table.

And shaking hands. And then it’s like, Oh my God. Like what?

John Lee: Yeah, it totally could happen. Yeah.

Frederick Vallaeys: But until that day comes, like definitely take advantage of this.

John Lee: And I would say like my, personally, my perspective I can’t speak for the engineers behind this, but like my perspective as an advertiser, as a marketer is if, and when you can get access to original photography.

Right that you’ve had creative control over that is best practice and that should be your your number one option This is that fail safe safety net right for when a maybe budget’s tight or two You know what? I know I can get them but I can’t get them for another three months six months, but I want to launch today I think that there is Room, right?

Room in there. But this should never be just, you know what? Screw it. I don’t need the original photography. I’m only going to use these. That shouldn’t be your default.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Hey, we got the audience participating here. So Yuki Weinberg, thank you for letting us know that it looks like a 900 percent max bit adjustment.

John Lee: And that is correct. So if you’re doing an individual bit adjustment, say it’s for gender, yeah, you could max that to 900%. What I need to confirm is, is if you have them stacked across multiple targets and you’ve got, say, 20 percent on one, you know, 500 on another, right? What is the max combination that you could potentially go up to?

It may very well be 900, but that’s what I need to confirm because Frederick was saying that it’s 1000 percent on the The opposite of that too, right? I mean, you can make negative bit adjustments and those could also end up stacking to, like, basically I’ll take that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Tim loyal listener has a question about linkedin data.

John Lee: So I would, I would love to be able to say, yeah, that’s happening. Let’s

Frederick Vallaeys: ask the question here for people just listen. But so any plans to give that buyer data on the social side? Like profile targeting, but reversed.

John Lee: Correct. Yeah. And like, what are people searching for on, on the LinkedIn side? We all know that that data exists.

I will say that it was a very complex process involving engineers on, on both teams. So LinkedIn, even though it’s owned by Microsoft is still treated as an isolated company. So that’s an important detail to keep in mind. And so the data sets are actually in isolated buckets. And so just for us to get what we have today for LinkedIn profile targeting Feats of engineering fe of feats of legal, right?

Making sure that that data is safe, it’s protected. And so that took a long time. I know that con conversations continue in terms of how can we expand that? What else can we do with this data on both sides of the platform, but there’s no development that I, I’m aware of that I can safely share today.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thanks for that question, Tim. Alright, John, we probably have time for maybe one more .

John Lee: Yep. I’ll just touch on the, the Microsoft Audience Network. Very briefly. And so for those that are new to me, because I’ve said it now like a dozen times Microsoft audience network is a native ad platform again, analogous to the Google display network in that it’s in the same platform as search campaigns.

But now you’ve got an opportunity to go out and, and on a CPC basis bid on placements on. Msn.com the edge browser outlook.com, and a host of new like oh, I think it’s Good. Housekeeping is one of our more recent you know, high quality publisher partners that have come on board and that will continue to grow.

But this is fully live in the us. It is in pilot and say, you know, Canada, UK, elsewhere in Europe. And in a pack. But in the United States, if you’ve not looked at this yet, I would recommend taking a good look because those are high quality placements. And when you think about linked in profile targeting what you can do with audiences in market, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera this is a very attractive option.

And so beautiful ad and a subtle plug here. If you’re, if you’re into the Google import tool, say, okay, I’ve done a lot of work on the Google side and I want to replicate that on Microsoft advertising. That applies to your Google display campaigns as well.

David Szetela: So if

John Lee: you have a display campaign, that’s rocking and Scott, you know, in market audiences and soon.

Remarketing lists. You can actually import all of that over, including the ads. So if you have responsive, responsive display ads on Google side, that will come through as an audience ad on our side, including the image. So again, don’t do double work. If you don’t have to TBD on when Google import for marketing lists will be live but soon, like maybe even within a month.

But just a quick explanation there that is not to say you will import the people. In the audience, it is saying I want to import. The logic, like the rule that I, that I’m building that list from. So people that have visited my homepage, right. It would take that list, a logic and pull it over and create that list on the Microsoft advertising side to immediately say, okay, I want to start building this from day one.

And if you’ve imported a Google display campaign, it would come with that targeting in place already. So just quick, quick pitch. Maybe we have another question here about LinkedIn, but so is it possible to actually target just a job function as opposed to do a bit adjustment? And the point being that if you do the bid adjustment, you may still show outside of that specific targeting.

Let me, let me think about this for a second. I believe it is possible to isolate the LinkedIn profile targeting. Audience. So that would be bid or be targeted, right? So that is, that is possible for you to do. And now in terms of thinking through the, you know, and or logic, it is limited. So if you think about like a custom combination type strategy, that is a limitation of our LinkedIn profile targeting today.

And so you’re going to need to be a little more blunt force with this today and how you approach it. Long term that again. We know that’s a pain point It is a it is a flag that’s raised and we’re aware of and working towards fixing it

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, I can’t believe we’ve already been talking hours. So yeah, it went fast.

Yeah, right. This was fun. But but yeah, so David, I know there’s some stuff we didn’t get to talk about, but I’ll give the floor to you to maybe make some final comments and tell us one more thing about PSA.

David Szetela: Oh, let’s say PSA and there, there’s some synergy between the PSA and there’s a LinkedIn.

group that I started 10 or 11 years ago called the PPC pro people that now has 18, 000 members or 19, 000. And we will not exactly merge the two, but we will encourage the members of one to cross pollinate the other. So look for that coming up and look for the stuff that John was talking about.

Mentoring is really big on our agenda, both standalone and as part of the conference.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool. John, let’s hear from you final points and how people can get ahold of you.

John Lee: Yeah. If anybody has questions, I love to talk shop. And so, you know, hit me up, email Twitter. And of course there’s all kinds of good information on the blog, as well as we have a, an actual training portal.

So that’s the learning lab. And so feel free to come in and take a peek and brush up on your, your Microsoft advertising skills. But otherwise, if anybody has questions about any of the features I referenced Resonate additional commentary. Again, feel free. I’m an open book.

Frederick Vallaeys: Cool. And that email address that we’re showing is correct.

Yeah,

John Lee: they Microsoft could not spare an end for me. All I got was Jolie.

Frederick Vallaeys: Jolie. It’s because you bought all the memory for your phone, right? All 200. Including

John Lee: Perna Virgie. Call me Jolie now because of this.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s always fun. Good. Hey, well, thanks for for joining me. Thanks everyone for listening. Next week we’ll be back. We have an episode on e commerce. I mean, we are going into Q4, so we can’t help it, but we got to talk about e commerce and we’re going to get really tactical again with some really good advice.

From our speakers, Brett Curry, next week. He’s the host of another PPC podcast. So thank you all for joining. Gentlemen, stay on. We’re going to wrap it up here, but thanks everyone for listening. We’ll see you next week.

David Szetela: Thank you. Thank you for the week.