PPC Reporting Hacks and Tricks

Episode Description

With all those numbers, PPC reporting can often be tiresome and complicated.

Making vast amounts of data easy for clients to understand is no piece of cake. You need time and focus to generate a good report that conveys what you want it to. Here’s reporting advice straight from industry specialists, featuring actionable tips and hacks to build a meaningful reporting process.

This panel covers:

• What do clients and managers want from a perfect PPC report?
• Tools and tricks for moving data between systems
• How to find competitive analysis insights more quickly?

Episode Takeaways

What do clients and managers want from a perfect PPC report?

• Clients and managers generally prefer reports that are succinct and directly tied to business outcomes, highlighting key performance metrics like ROI, CPA, and year-over-year or month-over-month comparisons.
• Visualization plays a crucial role in reports for easy digestibility. Simple visual representations (like line graphs for trends and pie charts for distribution) are favored
• Reports should not only present data but also provide insights and actionable recommendations.
• It’s essential to customize reports based on the client’s level of understanding and interest in details. Basic summaries with the option to delve deeper upon request can cater to varying needs. ** **

Tools and tricks for moving data between systems

• Using tools like Google Data Studio can help consolidate and visualize data from multiple sources effectively.
• Connectors like Supermetrics are valuable for integrating data from different platforms into a single reporting tool without needing to manually code APIs.
• Consistency in data reporting and defining a “source of truth” are vital, especially when data discrepancies arise between different systems like CRM and Google Analytics. ** **

How to find competitive analysis insights more quickly?

• Auction Insights in Google Ads is invaluable for understanding the competitive landscape, showing how often your ads overlap with competitors and how prominent your ads are compared to theirs.
• Tools like SpyFu can provide additional competitive intelligence, offering insights into competitors’ ad spend trends, keywords, and ad copies.
• Regularly checking these tools, even when there aren’t obvious issues, can help preemptively adjust strategies and maintain a competitive edge.
• Being proactive in competitive analysis allows for better strategic decisions and can explain fluctuations in performance metrics.

Episode Transcript

Steve Hammer: Thanks for it. It’s an honor.

That’s where we’re going to be posting all of these. But thanks all for watching and for engaging. Thank you to the panelists for being here and we’ll see you for the next one.

It’s going to be on everyone’s favorite topic of bidding, bid management. And we’re going to bring back Google to help answer a couple of questions and we can definitely go into the TCP 80 ROAS change, but And get to the bottom of all of that. So if you want to see those episodes, subscribe on the YouTube channel.

Frederick Vallaeys: Thank you, Steve. And thanks everyone for watching another episode of PPC town hall. We’re going to be back next week with learn with . And we’re going to talk about how to streamline your workflows with our blueprints solution at . And then the week after that, we’re back with another episode of PPC town hall.

I’m here for that. Twitter is armed hammer A R M O N D. Cause I didn’t want that that you know, baking soda company to take it from me one day. And and you know, feel free to reach out. We’re, we’re always accepting you know, new clients. So happy to hear from anyone that wants help.

I love to hear from folks with just about any question that they have about things, love to just be there to support people with, with anything they have. I talk as much about mental health anymore as I talk about PPC . So you know, happy to help people with anything they may, they may be going through if they just want to somebody to talk to you.

But check out my agency rankhammer.com. More than, more than often, if I’m posting anywhere, I’m posting on Twitter and, you know, about at least half of it will be about PPC . It’ll probably be about wine or shoes or something else too. Or mental health which I’m a huge advocate of you know, feel free to reach out to me.

Steve Hammer: Well you know, I, Fred was making fun of me for the fact that I don’t update my blog nearly enough, so I won’t say, go check out my blog.

Frederick Vallaeys: Nice. Steve, what about you?

Andrew Goodman: Page Zero Media, pagezero.com.

Frederick Vallaeys: And how do people find your agency?

You can get in touch with me, of course on social Andrew underscore Goodman. On Twitter and also check out my content series, the science of PPC . com.

And they’re also telling us stories about the underlying health of that whole group. And it’s, you know, so we’re, we’re already entering into a huge dialogue about, you know, how scared should we be about this participant in the auction? Who seems to kind of dominate absolute top, et cetera. So it’s it’s very useful for new businesses.

Is much better than a lot of other ways to look at it, right? So we’re looking at you know, what competitors are advertising and then we look at there’s a national company that has set up a lead gen site that it’s really just a front for Dental leads by another name. I’m, sorry chiropractic leads So I, I reported this to the client and they know one of the underlying businesses that gets leads from that advertiser.

Andrew Goodman: Okay. One more point on on the competitive stuff. I was helping a friend’s business. He’s a chiropractor. No, not really, but it’s similar and people on here tend to be intermediate to advanced, but we forget that to the average business owner this Google ads capabilities are like magic, the competitive intelligence you get right away.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey well, great. So this has been a fantastic conversation. I want to give each of you a minute to maybe tell people how to get a hold of you or mention any points that we should have mentioned Andrew, why don’t we start off with you?

Steve Hammer: Yeah, this time of year, but that was one of the most competitive words I’ve ever had to bid on.

I thought it was freezing there.

Frederick Vallaeys: air conditioning in Texas.

It should also be occasionally the reason, you know, that that big obnoxious competitor that was taking up number one position and being 200 for air conditioning in Texas, they’re gone now because they figured out that you know 10 percent conversion rate is still 2, 000

Steve Hammer: Yeah, exactly. It’s not just our savior.

Frederick Vallaeys: exactly. You’re not the bad guy in this situation.

Steve Hammer: yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: right? The opposite happens and you have to say

R. C. P. A. Went down 10 percent and not trying to tell the story that a competitor left or or something along that line. And it kind of makes you cocky about,

So those are the two tools we’re using to, to, to tell the competitive story wherever we, wherever we need to. And the best thing to do, by the way, is to be proactive. Go to SpyFu, even if you didn’t have a problem. Go to the Auction Insights, even if you didn’t have a problem. Cause I think most of us do it when like, Oh my God, our CPA went up 10 percent what happened versus.

Right? In, in that, in that nature. So I’m I, I’m a big fan of that for, for looking for those, those external validations and that also you can, should see what they’re. What their copy has been changing and how active they are on some of these some of these words that they’re, that they’re really actively you know, messing around with.

Then I use external validation. Personally, I’m a SpyFu user. I’ve always found that to be a, a, a, a great source. And while it’s not accurate, it’s relatively accurate, meaning that, no, I don’t believe their budget is $3,000 a month. But if it went from 3000 to 6,000, I, they probably doubled it.

But it’s, it’s not built in and I don’t know why. But it’s, it’s hugely valuable. And when you see that one competitor that was, you know 10 percent overlap with you, that went to 60 percent overlap, it tells a really quick story and it’s really easy to understand when you see that, that competitor come in.

Steve Hammer: Yeah In terms of what we do i’m using the the auction insights tool is a huge thing I’m, big fan of it. And the the one annoying thing about it is it doesn’t have time compare built in So, you know, that’s where the two monitor solution or, you know, two browser tab solution is really all you need to do it.

And then, so when they returned, it was July though, quietly returning in July, sooner than maybe many people had assumed. And so while we continued to do well in this e commerce COVID bump, you know, we were able to trace back. Okay. But within that context, You did face more headwinds as all the big big names returned to your auction.

Everyone in e commerce is aware that Amazon sort of backed off when when there was huge fulfillment problems and a number of other large competitors. So. On one hand, a number of large competitors got scared. So let’s say it’s in the Canadian in this case although we had a UK example as well where Large competitors were, were like spooked by COVID like so badly that they were, you know, shutting off ads.

And the competition is not as significant an issue. But with our other clients that have things changing month to month. This year was an interesting one, right? The auction insights reports in Google ads are, are unbelievably helpful because we can actually even tell when big competitors exited entirely.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, absolutely. So that’s, that’s a no brainer. There are people who spend their whole lives producing decks on competitive analysis techniques. And I used to attend those sessions and be blown away. But that being said, so with the example I gave that one wasn’t too bad because we’re selling some official goods under license.

How do you bring that competition part into the equation?

Right. So. Yeah, the source of truth is important. Hey, one thing we haven’t talked about and I want to kind of maybe wrap up at this, but so you talked about giving reports to your clients and they asked the question, Hey, what happened in December? Could have been done, could have been you, but it could have also been the competition.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, and then even between Google ads and Google analytics, one measures the conversion at the time it happened, analytics and one measures conversion at the time to click happen, which could be on a different day.

It’s first click attribution for the most part. Right? So what’s the first thing that brought things along? And Google defaults to last click right there. Boom. Attributions went poof.

Steve Hammer: No. Yeah. Like par dots, as I understand it, at least, and I’m not a part of it. I mean, I use it, but I’m not a pro.

So really the texture is important. If you have the opportunity to be able to log in to more than just the surface level GA, great. But, but it won’t always yeah. It won’t always give credit to your channels.

And, and, and definitely fend off the completely untrue sources. And, and one that comes to mind is, is Shopify. Shopify has a lot of truth in there. That’s more true than other places. But as far as any kind of marketing attribution I wouldn’t look at that at all now that being said with businesses we feel strongly about feel like almost an owner we look at everything in there We look at the orders I just don’t take it the channel attribution seriously at all but to understand different reports in a shopify is valuable, but or invaluable really.

Andrew Goodman: Great point. Absolutely important point. On that, I think as marketers, especially if we’ve been in a number of different situations or have a lot of experience, it’s incumbent upon us to advise a client or, or, or a boss as to the most likely to be true source of truth.

And what is the truth? And the biggest challenge I have is somebody talking HubSpot language or part out language or Salesforce language or whatever else. And I’m talking G. A. And those two don’t always agree. Right.

Supermetrics, you got a great business. You know are you available on the NASDAQ? Anywhere? Investors? It, it’s great because I don’t want to have to program that API 30, you know, every time I’m doing it. I don’t really even know what I’m doing enough to do that, and I’m pretty decent at it. So, that, that ability it, it, It does raise the cost, but not not significantly enough and where you have the multiple multiple systems that that are out there, you got everyone just has to agree on what what is the what is the system of record?

And and merging and bringing those things from the disparate systems is really one, at least openly speaking, is one of the biggest things that that that I find find a real challenge with. Data Studio 360, at least for us, can do that pretty well. Although, you know, you’re always paying for connectors, right?

Right? So if somebody’s got something like part out or HubSpot or something like that, that’s their source of truth, but it’s not always got the greatest reporting tools. It’s not always got the greatest way to get that information back out. Into into the systems that we like to use. That can be a real challenge for things.

Steve Hammer: I, the one challenge I always find with, with a variety of tools is what’s the source of truth and that concept of, Of trying to figure out what the source of truth is can be a really sticky one.

I think it’s great that people are doing more business intelligence We’re just an agency that is you know, kind of forced to stick to the economics of how, how much time we have for any given client. So

That’s a question What happened like oh, it’s a huge fail. Meanwhile, the business is thriving So you’re you’re like it’s 10 at night and you’re like should I just freak out right now? So then you go into all of the nuances some examples in that case one was that Black Friday’s dates were different this year and the December wasn’t a meaningful construct where his past 30 days Was year over year and then this is very typical facebook wasn’t reporting properly last year and it is this year and so on so, Yeah, I I I’d love to have the time.

And, and yeah, I mean, we don’t do as much with fancy tools like Power BI, but we’ve had clients just needing more color and, you know, so we dive into GA, bring it out. This is a constant thing. I love to do that. And you really have to have your wits about you because someone might actually have a made a huge mistake on the other side so you need to be Tactful, I guess you know, for example, hey, we’re down all like what happened in december.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, you know, one thing that I think we all do is we, we do, we pull reports on demand, specific answers to questions. Think about what either any version of Google Analytics offers and you can, you can go in and be very precise in what you pull out. And so that’s, you know, that monthly report is a nice ceremony that you can have.

And so that helps a lot.

That’s my reporting philosophy. I like to assume I have two minutes of somebody’s time, and that’s it. If they want to take an hour, great. And I have all that stuff ready. And Data Studio 360 is my friend. Because once I’ve rolled those out for one person, I can pretty much copy it and do it with some tweaks for the next person.

Then if we need to jump into those details and somebody wants to have that discussion of like, all right, well, we were down 10 percent on our you know, we, you know, the, the CPA rose by 10%. Why? What, what happened? Here’s what, here’s what happened. And that’s page two, three, four, five. They’re ready. And if I never get to them, I’m not upset.

How do we do last year? How are we, you know, how are we doing right now? How does that compare to last year? And how does that compare to the month over month? Red, yellow, green. You know, as simple as possible in chart form, see the numbers and just go from there with the, with the coloring behind it, keep it as, as simple as I can.

Or, you know, we really want to detail out all of the, the cool little tactical stuff that we do and talk about exactly how it affected us. Like, like Andrew was saying an F 500 CEO or F 500 director we’re one of 50 tactics to them. And they don’t care. Until they do. So I like to, in terms of reporting, I do everything in one pager and I like to make it as simple as possible.

Steve Hammer: I think this is another place where there’s a natural friction between what we want to say. Sometimes it’s PPC . Look at all this cool stuff we did. I optimized the quality score and this is what happened. Or I I raised the bids by 10 percent and this is what happened.

It’s really a return on time spent issue.

Even going back 14 months, so that visualization I feel is important. Give people that choice between understanding a year over year or a month to month. And for things like mobile revenue share, you know, pie, you know, pie, pie graph is better. Right. You know, beyond that you could do endless numbers of visualizations and And so that’s the thing is when and what is it your full time job to do it?

I will say I do like you know, whether it’s in a tool like we used to use or quizio. Whether it’s within Google, they used AdWords, had a little reporting thing that’s people now try to use Google Data Studio for that. I do like a simple you know, line graph that shows trend lines of key metrics.

I don’t feel like I’m, you know, you should listen to me at all. Big companies have a lot different requirements than smaller. Our clients are a mix, but we tend to have clients ignore Elaborate reporting they like get they get used to the rhythm of the metrics that matter and we jump off of the reporting whatever it is and and it’s more ad hoc conversations that lead off in a solving a particular problem.

Andrew Goodman: Oh, I, I’ll just preface this by saying my entire shtick on the last vid thing on reporting, which was over at a, at a conference series SMX I have to point out that I’m more about reporting to myself or for the PPC manager to find reports for optimization, the communication thing.

And if you visualize, how do you do it?

So this is kind of bringing it back to core reporting let’s spend a minute on that How do you guys like to do reports for your clients because there’s a lot of complicated concepts and there’s a lot of change So, how do you keep your client informed at the right level and how important is visualization in that?

Frederick Vallaeys: cynics on this call today. Yeah. Hey, let’s shift topics here for a second. So one person. Is asking about data visualization, right?

Steve Hammer: my job to be the cynic, Andrew. That’s normally my role. There

So too bad you can’t have any targeting you know, and, and you can only do that if if we have no choice in the matter, It’s

I imagine a bunch of wizards, like evil wizards, having strange tea and studying how to, you know, take over the world. And I, I think the wizards at Google studied Facebook and realized, Well, now Facebook’s making it a lot harder to really understand if you’re getting a precise audience and yet look at their profitability.

Andrew Goodman: So there’s already a thing where it’s guessing is not the right word, but understanding how to directionally or, you know, how to, how to interpret weak signals that you will never see full attribution. That sounds like it’s going to get a lot harder. This flock concept does sound to me, again, I just create stories in my head.

You know, if you’re in just a linear map, a linear model or a time decay model or a first touch value model or whatever the whatever the sort of model you’re using. But if we’re gonna have to go back to last click when we go beyond the cookie, what happens? I don’t, I don’t have an answer yet. Yeah, we’re, we’re in a really, and it’s, it’s already there in some ways where you have a weird attribution difficulty in long sales cycles, of course.

Which is incredibly important, especially in my, for a good portion of my clients that are business to business, where we have those multiple touchpoints by, by their, by their nature. And like you say, that. If your conversion link is half because it was truly a multi touch point, that helps you get away from just getting low hanging fruit and it has to attribute back to the original touch point as well.

That’s that’s the the big specter that’s out there, I guess. And who knows when that hi, Jenny. Welcome to Google. Now go explain flock to everybody. Which, you know, she’s, she’s certainly doing her, her best to do that. But you know, with the announcement to get rid of the cookie, how does, how does that affect multiple touchpoint attribution?

Steve Hammer: audiences, right?

Andrew Goodman: audiences of

Steve Hammer: Federated learning of cohorts. The new idea that that’s going to go beyond the cookie for for an attribution basis and and for for cohorting and targeting of of stuff on

Frederick Vallaeys: Flock? I’ve never heard Flock.

And as much as anything, those are questions for me right now, not answers.

Steve Hammer: Yeah, I’m, I’m a huge fan of going beyond last click to try and avoid this problem. I’m really curious as to how the new models are going to play with it, how Flock will play with it, how all this other stuff will, will work with multiple treasure point attribution.

Programmatic is much broader than just than what GDN can offer you. And if you’re not reaching people a few days after they see that high ticket item you could lose that sale.

So in some cases not enough Remarketing and retargeting is being done. For example, you might have limited reach on gdm facebook might be a lot better. Even though you can’t trust facebook’s internal metrics and programmatic is If done well and cautiously could be a huge hole in these things and now we’re getting into a whole new realm based on the changing tracking constraints that come through the main browsers available to people that may really, really affect that avenue.

These products, but that, that, that proved to us that, that that was almost entirely remarketing instead of any prospecting at all. But yeah, I think what you’re also leading us to Fred is that remarketing is really, really important and useful like email, like we think of it as a team, a team of marketing channels that if, if you’re Is certain businesses need that whole team to contribute cost effectively to create the most Profitable growth.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah. So on that this is not current, but it was an example of how one of our team dug up the Intel Intel on NGA as to whether. A certain campaign was producing conversions from, from remarketing audiences, there’s some segmenting you could do. And he it was, it was in something called smart display five years ago when there was a smart display and there were always evolutions to these.

So is that really as valuable as you thought it was? But then with smart shopping, for example, Google doesn’t really break it out by types, although there was a hack, a recent workaround, I think that somebody was seeing in beta. And we’re hoping that that comes to more. So in the reports, you could now add a dimension, which basically was going to show you when it was remarketing.

So how do you Detect that they are picking off the low hanging fruit and not actually providing maybe as good results. As they claim that they are. And obviously the bigger point here is you could be on a remarketing list because your SEO team did an amazing job and got people to the website. And now the SEM team that has their cookie on that page, picks it up and says, well, we’ll take that customer to last mile and take all the credit for it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Now, in terms of reporting I’m curious on the other topic that Andrew sort of broached was remarketing being the low hanging fruit of, say, smart shopping campaigns of really any automation that Google does, right?

Steve Hammer: Yeah, in reverse, right? The stuff that was good, that’s, that’s our position list.

Negative, negative, negative, right? And it is whack a mole, but at least with automation, you can sort of hopefully get lots of impressions that lead to not too many clicks. How we built the whitelist.

Frederick Vallaeys: a whack a mole. I mean, that’s where scripts are so ideal, right? So steve, you probably write one that’s like basically here’s my list of approved sites I mean the moment I get one impression or more from Something that’s not on that list.

That’s the problem is as soon as they come in You get another one that’s garbage that comes in right now. It’s

Steve Hammer: really there really is and it’s whack a mole.

I mean, what did go back to being a traditional marketer, which I, I’m not, but I, I can appreciate what they did. That is, here’s one thing you know is solid and certain. I want to be on this publication. I don’t know about the other publications. So I want my ads to show up in these places. That’s not perfect, but I know there’s just too many problems with the vastness of the uncertain universe of the rest of it So yeah, they’re they’re

Andrew Goodman: I like whitelist. I think it’s smart.

And I’ve started to build out a white list as much as I can get away with things that I actually know are good even if they’re off topic. And I’m trying to build those in sub segment than them down into industry verticals, because I happen to believe there’s enough inventory on the Google display network that It’s, it’s virtually unlimited at this point, right? So if, if I have a thousand sites that I know are good, that’s all I need. And I, and I’m more than happy to, to just bid on those. And again, in, in my world, I’m not trying to spend a hundred thousand dollars a day, so I don’t need the long tail stuff. So I, I’m a whitelist fan.

Steve Hammer: the for me, one of my first things I’ll always do is put in. Like rated content and then the negative, like those, those sorts of things, the, the, the broad exclusions, wherever I can get away with them, that helps.

Frederick Vallaeys: And you guys are customers for full disclosure. Yeah. The,

Andrew Goodman: Yeah Yeah, we there are a few tools There are now a few tools that will help you do that.

But or do 150 clicks.

Frederick Vallaeys: and shameless plug I mean, you could just use and put the rule engine in place to do that.

com. That was your exclusion and you were done one and done. And now what do you have to do? Well, there’s no way to do it other than 151. Mouse clicks to exclude every single app category some are nested So you’ll probably if you don’t know you’ll get 86 and they’ll just still be there So that’s well

Andrew Goodman: We used to be able to negative that all out if if you don’t want apps if you love the apps that’s for you, right But it was AdSense for mobile apps.

Frederick Vallaeys: bucks american

Andrew Goodman: as a reminder, which is like five

Frederick Vallaeys: That’s canadian canadian dollars

It’s not even that it doesn’t perform You can’t get any of the other placements to even show up because you’d spend three trillion dollars a day

Andrew Goodman: When we’re talking about things to negative out, maybe we should take a little detour and agree on what is the first thing you should do in any GDN campaign, even if it’s remarketing any tips. I have one by the way, inventory will crowd out everything else you’re trying to do, right?

So that’s another part of it.

Steve Hammer: Yeah. It’s worth mentioning. I’ve worked in some pretty nasty verticals, which are full of fraud too.

I mean, it’s account by account. I think if they come in in line with the same Roi, then you keep it for search partners And if it’s a just a really problematic Vertical then, you know, you, you have to turn it off.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah with that?

It’s really hard on search partners, but it does exist. And the problem there is if it does, what are you gonna do about it? You know at the at the core of it because there’s there’s no real negative search partner list I don’t like these guys, but I still want aol. What am I going to do?

I do that all the time just for negative lists. As best I can. We also have a script will will anything that gets over 100 impressions or, you know, whatever number that’s significant for the account will have a drop out and I’ll take a look at it. So we do a little bit of that. Mostly on the display network.

You know, there’s a lot of things that we’ll never be able to even measure, like incentivize traffic search partners that exist. And it’s out there. Go. If you want to see some of the nasty stuff that people can do, go download like a pay to win game that, you know, has the offer walls in it and play around with that and you’ll see where some of the searches go and what some of the things they’re doing and some of the MFAs that are out there that, that are just pure arbitrage and you’re just getting random clicks because of their design and things that are along that line.

Steve Hammer: The for me, in terms of our monitoring of click fraud I’ve seen, there’s some great pictures of like Philippine and, and other areas, India little literal click farms where they will have. A hundred phones and they’re just doing this through that throughout the whole thing. So I’m a little bit insane about that in terms of monitoring and looking for it and seeing what’s out there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And now here we’re hating on chiropractors. Apologies. I know. Chiropractors listening. Thank you.

Andrew Goodman: And by the way, I, the chiropractor is a disguised vertical. It’s a different one, protecting client confidentiality.

So we just opened up another chiropractor one. So we’re waiting for your reply to that.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. Sorry, lucky 31337, you’ve been providing some really good humorous comments here.

That’s monkey. See, you know add monkey. Click add just to be a jerk. So you can’t stop all of it. So it really is about marketing results and which channels are less prone to it as opposed to, you know, pristine.

Andrew Goodman: No, we don’t feel like we can monitor it. And we feel like Google has spent. Many, many years honing their you know, their statistical anomaly responses. They try to proact, I, I agree that Google tries to proactively stop click fraud. And, and does have some post facto refunding going on. That being said, you know, certain industries, you can just imagine the scenario, there are jerks out there and not even the sort of more techie you know, someone who’s really technical, who decides to create havoc. More like that chiropractor example, where there’s six or seven known people that you compete with, and then maybe a national group that, you know is involved and they’re just a handful of them.

How much do you monitor that? And is that a big issue?

But click fraud, like how significant is that from your perspective? And is that something that you actually have reporting for in house to kind of monitor how How much fraudulent or and there’s levels of fraud too, right? Like there’s malicious fraud and then there’s like misintention fraud, I suppose.

Frederick Vallaeys: right? And you’ve opened up two interesting topics here. And you’ve written on click fraud, right? So you sort of talking about click fraud leading into conversion fraud. I’ve actually never really heard about conversion fraud. So that’s an interesting topic that builds on that.

You know, we have to figure out what to do next,

And Dr. Augustine Fu who’s an expert on, on ad fraud more broadly can really tell you about. It’s way more widespread and nefarious in the world of programmatic than anyone can even imagine. So a diluted version of that is just, if the bot sees easy stuff and we need to go after the harder stuff then now what?

So they generated all of these. Leads from display that we’re coming from placements in the GDN that were, as Steve mentioned made for AdSense sites, but they, they not only generate clicks, but owners of those sites at the time fill out enough forms to make the CPA come back normal.

But I’ll go back to the weirdest one we ever encountered. And we realized this principle basically affects everything though. It was a niche B2B email software, fairly expensive. It was a security product. And oddly they’d hired a UK based agency that had more brand experience and big account experience buying display.

Is it you know easier? Is it brand queries creeping in to the query stream? Is it a remarketing conversion and, and other easy cherry picking types of conversions? Yeah, so there’s a whole range of not, so some businesses aren’t nearly as, as affected. It’s pretty obvious what a revenue is and it works.

So, the principles here seem like they’re surprisingly consistent over time. I’d like would say what we have to be on the lookout for and you alluded to it is almost fake conversions. Now fake isn’t exactly the right word. But but if you look at It’s not it’s not even just in a lead gen business that it’s a lower quality lead it can be it is that a low hanging fruit being measured.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, those are all great points, Fred. But even. You might not have to communicate return rates back, but you you might be a smart marketer if you if you knew that bar stools or a certain style of chair didn’t get returns and and you know, you can Position a business very well, and you should based on those kinds of things about what good quality customers do down the road and and on their first purchase.

I mean, if I sell, if I sell e commerce goods and I get lots of returns, well, why shouldn’t I communicate that half of my product was returned and that my ROAS, which looked amazing, actually wasn’t so amazing.

But without the junk that we’ve sort of come to see because maybe we’re not reporting conversions as clearly as we can. And I think that’s part of the reporting too, right? It’s like, we always think about reporting as taking stuff out of the ad engine. But what about reporting back into it about what we care and, and even restating values?

Right. So is that really the focus? But because ultimately, I mean, I think we’re all sort of acknowledging that smart bidding, automated bidding, Google, those things we can’t know. And even if we knew them, we can’t make auction time decisions based on that, the way Google can. So right. So how do we get the best of what they offer?

But now that Google is not doing it to a target CPA, but to maximize conversions while, which ones are they going to prioritize? Well, the cheapest ones, because you can get more cheap ones than few expensive ones, but the reason they’re cheap is because smart advertisers who actually communicate conversion value properly have identified these as being Mickey mouse leads.

And I think a little bit, the problem is that a lot of advertisers just are hesitant to communicate what’s truly, what really matters to them, to Google. Right. And if so, if it’s just a form fill and you say, that’s my lead, that’s my conversion, well, yeah, great. I mean, you’re going to get lots of lead fills.

So there is a little bit of distrust and I’m gonna have to see how this all plays out. But you know, as far as the leads coming in and the quality of the leads and the Mickey Mouse leads like you were saying, Andrew is that the real thing here that we need to focus on is You know, if we’re going to go into a world of maximized conversions, we just need to make sure that those conversions are high enough quality.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, Google has lots of dials, quality score being a fairly significant one. Yep. But but, yeah, I mean, I think we both alluded to it as well, right?

Steve Hammer: 90 percent or so.

The more they can do what they promised never to do, which was to kind of manage earnings expectations, which doesn’t have anything to do with advertising,

Andrew Goodman: Right. And anything that’s looser and more flexible and is really a dial a revenue team, as Google once called somebody who wasn’t supposed to be called a revenue team you know, if that helps them get past the bad quarter by turning up their profit by 2% then, then the more of those they have.

But we’ll see, you know, I’m always hopeful. It depends on how strong that hint is of what the target ROAS is, you know, if I put in 200 per conversion and I’m getting things at 500, that’s not kosher.

But even so that, that amount of data that they carry on an individual customer that we can’t be exposed to, we have to trust them a little bit on that. And it. And it works. The question is, how far do we push that trust? And my feeling is that this might be a little bit over the line for me. In, in terms of that, which will push me more back into manual and things that are that are along that line.

There’s no question in my mind that that Google knows things that we’ll never know about their customers before they get that click, right? That’s the ECBC works, right? Things like things like that have always been been, been good about it because of the data that we cannot be exposed to or, or cannot see you know, who knows with FLOC what’s going to happen.

Yeah, I think that’s one of the big challenges of all of it is, you know, where does that? That tension naturally place itself between the the desire, desire to truly maximize conversions and get as much business for our customers and clients as we, as we possibly can and the the desire to maximize the arbitrage of what’s out there.

Steve Hammer: yeah, sometimes a little too open minded. So a little bit liberty, shall we say?

And now you’re also learning that a Google is willing to consider that a lot of inventory might be relevant. It’s, it’s a pretty wide open, you know, it’s open minded. First of all, but then, of course, then you learn what you need to negative out. And

There’s some latency there. So we have attribution issues And my manual bids and even my target, you know ROAS bids weren’t really You Getting us the feedback that we needed. And, and so I, you know, as a next resort, I, you know, put that on maximize conversions and it’s, it’s just as good as anything else.

Andrew Goodman: We’ve used maximize and it’s not my idea. My colleagues jumped in a few times and I played with it, but it wouldn’t have been my favorite thing to do. Yeah. To wake up a brand new account to kick start it perhaps a newer account also when i’ve been throwing in the towel on something With extremely confusing intent that is a really and it’s a valuable product There’s a lot of different ways to look at that intent.

Steve Hammer: Yeah, exactly.

It’s not like you can, you can negative out like 60, 000 long tail replacements.

Andrew Goodman: we discovered long ago.

And one of the reasons I don’t trust it is the low quality conversions that that I’ve seen come through again. Business to business is a good portion of our business and a special and display. There’s farms out there that that exist. That everything when you look at the data exit, it looks normal, but you’re getting Mickey Mouse and it’s long tail

Steve Hammer: I don’t really use maximize conversion as a, as a thing, right? Like I do target, target row as, or something that’s very specific or actual conversion value bidding or things that are more along those lines. And So the pure maximize somebody was joking that they trust a chiropractor more than than, than maximize conversions.

There is seemingly To put that suggestion in now do you, do you make use of that?

Andrew Goodman: Steve, with if you play with maximize conversion value right now, would you be?

I, I don’t put my real target in, cause I know you might go over it. So I put a little lower than my real target in knowing that if you go over it, I’m still okay. So, you know, I think that’s that’s one of the real reasons for it. Turning a constraint to a suggestion is more or less that the idea here is, at least as I see it,

If they’re not. You know, five or four or whatever their number is, they don’t want to, they don’t want to play in the market. So that, that could be a real negative for some people. It is a true constraint, or, you know, you have to, when you’re talking about maximizing CPAs, are we going to get low, low quality conversions in rather than the high quality conversions we may be. Truly going after, right? Something I get for a business to business that’s on an industry publication is a much higher quality for me than something that’s a pseudo you know, pseudo spam or other things like that. And those people, In some of the farms will make conversions for you. So those are the things that I worry about within this, but you know, I know we’re also, we’ve also played the system a little bit, and I think that’s one of the reasons we’re doing, we’ve over constrained ourselves as agencies.

Steve Hammer: Yeah, I, I’ve, what I’ve seen is it’s more of a merge, right? They’re trying to bring those two together. So there’ll be a target in terms of what they’re going after, but not a constraint. And those two obviously play with one another, right? It’s one thing if it’s a true constraint and you know, at least my clients and other people’s clients, I’m sure their constraints are real, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, and Sarah is asking a good question, so it’s not clear. And I agree we’ve asked Google and not quite gotten the answer on that, but can you still set ad group level targets? The initial response we’re getting is that that should be the case because they really do see it as. Just basically renaming merge.

So

I’m not talking keyword search, that’s pretty well known. But are they able to sell once they’ve convinced everyone to turn on smart shopping or other YouTube, et cetera app inventory opted in. Do they simply mark up the prices now of. Less valuable inventory. Whereas right. This is just sort of a way to sell a little more of the lower performing stuff to people who are unsuspecting, we may not see a change, but it does affect us because now we’re using A smart bidding strategy that is less transparent, perhaps.

Andrew Goodman: Like so for a few months do does google? at the Sort of at the offending account managers or or asleep at the switch accounts do those budgets maybe not increase, maybe they increase slightly, but what happens is now Google is able to sell on non performing inventory.

And so hence now the budget just becomes the limiting factor

Frederick Vallaeys: Are you sort of saying that people will make the switch or they will be automatically switched into the new system, but there’s not going to be a constraint on the TCP or T ROAS because people are just Not that smart and they forget to do it.

They include novice account managers asleep at the switch big agencies that aren’t managing the account always, not every case. So have they figured out that a lot of people won’t really notice? And so that ultimately budgets will increase. And more diffuse Interesting. Are you sort of saying

For a lot of us It means limiting budgets because we think that this maximized settings are budget aware. And we aren’t quite clear on how it works. And we’re not ready to give carte blanche necessarily to Google to maximize anything. Meanwhile, there are a lot of accounts that include display that include even app inventory on display.

Andrew Goodman: Well, oftentimes because Google has made so many small and larger changes, they almost roll them out From a pre existing Long term planning process with bullet points of each little thing and what the revenue impact has been proven to be by testing and projecting So google is not unaware of the revenue impact on of that change so It’s interesting how that might might fall out.

When you’re doing maximized conversions value. So what Google is sort of saying is the ads being sunset, but it’s just being absorbed functionality will not really change. I think there’s always nuance. So let’s talk about that, right? What’s your guys first reaction to this announcement?

Yes, you heard that correctly. Target CPA and target ROAS are being sunset. Check out the Google ads developers blog, but the good news is they’re going away. They’re becoming absorbed into maximize conversions and maximize conversion value. So these are two of the existing bid strategies. Those two bid strategies will get an additional setting. So that you can put in your target CPA for maximized conversions and target ROAS.

Frederick Vallaeys: So what is this thing that we want to talk about? Right. For everyone watching. So Google put out a small announcement, sort of a by the way, on the Google ads developers blog, that starting sometime in April, the smart bidding strategies of target CPA and target ROAS will go away.

and let us be marketers rather than just tacticians and that, that, that I think helps everybody in the, in the ecosystem a lot.

Steve Hammer: Yeah. That there’s, there’s times, although honestly, as we were talking before the show, a little preview of things. I’ve started to trust Google’s automation a lot more than I used to. That may change in the future again, preview of future topics that I know we’re going to talk about, but in general it, that those things opened up possibilities for us to do things that we couldn’t otherwise, and I could fall back on, you know, sort of classical training as a marketer.

I didn’t do a proper introduction. I feel of you but Your agency won best small agency at the U S search awards. And Steve has been a really long time speaker, a lot on the topic of scripts and account automation. And I think especially in the small agency environment, being able to automate to scale your business as a, it’s really important.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah makes sense. And by the way why is steve someone we should all listen to when it comes to marketing?

Better at PPC in the first place, right? What is the problem we’re trying to solve and step step away from it? Just trying to hey, here’s our brand new shoes Let me show you those kind of things that were I I think a lot of us think in that mode

And that competitor is always outbidding me in, in the direct. I’m looking for an oscilloscope sort of world. But what are the, what is it? That they’re actually trying to do with that. And if you step yourself that one step back, you know, how do I measure noise on a power line? How do I measure 5g noise or whatever the, it is that that the actual product does and taking that one step back, that’s where I find a lot of the, the niches and the the cracks, I think you called it Fred for, for things finding those can be hard, but that’s where being a better marketer and thinking better about marketing makes you.

You just have to come back to the fundamentals. What is the problem that the user is trying to solve? And can I find another judo way to get at that? You know, At the core of it. So let’s say I’m, I haven’t selling an oscilloscope or something like really narrow like that. There’s probably not a lot of, a lot of people in that there, there may be a way more expensive one that’s willing to bid a lot more than I am.

I was going to say, I think Andrew’s got the right idea. You know, feed the machine. As much as you can manually and let it advance the learning and then switch yourself over at that point, I think is always the wise thing. I call it judo in terms of the way to play around when you’re in one of those competitive situations where you see that and you’re not, you don’t have a You know, you’re not gonna be able to update that person or you’re, you’re in an environment where you’re never getting the top position or other things at the core of it.

Steve Hammer: Oh,

Frederick Vallaeys: about you?

Andrew Goodman: So doing it for a business I owned or, or knew the owner. I would start manual. I would work really hard on it and tweak every little bit. If we can get the automation to work later on, then fine. But we’re learning so much about the competition and about ourselves in the early going. Steve, what

Frederick Vallaeys: And let’s talk, and I’d love to hear from Steve on this too, but are you sort of alluding to, you know, segmenting your campaigns and then so you’re saying you have a limited budget, right? Limited budget. So you have to decide where to allocate that budget. And so you say there’s a certain geographic zip code, for example, where I do well, so are you saying like you’re gonna go manually after that or do you trust the machine and TCP or T row as bidding to handle that for you?

So then they’re limited by budget. They only show up in the auction sporadically. So a lot of people are doing things wrong enough that you can find those cracks. And if not, you’re just trying to minimize the damage. So things like, you know, in that example, backing out to your geo segments. And instead of just knowing where your, your customers are generally, You’re going to have to bid those potentially with extreme precision and potentially give up on most of the metro area and then just bid way up on your, your tiny little radius, etc.

What they’re doing is they’re limited in budget. Let’s say they’re a local business, successful string of chiropractors and they don’t know what they’re doing and they’re doing okay with this. But the fact is they have a limited budget every month. And then the bid level at that limited budget is sky high.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, and when you look at it from the perspective of the US auction, it’s so developed. That that would and half of our clients and our revenues are from the U. S But it can be a different picture. So I will give you a couple examples and One thing is I think that others just doing it wrong despite automation despite everything else and I I’m loathe even to give away what they’re doing wrong, but you know, you look at an auction insights report and we can come back to that.

Frederick Vallaeys: And do you still find those cracks, Andrew? I mean, it’s like in the old days, you could buy typos as keywords and Google didn’t automatically show ads for that, but now with so much automation, it feels like if there’s a good click to be had, Google’s gonna be selling that to as many people as they can, and like those cheap opportunities and that arbitrage is basically not there anymore.

And that’s, that’s what PPC teaches you in this auction. Are there, are there cracks where we can get enough of what we need as opposed to thinking. We’ll just have easy sailing, right?

So that, you know, all of this, obviously we all agree KPIs like ROAS and profit are more important. But we need to know about the auction and and it for advertisers who don’t understand the competition it, it really slaps you in the face. You have to recognize that, hey, the others want those positions too.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah. So Steve mentioned how much, excuse me how much he liked absolute top so that you wouldn’t be necessarily overbidding. It’s also the case that if it’s unknown to you, it’s 5 percent or 8%, then you didn’t know that you really should be bidding up. And I’m seeing a lot of times where you’re not cracking it ever. So, you know, you, you’re sort of happy with your bid, but, but it is zero to be absolute top.

Because I mean, I don’t care about cost per acquisition. I care about people subscribing to my software, right? I care about how profitable that is. And, and so it’s like, you have to really take it down to as far as you can. For the business. And then there’s these vanity metrics, average position, even top impression share, it’s like, what does it matter if you don’t make profit, if those clicks are too expensive?

Because with numbers we can optimize. Okay. So then it was CTR and then Steve, you were saying, well, you know, we can have. Positive return on ad spend. But ultimately I find it so fascinating that so many advertisers don’t really think about, well, what is that next level? How do we really connect it to the business?

Because Google trains advertisers and. Us who’ve been doing it for a long time to really care about these metrics and have which position was something we cared about just because it was there and it was like, like a newspaper wouldn’t tell you exactly what page you were on and like all these metrics that we love numbers, right?

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And I mean, so Andrew, you were also referring to how great it was to have an advertising system that would tell you click through rates and it’s sort of funny, right?

Cause absolutely top means something to somebody that’s position one, period. End of story. It’s really easy to understand. The rest of the metrics are a lot harder to understand for people though. And I tend to ignore at least when I’m talking to others.

The, the reality of it though, is that’s not always the best metric for us to use anyway, because like you say, ROAS is the, is the king of, of it all. How are we doing in terms of our profitability and everything that’s associated with it? So I do really love. I actually really like the change. I think it’s easier to explain to someone, especially the competitive, the brand searches, those sorts of things.

5 versus if you’re 50 50, which is what most people interpreted that as right. So there are a lot of people, I think, that we’re pushing themselves up bidding a lot more in the in those environments when they didn’t actually need to. And so it’s nice to kind of see to see that as a, as the, if you actually have to be at the top, absolute top is the best metric to actually use.

I think that was that was what we’re all looking for. Really? Right at the core of it. Because you could look at yourself and say, I’m I’m my average position is 1. 5 and you could have been up there 80 percent of the time and then like 3 or 4. The remainder of the time and it still comes out to 1.

Steve Hammer: Sure. Yeah. I actually love the absolute top percentage metric.

Andrew Goodman: on a ghosty.

It was just like, I want to be position one. Or I won’t be position two because maybe position one is too expensive and I could better row ask a CPA in position two. But but how have both of you shifted? Not an average position is obviously no longer available

So you wrote a post on competitive metrics post average position and steve, obviously i’d love to hear from you As well. It’s not the most recent change. Average position did go away quite a while ago now. But that was often like the competitive benchmark, right? I mean, competition was basically not, we didn’t care who else was on the page.

Frederick Vallaeys: You’ve made your claim to fame but now you’re actually writing a 50 part series and there’s some good nuggets in there So we’ll touch on some of those but but let’s maybe jump into the first one.

And to reward us for better relevancy in a paid product was all new. By the way, the second edition 2008 and edition 2. 1, a translation into French by a Belgian translator 2009. So again, I stopped

Andrew Goodman: Well, I thought it was pretty amazing. There’s, I was just trying to figure out what Google had done and it was brilliant what they had done. The simplicity and power of, of allowing us to rotate ads, of allowing us to measure different click through rates.

So that was my first exposure to to Andrew and he’s sort of like this well known figure and everyone was looking up to him.

Frederick Vallaeys: A long time. And I remember, so when I was working at Google I think your book, your ebook was sort of required reading for the new people joining the support staff.

Andrew Goodman: Okay. So the published book with mcgraw hill was in 05. So we’re looking at 15 ish years. But the ebook came out three years prior to that.

He wrote the the first adwords book how many years ago was that now?

Frederick Vallaeys: Not bad, not bad. Well good. So, you know, we we promised people we talked a lot about reporting so and actually before we get into it like a good resource Is is andrew so and one little nugget a little fact.

And hopefully we’ll actually have the powder day this year. And you know, have people wherever they, wherever they need to be. So can’t, can’t complain about that. You know, nice light snow is a pretty relaxing environment to be around.

Steve Hammer: Steve, what about you? Much the same. It’s funny. We were, we were ahead of ourselves. We took rain camera 100 percent virtual before COVID. So that means I get to be up in the mountains of Colorado where it’s snowing.

Andrew Goodman: I’m working from anywhere.

Frederick Vallaeys: Wow. So you’re one of those people who decided to work from anywhere.

Andrew Goodman: So you know, sign of the times.

Good to see you again. Where are you today? Hey fred We’ve known each other for a long time. So I really appreciate you doing this I am calling in from Fredericton, New Brunswick, north of the border. We’re on something called Atlantic time and I have not been in over six months. I have not set foot in in Toronto.

Frederick Vallaeys: the super bowl is next, but folks, thanks for tuning in and and watching Andrew and Steven and myself. So Andrew Steve, you’ve both been on the show before. Thanks for coming back on. Let’s reintroduce you for the people who haven’t met you and tell us where you’re calling in from today. And at the same time, anyone watching, if you want to use the Tell us where you’re calling us from or where you’re watching from That’s also going to be the way that we take questions because we are doing this live So we’re going to get into some pretty cool topics here And if you want to ask andrew and steve some questions, that’ll be your way to do it So we’ll start with andrew.

Andrew Goodman: Yeah, this is like the closest thing to I don’t know, like, like a game just before the super bowl,

All right. All right. Andrew, it looked like you were enjoying that little music right there.

So with that, let’s get rolling with another episode of PPC town hall.

Yes. And then Google has been making a bunch of changes in the last week. Some things actually that are pretty important that many of you may not have heard about because they just posted it on the developers blog and really not much else, but you know, that’ll be our surprise, a little extra segments here, and we’ll talk about that too.

And then once you’ve produced those great results, obviously you want to tell the client about that. So then it comes to external, external reporting. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Internal reporting, external reporting, as well as how you bring all of that together to do some competitive analysis.

So, as we all know, PPC , we’re not the only people doing it. So, we have to stay on top of what our competitors are doing. And then based on what we find, we have to set up our strategies to do optimizations, to stay ahead of the game. And so that involves a lot of reporting. There’s both internal reporting, the type of reporting you’ll use to figure out what to do next so that your client will be happy.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello and welcome to another episode of PPC Town Hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host. I’m also the co founder and CEO at . So we’re back for another episode and this time we wanted to talk about something that’s near and dear to all of our hearts and that’s reporting and competitive analysis.