The Evolution of Keywords in Modern PPC

Episode Description

Keywords have been a cornerstone of PPC ever since they were the whole point of AdWords.

Their role and the way they work may have changed drastically over the years, but it’s not quite time to ignore them completely. We spoke to three experts about how they’ve managed the evolution of keywords throughout their careers. And why your loyalty should be to people, not terms.

This panel covers:

• Keep targeting specificity even when Exact Match is no longer exact
• Best uses of Phrase Match now that it’s absorbing Broad Match Modified
• Finding negative keyword ideas when search terms reports are restrictive
• The best structure when using multiple match types

Episode Takeaways

Keeping Targeting Specificity with Changes in Exact Match

• Adapt to the shifting nature of Exact Match, where terms are not as narrowly defined due to Google’s AI integration, affecting keyword targeting precision.
• Employ more sophisticated keyword management techniques to maintain relevancy despite broader interpretations by Google’s algorithms.

Best Uses of Phrase Match with Broad Match Modified Absorption

• Utilize Phrase Match to cover the functionalities previously handled by Broad Match Modified by carefully structuring keyword groups to catch a wider array of relevant queries without losing focus.
• Leverage the increased flexibility of Phrase Match to enhance campaign reach while maintaining control over the context in which ads appear.

Finding Negative Keyword Ideas with Restrictive Search Term Reports

• Innovate negative keyword strategies by analyzing broader data trends and user behaviors instead of relying solely on search term reports, which have become more limited.
• Utilize tools and technologies to mine for negative keywords and refine lists continuously to prevent irrelevant traffic and improve ad spend efficiency.

Best Structure When Using Multiple Match Types

• Structure accounts to leverage the strengths of each match type effectively; integrate Exact, Phrase, and Broad Match strategically to balance reach and relevance.
• Implement segmented campaign approaches, assigning different match types to specific campaigns to tailor bidding strategies and control budgets more precisely.

Keeping Targeting Specificity with Changes in Exact Match

• Adapt to the shifting nature of Exact Match, where terms are not as narrowly defined due to Google’s AI integration, affecting keyword targeting precision.
• Employ more sophisticated keyword management techniques to maintain relevancy despite broader interpretations by Google’s algorithms.

Best Uses of Phrase Match with Broad Match Modified Absorption

• Utilize Phrase Match to cover the functionalities previously handled by Broad Match Modified by carefully structuring keyword groups to catch a wider array of relevant queries without losing focus.
• Leverage the increased flexibility of Phrase Match to enhance campaign reach while maintaining control over the context in which ads appear.

Finding Negative Keyword Ideas with Restrictive Search Term Reports

• Innovate negative keyword strategies by analyzing broader data trends and user behaviors instead of relying solely on search term reports, which have become more limited.
• Utilize tools and technologies to mine for negative keywords and refine lists continuously to prevent irrelevant traffic and improve ad spend efficiency.

Best Structure When Using Multiple Match Types

• Structure accounts to leverage the strengths of each match type effectively; integrate Exact, Phrase, and Broad Match strategically to balance reach and relevance.
• Implement segmented campaign approaches, assigning different match types to specific campaigns to tailor bidding strategies and control budgets more precisely.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hello, and welcome to another episode of PPC town hall. My name is Fred Vallaeys. I’m your host, and I’m also the co-founder of Optmyzr . So today we wanted to go back to basics and talk about the keyword. The keyword is so foundational to PPC, and yet it’s one of the things that we really don’t talk about that much anymore.

And maybe it’s partially because the keyword is not that sexy anymore. A lot of people are talking about, you know, yeah, we can do keyword targeting, but really let’s layer in audiences. Let’s do all the cool new stuff. Okay. But at the same time, Google is making a tremendous number of changes that really impact how keywords work.

Exact match is no longer exact match. Broad match modified is no longer a match type. There’s a whole bunch of changes happening. The query data is being reduced. So it really does change how we as agencies, as PPC professionals have to think about keyword targeting. And it’s actually becoming more important because due to privacy concerns and flock and the whole Bird series of things that Google is announcing.

We’re really not that sure anymore how audiences will work So we have to go back to those fundamentals and really think about the keywords. So we wanted to talk about that today We have a great, set of panelists. We have some people who’ve returned for Something like the fifth time now and we have some newbies as well.

So Welcome to PPC Town Hall about keywords

All right. And here we have our panelists. And before I introduce the panelists everyone use the chats, the chat feature on YouTube, the comments. That’s how we’re going to take your questions. But we always like to start off by having people say hello and telling us where you’re calling in from. And so we’ll have the same question for our panelists and let’s start with the newbies.

So we have Sonika . Sonika , welcome to the show.

Sonika Chandra: Thank you. I’m calling in from Pennsylvania. I am usually at the Philadelphia SEER office, but currently I’m in Harrisburg. So really nice day here. It’s actually going to be in the eighties. It snowed last week and that is PA weather. All right.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, if you had snow last week, I guess you deserved some nice weather this week.

And what do you do over at SEER?

Sonika Chandra: Previously I was a paid media manager and now I’m moving into a role called data strategy. So a lot of what I do is higher level marketing and business consulting using paid search, SEO, analytics, all data from digital marketing. So. Really helps our clients kind of understand a broader strategy and And what I’m using is plenty of search term and keyword data.

So Really aligns with what we’re going to talk about today.

Frederick Vallaeys: Awesome. Well, it’s great to have you on.

Sonika Chandra: And then we

Frederick Vallaeys: have Sarah and I’m going to say your last name because I actually know how to say it. I’m from Belgium. I guess that’s a Dutch last name, Sarah.

Sarah Vlietstra: Yes. Yes, it is a Dutch last name. My husband gave it to me and no one can pronounce it.

So this is very special. This is a special moment for me, Fred. I appreciate it.

Frederick Vallaeys: I’m so happy I could make it special for you, Sarah. So Sarah, you work with Kirk, right? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah, so I actually kind of accidentally landed into the digital marketing realm working as a contractor with the Google program.

And I worked there for about six years. That was how I met Kirk and started working with his agency in June. And yeah, we’ve been working together ever since. I’m one of his Senior paid search strategists. So we work on a variety of, of accounts of mainly leaning towards e commerce.

Frederick Vallaeys: So when you said you worked at Google, is it true that you were actually Kirk’s like agency representative at Google?

Yes. For a couple of

Sarah Vlietstra: years.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah.

Sarah Vlietstra: I must’ve given him better advice than raise your bids and increase your budgets and move to smart bidding.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And you saw the news that Google their earnings, 18 billion in profits. Yeah.

Sarah Vlietstra: So I

Frederick Vallaeys: guess all that effort in terms of saying people raise your budgets and raise your bids.

It’s it’s paying off

Sarah Vlietstra: Some people listen to us. It’s remarkable And kirk

Frederick Vallaeys: no stranger to the show or the industry. It’s good to have you on again

Kirk Williams: Thank you. I love being on here and I love chatting with you fred as always so and Sarah is fantastic So we we love Sarah around here. So does a fantastic job.

Frederick Vallaeys: And now the last time the two of us chatted was a couple of weeks ago You We we did a session and then like right afterwards, something special happened, right?

Kirk Williams: Yes. Yes. It’s funny. Cause I almost forgot what you were talking about. I had a baby. Yeah. No it is not, I’m, I’m serious. It is no exaggeration to say.

It is definitely harder to go from zero to one children than from five to six. And I have just learned that. In fact, sometimes we almost forget that there’s like another one there. So I guess we’ve officially hit that point. And do you mind sharing the names of your children with the audience? Sure. So every single one has seven letters.

And then all of the girls are B R I and all the boys are B E. All right. So it’s Bennett, Brielle, Bristol. Beckham Bentley Berkeley. So there you go.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so let me ask you the system for naming. Did that come into existence after you named your first child based on the name that you kind of wanted? Or was there a plan before you even started having children?

Kirk Williams: I think It came into existence after like the second or third. I think if I remember it was one of those things where all of a sudden we like looked around, we’re like, Oh, Hey, there’s a theme here. We should keep this going. Love it.

Frederick Vallaeys: Well, great to have all of you on the show. So the theme for today is keywords, right?

And and thank you everyone for putting in the comments where you’re calling in from. If you have questions or if there’s a direction you want the conversation to go, please put that in there. Also, by the way, we’re going to show at the bottom of the screen, the place where you can sign up for the first virtual user conference that Optmyzr is doing.

That’s happening in about three weeks. And that’s open to everyone. So we’d love to see more people joining that. But yeah, let’s talk about keywords. And Kirk, you had a post on search engine land, and I’m going to show that up on the screen right here. But it’s about the concerning future of the resilient keyword.

So tell us a little bit about like how you’re thinking about. Everything that’s changing. And it’s not like one change that recently happened, but it’s like this amalgamation of many changes. And like, it’s bringing us to a point where it’s like, what’s the key? We’re really doing that.

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So, I mean, this is, this post is one of those where it didn’t come from an hour of thought.

It came from like now the past years of looking at Industry changes of our own management and seeing some necessary things that need to change of being surprised by things that work that didn’t used to work, you know, sometimes paradigm shifts happen from a lot of things, right? And that’s that’s definitely this post.

I mean, I joke in the beginning of this post. In, in, in a non joking way that like, when I wrote my book, the very first chapter was basically me professing my love of the keyword. Because I do think that it’s just a remarkable in intent based form of marketing that I still think is just about the most targeted marketing that we can have.

There it’s, it’s, it’s individual, it’s personal, it’s timely. All of those things together allow us to connect with a person who’s telling us what they’re interested in. Right. And yet. We look at things that have changed. Some, sometimes those things may not even be great. They might be something that we feel that Google’s shoving on us that we may or may not like, but at some point as PPCers, we can try to work change in the industry, but also at some point, that’s where evolving, adapting comes in as well.

So trying to strike that balance of maybe speaking out on things of saying, Hey, maybe this is not healthy behavior on Google’s part, but I’m also saying, okay, this is the reality. So now what do we do? Right? And then some of the, and so this is the, the, the majority of the post though, is really about, you know conversation that came out from our internal team as we started really kind of walking through, not simply what has happened on the ad side, which is really where our brains so often are as, as, as PPC ers but really starting to think through what has changed on the user behavior side.

So like the search side and, and has that impacted things as well. And the more that we were talking about this and chewing on it over time, the more it became a bigger deal than I even. had realized of this, I think is part of what is driving everything in our need to see the keyword as, as different than it was before.

So, so things like Google search is basically a better product now than it used to be. You have autocomplete that’s, that’s better. That’s used more obviously mobile device impact. So a number of those things combining to say. The keyword has a potentially less individual intent than it used to in some ways because of, of user behavior change.

And then you bring in some of that Google ads side stuff too, especially the things you mentioned, close variance you know, then make an exact, not as exact automation, all that stuff together.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let’s pause on the intent for a second, right? So I think one of the points, if I understand the article, was that in the olden days, he would type in very specific queries like Samsung 55 inch flat screen LCD TV. And so it was very specific. It was very clear that that’s what you were looking for. But nowadays there’s so much auto complete happening. Then I start typing S a. m. And it’s like, Hey, did you mean Samsung LCD 55 inch TV? And I’m like, Oh yeah, sure. I’ll take that one. And then I didn’t even realize there was a 65 inch.

That’s the one that I might’ve actually wanted, right? Is that kind of what you’re talking about?

Kirk Williams: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think just Google between its ads product as well as just its search product is just. It’s just better at personalization to you, the user. So, you know, what Fred is typing in when he says new TV is going to be different results than what I see when I type in new TV, that’s cause it’s personalized to us.

And in that way, it’s kind of changing what was the old school way of seeing. Specific keyword intent, which was, Hey, how many words, which words, some exactly like you said, kind of that long, a really long phrase, multi word including very specific modifiers in there, all that stuff is what we used to really expand out.

So like, let’s build out this keyword list and then let’s add, you know, let’s take our keyword list of like 50 and then let’s add in best to that. And then all of a sudden we have a hundred and now let’s add in it. Buy, you know, and then as locate as like local stuff added in, we’d be like, okay, now let’s add near me.

And so pretty soon you have, you know, 40, 000 keywords for two products or whatever. And, and, and so some of this is coming from also then practically as we’re actually managing the accounts too, and kind of shifting thinking in some of this, even practically with what has been working as well. And we’ve even just started noticing.

How the automation has been getting better, especially with, with bidding and that, as they are tying that into users and what they’re tracking, those users, their, their past browsing history, you know, all the stuff that they’re starting to bring into all of this. And so we’ll start to see some of those more Obscure, you know, shorter keywords that wouldn’t have really shown us the intent that we thought was great in the past.

And now those may be some of our best performers in our account because of some of the other stuff. So, so just kind of the need to really like, where are we right now with the keyword and, and, and how do we need to rethink that?

Frederick Vallaeys: And Sonika , I want to hear from you. Like, what’s your perspective on the changing intent behind keywords and I guess the data analysis piece.

How do you figure out.

Sonika Chandra: Yeah,

Frederick Vallaeys: behavior.

Sonika Chandra: I mean, I definitely agree with Kirk that things are changing. And for that reason, I think embracing the close variance and the different automation features that Google is adding in is important. One because we don’t have much of a choice and two because a lot of these tactics do work.

Because they capture that piece that we’re not seeing with just the keywords. So typical user behavior. How much is the user willing to spend on something? Are they a previous purchaser? How much are they spending on other websites? You know, all of that kind of does factor into automated bidding and bid management in that way.

But to touch on other data that, you know, you can use if you’re not already what you were talking about earlier with you know, your search kind of filling in itself. That’s why we focus on cert features. Why we, we gather the data on people also ask results and other things like that, because that data is available.

It helps us kind of tailor other pieces of our strategy. Say the keyword goes away. Add copy is not going to go away. Ad extensions won’t go away, so we can kind of update and optimize upon that. In the event that the keyword is no longer, you know, our primary targeting measure.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. I’m curious about how you do all of that, right?

So, Sear, is it the biggest independent agency or it’s certainly a good size?

Sonika Chandra: It’s a good size. I don’t know if I can commit on air to being the biggest because I don’t know. But, sierra Sierra has definitely innovated quite a bit on finding data sources that are not necessarily typical to use to build a broader strategy.

And some of our methodology includes definitely using both SEO data, analytics, data data from other channels to guide our strategy. And I know it sounds definitely like pie in the sky with that. But a good example would be in terms of discovery for content or for ad copy. We’re looking at search query data.

So what is the user actually typing in to guide our intent? And then based on not only PPC performance, but ranking data, how many times is a user converting through an ad when there’s also a cert feature present? Whether that’s an answer box or people also ask results a video, you know, so all of that kind of factors into our decision of, you know, Are we one relevant on PPC, but two can our client maybe run video ads or YouTube ads, because we can see that there is a much higher propensity of conversion rate when there’s a video present, but also give some more information.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I’m curious, and this is for you or anyone else, but given the amount of personalization that’s happening, looking at these other data sources and like, was there a video present? Was there a SERP? Like is that down to the user level almost? Or how do you, you know, from a data perspective, look at something that is actionable in the, in the realm of sort of the settings that Google ads gives you, which is certainly not to the user level.

Sonika Chandra: Yeah. I would say it’s, it’s not necessarily on the user level, but more on the theme or the intent level, because we’re breaking down our queries by. Ngrams or bigrams. So we’re able to see people who are typically searching near me. For example, Kirk, you know, if we’re seeing that in tons of search queries over and over again, we can isolate that and see if someone’s looking for near me.

Is there also a map pack result present? If not, can our company or our client optimize their Google My Business? What can they do to kind of one up the competition in areas that aren’t? Just PPC related.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. And in doing so, you even display some of the ads by being the one who pushes the maps box to, to show up.

So it’s kind of a double whammy if you win that one.

Sonika Chandra: Right. And that’s why we look at it as more of a holistic marketing strategy or digital marketing strategy and not so much siloed division based PPC or SEO. Because it really should all work together to. Have the best result. And you can’t do that if you’re only looking at how are my ads performing?

Frederick Vallaeys: So Sarah and kirk sort of a different perspective right zato Amazing agency, but much smaller, right? So what is your approach to this change in keywords?

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah, I think that a lot of what we’re seeing here and a lot of what what Google is doing in terms of the loosening of the match types, I have maybe a little bit of a different perspective on it.

I feel like it’s almost being done out of necessity. So what we’re seeing are people are no longer searching for the same things over and over again. We’re seeing a lot of different unique searches and well, obviously Google is in the ads business. They want to make money. So how can they make more money by expanding out these keywords to return for?

more and additional searches. Now, fortunately, they have given us awesome machine learning algorithms. And so I found that exact match being exact match isn’t necessarily an issue if our machine learning, learning algorithms are collecting the right information, if they are able to bid appropriately based on the user’s intent, the user signals, and the information that they’re giving to us.

And we’re still able to achieve really great results even with the loosening of some of these restrictions

Frederick Vallaeys: And so with the loosening of the restrictions, are you basically saying it’s fine? So long as you’re also automating bids so that that can take into account like what’s the how close is that close variant actually?

To what the user intended and that google’s capturing that pretty well and so setting the correct level of bid Is that kind of what you’re talking about?

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah to some degree now we’ve actually been experimenting with broad match You And it’s actually worked relatively well when paired with like a target ROAS strategy or even like dynamic search ads.

Like they’ve been really great using machine learning and automated bidding. As long as we’re giving the system, you know, the appropriate information we’re tracking the conversions, we’re appropriately tracking revenue and value from the sales that are happening through these interactions. I’ve, I’m just seeing smart bidding get getting better and better and ultimately kind of.

but alleviating some of the strain that, that we would see on the match types of being as exact as they were prior.

Frederick Vallaeys: And this is the funny thing about, and this, sorry, we’ll come to you in a second here, but what’s so funny about PPCs, we’re talking about keywords today, but inevitably we go to bidding and everything’s becoming so much more interconnected.

So that’s a great point that if you use these systems together, they can actually do a good job. And I’d love to hear more too, about how you do conversion tracking. And what kind of data you put in. But also, no, Kirk wanted to say something, so

Kirk Williams: no, that kind of goes along with what I was gonna say.

I’ll throw on a couple of, of, of notes to what Sarah is saying as well, which one being what you were saying Fred, the inputs is really, really important then so you can’t, you can’t lean too hard into an automated system. If you’re not giving the system the best inputs. Right. And so, so you really do need to kind of think through even each client, each individual client, what what is going to best, this sounds more generic and philosophical, not because we don’t have specific ways, but because sometimes it needs to be that more generic way that you’re thinking so that then you can get individual in each client.

Right. Cause every client has a little bit of different metrics of like how they see success and then what are, what are different. What are different places in the customer journey that are also pointing towards that ultimate success? So like, for instance, we have a number of B2B e commerce sites, which is not something that’s very common, but we’ve really started to.

And we like love them, but that can really get you into trouble. Like, like, let’s say you focus with a lot of automation and you’re, you’re selling a 14, 000 product with a nine month sales cycle, right? You’ve got to be feeding additional, like that’s, it’s not that automation can’t work. It’s that you need to be feeding additional inputs in to, To it aside from just simply the single 14, 000 sale.

Right. And so inputs is really, really important. So that’s, that’s a, that’s a really crucial part. So someone just listening to this thinking, Oh, Hey, I’m going to just go turn on everything automated. Let’s just run everything going crazy and hasn’t done something like that. That’s probably going to fail.

They’ll blame it on automation maybe. And there’s another reason. The other thing I’ll say too, is we Like it really does depend on the account. And what we’ve found, especially with newer accounts is if, again, if you don’t have that data, that’s really important. And, and if you have other things, so like limited budget might be something very competitive, high CPCs, you know, you have, you have kind of these, these different, you know, Data points that as you look at this account, you say, what’s the best way I should manage this?

There still is a case and we were just having this conversation yesterday. Actually, there still is a case, especially on some of those smaller accounts where you still might want to start with a little bit of that old school mentality of some manual bids, exact match only campaigns, things like that in order to help.

Build that history and really kind of start aiming the Google machine in the proper place. So that at some point their machine learning algorithms that do take your entire account history into play at some point, like you’re starting to give them that good stuff. So that’s also another caveat that just requires.

A human to assist in kind of thinking through this stuff. So while we’re saying we like automation at Zato, we’re also not saying, therefore, what we do in every account that we land is just like plop some broad match things in there, throw in an automated bidding strategy, walk away as like, you know, the explosion of awesomeness happens behind us.

Not, not at all. It’s very, Very managed. Yeah. I mean, I mean, that’s like 90 yeah, those are some good caveats, Kirk. Obviously. Yeah. We do want to make sure we have historical conversion data. We want to make sure that where we’ve been collecting conversions for a period of time, the system can track that back to specific keywords and that type of thing.

Sarah Vlietstra: As well as. Monitoring search terms, definitely as much as we can.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I wish we had a feature here where we could put like explosions of unicorns and rainbows behind Kirk, cause he was saying how awesome it all is. But I think that’s, you’re right. It’s a big part of the, the reason that people hire agencies is because you could just go into Google and say, okay, just go for it.

DSA broad match keywords. Here’s my goal. As I’ve lost my camera. So Well, I can’t talk anymore when I can’t see myself. It’s weird. But yeah, anyway, Kirk.

Sarah Vlietstra: Did

Kirk Williams: I see you, Sonika ? Did I see you unmute? Did you have something to add too?

Sonika Chandra: I was just gonna say that I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t mention because this is something that is over and over again brought up at SEER, but not every optimization strategy and automated bidding strategy works for every client works for every campaign or every product type.

So testing, testing, testing is so important in figuring out What is going to work? Sometimes we have seen that manual bidding just works best for a specific product type for a client. So of course, you know, it’s phase one is test and then phase two is optimized. So I just wanted to bring that up as well.

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah, I completely agree, Sonika . That is a good point.

Frederick Vallaeys: And Sonika , how much do you guys rely on automated bidding then or smart bidding?

Sonika Chandra: We’ve definitely leaned into it heavily. There is no blanket answer. I’ve I’ve seen it work on many of my accounts personally had a lot of improvement in performance after adopting more smart bidding, but, It’s definitely been it’s been a phased approach.

We’ve definitely been testing it. And overall I think, and I, I know Kirk, you mentioned this a lot in your book, but just, you kind of have to adopt or fall behind in certain ways. And and the inputs are the most important and getting that time back to put more effort and interest in time into strategy the automated bidding and all that kind of gives you, which is really nice.

Kirk Williams: That’s, that’s something we’ve found as Fred goes in and out, I’ll Can I just say I love

Frederick Vallaeys: the iOS 14. 5 or whatever update, I just decided to restart my computer. Yay privacy!

Sarah Vlietstra: But the apps won’t track you, Fred. At

Frederick Vallaeys: this point, I’m private.

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah, if your computer doesn’t work, the apps can’t track you anyway.

Kirk Williams: Yup. No, I was just going to say that’s, this is something that we some of this has been like a personal journey for me, cause I’ve, I’ve been huge in the last few years. So, so we’ve hired Sarah and Tom. So Tom also worked as a, as a Google rep as well. And it’s been almost this fun, like clash of cultures, if you will, in a really good way.

There’ve been accounts basically that I’ll hand off to Sarah. And. And, and we’ll not, we’ll try, we’ll do my best to not micromanage and basically like you manage this in kind of the way that you see best. Also, here’s some things, like, here’s some things that we see in terms of the really ultra like Uber OCD controlled, like.

Kirk way of doing things in 2015, right? So here’s some things that probably are still important. We should consider blah, blah, blah. New versus returning is still really important to me. Kind of keeping those, those separated out. I am, I still think that having marketing dollars that you’ve invested into return should have different goals and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff.

So there’s still some of that stuff, but also like. Hey, you know, let’s see what you do. And that’s just taken account that I’ve had for a few years and like, it’s just doing so much, it’s just doing better, you know, and I’ll, at some point I’m looking at that, like, well, cool, but also ouch, but, but cool. And so some of that has been happening where I’m seeing where we’re having these actual internal conversations.

And then I’m reading books like, like, you know, your book, Fred on automation, Patrick Gilbert’s book, join or die. Seeing the changes that Google’s making. And again, trying to look at all this stuff and be very realistic. And as, as someone say, I recently, I recently, I’ve had a couple of times where someone will start to kind of say that I’m, you know, drinking Google’s Kool Aid, that sort of thing.

Buying into buying into Google, that sort of thing. And I’ve had different times where I’ll push back on things that I don’t agree with, but for the most part. I just think that we are at this, I think we’re at this important transitional time. I don’t know how else to say it. And I do think that the good PPC ers will be able to evolve and adapt right now and, and kind of jump on this and not just consistently be frustrated and complain about what we used to have.

If that makes sense. I think

Frederick Vallaeys: OCD Kirk is going to have to shift what he’s OCD about to a different set of things. Right. Instead of managing, like I need to show up on that exact search query. Like children,

Sarah Vlietstra: there are still Legos.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. How many do you have behind you?

Kirk Williams: I don’t, I don’t know. I don’t know how many sets there’s cause there’s more on this side too.

Then I’m working on a couple of others that

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think you’re going to have to shift your, your focus from that exact keyword, that exact ad that needs to show to what you were saying, which is I care deeply that I value. A returning customer differently from a new customer right?

And that’s a level of obsession as well, but it’s obsessing over setting those values correctly, which is teaching the machine so that they can go and do the things that we used to do manually. So it is a mind shift. It’s a pretty big one, but I think. And is this especially true that even with automation, like I was doing a session yesterday with a far less advanced PPC crowd and it’s like, can we just put stuff on automation and be done?

And it’s like, well, yeah, you could, but you’re going to get average results. Right. If you want better than average, you got to talk to this crowd here. But this crowd has some questions, so let’s jump into a few of these. So Yuki’s asking, if I only had a small budget for a campaign, would you recommend smart bidding and broad match?

Or would you then also do sort of what Kirk was saying, which is still start manually and control the spend on a small budget? And I don’t know what small budget means in this context, but Sonika , what’s your thought on this? Yeah of course it depends how small, you know, 5 or 500 or 5, 000. But depending on, on all of that, I think again, you know, testing is important if you have the time.

Sonika Chandra: I would probably start with manual, see what and of course doing keyword research beforehand is also really important so you can get a gauge of how much should I be planning to spend on these keywords, what’s the competition like. But assuming that that’s all been done, I do think testing with manual to begin and let Google get a feel and the machine learning, get a feel for what your goals are moving into smart bidding after a few weeks and kind of looking at results is probably how I personally would approach it.

But I think it’s really just kind of personally dependent on how much time you have to be looking into the optimizations and looking into the data. If this is something that you’re doing for a small business and you don’t have, you know, the time to go in and do all the optimizations, then smart bidding is kind of made for you.

And that, that’s probably how I would approach it, but I would really like to hear from Kirk as well and and from the rest of you on, on your thoughts.

Frederick Vallaeys: So Sarah, what do you think?

Sarah Vlietstra: So she mentions that she has a small budget for the campaign. I’m curious if there are other campaigns in the account, how much conversion data we have within the account.

A lot of the instances that we’re seeing really, really good results on broad match plus smart bidding are on our larger accounts that already have a lot of historical conversion data. So the system is kind of able to weed through and know which which users are going to result in that purchase. Or which ones they should ultimately bid lower on.

So if this is the very first campaign with a small budget, I, I kind of would maybe more go towards a more conservative route, like Sonika had mentioned, maybe actually start using more restrictive match types with manual bidding to start and just to generate some historical conversion data before moving to something like a straight broad match and smart bidding.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, and you need sort of that foundation of conversion data for the system to start learning But it’s interesting because now even with smart shopping campaigns They used to have a minimum requirement for conversions, but that’s kind of been taken away and so google doesn’t really explain how this works But you could assume that they kind of know from similar queries how they tend to convert And that becomes the base level for a new advertiser brand new account But I think there is something to be said for build that foundation, right?

Because there’s so many people doing searches. There’s so much volume out there that if you can hone in on a segment that, you know, is tightly matched and relevant to what you sell, build up your conversion data from that, right? And then start going into broad match, then start saying, Hey, machine, Find new queries for me and hopefully tell me what those queries are, right?

Search query data is a bit more limited, but still tell me as much as you can. And let me start managing it from that point.

Kirk Williams: And Google does utilize, you know, account level history, right? And so that’s even where it starts to again, get tricky. It’s just an, it depends situation because someone creating a completely new account with.

Absolutely. No history who’s tries a smart shopping campaign where they, you know, where they don’t have to have a certain amount of conversions, that sort of thing. May see that fail miserably. Sometimes based on the circumstances that actually might do okay, but they might see that fail miserably where someone else.

Who has a lot of account history that Google can also utilize in its algorithms. Patrick Gilbert again in his book was the one who actually, I didn’t realize that Google didn’t move beyond that into utilizing account level in its algorithms as well. Not just simply, Within your campaigns individual campaigns.

And so that, that also is just part of that, like whole, it depends like literally every situation for the most part though. Yeah. As the others have said, newer account, not as much account history. I’d probably do some research, start more restrictive and go from there.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right. So technical detail that you’re I’ll kind of talking about conversion tracking is at the account level.

So conversion tracking is basically it’s the conversion tracking pixel with everything that happens in that account. So even if one of the campaign, if you have multiple campaigns, some are using smart bidding, some are not. But they’re all using the same conversion tracking pixel. Then all of that feeds into the data that the machine uses to make decisions.

And those decisions could be bid management decisions, but they could also be, you know, broad match decisions. What, how broad are we going to go on a keyword and still think it’s relevant enough?

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah, Fred, and I’ve actually heard from Google that sometimes if there isn’t enough account level conversion data history, they’ll actually go to an MCC level. Conversion data, and then possibly even a vertical level conversion data. Now, I don’t know how much this will all change based on, you know, what we’re seeing in terms of third party cookie deprecation and the loss of that information.

But that was kind of some of the information that Google utilized to showcase that you could start off on smart bidding with, No historical conversion data, though. I’ve never found that that really works successfully.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, we’ve got one of our team members here, Juan from Chile. Hello. Thanks for asking a question.

So he’s he wants to hear from the panelists about Skaggs. Skaggs, obviously, for those of you who don’t know, a single keyword ad groups kind of an old school way of doing things. Really controlling which keyword for which ad building high relevance through that high quality score. But it’s a bit of a controversial topic, right?

So some people love it. Some people hate it. Do we have a more nuanced opinion here or a lovers or haters?

Sarah Vlietstra: I’m two thumbs down on skags. I, I find that ad groups work best if we’re able to develop maybe a, a group of keywords that have the similar relevance that we can then enhance the ad rank of the entire ad group through having those various keyword inputs.

I haven’t, is, gags are also more difficult to manage. Very very difficult to manage in terms of negative keywords add copy all of those types of things That’s my my opinion at least

Frederick Vallaeys: and shameless plug anyone who struggles with skag management Optmyzr makes it super easy but I hear your point on staying thematic, right?

And so I I think the principle behind skag is very valid And if you have the tools or the capability or the scripts to manage it then great do it I think when it gets into into the realm of hey, we’re going to skag everything. That’s just dumb Right. That’s overkill, but there are certainly those keywords that are high volume that are really important where you want to have tight control over the ad.

And we’re kind of getting into RSAs even now. Right. So if we have a keyword, that’s really important to us. Like, how do we make sure we get the most from that keyword? Do we trust Google to craft a specific ad variation using RSA components? Right. And then now, if we put that with multiple keywords, it’s like, wow, We get even less data about what the ad components are that are performing well for this one keyword that we really care about.

And so that’s where I do get it that people want to skag. Sonika , what about you?

Sonika Chandra: Yeah, I’m with Sarah. From a practitioner’s perspective, nightmare. Before we actually started utilizing Optmyzr at Sear, I did have a client that was running them. And it does make changes in the account really difficult.

You know, if you want to update ad copy, you’re updating ad copy for thousands and thousands of ad groups. If you see that, you know, there’s one thing that you would want to change, but every element includes a product name, you can’t do that at scale. So that was a big issue from a practitioner side.

But again, even from a performance standpoint after testing, you know, multi match type ad groups and things like that, we’ve just seen more success for most of our clients and and kind of waning in again to a lot of what Google’s kind of pushing and and it’s been working.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so let’s talk about what google’s pushing for a second, right so google we’ll go in and say basically remove all account complexity And I think a lot of advertisers what they do from google is Oh, just put everything in a single campaign like really big ad groups very little Account structure and I think that’s not what google is really saying google saying you don’t have to have that really detailed account structure But maybe you know, when it comes to new and returning customers, or when it comes to, you know, you have performance differences in different cities and it’s based on different messaging resonates first between New York and California.

Right. The only way to control those things is to really still have multiple campaigns or to use ad customizers, but that’s. Its own level of complexity, right? So, and that’s completely fine. And that goes back then to do the fact that Google looks at the account level data or even the MCC level account data for the conversion pixel, right?

So it doesn’t matter if you break things into really granular little bits. Automation is still going to work, but it’s like, how much complexity do you put on your own plate? And is that complexity that. Complexity there for a good reason. Or did you just make it complex because you kind of wanted to look at this granular data but had no actual business reason to do it?

Sonika Chandra: Yeah. And one thing I thought about when Sarah was chatting earlier was that going back to your customer kind of being first and wanting to provide the best experience for them. Sometimes having a more thematic sense in the account is better when you have these single keyword ad groups. They’re also being served an ad for that keyword.

Usually if you’re if that’s the method you’re using, but I’m Sometimes your customer doesn’t always know what they want. You know if you’re looking for a Samsung 55 inch, but there’s also a 65 inch available, you might not even know that if all you get to is the point where you’re being served the 55 inch ad.

So in, in terms of that kind of Thought process too. That’s another reason I lean towards more of a themed ad group than a single keyword ad group.

Frederick Vallaeys: Let me play on that for a second, right? So I was doing another session and the session I mentioned before, but it was with Brad Geddes. And he was saying that one of the user behavior changes that’s interesting for the next five years is the voice assistance.

And basically saying kind of what Kirk was saying earlier, which is Google is guiding us towards the one thing that we should want either by pre filling our search query or in the case of a voice assistant, like I ask it for something, it’s really only going to give you one result, right? And so how, how important is branding and sort of being, how do you become that one result that users want?

And in my case, right? So if I bought more LG TVs and Samsung TVs, does that basically mean that at this point, Google’s going to assume that I just buy LG and Samsung is like, how do you How do you become that brand? And how, how do you prevent the consumer from getting stuck in their own echo chamber, if you will?

Sarah Vlietstra: I think that’s a good point, Fred. And I think it’s it speaks to kind of some of the strategy that we’ve been doing over at Zayto. We’re making sure that when we’re running shopping campaigns, specifically like heavily automated smart shopping campaigns, that we also are running you know, standard campaigns in conjunction with that.

So we are able to capture impression, share. For those keywords that the smart shopping campaign might necessarily give up because it doesn’t see good intent from the user But we’re still able to remain in front of them Via those standard shopping campaigns with manual bidding

Frederick Vallaeys: yeah, so keep using standard campaigns and I bet probably also youtube campaigns and Do a bit of the brand building so that the consumer Gets nudged towards wanting you as the number one result. And then when we have those very specific advertising mechanisms, whether they be on voice assistance, then we can just push that number one result and close the sale.

Sarah Vlietstra: Yeah, that is

Kirk Williams: a really, that is really interesting, Fred, though. I like, it’s a fantastic question because I do think that is potentially the problem with algorithm algorithm based everything, right. Is that you run the risk of starting to, in some ways, Without going into this at all, but that’s even part of that broader concern and question that like governments get involved in with things like Facebook and that sort of thing too, right?

Kind of this algorithm type thing. Almost the question is almost like what level is us as people exercising free will of like interest and choice. And then what level is the algorithm kind of forcing us down the path? Maybe even in some ways based upon our past history, but then there’s also some level of like our past history could change, right?

Maybe you buy LG a lot. And then for some reason, Samsung comes along with something interesting. And so some of that, to me as kind of that bigger branding question is the need to look, I guess, beyond paid search to answer as, as like part of that, to answer that, right, is we, at some level might just not be able to necessarily, aside from some, some tricks, like Sarah was saying, in terms of shopping ads, some things that we can do with that but at some point you know, I see that almost as part of a quality score type question where if, if we’re not as relevant, then like we’re just paying more for those things too.

So at some point outside from jacking our bids up to try to appear in some of those that Google’s algorithm no longer thinks that we’re relevant in some of those auctions. So some of that to me is the importance of business looking not solely to Two page search. I mean, if we see someone who’s like 90%, 95 percent of their marketing budget, we even ask this question actually, before we take on a client, because we just kind of want to have a good idea of, of who these people are, right?

If like 95 percent of their marketing budget right now is Google ads, like that’s a red flag, right? Because you as a business need to diversify. And so some of what you’re asking, Fred is like a great, that’s a fantastic, like branding question. And I think that goes beyond paid search and into some of those, those additional brand awareness type of like, what are you doing to get in front of people to communicate how great Samsung is in more of a, You know, kind of thinking connected TV, thinking YouTube, you know, kind of thinking of some of those other things to increase that interest aside from just on the demand capture side of, of paid search.

Frederick Vallaeys: And so that’s a fantastic response. But now the client comes into your agency and is like, Hey, Kirk or Sonika , we’re, we’re going to hire you. Right. But. You’re doing PPC for us. And we’ve heard PPC is like ultimately measurable. And now you’re saying we got to do YouTube, but you’re not going to measure that exactly.

Or how do you, how do you bridge that gap? Right. And is that a concern you hear or not so

Kirk Williams: much? I mean, the first thing in some ways, yeah, the first thing I say in that is I, I immediately jumped to the ultimately measurable and I try as best as I can to just completely Like blow that out of the water and have them question everything.

Because I actually think that’s really, really important that you not think that everything that, that you not like get so focused on this track conversion, whatever your dumb attribution model is. We were just talking about that today with DDA, like the limits of DDA. First of all, it’s not even including display it’s search shopping and YouTube, right?

So it’s not including. Any other sources of anything. It’s not including Facebook. It’s not including email. It’s not including display. And so if they visited 27 times through Facebook and then they type in your brand and click on that DDA is like, Oh, Hey, one click, you know, a hundred percent of the, a hundred percent of the credit goes to this, this brand ad.

So even with data driven attribution, there’s problems. And so in some ways I think it’s healthy to just help. Help people see the limits of, of conversion tracking of attribution of seeing the stuff more and more as this directional piece of a bigger marketing puzzle and, and, and kind of starting there and then being able to, once we kind of agree and understand and are honest about the limits, then I think we can start to have those honest conversations of here’s where paid search fits really well with your strategy.

Yeah. Here’s where it doesn’t. And we just try to be as transparent as possible with that.

Frederick Vallaeys: It’s Anika. You definitely, I mean, working on analytics and strategy, like what’s your take home?

Sonika Chandra: Yeah, I, I fully agree. And I think it goes back to something I think I heard will say in a previous episode that, you know, it goes back to your product.

It goes back to the education that you’re. Sites given and a good customer experience overall and doing the right thing. It’s not always about serving ads. And you know, there’s also an element of ad frequency and things like that, and kind of being the bug in your customer’s ear. So 95 percent of your budget being put into paid advertising.

Is it, if that’s what you want to do, that’s what you want to do. I wouldn’t recommend it though. And I do always kind of refer back to quality of content and you know, in, in the Moz guide to SEO, there is repeatedly over and over again, is your content 10 times better than your competitions? And that’s for a good reason.

You know, you want to provide education, you want your consumer to know what they’re getting into. And that is not always achieved. By paid search advertising. But it is also a really big element to full marketing funnel strategy.

Frederick Vallaeys: Hey, let’s do another user question here. Fewer question. And this one is about micro conversions, right?

So we had an example of the longer sale cycle, what, nine months for the 14, 000 sale. So you probably set some micro conversions along the way to say, Oh, they downloaded the white paper, they downloaded, or they looked at the video. So these are probable stages along the way to them eventually converting.

How do you value those? And specifically the question is if you’re not doing TROAS, right? So if it’s just a microconversion, but you’re only doing TCPA. So now that microconversion carries as much weight as the ultimate conversion. Or is that just like flat out? Not a good idea.

Sarah Vlietstra: I think it can be beneficial to assign a value to something that. doesn’t necessarily have a value towards it you’d have to probably do some research and some insight into customer value, or if it was a lead form, how many of those leads then turn into an actual sale and kind of work backwards on the math there to assign that conversion value and bid for that particular CPA target.

Frederick Vallaeys: And Try to come up with the right number. But I think the point that a lot of advertisers misses that the value doesn’t have to be precise, even if it’s just a relative value. Right. So say that my actual sale was worth one conversion one, but this micro conversion was worth. 10 percent of that, or it’s a small indication.

They might be on the right path and give that a value of 0. 1. Now when you do start setting these relative values and you combine it with TRO as bidding, one point that Google makes, and that I think is worth echoing is be very careful because say that you have a law firm and you’re in a very competitive space.

Clicks are usually 100 plus, maybe 1, 000 per conversion. If you start reporting conversion values in the value range of one, 0. 1, Google is very quickly going to say, these are horrendous clicks that we’re giving you. Like they’re not driving a lot of value. And they might actually reduce the number of ads they show for you.

Right. So try to have some, some baseline that’s. In line with your industry, right? So in the case of a lawyer, you might want to have the main conversion be worth a thousand and the you know, looking up a video or downloading a white paper, maybe that’s worth 10 or a hundred again, a fraction, but it’s at least a fraction that kind of makes sense in the bigger scheme of what a typical conversion would normally be worth in an industry.

And that’s relative to your click.

Sarah Vlietstra: You could also probably set up different campaigns and then using campaign level conversion actions just to ensure that Google wouldn’t. Would be serving specifically towards the conversion action that you would want to be targeting.

Kirk Williams: That, that’s what I was going to say, Sarah.

I think there’s a great call out, especially if you, as we kind of continue this idea of like keyword themes, right? Especially if you are thinking of structuring your account in a way that is, is more of like, where are these, where are these themes? How does it hit these users where they’re at? Maybe even in that funnel.

And then that can tie into specific specific Goals that you’re, you’re including at that campaign level conversions, because like, that’s a great question on TCPA. Cause I think that is a problem. And so sometimes that might mean that’s actually not the best bidding model for you. If, if you don’t have some way of, of doing that, of, of.

of identifying, okay, if these users are, if this is more of a brand awareness type campaign where we just really don’t see, like, if we get a 14, 000 sale, sweet, we’ll take it. Like that’s just not the common, most commonly they’re, they’re hitting those first couple of micro conversions with a demo request or, you know, whatever it might be, then that does allow you to, to pre select those target them as, as your CPA or, or just, as you were saying, kind of assign some, some various values that you can and kind of think more in line with a conversion value or ROAS type thing.

Sarah Vlietstra: So

Frederick Vallaeys: another question for you, Kurt, they’re differentiating between new and returning customers and smart shopping. How do you usually handle that?

Kirk Williams: Yeah. So There is, and someone might someone else on the panel might have a better insight into, you know, some of the additional betas that are there I may or may not be aware of.

But so the new and return, the new and returning customer acquisition currently within smart shopping is, is different than new and returning users. I think it’s just really important to at least just understand that. So they are, they are saying, these are people who have not purchased. Purchased from you yet, or these are people who have purchased from you.

That is very, very different than these are cold or warm audiences, right? Those are two completely separate things. So in that way you know, you can utilize and test the new and returning customer acquisition thing within smart shopping, where you basically, basically what you’re doing is you’re saying, this is how much additional value a new customer is worth so that you give Google a little bit more incentive to go after someone.

But for me, I’m, I’m more interested kind of what I noted previously about new and returning customers. Users. So a completely cold audience to my brand has a much different profit to me. It has a much different objective. It’s going to take longer to nurture them in the funnel, which is okay.

That’s part of it. New customer acquisition. Right. And yeah, I’d like to still get better insight and be able to target. Specifically new and returning visitors, users. And as, and we don’t have that yet.

Frederick Vallaeys: Makes sense. And let’s do one final question here and then We’ll wrap it up because we’re getting close to the end of the hour.

Andre is asking when setting up pure broad match keywords, do you recommend segmenting those into its own campaign and adding negative keywords? Actually he’s asking, adding negative. So I

guess I don’t understand the question. Do you guys understand the question?

Sonika Chandra: The answer is yes. Yeah, I was going to say that too. I think the question is are you applying negative keywords in the beginning as you launch or are you letting it run and then slowly adding in the negatives as you’re kind of seeing them pop in the search queries?

And the answer is yes. I, I would say either one kind of works or both a combination. If you have. A standard negative keyword list that’s either campaign, wide or account wide or we have them some at seer that are you know, we But on every client, if it’s something that’s like, you know, it’s seen through our data warehouse that has been historically bad performing.

But then again, there’s always the element of one constant monitoring, which can be done through scripts. It can be done through Optmyzr . It can be done manually can be done and be I tools. Definitely a lot of different ways that you can go about that. But something that a friend of mine and a coworker, has kind of shined a light on for me personally recently is don’t forget to also go back and monitor What you put in your negatives list? Because at one time you may have added something that It wasn’t a priority and you didn’t have a lot of budget. You didn’t want to be spending a ton of money there but maybe you’ve either gotten more budget in or you’ve realized that these words are more important to you You So just a friendly reminder to everybody to definitely look at what is in your negatives list and don’t let that be a set it and forget it type of thing.

Frederick Vallaeys: Right, you can build those negative keyword lists just by using the keyword planner tool. So even if you have no data in the account, you can sort of see what Google considers to be similar. And that could be a basis for your starting point for negatives.

Kirk Williams: Fred, I think Andre wrote a couple more and I think he was specifically asking, I think about like a query filtering, right?

So when you throw your broad, then do you add in the other keywords that you’re targeting into that campaign, let’s say Even if he’s not, I’ll quick answer it. That’s something like we’ve been starting to shift away from just an aggressively query filtering type strategy. So basically like, here’s our, and again, I like years back I wrote like the, I think it was this specific blog post that was like, here’s why.

segment by ad group match types and all that. But where you would then go in and say, yeah, we want to make sure only our exact get into here only our broad and that sort of thing. So we’d exclude exact match keywords in your account that you’re targeting and you would put those in as negatives into your broad match just to make sure your broad’s not targeting that.

I, like again without trusting the machine too much, we are getting to the point where Google to my understanding, Google has noted that they do prefer Exact match in their, in their, in their algorithm there. So that means to me that for some reason, if there’s just something about the different ads I have, or there’s something about the way that things are targeted with bidding where Google actually decides, no, actually we’re going to show.

This ad within that for that broad match keyword to that exact match. We’re, we’re pretty much more and more allowing that to happen. So we’re not as aggressively excluding and, and filtering into just the tight little boxes that we used to have. And again, kind of letting the algorithm kind of decide a little bit more, especially as they are as they are, as they are at least prioritizing exact match.

And for the most part, we’re seeing that. That worked for us. That’s at least how we’re doing things.

Frederick Vallaeys: And we’re at the top of the hour here. So we’re going to have to say goodbye and thanks everyone for watching. I know there were a bunch of questions. What about the search query report and that data becoming less and less you know, specific keyword strategy.

So I think maybe we can do a couple of learn with Optmyzr s, which go really specifically into those topics. But thank you so much to the panelists for sharing how you guys all think about the evolution of keywords and targeting and keeping accounts profitable and healthy. Kirk, where can people find you and Sarah?

Kirk Williams: Yeah, you can find us zetomarketing. com zetomarketing. com. Look us up. So,

Frederick Vallaeys: right. And let’s show your PPC handle for people who don’t know it, which would be amazing if they didn’t. You’ve also got a book, right? Sonika , you have both of the books. Do you want to hold them up?

Sonika Chandra: Yeah, look at me a marketer born.

Here you are.

Frederick Vallaeys: There you go.

Sonika Chandra: Is there both of the books? You guys should definitely read these. I swear I didn’t buy them just for this.

Frederick Vallaeys: Sonika , where can people find you?

Sonika Chandra: If you have questions, I’ve loved a lot of the questions you guys added. So please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter. I’m also available on LinkedIn or I work at Sear Interactive and anyone at Sear can help answer questions as well.

Frederick Vallaeys: Great. And then one more reminder, we have the Optmyzr user conference called Unlevel. The URL is right there. You can register, sign up for that. So thank you, all of our panelists. Fantastic session again. Thanks everyone for watching. We’ll be back in two weeks and we’ll do a session on conversion rate optimization.

So tune in for that one. Subscribe to the channel if you want to see the future updates. Thanks. Have a great Wednesday. Thanks for having us.

Sarah Vlietstra: Thanks so much.