These Ads Are Costing You TONS And You Can Fix It Right Now transcript

and when you do this there is like real money to be saved in your business like again thousands of dollars sometimes per month both in branded search that you're overpaying for and in categorical search that is actually not performing so it's just like a a low row ass campaign that you should be spending less money on Etc and and you can't see it let's move more into a world that I know a little bit better which is the world of digital marketing um you you this is another thing I jumped out with your original tweet because it's something I probably need to say I probably just need to pre-schedule a monthly tweet about this um but it is the scourge of non-incremental branded search in uh your Google ads account which is happening right now in your Google ads account dear listener like it is it is definitely happening and by definitely I mean in 80 plus perc of the Google ads accounts that I look at um so talk through your Insight here and uh then let's help people save some money on branded search yeah I think we're on the same page as far as our Crusade against branded search but uh the first thing I do is export the keywords that you're actually matching for and you will be disturbed you'll look at it you'll say holy I didn't believe this guy talking about branded search at first and I exported it I looked at it and now I want to gge my eyes out um yeah ju just really fast just just to just to be really clear because this language is actually a little tricky uh what you want to export is the Search terms not the keywords right uh because the Search terms is actually where you see what words people have searched to uh to land on your ad so so keep going yeah exactly so you know you see what they're actually searching for and you you just be really really alarmed it doesn't take long it takes literally want want to say even if you don't know what you're doing 15 minutes to do um and from there I wouldn't bother running a really fancy incrementality test I would just lower spend by 50% just see what happens and in most cases probably nothing and see what happens over the course of two weeks and my guess is is probably nothing and you'll just save a bunch of money I have um I think there are two elements of this uh strategy so the first is many if not most uh folks have in their Google ads accounts um some version of a branded search campaign setup right where it's like you're you're targeting branded keywords and and there's been a lot of ways to do this over time Google ad has changed a lot but basically some version of Rand search right so um so I'm wearing my wander Club hat here so if it was for the wander club which is a client of mine they they um you know it would be some Search terms with or with the word The Wander wander club or wander company or whatever you know all the little variations that people misspell and mistype right Wonder Club whatever so all those trigger ads okay and that's great go ahead and set that up and maybe you run that at a really high rise I'm just going to tell you right now especially if you don't have real competitors really bidding hard against your brand terms something like that that should be running probably at least at a 15 to one at least okay if you even have it at all uh I'm I'm comfortable with running it as long as you're at some kind kind of ridiculous for us like that right but there's another thing that you're talking about here which is that when you go and look at your actual like non-branded campaigns right people call them all kinds of things generic search categorical search non-brand search whatever and then go export your Search terms what inevitably is happening almost all the time you'll see like oh I got a two to one on this campaign or a three to one but when you go and actually export the Search terms what's happening and in fact you don't even have to really do an export you could just you just pull it up in Google ads dashboard just look up you know it'll it's under I think Insights search terms is where you see it if you um if you go pull that up what you will inevitably see if you have not been like um sort of diligent about this is that you will see some variation of these terms right so instead of the wander club like I said it'll be Wonder club and it's clearly somebody searching for your brand but you didn't exclud it from your non-brand campaign and that will be actually running at a 10 to one and all the rest of your categorical search will be running at a 0. five and it'll come out to a blended average number that you see at your campaign dashboard level of a two or three or whatever it is right depending on the volume um and so you have to go and ex exclude those Search terms and when you do this there is like real money to be saved in your business like again thousands of dollars sometimes per month both in branded search that you're overpaying for and in categorical search that is actually not performing so it's just like a a low Ros campaign that you should be spending less money on Etc and and you can't see it so um that basic process uh gets you really far for just like marking out what is a complete and total nonv valuable cost center in your business um okay so say more anything else that that you want to add to that the other big giveaway is in North beam if you look at the average touch points to convert and time to convert you'll see that it's much faster and it's almost always just on desktop that's because people are going for mobile to go purchase on desktop and you'll notice that it's really bad for any brand with a high number of average items per order because people are more afraid of ordering something incorrectly on mobile or like if you have a complex ordering process where there's a lot of customization you see it way worse um and that's like a fun thing you can do in North beam so yeah that is uh makes a lot of sense people definitely forget about that uh like cross device conversion thing um it's it's a real thing the other way I manage this in an ongoing way as somebody who's really not great in Google ads but who um you know I've spent some time in the past I manage Google at points and can and um and what I always say to like clients about this is like I can't run your Google ads but I can definitely help you waste less money on your Google ads um and so like I you know I won't be the person to go scale on account for somebody but uh but just wasting less um in uh and the other thing to do the way I would just handle this is in your branded campaign um you just select search impression share as one of your columns and as long as you're ranking for 90 plus percent of the searches for your brand name uh you're ranking for plenty of them and then every day that I am still getting 90 plus percent of the searches for my brand name uh I just tick down my target CPA or tick up my target roas or take down my target CPC I don't really care how you B bid it um and until you get down to the point where your search impression share gets below that because what that's doing right is telling you how often your uh ad is ranking relative to the Search terms that you're targeting and what I consistently see and smarter Google people than me have have more sophisticated ways of doing this um but what I consistently see is like you start at like okay a $25 Target CPA 95% search term uh search impr fres share right you can get that down to $ five sometimes and just keep going lower and lower and lower and it's just hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars per week depending on how big your brand is uh sometimes per day uh where it was just like Google just taking extra money from you they did you did not need to pay that much for your CPA to rank for those terms and you just March it down every single day really unsophisticated way to do it but it works really really great and the other thing I would add to this same point is um this is something that I think is a dead giveaway that your Google ads agency is not doing a good job um is is if you're working with a Google ads agency and there are lots of brand terms floating into search and categorical shopping campaigns this is a very quick way to audit whether or not they actually care about your account or or not they're actually doing good work because it's is so Google 101 that when a Google ads agency is not like just again being diligent about handling this some of them will even just have scripts that do it for you you know that just make make sure this happens um it for me is like pretty much grounds for firing them it's just like or at least for grounds that for having a very hard conversation and saying you owe me a bunch of money that you said you were not uh that you said you were uh you were you know uh keeping in campaign a versus campaign B and and you're were overpaying for so um all of their reports are wrong if they if they've done this so it to me it's a dead giveaway of a poorly managed Google ads account um okay anything else to add to to that that was a little bit of a TI raade by me because it's nothing on it's a good crusade to be fighting yeah yeah it's again it's just fast um okay U merchandising and collection sort is another uh area that you want to talk about and I love this point because it's something I hear people talk a lot about but frankly don't feel particularly educated on and so guide me matab tell me tell me how to think about the value of how you sort your collections and what you're looking for and how you go do it so this is probably mostly applicable to anyone with a larger catalog um say apparel is always like a classic winner here um the the main thing is paying attention to which say you're sending to collections off of ads paying attention to how products are ranked and why they're ranked that way and having some sort of logic the gold standard is like gross profit per click from The Collection level um which you used to be able to do with another layer on top of Google ads but it's changed now and now it's way more complex to do in G4 you probably need a Dev for that but I did I actually wrote like a really detailed blog on how to do this step by step totally free um but the the goal is like okay let's let's uh let's make sure to link that so that that uh uh merchandising blog post um uh is in the show notes of this episode so okay so keep going yeah so basically you want to make sure you don't have really low converting Products near the top you don't want to have if you're an apparel you don't want to do something like rank a product with really limited size coverage up top because it's super frustrating for the customer if say you sell shoes and you only have side scks left or something uh you'll see like your your your efficiency with ads decline you'll wonder why and it's because you're sending people do a collection where the top few product the size coverage is really limited really bad and again you can expand this out this logic out to email it's the way your menu structured that's made a huge difference um and this a very very consistent way to increase aov primarily is what we've noticed um and again you can expand the same logic to things like suggested products that show up or other products that are linked within a certain product display page and it's usually really big lift it takes maybe a few hours to do if you want to do it a relatively unsophisticated Way by looking at something like um you know maybe page value or some other proxy but most of the time we come up with I don't want to call like an algorithm or anything just like a simple formula depending on the brand and kind of what we found works it's really easy to AB test which is really nice um in shop you can duplicate a collection and just change the sword order for one of them and just send some traffic to one LP not LP sorry one well it is LP but some traffic to one collection yeah and then the other one to the other one and doesn't take any Dev work super super simple don't need any tools even uh you can just do that in Facebook if you want and you'll have results fairly quickly [Music]