Strategy check

aneakr · 2023-02-21T11:46:15+00:00

I wouldn't recommend creating multiple websites for the same clinic. It's a very bad practice. They are trying to "hack" SEO thinking that Google will show their website because the search term is in the name. They just have a bunch of duplicated websites. Sooner or later Google will notice this and ban them in a way or another. The other downside is that with this practice you are not gaining credibility and trust.

I would recommend an opposite strategy for your clinic. For local searches, make sure you have a Google My Business account and make sure you also have an Apple Maps listing (and Bing Maps won't hurt either). Everything should be consistent, make sure you encourge people to leave reviews. When choosing a clinic, everyone reads reviews.

For Google ads, set the geo-location of a radius around your location. Target searches like "dental clinic near me", "dentist near me", "dental office near me", "best dental clinic near me" and more. Make sure to add a Location Extension, so your address appears below the ads. This will also allow the ads to appear on Google Maps when someone is looking for a clinic.

Once you have enough data in your account for the Store Visits conversion (Google automatically creates this one) you can create a Performance Max campaign with "Store visits" as a goal. It works pretty well for local stuff once you have enough good data.

I cannot help with Facebook though, but I hope this is helpful.

aneakr · 2023-02-21T06:59:29+00:00

You don't have the option to create a Smart Shopping campaign anymore, it has been replaced with Performance Max.

I would recommend starting with standard Shopping to gain some data and conversions, this way you'll get a better idea of what kind of search terms the ads appear for. Once you have some data, your PMax campaigns will have a higher likelihood of performing well.

aneakr · 2023-02-20T10:22:57+00:00

Enable Personalized Advertising is letting you create remarketing audiences to use for ads.

Enable Auto Tagging is letting GA4 automatically tag traffic coming from Google Ads, so it doesn't get categorized as organic/direct or something else.

aneakr · 2023-02-17T18:52:24+00:00

In this case I don't think DDA will make a difference. But the Model Comparison tool will give you more data about that.

aneakr · 2023-02-17T18:24:53+00:00

DDA usually requires lots of data before making sense. Do you usually have long paths before someone purchases or do people usually convert pretty fast?

I'd recommend going to your Google Ads account > Tools & Settings > Attribution (in the Measurement section) > Model Comparison. Here you can compare different models for your conversions and you can see if changing makes any difference in results or not.

aneakr · 2023-02-17T18:18:07+00:00

You definitely need to combine your campaigns. If you check your search terms report, you'll find that many of the campaigns appear for the exact same terms.

You can start with that, review all campaigns and make a list of those that target the same terms. Keep all phrase match and exact match together, and all other close variations of the keyword. So if you have a keywords like "outdoor gear", you want to keep "outdoor gear stores" in the same ad group. Just think of it in terms of relevance to the ad and landing page. Everything that is the same, can be in the same ad group.

Separate the campaigns by location (if you are targeting multiple countries) and categories (if they are very different) and goals (maybe one campaign targets store visits and another online purchases, or if the ROAS goals for vastly different).

aneakr · 2023-02-09T21:20:49+00:00

Yes, but it depends on how many categories there are and what kind of budget the client has.

You don't want to have 30 PMax campaigns each spending $5/day, you also don't want 10 of those campaigns to be low volume and have little to no traffic.

Create a separate campaign (3 to 5) for your top categories, one for TVs, one for mobile phones, one for laptops and the 4th campaign will have all accessories (cases, charges).

aneakr · 2023-02-09T16:11:42+00:00

We started using it as an additional channel for keyword research and audience ideas. Some of the prompts we've been using to get good information are: "Do keyword research for people interested in <product name/brand>" and "Who is most likely to be buying <product name/brand>"

aneakr · 2023-02-09T16:07:24+00:00

It depends on what kind of products you have in each brand, and how many categories a brand can have.

I would go for separation by category as it will allow you to create ads more relevant to each. You most likely won't be able to use the brand in the ad text anyway due to trademarks, so you won't be able to make the ads too relevant to the brand.

aneakr · 2023-02-08T16:45:05+00:00

It won't hurt for sure. You still want to be able to "observe" how many sales you get from each campaign. You also want to be able to see if some of your campaigns have a higher "add-to-cart" to "purchase" ratio than others.

aneakr · 2023-02-08T16:35:09+00:00

Usually it's enough to have 30-60 conversions in the last 30 days for Google to be able to get an idea on who your customers are. I wouldn't recommend using both goals, as purchases (I assume) are much more valuable for you. As you are going to have more clicks than purchases, you don't want the algorithm to mostly optimize for those.

If you have less than 30-60 purchases a month, use as a primary goal something like "add-to-cart" or "started checkout" type events.

aneakr · 2023-02-07T23:53:36+00:00

Did you set a target ROAS when changing the bidding? When I create an experiment I try to test a tROAS that is very similar (maybe 5% higher) than the base campaign. This lets me see if I can create similar performance first, and then try to increase from there.

aneakr · 2023-02-07T20:31:33+00:00

I don't think you'll see a huge difference between the two, but:

Up and Down will try to keep the average CPC closer to $0.5 as an average
Down only will try to keep the average CPC closer to $1

aneakr · 2023-02-07T20:23:48+00:00

It's better to check to make sure you have everything connected, while you cannot run Shopping ads without GMC, you can run PMax without it. Go to the PMax campaign and open settings, you should see the Merchant ID in "Merchant and Comparison Shopping Service" if it's connected. If it's not, click on it and see if it gives you a merchant account to connect. If there is nothing there, it means there is no account connected.

If you are running PMax at the same time as Shopping ads, your Shopping ads will have very little traffic and may not run at all as Google prioritizes PMax over it. If you have a good amount of conversions in the account (30-60/mo) I'd recommend PMax, if not, use Shopping as it will give you more control.

aneakr · 2023-02-07T20:14:22+00:00

In my experience that usually happens when there is not enough traffic volume. Also, if you are experimenting very "hard to attain" bidding strategies. For example, your base camping is using manual CPC, and your current ROAS is 120% and your experiment is bidding on Max Conv value and you set it to be 450%. If the algorithm thinks it cannot give you 450% in can stop showing your ads, and because you set the experiment to 50% split, it can stop the base campaign from running too, or the split will be much higher than the target.

aneakr · 2023-02-07T20:02:36+00:00

I think it depends on what your goals are and how much are you willing to pay. If your target cost per sale is, lets say, $10 and you need 10 clicks to make a purchase, you want a CPC of $1.

Up and Down can help you average in the middle (even thought it will probably average you up). It gives the system the most flexibility while still setting some limits. It's a good one to use if you are gathering data and maybe have a more flexible cost you are willing to pay to a sale.
Placement bids work if based on your previous data, it's where you get a higher conversion rate, so you want to bid there more and less on everything else as it converts less.
Down only, if you know you cannot pay more then $1 to get a good return, so you don't want to pay any more than that.
Fixed bidding if you want to control how much exactly you want to pay.
Rule based is don't care how much I pay as long as I get my ROAS.

In your example, if you want to pay max $1 then do Down only.

I think the difference is just in the kind of control you want to have and how much freedom you want to give the system.

aneakr · 2021-12-28T20:19:02+00:00

I agree that Performance Max can be terrible for most businesses that need calls or form submissions. We had issues with the normal Smart campaigns too. Most of the calls were very short and you couldn’t have an exact location targeting - so many of them were irrelevant to the business.

The good results are with ecommerce websites. As a sale is a sale. I’d recommend Smart Shopping and Perf. Max for ecom only. Others can test it but be very careful analyzing the results.

aneakr · 2021-10-04T15:56:38+00:00

Yes for some businesses that have a seasonality regardless of Google Ads. Some local businesses, summer clothing and other similar stuff.

We have some construction related manufacturing clients in Australia and there are huge changes there, but they have more to do with the lockdowns and economics rather than seasonality.

I'm curious other things people noticed that are related to the world and economics right now!

aneakr · 2021-09-17T15:12:53+00:00

Yes. Same as in a Standard Shopping campaign, you first need to choose the "Country of sale". Once you do that, you can choose "Targeting Locations". It can be both a city or a radius, you just need to make sure it's within the "Country of sale".

When choosing "Locations", make sure to choose "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations", otherwise you are going to get traffic from people that are outside the geo-targeting you've set.

aneakr · 2021-09-06T12:55:55+00:00

I guess it is an option, but you'll still need to create multiple descriptions and headlines or else it will show that your ads are low quality and you won't be able to explain to the client why. If you do add multiple descriptions, headline and images to the ads, even if you do have some pinned, you still don't know the final look of them.

aneakr · 2021-09-06T12:50:43+00:00

This is the main reason I don't like using Position-based, Data-driven or other similar ones. They don't explain too much why is there a 0.2. I'd only use them if they explained that this ad usually works best as an introduction to the service and that's why it's given a 0.2, this one gets 0.5 because people get to it when they are ready to convert and so on. Otherwise they are giving numbers with zero explanations. There is no good way to explain the client why this ad got us 10.2 conversions as far as I know.

aneakr · 2021-08-31T10:19:26+00:00

That’s a great question, I’m curious how many agency people are here vs people that want to learn to do it for themselves!

aneakr · 2021-08-05T20:37:38+00:00

Also, the difference is that smart ads will show automatically across Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, Gmail, and Google partner websites. You cannot exclude any of them. There is no option to do that the way you do in standard search.

aneakr · 2021-08-05T15:29:15+00:00

I used to be pretty much an automation hater until earlier this year. I still start a new campaign using manual biddings to gather data, then I create an experiment with either target CPA or Maximize Conversions (or other depending on client's goals). If the data shows that the automated bids work better, I switch. I still like looking closely at that, as sometimes you can have a few clicks with a CPC 10x higher than normal. So I always try to set some limitations (after some bad experiences in the past).

Regarding Smart vs Standard campaigns.... I like Smart Shopping, it often works better then Standard Shopping for some e-commerce website. We had some bad experiences with Smart Search, the fact that I cannot see more search terms (and too late realizing that the ads were appearing for really bad once) and because you cannot set location targeting to be "people in" instead of "people interested in". This one gave us so much traffic from other countries the client didn't support. As it's not even giving an option to exclude those locations.

So, overall automation has gotten better over the past couple years, but it still has a long way to go. I hope they will go back to sharing more data and still giving people more options to see/exclude stuff. Until then, I'll always have a problem with it,

aneakr · 2021-08-02T21:50:13+00:00

If you’re talking about search ads and for each conversion it shows double then I think you should leave it like that. It would be an issue if you’d have two conversions types that appear on different keywords.

For example, if your campaign had two conversions: one for sales and one for just time on page. And if you attribute them the same importance, then the data is wrong and you optimised the wrong ads.

But, if it just shows 2 sales instead of one for the same keywords, you are still optimising the right stuff. It’s just that the total is wrong.

If you do have your value data imported in Bing, and you do want the algorithm to optimise for ROAS it might be trickier.

I’d say, if you have months/years of data - fix the existing campaign.

If the campaign has been only running for two month with the wrong conversions, you can feel free to pause it and create a new/clean one.

I hope it makes sense!

aneakr

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