Episode 394: The Nitty-Gritty Paid Search Account Health Check by Amy Bishop Part 1 #394

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. My name is Matt Bertram, your on-call PPC specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. We probably don't have a tip from our previous podcast because I don't think I brought it over. In fact, I know I didn't bring it over. We're busy. We're busy. And it's Halloween. If you're watching the video, you may know that we're off kilter. It's a Halloween, I don't know, Halloween-ish thing. We've got bats and then spiders flying all around. Don't knock off my hat. Don't knock off my hat. All right, so normally we have a tip from our previous podcast, but what we certainly have is a great article. The article that we're going to talk about today is by Amy Bishop. And if you're in some position to do some sort of hashtagging and tweeting and whatever, what we'd like you to do is tweet hashtag SEO podcast. This is podcast number 394. Make sure you tag us in it at bestseopodcast at ewebrezults. And also tag Amy. She is at Hoffman8. That's H-O-F-F-M-A-N, the number eight. Her article is the nitty-gritty paid search account health check part one. There are actually two parts. There's eight steps in this particular part, so we're going to get started on that here in just a second. Please remember we are filmed live here in Houston, Texas, and we've got a review, right? So you notice one of the tear tattoos is gone. Jay Edwards, he says, great content, but could do without the carry-on, annoying to listen to. And we were just talking about that. Yeah, that's the only bad feedback we've ever gotten, and statistically it's pretty low. Mostly we get that people like it. It is only four stars. We understand. Punch in the face to you, Jay. Thanks, Jay. We appreciate the feedback. We really do. We will try to cook the potatoes a little faster. All right. So this will be the last podcast

that we're sharing our 17 tips, mostly because I didn't update the URL. It's one of the things that got sidetracked. So if you would like tips from this podcast about internet marketing, you can get that at SEOtips. So ewebresults.com slash SEOtips. Those are going to be taken down and replaced. Actually, we're replacing them with five key internet marketing things you should focus on, something like that. We can leave the tips up there, too. We can keep adding stuff. We'll leave them out there, but what you'll hear in the podcast is going to be a little bit different. Yes. If this is the first time you listen to the podcast, howdy and welcome to the show. As you just heard from that review, you might get a little irritated by this beginning. We like it. It sets the tone. It sets some fun for the podcast. Just fast forward to like three minutes. Yeah, it's called the potatoes. We get into the meat a little bit later, and it's worth it. Even this guy is like, it's great content, but get rid of the carrying on. He's British. So if you've listened to this podcast before, we really appreciate it. Welcome back. And you know, we run a contest each and every week. And the way the contest works is if we get one review, which we did get this time, and if we get 10 shikos. A share, a like, and a follow. If we get any one of the 10 shikos, and we get one review, then we don't tell you how to leave us a review. We did not get the 10 shikos, right? Okay. Well, I want reviews on Yelp. On one place. On one place. We're going to tell you the one place you can leave us reviews. It's easy to get there. All you need to do is go to ewebresults.com slash Yelp. Yelp. And that'll take you to our Yelp page. Please leave us a review. Please make that review. Five stars. All right. Next, if you would like

to shiko us, share, like, or follow us, you can do that on our profiles on all of the platforms. Facebook.com slash. Ewebresults. Twitter.com slash. Ewebresults. YouTube.com slash. Best SEO Houston podcast. Ewebresults. Instagram.com slash. Ewebresults. We got them all. We got all the tags. We've been in business since 1999. LinkedIn.com slash. Companies slash. Ewebresults. And all of those will take you to our profiles on those platforms. Please shiko us there. We would really appreciate that. If you're a PHP genius or a WordPress guru. We've hired you. Yeah. We don't need it. We don't need you right now. And if we need you later, call and leave an audio resume. But account managers, we're kind of looking for right now. If you're in Houston, give us a call. We're looking at some people right now that have reached out to us. And we're open to bringing on a few more. Yeah. Absolutely. If you would like a no longer free website analysis. It's not. It's not. It's not saying it. It doesn't. If you want. 15 minutes with an expert. If you want 15 minutes with an eWebResults internet marketing expert for free. Valued at $125. Go to our website, eWebResults.com and fill out the form. You get great results. We're getting good reviews off of just the 15 minute. Yeah. Well, the 15 minutes, the $500 reviews, everybody's walking away. It's a coaching session. I love it. Yeah. Y'all are great. Like a lot of people have converted over. We did one. Yeah. We did one this week, like same day. She was like almost in a panic. Yeah. Right. Same day. And then we ended up doing more work for her afterwards just because, you know, she got so much value out of that. So 15,000 hits per month, right? Per month. Yeah. I mean, she's got a blog. Punch in the face to you, Candy. You're killing it. Yes. We appreciate it. Yep. And I've talked to her about doing some kind of guest posting and so she's open to the discussion. So you

got to like that. That really is the potato. Well, no, that's not the potato. Oh, we were almost there. We hurried it up. What do we got? All right. So I just got three little pieces of news. Um, Amazon now has more than 500,000 employees and they want to walk into your house and they want to walk into the package Amazon key. Yeah. Yeah. Just, yeah. Let's put the Amazon key on your house, man. You know, statistically, a lot of people are going to allow that. Well, Walmart's trying to do it too. I mean, it's head to head now, like low cost leader. Yep. Um, and now YouTube has 1 million hours of watch time on living room devices, right? So that's in the living room on your TV. I know you cut the cord. So years ago, years ago. So you're the YouTube, you probably watch YouTube on your TV if you bother at all. I mean, my mom was with Microsoft for 25 years and she said everything is going to, that's what the goal was with Microsoft is to get it in the living room, the desk, you know, and, and I have one in my living room, so I'm there. Well, I mean, not, not multimedia on one device, all like the internet, everything like that was their goal, like 25 years ago. I mean, it's now just coming to fruition. And the device, when I first tried a Mac, that was actually, I got unlucky because it was like a defunct, defective Mac. That's not Apple's fault. That's just, you know, a little bit of hardware issue. I bought it on eBay. I mean, on Craigslist. And now I have a PC. It's a PC. I just ordered two new laptops on eBay refurbished. I'm, I'm okay with it. Monitors, not so much. Yeah. Refurbished PCs I'm very comfortable with. But not monitors. I like to buy monitors. In fact, my mom's computer died and, well, actually it didn't die. Comcast came out and said, we don't support that computer.

Time to upgrade. And she's like, what should I get? I'm like, get this. And it's a refurbished and I trust it. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the meat. This is a Halloween episode. That's why there is a, or there was. There's vampire bats. Vampire bats. And it says Halloween. And we're covering an article by Amy Bishop. Again, you can, you can tweet her at Hoffman eight. And the title of the article is the nitty gritty paid search account health check. Part one. PPC doctors here. There are eight steps. I feel like, okay. So just a, just a warning. He's going to have a lot to say. And I might, I might be like doing the across the throat. Like, okay, that's enough. We got to get into our podcast, whatever. He also has someplace to go. So there's probably a good blend of, oh, we'll get a good balance. There's eight points. The first one is first, get the background. Remember last podcast or two podcasts ago, we were talking about how many internet marketing companies actually don't do a comprehensive analysis when they get a new customer. We're talking about paid search account health check. Get, get the background, right? So you want to know who are the targets? How is the performance measured? What are the goals, right? Because you're going to have different goals. Maybe you want newsletter signups. Maybe you want video watches. Maybe you want purchases. That's usually what a problem. This is a lot of what we're doing in the $500 audit too. People are asking to audit their analytics and their AdWords. How do they track success? What, so here's a question that's always interesting from a performance perspective, and she didn't include this in hers. What is the lifetime value of a new customer, right? So if we're acquiring a customer, right, and we know that you could have other goals like newsletters, we mentioned some of those, but what's the lifetime value of the customer? Because that's

a really important thing to consider if you're going to figure out how much you're spending on it. So I don't know if you've got something to add to. First, get the background. Well, yeah, you've got to understand who you're targeting. You've got to understand what you're trying to achieve. And a lot of times, like give us an example, one of our clients was pushing a little $75 item where they had a $3,000 item that they were going to sell. You just really got to understand what the cost is of acquiring that lead and then work it all the way backwards through all the steps. I think that's a good thing to just touch on real briefly because what happens here at eWebResults is so much more than internet marketing. Internet marketing is so big. Business strategy. Right, business strategy, right? So literally a customer comes to us, they want to sell, they've actually ordered, they have a warehouse full of these $45 items and they also sell a service that is like $2,000 to $3,000. And I'm like, the first thing we need to focus on is how do we pay for our service so that you guys can continue to work with us for free, right? Effectively for free. Sell the $2,000 item, boom. Now we just sell the, now we work, focus on the $49 item. Well, yeah. Well, there's a lot of strategies too and nurturing the lead of a value chain and just how to structure your business the right way. And it just really depends on what you're trying to achieve. And I think that that's the biggest thing we got to establish up front is, well, what are you trying to achieve? And does it line up with the goals? What does it line up on the bid market? Right. Like the cost per click? You know, there's a lot of things to consider. Like a lawyer, like, hey, we got a $300 budget. Right. Like, okay, you get a couple clicks, you know? Like, so it just, you

just got to make sure it all makes sense. Yeah. So. Absolutely. Next, conversion tracking types, values, and priorities. So she said this should come as a big part of any account background, right? But make sure you focus on it, right? Because it's out of the background information that's some of the important stuff. We've looked at bad conversion metrics, right? Like, we've adopted accounts from other companies, and we're like, okay, this, if you look at these conversions, and they were of reasonable value, they were killing it, why are you leaving them, right? And then you're like, oh, is a conversion for you is 10 seconds on a web page? Yeah, there's been some really, like, 92 conversions, and I was like, wow. Yeah. Like, and then, yeah, it's like 10 seconds on page. Which is almost of no value. And then on the other end of it, be cautious when Google builds you a campaign. Oh, yeah. We've had a lot of people come to us where Google's built them a campaign, and they're like, AdWords doesn't work. Well, Google's goal is to get clicks. Now, they said this quarter they're trying to change to conversions. We'll see what happens. Right. But, I mean, just, you got to look at the whole picture to understand what's going on. Just know that an internet marketing agency is going to have your back a little bit more than Google, right? We love you, Google. Yeah. We love you, Google. As a Google partner, we actually have access to Google personnel if we've got questions about optimization. But, you know, and you want to make sure you're focused on which goals make a difference. Again, 10 seconds on a web page, not really going to make much difference. If you're under that, then, you know, you've got bigger problems. And, you know, a real goal is going to be a form submission, maybe a phone call, you know, those types of things, a video watched situation. Or like a pro tip, they land on that page, you target them

with like remarketing or something like that, or email drip automation. I mean, there's a lot of really cool things you can do if you have maybe someone come back and hit a second page or click through to something. I mean, there's, you can do almost anything you can imagine today. It's really exciting. All right. Number three, performance trends over time. So again, this is the nitty gritty page search account health check. Performance trends are important. You can start with performance trends if you're looking to resolve any glaring issues, right? So you can see that. One thing she said is, I look at what is working now and what isn't working now. I also look at what was working and why it stopped working. Try and understand why it stopped working because there's a lot of things that you can learn in those situations. I don't know if you've got something to add about performance trends over time. Yeah. Look at seasonally what happened or seasonally or look what happened with the hurricane. Yep. I mean, the hurricane produced for some companies huge amounts of clicks. Because they were doing, they're redoing the floors or they're redoing the drywall or cleaning their pool or cleaning their pool. Right. But, and then on the other end, just stop search traffic. So a lot of times, like one campaign brought in, it was big, five, $10,000 a month. And basically the economy was crashing at that time. And so, you know. It was tough to even generate one leak. Right. And then the hurricane happens and. Yeah. So it's just, it, it, it changes with what's going on. Yeah. Seasonally. Yeah. Stuff like that. Absolutely. And one of the things that we, we have a, an MRC monthly results call with our clients. And one of the things that we incorporated is let's look at the historical trend of traffic last year. So say in this case from October to November, you want to look at that in 2016 because we have, you know, there's some industries, plumbing

was one, and this is not the right month set, but the search traffic from one month to the next month last year dropped by 50%. So we can pre, we can prepare our customers. One, hey, if you, if you continue with the exact same strategy, you will probably get a 50% drop or we can implement new strategies to make sure we're taking more of the business from the other people. Well, I mean, that was one of the things we were talking about. If you let everybody spend their wad at the beginning of the month and save it till the last week, you're going to get a lot less competition. So there's a lot of different strategies you can implement. It just depends what you're trying to achieve and what those goals are. So there's a lot of different tips. You can still compete in this market, even with more people coming in, you just got to get a little more creative. Yep. All right, next, campaign structure. Again, this is the nitty gritty paid search account health check campaign structure. How many keywords are in an ad group? These are the kind of things you want to look at. Are they relevant to each other, right? When they're in the same ad group. And I added, is the target page. So I know she doesn't really, maybe that's in the next article. She doesn't really get into the target page. When you're looking at your AdWords campaign and you're trying to really be, be focused on the ads and the groups and how they're organized. But what are they, what page are they landing on? That's the biggest thing that people are missing. They're looking at one side of the equation. You have to look at optimization of the page and that's quality score. All kinds of things play into that. That's probably like one of the biggest pieces you have to consider. And it's part of the total process when using AdWords. Yeah, even that customer that we're talking about whose business was kind

of struggling because of the economy, when they joined us, their campaign was pretty good. It got a lot better with us, but it was pretty good. And so I was like, my first structure is that's, and it had been performing better in the past. So let's roll back to the past and then let's start working on landing pages because the campaign wasn't horrible when we started. Well, you know, you can break up different ad groups too. Right. And really up the click-through rate, which Google will reward you. You work with the optimization score and the value score. And so a lot of times when you're building, and I guess back to this question, you know, five to 10 actually, people say 15, 20, whatever. I like to get super segmented so I can see what's performing and what's not. And I have a lot more ability, like control. But it's really based on like the core keyword, right? And then the modifiers on both sides of it. But that core keyword really dictates how many ad groups you need and what you're going after and that sort of thing. So a couple other things that you'll look at. Again, under campaign structure, are there any performance outliers, good or bad? And let's figure out why. Are there any keywords or ad groups that are budget capped because the campaign's average performance or whatever? So here's an example, you know, just inside of Facebook, right? So that's a paid campaign. You've got these ad groups, right? Well, not really ad groups. They're demographic markers, I guess. Well, they're ads. Actually, you've got these ads and they're active. Yeah. But they weren't getting any impressions. And the reason is because the campaign was capped, right? Yeah. So we do Facebook. We do LinkedIn. We do Outbrain. We do Bing. We do everything. I know we talk about Google a lot because it's just the big 800-pound gorilla in the marketplace. But we do it all and it just depends what the client's trying to achieve. And a

lot of times using them together gets you some real bang for your buck as far as generating demand, harvesting demand. Right. Absolutely. Are campaigns organized in a logical way? That just makes things work better. Did anything come up in part of the audit that would indicate a different structure might perform better? Like localization. So map out different areas that you service into different campaigns. So excellent. Number five is device performance analysis. So analyzing device performance can uncover low-hanging fruit, right? So that's, you know, do things perform better on mobile devices? Do things perform better on a workstation? Maybe on a tablet? And what can you learn and adjust based on that? Yeah. No. I mean, the click-to-call ads work a lot better, right? Yeah. On mobile. Right. And certain time periods of the day, you get more mobile versus desktop. Tablets seem to always just do well in all my campaigns, but there's not a lot of volume. Right. So it's kind of weird. They convert good, but yeah. So maybe you do a bit adjustment on tablets to try and make sure that you can. Yeah. There's just not a lot of volume usually, but it seems to people like buying stuff on tablets. So there may be low-hanging fruit. Go ahead and take advantage of that. Number six. Again, nitty-gritty paid search account health check. Item number six is geographic performance analysis, right? Geography is one of my favorite subjects. This is what Amy says. First, I look at the localization, the location, excuse me, settings within a campaign. So what are they trying to target? What are the areas they're targeting to target? You know, this is where you've got to have the conversation with the customer and then look at what they're targeting because it might be different, right? There's tons of tricks here. I could go on for hours about things that you could do here, but I won't go into it. Let me finish my notes and then I'll turn it over to you, right? You want to exclude

people from other regions, right? So her example was you may be targeting Venice, Florida because you're, you know, whatever, vacation or something and ambiguous searches like Venice, Italy could come up, people searching for something Venice-related in Italy. So you've got to manage those. One of the things that you can talk about, and this may apply, that probably applies, certainly the volume of searches is higher in the Houston area, but, you know, people, there are people outside, people are outside the Houston area looking for services for their home here or their mom here or, so it's not necessarily, you want to really control the keywords outside of the Houston area in this case or outside of your area, but be aware that there are people who are searching for your services or your customer services in your area who live outside, who are currently outside their area, right? So you're on a business trip and your wife doesn't handle the plumbing and says the toilet's overflowing, like you're looking for plumber Houston from whatever city you're in. It just all comes down to strategy and budget and what you want to try to achieve. And what's the value there? Yeah. So did you want to talk for hours right now? You didn't? Keep going. Okay. Number seven, you've already mentioned time of day, day of week performance analysis. So analyzing time of day and day of week performance can result in multiple different optimizations. And I think, well, I was working on a campaign this morning and last night, but I was working on a campaign this morning that basically when I looked at the historical all-time data, all the leads that converted were between 6 a.m. and noon, like all of them, every single conversion, like always, always. So I capped it, right? When I turned it on, I capped it, right? So there's a lot of things you can do to save money because all those other clicks were just thousands of dollars of potentially wasted conversions, historically. And she talks about if you're

maximizing, so if your budget enables you to be max bidding across all of it, there's not much you can do. But if your budget's capped, then yeah, you know that conversions happen here, like focus budget there. All right, number seven, review ad tests. So maybe there's some ad tests running, if they are, and you're doing a paid... There always should be. Yeah, there always should be, absolutely. There always should be A-B tests running. Yep. So if you're doing your paid search account health, make sure that there are tests running or put some on. If so, are there any clear winners? Are there anything that are stopping the clear winners? Do you maybe not have enough search volume to really see who the clear winner is and make those adjustments? So there's apparently a book by Brad Geddes. Yes. Ad testing guide. Okay. I've read some of his books. Okay. He has a couple. It's funny. Brad wrote the book on ad testing. No, really. He wrote the book on ad testing. So that's a review ad tests. And finally, number eight. Again, this is nitty gritty, paid search account health check part one. Number eight is reviewing ad extensions. You were talking about our account or something today. You got to... When you audit an account, you need to look back at all the ad extensions to make sure those links don't go to 404s or something that you don't want it to. So of like actually what the link is and like actually where it's going. And so when you're auditing an account, you really got to go through everything with a fine-tuned comb because there's stuff that's easy to miss. She says, talk about the relevance of the extensions. Are they compelling? And are they performing well? Those are the things that you sure... Are they live? Are they active? All right. So this is part one of Amy Bishop's, the nitty gritty paid search account health check article. She'll have part two. Guess what that means? I don't have to research what

article we're covering next week. All right. I like that. Punch in the face to you, Amy Bishop. That is a good thing if you're watching and listening. That's a good article. I like it. Thank you. Yeah. Happy Halloween. Go Astros. Go Astros. So they're playing tonight. I think they start in about an hour. Yeah. We got to get going. Yeah, we've got things to do. All right. So that is the meat of our podcast. If you like this podcast, we ask that you please share it with three friends. Go ahead and shiko us, share, like, and follow us. Go to Yelp and give us a review, please. Yes. And it's easy to get there. eWebResults.com slash Yelp. If you're interested in growing your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet... The internet! Call eWebResults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-67... I'm dodging the spider. 6724. Go ahead and reach out to us. If you have a referral, that's somebody who's interested in internet marketing. In fact, that deep dive website analysis that we talked about was from a referral. We're going to follow up with her. If you have that referral, go ahead and send that referral to us. When they pay us, we pay you. It actually works really good. If you're doing networking in Houston, go ahead and visit upsocialnetwork.com. Remember, we are filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street, Suite 106, Houston, Texas, 77092. If you want transcript, audio, or video of this podcast, you can get that at eWebResults.com. That is our website, just so you know. We are the most popular internet marketing podcast on iTunes. That is because of you, you, all, all of y'all. Thank you. Thank you so much. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.