PPC Ad Management: 5 Bad Habits to Break by Lisa Raehsler #404

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 PPC specialist. PPC specialist. It's good that you're the PPC specialist today because we're going to be talking about PPC today. That's kind of how that works. Welcome to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 404. 404. Danger, danger, danger. A tip. 404. That's right. 404 error. I mean, we're not found. Actually, people just in the podcast are like, 404 are not found. We have a great 404, like- Like page? Yeah, page, yeah. I think so. And so, as always, we have a tip from our previous podcast, and our tip is- Hilarious, actually. Don't focus on production value of your video. Focus on real value. Right. So, people make debates. Hey, should I hire a video company to make a video and make it really high production quality? We actually say, and some statistics that we've heard rumors of, not actually read, say- I've read. It's three times greater if it's a true picture versus a stockpile. True picture or a true video. We're applying that to that. So, just grab your phone, make a video, make it good content, and that's going to be a lot better. Subscribe. Follow. Boom. All right. So, this is podcast number 404. We're broadcasting live here from Houston, Texas, and Matt and I, we are your results Rebels! Rebels! Woo! All right. That just feels good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That just feels good. I want to jump in with a- We've got two really good reviews today. I wanted to jump in with this really short one. This is from Pam Fournier. It is, of course, five stars. And it says, I have been listening and re-listening to this company's entertaining and informative podcast, working to implement these strategies. Thank you. That was on Yelp. Woo! Boom! Yelp! She added it on Yelp. I like that a lot. Thank you so much. I think this other one, I can't remember

where I found this other one. That whole thing? Oh, yeah. It's a review. It's a good one, right? It's a doozy. We'll get into that here in just a second. Just so you guys know, we've got a great article we're discussing today. If you missed it, shame on you for missing it. Our last podcast, we interviewed Lauren Baker, the founder of Search Engine Journal. Yes, that is the publication that we cover. A lot of the articles that we cover are from the Search Engine Journal. It was an awesome article. I mean, awesome podcast. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, it was a great interview. Absolutely. He wrapped it up, actually, after the podcast, and he said, I feel like I've known you guys a long time. When we get to Houston, we're going to have beers. We're like, yes, that sounds awesome. We'll do that. Javi is over there taking photos, going, yes, he would like to join us for the beers with Mr. Lauren Baker. So, a punch in the face to you, Lauren, for joining us. And to Javi, actually, for getting all the technology sorted out so that it would work. We've got a couple improvements. We heard that the audio may have been a little bit low on Lauren. That's why we're going to do some closed caption. Closed caption. Absolutely. The article we are covering today is titled, The PPC Ad Management, Five Bad Habits to Break. Yeah. So, in fact, we've got our own. If you're interested in, like, five bad habits you should break, we've got, for free, five online marketing mistakes that can tank your business and how to avoid them, you can get that for free just by going to ewebresults.com slash SEO tip, fill out your email, and you'll get that PDF. Really great article that Sammy put together kind of based on some information around here at the office. This article we're covering today is by Lisa Rossler. Hopefully, I'm saying that. Go, Lisa. You can, in fact, if you're near some sort of electronic device, what

we're going to ask you to do is go ahead and tweet, hashtag SEO podcast, tag us in it, at best SEO podcast, at ewebresults, and also tag Lisa in it, at LisaRocks, S-E-M, and it's capital L, capital R. I can't remember if that makes sense in Twitter. It shouldn't, but I think it does. Was it Instagram that just put all the spaces in, or, like, forced the spaces in, like, the underscore? Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know. I didn't notice that. Twitter, I think, is fine. Yeah. So, LisaRocks at S-E-M, go ahead and put a tweet out there. Let people know that you're listening to us talk about Lisa's article. So, that's really good. Again, you can get those five online marketing mistakes that can take your business, ewebresults.com slash SEO tip. We did tweet. Howdy. If you've listened to this podcast before. You know what we're about to say. Welcome, yeah. If you haven't, howdy. We're in Texas, and welcome to the podcast. We're about to get into the meat. This is called the potatoes. We'll give you some kind of background information. We talk about a little bit of news. We'll get to the meat here really quickly. Each week, we do run a contest. The contest has two components. If we get 10 shikos. A share, a like, and a follow. A share, like, or a follow, a shiko. If we get 10 shikos and a review, then we don't go through the process of telling you exactly. Well, we actually postponed the process to the end. And guess what? We are postponing it. Boom! We got 10 shikos, and we got two reviews. So, we're real excited about that. So, like I said, we won't tell you how to leave us a review on Yelp until the end of the podcast. Just got to split that in there. Hey, if you want a free website analysis, this will be the last promotional piece. We've got a free website analysis for you. You start it and get the process rolling by going

to eWebResults.com and clicking, I don't know, the free website analysis button. Is that a good... That's a good place to start. That's a good place to start. That'll get the ball rolling. You'll talk to one of our internet marketing experts. It might be Matt. It might be me. It might be one of our other internet marketing experts. We actually did have somebody specifically request that their analysis was with me. I was happy to do that. It was really good. Punch in the face, too. Apogee rockets. And I've got a proposal, actually a plan, a marketing plan going out to him a little bit later today. I have a little bit of news. Amazon Prime jumps 20% in terms of cost. I don't know. Are you on Amazon Prime? It keeps going up. $10.99 to $12.99. And then ZTE wants to lead the charge on foldable phones. Okay. So you've got the foldable phone and then you've got the big screen. We're always looking for more screen space, right? So they basically show a tablet and then it folds and now it's a phone. It's kind of cool. The Instacart news was the big news that CVS and Costco and everybody's teaming up. Walmart, watch out. But I know that that's not SEO news. Well, no, but that's news. But I think it's a big deal of what's going on in kind of the space. Some consolidations in the online retail space. All right. And I don't think you had any tips. I didn't. So let's get into this. This is really awesome. This one I know was definitely on Pam. The last one was on Facebook. This one was actually on Yelp. So this is really awesome. This is from Emily F. It is five stars. And Wigington, she's in Wigington, United Kingdom. It says, listen, this is great. I listen to your SEO podcast every day before and after work or will do until I'm caught up again. And totally love your goofy delivery of top quality content. She says, I'm goofy so-and-so herself.

Thank you so much. All the time and hard work you guys put into delivering value to myself and others in the industry. I really appreciate the effort. And you've inspired me to promise myself to up my game this coming year. I like it. Thanks to you, Emily. Now, this is where it gets really interesting because this is part of our conversation with Lauren Baker last time. She says, I was actually just listening to your podcast and interviewing Lauren Baker from Search Engine Journal. And your section about not knowing what to do when people see you as celebrity worthy really resonated with me because you're exactly right. Anyone can do what we're doing, though I doubt with the same humor. And she's spelled with a good British humor. Punch in the face to you. But the fact is that many people don't do it. They don't do it. It's a huge amount of effort you put into, and we all admire that this has managed to reach, influence, and impact so many people. So be proud. We are, absolutely. And you do an incredible job, and you encourage us all to confidently strive to improve ourselves in the industry. Muchos gracias. Punch in the face from England. Wow. Punch in the face to you, Emily. She says, you're a digital marketing pal. That's just awesome. Yeah, that's really nice. I forwarded it. By the way, I did forward that over to Lauren Baker because I felt like he would appreciate it. It's really cool. Yeah, absolutely. I feel like we do a lot of work for the podcast. Think about what it takes to get Search Engine Journal up, running, and managed all the time. Oh, yeah. Very cool. All right. So that is the potatoes of our podcast. It is time to get into the meat. Again, this is five bad habits to break when talking about PPC ad management. And we're just going to jump right in. I was going to kind of throw a curveball, but, you know. Uh-oh. It's not good for

a curveball. That's the nervous time. Oh, no. Please do not throw the curveball. Bad habit number one. Again, this is by Lisa Reisler. Ads permanently set to rotate indefinitely. Right? So there is a setting called rotate ads more evenly. And Google even notes that this is not recommended for most advertisers. And the reason is because it's often not followed through. So basically, and correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not in AdWords all the time, but you can usually set up a couple ads and Google will rotate and eventually decide which ad to show consistently. Yes, but at the same time, it might not be statistically significant. Oh, they drop it earlier. Google just wants more clicks. Right. So they're going to lean that way. And so you can't really do a true ad test. Ah, interesting. So there's two factors to consider here. So what she's saying overall is if you use this rotate ads more evenly, then it rotates the ads evenly, and you can collect data and eventually you should make a decision. And Matt makes a really good point, like just clicked with me. You might be, Google's going to make the decision based on what gets clicked. You want to make a decision on what gets conversions. Yes. Right? Yep. Because we talk about how the two things that your ad and your meta description need to do because that's right there on your search, your search engine result page, is they need to engage the user and also steer them in what needs to happen next. Right? So if you can get them to say, you know, buy now is in your actual PPC ad, and maybe that's a little intimidating to people, and one of your other ads just says read more. Right? So they may come, and the people at Google may notice that they click read more more often because it's less intimidating. Right? But when they click to buy now, they actually buy. Right? And so you might say, okay, I get less click-through rate,

but I actually get more conversions with buy now versus read more. So I would agree with her from the perspective, never just throw money against the wall and see if it sticks. Right? Don't just say, oh, I'm going to leave this, and then I'll eventually come back. And if you aren't the kind of person who doesn't come back, then, you know, don't do it that way. If you're having trouble and you're managing an account and you're doing other things, set a calendar. Yeah. Right? Set a date to come back and take a look at it and just be diligent about that. But I think that this article, when I reached through it, it was kind of set it and forget it kind of thing. Right. Right. Yeah. So that's what she's saying. Don't set it and forget it. You do have to visit. I mean, we visit all of our daily accounts for which we're handling PPC. We visit them at least weekly. Usually when they first launch, they're visited daily. So, all right. So that was habit number one. Habit number two, ads displayed outside geotarget. Right? So you can view where your ads are showing just by going to the view user location inside AdWords or geographical location inside of Bing ads. So it's one of the things we've gotten. I know we've gotten into different AdWords campaigns. And like one of the first things we're like, do you realize that you're showing ads? You know, maybe they targeted Houston, but the company only serves the west part of Houston. And these ads are actually showing in the east part of Houston. Do you realize this is happening? This happens all the time when you pick up accounts. So I'm sure you bump into it. Well, I mean, there's a lot of things. I mean, one of the major things when setting up any campaign, actually a campaign that just took on this week that I was looking at is basically one of the options is search for people in my area or

people or, or, or, or it's something like that or people in my area. Right. Right. Right. And, and Google's default is search for anybody in this area has an interest in this area or is located. Right. And you always got to kind of switch that to make sure it's only people in that area. Right. Typically based on, you know, what kind of campaign you're running for mostly small business, you want people that are in that geographic location. Right. Right. And then like exclusions, like we got some in Houston. We got some airports. Right. Right. So if you do a circumference around the area and you're including the airport, you're going to be showing ads all in that area. Right. Right. So you're going to getting people that you don't want. So, so there's, there's a lot of kind of, uh, which may not matter for like a community airport, but when you've got millions of people going through, uh, like the Houston intercontinental airport, by the way I'm just, this is cool. Cause I hadn't thought about this. Um, and they're doing searches cause they're sitting on a layover. Right. And those searches, if they're searching for anything for a local service, you're not interested in showing ads to them. Well, and also there, there, there's functions where you can target demographics. You can target salary ranges. You can target age ranges. You think you only can do that on display. You can actually do a lot of it in search and it kind of helps when, uh, you're going after different demographics. You can do like, uh, uh, like a ad bid increase for a particular area based on, uh, income level, stuff like that. So, so I just had this, this, this popped into my mind, like, so when might you want traffic for a local service from outside the area that they service? Um, this is, I am throwing you a curve ball, but, um, when might you, uh, when might you want traffic from outside of the area that they service,

um, even though they service in a certain area. So they service a tight area. Why might you want traffic outside of it? I need, I need more info. I need more input data. So here's, here's what I thought, right? Cause there are situations where it might be okay. So for instance, uh, you can imagine in Florida where there are a lot of rental properties, right? Okay. And it's key. You want to tie it to the keyword, right? So if somebody is outside of Florida and searching for plumber in Miami, just the fact that they're not in Miami, that's still probably a really good phrase. Sure. And the fact is it really does need to include Miami because if they just search plumber and they're not in Miami, they're not going to get what they're looking for if they need a plumber for their rental property. Right? So that's just the kind of thing. There are situations where, where the service you provide could be offered to people, um, who are outside of the area, but the service needs to happen inside the area. Okay. I mean, to, to, to bring that in a little bit, right? Right. Like you're targeting a geographic area, but you know, people work downtown. Yes. Right. So, so that like, you know, kind of in Florida here, that was that, but I understand what you're saying. Right. I understand what you're saying. So, so there are options for that. I mean, I would say probably start with the low hanging fruit. Right. Right. And then when you're looking for more search volume, you can move up the funnel and you can widen this, you know, you can do- Well, you probably need a separate campaign that really says, so we've got a- True. Okay. A customer that provides a pool service. And you make a great point. When are the people who need pool cleaning service for their pool searching? So one, interestingly, we know that they do, they convert more on workstations. Yep. Than mobile, even though there's lots

of mobile traffic. It's probably when they're getting to work, right? Like they're coming after the weekend and they spent the weekend cleaning the pool and like, this is ridiculous. I don't want to do this anymore. They get to work, they're at a computer. Well, work may be outside of the service area that they need the service in, but they will have to add the geo targeting in order to get the right results. Well, like if you're booking a doctor's appointment or a dentist's appointment and you're working outside maybe where they live, they might, you know, so you might have to widen that. So I think it's a good point. And I think creating a separate campaign to kind of target that so you can really drill in on the data is a good idea. Cool. All right, good. So bad habit number three, improper use of search query tool. All right, so I had to read this to get a little bit of an example. She said, say you want to, say you don't want to serve ads for TV shows like HDTV. This is an example or house that she has. A common bad habit is to just add the negatives in an exact match default because that's the default for Google. However, this will only exclude a very small portion of what you really need to exclude. Therefore, you want to change these simply to like HDTV broad match or house broad match just to make sure that that you get the right exclusion. Well, so Google's tricky. Google wants your clicks. And so the same thing that Google would use in broad match for just a search term. Right. Right. They do synonyms. They do misspellings. Right. They do sort of the thing. Like, yeah, non-negatives and plurals and all that. Right. And when you're creating negatives, like, I mean, I would do phrase match and I would do exact match or even broad match, all three of them. Because even on the search terms, Google's just sometimes weird about stuff. And

sometimes stuff will show when you don't really think it should show. So just kind of protecting yourself with the negatives is really important, especially when your clicks are 15, 45, you know, even, you know, $85 a click. Right. Because if you're looking at cost per conversion, it's really difficult. So it's just something to make sure you're looking for. Yeah. Is everything okay? Can you all hear us? Hey. No, they can hear us. We're just going to use the audio from the YouTube this time. Oh, let's hope that it is a lot of notes. But we'll get that. I don't know. I forgot to start that. We were goofing around before. All right. So I wanted to ask this question, right, because this brings up negative keywords. On a scale of, say, one to ten, how important is it even from the beginning of a campaign to do negative keywords? Super important. It's like before you launch the campaign. It's a must have, right? Yeah. Well, there's even lists out there that are like standard lists that you can import because you're going to get all kinds of stuff if you've never ran a campaign before. Right. And you're going to spend hundreds of dollars just trying to negative out everything. Really, in your search space, when you're really researching it, is a good idea when you're not just looking for terms to use, but also terms you don't want to exclude, start now. Yeah, start now. I mean, that's, yeah. And negatives just, I think people spend not enough time on it. So. So Matt mentioned Google and its approach on negatives. Just she adds that on Bing Ads, negative keywords are not added as exact match. Instead Bing Ads presents negatives as exact or phrase and provide a drop down that allows you to change that match type easily. So. All right. Number four. This is ignoring ads. It is bad habits, right? So bad habits that you need to drop as you go into 2018 related to PPC ad management. It says ignoring

ads on mobile apps and games. And so we often don't see great conversions, right? So we often just don't put any ads, don't want to show display ads on games. I don't know if you've kind of shifted that. What do you, can you speak to that a little bit? Well, you know, I'll tell you that, yeah, like games are horrible for conversions. And I think, you know, what she used here, I guess she'll get into it. But yeah, if you, if you, if you want to just block all the games starting out, I mean, how many times if you're in a game or even, even I'll tell you, even like the flashlight, like all the little apps, but you're trying to do something, right? And the interruption marketing is not strong enough to convert you. So you got to really be careful. They're there. So, so yeah, no, no, no game apps. No game apps. Unless you're marketing a game, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That may be a situation where you want to. She says that if you want to just exclude all games, then you need to enter. And she got a good screenshot on this article, AdSense for mobile apps.com. And that will get rid of all of them. So there's also one for Android. Okay. So, so that's iOS and then for Android. So it's, it's really nice. When I learned that I started using it on all the campaigns because when you're doing display, it's kind of a jungle and to help just limit all these nonsensical clicks, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So get rid of them. All right. That was bad habit number four. It is the last bad habit. Thank you so much. Lisa Rice, the Rossler. Bad habit number five is no ad extension strategy. So I was reading this and I'm like, yeah, this is bad. So one of the worst bad habits in managing PPC accounts is neglecting the ad extensions component. They seem to be added as an afterthought with a new strategy. Often you'll

see ads that are using extensions, but you end up with duplicate information. That's just a waste of, of, of text opportunity. It can be time consuming to sort these things out, but it is a habit well worth kicking. Get rid of the habit of not applying enough strategy and time and thought to your site links. I mean, I see a lot of people that are not even using them. Like a lot and, and there's the new message function where they can text you directly. Yeah. You know? So there's, there's a lot of good stuff in that extensions. They're very helpful to site link extensions, seen a lot of conversions from it. You can put offers in there and also it's taken up more real estate on a page. So, so, so you really want to use it. Also, if you don't have the location extension, you won't show up in mobile where, where those ads are. So it's really important in that you also got to make sure you're doing just not Google, but Google search partners as well to get in there. So that's a good tip because a lot of people have been asking me about that. Yeah, she, she mentioned, so just make sure you understand the purpose. Site links are to link to deeper content. Structured snippets are to, to highlight a specific aspect of a product or header with no link. And then call outs or features or benefits, again, with no link. So for more tips, I like this. For more tips on these and other ad extensions, go to 4PPC ad extensions you should be using today. Cool. Punch in the face to you. Lisa Rocks SEM is her Twitter handle and it's Lisa Rosler. I've probably pronounced it three different ways and I appreciate, I apologize for the ones that were wrong. We appreciate your patience. Yeah, we do appreciate your patience. All right. So we do ask you if you've liked this podcast and we hope you do. One, leave us a review. We're only asking

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iTunes. And if you're interested in getting more of the podcast, so audio, video, transcripts of the podcast, you can get all of those at eWebResults.com. We're the most popular because of you. Because you guys tune in. Because you guys reach out to us. Ask us questions. And like us on Facebook. We are. And we might do a conference this year. Maybe. Ooh. Yeah? Yeah. I would. We've been talking about it internally. I think it's a great idea. Again, just about giving back to the internet marketing community and kind of connecting with others. That's why the podcast, the interview with Lauren Baker was so powerful and awesome. And we've got more to come. More to come. That's it for the podcast. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now.