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A podcast about Google Ads and PPC Advertising by Corey Frankosky from Surfside PPC.
What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC podcast. Today is episode number 25 and today is going to be somewhat of a performance max tutorial. So my plan over the next week is to put together a few different performance max tutorials for the channel. So I'm going to be putting them all together into a longer form Google ads tutorial that will be going out to the channel as well. So this will be the first one. So performance max tutorial in the form of a podcast. And essentially what we're going to be doing is looking at a performance max campaign that I was running just basically as a test and then look at how it operates and then go through the process of actually building one so we could see okay this is what a performance max campaign kind of looks like when you are building a different performance max campaign. So I would say when this performance max campaigns and I'm not going to keep saying that over and over but when they first came out essentially they were really built for e-commerce because they're built when you have really good conversion signals to drive you more and more conversions. When you don't have good conversion signals they become overly confident on whatever conversion signals you're sending and really whatever whatever way that they're using to optimize your existing campaign. I would say the number one issue I see with Performance Max is a poor conversion starts converting. Maybe a button click, maybe a page view, you know, something where it's not a qualified conversion starts converting and then what happens is the campaign just naturally keeps going after that lowquality conversion action and then over time it just trains itself to continuously get this lowquality conversion action which isn't really a new client, a new customer, you know what we're actually going after. So, when we look at a a performance max campaign, within it, you have different asset groups. So, similar to the way you have a search campaign, you have different ad groups. These are called asset groups. So, if we look at this one, this was one that I ran just just to test basically to see what happened. So, I had four different asset groups in here. We had Google ads for tree services. So, I'll go over what ended up happening, but this was essentially targeting tree service companies with ads for pay-per-click advertising, Google Ads management. So, that was really what this asset group was for. The other one was Google Ads course. So, getting people to purchase my Google Ads course, Google Ads free training, getting people to come in, sign up for my free training. And then last one is just straight up Google Ads management. Just general Google Ads agency, Google Ads Management type of searches. So, I launched this basically like, let's just see what happens. I had good pages on my website for all these asset groups, but ultimately, if you're running a performance max campaign, you really want to have one goal. Like, do you want core sales? Do you want new clients? Do you want people to sign up for your free training? So, this at the very beginning is not the right way to really set these up. But I was just like, we're going to throw a bunch of things at the wall and see if anything sticks. It actually did lead to a couple of contacts for me and then also some free training. Some people came in for free training as well. And the one I ended up leaving live was just Google Ads Management. So, I I was running that for a little bit, but it just ends up going after lowquality searches. It's one of those where budget-wise I just really need to plan to budget, you know, several thousand a month for this. And right now, I just don't really feel the need or see the need to spend that on Google Ads management keywords. And, you know, you might be saying, how does a Google Ads company not do that? But ultimately, most of my most of my clients come through referrals or they just come through people finding me through my YouTube channel or my content. So, really trying to go after do the content and invest in that rather than Google ads right the second, but I'm sure I'll be running it in the future. When it comes to this campaign, What I always say, you know, how to see what actually happened is look at your search terms. So, I've ran this campaign a few different times. When I first launched it, it was really more geared towards consulting. So, this in February is consulting. This one over here was definitely more of, you know, trying to get people with Google Ads management type searches. So, if we look at our search terms, we go into our performance max campaign. Okay. So, they want don't want to give me my all-time search terms, but we go for last month. The the very first thing that happened was tree removal for seniors. So, I got 16 clicks, 50 cents a click. I spent $8 on that. Now, you're going to be like, why why would it go after that? And essentially what happened was I was trying to target tree Google ads for tree services. And Google just went after tree service keywords. I was not targeting any search themes and I'll go over search themes. I was not targeting any search themes or anything related to specifically for tree services, but that is what Google interpreted from my performance max campaign. So, here were some of the things that we went after. So, serverside PPC very obviously Now, people are going to ask about what should I do with branded keywords inside a performance max campaign. And to me, the answer is fairly simple. It's leave them in there. If you want to have a non-branded performance max, then create a separate performance max campaign. Have a branded campaign with the understanding that yes, my brand is coming through here, but we also have other searches coming through here as well. So, it's not just my brand dominating it. The other thing is going to be, you know, if we're trying to really emphasize non-brand, using your brand to get in the initial conversion date. is a good strategy. And once you remove it, it does take a huge part of your campaign away. If I can get $1 clicks on my brand and drive conversions for $2.50, I'll do it all day long because it's going to get conversion data into my Google Ads account a lot quicker. If my budget is endless and I have a ton of conversion data in my account already, you don't need to do brand. So, it might be one of those things where you're like, I don't really want to target brand. You don't necessarily have to. So, you really don't. It's not like something where you're forced to target brand keywords. Let's go all the way back to April and see if anything looks different. No, pretty similar. Okay, so now if we look at total impressions. So, Surfside PPC, digital marketing tutorial for beginners, digital marketing in USA, Google Marketing Live. Lot of things in here. So, Ashley Brock paid ads academy. These are searches that I expect to see in here because Google takes things very literally. If I'm saying, okay, I want to target people looking for Google Ads training. If somebody is searching for a specific paid ads academy, clearly popular, it's getting a lot of impressions. If somebody's searching for that specifically, then Google's going to say, are you interested in side PPC. It's like no digital marketing course, Surfside Marketing. So, you know, there's a bunch of different searches in here, PMAX. But, you know, ultimately what you'll see in here, tree cutting, Google commercial marketing course, metapixel. So, these are good searches. PPC marketing agency. That's essentially what I want to target. But if you're really trying to target these keywords, you're much better off doing it in a search campaign and then focusing your efforts on that search campaign. Performance max should come later. So, when it comes to lead generation, I always say search is number one. Always start with search. Performance Max should come after search or alongside search. So that ultimately what you're trying to do when you're launching a new account is get in conversion data. Performance Max can do that decently. If you have a pretty good brand that's getting a lot of searches, Performance Max is pretty decent at getting those brand searches in initially, getting those brand conversions in initially, and then from there, you're able to really build off of that base of conversion data you have in your account. But if I'm running campaigns for myself, like a Google Ads agency, Then I'm going to start with search and target those keywords. Google Ads agency, Google Ads Management, Google Ads Management Services, and then break it down into, you know, medical Google Ads Management, dentist Google Ads Management, and try to, you know, target people based on what they're actively searching for. That's really where you're going to find like the best results and just keeping a consistent, okay, we're getting good clicks come in, we're getting good, you know, searches come in, and it's leading to actually people contacting us and new clients. So ultimately, that's the goal is, okay, How much do we have to spend to get a new client? If for me it's, hey, we have to spend $1,500 to get a new client. My client lifetime value needs to be over 1,500. That's what a lot of marketing agencies do. They're like, hey, we can land new clients for $1,000 a piece. And our cut client lifetime value is 3500. So, you know, we just kind of try to get in four new ones a month and we lose two and we get in four and we lose two. And that's kind of the the churn of a marketing agency that that you tend to see. So, that that's common for me. I try to get more in without paying paying for them. So then you don't have this expense tied to every single one of your clients. Obviously, it helps to run ads and and get that in. That's one of those things where probably longterm I will run more ads for Surfside PPC. It's one of those I've been able to get away with not doing it that I haven't. Now, for creating a performance max campaign, just kind of going through the process of, you know, what what ultimately are we trying to do here? Keep in mind, performance max is really geared for e-commerce. So, if you have a product feed and we take, you know, any example here. I was looking at these products earlier. So I was looking at kids stainless steel water bottles. So if we go into any of these like let's use thermos will be a good example. So if we use thermos as our example and we say okay we go into their shop and thermos wants to run perform Google ads campaigns. What thermos would want to do is take their product feed and you know if it's a Shopify website you can take your product feed publish it to the Google Merchant Center and then from the Google Merchant Center you connect that to your Google Ads account. Then when you have a product feed you're able to actually highlight those products. directly within your campaign. So if I were ther thermos, I would have a separate campaign for drinkware. I would have a separate campaign for food storage. I'd have a separate campaign for coolers. And you know, over time, you might say maybe we'll put some of these in the same campaign or we'll have like a campaign that takes all of these into account. It's also different when you have a brand like thermos that's very recognizable, gets a lot of searches, and there's probably people that are searching Thermos ready to purchase whatever product it might be. Your goal is just give Google all that information and I would probably separate a lot of these things into their own campaign. So, kids potentially into their own campaigns. Drink wear, food storage, coolers, accessories, and parts. This is something I would probably end up putting into like a catch-all campaign. So, when you're running performance max for a a brand like this, you're going to have a lot of different campaigns and you're going to have a lot of different asset groups for the different products you have. If I go into drinkware or or we go into food storage and we say, you know, let's go into food jars. Okay, so we have thermos food jars and these are all the different food jars we have. These will be all in their own asset group. I could potentially create one, you know, a thermos jar for Disney and just, you know, highlight that. I don't know how much they can put in their ad copy. I assuming they have some type of trademark trademark that they're able to use this stuff, but you know, you can break down your asset groups even further and just say, you know, people that are searching for Disney themed food jars or Disney themed food storage, I want to make sure that at that time they're seeing, okay, here is my, you know, Disney princess food storage food jar. So, thermos That would be probably the best way to set that up. When it comes to your actual performance max campaigns, when you come in here to create a new campaign, you'll have the option of creating a campaign. And performance max, the objective has to be leads or sales. You're you're not going to run it with a leads or you're not going to run it with a website traffic or YouTube reach. Now, local store visits is another one that you could run it with, but essentially store visits, I would put in the category of leads or sales. So, store visits is another one, but you know, for YouTube reach, you're not going to run a performance max campaign. For website traffic campaigns, you're not going to run performance max. For this, I would want to do leads. If it was for Surfside PPC, I would probably say, you know, am I trying to get phone calls? Make sure I'm tracking that. Definitely the submit lead forms, add to cart and purchases. That would be if I was trying to sell my course. So, remove that. Remove purchases. That's actually where I would have two separate campaign types. One for the service side, one for the product side. Like, I want people to come in and purchase my course. I probably will run ads for that eventually, but To me, it makes more sense to run ads for my training, get people into the free training, and then try to upsell them on courses and potentially consulting or other services. Phone call leads, submit lead form, and click on next. And then we create our performance max campaign. Advertise products from a merchant center account. This is where you'd want your linked merchant center account to make sure you have that in here. I have different ones that will probably show up and pop up here, so I'm not going to click on it. I haven't done it for my digital products for Surfside PPC yet, so I do plan to do that. I'll probably a video about it eventually. So, what we're just going to not select this for this specific example because what I'm trying to do is get leads. I'm trying to send people to, for example, I'm targeting people related to orthopedic marketing agency. So, I can send people to this page. Now, you're going to see management starts at $300. How does that work? Well, $300 is basically the lowest possible price for the most basic type of campaign there is. When somebody comes to me and says, "Yeah, I have like $750 a month to spend." It's like, "Well, it's hard for me to charge much more than almost 50% of your advertising spend. So management fees do start lower, but obviously if you're a larger practice, you don't want your management fee to be that low because probably somebody's not paying attention to it. But ultimately, if I get people to come in here and look at, okay, Google ads for orthopedics. Okay, so we come in here, we have our own page for Google ads for orthopedists. So I can send people to all of these pages, you know, all of these different categories that I've created on my website. And then my goal can become, okay, let's get people in here get to the get started today, fill out this form and basically get to my thank you page. So, what you would want to do when you're creating a new campaign is make sure that thank you page is tracked or your lead form submission is tracked correctly. Performance max campaign. Enter our final URL. So, what I would do is just, you know, Surfside PPC. Let's just say I want to focus on doctors and medical professionals. So, we'll take that as our final URL. We will copy and paste that here. Doctor and medical professional marketing agency. Click on continue. And then with Performance Max, you can only focus on conversions or conversion value. So, you only really have that option for it. Adjust your bidding to help acquire new customers. This is where a non-branded campaign can come in handy or saying we have one customer, one campaign that's really focused on existing customers, people searching our brand and one where we are bidding completely separately with the main focus of driving new customers, adjust your bidding to help re-engage lapse customers. So, if you have, you know, if you're looking for repeat customers, these are really good bidding strategies to implement and one of those things where you're like, How do I know it's implement? Well, this is why you have somebody managing your ads. So, in my case, I'd say I want to focus on conversions. I'm not going to set a target cost per action to begin with, but over time, that is something I'd want to add. You know, if I if I can get leads for $250, then I would set a target CPA here of I want to get leads for $250 or less. So, it really depends on what you're trying to get leads for. For my specific services, it is more expensive trying to get marketing leads. Marketing companies pay a lot of money for good clicks. They're really good. at running advertising. So, it's one of those that a lot of marketing agencies are very dialed in because that is what their business is. So, for this case, I would just focus on conversions and leave it open for now. One thing to keep in mind about Performance Max is if I'm anticipating that my cost per a lead is going to be $250. I can't go and then set my daily budget like like I do for these examples and set my daily budget at $10 a day because what's going to end up happening is I spend $300 a month, I get absolutely nothing out of it. Google spends it on basically nothing. Whereas if I say I'm going to spend $300 a day and I'm willing to spend 5 to 10 grand a month, then it's much easier for me to say, "Oh yeah, we ended up getting 25 good leads this month and we ended up turning that into this many new clients." So it's one of those things that it it it does help to have a larger spend and get more of that conversion data in. And one of the biggest challenges I deal with on Google ads and and even meta ads in general is just not getting enough volume. So, what do we want to f focus on is conversions and click on next location. So, here is where, you know, for me, I could potentially say, let's take a location-based approach and say I'm going to just target the the local areas around me. But the other thing I could do is say I'm going to target the entire United States. I always think it's you're better taking somewhat of a location approach depending on your budget. If I had a massive budget, just leave it wide open. You know, who cares how how large it is. If it's like I'm targeting medical for example, you might want to say, "Hey, let me focus on some of these cities where things are a little bit more competitive." Marketing, I would say local, it's not a bad thing to say, you know, let's target, for me, let's target South Carolina and North Carolina and maybe Georgia and maybe Florida and just say, "Oh, yeah, we, you know, we're located in the South." And, you know, sometimes if you're close enough to an area, people are perfectly fine with it. But there are people that if you're located in California or Arizona, you might say, "Well, why am I hiring this person out in, you know, South Carolina?" EU political ads, no. Languages English ads ad scheduling just depends on when you want to run your ads. I for B2B I tend to run ad schedules unless again massive budgets make it a lot easier to you know to to to not set ad schedules. If you're a little bit more limited then yes it's a little bit harder to to not set that. All right so asset groups I would generally for this I would break out my asset groups more by the final URLs where I want to send traffic to. There is final URL expansion so you don't have to go you know absolutely crazy. doing this. But if I was creating this campaign and saying I want to create a marketing campaign that's targeting companies that are essentially looking for marketing services related to medical practices, you know, let's just say that's exactly what I'm trying to target. Then what I would do is create asset groups for some of these different medical practices. I'd probably go, you know, more popular ones to get started. So dental is always a popular one. Then you have the dermatologist, physical therapist, optometrist, you know, there there's others obviously that are kind of all in this category where there There's a lot of different a lot of them a lot of competition and if you're looking to target specific c or you know categories of services and things like that then you know there is a lot of competition there. So within this asset group basically I would try to break it out into you know if I'm looking at my services there's no reason not to break these out pretty decently. You might say okay we could put med spa and plastic surgeon and dermatologist all kind of in the same category and then we can put you know chiropractor and orthopedic and certain things in the same category. To me, I'd probably separate these all into their own asset groups. So then I can create ad copy that is geared towards these different marketing agency types. Maybe I will build this out as a performance max tutorial. Maybe that'll be kind of step two of this. So within here, you'd want to build asset groups based on your final URLs. Business name. So Surfside PPC. Select your your logo. They have more options in here. Visual and text guidelines. So yes. Yes. Obviously not my logo. Business names. curve side PPC they do pull in colors a lot of times I've noticed this one they don't have it for me but I think maybe when you implement your logos and they've watched it your campaigns for a little bit they will use some of your custom colors otherwise I just you know I have a eyropper tool here that has all my custom colors in here and all the different colors I've tried to look up for you know over the past several years so visual guidelines in here always want to start with your brand guidelines first then you have assets so here they pull in a lot of these medical practice marketing full service medical marketing, AI marketing for healthcare, your medical marketing partner. So, we have headlines, long headlines, description lines. Can start adding in images. The weird thing about the images is they make them look like me, which is kind of weird. This is not me, but it looks somewhat like me. It's a generated image. So, they will generate images that somewhat look like your brand and look like you. This one is definitely not quite me. But some of these other ones, like the this one's not quite me, but some of these kind of look like my face and it's kind of odd. So, The generated images definitely gotten a little bit better, but I still think, you know, for a medical thing, I'd probably try to show some doctor or something medical related. Can add in videos as well in your performance max. So, your assets are a combination of images. 20 images. I'm surprised they haven't added more image options in there. Wouldn't be surprised if that increases. Videos, I believe, is up to 20 now. It was five when it started. Keeps keeps kind of increasing. I remember when I started adding videos, like, all right, I can only add five here. And now they I think the last time I did it, I did 15. So, they do Google let you add a lot of different videos in there. I always say when it comes to images and videos, use all the different formats. If they're showing, hey, this format isn't, you know, use different formats, different lengths when it comes to video. There's no one right answer to, hey, this is the right video. Obviously, a better per, you know, a better produced commercial will do better than a very basic slideshow level video, but it's also one of those a full marketing strategy will always do better than just throwing together lowquality creative. So, we have our headlines, we We have our long headlines. So these are 90 characters and limited punctuation. So really just kind of a longer version of your short headlines. You can kind of combine a couple of these description lines. So you know your standard descriptions with punctuation, images, videos, then all of your assets, your site links, your call asset, lead form if you want to use it. I don't use those very often. Callouts, structured snippets. Should do a bunch of asset videos. I probably will. Asset optimization. I always say text as far as customization and Funnel URL expansion fully up to you. I kind of go the route of saying maybe in the beginning turning it off and over time as you get more data turning it on will will really only help your results. This is saying I'll get 41 weekly conversions for $25 cost per conversion. Take these numbers with a grain of salt. They really don't even know what my conversion is at this point. Next is going to be your signals. So this is where you actually say this is who we're targeting. So signals is going to be search themes. They're not specifically keywords. They are search themes. So you know if you're target Mechanic near me here. You could probably target mechanic as a search theme and it it's going to be a think of search themes as broad match even more broad. That's the way I always look at them. I don't know exactly how Google is matching these but it does seem like they are very broad and Google is not using these as you know if I do for my example earlier Google ads for tree service companies and I do tree service Google ads management and tree service Google ads agency and tree service advertising agency. I was I was still matching for things like tree cutting services near me. So, the search themes are not perfect. It's not one of those things where you're like, "Okay, this is this is going to work exactly as intended, but it is one of those things that if you use them, just understand that, okay, these are like broad match keywords." So, just put in the closest searches for this. If I were doing medical marketing, you know, medical marketing agency, medical, you know, I would do it that way and that would be, you know, to me the best way to handle it. Enter in your data. So, this is going to be your retargeting data, any of your customer list, YouTube users, website visitors, I have a customer list uploaded but maybe I need to upload it again. Customer lists if you have a mobile app data anywhere that you have customer information you want to incorporate into your performance max campaigns. Additional signals include in market segments you know you can see all these different inmarket segments they have in here built in in market life events detailed demographics. You can create your own custom interests. I have a few here. So this one is just based on jumpfly.com and Google ads management services just I think I made it in a video just as an example. So custom segments, how you can create those as well. And basically what you're trying to do is create an audience signal. You can see add a saved audience signal. And the way I look at this is if I can give Google here are the people that are watching my YouTube videos, people that are subscribed to my channel, people that are visiting my website, Google's going to take all this information and say, okay, here is based on the conversion you're going after, the best set of people for us to target. Also, when we incorporate in the search themes that you're targeting. So if I give Google Here's 10,000 people that are on my email list or watch my YouTube video or visit my website. You know, 10 to 20,000 people. Now, I'm running ads for all of these different services here. You know, medical marketing type of services. And what I want is for you to drive me people who are going to go to my contact page, fill out this form, and end up on my thank you page. Over time, the way Google Ads has changed is Google Ads is smart enough to kind of figure out here is how we, you know, target those right people. You just need to set up the right audience. signal the right search themes, the right conversion tracking and understand what is essentially happening behind the scenes with your Google ads campaign and then it becomes I don't want to say easy but it becomes easier to actually keep your campaign on track and have a consistent lead flow for even a B2B company where there's a lot of challenges with getting getting the right people in essentially. So if you have any questions about performance max campaigns, please leave them in the comments of my YouTube video. Thank you for watching my podcast. This is episode number 20. 5. I figured we would do a performance max tutorial. Need to start going over some of the other campaign types, demand genen, and and more YouTube videos. So, we'll be covering a lot more in terms of Google ads on this podcast. So, make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC podcast wherever you get your podcast or just watch my YouTube videos when they come out and you will get a lot more data than sometimes my podcast gives you. So, if you have any questions about any of this, please please leave me a comment and thank you for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to my podcast.