Today in Digital Marketing - DEEP-DIVE: Google Ads with Jyll Saskin Gales

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

A special episode: We go deep inside Google Ads with one of North America's leading consultants in the space and learn about the new targeting capabilities, how to improve a campaign that's going off the rails, how to even know if it's going off the rails, and the biggest mistakes you might be making with your PPC.• Get a Free 7-Day Trial of the Premium Newsletter (with exclusive content, videos, links, and more) — https://b.link/pod-newsletter GET YOUR WORD OUT:• Ads as low as $20! See https://todayindigital.com/ads• Be a guest expert: https://b.link/pod-expert JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!- Slack: https://todayindigital.com/slack- Discord: https://todayindigital.com/discord- Reddit: https://todayindigital.com/reddit ENJOYING THE SHOW?- Please tweet about us! https://b.link/pod-tweet- Rate and review us: https://todayindigital.com/rateus- Leave a voicemail: https://b.link/pod-voicemail FOLLOW TOD:- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin (https://b.link/pod-todsite) and produced by engageQ digital (https://b.link/pod-engageq). Subscribe at https://TodayInDigital.com or wherever you get your podcasts. (Theme music by Mark Blevis. All other music licensed by Source Audio.)Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected, be Zen. Today, a special episode. We go deep inside Google Ads at zensurance.com. Happy Industrial Day, Argentina. I'm Todd Maffin from EngageQ Digital. It's Today in Digital Marketing, episode 460. So yeah, a bit of a different episode today. This is always the slowest news week of the year, and we hunted around for new developments in the digital marketing space this morning. Came up a little short. This happened last year too around this time. But we promised you an episode every weekday. So today we are doing a deep dive of Google ads with Jill Saskin-Gales. Jill spent six years at Google helping major brands launch and improve their ad campaigns. And last year, Jill was rated one of the top mentors in the Google for Startups Canada

Founders Accelerator. You can learn more about her at jill.ca. That's J-Y-L-L.ca. Jill actually joined us for this interview a couple of months ago. It was one of our listener Zooms. So people on that call and those who got the premium newsletter got an advanced listen. But for now, here's that session. And we'll be back tomorrow with a regular episode. Yeah, so inside Google, I worked in the large customer sales organization. So working with companies that spend millions of dollars a year on Google Ads.

And my role specifically, I was an international growth lead. So I was part of a global team at Google that helped businesses expand outside their home country using Google's insights and ad products. So I was the only one in Canada for a time that there were two of us. So all the big Canadian companies, you know, I worked with them to help them expand to the U S to Europe, Asia, everything like that. And when you say you help them, like, like sort of like action, you know, I worked with them to help them expand to the US, to Europe, Asia, everything like that. And when you say you help them, like sort of like, how do big brands get that help? Are you going in there and just showing them how to do it themselves? Are you setting up stuff on ads manager? Or is this in a whole other platform that we plebs just don't even have access to? All the above, all the above. So work with them in three ways so let's say for example there's a company that sells yoga pants that's a big canadian company and i was going to work with

them to help them expand in asia uh there are kind of three ways i do that the first is at google we have really powerful insights tools you can use um everything you see externally from google is just a watered-down version of what happens internally. So, for example, Google Trends, you're all familiar with, is nice, useful to a point. Internally, there's a tool where we can see like every single user search, not the user who searched it, like totally privacy safe, but like every single detail, but every single search and volume. Really? Yeah. And again, I want to be really clear so there's no misunderstanding. We do not know who searched it right right right um but can analyze really deeply and at scale to understand

search behavior in um different countries and that's what do they call that tool internally i don't know if i'm allowed to it's not an exciting name but i just don't know if i'm allowed to say okay and is there any way that that we humans can get access or is it strictly internal only it's strictly internal only um there's like certifications and trainings we have to renew every year to be able to have access to that really oh yeah it's like google takes privacy so so so seriously um and so i actually had like a super access because of my role um so i was able to access actually anyone's google ads account but only find a business reason to do so and access a lot of like in quarter data with that

tool that's another thing because if anyone could access this it's actually considered like market moving data like could facilitate insider trading right to be able to see what people are searching in real time um so even for me being able to access yesterday's search data, not everyone at Google could do that. Sometimes you could only access once the quarter had closed and earnings had been released. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, so that's one way I would like analyze all that search data and bring that insight to help companies understand like where and how to expand. And then one of the things my team did at Google that anyone who has like a proper Google account rep can do is help them operationally. So like how to accept payment methods in Germany or like how to activate cross-border logistics or improving your website UX.

Like that's a service that Google offers for top clients that I would facilitate. And then the third piece is actual like Google ads. So Campaign Trans campaign translator is one of the key tools that came out of my team. And so again, if you have a Google rep, you'd be familiar with that. Google will translate your campaigns for you for free and to pretty much any language. And then, yeah, I just love how much money do you have to spend to get like that level of service? Is there a dollar amount? It varies by country and the requirements vary as well. So if you're a

Canadian company, the threshold is lower than an American company, but there's no one dollar number above below because the sales teams also look at growth potential. So maybe there's a company that spends a bit less, but is really growing fast. Large customer sales would rather take that client on than one who may spend a bit more, but has like flat for five years interesting um and i'm not gonna obviously ask you to disclose anything i'm sure you're still under nda for the rest of your life and all of your children are as well um but i am going to push a little bit and so you tell me to back off if i'm if i'm pushing too far um so ballpark i know that you don't that there isn't necessarily a dollar figure for getting that tier of support. But ballpark, are we talking like $5,000 a year, $50,000 a year, $500,000 a year, $5 million a year?

Like give me a rough order of magnitude. For the projects I worked on, I said I don't get out of bed for less than $1,000 a day. Fair. And again, that's in large customer sales. There's a whole other org that's called Google Customer Solutions where you also get Google support. And I, that's in large customer sales. There's a whole other org that's called Google Customer Solutions, where you also get Google support. And I did not work in that. I worked with like the largest of large customers. And so the companies that I would work with spent millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions on Google ads each year. But that's not required to

get all the services I talked about earlier. All right. Well, most of us don't run million dollar budgets. That's for sure. So let's talk about kind of what the average person who probably listened to this podcast would be doing. So most people who listen to the podcast and subscribe to the newsletter are intermediate to senior digital marketer, been in the field for a little while,

usually either with an agency or running their own brand. And I would say that the spends are probably, you know, each campaign that might, that might run. I mean, I mean, I guess Google is more evergreen. Google is more, you know, kind of leaving them running, but I would, you know, maybe annually of $5,000, $2,000, not a ton of money. Let's, let's start with like what offerings Google has. So we all know that we can buy keywords and run them there inside Google. That's the primary thing. But I think a lot of people aren't aware that there are other products, there are other placements, not just that. There's shopping, there's display, there's YouTube. Can you walk through to the best

of your memory the non-Google search products that people might not even realize they can access through the ads platform. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, especially for small business owners, I think they're even more important because search ads are expensive. So YouTube is the one people often don't think of. You buy YouTube ads through Google and there's so many different YouTube formats. One of my favorites is bumper ads, which is just a six second ad unit that you buy on a CPM basis rather than CPC. Great for just general awareness or general remarketing, but then also skippable ads. You can make YouTube ads shoppable, like so much potential there.

You know what the CPMs are right now for bumper ads, roughly? I haven't run one in a while, but last did like pence like really yeah like wow and you get like any certain kind of called action button or anything like that on not with a bumper because it's only six seconds so normally that skip this ad thing comes about six seconds it's not skippable because it's over by then so it's really good for just like a quick hit in market i've seen them work really well on every marketing basis or on like a top of funnel, just awareness basis. Yeah, YouTube, great, tons of different formats.

And actually I've seen that Google's doing a big PR push now around that too, trying to push YouTube advertising. So great resources there. And then discovery ads are one that people often don't talk about. Discovery ads is like Facebook ads for Google. The ad formats are actually like the same sizing requirements. And it's like running display ads, but only on Google owned inventory. So discovery ads run on Gmail, YouTube, and in the discover feed, which is like Google News, if you have an Android phone, you've seen the discover feed. And so I think that's also really underutilized format. In my anecdotal experience, I have seen better performance,

meaning higher click-through rate and higher conversion rate from Discovery than from Display, but all the same targeting audience capabilities as YouTube or Display. And what is Display? Those are banner ads? People think of Display as banner ads ads display are just ads that appear all around the internet um and they can be a banner but more often now in google ads you use a responsive ad so you would give google ads some headlines some descriptions some images and then the machine learning will put all those pieces together in different combinations why do you hate those todd it's great It makes you eligible for all the placements.

Who wants a static image anymore? Because, all right, now shoot me down if I'm wrong and I'm completely willing to, I know you will, and I'm completely willing to accept that. Okay. I have, I have a stick up my ass about, about machine learning controlling my creative, right? So like, I believe that the words that I use in a headline are effective for headline and the words I use in description are best used as description. And now Google and Facebook as well want to come along and throw those kind of all into a big bag, like a Scrabble bag where you draw a letter out individually and put it on the board. So am I wrong? Is there, is it actually, do you actually get better results by letting Google throw

these around? Yes, well, think about Google's incentive, and I don't mean like the Google algorithms are designed to do what you tell them to do, which for most people is to drive conversions, so they're going to do whatever they can do to get more conversions, because that's how you're going to put more budget, right? Getting better performance. So that means putting two headlines together that you would have never put together but for whatever reason it converts better it's going to do that and in turn isn't that what you want like don't you want better roi don't you want more conversions i just don't trust

it so maybe i need to get off my yeah i mean it gives you an assets report and you can actually um with responsive search ads at least you can pin like this has to be in position one, this has to be in position two. And headlines and descriptions are two different things. But yeah. If I wanted to test that, right, if I wanted to test this sort of this dynamic creative or whatever Google calls it, what's the most effective way to do that without sort of cannibalizing my existing audience? Do I run two identical campaigns, but only one of them has got this turned on and the other, I've pinned everything? Or should I run them at different times? Is there a way that I can test to see whether or not I will get better results out of it?

Yeah. So the exact scientific way to test is you can set up like a drafts and experiments in Google Ads. But in order to get enough data for it to be statistically significant, you'd probably have to spend a lot of money. And so given of ad, one ad group, the other, let it run. And because budget is set at the campaign level, as the machine learning, the machine bidding learns, it'll allocate budget to whichever one's working better just over time. But the hardest thing as marketers and especially as business owners is to be hands-off and let the machine learning learn. And the look on your face, Todd says, I don't know how long you would give the machine learning to actually learn. And remember the smaller your budget, the longer it takes to learn, you know,

every time you touch it, it resets. So yeah. Is there any touching I can do that will not reset it? Like if, if I just give it, if I change the budget, that doesn't reset it. If I just change budget, right? Yeah. But if you like, are you going to cut the budget in half or even a double, but like any kind of wild swing kind of knocks it. Like if you're on maximized conversions bidding, which is telling the system, just get me as many conversions as I can get for my budget. And then you double the budget, even though that's a budget change and not a bid change,

that's going to change your bids because suddenly you get twice as much money to work with. Okay, it can increase bids. So these things do have an impact, even if it might not always seem it in the beginning. So until it first starts out with Google, and start thinking about your questions, folks, because in about five minutes or so, I'm going to throw the floor open.

So when people first kind of get interested in it, one of the things that Google pushes or suggests that you should do is something that they call, ironically, smart campaigns. Tell me about smart campaigns, Jill. I hate them. I hate them. Good, good. I'm not the only one. Do not run smart campaigns. And by the way, a smart campaign, a smart shopping campaign and a smart

display campaign are three different things. So we're just talking about, yeah, right. A smart campaign is when you first sign up for Google ads, it'll spit you into what I call Google ads for dummies. And it just lets you set up a smart campaign and they're terrible and do not do them. I will say in Google's defense, they're designed to make it simple because Google ads is so freaking complicated. They're designed to make it simple for you, but you pay for that with proof. I've never seen one of these things drive good results. Anytime I start working with the business, the first thing I do is turn off the smart campaigns. And if you think Google ads aren't working and you're running smart campaigns, that's why they're not working. Yeah, that makes

sense. What's the biggest mistake you think people make when they try their hand at Google ads for their brand or their client? Smart campaigns is a big one. Other mistakes, not having conversion tracking set up properly or even before that, just not having a website that already converts. I think often people think like, hey, I have my business. I'm ready to go. Let's throw some ads in. And then they don't see revenue and they say, oops, the ads didn't work. But you need to make sure that you have a well-converting website or app or whatever it might be first. It's like you have to build the fire and then ads is pouring gas on the fire. But if all you have is a bunch of wood, pouring gasoline on that will do you no good. So those are definitely some of the most common mistakes. That is an outstanding analogy and one that I'm going to steal.

Go for it. Go for it. All right. If you have questions for Jill, our Google Ads expert, please raise your hand in Zoom. You can do that again by clicking reactions and then raise hand. If you don't see that, then send a message in chat to me and I will unmute you that way as well. And then go update your Zoom client. All right. We have before, and I will get to you, Judy, in just a moment. I hope I'm pronouncing that right. Jill, before I forget, what,

if someone wants to work with you, tell me about what you do specifically, because you sort of left Google to start this consultancy around Google ads. So what do you do? How much do you cost? Yes, absolutely. So I actually left Google, this is like little notes, I left Google for another job opportunity, that job opportunity fell through. And then I was like, WTF, I just left Google, what am I going to do started creating TikToks and accidentally build a business off the back of it. So now I do Google ads consulting and coaching. So there are kind of two reasons people hire me. One is like, hey, here's my business. I need some Google ads. Can you get it set up or running for me? And that's great. And then the other way is I'm actually

working with some larger companies and ad agencies and mentoring their in-house teams. So they might say like, hey, we do Google ads, but we're sure we could do it better. We think we could do it better. Could you help us do it better? Like teach us how to fish? And so that's another way I work with clients. So if you want to learn more, my website's Jill.ca, jyll.ca. I charge 300 Canadian an hour, which is about 250 US and would love to hear from you. And if someone wanted you to set up an evergreen campaign,

let's use the podcast as an example. I wanted you to just do it for me because when I've tried it, it's been a disaster. I want some reporting, that kind of thing. What ballpark would someone expect to pay above and beyond the media spend, of course? Yeah, so generally it's about five to seven hours to get a business up and running on Google Ads,

less if you're a really small business, more if you're a larger one. And when I say up and running, I mean like create all the campaigns and then manage them for the first kind of four to six weeks to make sure they're running correctly. And then after that, the work is usually pretty minimal. Like once they're optimized, you know, Google becomes the money printing machine. You just, you put money in, you get money out, check in on them once a week. Yeah. And so businesses choose to keep me on a retainer and others say like, hey, Jill, can you just teach me? Like, what are the five things I have to do each week to keep an eye on my Google ads? And I love doing that. I love teaching and coaching. So great. And people can find you at Jill.ca with a Y, J-Y-L-L dot C-A.

If you have a question, please raise your hand or send me a message in chat. Judy, welcome. You are up first. If you have a question, please raise your hand or send me a message in chat. Judy, welcome. You are up first. Hey, thanks so much, Todd. Thanks so much, Jill, for just giving us so much insight and wisdom here. I'm actually in the nonprofit sector. Would love to have any kind of like big nonprofits that you know that the net sector does well,

whether Canada, North America, anywhere um just for us um we're currently uh have a pretty good campaign we spend probably three to four k um a month on on page search so you're asking for examples of non-profits that do google ads well i don't know of any sadly there's amazing for those who don't know, there's a Google for Nonprofits program. So any nonprofit can get $10,000 US a month for free from Google to spend on Google search ads, search ads only. And that works in Canada as well? Canada as well. It's in like tons of countries around the world.

The grant itself is in USD. And actually, when I worked at Google, I volunteered with the Google for Nonprofits program where they have Googlers help nonprofits get set up and using it to start because there are a lot of restrictions and requirements there. So I can't share the names of the nonprofits that I did work with. I don't have anybody to point you to, but I will say like three to four thousand dollars a month is great. There's probably ways you could spend even more of that free money from Google to make sure you're really maximizing that. And the number one thing as a nonprofit that you need to do to use that money properly is to have conversion tracking set up. Because if your Google ads with the nonprofit grant is set up to track conversions, there's no bid limits on your CPCs. But if you are not tracking conversions, you have a two dollar bid limit on your CPCs.

Yeah. Oh, interesting. So they sort of penalize you for not having. Huh. And quality score. They penalize you as well. If your quality score is too low, you can get kicked out of the program. So think of people were doing they were getting the free money and then just advertising on like any keywords. They were like, whatever, it's free.

And it was a big problem. So so you need to maintain good quality score um and if you have conversion tracking set up they assume that okay we're like driving towards a business result and they take away the cpc bid limits can we talk about quality scores for a second judy does that answer your question did you have a follow-up? Oh, I got to unmute. Sorry, I got to ask. I got to click the button, right? Because I'm a control freak.

There you go. Thanks so much. Sorry about that. I muted myself. Yeah, I guess if it's not a specific nonprofit out there, are there companies that do good that we should kind of look towards? Because I know nonprofits in general, they're all kind of in the beginning phases of the paid search kind of like game.

But I would love to just kind of have like an example of many good companies that does search well that we can kind of look towards too. Yes, if you're looking as a nonprofit of an example, like who does paid search well, I wouldn't look to other nonprofits for your example. Generally, the people who tend to do paid search really well are wouldn't look to other nonprofits for your example. Generally, the people who tend to do paid search really well are like big e-commerce brands. Look at what they do. Big kind of B2B SaaS companies tend to do it really well. And travel companies,

at least pre-COVID, have really mastered the paid search game. So I'd suggest looking to just like big advertisers in general, look at how they're writing their headlines, how they're writing their calls to actions, using the different extensions, look at what, and then look at their landing pages, look at what they're doing. And I think that's a much better place to learn than looking to other nonprofits. Awesome. Thank you for that. Is there a Google ads library that we can all look at kind of like Facebook has? No, not to my knowledge, at least. No, I love that Facebook has it. As a Googler, it's always fun to like look at what your client's doing on Facebook

and then be like, yo, bring those dollars to Google. But no, Google does not have something similar. There are tools though out there. I think SEMrush can grab some of those things. I don't know how. I don't know whether that's API or they're just scraping it, but, but paid tools for sure. Yeah. So you can look at in Google ads, you can look at the ad preview and diagnosis tool.

I find it's a very finicky little tool to use, but you can sort of see how you're appearing in search results. I never suggest just Googling yourself to see how your ad looks there could get into that, but better to use the ad preview and diagnosis tool to see how your ads look. And then if it's like a discovery or a YouTube ad, when you create the ad in Google ads, there's a way to preview it there rather than trying to find it in the wild. Does my voice sound better now? Is it any difference?

I thought I thought I put it the wrong way around there for a second. All right, Jonathan, I see your hand, Sam. I see your hand before I get to you to very briefly, Jill. Thank you, Alan. Very briefly, Jill, quality score. What is it made up of and how does it affect the campaign? Yes. So quality score is really at the heart of how Google ads all works because it determines where you show on the page and how much you pay. So where you show on the page is determined by the amount you're willing to pay,

right? Your bid, your cost per clip, whatever it might be, and your quality score. how much you pay. So where you show on the page is determined by the amount you're willing to pay, right? Your bid, your cost per click, whatever it might be, and your quality score. And quality score is a score from one to 10. You can add it as a column in Google ads, 10 is the best, one's the worst. And it's made up of three key components. And those are expected click-through rate. So how often are people clicking on your ads when it shows how it makes much to click? Relevance, what is the connection between the user's search, your keyword, the ad text, and the text on the landing page? And then landing page experience. Does your website load quickly? Does it have original content? If the user's on mobile, is it mobile optimized? So those are three components. And quality score is determined at the keyword level. So every single one of your keywords will be given a quality score by Google Ads.

It can change over time, of course. And if you want to keep track of it, you can add all of the quality score and those three measures I just mentioned, expected click-through rate, relevance, and landing page experience as columns within Google ads. And so the better your quality score, the less you have to pay in order to hit the same position on Google. And so especially for small business owners, spend time on your quality score, writing really great ads, having really strong relevance, because that's an advantage that you can have over bigger companies that just want to throw money at it to rank higher. And this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone in the game.

Facebook has its own version. It has three different scores, actually. And the better you do, the more you're rewarded with it. Do you have business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters.

Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. Jonathan. You might have to unmute him I'm so bad at this I have no like they ought to be a course on like how to

zoom properly I'm sure there is Jonathan you're fine if I mute myself you have to unmute me again right right right it works gotcha so actually I wanted to kind of continue a thread that you hit on a little bit earlier with CPM scores on particular products whether it's like smart display feeds or other things. Todd does a really good job in this podcast hitting on different notes about interesting new placements.

And I'm curious just for your analysis of some of those placements, some of them which Todd might have mentioned in the last month or two when we're talking like maybe it's an audio podcast or our unique GMB placement or something unique, you know, those often go under the radar for us to utilize. And, you know, usually it's pretty cost-effective for us to just at least test because they'll have the low CPM rates. Is there one or two that you're particularly interested in or playing with right now? I guess I focus more on the format than the placement. And maybe it's like a Facebook versus Google language difference. So in terms of like formats, you know, display, discovery, YouTube is where I'm focusing a lot right now. I don't pick specific placements.

Like I want to show on this website or I want to show on this YouTube channel or I don't want to show on this app again because like the machine learning and auditing will take care of that for me and figure out where I'm going to get the best results. Okay. Well, yeah, I'm less talking placement as far as YouTube channel or website, more just like their new placement offerings in general that might've come up within GMB or within YouTube

or within an audio product. Because I think that Todd, correct me if I'm wrong, weren't you talking about maybe a month or so ago about YouTube audio ads being like a unique opportunity? I'm kind of curious your perspective on those different ones, because I feel like something's announced every month as a new option within AdWords ecosystem. Absolutely. Yeah. There are new products coming out all the time i see what you mean now about different placements i don't have tons of insight to offer you there um also because i have to be a little bit careful i'm still recent enough out of google that i know about stuff that i don't know

if it's public or not yet um so i can't safely answer that question unfortunately jonathan but i will say just like brain implants she She's talking about brain implants, people. It's coming. But generally like a format that I'm experimenting with a lot these days is discovery by design. You can't choose how much of your discovery by goes towards YouTube or Gmail or discover feed. Um, the tip I've been given is to make sure that you have all three image sizes in your campaign to ensure you're eligible for all three. Um, but that's the format that I've been really focusing on lately because I've been seeing really great results, especially versus display. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Jeff, you are up. There's some of the TikTokers and Google tips and tricks, things you don't know about. Mention for display ads, typing in when a visitor has visited this website show the ad or we want to look like that is that a do you believe in that is that a good tool to use or is that just a gimmick not just a gimmick i actually did a video about that either today or yes yesterday how to steal your competitors customers there's a snazzy tiktok video title um what you're referring to is custom audiences and it's something i think a lot of people don't realize

you can do in Google Ads. You can target people on display YouTube discovery based on what they search for on Google, for example. You can target people based on what websites they visited, based on what apps they have on their phone,

based on the kinds of places they visit. Wait, wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. You can target people based on the apps they have on their phone? Yeah. What, can Facebook not do that?

Anyone, say in chat if that's a function in Facebook you're aware of, but I have not heard of that before. How does Google even, is it just Android phones I'm speaking now from me personally guessing not having inside awareness like yeah maybe but maybe not because even if you have an Apple phone you would have Google stuff installed maybe it's just Android I don't know is it is it just like oh gosh... No, that's a publicly... I'm doing it for clients right now. You can target people based on what apps they have on their phone.

So if I am Hootsuite, I can run ads to people who currently have Sprout Social or Buffer installed on their phone. You should be. And if they uninstall it from their phone, do they fall out of that bucket? I don't know. Unfortunately, I don't know like the mechanisms. I just know that you can create an audience. And again, it's one of those things where like,

if you were to create a campaign that only had one app in there, it might not run. You probably need to have like knowing the way Google thinks, but you probably don't have five to 10 apps. Okay. But yeah, I'm using that right now with all my clients but the next one i was going to talk about which maybe this one will blow your mind i don't know um you can target people based on real world places they go so for example you can target people who regularly visit veterinary hospitals you know so if you're like a pet company, that's something you could do, for example.

Yeah. I don't think you can do that on Facebook. And you can create combinations of them too. Yeah. If you want to target your competitors, you could target people who search for like all your competitors, like names, or you could target their apps or people who visit those domains. Yeah. Google. it's great that those two shocked me those two shocked me so i can so i can target based on like people who spend a lot of time uh at convention centers it doesn't say spend a lot of time okay people who visit a

regularly visit yeah okay so it's not very clear on how they're measuring that, but. Yeah. Again, like if I worked at Google, I would go open the com doc and have all the info on the details and capabilities, but yeah. Custom audiences you can build are super powerful and useful. And they're also releasing new like in market and affinities all the time. I went in yesterday and I was like, Whoa, I didn't know we could target that yeah yeah in markets being like that meaning people are in the

market for so like in market for an suv or i'm in the market for a outdoor pool or whatever exactly and so people come on and off of those lists like once they bought the i mean not the second they buy the pool but like google knows if you're in market for contact lenses for example that's like a 24-hour purchase you buy more contact lenses versus a pool would take a lot longer. And then the other main kind of audience targeting is affinity targeting. And that's more standard over time. So like I'm probably on an affinity audience for like green living enthusiasts, you know, or people who are like beauty mavens. Things that are more like intrinsic to who someone is and don't change,

whereas the in-markets change as people shop for things. Anyone else have any questions? I saw a hand up earlier, or if you'd asked a question before and you were prematurely muted by my inability to run a Zoom meeting, feel free to put up your hand.

What do you think is the single thing, Jill, that is responsible for the best performance in Google ad campaigns? Like what are people doing? Like if something is not working well, they do this one thing that tends to, as a rule, really work well. It's either conversion tracking or using audiences. And I spoke about conversion tracking. If you're a smaller business or having a smaller budget, and I don't mean that offensively, as I said, I just come from a world

where people spend millions, but now my clients don't spend millions, right? They spend hundreds a month, maybe thousands. Yes, conversion tracking. If conversion is just a purchase and you only get a purchase, maybe one a day or one every other day, like that's not going to be enough data for the algorithms to learn quickly enough. It's going to take long. And by the time they learn, you'll have already decided it's not working for me. So I encourage you to use something called micro conversions. So like what are the steps people might take before they convert? And can you use that?

A great example of this is actually the Shopify Google integration. When you link them together through the Shopify Google channel, Shopify automatically sets up micro conversions for you in Google ads. When you say micro conversions, are these just stages in the funnel toward a conversion? Like exactly. Okay. Okay. Start checkout, right? So in a given day, maybe you only have one purchase, but you have five add to carts. Five is five times more data for the algorithms to learn than one. So start by optimizing towards that. And that's what I actually do with all the Shopify stores I work with. First, we start by like actually viewed product page.

Let's optimize towards that. Then we optimize towards add to carts. Then once there's enough data, then we optimize towards starting checkout so that the algorithms can ramp up faster. So that's one of the basic just conversion tracking and thinking about conversions beyond just purchase. And the other thing is audiences, using your own first party audiences, remarketing. But if you can, customer match. Unfortunately, Google actually just made changes to customer match, which is where you can upload a list of customer email addresses. Now, like you have to have had an active account for 90 days and spent at least $50,000. They've like just, just, just put limits in place on that.

Like using that as well as Google's own audience data, as well as the custom audiences we just spoke about and using that to add a layer on top of all of your keywords to really help performance. Those are things that people often don't do. Jonathan, I see your question, which I'll ask as well. Judy, you are in line after that. If anyone else has a question for our expert, Jill, please use the reactions button and raise your hand or just type me a message there. Before we get to those two,

what about if you have a website and you do not have the ability to control conversion or to measure conversions, i.e. put a pixel on the converting site. So this would be something like, for instance, you're a hotel and you have your own website, but the booking happens on some other people's website and they refuse to put any of your pixel code

on their site because blah, blah, blah. Or in the case of podcasts, for instance, I've always wanted to measure conversions on my ads, but I have a podcast site. And sure. I have a button that says click to go visit Google podcasts or Apple podcasts, but whether or not they actually subscribe to the podcast, I don't know. Cause I don't control those sites. Is there a way we can conversion track on the button that sends them to those sites? Absolutely. Uh, and I wouldn't have known this a few months ago, but I've had to do it now with a lot of companies I work with in Google Tag Manager. You can set up an event for that button click.

So I would recommend doing that. So for example, Todd, if they come to your website and then from there, click a button that sends them to apple to download it like you don't know if they actually did subscribe on apple but you know that they did click the button so that i would recommend and is it fairly easy is it like a does it put it up in your like facebook does this where it'll put it up kind of your site and then you click on the button that that you want to create the event for and it'll just do all the code in the background or are you like having to go into the css and type in what the actual code button label is and all that stuff?

How much coding does it take? Not zero. I'll put it that way. Normally when I do this, I don't personally do it by myself. I work with a developer or like with someone's tech team in order to do it. So first you need to have Google Tag Manager

installed on your site. And so a lot of like the more accessible kind of web platforms don't even allow that. They'll only allow Google Analytics. And then once you have Google Tag Manager, then there's tags and triggers. Anyway, Google it. It'll explain it much better than I can here right now. But I will say if you do have Google Analytics set up, which most things will let you do, you can create goals in Google Analytics for when a certain page loads or duration on site. There's a lot of creative ways to get around it.

But all that being said, if you truly cannot track when someone does the thing you want them to do, then don't put ad money against it. Because not only will you not know if the ads are working, but Google Ads won't know if it's working either. Right. Only way you not know if the ads are working, like Google ads won't know if it's working either. So, right. In a second, I'm going to ask you about whether or not we should accept machine learning recommendations that come from Google or, and also, all right. Oh, but like, I would love to talk more about that. I've seen some horrible things happening with that. We will, we will talk about that.

And we'll also talk about how iOS 14.5 is affecting Google. Cause it's not just affecting Facebook, But let's get to the questions. Jonathan asks, is there a good Google blog or alert site besides waiting for SEO journal type sites that announces new Google Ads products like the aforementioned audio ads on YouTube where we can look for new things? Where Jill knows where they're announced. Of course, the real answer here is just listen to the podcast. But realistically, where do you go, Jill, other than the podcast to find out about Google changes? I'm thinking carefully about what I say, so I don't get anyone in trouble. No, I listen like the top Google customers and the top Google agencies find out about all the betas and stuff first. It's just the way it goes. It's not just because Google is trying to give them preferential treatment.

It's because in order for Google to test all these new things and see if they work, they need to test them on bigger budgets and see if the products work or not. So I don't have a good answer for you, unfortunately. If you do work at an agency or like work with a bigger agency that has bigger Google support, they tend to be first to find out about everything when it's an alpha and then beta and then onwards. But other than that, yeah, just other than this podcast, of course, just industry news, blog posts, people reporting, seeing things in the wild. Like, again, I'm three months out, four months out of Google right now. Once I'm a couple more months out,

I'm going to be looking at blogs the same way you are to find out this stuff. Fair enough. If you have a question for Jill, just raise your hand. You'll find that under the reactions button. Judy, welcome back. Thanks. Just a follow-up on your custom audience suggestion. What's a good amount of data for custom audience?

Like I'm sure, you know, custom audience would tend to do too much. What's a good amount of data? I mean, what's a good amount of like number of audiences in there? Yes, I guess whether it's with audiences or with bidding with budgets, it's always best to start broad and then narrow.

Often you're tempted to like start super narrow and then expand from there. But again, machine learning needs data. So when you're starting with custom audiences, I would say, oh, hello there. There's a very cute baby appearing on screen right now for those who are listening to this later. It's better to start broader and narrow from there. So like, I would not recommend your first custom audience be like, must have searched for like this keyword and visited this website and have this app, right? Like start with those as three separate things. Maybe have one ad group that's people who have one of these five apps and another of

people who've searched for one of these 10 keywords and another people who visited these certain websites and then start to see what works best and then try creating combinations of the best ones to see if those perform even better start broad then narrow yeah answer your question judy do you want to come back and yeah okay good good good all right uh jeremy you are next hey guys thank you for taking my question. I work for an arena here in North Little Rock, Arkansas. So we do ticketing through Ticketmaster for all of our events. And when I launch ads on Google, even though I have placed the proper certificates where I needed to, my ads continue to get flagged because they're worried about third party scalping problems. So I chatted with the representative today and she said that it will still happen, but if it does happen, just continue to dispute that and it'll go through. And I asked, is there a way that they can reference our ticketing certification to where this 24 hour, 48 hour, whatever delay might happen, we might announce a show and they need

our stuff to go up like immediately. Is there a way to do that? Like, can you get whitelisted essentially? Yeah, exactly. And she said, although we are whitelisted, it's still, there's something hung up there. So I don't know if I did anything incorrectly, but just wanted to get your input on that. Unfortunately, I don't have any other information to offer you beyond what you just shared. There's a lot of whack-a-mole that sometimes needs to happen with policies behind the scenes and it sucks. And I'm sorry you're dealing with that. Unfortunately, I don't have anything to add. But one thing I would just like to say is actually Google, we phased out.

I say we, I don't work there anymore. Using the terms whitelisted and blacklisted. As soon as it came out of my mouth, I thought, oh, I screwed that up. No, it's okay. But I just figured we're a room of digital marketers. So we say like allow list and block list is actually the preferred language for that now. Thank you. Yes. I'm trying. I'm trying to get through that one. There's a few that I've worked on that I've successfully gotten into my own lexicon. I'm getting there. Judy also asks, can Jill speak on Google ads getting rejected and the appeal process? Some nonprofits I work

with get their ads rejected because it relates to social issues. So what are the triggers for a rejection of an ad campaign? And what is the process for hopefully getting that resolved if you believe that it was inappropriate? So many things could be triggered for rejection. The best source, and like even when I worked internally at Google, I would use the external Google policy site, just Google ads policy, and it will list out all the policies and all the restricted industries and everything like that. And you can see there. And unfortunately, I do not have much help to offer you. And also, if it's any consolation, even the companies that spend millions a year have to deal with this too. They just have full teams of people who can help deal with it. And they have someone at Google, they can pick up and say, get this fixed right away.

Whereas you might have to deal with like the 1-800 number as we call it. I'm speaking to a vendor somewhere helping you out, but yes, unfortunately I don't have a fix to offer you. I know it's a problem across all ad platforms. I actually had a video on Tik TOK that just got flagged for a community guidelines violation. It's the video where I talk about Google for nonprofits. I don't know why. Apparently was it flagged for graphic violence

right like what i i don't i don't even know how they got there um but anyway it's safe to say like i'm sorry you're going through that it sucks i don't have any helpful anything to offer you there my first live that i did on tiktok uh 10,000 or maybe it's 1,000, whatever the metric is that you need to do lives at, I did in a hot tub. We were out doing a little mini vacation and I was sitting in a hot tub and it went on for about five minutes and I got banned for sexual content. And let me tell you, it was one of the greatest moments of my life. I'm like,

if some machine learning algorithm out there believes that this 51 year old chest up body is sexual content i'm winning the game absolutely good for you todd thank you thank you it was a heartbreak when i had to appeal to say it's not sexual content. Cameron asks, I have a client, which is a B2B software as a solution company, software as a service, excuse me, SAAS, in financial automation. So that's this person's client. The monster spent between $5,000 and $10,000 over the next two to three months on paid ads to drive leads. My first thoughts were to run paid search ads with custom audiences based on keyword searches and custom targeted ads on LinkedIn. Cameron says they have a list of LinkedIn users that they can custom target.

What would be the best spend of this money as our target market is a fairly niche space? All right, bring it on. B2B SaaS is one of my specialties. I'm happy to speak to this. I think the only thing, a clarification I like to bring up here is that search ads are keyword based and then you can layer audiences on top. So you wouldn't actually run a paid search ad with a custom audience. Custom audiences, I could be mistaken, but I'm 90% sure I'm right with the statement I'm about to make that you can't put custom audiences on search. So a search, you have keywords. I'm not 100% sure it's been one of these, but I don't think you can run custom audience.

You can run your remarketing. You can run your similar audiences. You can run any of Google's first party, like in market or affinity audiences. I don't believe you can run custom audiences on search, but it could be wrong. So search ads are based on keywords and then you can layer audiences on top. So for your example, whatever your keywords might be, you may want to add on audience targeting on targeting mode, meaning I only want to target people if they search for this keyword and they're on this audience and use audiences like there's an affinity for business professionals. And there's a whole bunch of in-market for business services like payroll processing or signage or accounting software, like things that suggest this is really B2B. All the B2B SaaS companies I worked with used a lot of those in-market for business services

categories as layers on top of search to help with lead gen something else you might want to consider are the lead form extension in google ads which lets people like fill out a lead form from their search or display or youtube ad unit um which is similar to how linkedin has lead form ads um and these are these are mobile friendly they pop up right in the thing and do they pre-fill in data i believe so i believe they pre-fill your kind of email address and they make it super easy to just hit submit um i've seen mixed results on the lead formats i think people aren't used to seeing a lead form in a search ad they're sort of like what where'd that come from um but definitely good to put in there and get the

lead since that's your goal anyway you're just removing the steps to conversion as we say by having them convert right in the ad um but, it sounds like your thoughts you have for your client are the absolute right thoughts. So I would say do that. Jeff asks, when you mentioned landing pages for ads, do you mean a dedicated landing page or a page on a built site where the user lands after click? I think you just mean the destination URL, really. I mean the destination URL. Yeah. And so it is good to create custom landing pages sometimes. Like for example, one company I work with, the Playful Peacock, she sells beautiful children's toys and she wants to have search campaigns of people searching for like gifts for a one-year-old or gifts for a two-year-old, but her site's not organized that way. It's organized by stacking toys and blocks.

So we're going to create a landing page on her site of gifts for one year olds that'll have a few different products there so that she can run ads to that page. That's an example of where you might create a specialized landing page for given ads. I think I know the answer to this, but just to just to sort of put it officially on the record, is there any budget that I need to spend as a brand which would get me improved organic search results? Absolutely not. And I'll be very, very clear about this, that like, although to us as people,

when we search for something on Google, we just see ads and organic and Google My Business like all together, in the back end, the ad system runs completely independently of the organic search system. So like they run totally independently. And actually as a Google ad salesperson, they intentionally did not teach us anything about SEO.

There was no training we could take on it. I worked with clients who spend a million dollars a day on Google ads. And even if they asked us to help with SEO, our answer would have to be, we cannot help you with that. So no, there are no advantages from an SEO perspective of paying to have Google ads.

And on the other side, of course, by the way, if you're interested in SEO, a phenomenal YouTube channel is called Google Search Central, where they do these weekly, I think they call them webmaster SEO hangouts, where basically John Mueller usually gets on and just answers questions. People can, it's like a Zoom basically, but it's a Google meet, hangout,

whatever they call it now. Meet, I think. Meet. Google meet, yes. And so you can ask all sorts of questions in there. And every once in a while, someone will ask a question about ads. And John Mueller, who is a search engineer, is like, I have no idea. Like literally, we never get trained. We never talk to those people.

And it sounds like there's a very thick wall between there, as there should be. Joe, can you pretend that I'm five? Okay. And explain broad match and phrase match. Sure. Pretend that you're five. Like, really pretend that you're five. Yeah. Like give me, well, don't like speak in a cuckoo voice, but I mean, you know, give me like

the, um, give me like the Reddit version of explain like I'm five, but like the very basics, if no one has ever done any Google ads before, what, what is the difference between phrase, mage match, broad match? Um, there's another one in there as well and they're kind of getting merged aren't they aren't they kind of it's all been changing yeah so basically when you go to google or go to your chrome tab and you search for something on google let's say that you're searching for yoga pants that's always the example i use okay so you type yoga pants into that google search bar and in milliseconds you see ads but behind the scenes there are probably thousands of advertisers who could serve an ad there. And the way they do that is by putting

something called the keyword in their account. So what you type into Google is a search term or a search query. What the advertiser puts into their Google ads account is a keyword. And if there is a match between the keyword and the search term, then you're eligible to show an ad now matches can happen in three ways. An exact match is when your keyword exactly matches the user's search term. So your keyword is yoga pants. They searched for yoga pants, those exactly match. Phrase match is when your keyword is included in the user search term. So if you have the keyword

yoga in phrase match, and the user searches yoga pants, that is a phrase match because the search contains yoga, but it would not be an exact match because if you have an exact match on yoga they search yoga pants no match but a phrase match on yoga yoga pants there's a match and then the last kind is called broad match um and broad is kind of the says to google like i'll give you a whole concentric circle of relevant things, sorry, five real ones say concentric circle, that match. So maybe you have the keyword running pants in broad match, and the user searched for yoga pants. Google understands that running pants and yoga pants are similar enough that under broad match, that would be considered a match, and you would be eligible to show your running pants ad to a yoga pants user. And the takeaway I have for all of you is that in the vast majority of

cases, I recommend using phrase match because it's a great middle ground between having the reach to discover new searches that might be relevant to you while keeping it locked down enough that you're not going to end up surfacing on totally random things that aren't related to your business. Every once in a while, whenever I go into Google ads, which is not that often, but when I do, it's usually giving me these machine learning based recommendations. And it says, if you were to only spend 45% more, you'd increase your CPE or your CPA or whatever. Should I listen to any of those mostly no and this is something that over the last week i've become like very passionate about um what you're talking about is called the recommendations tab and google will use machine learning to come up with all kinds of

recommendations to improve your performance and it goes one step further you will get emails from google that say your account is not optimized. You need to make these changes to optimize your account. Do not listen to these. I had a client I work with who got this email after I set up her account and it was from Google and it said like, your account's not optimized. So she just accepted all the suggestions and it totally tanked her performance. Like one of the suggestions, for example, is use broad match for all your keywords with target CPA bidding. So if you have phrase match, like we just talked about, it wants you to use broad match, of course, because you can match to more searches and therefore spend more.

And it says, but don't worry, you're using automated bidding. So like we'll only make it relevant for your business. And look, if you're spending $1,000 a day, absolutely, I recommend broad match keywords with automated bidding because you can afford for 10% of your career, you know, to not be relevant. But if you're only spending $20 a day, which means realistically you're getting what,

eight to 10 clicks per day, if we're talking search ads, you cannot afford broad match keywords. And that's just one example. So of all the recommendations they could give you, like 10% might be useful. But those recommendations were all designed with large advertisers in mind, not with the vast majority of advertisers in mind. So yeah, please do not just accept it because Google says so. If you get one of those alarmist emails saying your account is not optimized, ignore it. Like look at the recommendations. If you want to accept it, do, but do not just take them at face value.

I know the answer to this question is it depends. And maybe you can't answer the question as a result, but I'm going to try it anyway. What is the average cost per click on Google right now? I mean, not literally right now, but like right around this time. It depends, but I'll give you an answer. Like it depends. I would say if you're like just getting started on Google and trying to budget, you can say maybe like $2, $3 per click, but like it really varies. You know, the cost per click for your brand name is probably pennies because there's not going to be much competition there. And if you work in certain industries, like in insurance, for example, your cost per click could be $50.

But if you get a customer, you make thousands, right? I think that's why people are often scared of using what we say automated bidding or like machine bidding algorithms because you want to set your cost per click. But like, you don't actually care what your cost per click is. You care what your cost per conversion is, your cost per purchase, your return on ad spend. And so that's why like, although you cringe at first, like when I used to run an MBA admissions consulting business and CPCs were like 10 to $15. And so especially if like someone clicks on a keyword that's not relevant, but it was worth it to find a client, I made $1,500. So always keep

that in mind. Like sure, if you sell a $20 product, well, you probably can't afford search ads for the most part. But if you're selling products that are more expensive than that, you can afford a higher cost per click. What you really need to focus on is either a cost for conversion, your CPA, or even better, your ROAS, if that's something you can measure your return on ads. Is there a place there? Is it Keyword Planner?

Where's the tool that I can go in and find out before I even put a penny into it? Because there's a way to get an estimate of how much these are going to cost CPC on the keywords, correct? Yes, Keyword Planner is in Google Ads. You do not need to spend any money in order to use Keyword Planner. So anyone can go in and use Keyword Planner

and you can type in the keywords you have in mind or you can just give it a website to start from and it'll crawl the website and recommend keywords. A great thing to do with your competitors' websites, by the way. But when you go in there, it'll give you a top of page bid low range and a top of page bid high range. So I always and then you can download it to a spreadsheet if you want. So I always take the top of page bid high range and I increase it by 10 percent just

because I want to be really conservative. I'd rather start running a campaign and find out CPCs are lower than start and find out they're higher. So I like to be conservative, use the high range, and then I just kind of add 10% to it. Because when you are a new market entrant, like you don't have a quality score yet, right? You don't have an expected click-through rate yet. So your CPCs could start out a bit higher as Google's figuring out how relevant and how good your ads are. It is now two minutes to the top of the hour. Do you have a hard stop, Jill, at the top of the hour? I can go a few more minutes, but the moment my toddler walks through the door, I will have to

leave. Fair. Let me wrap up with this question then. And unfortunately, it may be a longer answer, but to the extent that we can with your limited time, how is iOS 14.5 affecting Google? Everyone talks about it affecting Facebook, which of course it is, but it's affecting everyone, right? Facebook isn't the issue. It's all of the service providers who are getting data downstream from Apple, including Google. So what have you seen so far? I haven't seen big changes. I know that some people want to hear, and I'm not trying to say that there aren't changes and that performance won't go down in the future, but I have not seen

wild swings in performance the way I've heard it happening on Facebook. I will say that and again, this is no insider information. I only learned this once I left Google, that there's now actually limits on what you can do with your customer email list in Google ads. It used to be at any time, as long as you had at least a thousand valid emails, you could start to target them on Google ads. Now there's like spend restrictions and you have to have had google ads for a lot of time

which suggests to me that google and google ads is thinking more seriously about like privacy and limiting what kind of like person-to-person marketing you can do um so i say a lot to say like changes are coming uh absolutely you know the days have just been able to market the crap out of everyone are going to be gone soon. But at least in my own personal experience, we're still able to do that in Google Ads, at least for now. How does someone reach you if they want to work with you? Yeah, please feel free to visit my website, jyll.ca. I have information and contact info on there.

And I'm also very active on TikTok. That's actually where I met Todd in the first place. My username is at the Google Pro, the underscore Google underscore Pro. And yes, it's been a pleasure being here with all of you today. Thank you so much for your questions and especially your difficult questions. So my thanks to Jill Saskengales for joining us for that interview. You can learn more about Jill and what she offers at jill.ca. That's j-y-l-l dot c-a. Regular episode tomorrow. Talk to you then. you can learn more about jill and what she offers at jill.ca that's j y l l dot ca regular episode tomorrow talk to you then