Today in Digital Marketing - SPECIAL: Black Friday and Your Google Ads

Episode Date: October 23, 2021

A special long Weekend Edition for you — a deep-dive conversation with Google Ads consultant Jyll Saskin Gales — https://jyll.caJyll spent six years at Google helping large brands with their Google Ad strategies. These days, she runs a busy consultancy doing comprehensive ad account audits for businesses of all sizes, and does one-on-one or small group Google Ads coaching, in particular for Facebook Ads experts. Her TikTok account is a must-follow — her account is @the_google_pro.• Get a Free 14-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- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/todayindigital- 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:- TikTok: https://b.link/pod-tiktok- Twitter: https://b.link/pod-twitter- LinkedIn: https://b.link/pod-linkedin 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. platform that we use today to record the show. And there is an echo on Jill's end. And it's not clear to me where or how because we had echo canceling turned on. But my apologies for that. If you are a premium member subscriber, you will have received by now in your email, a link to the video and the video for whatever reason does not have that echo in it. But anyway, there you go. Hope you enjoy this. What I thought was a fantastic session with Jill. And I'll talk to you next on Monday.

Here's the episode. Well, welcome to a special weekend edition of Today in Digital Marketing. I'm Todd Maffin. So CPMs are up, CTRs are down. Nothing to panic about, though. Welcome to Q4, the time of the year when media buyers either increase their budgets or increase their consumption of cheap gin, depending on how bad things get. Competition is a part of what we do, but sometimes it seems that competition is particularly fierce around Google ads.

Everyone wants to be at the top of the search results for their keywords. But even if you held that position all year long, Black Friday and the holiday buying season often shifts things dramatically. Which is why today we have brought back Jill Saskengales. Jill spent six years at Google helping large brands with their Google ad strategies. These days, she runs a busy consultancy doing comprehensive ad account audits for businesses of all sizes and does one-on-one and small group Google ads coaching, in particular for Facebook ads experts, which I want to ask you about in a second. Jill, your website is jyll.ca. Welcome. Thank you. So glad to be back again.

Welcome back. Yeah, I should have said. By the way, if you're on TikTok, Jill is a must follow. Her account is the Google Pro with underscores underneath, the underscore Google underscore Pro. In addition to the two of us, we have a live audience as we record this. And if you are in that audience right now and you want to ask Jill a question, just click the button at the bottom that says Start Live Call-In. And if you're a member of our premium newsletter, check your email because we just emailed you a kit of Google's ads, resources, and training videos. So, Jill, it was interesting that you mentioned to me in email that a lot of your Google Ads coaching is done for people who are Facebook ads experts.

Is there a lot of crossover between the two platforms in terms of the skills that people need to run Google Ads? The basic foundational understanding of how digital advertising works is the same, but the tactics and execution are really different. And I only started to appreciate that recently because now that I don't work at Google anymore, I wanted to learn how other ad platforms worked. And I got LinkedIn ad certified and Amazon ad certified and Facebook ad certified. And when I got Facebook ad certified, I was blown away at how backwards some things felt to me. So I kind of parked that for later. And then as I started doing more and more Google ads account audits, I noticed that I would see a lot of the same mistakes over and over and over again. But now that I understood Facebook ads,

I understood why people made those mistakes. Like a really common one is when you run a Facebook ad, you don't need to put the name of your business in the ad because it's from your business's page or account. But on Google ads, you do need to put the name of your business in the ad because it's not coming from a page or account. So I picked up on little things like that. And now, yeah, I work with a lot of Facebook ad experts teaching them Google ads so they can also offer that as a great service for their clients. Does that mean you can put any brand in there? Like if I want to run an ad and claim to be Nike, I can do that? Well, you aren't allowed to use someone else's trademark in your ad text. So that would get disapproved if you tried to run an ad as Nike

and you are not Nike. No, I know legally I'm not allowed to, and they would boot me. But I mean, like until I get the boot, like it will let you put anything in until it does the review? Before the ad is even allowed to run, it goes through an automated review. And in that automated review, it would see that there's a trademark in ad text. You would actually be limited because of trademark in ad text. And that's why competitor conquesting is so expensive on Google search. Because if I search for Nike and you're trying to get my click, but your ad can't say Nike, why would I click on your ad? It'll have low relevance, high CPC, et cetera. But I'm allowed to target the keyword Nike if I'm a competitor, right?

Exactly. You can't trademark a keyword. So you can target that keyword, but your ad can't say Nike in it. And so as a result, your quality score will be so much lower because the keyword's not included in your ad and your landing page probably also doesn't mention that keyword. So that's why conquesting is so expensive. So let's back up and start with the basics. So prices for ads rise around this time of year because we're all actually at an auction, right? Can you walk us through how the Google ad platform works? Maybe for someone who's completely new to this. Absolutely. So Google ads and actually pretty much all digital ad platforms run like an auction, but they don't work like an eBay auction. On eBay, if you're willing to pay the most for an item, you win. On Google, what you're willing to pay matters, but what also matters

is quality. And quality score is made up of a variety of things. You can just Google quality score for much more in-depth explanation. But there are certain quality factors that matter. And why that's so important is because if your quality is higher, the amount you have to pay to win the auction actually goes down. And so by focusing on having a really high quality score, having a really relevant keyword ad text connection and a high click-through rate on your ads, you can actually pay less than the big guys to get those same clicks. And that's a metric that we can see in Ads Manager?

You absolutely can. We don't call it Ads Manager on the Google side, but yes, in Google Ads. What is it called? Just Google Ads. Okay. There's no name for like the actual platform. Google ads. No, I guess on Facebook, there's ads manager and business manager and the Facebook app itself. Whereas when you go to Google ads, you're only there to run ads.

Ah, fair. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yes, um, you won't know the quality score of your keywords until your ads start running because they have to run for your quality score to be determined, but you can actually see your ad strength as you're creating the ad. And so Google ads will tell you if your ad strength is poor or average and how to improve it by putting more keywords

into your headlines or creating more unique headlines, that sort of thing. Oh, interesting. So ad strength, I guess, is like it's algorithmic guess at sort of your alignment with best practices. And then the relevant score is more a measure of how people are responding to it as it's out in the market. Yes. So the ad strength has to do with just like, is your ad adhering to very basic best practices, including your keywords and the headlines, having a variety of headlines and descriptions, one or two other metrics. Your quality score has three main components. And the most important one is expected click-through rate. Of the number of times Google shows your ad, how often are people expected to click on it? And of course, your expected click-through rate is based on your historical click-through rate. So that's why you don't quite see that till ads start running.

So there are things that you could have an ad with really strong ad strength, but your ad has no call to action in it. So then your click-through rate would probably be lower, quality score lower, even with an excellent ad strength. But usually, again, I see many Google Ads accounts every week through the audits and management I do. And generally, if you see a poor ad strength, you're also going to see a low quality score. And if you see an excellent ad strength, you're also going to see a high quality score.

Gotcha. Gotcha. Remember, if you're in our live audience right now, and you want to ask Jill a question, click the start live call in button at the bottom of your screen, you'll be prompted for what your question is. And we'll be taking your questions later on. So Jill, I think most people know that there's a few parts to a good ad campaign. There's the creative, there's the targeting, there's the budget, and there's the bid strategy. I've always thought that there's a fifth that I think a lot of people don't put a lot of thought into, and that's the processes, right? That's sort of like the workflow that you create and that your team follows. Can you talk a bit about

good systems planning as it relates to Google ads before we get into the nuts and bolts of a campaign in the context of Black Friday? Absolutely. And just for a moment, Todd, a few people in the chat are saying it's hard to hear you. So I just wanted to let you know if you're able to turn your volume up at all. See, this is what happened. No problem. You work on that while I answer your question.

Yeah. see this is what happened. No problem. You work on that while I answer your question. Yes, there are absolutely systems and processes that should be in place. And specifically for the holiday season, it's really important to plan in advance. You know, when it's Black Friday and you're firing in all cylinders, the last thing you want is to have to make a strategic decision in that moment. So one of the things that we would try to do when I worked at Google with larger customers, but any size customer can do this, is scenario plan in advance. For example, what if it's noon on Black Friday and we've already spent our whole budget,

but ROAS is through the roof? Are we going to spend more budget in that scenario? You can make that decision in advance. And conversely, what if we are halfway through Black Friday and we're really underpacing? Would we adjust our bid strategies or our targets in order to spend more and potentially make more revenue? So whether you are running your Google ads in-house or working with an agency, I encourage you to just sit down before all the craziness and plan through what are the scenarios that could happen and what would we want to do in those scenarios so that in the moment, you don't lose an hour to a back and forth and emails and slacks. You can just go,

go execute and not miss any opportunity. And then one more piece of advice I would definitely give is that every year at Google, we would have one or two clients whose websites would go down during Black Friday or Cyber Monday or over the weekend. And that's like five, six figures in revenue lost a minute, an hour, depending on the size of the client. You really, really, really don't want that to happen. So for every business where Black Friday, Cyber Monday, the whole month of November really is a key part of your sales for the year, make sure there's someone from your tech team or web team who is on call from Thanksgiving, Thursday, all the way through to the end of Cyber Monday, including over the weekend. There should always be someone that everyone in marketing knows they can call if there's a technical issue so that if a technical issue arises, you can solve it as

quickly as possible and not miss out on too much revenue. That makes total sense. And that's, you know, it's important to have those sort of foundations down. Chat, can you tell me if my volume has been fixed? I tweaked some knobs and pulled some levers and hopefully that worked out. So let's talk about the creative because I think that's what a lot of people focus on when it comes to Black Friday is what is the message? What's the imagery and all that kind of stuff? I mean, walk us through sort of where the real opportunities are that are sort of above and beyond where people have been using it so far. So many great opportunities over the holidays to refresh your creative and try different creative and try new things. I guess a few things I'll mention first is that within Google Ads, you create ads, but you also can create something called extensions,

which are like little extra pieces of information that aren't guaranteed to run with your ad, but can run with your ad. An example is site links. You may be familiar with site links from SEO. You can actually put in your own site links for Google ads to direct to certain parts of your site. And one kind of extension you can run over the holiday season is a promotion extension. So let's say for Black Friday,

you're planning to run a 30% off promotion. You can add a Black Friday promotion extension to just run across all of your ads to show people that that's an option for the holiday season. And you can also do the same thing in Merchant Center. So Merchant Center is the part of Google that connects to your e-commerce store and collects all of your product and pricing information and then sends it to Google Ads. But in Merchant Center, you can also show free listings on Google.

And there's a feature in there where you can let Merchant Center know about any promotions so that your free listings, the ones you aren't paying for on Google, can also show your Black Friday or Cyber Monday or Boxing Day promotions. And do those extensions cost any extra?

Does it trigger higher costs in the auction or anything? They don't cost anything extra, and they can actually help you decrease costs, because study after study at Google showed that more extensions means higher click-through rate. Higher click-through rate means higher quality score, which means your cost per click goes down. So it's in your best interest to use as many extensions as possible. Another new kind of extension that only recently has been rolled out to all accounts is an image extension. So now in Google search ads, which have always just been text only, you can show images as part of your text ad, which is really cool. And most

accounts I look at are not using it yet because it's such a new feature. What does that look like? Does it look like a banner ad? No, it'll be the search text ad taking up maybe 80% of the horizontal real estate. And then kind of the last 20%, I've always seen it on the right-hand side of the ad. I don't know if it's always that way. We'll just be the small image. It shows pretty small, but it's a great place to show a product photo, or I've even seen kind of B2B companies use what's probably stock imagery there, but just a great way to stand out in search results because the rest of that

page, the rest of the page below that will be all text. I have seen a ton of messaging already around sort of supply chain issues. And if some people even in the creative, like using the phrase supply chain, which I don't think consumers understood, but I think that's just part of the news now. Is that should we be should we be using that kind of language? Do you think to sort of ask people to buy early, buy early? I definitely think it's important to incentivize people to buy early. Just telling consumers like, hey, there are supply chain issues. Buy early. Why should I care? That's your problem, retailer. But you can definitely start your sales earlier, have messaging earlier, give people a reason why they should buy earlier. I think people are sometimes hesitant to buy

earlier because the rate of, what if this is 30% off now? Is it going to be 50% off next week? So something I've seen retailers do is assuring people, even if it's only the second week of November, like this is our best deal, you know, buy now while it's still in stock, having those going out of stock notifications when it says, you know, only two items left, or this is in 10 people's carts already. All of those things can be really helpful to encourage people to buy early because it's valuable for them, not because you as a retailer know that you're experiencing issues. When you do these ad account audits for folks, do you look at the creative and make recommendations based on the messaging and imagery and all those sorts of things? I don't go into kind of copywriting recommendations because that would fall outside the scope of my expertise,

but I will look at their ad strength. And if it's poor or average, I'll give them recommendations of what they could do to improve their ad strength. And then same if I'm reviewing display or discovery or YouTube campaigns, I will take a look at the creative and let them know whether or not it adheres to best practices

and what some of those best practices are they're missing out on. Gotcha. Gotcha. So that's process. That's creative. Let's talk targeting. A lot of people... Actually, can I have one more creative thing that's super cool that not a lot of people know about?

Some people are familiar with a feature in Google Ads called dynamic keyword insertion, where you can set up something in your ads so that the thing the person typed shows up in the ad text. And that's cool and all. But another cool thing you can do that functions similarly is a countdown insertion. So let's say you have a sale that ends on a given day and time. You can do the little squiggly bracket as if you were going to do dynamic keyword insertion, but instead you choose countdown. And so the ad itself will say like sale ends in five hours,

22 minutes, and that adds an amazing sense of urgency. That is super. That's just an extension? It's not even an extension. It's in the ad itself. The way that search ads work now on Google is you create a responsive ad. So within one ad unit,

you can create up to 15 different headlines and four different descriptions. So rather than having to create all new ads for the holidays, which we used to have to do, I mean, you still can do that. Or you could just sub out two or three of your existing headlines for new things like one of these countdowns or a message about free shipping, which, by the way, free shipping is the top purchase driver. Shoppers care more about free shipping than they do about a coupon or a discount. You can insert special messaging as a few of your headline or description options while

keeping your same ads, or if you prefer, have completely separate holiday ads. Someone in the chat is asking if there's a limit to how often you can change it. Like if you had three different sales a week or something like that. That's fine. Yeah, you can change it. No limit.

And with the countdown ad, once you kind of create it in the ad, it's there. But if you're creating some special different holiday ads, you can create the ads in advance, have them on pause, and then just activate them at the time that you want them. Gotcha. Gotcha. Cool, cool.

By the way, if you are watching us right now on YouTube or Twitch or Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, welcome as well. However, we are not monitoring the comments there. So if you want to ask a question, you've got to be on the actual live stream, which is at todayindigital.com slash live.

Folks in the chat, make sure you're pressing the start live call-in button at the bottom of your screen. You will not go live immediately. It just puts you in the queue when we take questions, which will be very shortly. All right, so targeting. I think a lot of people spend

the year building a qualified audience, you know, traffic campaigns, brand awareness campaigns, and so on. Should we keep those campaigns on during Black Friday holiday buying season or pivot to something more conversion focused? I'm not going to give blanket advice to turn them off, but those campaigns will get much more expensive. It's the most expensive time of year, as you've mentioned. So what I generally recommend for most businesses that don't have outsized Google Ads budgets is to either pause some of those campaigns or use your remarketing lists more strategically. Something that you can do that not many smaller businesses know about is you can actually layer your remarketing audiences over your search campaigns. So what that means is let's say that normally you would advertise on the keyword for, I don't know, coffee mug. It could be really expensive to keep advertising to

those people who may not have heard of your brand. So you can say, I'm going to keep advertising on the keyword coffee mug, but only if the person who is searching is on my existing customer list or only if they visited my website before. And that way it's going to lessen your reach, but likely increase your conversion rate because you're not trying to introduce yourself to someone for the first time in the middle of the busiest season of the year. You're just capturing that value that you already created in those relationships earlier in the year. Yeah, that layering is super, super powerful. And I'm surprised, frankly, the platforms don't encourage it more or point it out more. Like one of the sort of peculiar buckets that Facebook has is a, I mean, we could call it a layer, I guess, an audience targeted that they've

set up called engaged shoppers. And at first, i just thought it was people who bought a lot of things but it's not it's actually a very specific um metric it's people who have clicked the shop now call to act or any shop now call to action button on a facebook brand page in the last seven days that's how facebook determines that they're engaged shoppers so you do if you then layer the you, interests and demographics of people that you think are interested with people who have clicked that button before, then, you know, theoretically, as you say, the quality of the audience would be higher. Would the cost to reach that audience on Google ads be higher as well then? Let me think about that for a moment. Not necessarily, like in general, those CPCs will go up. But again, if you're only targeting people who are already familiar with your business, your click-through rate will likely be higher.

And your conversion rate will also likely be higher. Like most businesses don't actually care what your cost per click is. That's just a marketing metric. You care what your customer acquisition cost is or what your ROAS is, and that should all be better. So net-net, you may spend more budget overall because there's more opportunity, but I would expect performance to also be better than usual during that period. Gotcha. You're bullish on YouTube ads for this part of the funnel. I definitely am. YouTube ads can be a great way to build an audience because you can actually in Google ads across any ad format, retarget to people who have seen your YouTube videos before, kind of like how in Facebook ads you can create a custom audience, they call it, of people who've engaged with your content at some point.

The equivalent of that in the Google verse is people who have watched a video or engage with their YouTube content. Even if they're not a subscriber, you can then reach them. I mean, through YouTube, but also use that as a layer over your search ads or reach those people on discovery or other things. So if you are still in kind of audience building mode, launch YouTube ads now, you know, get your messaging in front of people now, introduce them to your values and your brand and why they should like you. And then during that busy time of year, you can remarket to just those people on YouTube and you can use those lists to reach people through other formats across Google Ads. We'll be taking questions from our live audience next. So if you are here and you have not submitted

your question, don't type it in the chat. Click the start live call-in button at the bottom of your screen. We will bring you onto the show Zoom style shortly. The last major component of a campaign is going to be bids, budgets, things like that, both of which can be pretty dramatically, I think, impacted by competition in the ad auction. Is there a way in Google Ads to forecast demand increases? There actually is, and it's been made much more intuitive this year than in years past. So if you are a Google Ads advertiser, of the many options you can choose in the Google Ads interface, there's something called the Insights tab. It's right next to the Recommendations tab. And in the Insights tab, it'll show you right now and forecast over the next few months

demands in your category and for your keywords. So you can go in there right now and Google ads will say, you know, right now you're capturing X percent of impressions or X percent of clicks. And this is what we expect it to look like over the next month, over the next two months. And so based on that, you can get an idea of how much you may want to increase your budget or increase your bids to capture that additional opportunity, which is really great. So that's only available if you are already spending money in Google Ads so that there's enough data to go off of. If you're not

currently spending money on Google Ads and you want to know that as well, the top resource, actually there's two. One is Google Trends is great. While it won't forecast for you, you can see what happened last year. And given how crazy last year was, you may want to also look at the year before. And then another tool that's from Think with Google is called Rising Retail Categories. And it's sort of like Google trends, but specifically for retail. And once you see kind of week over week or month over month, what are the top trending products, product focused for us and about a dozen other countries, Canada's not on there. Um, but yes, so you can see, and it's about trending. So what is top search for this week that wasn't last week or top

trending this month that wasn't last month. It's sort of like a very curated version of Google Trends. And there's another metric as well inside there called impression share. Is there a role for that for us to be paying more attention to impression share in the coming weeks? Yes. Impression share is something that I actually look at very closely these days. Impression share just means of all the times you could have shown an ad, you could have gotten an impression. How many times did you get an impression? And generally for your brand, if we're talking about branded keywords on search, you want that to be 90% plus. If you're advertising on your brand for non-brand,

you're never going to be that high because there's competitors, but you know, 20%, 30%, whatever it might be. Now, given that your impression share will likely not be 100%, Google ads will also tell you why you missed out on impression share. And you can miss out for two reasons. You can miss out due to budget. You just ran out of budget and couldn't afford all those impressions. Or you can miss out due to rank, due to ad rank. And as we talked about earlier, your ad rank is a function of your bid, how much you're willing to pay, and also your quality. So I keep a very close eye on impression share. You can't see today's impression share, but you could see yesterday's or any day before that. And if you're keeping your bids and budget static right now,

you will notice your impression share going down because more and more and more people are trying to get into the auction. So it's something to watch closely. And if you notice that you're missing out a lot due to budget or a lot due to rank, you might want to actually just turn off some campaigns and focus the budget you do have on the highest performing campaigns. I'm speaking with Jill Saskengales. Jill runs a very busy Google Ads consultancy. Her website, jill.ca, that's J-Y-L-L. I know we have more on the list that you and I sort of chatted about ahead of time,

but I want to get some questions in here. Again, if you're in the audience, you want to ask Jill a question about your own campaign or anything you've heard here, click the Start Live call-in button at the bottom of your screen i see melissa is and jamal has a question about scaling youtube uh ad campaigns jamal jamal welcome to the show hi joe hi todd yeah so with youtube we managed to get like five campaigns i'd say like three out of five are on target to cpa, but we often have some issues with scaling. So I've been like, is it better, for example, is it better to kind of scale a campaign that's on CPA, go 600 to a thousand bucks, like once on Monday and leave it? Or is it better to kind of like trickle it like plus 200 on Monday and then again on Wednesday and then again. So is it like once and kind of let it re-optimize?

Because I noticed after you kind of up budget, it kind of fluctuates for a few days. Yes, thank you for your question. And my advice to you, by the way, will apply whether it's YouTube ads or any kind of ad. So if you're on target CPA bidding, that means you know exactly what you're willing to pay for a conversion and you just want the ad to be able to achieve that for you. So in that scenario, increasing your budget does make sense. I usually recommend making changes in 25% increments. So if you have a $600 budget going to a $1,000 budget the same day, theoretically, it should be able to do that because you're on target cpa bidding but

in practice like you i would feel a little bit nervous about that so i would suggest um making a change one day maybe giving it a breather day and then making a budget change again the next day if we were talking about bid changes i would not recommend changing bids that frequently bids need more time to learn but given that you're on target CPA bidding, I would make that budget increase change over a few days. That's what I personally would do. Got you. We're on max conversion. Do you recommend target CPA for YouTube? We haven't tried it yet. So on max conversions, my advice would be different. The maximized conversions bid strategy means this is my budget. It's not going up Google, so don't bother telling me to increase it.

Get me as many conversions as I can within that. And because of that, when you increase the budget on a max conversions campaign, that effectively changes all your bids because suddenly Google or YouTube ads is able to increase your bids in order to fill up that increase in budget. And that is a really big change. So if you're on max conversions, changing your budget effectively is like changing your bids. And so I would try not to do that more than once a week as like general guidance, not hard, fast rule of thumb,

because that will cause very big fluctuations. So if you are on flexible budgets, Jamal, you can actually spend a lot more, then I would suggest trying to get onto something like target CPA bidding or I don't think you can do target ROAS for YouTube, but for other campaign types, target ROAS so that you can capture the full profitable opportunity. But if you are on a fixed budget and that is your budget, then staying on max conversions or for other campaign types, max conversion value would be the way to go. Thank you. I appreciate the insight. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Does Google Ads have a way also to channel?

I know Facebook has a way to maximize conversions, but also maximize conversion value. So instead of focusing on getting 100 sales at all costs, it doesn't matter what the sales are, even if they're a dollar, it'll focus on trying to get the higher value sales. Is there an equivalent on Google? Yes, there is. So really, Google has been removing bid strategies to try to make things more simple. Yeah. So with a few exceptions here and there, there are kind of three main kinds of bid strategies in Google Ads. Maximize clicks, maximize conversions, and maximize conversion value.

And then for each of those, if you do have a specific target, you now set that target within the bid strategy. It's not considered its own bid strategy. So if you have a target ROAS, a target return on ad spend, that's now considered part of the maximized conversion value bid strategy where you have the option to set your target ROAS. Gotcha. 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. If you're on a live stream and you want to ask a question, click the start live call-in

button at the bottom of your screen. Don't worry, you will not pop in live stream and you want to ask a question, click the start live call-in button at the bottom of your screen. Don't worry, it will not pop in live. I still have to add you in, as I am doing right now, to Melissa, who is joining us and has a question for you as well. Welcome, Melissa. Oh, and Melissa just dropped off. Did I screw that up? I blame you, Todd. Maybe I screwed that up. Melissa is asking something in chat, but I'm not. Melissa, click the button again. This is the first time that we've used this setup.

So while we wait for Melissa or anyone else to click that start live call-in button to get some questions, let's say we've gotten through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We're solidly into the holiday buying season. CPMs are going to keep going up. Do we shut our ads off for December? Absolutely not. Because you've just said something that turns out to be incorrect, Todd. CPCs tend to actually go down because so many advertisers focus so hard on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and they exceed their sales goals and then they sit back and sit out for December. Oh, interesting.

Okay. So can we identify windows? Is it like the day after and then up to two weeks before Christmas? Like where's the window where CBCs are lower? It would vary too much by industry and whatever, so I can't give you a blanket. This is it. But generally, keep the lights on in December. A stat that Google is recently sharing with agency partners

is that 45% of holiday spending is completed by the end of Cyber Week. But flip that on its head, and it means 55% of holiday spending is still left to happen after Cyber Week. So absolutely, you still have sales to make. People still have presents to buy for themselves and others. Keep the lights on in December. And actually, the week leading up to Christmas, starting last year and expected again this year, we see huge spike in demand for gift cards.

All those last minute shoppers who haven't bought a gift yet and you've missed the shipping window, gift card searches spike. So even if you don't normally offer gift cards, if there's any way to sell gift cards, that's a great thing to do. And then there are other industries that see different trends and you could spot this in Google Trends. But two that I find really interesting are one, if you are advertising an app, app downloads spike on Christmas day because so many people get a new phone for Christmas. Right.

And so they're turning on their new phone and playing around app downloads spike. And like so many advertisers are not thinking about that. So apps Christmas and boxing day are great. And then if you are, we should say for our American friends, what boxing day is, that's that's December 26th happens in Canada.

Yeah. The day after Canada,, the day after Christmas. Canada, UK, and Australia, I think, have it. So, yeah. Boxing Day is a big, big, big deal in those countries. Americans don't know what it is. But not as much anymore, Todd. Interestingly, when I first started Google six years ago,

like, Boxing Day was bigger than Black Friday in Canada in terms of search interest. But now, pretty much any country in the world, Black Friday is just the biggest day whereas like five years ago europeans didn't know what black friday was you know what was interesting to watch about boxing day that i thought was very much what's happened with black friday as well where black friday was a day and then it became black friday week and now i mean i've i've seen black friday promotions already and it like it's, like, we're a month and a half out from Black Friday. And Boxing Day did the same thing.

You know, like, when I was a kid, 412 years ago, it was Boxing Day. And then it became Boxing Week. And I actually saw Boxing Month. Like, it's just kind of crazy. And what I love is Canadians, we celebrate Thanksgiving in October. And so Canadian retailers a few years ago clued in because Canadians were searching for Black Friday before our own Thanksgiving. People were getting confused. It became such a big search trend that retailers in Canada started advertising Black Friday deals

in October because our Thanksgiving is in October. And the best part about that is you get eggnog twice a year. You get it for a little bit in October and then again afterwards. Melissa has a question, which I think we may have covered partly, but Melissa has a question about targeting competitors. Yes. Thank you guys for taking my question, Jill and Todd. I really appreciate it. So I have a client who has

competitors in the local area and we kind of thought we would make a strategy where we're like the best plumber in the area and we would target our competitors but what was happening when people were calling our plumber and thinking that they were getting in touch yes the other other plumbers so i'm wondering how would approach that? I have heard that quite a bit before, the downside to competitor targeting. So I guess, first of all, just to make sure those listening know what we're talking about, competitor targeting or conquester targeting just means that you are putting your competitors' names or brand names as keywords in your campaigns to try to run ads when people are searching for competitors. But the limitation that you might not be facing here, Melissa,

is that you can't put someone else's trademark in your ad text. So for example, if I'm Adidas and I want to conquest on Nike, I can have Nike as a keyword, but I'm not allowed to put Nike in my ad itself because, well, that would be confusing to consumers. And that's their trademark. With plumbers, you may not be facing the same thing because it's like people's names or more generic terms that aren't trademarkable. So kind of two ways you could go with this. One, if people are calling your clients, your plumbers, looking for other plumbers, you could try to work with their client to have either like a script or a turnaround or how to be like, hey, like here's what you might want us instead.

If that's not feasible because you're getting a lot of like complaints and customer service requests, that's like not things that you can turn into clients. Then if you don't want to turn off the conquesting, I would just make sure you have a lot of headlines that mention the name of your plumber and make it really clear that that's the business who they're calling and that you don't have anything that suggests that you're an ad for a different plumber. So not even getting creative with like using something that's not a trademark, but spelled a little differently and could mislead people. So that's what I'd suggest either turn off the con questing if it's too much.

If you do want to keep it on, work together to figure out what someone can say when answering the phone to try to turn it into a sale. And or try to make it really extra super duper clear in the ad text who your client is and that it's not these other plumbers. Awesome. That's really helpful. And I did have one more question about simple keyword ad groups. So when we start a new campaign and we throw those in there, how would you describe that and how that works? I'm not generally a fan of single keyword ad groups. My kind of general guidance, not hard, fast rule of thumb, is that ad groups should have five to ten keywords. Just to keep management simple, if you have one keyword in every single ad group,

that means you have to create a whole new ad for every single keyword. And while it does give us more control, I don't actually believe it gives much benefit and it makes management so much more complicated. So I'd recommend grouping some of your ad groups together. You want to make sure that any keyword that's in an ad group displays similar intent. It doesn't have to be exactly the same intent, but similar intent, because any keyword in a given ad group will direct to the same landing page. So as long as that landing page could serve a few different searches, and it probably can, then they can be in that same ad group together. Well, thank you guys so much for taking my question.

Not at all. Thank you. Thanks. Only five to 10 in each one. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Do you commonly see a campaign set up where there's like a hundred keywords in an, I, I feel like that's the way people do it is that they just dump in like 50 or a hundred because the suggestion bot just keeps suggesting and suggesting and you just kind of click on everything. I'm not saying that what is the good practice, but do you see a lot of that where it's

just like an enormous number or am I the only one doing that? I don't see that often. I see actually more of what Melissa just mentioned where people will try to have so much control that they only put one keyword in every ad group. Sometimes I'll see ad groups with kind of 20 to 30, but the problem is that it's very unlikely that all 20 to 30 of those searches have the same intent and are from the same kind of audience. So because of that, you wouldn't want to lump them all together because you wouldn't want to direct them all at the same place. And the other issue, Todd, is I mentioned with a search ad, you can have up to 15 headlines and you need to make sure your keywords are included in your headlines in order to have a good ad strength and high relevance and click-through rate.

So if you have 50 keywords, there is absolutely no way you can include all of those keywords in your headlines. Your ad strength will be poor. Your click-through rate will go down because the thing the person searched for is not showing up in the ad. And just all around, it's not a good thing. So, but five and ten is not like must-do, never go past ten. That's just like my general blanket guidance. Of course, every business may need a bit more, a bit less, depending on their industry. Sometimes when people get started out with it, Google will prompt them to do something called a smart campaign. That must be really, really good to use, right? I mean,

why else would they call it smart? It's smart. It's smart. Smart. Smart. Smart is stupid. Repeat after me. Smart is stupid. No. When you create a new Google Ads account, you can't just create an account. You have to set up a smart campaign and then enter your billing information to create an account. Oh, really? Oh, so they force you into the down one. Oh, wow. They force you into it. And then if you want to run an actual search campaign or YouTube campaign or anything, you need to go and switch to expert mode. And then it prompts you, are you sure you want to do this? And does that thing where it grays out expert mode and keeps bright? Like, no, I want to stay. I understand why Google does this.

A smart campaign basically shows your ads, not just on Google search and other Google properties. And rather than picking specific keywords, you give it keyword themes and it kind of figures it all out for you. It's smart. Successfully doesn't figure it out successfully. I've never seen one of these perform well, but here's why. It's because if you were running one of these things on a giant budget, then like, sure, it would figure out what's working. But generally the only people who use smart campaigns are people who are brand new to Google ads, running really small budgets, and don't really know how it works. And so as a result, no, they do not drive good results.

And so some people walk away just saying, oh, Google ads doesn't work for me. I can't tell you the number of times I do a lot of startup mentorship and mentoring small business owners. And they'll say, Google ads doesn't work for me. And I say, mentoring small business owners. And they'll say, Google Ads doesn't work for me. And I say, open up your account. And lo and behold, it's a smart campaign. It's not working for you. I'm not saying Google Ads will work for every business, by the way. It won't work for every business. But just say no to smart campaigns. Just say no to smart campaigns. Which, by the way, should not be the word smart is used a lot of places in Google ads, smart bidding. Good. Um, smart shopping versus standard shopping. I prefer standard shopping, but like smart shopping can be okay.

What is that? What is the difference there between smart bidding and smart shopping in those? So smart versus standard shopping, important distinction. Standard shopping is our typical shopping campaign, which means you have set up Google Merchant Center. So you are telling Google your product availability and prices and photos and all that stuff. And then a shopping campaign

is how you show that in search results. So if you search for something and you see all those like pictures and star ratings and pricing at the top, those are shopping campaigns. And those are free, aren't they, in some way? Well, there is a free version called free product listings, but shopping campaigns are like paid ads you run at the top,

and you don't get to pick your keywords. Oh. Your keywords are automatically generated from your product description. So when you set a shopping campaign live, I say that it's like playing whack-a-mole with negative keywords. You just have to wait and see what search terms triggered your ads

and then add a whole bunch of negatives. And after a week or two, it does its thing. So that's a standard shopping campaign. Now a smart shopping campaign is that plus dynamic remarketing run out of the same campaign with no control for the advertiser. And dynamic remarketing is an ad where you add something to your shopping cart and you go read the news and you see that banner ad on the side of the thing you added to

your shopping cart. That's dynamic remarketing. It's dynamic because it will show that user the products they viewed rather than just like a standard remarketing ad. So smart shopping says retailers love shopping campaigns. Retailers love dynamic remarketing. Let's put it together, take away all their control, and just do it for them. It's smart shopping. And this can work, but again, once you know how the platform works, you're better off getting more control and managing your standard shopping and your dynamic and marketing separately, in my opinion. Gotcha.

So this is your last chance, folks, in the live stream. If you're not on the Riverside site, you should be there. And it's todayindigital.com slash live. That's where we're taking your questions. I don't see anyone lined up for questions. So if you're shy, you can certainly ask in the chat, even though I said I wasn't allowing it. But I'll allow it this time,

because clearly I don't fully understand how this works. Jill, while we wait to see if anyone else has any questions, other than hiring you, of course, to coach people through either individual or small teams, where is a good place for someone to kind of learn the basics? Does Google have sites for this stuff? Yes, Google does. The best place, in my opinion, to learn about Google Ads is directly from Google. And Google actually has a lot of different learning sites, but the one I'd recommend is called Google Skill Shop. That's the place that

you can go to get Google Ads certified. Unlike Facebook, Google lets you get certified for free. No proctored exam or anything. There are six Google Ads certifications. And what's so great about Skill Shop is that the Google Ads trainings there are actually the exact same Google Ads trainings that we get as Googlers. When you work at Google, every year you have to refresh your product knowledge, depending on your role and this and that and the other. And we have this whole fancy internal system, and you have to get recertified and all these things. And then when I left Google, I thought,

oh, none of my internal Google stuff is recognized. Let me go get Google Ad certified. And I opened it and thought, I know these example questions. I've seen this before. It's exactly the same. And so the added benefit is the Google skill shop trainings are up to date. They have, for example, some training in there about GA4, which is brand new. And like no other part of Google has training about GA4 yet. They have a training there about discovery campaigns,

which most people don't talk about. So there are, I mean, great YouTubers and all kinds of places you can go to learn about Google ads, but the problem is they get outdated so quickly. So I recommend Google skillshop because I have personally seen that is very frequently updated with the latest capabilities and you don't have to get certified. You can just go there to learn. And that's the best place I'd recommend people start learning. And then from there, you just have to start doing it. You know, that's going to teach you all the theory of how it works. But of course, putting it into practice is a whole different ballgame. You know, when you and I were working on the package that the premium newsletter subscribers are getting with this, you had a great point, which is because I'd listed the ones that Steph on our team had found.

And you're like, anything that refers to the phrase AdWords, kill it. Because it's four years old. Because Google has changed the brand name for that a while ago. It is true, yeah. And are there lots of different types of training in there? And how, like, in terms of different approaches to it? And how long does a training program take in terms of our personal time commitment? Yes. So there are six certifications, each of which has, they call it three hours of training,

but like it really doesn't take three hours, I promise. There's search, display, YouTube, app, shopping, and measurement. Those are the six certifications for the company coursework. And then there's additional coursework you can do that there's no certification with if you just want to learn. So discovery campaigns are one of those. Google Analytics is in there. I was just looking today. There's one all about privacy and how that works with Google Ads. So lots of other learning available, depending what is interesting to you. Training is about Google Marketing Platform, which is like a really advanced version of Google Ads. So, yes, lots of great resources directly from Google, free, up to date. And then if you want them, there are six certifications available.

Melissa is asking in the chat if there is Google Tag Manager training. Yes, there is Google Tag Manager training. I believe it's in Google Skill Shop. But if not, there's this old Google training that unfortunately is pretty out of date. But it's called Google Analytics Academy. And if you are looking to learn old Google Analytics, UA, or Google Tag Manager, that training is great. I've actually personally done it and would recommend it. If you are looking to learn GA4, which is new Google Analytics, you are out of

luck with Google Analytics Academy. Google Skill Shop has a little bit about it in there, but there's not much official training material in like a user-friendly way out yet on GA4. It's still too new. I'm going to give a little secret to those of you on GA4. It's still too new. I'm going to give a little secret to those of you who stuck it out to the end of this. So LinkedIn has a great, great service called LinkedIn Learning, which they bought from a company called lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A, which still I think operates under that brand. It's usually like 40 bucks a month or something like that. And then you get access to the full library. And I have to say, I mean, it's certainly not, it doesn't come from Google, so it's not a hundred percent up to date, but they keep it really up to date. It's well-paced,

good learning. Here is how you can get it for free, for life. And I'm not making this up, and this is not a scam because normally you go through LinkedIn learning or lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A, and you have to pay $40 a month. Here's what you do. You get a library card from your public library. You log into your public library in your town, your public library's website, and you look for something called like digital library or the digital shelves or something like that. And nine times out of ten, they will have – it won't be called LinkedIn Learning. It will still be under the old brand name lynda.com and you can get it for free because the library system in your

community uh pays for it i i have been using it for 10 plus years and have not paid a penny wow i use that to get the economist for free same thing through the local library um sorry economist i i don't pay i get it for free from the library digitally yeah my wife does like audiobooks anyway this is not a library loving show but um jill can you talk a bit about the coaching and auditing that you do and like how it works and what sort of clients you work best with in terms of um? Yes, absolutely. So I offer Google ads coaching, usually kind of one-on-one, but also in small groups. And the people I work with are marketers. They're either people who work at agencies, anywhere from beginner to expert Google ads users who want to improve their skills,

or perhaps just like have one or two questions you haven't been able to get answered anywhere and just want to talk to someone who knows how it works at Google. And so I do those one-on-one sessions. And then I also do some coaching and training around the Google Ads certifications. As I mentioned, the certifications are free and great and anyone can get them, but they don't give you any practical in-platform knowledge of how stuff works. And so a few companies have hired me to come in and teach their marketing departments alongside the Google Ads training. So the employees will do the Google Ads certifications. And then I come in to supplement that with coaching to show like,

and here's how you apply it to your business. So that's how the coaching works. And some people just buy one hour of my time, get their questions answered. That's it. And others I meet with on a weekly or bi-weekly basis for professional development. So I absolutely love doing that. Entrepreneurs, business owners, marketers, everything like that. And then my audits, it's actually, when I worked at Google, I worked on the international growth team and I developed something called an international account audit that became really popular amongst my clients. And so when I left Google, I thought, how can I continue to make this useful, not just for international clients? And so I developed my Google Ads account audit. And so I go through a Google Ads account,

top to bottom, inside out, give you kind of a red light, green light, yellow light on all the key measures of success in Google Ads, and then a very detailed list of recommendations. And then after the audit, one of two things always happens. Either the client says, this is great, Jill. How much does it cost you to just implement it all for me? And we do that. Or they say, this is great, Jill. Can we do some coaching now so you can use the audit as the basis to teach me how to improve my account? And I love doing either. Yeah. Melissa is saying like a creative checker, just like a professional once over, even finding some shady stuff. Sometimes, unfortunately it's happened more than once that I audit an account where like one agency takes over for another agency. And I find that they were double counting conversions, inflating revenue,

all kinds of crazy stuff. So I take a microscope to those accounts, performance, hygiene, sketchy stuff, everything. And I have to say, because you and I got on a business call as well, because I was going to hire you to help us to get Google ads to get subscribers to the podcast. And in about maybe 30 seconds, you shot it down like that. But I'm so glad you did. Yes, I did. Because I didn't put the math together and you did quite clearly, which is like, okay, well, let's assume that you're going to get $2 per click. What percentage of people do you think are going to actually, you know, follow through on that and subscribe? And I said, I don't know, maybe one in 50.

So she's like, okay, are you willing to pay $100? Is that how the math works? $100 per subscriber? I'm sure there was this long silence while I... Ah, right. Yes, I've become kind of infamous for convincing people not to hire me. But that's what, you know, when someone comes to me and wants me to run Google ads for them, I'm actually capacity now, I'm starting a wait list for January. So that's one reason I turn people away, but also I'll ask them right away, like before I agree to work with you, just let me know what is your average order value and what is your conversion rate? And here's what the math looks like. And like, no, this won't be

profitable until you improve your conversion rate or improve your average order value. And I can help you figure out how to do that. I also actually do a website conversion audit for e-commerce businesses, but I don't want you to put ads behind something that's not working. Like my favorite analogy, I think I've shared this with you before, Todd, is that building your business, you know, is like building a fire and you have to build that little wood, you know, trying to put all the pieces together and ads is like gasoline. And if you pour gasoline on top of a pile of wood, trying to put all the pieces together. And ads is like gasoline. And if you pour gasoline on top of a pile of wood, you have a wet pile of wood. You need to figure out first through organic means how to light that little spark of a fire, get something that's working. And then you pour

gasoline on top with ads and really 10X. So yes, if someone comes to me and wants me to run Google ads for their business, I will not do it unless I think that that's going to drive good results for them. Otherwise it's not worth their money and not worth me getting that money. Jill Saskin Gales helps brands with their Google ad campaigns through, as you heard, deep dive audits of the ad accounts coaching for individuals or small groups of marketers.

Again, her website is jill.ca that's J Y-Y-L-L.ca. And her TikTok account, which I promise you is a must follow, the underscore Google underscore pro. Jill, thank you so much again for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Todd. And thank you to everyone who joined us live today as well. That's it for the special weekend edition. Thanks for tuning in. I will be back with a regular normal episode on Monday. Bye for now.