and we are live what's up everyone how are you doing today pam say hi hi everyone it's exciting to be back here I guess Yeah, it's so weird just taking a break from the podcast. So let me break this down for you. For those of you wondering, why is Devin and Pam live right now and what's exactly happening? So basically what we did was we used to have the Weds Up podcast where we kind of recorded the episodes first. And then what we did was we edited them and then we released them to you. So we decided this time that we were going to be a little bit more adventurous and see what would happen if we just did these live where you guys could ask us anything and you could kind of join the conversation while we're going through it. Now, our topic for today is... Let me just pull it up over here. Our topic for today is... Am I going crazy or are my ads getting more expensive? And before we jump into it, I just want to introduce my lovely co-host, Pamela Wagner. She's an ex-Google Ads employee. She's optimized over three thousand Google Ads accounts. And together we've helped businesses all over the world do better with their Google Ads. So, Pam, let me ask you the the the simple question. Why are people's ads getting more expensive? Or why does it feel like ads are just getting more expensive these days? So, thank you for the kind introduction, as always. And for everybody who's new, welcome. And I think the one thing we've observed over the past five to six months is... that people are trying to scale their google ads they're really trying to give google more money but they're feeling like it's getting more expensive and they cannot pinpoint for their life what's going on with their ads and by now I have these conversations pretty much every week with like advertisers just like you know my business is going well I know I need to use google and I I'd like to use google but somehow what we've been doing before doesn't work anymore and then At one point, a Google rep came and said I should do Performance Max, and that's going to solve all my life issues. And it worked in the beginning, but then it didn't. So, yeah, something's going on. Yeah, something's definitely going on. Well, I've got a little bit of an article for us to just look at. And there's actually quite a couple of interesting things over here. So Search Engine Land, if you haven't already checked them out, they said Google Ads. Search CPC, for those of you who don't know, that's your cost per click. It's up by thirteen percent year on year. And the most interesting part of this article that I found, well, actually, there's a lot that's interesting. So As you can see, the cost per click has continued to increase by thirteen percent year on year, but that's compared to a nine percent year on year increase in Q four twenty twenty three. So not only are they getting more expensive, but year on year, that price of your clicks are actually accelerating. And what is crazy, this is absolutely crazy for anybody who is in the retail space. Cost per clicks are up by forty to fifty percent in the past five years. The article also sends a little bit of a shout out to Performance Max, saying that Performance Max was horrible. It was thirteen percent worse and now it's kind of less worse. But these are not enticing statistics to look at, especially for somebody considering spending more on Google ads or even somebody starting out with Google ads. Pam, what do you think about this? So interesting stats that I believe I would, probably this was measured across search campaigns besides the mention of the PMAX campaign. So just for everybody out there, whenever you read stats, just always be cautious of how these stats came to be and how they were produced, right? So my guess in this case, it's search campaigns. Now it's of no surprise that the cost per click increase because a lot of people just started focusing more and more on conversion bidding. And then what happens is like the cost per click actually goes up because when you focus on conversion based bidding, you cannot put a limit on your manual CPC, right? And we even recently had this with a client who's in the kind of like fertility slash infertility space. And we set a very conscious bid limit of twenty three bucks for a click, which is already fairly high. Right. But on some of the days we saw a cost per clicks of even forty five bucks. And wow, Google, why is this happening? Like and even across the last two two weeks, they were like no click was actually under twenty three bucks. And then Google came with this response. I'm actually surprised we got a response that, well, overall across a thirty day range, of course, the average is going to be below twenty three. Right. I'm like, yeah, but what if I only run the campaign for like two weeks, which technically you shouldn't do often. Right. But if there's people who just want to try it out. Right. Like it's not just that your budget can be exceeded on certain days by up to like thirty percent more or sometimes even more than that. evening out across a thirty day range. But it's also that the cost per click now can be a lot higher in this case, like forty five bucks is that's twice as much than twenty three than the limit that we set. Right. And if you don't pay attention to your ad account, if you don't look into your campaigns like at least once a week, it's very easy to lose track of them and then suddenly start spending a lot more. Yeah, that's super true. And some of you might be listening in and wondering, okay, well, Pam, Devon, so who cares if my cost per click is getting more expensive? These are just clicks. And I want you to understand a little bit about how your lead cost or the cost that it takes for you to acquire a customer happens on Google Ads. You're going to get a lot of clicks. Eventually, one of those clicks is going to turn into a client. Now, if you get five clicks at a hundred dollars each and it takes five clicks for you to get a client, that's a five hundred dollar cost per lead. Right. That's a five hundred dollar cost for you to get the client. Now, let's say that you are only paying ten dollars per click. Now it's only fifty bucks to get a client. So when we talk about CPCs going up and your cost per click going up, what we're basically saying is that the cost of getting that lead, the cost of getting that call, the cost of acquiring that client is so much more expensive because what Google is doing is it's charging more for its clicks slowly over time. And. I think this is a bit scary. Do you find this scary? So I think it's, I've always had a fairly neutral view towards these things. Cause it's, it's dynamics going on at Google that I cannot control. Right. And I used to be the type of person where a couple of years ago, I was like, don't, don't worry about your cost, but like, I literally, I'm not going to look at a cost per click because all that matters to me is the cost per conversion. But what we've seen in the run of the year is that the cost per conversion would slightly go up and the cost per click would go up so much. So if we had, for example, a search campaign that was focused on conversion bidding, the cost per click would be, let's say, nine bucks. But if we remove that conversion bidding or when we actually removed it, and we ran these experiments across a whole bunch of accounts and campaigns, then the cost per click would now suddenly be around like two or three bucks. So in most accounts, I ran the experiments of like conversion bidding versus manual CPC bidding. The cost per click went down by up to sometimes eighty percent. And in almost all instances, the conversions still kept coming in or they went back again to a level that they were like maybe a year ago or much cheaper. Right. We had this one client where we paused the collaboration a couple months ago because he had gotten in so many leads and he had a shortage of staff. So he literally couldn't take on any clients anymore. That is a lot of problems we have. I know, right? It's a good problem. Pam is a star. Just slow things down. I've got way too many clients. Pam, stop doing your job. Just pause. I know. I'm happy. That's a good reason, right? But I mean, we still kept the campaigns running on a low level because typically we just shouldn't just shut the campaigns off completely and then two months later he came back and he was like yeah I don't know what's happening my cost per conversion shot through the roof like it's about like two hundred bucks now when it used to be like around thirty to forty bucks and I was like well yeah no surprise because now that period was literally the period where the cost per conversion started going up the cost per click started going up and so we changed it and after changing almost every campaign I think except for one back to manual bidding. Now he's gotten back to a steady lead flow, more like towards the thirty, forty bucks again per lead. And yeah, it's just I think you just sometimes got to like run these experiments and give other things a try. And like three, four years ago, you did something and it worked for the whole year. Right. And that's not the case anymore. What works this month might not even work next month anymore. Yeah, yeah. And that's, it's pretty scary, especially, I sat with a business client today, and we were discussing her ads, and specifically her shopping ads. Oh, that, that tea looks so lovely. I want some, by the way. We were discussing her ads and her shopping ads while she had search ads. And she said to me, how come these don't work anymore? Ten years ago, these used to work fine. And I said to her, when you were on Google ten years ago, you were one of the only people on Google. doing what you're doing. You were one of the only businesses. And I think this is what business owners get wrong with Google ads. Like the platform is evolving. More competition is on the platform. So for you to be doing the same thing that you're doing ten years ago, Of course, your ads are going to get more expensive because you're still doing the same stuff you used to do ten years ago. And there's newer, faster, quicker ways and cheaper ways to advertise. But you got to find them. And this is why Pam is talking about experimentation. And this is also why I encourage experimentation. I had an experiment this month where I tried to sell a nine dollar digital product with search ads. I always advise people not to do that because you're just going to burn through your money. But I said, you know what? Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe things have changed. And I did the experiment and I've lost eighty three dollars and forty five cents so far. And I haven't made a single sale. But sometimes even the things that we say as experts, we have to go and we need to test them. Like if I tell you that use manual CPC, sometimes you need to just play with the automated bidding strategies and see, are they getting better? Are they getting worse? And I think a lot of people are scared of that experimentation side of Google Ads. So Pam, if I came to you and I was a business owner and I said to you, look, clearly something's wrong. My leads used to cost five hundred dollars. Now they're costing me eight hundred thousand two hundred dollars. What am I doing wrong and where do I start when it comes to solving this problem? So. I think the problem behind that is often much bigger. And I'll give an example, actually, just with it, with a client. I had a conversation yesterday with they're even a shark tank company and they were they're struggling with their ads and They were talking about a competitor who did more than, I think, twenty million dollars in annual revenue and their competitor went out of business. So they're really the point of the like. Our ads aren't working. We could go out of business. This is very serious, right? So if our cost per conversion is too high, then obviously, you know, we might not be able to match up the the the cost of a lifetime value even so. If your current cost per conversion is too high, what I would do is I would run an experiment. So in Google Ads, you have an option. Let me see if I can pull this up here to run experiments for any type of campaign or search ads is the most efficient one. It has the most options, so to speak. So I want to do this while Pam is pulling that up. What we're going to do is we're going to cut to an ad break and then we'll come back into the screen share. All right, guys. So we will see you soon. Now, nine years ago, I used to work at Google. And eight years ago, I founded my own ad agency, Adjala Digital. And since then, we've helped over three thousand advertisers all over the world grow with Google ads. No matter where they're based on this globe, they have one challenge in common. They are usually tired of having to figure it all out on their own with ads and not getting the return that they're looking for. If you are currently tired of your ads, if you are tired of figuring it out on your own and you need help with a real specialist and expert, then feel free to reach out. Check the link in the description below. All right. Cool. How was that? It was perfect. It was perfect. Should I pull up the screen? Yeah, sure. You can share the screen. Okay. So there we go. Okay. So by the way, there's one interesting thing on the screen. Can you see it? I just noticed it now. No, I cannot see it. Sit. Test. I can't see anything. Yeah. See what's below test. The year. Oh, nineteen seventy. Go you. What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? There were a whole lot of advanced people in the nineteen seventies. I know. Imagine we were living through like Google Ads two point O and it already existed like fifty years ago. And yeah, we thought thinking we were like the OG Google Ads experts. Meanwhile, guys from nineteen seventies are just like, listen, this is old to us. This is old school. Yeah. So anyway, back to experiments. As you can see on the left-hand side, you have your campaign button and under campaign, you have experiments. If you go there, you can always set up a new experiments. You can let your current campaign run, but you can say, you know what, I'm going to use fifty percent of my budget of the current campaign to allocate that to an experiment. In this case, I could say custom experiment, I'm going to focus on search, And I'm going to give it as experimented names. I could just call it manual CPC, right? I'm going to choose base campaigns. I'll just quickly select any. And. What we can then do here is we'll have to go to the settings, right? This is not super obvious because the interface changes here, right? But you have to go to settings and then. Nope. Hold on. Absolute fail. Can I slow you down there for a second? Can I just slow you down there for a second? What am I doing if I'm comparing the manual CPC to the other bidding strategy? What am I doing? What am I actually testing for? So... Here I'm going to test the first of all the clicks and I'm going to test the conversions. I cannot select the cost per click, but in the end I want to see if the cost per click is lower for my campaign with manual CPC than it is for the campaign that focuses on conversions. OK, cool. Right. Gotcha. I want to test if I'm not. letting google optimize for conversions I'm still measuring them I'm just saying I'm not letting google optimize for conversions am I getting more clicks now at a lower cost right and so I can say well I want the clicks to increase and I can also say I want the conversions to increase these are mostly for you to to view google does not really optimize for these two right And then I can see here, I'm going to split the budget. Fifty fifty. We typically do fifty fifty. I would only do, for example, like eighty twenty, like eighty percent for the original campaign and twenty percent for the test campaign. If I if I'm just curious. Yeah. Right. And I don't want to spend too much money on it. Yeah. So in other words, guys, if you're scared your customer is going to fire you and you know the account is running well already, then please, the eighty twenty rule just to experiment. But if you have a hunch that something might be wrong and you really feel like you could get your client results that are a lot better, then go for the fifty fifty. Exactly. That's very well said. That's very well said. And in terms of duration, just set it to thirty days. Um, really that that's enough for you to see whether, whether it's working or not. Right. Um, and always turn off the synchronization because I obviously only want to sync the changes if they're better, according to my metrics, the ones that I'm measuring. Right. And Google has this, this tendency to automate everything for you and say, Hey, let me take that decision away from you because I know how to make it better. We've seen this, not the case. I know while shake from them. Yes. Um, so then you set this up and you say create experiment, right? So it might take you like five, ten minutes to set this up really shortly and you just let it run. Right. Um, there's nothing you typically optimize in the, in the manual CPC campaign or in the, in the experiments for the reason that you wanna see how that experiment is really running on its own for those thirty days. Right. So yeah, that's how to set up. An experiment and just test it for yourself, right? Like we can, we can tell you tons of stuff, but I think both Devon and me always say test it for yourself. Right. And see how it looks like for your own account and for your campaigns or even your clients. Wonderful. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. So I just want to get back to this one point. We might have some clients listening in right now. We might have some people listening in right now and they're brand new to Google ads and they're saying, okay, so this experimentation is fine. I get the testing part. But Devon and Pamela, are you telling me that different ads have different prices? Like what if I decide I want to run a PMAX versus a search ad? Is each ad going to cost me like a dollar a click or are there variations between the different types of ads that I'm running as well? Great question. I love how you break things down. Yes, there's always different costs associated for certain clicks, right? And... A lot of times people even use the term like buying a keyword, but technically you don't buy keywords, right? You add keywords to your account and then you bid on them, right? Yeah. So... Different ads have different prices, whether it's display search, PMAX and so on. And you even ads within a campaign can vary strongly in terms of what a click costs on them. Like just yesterday, I saw this account where one ad was. had a click-through rate of like four point two nine percent I think and the other ad had a click-through rate of one point one point something percent like one of the ads are the three times higher click-through rate so obviously you want to focus on the ad that has a higher click-through rate because if it's three times higher that means you're getting three times more clicks out of your budget so you always want to make sure you pause the ad that's performing worse Yeah. And how do I improve a click-through rate? Let's say I'm looking at my ad right now and I'm saying, okay, fine, but isn't click-through rate just a thing that happens while I run the ad? Is there any way that I can influence it and make it more so that my ads are cheaper? So always make sure you have the keywords in the ad, right? Whatever keywords you're using, make sure they're present in the ad as much as possible. Not like don't do keyword stuffing, right? Yes, please. That's my pet peeve. Please don't do that. Don't keyword stuff. Just make sure they're there in a way to make sense for you and the user, right? I'm going to stop you there. I'm going to stop you there because when we say don't keyword stuff, Some people say, okay, I want keyword stuff that much. No, guys, there are human beings that you want them to put your credit card into your website. You want the human beings to submit a lead. If you write your ads so that it makes sense to only a robot, it doesn't matter because the human beings with the money are not going to click on your ads and they aren't going to submit leads so for example if you're selling blue cheese writing blue cheese seventeen different times on the ad it's not gonna do you any favors okay you have to say it in a logical contextual way that somebody will look at and go wow I'm really hungry I want some blue cheese right now But do not just write blue cheese. We have blue cheese, finest blue cheese, blue cheese, blue cheese, blue cheese. Please do not do that. Use your keywords sparingly and make sure it makes sense to a human being. That's all I'm going to say on that subject. Pamela, you may continue. Perfect, perfect breakdown. And mention numbers in your ads, right? So like if you've served a certain amount of customers, if you have a certain number of years of experience, if you got a certain number of like five star reviews in Google, mention all that, right? Because numbers typically help the brain comprehend anything it's reading much better, right? So the more you add at least two to three for your ad in the headlines and descriptions doesn't matter. And the other thing that we'd like to do, and for example, search campaigns, and you can also do this and like video campaigns and display campaigns, add a customer testimonial in one of the description lines, right? Take it from somewhere. Most likely you have to break it down a little bit because of the character limitation, but use that because that way you add social proof. Google used to have these review extensions or review assets. They removed them by now quite a long time ago. So you got to bring that in yourself. Yeah, definitely. And one more thing I'm going to say about this topic is, and guys, if you're watching this live stream and you're scared to jump in, don't worry, we won't bite. Ask your questions in the comment section, just like a normal live stream, and we'll gladly get to them if we find the question interesting, of course, and if it adds to the conversation. The one thing that I'm going to just jump in on this and say is that Going through all of these settings and making sure they're fine, writing your ads better, it might seem like these things are unrelated. But let me tell you how this whole advertising game works. Back in the days where you used to be the only shop that sold blue cheese, right? You could get away with anything you could do. bad advertising. You didn't have to have the right settings. You didn't have to have the right keywords. And because there were only two of you or three of you on the search results, people would just click on your ad and you would get clients that way. The way that Google ads is changing is more and more people are using the platform. So now, instead of just having three businesses to choose from, they have, when I say they, the person searching has a hundred different businesses that show up on the search results. And they can't tell the good ones from the bad ones. So this is where it comes to using numbers, like Pam said. Back in the days, you could just say, we're a plumber and we've got twenty years of experience. That's fine. People would click on your ad. But now what if every single plumber on the search results says they have twenty years of experience? Now, all of a sudden, the client's looking at that and they're going, which one do I pick? I don't know. I don't know. This one says they've got twenty years of experience. This one says they have fifty years of experience. So when you use numbers in your ad copy, you differentiate yourself. If you can say we have successfully repaired over five hundred thousand leaking roofs in the Chicago area, then all of a sudden. that number is going to make somebody go, wow, these guys really know what they're doing. If you say we have over a thousand five star reviews on Google, then somebody will go, wow, okay, these guys look like they have good customer service. If you say, like, we will be at your premises within twelve hours, That is another way of saying that is another way of conveying to the customer that you can help them. But just writing plumber near me or writing plumber, we fix leaking taps. That's just not going to cut it in twenty twenty four. yeah and there's there's this concept called pattern interrupt right so if you want people to pay attention you got to interrupt a typical pattern the typical pattern for a text ad is to read text right so any number you add adds that pattern interrupt and you just grab people's attention easier than if you just had word after word after word Exactly. Exactly. And I'm looking around. You might see me looking around. I'm looking for my favorite book. So I'm going to run away for a second. I just want to give them a book recommendation that's going to talk about pattern interrupt. So give me a second. Yes. Besides pattern interrupt, just a couple of things you can do also to increase the CTR of your ad. You probably know there are these things called assets, which are additions to the ad, right? So you can add products. additional pieces of text. You can add promotion details. You can add site links linking to other links of your website, right? So the more you make use of all the different text pieces and the assets that you have available for your ad, the bigger it becomes and the less space you leave to competitors. And that also in return will improve your optimization score as well as click-through rate. So Google, of course, rewards you for providing it with more information. Fantastic. So this is the book. It's called Zag by a dude called Marty Neumeier. Sorry, I can't get it smaller, guys. Let me try this. It's by a guy called Marty Neumeier. And this whole book is literally about just differentiating your company and making it stand out. And I know as business owners, you don't want to think about this type of stuff. Let's be honest. We'd rather just deal with customers, do deals, close deals, send banking details, send invoices, send quotes. We feel like that's our job as a business owner. But unfortunately, if you want to run Google ads and you don't have an agency that's going to help you with it and you don't have a consultant that's going to help you with it, you kind of need to know this stuff. I'm going to just switch on my ads. They're just going to work. They're just going to bring me leads and I'm just going to make a ton of money. That's five years ago, maybe, maybe eight years ago. But that is not the world that we're in right now. What you have to do is you have to get granular, get granular about your settings, get granular about your ad wording and really understand the whole thing. Another thing that I want to talk about is... If you're getting a lot of spam leads from Google ads, they're charging you for those leads. Are there anything that you can do to, is there anything that you can do to reduce that cost as well? Because a lot of business owners that I talk to, it's not so much the fact that the leads aren't cheap. The leads are cheap. It's just the leads are straight up just garbage or people trying to sell them stuff or people asking for jobs. How would I circumvent that? Yeah, so I will probably take a step back, or maybe two steps back, and first of all, look into my conversion tracking. It's fairly common that people don't just track the conversion that matters to them, but that they track page views, they just track clicks on buttons. Also, again, just yesterday, they were tracking clicks on a button that took me to a form, but what actually counted was a form submission. So if you just track the click on the button without people getting to the form yet, what happens is that Google optimizes for people that click on a button, but not for people that submit your form. Right. So first of all, check how your tracking is set up. And what I mean by that is you can either go to the conversion section in Google ads and look at the summer and see which conversions are currently active and how they're set up. Or what you can also do is go to tagassystem.google.com, put in your website, and see which conversions are actually getting triggered as you click on certain elements of your website, right? So that needs to be fixed. The second step would be to look at the funnel that you have, right? So it might not always be the best step to immediately offer people a call if they don't know you yet. It might be that you first want to offer them something else, like a video to watch a free guide on something or anything that's like a low level investment that makes them get to know you and also kind of like puts an obstacle in there for them, not just like being able to pick up the call and, you know, ask you random questions. And that way you can pretty much minimize the chances of getting such bad leads. And then of course the other aspect is keywords, right? Make sure you have the right keywords. So let's say you are a, um, forensic investigation service, right? And by the way, say what? Weird example, but okay, we'll roll with it. Yeah, it's literally somebody I talked with yesterday as a client. All right. And I'm just trying not to give away too many details. So they... Em is basically what she's doing is she's copy and pasting in her mind now. She's editing. Like, you know how you edit a video? She's kind of blurring out this and stitching it all together. Yeah, literally, yeah. So they also offer services where you can make videos clearer, like surveillance videos so that you can recognize people better and so on. And they put quite some of the keywords in broad match. So they were showing up for like video editing services, how to make high quality videos, which of course isn't relevant at all to their service, right? So the first step would be to put all your keywords in phrase match. And the second one is add, you know, whatever words that should be in the query to show that the intent is really something for your business. So instead of just using a keyword that says high quality videos, I would put in high quality surveillance videos. right oh okay gotcha gotcha the more words you add to a keyword typically the better of course I can sometimes reduce your traffic quite a bit google might show you there's a low search volume and so on but don't let that deter you from using them because oftentimes you'd still get traffic anyway OK, I got you. Now, I want to take you back to something that you said. You said that some people are tracking button clicks on forms and some and I know some of these business owners or some of these business owners will say, hey, but I want to track everything. I want to understand what people are doing on my website. And I want to count that button click as a conversion because it shows that that person was serious about submitting a lead maybe, but they didn't submit a lead. What would you say to that person who thinks that, okay, they want to track the button click, but they just want to know that somebody is actually interacting with their website? So what... The problem is that Google will always optimize for the type of conversion that you get most off, right? And if I optimize, let's say for a button click on the website that takes me to the form, that's not even the submit button yet, right? Just the button that takes me to the form, then obviously you'll have much more people click on that and submit the form. So Google will keep optimizing for that first button click because that's where it gets more conversions from. It's like, oh, that's more valuable to you. Right. So when you say optimize, it will go and find more people that will want to click on buttons but not submit forms. yes yes okay um because it wants to say hey look we're giving you so many conversions right and I think about a year ago or something google introduced the classification of like primary and secondary conversions so if you go to the conversions in your account there is a column called action optimization that's going to say primary or secondary and what you ideally should do is set the form submission conversion in this case to primary so they just say hey please measure this conversion and also optimize for it if you decide to go for a conversion optimization campaign and set the first button click if you still want to measure it to secondary. That way it'll still be measured and it'll still show up in the campaigns but Google won't optimize for it. Yeah, yeah, that's super true. And that's, that is, that is such good advice. That is Pam just saved you. If you're listening to the show, Pam just saved you at least ten thousand dollars. So you guys know what to do. Ajala down in the link in the description below. Make sure you contact Pam and make sure you tell her thank you. Maybe even higher here. All right. So one thing I want to say, and Pam just touched on this as well, is, you know, you want to give them a video to watch now. We don't have a video in my business, but what we do is we just take them through a short survey where we understand who are they, what are they trying to achieve, and can we help them? Because I feel like sometimes when we say a video, some business owners might feel like, oh, that's so intimidating. Now I got to come up with a whole thing and I got to pitch and I got to tell them. You don't have to... You don't have to do anything that crazy, but I want you to think about something. If you're a business and you open your doors and you allow everybody to come into your business, right, you have to understand that some people are not as interested as you think they are. Some people are browsing. Some people are just looking around. Some people are honestly just looking for a friend and trying to help a friend out. The reason why you wanna set up all of this stuff is you want gates, right? So imagine yourself as the trophy. Imagine yourself as the grand prize. You don't start playing a game and then automatically you're just at the trophy. No, you have to go through a first boss, a second boss. You have to go through some challenges. You have to go through some obstacles. And the problem with business owners is you make it so easy for people to waste your time by just putting a calendar over there and not asking any questions. Ask them, can you afford to spend five thousand dollars? Can you afford a new kitchen? Are you the primary decision maker? Do you need finance? Are you blacklisted? Maybe or maybe you can't get finance. These are important things for you to do, because as you add those gates, you're going to find yourself being less busy, but you're gonna spend your time with more qualified clients more often. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna help your marketing out as well because you're signaling to Google that these high value people are the people that you want to work with so the more that we track conversions the right way and the more that we track people who are really interested in it google will look at that and go oh that's a good signal so you're telling us that if a guy lives in this um high-class suburb and he has this type of extra spending and he loves this type of lifestyle that's the client that you want Now, when you do that, that is so much more powerful than just saying, oh, yeah, I want everybody who clicks on this button, right? And that's kind of what we're trying to get at here. We're trying to teach the machine that you only want the A-grade clients and you don't want just anybody who decides to come on your website and just clicks around a bit. yeah and and the example that also comes to my mind here is so for for everybody who's new here I'm originally from austria um the beautiful city of vienna and a a friend's friend opened a store it was a boba tea store right so the bubble tea store in a location that you would think the store would run really well like it's one of the prime locations right But what ended up happening, like she had to close down the store after about six months because people were just passing by and kind of window shopping, but they weren't buying because it was such a touristy location that there were so many other options around that in order for you to stand out, you would have had to be like a big brand. Right? So, like, always understand, like the moment that you catch your users in already actually ready to buy, right? Where are you catching them? Are they on display? Are they on YouTube? Are they on search and so on, right? And if you do P max, they're everywhere, unfortunately, and you have no control over where your ads are shown. But really understanding in what moment you're catching your customers and if they're actually ready to buy makes a huge difference on what kind of messaging you put out there and what you ask them to do. Yeah, that is super important. What we're going to do is we're going to go to a break. And then after that, we're going to wrap up the episode. So if you want to ask any questions, the comment section is there. Feel free to ask us anything you want. But remember, we are talking about why your ads are getting more expensive. So if you ask me, Devin, how do I do conversion tracking? I'm going to throw you out. All right. So we'll see you after that. Now, since we're on the subject of ad setup and getting your ads set up properly, what I want to do is I want to offer you a chance to copy my personal ad settings, the ad settings that I'm using right now in my business to generate leads and sales. And you can do that with my Google Ads setup cheat sheet. Now, included in the setup cheat sheet is over twenty two settings that I'm using right now to generate new business in my business. What I'm also going to do is I'm going to include a little mini course. So if you're a Google Ads beginner and you just want to find out how to get your first hundred leads, or maybe you just want to learn the dashboard so you can feel a little bit more confident, that's in there as well. Now, you can find all of this at the link in the description below. And let's get back to the show. All right, cool. So guys, it's your time to shine. You can ask anything you want. We're just going to continue on with the conversation over here. I think we've been pretty comprehensive today. Haven't we, Pam? We did. We packed a lot into this. And also, obviously, if you watch the recording, right, like just comment below and we'll get back to it as soon as we can. There's so many elements these days to Google Ads that I understand if right now you're feeling frustrated or if you're feeling confused or you don't know what to do. Let me tell you, that's normal. Almost every business owner feels like that at one stage, but also be aware that there's people who've done this before. There's people who can help you out there, right? Whether that's us or somebody else, but like there are ways out there to help you avoid making those costly mistakes or keep making those costly mistakes, right? And your business doesn't have to go out of business because of some high marketing costs, right? Like take care of it now, take care of it today and take a small step every day to bring that change about, whether that's starting an experiment, whether that's changing, you know, the match type of your keywords, whether that's adding different keywords or adopting your ad text, right? Whatever it is for adapting. So there are solutions out there for whatever you're facing right now with Google Ads. Yeah. I always tell my students, my students are always worried about, oh, they're going to take away phrase match or, oh, one day manual CPC is going to be removed. Oh, in five years time, it's going to be so expensive to run ads on Google Ads. And I always tell them, look, control what you can control. I can't control how much Google Ads is going to charge us for a click. I can't control what they're going to do. I can't control if they take away bidding settings. I can't control if Google decides tomorrow to charge everybody on the platform, two hundred percent more. They're a monopoly. They have the right to do that. It's not like we can go and stop them. They own like eighty six, eighty seven percent of the search market like they would do that. Right. But at the end of the day, you also have options. You also have your free will. You can decide to get better at running ads. That is an option. You can decide that you don't want to be on this platform anymore and you want to be on a different ad platform. That is an option as well. But the one thing that you can't do is, and the one thing that won't change the cost of your ads, and it's weird because I see so many business owners in this position, is complaining about it to a professional is not going to... Like, imagine going to the doctor and telling the doctor, doctor, I have a headache. And the doctor's like, okay, if you have a headache, this is what you need to do. Take this medication twice a day, blah, blah, blah. Then... they don't take the medication they come to the doctor's office the next day same complaint the next week the same complaint and I have lost track of everybody that I've told and I said it to them very simple I said listen we can complain all day long you can say that this is not working all day long but until you actually do something to improve your conversion rates your control on your spending in your account, it's just gonna be more of the same. I think too many people treat Google ads like gambling. They think they're just putting money into a slot machine, they're gonna pull the little lever and customers are gonna come flying out. It doesn't work that way. There have to be a lot of things in order. Your branding has to be in order. Your website, your landing page. We've got another podcast episode coming after this. It's about landing pages. That has to be in order. Your messaging has to be in order. A lot of people don't understand messaging and how to get offers right, but that has to be in order. And once all of those little things are in order, Then all of a sudden you're going to say, wow, okay, this is working and it's working like I never dreamed it would work. It's working perfectly fine. But just changing your daily budget, it's not optimization. You're just trying to change how much money you put into the slot machine. I'm sorry, it's still gambling. And see, that was another client conversation yesterday. It was like, I worked with this ads consultant. She just showed me every day what she was doing. And she made all these like, two hundred changes in the account, but nothing was getting better, right? But she just showed that to me to show that she was doing something. But the problem was that the doing wasn't resulting in more, right? So doing more doesn't always mean you're going to get better results, right? So you've got to be really, really targeted and what you do. And that is by following the tips that we outlined in this video, right? Like literally like changing keywords, adapting to the your ad and so on. These are all tiny steps that you can take every day to take a couple of minutes. And, you know, for of course, use use Claude or chat or whatever to help you with that. Right. But focusing on doing small things every day can make a big difference. And lastly, for another client where I told him yesterday, because he had a little bit of a conversion mess as well. I think it was like eight, nine different conversions. That was the one with the button click. And he was like, well, so I got all this tracking and obviously this tracking mess, and obviously it's going to take me time to figure out. So what can I do now to help with the ads, right? And so we literally went in and we optimized the keywords. We optimized the ad text. We optimized the assets. We looked a little bit at the landing page, right? We, I think for the bidding strategy, were also some aspects that we took care of, removed search terms, right? We didn't even talk about that today yet. But just by looking at the search terms report once a week, you can already remove any kind of search terms that are not of any value to your business, right? So there are really small steps that you can take that are not magic. It's just you going in, looking at some data points, not a lot. You don't have to be a numbers guy or gal for this, right? And you can figure this out on your own or with Devin's or with my help. Pam, I think this would be a perfect time for you to talk about your optimization guide, because it sounds like there's a lot of people that might, they kind of want to optimize their ads. Just like when you say it, it sounds easy. And when they're in front of the Google Ads dashboard, they're like, how do I, what do I, it says, nineteen seventy on my dashboard. What do I do now? I should have taken a screenshot of the box and see if I can actually take a screenshot of this. We've got the recording. Oh yeah, we got it. Perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God, back to the future. Yeah, so we had like a lot of business owners are at the stage when they do Google ads and they're like, how do I actually know if A, my ads are doing well and B, if I'm working with an agency, if they're doing a good job, right? So we put together this guide, which lists a whole bunch of steps of optimization opportunities for your campaigns. I haven't even counted them in since. Yeah, pretty much everything that I've collected over ten years and tells you exactly what you need to do, how you need to optimize your campaigns, what to look out for, which buttons to click, which settings to take in order for you to optimize your campaigns. And we set it at a really low price. I think it's one or two cups of coffee, depending on which country you're in. So get it, look through it. The people that have gotten it so far said it was a really good checklist for them to understand better where am I at with my account? What can I actually do with my campaigns? And sometimes even just getting that confidence back that, hey, I can do this myself, right? Like even if I have an agency right now, it could be that you are actually no more right now than your agency. I've seen this plenty of times before too, right? So put together by yours truly for you. yeah so it's over nineteen pages long people so there is something there there is something there for everyone and um yeah I think what we're gonna do is we'll end the episode uh for those of you who are confused because you're seeing two live streams scheduled on the channel we're gonna jump into another live stream after this a different podcast episode but yeah I think my the final words that I want to leave you guys with is just You have to get more serious about your marketing. You have to get more serious about your tracking. And also, when you're thinking about how to run Google Ads, knowledge is your friend. Do not just sit there in the darkness and say, I don't know how to do this. I don't know. If you don't know what CTR is, watch a couple of videos. You will know what a CTR is. If you don't know what a conversion is, watch a couple of videos, you will know what a conversion is. And if you need somebody to help you, Pam is one of the best people to help you. I'm also going to drop in here before we say bye. We are having a massive, massive Black Friday special. There's going to be so much cool stuff. And what I want you to do is sign up for the early bird list below. Everybody who signs up gets a free gift. I'm not going to tell you what that free gift is, but you do get a free gift. And yeah, let me just say, you're going to be smiling. That's all I'm going to say. You're going to be smiling. So I would like to say thank you very much, Pam. It's been fun. And Pam, any last words? Thank you too. Last words would be just do it. I know it feels scary. I know it feels like procrastinating it, but just take that first step and it'll recreate or it'll create that feeling of happiness and accomplishment that you're doing something with your campaigns that will hopefully benefit your business a lot. Definitely. I love that. I absolutely love that. All right, guys, we'll see you in the next one. If you're looking for the next video to watch, there's one on your screen right now. Peace. Bye.
