PPC Essentials Part 2: Where Investors Go Wrong With Google Ads Copy

"Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'll be joined by Shaun Young from my team. Shaun Young is an account strategist that works with over 50 Real Estate Investors across the country, and we're going to be talking all about Google ads, specifically the ads. This is part two of an eight-part series about all the things that matter to have a successful PPC campaign. We talk about where investors go wrong, where they potentially do better, and how you can do exceptionally well so your competition cannot catch up to you."

"All right, how you doing today, Shaun Young?"

"I'm pretty good."

"Awesome, happy to hear it. Another last-minute podcast for you."

"Oh yeah, excited. My favorite kind."

"This is the second part of a probably eight-part, unless we change our mind, series that is all of the things that you need to do to have an excellent performing PPC campaign. For each one of those things, we're going to talk about what do people do wrong, what can they do better, and how do you do it the absolute best so that your competition can never catch you. And we'll talk about all three of those things today."

"Last time the topic was keywords. This time the topic is ads, and those are the first two out of like I said eight things that have to do with Google search. If you don't care about the details of Google ads, if you don't want to get into the weeds, this episode is not for you, and this whole series isn't for you. But if you have an interest in the specific weeds, you want to know why your campaign's not performing, you want to understand the specific aspects of the ads and how they work, then this is a great episode to dig into some of that stuff more in detail, and we will share all of our secrets so that you can hear them."

"Super excited to get into things. So let's start with what people are doing, and I'm thinking we could just do it one by one. What are they doing wrong and what's the version that's better? When it comes to ads, what would you say is the first thing that people are messing up with?"

"Yeah, honestly, one of the first things I want to talk about is people only using one ad in their ad groups, the one like responsive ad, and just one of the easier pitfalls to fall into because it's easy. You only set up one ad, it makes some people think, 'Hey, I'm going to test this and replace it with more content later on,' and things like that. But when you have only one ad in your ad group, it limits what Google can do."

"Google has what, something like 75,000 touch points on everyone? We've shared different numbers of different points in this podcast, and all of them are different. I know they're probably all different, but we don't actually - I don't know that anybody knows, but it's a lot, a bigger number than anybody can imagine."

"Yeah, it's massive. And so it's - I think in that context, giving Google more to play with allows it to do what it wants to do and do best, and let it test the different responsive ads. Let it show people what it thinks is going to be best because you can set up your demographic of what you want and everything like that, but you don't really know Billy Bob Joe who's going to be searching for 'we buy houses' later on today. You don't know what he's like, and Google does, though. And so by giving Google options within the ads to talk about, it can know, 'Okay, this responsive ad is going to be better for Billy than this other one,' and you're more likely to convert. You're more likely to have a better lead quality and lead flow with more options for Google. And so having multiple responsive ads is something that I think is a huge thing that's a problem because a lot of people don't do it. They'll just do one ad, one ad group, one campaign."

"Yeah, gotta get more in there."

"Yeah, I get what you're saying. I'll just add a couple things. I think we probably want to clarify responsive ads in case someone's not familiar with that. Google, for the longest time, used primarily expanded text ads, and what that was is it's exactly what you expect to see from Google. There's like headline one, headline two, headline three. Sometimes they added that kind of partway through and used it half the time, and that was kind of how Google functioned."

"Now they have these things called responsive ads, which means you just throw in - I think it's up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, or maybe more than four descriptions. I can't remember. There's some other options, but I think it's four."

"Yeah, so you put in a bunch of descriptions, bunch of headlines, and then Google just mixes and matches that and turns it into whatever ad it wants. And a lot of people think because they're doing that, they don't have to have multiple of those because there's like lots of assets there. So on one hand, you need to have a lot of things in the responsive search ad so Google has options, but the tough thing is you can't have things that don't make sense together in there."

"So that's where having multiple ads allows you to have multiple themes. Then you can be testing theme one versus theme two, in addition to testing which headlines work for each theme the best. Otherwise, you're just restricted to one ad, one theme, or you have multiple themes in there and your ads don't actually make sense because Google throws them all - those headlines in whatever orders they want to throw them in, and it just doesn't actually make sense."

"Yeah, no, and I think on top of that as well, making sure that you have them grouped by the right themes too. Like not grouping them just randomly and things like that. You need to have them be along the same - I guess repeating what you said, but a little bit deeper is making sure that those themes actually go well together. Because when you have more than one ad, you do open yourself up to different messages being shown, and you need to make sure that those messages are in line with what you're trying to get with that ad or with that campaign."

"Absolutely. One kind of like sub-subtopic of this, not something we planned talking about, is pinned headlines. You have any thoughts on pinned headlines?"

"I have mixed feelings about pinned headlines. They're beneficial if you know that a headline works well, but if you don't, don't pin is kind of my opinion. I think you should give Google the opportunity to have a level playing field when you're first starting out a new campaign. I don't like to pin things when I'm just starting out if it's like a fresh campaign that I have no data on. And given - like in our campaigns, we pin a lot of that, but that's because we have aggregate data across all of our clients. We know what works and what doesn't. But if you're starting a brand new campaign, don't pin anything in the beginning is my opinion. Don't pin and let Google play with everything. And then as you get some data in from performance, you'll start getting a picture of which headlines are working, which ones aren't. At that point, you can start pinning the ones that really work."

"Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And you're right that considering the data we have, we have more liberty to do more things earlier. We can kind of set up guard rails because we already know where it's... oh, this is already learned in 20 other accounts that these are the headlines that work better here or in this certain position or whatever the case is. And just lower the number of things that Google's testing to just the ones that we think are most likely to work, and it gets you there faster because Google will get there, but it could take it a really long time if it's just doing things randomly."

"I would say there's one exception to what you talked about, and I see this problem with a few accounts that we audit where they have headlines that just don't make sense in certain orders. You have to make sure that they actually make sense because Google's machine learning doesn't really understand that. It just knows the performance of this headline is a certain thing. Like for example, a call to action for the whole ad - you don't want that to be your headline number one. So you can pin, and there's ways to pin where you're just pinning to a position. You're not just making sure the headline shows up, but you're just saying if it does show up, make sure it shows up in spot number two or spot number three or whatever the case is, because maybe it doesn't make sense if it shows up in spot number one."

"So it's hard to imagine because if you have 15 headlines, if you imagine every possible order that those could come in if there's going to show three at a time... I know there's some mathematical way to figure that out, but the answer is it's a ton of stuff. But it has to actually make sense, and the machine learning will eventually find out what converts and what doesn't, but it needs to... sometimes it'll just take it so long and it has to gather so much data to get there that you can shortcut that process."

"It's a good point. Any other notes on multiple ads?"

"I think I've given my box, but summary there - just make sure you have multiple ads with similar themes. It helps a ton versus just having the one."

"Yeah, absolutely. The next one that I want to touch on is the what those headlines themselves say. I think there's a tendency for marketers overall to always be focused on what gets someone one step deeper down the funnel. So when we write an ad, we think how do we write an ad that someone wants to click. But the other variable that we have to think about there is not just are we getting someone down the funnel, but who are we getting down the funnel. And it could be that a certain headline attracts more people but less of the right people, and that's true really often."

"And then the other thing to think about with pay-per-click advertising is exactly that - pay per click. It's not pay per view or impression. Now on Facebook, that's a different story, right? On Google though, it's pay per click. So assuming you're going to be paying for that click, you want to make sure that you're qualifying the person. So that's where the rule of thumb is qualify and convert, don't just convert. Whereas most marketers just focus on the convert section, they look at what ads get the highest percentage of clicks, the highest click-through rate, but we want to qualify too."

"And I think a specific example of where that goes wrong in this industry is messaging around pricing. If you look at all the options that a seller has, basically a wholesaler is usually the absolute worst at price, and they're the best at everything else. And then they could go like retail, for example, that's much less convenient and takes a lot longer, but the price is better. So you just have to think of your strengths as a company. Literally, the thing that you're worst at is price, and I cannot tell you how many ads I look at in this industry that say, 'We'll pay top dollar for your house. You'll be shocked by how high our offer is,' you know, all this stuff where it just doesn't attract the right kind of person by any means."

"And you pay for those clicks, and then those same people, when I'm doing these audits, they're complaining to me that their leads are all too retail. They all want too much money for their house. And I look at their ads, and their ads say, 'We'll pay you more than anybody else,' and they're surprised that those people are the people that are being attracted by those ads."

"So I think that's something to keep in mind. It's not just about what gets the most clicks. You want to think each of these clicks you're going to pay for, how do you make them count? The opposite version of that is you could say, 'I'll buy your house for 50% of market value' in the ad or something. Then nobody wants to click it, right? So there's a balance here, but I think focusing on the pain points that you want people to have is a really good way to make sure you're getting the right people. And you can let your competitors buy all the clicks from the people that are motivated by the wrong things. It's the most ideal scenario. You have any thoughts on that?"

"Yeah, mostly along the lines of what you're saying here. I think some marketers take advantage of the fact that high lead flow looks good when quality suffers because of it. And that's where like a lot of like broad match keywords and phrase match, exact match keywords get for... where we take the stance that we want... we don't turn the dial as far towards quality as possible. And honestly, like nine times out of 10, I feel like the investors that I work with are like, 'I'd rather have high quality, a little bit lower lead flow than like massive lead flow, low quality.' It's just better to be not filtering through all the garbage."

"And so that's what I typically recommend - really trying to decide what you want as quality and making sure that your message is absolutely in line with that. Because like you said, if you just say, 'We'll buy your house regardless, no terms attached,' everyone will come to you, but you won't get any deals out of it because you can't do that and you don't want that. So having that key messaging of making sure that you have a good balance of, 'Hey, we want to convert this ad, but at the same time, we want to make sure it's the right person,' is super crucial in making sure that it's a successful ad campaign."

"Here's another thing - I completely agree with what you said. I think another thing that makes us even more dangerous is the machine learning that we're dealing with in Google where you can give it 15 headlines and it's going to start to learn. And if you look over time, it's probably going to end up serving a few of those headlines way, way more than the other ones because it finds that they work better. So if you have some things that attract the wrong people but they get a lot of clicks, you risk - even though that's one headline in 15 - you risk that headline is going to be shown 90% of the time because Google's AI is going to learn that's a good headline because by every measure that they have, it's showing that it's a good headline."

"And that's, I think, probably the most dangerous thing about... we see this on Facebook too. It's not just about having the thing there and attracting the wrong people. The problem is these ad platforms, they double down on mistakes, and you start spending all your money on a piece of junk over some time."

"Yeah, it's like just imagine giving your acquisition manager a high five every time they get just a really bad deal, a bad contract. That's exactly what you're doing by trying to just push high lead flow with all these ridiculous statements in Google. So because Google thinks that you want it, and it'll give you more for a long time too because you have to retrain it if you try to change. So yeah, absolutely."

"What else? You have any other items?"

"Yeah, the other one that I wanted to talk about is making sure that your keywords are actually relevant in your headlines. One of the things that we've talked about numerous times is that you got to be really careful with what you're using in the headlines because Google's AI doesn't understand proper English and things like that, and you can get some really weird looking headlines coming out of Google if you're not careful about what you're putting in there."

"Making sure that you have headlines that are going to sound attractive to people but not just like keyword stuffing them. What I typically recommend in those situations is you want to have your keywords in your headlines and things like that and your description, but you can't just have just your keyword and just shove a bunch of keywords into it. This isn't the 90s anymore. We can't do that, right? It has to be relevant, it has to look good."

"People read things on Google, and you just think of the scammy ads you've ever seen on Google, and they all look exactly like that. Think of just... I think of Alibaba, for example. Have you ever shopped on Alibaba? Their listing, their titles are just like keyword stuffed to every keyword possible that could be related to that item, and it looks so bad. And you just look at it, you're like, 'Yeah, I'm not buying that. That's weird.'"

"So you want to make sure in your headlines and titles on Google that it sounds good. It's something somebody's going to read and be like, 'Oh, that sounds like a reputable company.' And on top of that, also it ties into making sure that you're qualifying and not just converting as well. Making sure that you're not just putting the keyword in there... you can't just have a dynamic keyword line in your headline so it just shoves their keyword in there every time they search for it. You need to have good content that people can read and actually like."

"Yeah, that solves my situation. If someone's searching 'sell my house for cash,' you can't just have an ad that says 'sell my house for cash,' and then it just looks weird. You have to be like, 'We'll buy your house for cash,' and here's our stipulations, those things to help try to qualify that as well. So that's my thoughts on keyword stuffing and having good quality headlines. You have anything to add to that?"

"I think what you just noted is the most common way that people screw this up. I think of it kind of like a continuum, though. You have that side that you just talked about, which is Alibaba keyword stuffed everything, do it for the algorithm, not for the person. And then you have on the far other side - this is much less common in this industry, but then we have brand marketers. Like, never have a brand marketer write your PPC headlines, 'cause it's going to be like something incredibly creative and nobody's going to get it. They always think too creative, too high of cognitive resources that are necessary to understand it, and it's always like the next step instead of clarifying that this is relevant to what you just searched."

"So it's one of those things that... which sounds amazing, but for people that are like... the average cognitive resources that people have available as they're doing searches on Google is not enough to comprehend those headlines. So that's one side, and then yours - the other side is kind of in between. Because if you don't put enough keywords in your headlines and that kind of thing, then Google doesn't like you because part of your quality score is going to be your ad relevance. They'll actually charge you a higher cost per click if you don't have your ads hyper-relevant to your keywords. And including the keywords in the ads is a great way to do that, or like slight variations. But yeah, you can go too far. So I think it's about finding the balance for sure."

"One thing on that topic is... mentioned this briefly... it's Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Yeah, this has been a common practice in Google ads for a long time. Google has these dynamic possibilities where you can basically put your keyword into your ad dynamically as a headline. So someone searches something that matches to your 'we buy houses' keyword, and then your ad will say 'we buy houses,' inserting that keyword in. And this is something that I've seen pretty problematic in a lot of accounts because what you can end up doing is you don't write your keywords with the intention of them being in an ad, but then you write an ad that inserts them."

"So your keyword might be 'companies that buy houses,' and then your ad might have Dynamic Keyword Insertion, and then you insert 'companies that buy houses' into your ad. And then just think of that - someone searches for 'companies that buy houses,' and then they read your ad and it says 'companies that buy houses.' That doesn't make sense. You're a company that buys houses, so you might say something being like 'We Buy Houses,' right? And then it's like really clear. But if you just insert 'companies that buy houses,' that doesn't make any sense."

"Yeah, and that can definitely bite you. It doesn't always make sense. I think one of the reasons that people do this is so they can have a single ad group. For anybody that's unfamiliar, an ad group is like a container that holds keywords and ads, and the idea is you want everything in it to be somewhat relevant to the other things. But if people put like all their keywords into a single ad group, then you have to have this in order for it to be relevant to all those things. But if you have your ad group structure set up right to where all the keywords in it are relatively the same, you don't have to dynamically put them into an ad to make it relevant."

"The other place where I've seen this bite people is in with trademarks. It's easy to have competitor keywords, which are just a pretty standard practice that you have a competitor - the most common one's probably 'We Buy Ugly Houses,' right? But 'We Buy Ugly Houses' as a keyword, it's a great keyword. So common, almost that I think a lot of people don't even think about it as a competitor keyword, but it is technically. But then if you have Dynamic Keyword Insertion, you'll take 'We Buy Ugly Houses' and you'll put that in your headline, and then you're doing trademark infringement. And Google potentially won't even let it run, or if they do, you might get sued. And that particular company tends to be very litigious."

"Your other companies might... you can definitely use competitor keywords. Generally, attorneys will agree that that's not illegal and that's not trademark infringement. But putting those in your ads so it looks like you are that company is very much trademark infringement because it causes confusion for the consumer. So that's another place to keep yourself out of legal trouble. You don't even have to write a trademarked ad to do trademark infringement in Google ads. All you need is just the wrong setting turned on in your ad and a keyword that makes it trademark infringement, and you'll have no idea it's happening because you won't be seeing those ads very often."

"Yes, yeah, absolutely. Because you never... you never realize that those things come together. So I generally... I don't know what you would say. I'd say just don't use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Make a structure where that's not necessary. But if you do, definitely review all of your ads with that Dynamic Keyword Insertion and make sure that you don't have trademark issues, make sure they actually make sense. Because anytime you do something dynamic like that, you just have to be careful about what could possibly pop up because there's tons of variations."

"Yeah, yeah. No, I'm on the same page. I think using Dynamic Keywords is something that's much more tactical, and I wouldn't recommend using as someone who doesn't work with ads daily. So that's my opinion on it."

"And you mentioned too earlier where you mention the ad score, and that's one thing too. Uh, anytime you build an ad in Google, Google will give you an ad score, and it will dynamically update to be better or worse as you're building out the ads. It drives me nuts. If there's one piece of advice I could give on that - just don't pay attention to the ad score. It's not worth it. Google doesn't have your best interest in mind because that ad score is based on a very narrow set of rules that are meant to be widely purposed for every type of ad. And the problem is, I've listened to tons of podcasts, tons of other agencies talking about their results of using, trying to... these ad scores, and it doesn't seem that it really has a meaningful impact on the ads in the way that people really think it does."

"I worked for an agency, and one of the top things on our list of things to do when we were building ads was make sure your ad score's as close to 100% as possible. And it did nothing. And honestly, like the ads that agency did not do well with ads in my opinion, and I think that's one of the reasons is they were so focused on what Google was telling them to do that they weren't focused on what was actually needed to happen."

"It's similar with the Google sales reps that call all of us every day. I get daily calls from them, and they don't know what you need to be doing. They know what Google wants you to be doing, and that's not going to benefit you. So as far as the ad scores go, when you're building out those ads, like you do want to have quality headlines and things like that, but Google will... if you're trying to hit that 100% score, Google will be stuffing keywords into your ads. You will be building ridiculous headlines that don't make sense just because you need another headline or something like that."

"Like kind of like you said, there's 15 headlines, four descriptions, and some other options as well. You don't have to have all 15 and all four if it doesn't work. Sometimes there are situations where you don't need all that, but Google in every situation can say you need all 15, you need all four. So I just recommend don't pay attention to the ad score. With our ads, our ads do amazing, and our ad scores are not a reflection of that. Google standards... yeah, we're just like average and sometimes worse than that. I have one client that's doing just crazy right now. He's killing it, and I think he has an average of like 30% on his ad score, which is in Google's eyes horrendous. Don't worry about it. It's not really worth focusing on. It's at the bottom of the priority list."

"Yeah, I'm gonna join you on your soapbox for just a minute. This gets me fired up. Another one that I just hate - optimization score. This is so... the ad score is for an individual ad. The optimization score is what Google says for an entire account - how well is this optimized? And there's a lot of debate around this because this is why we're not a premier partner with Google. Because Google has this Premier Partner badge. You don't really get much from it, maybe slightly better rep. Most agencies just use it for their marketing to where they can say we're Premier Partner with Google, and it's hard to achieve that because it is hard to achieve that. One, you have to have all these requirements with the number of accounts and how long you manage them and all this different stuff."

"But one that's just non-negotiable for me is you must have an optimization score across your clients of at least 70%. An optimization score is a completely arbitrary metric that Google assigns on an account level saying it's not how well you optimize, it's how well are you following what Google wants you to do. And most of those recommendations are junk. They're not actually good things that actually... yeah, help our clients. So in order for us to be a partner with Google, we have to prove that we follow their rules, not what's best for our clients. And it... it drives me crazy. So that's why we're not... we're not a part of that program."

"But along those lines, we just... I just had an experience with a client over the weekend where I was just... I was looking in there. We were talking about something else, and I look in there and I see in the change history like your... like nightmare where you see 'applied recommendation,' which recommendations are kind of part of their optimization score. They say you should do these things. I'm like, 'Why would we have applied a recommendation? Who is it?' And I look, and it was the client that did it in their app. Like it just popped up and it said, 'Please let us do this. This will improve your results by this much.' And it was to include the Search Partners Network in their ads."

"And so I messaged him immediately, and I'm like, 'Why are you doing this?' And he's like, 'Oh, is that going to be a problem?'

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