Andrew Goodman has been doing the Google Ads, back then AdWords, thing since 2000, so for over 20 years now under his agency Page Zero Media. He wrote one of, if not, the first book on Google Ads named 21 Ways to Maximize ROI on Google AdWords Select and in 2005 “Winning Results with Google AdWords.” We spoke a bit about the earlier days and how the industry has changed over the years.
Andrew explained that the fun part is when you have a new challenge, a company and business that is new, in retail, he said one of his company’s specialties is in this niche. When it comes to commercial intent, Google has some nifty features you can leverage on the paid side. You can hear the way he talks about his trade; it is like a form of art and science at the same time. He is trying to blend the right mix of shopping units with other text ads, higher funnel, lower funnel, and then mixing in all the audience targeting and retargeting is hard to do. His company takes over accounts and sees how some of these companies are bleeding money in their paid search campaigns, and that is sometimes hard to see.
One example he gave was that he took over a campaign for a client that was first run by Google directly and then for a short while another firm. It was just done wrong in so many ways. You must hit your KPIs, and you have to make sure your CPCs and CPAs are set right.
We then briefly talked about the new Google Partner agency rules. He discussed how often clients with no certification have access to campaigns, and to ask those clients to remove their access so that you can keep your Google Partner level is something you just do not ask. As an FYI, these requirements have been pushed back because of COVID. He does plan on having a talk with the Google Ads team about this, but not yet.
When it comes to experimenting and testing; he said it is all about testing in the paid search world. There are macro-level strategies and things like smart bidding. There is a labs feature called Google Campaigns drafts and experiments, he said you use the experiment part - you do not need the draft part - but you can use just 50/50 experiments. If you run them long enough, you can test things and clearly see what works best. He did give us some caveats and things to watch out for when it comes to ROARS and other retargeting areas. He said Google has shoehorned in features and techniques have worked in a big way to get their ad revenue to grow, but it works on new paid search folks, not paid search experts. He talked about a few of these different automated techniques that you need to watch out for.
Andrew said you can follow him on TheScienceOfPPC.com and follow a 50-part sites by Andrew on PPC tips, tricks and methodologies. You can also follow him on Twitter @andrew_goodman.
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Forum discussion at YouTube.
