PPC Settings Google Doesn't Want You to Know About

[MUSIC PLAYING] PPC settings Google doesn't want you to know about. Welcome to Legal Marketing 101. I'm Toby Rosen. Today, we're going to be talking about Google Ads settings that Google doesn't really want you to use, but that I actually really like. However, before I dive into what these settings are, I do just want to disclaim that I completely understand why Google tends to guide users away from the settings we're about to talk about. We're going to be talking about using some different bidding strategies and different optimization strategies that Google generally wants us to let them do for us with their automated and algorithmic and AI and whatever you want to call it systems. Google tends to prompt users to select more automated systems for their campaigns because most users will benefit from these automated systems. And don't get me wrong, I do too. But because I've managed a lot of campaigns, I know that there are some situations that call for a slightly more hands-on approach, especially when we're getting started with a new campaign. So let's dig in. First up is enhanced CPC. This is a bidding strategy. And I'm going to use a few acronyms here. And if you're unfamiliar with them, I'll leave a couple of links in the show notes where you can read a bit more about these terms. But I also strongly recommend doing something like a course to get a basic understanding of how PPC or pay-per-click advertising actually works. If you're going to be managing your own campaigns or managing people who manage your advertising, having a cursory understanding of concepts like CPC, conversions, ad rotation, and things like that are really helpful when communicating with your team. I strongly recommend the PPC course I created for the Rosen Institute. This is my father Lee Rosen's law practice management program, which you'll also find a link to in the show notes. Okay, back to enhanced CPC. Similar to a basic cost-per-click strategy where we're setting bids individually on every keyword, enhanced CPC is basically the same, except that it is, of course, enhanced. What that means is that Google's algorithm is actually interfering a little bit in your bidding. Similar to bidding strategies like target return on ad spend or target CPA, when Google thinks that a click is likely to lead to a conversion, it might raise your bid a little bit automatically in that particular search auction. If it thinks a user maybe isn't as likely to lead to a conversion, though, it's then going to bid a little bit closer to your set bid or maybe even a little lower. I kind of think about it like AutoTune. That's the music software that allows you to change the pitch of your voice when you're singing. You can use AutoTune to be successful in a few different ways. If you're a completely terrible singer but you have some other aspect of you going for you, you can use autotune to completely change your voice, how it sounds, how it's pitched, and still become a star. But if you're a talented singer already, you can just use it to be creative and to make every single note pitch perfect even if you're off by just a hair on a difficult note. Here's another way to put it. Ed Sheeran or Beyonce probably do use a little bit of autotune, but it's something like makeup or is a creative tool. But that doesn't take away from the art that they create. But the same also goes for T-Pain. The application of this tool is just really different. And if you don't know, T-Pain can sing "Check It Out" on YouTube. But how do we actually use this? When you're setting up your Google Ads campaign, simply enable Enhanced CPC in your campaign settings. Or, go and visit the settings to see what bidding strategy you're currently using. go changing things right away, especially if you're currently on an automated or fully automated strategy. Doing that without a game plan of how to execute things will absolutely tank your campaign performance. Before you switch over to enhanced CPC, you really need to come up with a strategy for your bidding and rules for how to implement and optimize it. Enhanced CPC can be a really powerful tool in low traffic situations or in situations where keeping bids low is critical. It's also great in a crisis, when conversion prices have increased a lot under an automated strategy and we just can't figure out where Google's system is overbidding. Using enhanced CPC allows us to bring it back to basics but still get this helping hand from Google so that everything in our account is still pitch perfect. In some situations, though, that helping hand can be too much. with automated strategies for bidding that can sometimes seem really rigid in terms of their capability to adjust to bids and conversion prices. And Google's ad rotation optimization can have some, let's call it interesting, effects on our campaigns. By default, Google optimizes the rotation of your ads. What this means is that if you have more than one ad in a particular ad group, Google is, default going to start automatically testing which ad is generating the most clicks and/or conversions. And then it's going to show the winning ad more often or mostly. It's like a mini-AB test, which I've talked about here before. And in some situations, this optimized ad rotation can be a big benefit. But we're talking about things Google doesn't want you to know. And what Google doesn't want you to know here is that it's generally not re-evaluating your ads. If you load 6 to 10 ads into an account, turn on the spend, and let it run for 6 months, Google's going to do all of its testing, depending on what testing it does, in the first 2 to 12 weeks of that. And then it's going to assume that it got things right, and it definitely can get things right sometimes. And, of course, this system may change with AI and with more development at Google, and I really hope it does. But this system, the way Google optimizes and doesn't seem to reevaluate, can really be a limiting factor for performance if it's not understood what's actually going on in the account. And again, we're talking about a more involved solution for ads management here when we're talking about fixing these problems. But switching over to manual ad rotation is the way to go if you want full control over how your ads are displayed. Yes, the burden is on your shoulders to do the testing. It's on your shoulders to make the changes and to improve your performance. at the same time, for firms with low traffic or firms who just want to start with a small budget, the optimization that Google does could kick in before you have enough data to be statistically relevant. And this is going to hamstring your efforts. Look, this optimization is not a bad thing. Don't get me wrong. But it's really important for us to understand how our campaigns are affected by the systems Google puts front and center for ad management. So if you think you might have your ad set to optimize automatically and you want to take over and do your own testing, once again, you're going to navigate over to your campaign settings for the campaign you want to update. You'll need to find ad rotation and then set it to do not optimize for completely unoptimized rotation. Google is constantly updating these options though, so even by the time this episode is published there may be a better option that allows Google to start to get a better picture of what's going on in your account so they can really optimize and adjust things. At the end of the day, we are on the same team with Google. It might not sound like it sometimes, and I personally might get really, really irritated with them sometimes for making it more difficult to get hands-on with campaigns and with data. But again, at the end of the day, they're providing products so that more people can manage ads effectively. Google Ads has a troubled history with users coming and going rather quickly, but there really is an aligned interest between advertisers and Google. We're both trying to provide the right information to the right people at the right time. That's it for Legal Marketing 101. Check out rosenadvertising.com for more. Thanks.[MUSIC]