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What to Do if Your Google Ads Campaign Is Not Converting on Cold Terms - Part 2

John Moran, our Senior Client Strategist, continues to dig deep into the Google Ads account that hasn't been converting on cold terms. He doesn't analyze the Performance Max campaign, which only converts on brand terms. He also analyzes their YouTube ad sequence campaigns that don't seem to be getting any sales. He also dives into the important metrics to cover, attribution, and all the traffic sources. Listen to this episode now and discover John's recommended strategies for better targeting and traffic quality to improve overall campaign performance.

If you haven't seen Part 1 yet, watch it here:   

 • 🧐 What to Do if Your Google Ads Campa...  


PS: This episode is from a recent internal Solutions 8 training.


Learn about the Solutions 8 Digital Marketing Services here: www.sol8.com/digital-marketing-services


0:00 Intro

0:32 What to Do if Your Google Ads Campaign Is Not Converting on Cold Terms - Part 2

5:42 Check all ad spend in all traffic sources

10:42 Considering the time lag with conversions and conversions (by conv. time)

15:46 John’s SOP when running YouTube ad sequence campaigns



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Transcript
John:

So our Google ads campaign, especially our PMAX campaign is

2

:

not doing anything for us because

that is going to live and die.

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:

I would imagine you've

probably seen performance max.

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:

If we're following that correlation, it's

like when product syncs up, we look great.

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Proxy down, we look bad because

performance max is using that

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:

as a external traffic source.

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We're not necessarily

driving any of our own users.

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:

and then this thing also gets

blown up where it's like,

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So John, if I'm seeing like, we've just

launched that YouTube campaign, and

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we're not getting a whole lot of traffic,

but I'm seeing Shopify, we're just not

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like top line numbers aren't moving.

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Like orders are down or

total sales are down.

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So I'm just like, I'm having a hard time.

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I guess with the client, I know the power

of a top of funnel strategy on YouTube and

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driving good quality traffic, like top of

funnel, and then converting through brand

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or wherever they're going to convert.

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But it's hard for me to justify, when

I'm not seeing anything like top of line

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really move, like in terms of sales, like

sessions have increased conversion rates

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going down, If you can help me Absolutely.

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So here's 1 thing to note is when

you're looking at these metrics in

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the back end, the different stream,

like gross and net or attribution.

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All this right here, for example, is

a total amalgamation of everything,

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which means when you drove your YouTube

campaign, so to go to the online store.

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Yes, this is a different,

what date range are you at?

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This is the date that you started YouTube.

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Okay.

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There was also a sale in between

here, which muddles things a bit.

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Exactly.

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Now, what happened on ProductSync

during that time that lost

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61 percent of its revenue?

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I think he pulled back his spend.

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So those two things are not Are going to

cause, this to not be a reliable, metric.

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So while we're looking at leading

indicators, like we started

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YouTube online store did better.

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Okay, now what was the online store?

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Why was it getting better?

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let's look at some traffic sources.

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So traffic on direct is

gonna be down heavily.

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All attribution side of here sucks.

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The direct traffic is things inside

of the back end of Shopify by

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saying this came from product sync.

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where's product sync?

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Product syncs on our site.

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So we're sending our own

traffic to ourselves.

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Yes, attribution Shopify is dead.

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That's why this number here is going

to be really hard to attribute.

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So sales by traffic source

of being down indirect.

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Means that these here are going

to be a little bit messed up.

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This isn't real metrics because this

means that there is an attributed

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sale, which would mean that these

metrics here, which is funny to

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think about all of this revenue here.

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7, 000, 7, 000, 6, 000, 6, 000 is

only going to be able to be identified

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and some here.

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So it's interesting because this means

I don't know, but this means I know.

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So you see how the brand went down 37%.

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So our brand seems to be following

whatever their product sync outreaches

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to Boola, Outbrain, Influencer.

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So our Google ads campaign,

especially our PMAX campaign

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is not doing anything for us.

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Because that is going to live and die.

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I would imagine you've

probably seen performance max.

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If we're calling a correlation, it's like

when product sinks up, we look great.

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Proxy down, we look bad because

performance max is using that

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as the external traffic source.

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We're not necessarily

driving any of our own users.

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and then this thing also gets

blown off where it's like, ah,

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like awesome Easter sale people.

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Oh, my God.

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Look at the Delta between these two.

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So this Delta is the same as that

Delta, which is the same as that Delta.

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so the blue has stayed about the same.

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The blue was only lifted up

by the purple, pushing it up.

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A lot of returning customers.

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New customer growth is if the blue is

starting to crawl away from the purple,

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but we already established that this

company makes majority of its first

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time sales through attentive and Clavio.

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Where's it coming from?

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Taboola, Outbrain, not Pmax, but when

we drive good old fashioned standard

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shopping, as an example, and remember

my glass ceiling meeting from everybody,

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a few weeks ago when I said traffic

sources will have different glass

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ceiling, standard shopping might

hit and media efficiency ratio crash.

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With 10 grand a month, that might

be the only 2 percent of available

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traffic that we have in direct response

that wants to buy our product today.

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So only 2 percent of the available

market that wants to buy your

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product at any given time that

may 10 grand might be 20 grand.

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I don't know.

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But when we start to push past that, we

see NCAC drop or NCAC keep climbing up.

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Okay.

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We hit a point to make

sure in terms of pullback.

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This though is going to be so

heavily reliant on this dude

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here telling us what the hell he

is doing on that channel there.

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If you're going to have 200, 000 swings

in 30 days, nothing that we do is going

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to be helpful, but we should see though.

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NCAC, boom, fluctuate 10, 20%, but at

crazy volumes, 40 NCAC, 10, 000 sales.

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50 NCAC, 60, 000 sales, 20 NCAC, 12 sales.

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So those things are, the NCAC is going to

fluctuate based on the amount of volume,

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usually higher volume, slightly higher

NCAC, lower volume, slight lower NCAC.

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So when we're looking at these big

swings, do we know if there's a

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cost associated that he has here?

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No, I don't know.

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Okay.

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And you said that he's running Google

and Meta, but he also runs Tubula,

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Outbrain, those other types of things.

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Yeah, those do have

costs associated to them.

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Yeah.

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And like affiliate.

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So that would obviously,

yeah, it would have a cost.

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Yeah, so that's what we have to

do is we have to get, hey, what

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are you spending everywhere?

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Because we're going to be driving some

high quality, good old fashioned traffic.

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you're doing a meta.

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But it's also going to look like meta.

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It's going to look crappy, but if we

can see that we can have a scalable

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achievable NCAC, because once they get

to your site, sir, it was a guy, right?

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Yeah.

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Once we get to your

site, sir, they buy that.

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They go through the quiz and then you

text them and boom, we got a new customer.

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Or then they start Googling Cora things.

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is it good?

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And then Cora converts

them under native ads.

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I don't know, but all of the conversion

paths that these people have, that he

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has figured out how to take, we want to

increase the amount of traffic to it.

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We just can't, say PMAX followed

product sync and now we're good.

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Yeah.

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We've known this for a

long time with the PMAX.

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It's just that even when we run standard

shopping, like standard shopping We'll

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also stick with the branded terms.

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So we can't get standard shopping

to go cold or even show like

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impressions or whatever on cold

terms, peptide cream or whatever.

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Like we get little volume there.

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So that also becomes hard.

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The only traction on like top funnel, cold

stuff was P max from, even though it's

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half free marketing, and branded terms.

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have you run a non

branded center shopping?

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Yes.

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repair and release.

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they all should be non branded,

but they'll still branded

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terms will squeak in there.

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this is good.

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because like really good amount

of quality down here, but, almost

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like next to zero conversions,

which is like very high in CPA.

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Yep.

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And that's the same as.

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I was just going to say, we didn't

see like a huge difference in

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Shopify, but we could have been

looking at the wrong metrics and

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that's totally on us if we were, but.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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That's the thing too, is like this one

might've crushed it or might be really

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broad, but peptides for skin, like that

seems to be a good, like when we can

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attribute something that looks healthy.

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Yeah.

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It was a good term when

we could attribute it.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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So if we say peptides,

that's 100 right there.

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that's fantastic.

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And we probably, we don't even

know what really came from this,

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but peptides was like, yeah, boom.

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And it was pretty consistent for

a hundred bucks, which we look at,

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an average order value of one 26.

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That's a, probably a really

shitty attribution, but

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we're still giving them a 1.

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25, even though we can attribute.

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But yeah, so this is a good

indicator of good quality traffic.

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what I would say is a good idea is to

go through and see like the themes.

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So it definitely seems like a

peptide, neuropeptide, peptide,

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even though that was called signal

does was peptide, skin camera,

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peptides, like all of these are good.

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So we turn this into a, try

to use a peptide, and do it

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like a, do it T row as of 20%.

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this has got good click.

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The rates got really good.

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this would be a really good indicator

to start to push into, to see how that

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affects our NCAC totals, because this is

where we can see the interest, whether

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they immediately buy on the site majority

of our ad spend should be going towards,

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increasing that good quality traffic.

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I think that PMAX is just trying to

get the returning users or people that

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are, Googling things about their brand.

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. Yeah.

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That is what's happening.

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Okay.

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So John, in the sequencing campaign

in YouTube, for the same account, it

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is, showing like it conversion in last

seven days, but in North it is zero.

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Can you just help me why it is.

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Like

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Absolutely.

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when you're looking in the last 14

days, what do you wanna measure?

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Is the time lag between

conversions and conversion?

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By time, what The go away stupid thing.

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So check this out.

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This is the last 14 days.

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Let's just count this here.

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At day one ish, the

blue is the conversions.

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The red is the conversion

by conversion time.

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So there is a time lag here between

when they started to engage with our

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content versus when they actually

pulled the trigger on something.

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And you'll see that this is, on

day two, this started to work.

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You just didn't see it until day six.

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So that top of funnel.

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Is saying, okay, we're starting

to hit some cold traffic.

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They're starting to

engage with our content.

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Yes.

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When did they buy?

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we spent the money on day one.

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They bought on day six ish.

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I don't see the dates here, unfortunately,

but those are the things that we look

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for is those kind of, Patterns, I guess

I would say those are the patterns that

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we're looking at it's gonna be very much

like meta we're hitting that cold traffic.

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They're not just going to see YouTube.

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I'd be like, Oh, my God.

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And then by, we're warming them up.

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That's why high frequency is good on

YouTube, which is what campaign does is

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this focuses on a high frequency because

the structure of the sequence means you

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have to go through a high frequency.

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That's what's really good here is

they're seeing at least four and if

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they skip, they still see, skip one.

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It's view base and the

whole story is different.

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Like they might look same from

thumbnail, but they are totally

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different videos, different story

and all of the other things.

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like everything below this line,

impression skips, as our impression steps,

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what this means is that, if they view,

and then skip this one, if they also

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skip this one, they don't see that one.

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So what I would say is take these here

and change this to, we can't rebuild.

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Don't rebuild it.

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It's a big pain in the ass to rebuild us.

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But if it's usually a, impression

based skip, what it means is that

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they can view this one, skip,

and then they don't see that one.

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They don't see that one.

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So usually at any point in time

that they skip, these are usually

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just impressions after this, because

I'm going to force you to watch the

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next ones, whether you skip or not,

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especially here, it's if I skip

that one, they're not going

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to see anything down here.

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Because they have to view this

one in order to continue on, they

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have to view this one, they'll go

through this one, which is great,

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but see how you did this one.

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Okay.

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So you skip the 1st 1, you skip this 1.

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Now you're going through all of it.

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So this is probably going to have

the biggest path is step to skip 1

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step to skip 1 and then everything else.

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has less impressions because this

is the path that they are taking

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now because of that structure.

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Yeah, this is one that

says, okay, did you skip?

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Yeah.

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Okay.

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This one's going to be it.

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Everything else is going

to be you watched it.

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You watched it.

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You watched it, which is good.

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It's okay.

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but this will just skew those metrics

into being like, okay, if you skip the

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perfect scenario and I force a video

at every section there on out, do they

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come back on the 3rd or 4th video?

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But we can't see that because

we're just forcing him through.

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Okay.

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You can skip everything

and this is the path.

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So all of our non engage users have

to go through this path and we don't

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see if we ever pick them back up yet.

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That makes sense.

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But, yeah, this is honestly in

this scenario, this is perfect.

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This is what we want.

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a 443 cost for conversion on impression

based attribution, which is I'm

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imagining is probably going to be it.

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Out of a type, gauge view, step two,

add sequence two, five, engage views.

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Great.

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This is okay.

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as long as we can confirm this is fairly

cold traffic, which we can look at.

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Here's one thing that I always

do in my YouTube sequences.

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is build another ad group with the

people that, visit the site and

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then clone that, from the other one.

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So it's a big pain in the

butt, actually an easier way.

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Just clone the campaign and in

the campaign here, have your

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exclusions be website traffic.

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So this one stays cold.

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If they ever click,

they jump into the next.

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The other campaign, which

is the remarketing one.

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Then what's nice is if you want

to take that two 50 a day and then

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the remarketing, let's say is that

50 a day, it's like, all right,

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scale, I can scale a two 51.

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Not necessarily scaled.

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That could be going towards warm traffic.

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That's on the site.

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Sequencing stays pretty

cold though, which is okay.

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So we're okay for now.

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That's just yeah.

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All right.

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Everything that we're

doing is actually good.

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We're starting to push, starting to scale.

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I wouldn't just dump all of our money

into this one to scale it because

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this will turn more warm later on.

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that's what Google does.

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so it'd be good to potentially

divide those into a prospecting

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only and remarketing only that

have the same videos that when they

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click, they jump into this campaign.

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And so you can raise this up

20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, which means,

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a 200 hour campaign and a 50.

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He had 10%.

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A 200 goes into 2050 goes to 55,

so they can still keep the same

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amount of engagement, but you're

able to scale something that, is

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prospecting traffic to hold that in.

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This is fun.

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Thanks, John.

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I appreciate it.

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Thank you so much.

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You got it.

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Good stuff.

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