A question I’m often asked and as it happens I was asked by a web agency for some advice on a potential client who questioned whether his current agency was giving him the service he really needed (not really…). He seemed to have a bit of Google Ads knowledge from the past or at least some advice from someone who had that old knowledge so he questioned keyword match types and some other aspects of his setup. Here’s how my response went after I got access to the Google Ads account:
Hey mate,
I can see how the client was disappointed in his Google Ads performance, certainly in that niche you have to be extremely tight with the keywords and ads employed and these days Google does not make that as easy as it was in the past.
An example in how that control has been removed is in the sometimes ridiculous search terms Google will deem as suitable matches to a keyword. For example, in this case I see that Google matched someone seeking “cleaner agency sydney” to the keyword “commercial cleaners sydney” even though the keyword was an EXACT MATCH keyword.
In that case the search intent was probably from someone looking for a domestic cleaner or maybe even someone looking for a job as a cleaner but Google in its wisdom thought the search intent was a good enough match to the keyword “commercial cleaners sydney”.
The PHRASE MATCH keyword “commercial cleaning” triggered ads to show to people searching “commercial grout cleaning”, “commercial dry cleaning” and other clear mismatches.
Unfortunately, Google has been wrestling previous controls back from advertisers, it seems it really wants clients to just hand over their credit cards and hope for the best from Google.
I’m happy to do better for the client but they have to understand stuff like that is the way the system works now and the only way around it is to develop a huge list of negative exact, phrase and broad keywords that stop the mismatches. Those sorts of lists develop over time as it’s simply not possible to know in advance just how crazy Google’s attempts to match searchers to keywords can get (and it varies from time to time too).
There are some other things the client mentions which indicate a misunderstanding of how some Google Ads features really work these days which I’ll mention here:
There is no point setting a campaign to ‘Maximise Conversions’ unless there is a substantial history of conversions (I’d recommend at least 50 per month) AND the budget is several times the average CPC. Without those two the algorithm just can’t work properly! That now said, I don’t recommend ‘Maximise Clicks’ as a strategy except in very particular circumstances.
Google’s ‘Ad Strength’ means absolutely nothing in terms of Ad Quality! It’s just an indication that all 15 headline fields were not completed and that’s often a good thing. If you want real control over the ad text you DO NOT give Google 15 different messages to choose from. Google tries to push advertisers into giving them huge control over the ads as well as the search terms so it marks ads as ‘Poor Ad Strength’ to force the issue!
Google Ads will often flag an issue of ‘No Google Tag’ – we see it all the time as for some reason they ignore the other Google tags for Google Analytics and/or Google Tag Manager which are often better ways of getting the data we really want!
Sitelinks – if you are running a dedicated landing page for an ads campaign then it would be silly to use sitelinks as they would defeat the purpose of the dedicated LP so they’re not always a good idea. Interestingly we sometimes see Google flag sitelinks should be added when the site is a ONE PAGE website – clearly sitelinks are impossible in such a case!
I’d suggest testing two versions of the landing page – one with the video and one without (but amended to show any offers boldly), there’s been studies showing many users do not want video ‘presentations’ when looking for a service so it would be good to test that aspect.
I don’t know why other agencies had difficulty with logos and Google emails/alerts, that sounds odd but I can’t see any problem with setting those things up.
Let me know if you want to take things further on this client’s Google Ads.