Drive and Convert (Ep. 098): How To Turn Your Google Ads Around

Listen to this episode:

About This Episode:

Jon and Ryan explore the challenges brought about by the shift to GA4 and how it has impacted Google Ads. Thankfully, there are some steps that companies can take in order to turn things around. 

They explore the critical importance of feeding the right data into analytics and the impact of setting appropriate goals to stay ahead of the competition. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What challenges companies are experiencing with Google Ads
2. How to leverage Google Ads Pixel
3. Why companies need to review and adjust their goals 
4. How to optimize product feeds
5. Why you need to test and measure any changes

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey Ryan. So, AI is all the buzz, and so many marketing platforms have been using it in their campaigns long before it was cool, let’s say. The latest version of Google Ads, right? It’s called Performance Max, which we know is code word for AI ads, if you will.

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
And I’m seeing so few people having success with it, really. I’m seeing a lot of more people venting their frustrations around Google Ads account heading in the wrong direction and I think they just feel hopeless. They just don’t see any hope in sight and they simply just can’t figure out how to turn an automated account around. I’m assuming your team has encountered this and you’ve been able to do that.

Ryan:
Thankfully we have. Every Google change is always like, oh my gosh, is this going to be the one that we can’t figure out? And it happens so often, I should probably just know that we figured out, but I still get nervous. But that’s also why we have a job as Google keeps changing and there are some things we’ve uncovered that can help direct AI a little bit better in your favor, if you will.

Jon:
Okay, that’s great to hear. And I had no doubt you would’ve been able to fix this, which is why I’m sure we wanted to talk about this today. All right, so knowing you have fixed it, we got to have you spill all the secrets here. Can you walk us through some of the methods your team has come up with?

Ryan:
If I know, to be fair, I am not the one in the weeds and if you expect that you’re going to be disappointed. But I do understand quite a bit, quite a lot of it just being in the industry a lot. And anytime there are issues in a Google Ads account and I look at, I don’t know how many hundreds a month, I look at a lot of accounts a month and you always have to go back to what’s being tracked and can you trust that? And so, the first thing I go into is let’s look at conversion tracking and let’s make sure that that actually is passing the logic test before I go look at even the data in the account. And so first off, if you’re frustrated with your Google Ads account and you think it’s going in the wrong direction, how do you know it was going in the right direction before? And it ends up being one of the more confusing pieces for a lot of businesses as they start looking at Google Ads where they felt like, I get that a lot.
“Well, I feel like my Google Ads was doing a really good job before and now it’s not.” I get it. Business owners do have feelings and sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re pizza from yesterday. But the change to GA4 was a massive shift in a lot of ways, but for business owners that didn’t have a tech team or an agency helping guide that transition, Google did not necessarily make it easy to continue seeing the right data. And so, often if you had conversion tracking working in Universal Analytics and had revenue tracking in there and you made the change to GA4, quite often that new GA4 is not tracking revenue period. And so, they’ve assumed that, Hey, I had these wonderful goals in Performance Max that were working at the beginning of ’23 and now they’re not. Well if you don’t have revenue tracking going in there, step one, let’s get revenue in your account in Google Analytics, so, you can see that.

Jon:
And this, it goes back to a lot of the GA4 issues people are having right now too, right? So we did a show about that not too long ago. It might be worth-

Ryan:
Yes, go back and look at that and there’s some easier ways if you haven’t talked a little data to fix your GA4 revenue tracking, it’s a pretty easy button for you. It does cost money, but it’s probably worth it if you haven’t gotten revenue tracking at this point in listening to this in the new year. Also though, understand the differences with GA4. Again, we just talked about it, but it is data-driven instead of last non-direct. Often that is going to show less credit to Google Ads and that if that is your source of truth going into Google Ads, it’s going to show less revenue and the pixels going to have less data to work with. And also comparing data is going to be wonky as well. And you can again go back and listen to some more GA4 specifics, but I would like to see most brands spending money on Google Ads, not use GA4 data in their Google Ads for optimization.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
Put back in the Google Ads pixel. Even if you really love GA4 revenue tracking, I do think you should have a backup and I think the Google Ads pixel should be functioning and collecting revenue even if you’re not using that as a primary source. Many companies out there, the reason they’re feeling like their Google Ads account is doing worse is because their conversion tracking is tracking multiple things and they’ve got a bunch of Monopoly money in there. So, the Pixel thinks it’s doing awesome. Then you get in there and you’ve got oh, big commerce revenue tracking, Google Ads tracking, GA4 tracking, and then you have calls that have been associated with some revenue number from five, six years ago still in there, and all of a sudden your Ads pixel thinks it’s generating a Hundred-thousand-dollars of revenue when in reality it’s probably driving somewhere like $30,000 in revenue.
And so, that also can cause things to go in the wrong direction for your account. So, make sure in the conversions tab of Google Ads, you believe what it’s showing in there that directionally it’s close to what is processing through your virtual processing account. There’s not a lot of repeat rate. Oh, this is a fun one I didn’t even put in my notes. So, when you go into the conversion area of Google Ads, I always look at the table, so it comes up and there’s a little blue link that says view conversion table, but it lists them all out. So, you can see all of them on the same list and it’s much clearer than the original one. Google used to have by default the repeat rate show. Now they don’t. And so, the repeat rate says it’s usually 1.05 and says 5% of your purchasers purchase another time in whatever window you’re looking at.
It should be usually 30 days for most e-commerce and 5% to 6% repeat rate is about right, especially if you’ve got your post-purchase stuff going on correctly and loyalty and all that stuff. 5% is normal. If you’re looking at 40% or 50% repeat rate, you might have an email going out to verify tracking, shipping, tracking and all that, and they’re going back to the same URL that was the conversion page and you’re firing that pixel again. So, it’s collecting that revenue and conversion again, a lot more Monopoly money, but you have to go in and edit columns now in that table and add repeat rate. Just an annoying extra step that I don’t know why.

Jon:
And you thought you couldn’t get in the weeds, here we are. I’m pretty sure-

Ryan:
Yeah, I was like, well, that’s a very important one-

Jon:
You got it.

Ryan:
At least conversion tracking because that’s the core of the data you are feeding into a pixel to achieve your goals. So, make sure your GA4 is collecting revenue, make it a secondary tracking pixel. Don’t include it in primary and let’s go with Google Ads if you can because then it’s showing the actual revenue you’re looking at and the Google Ads pixel does claim more credit, and so it’s going to be a little more aggressive, but it gives it enough data to start firing, especially in small accounts. If you’re only getting five to 10 conversions a month through Google Ads, the pixel is really going to struggle to see how you can be competing in the marketplace and find opportunities. So, what inevitably happens on those small accounts is you start the Performance Max campaign, which is the one that’s most of the AI and Google Ads and doing most of the lifting for small accounts, even big accounts.
We use it across almost all of ours because the AI is very powerful and honestly functions very well. If it doesn’t have enough conversion data, it’s going to move further down the funnel where there’s less volume, less conversions, and it becomes this slow little decline trickle where you’re feeling about your ads account doing worse is actually what’s happening because it just can’t find a way to get conversions at that mid and upper funnel. And so getting that Google Ads pixel in there, often we’ll give it some more conversion data, so that it can find opportunities to go compete where it wants to.

Jon:
So, I’m guessing you’ll also step on that goal soapbox right now at this point, right?

Ryan:
No Jon, you do know me well. You can’t talk about Google Ads and success in Google Ads if you don’t discuss the right goals. And whatever worked a couple of years ago for your goals, you can probably throw it out the window because it’s gotten more competitive. I mean, I say this every year I think that you need to adjust goals, you need to adjust goals. It’s more competitive. But even just the more recent Turkey 5 we had on a large swath of our accounts, I pulled our enterprise data earlier today, 10% up in revenue, which is about in line with the market. So, kind of what we expected, but costs and CPCs were both up, and so ROAS took a dip largely because of competition. So, if you have a lot of competition on the same pie, costs are going to go up, your return is going to go down.
So, if you’re not adjusting for that within your account, everybody else is going to get more market share than you because they’ve lowered some of their goals for Google Ads, which allows it to get more aggressive and move up funnel while you keep getting forced further and further down and getting less and less impressions. So, be looking at that. I like seeing trend lines. Google Ads still has some very good visualizations on the initial campaigns tab where you can put a time period in place and start looking at, okay, what are my CPCs doing? And then I want to see that against impressions. So, if my CPCs are going down and impressions are going down, most business owners would be like, oh, market’s down. Everything sucks. The economy is down. Potentially, but often if you look at Google Trends and you look at the Keyword Planner, it’s not actually down that much. I had expectations at the beginning of the year that our economy was going to be down much more than it is now. I think

Jon:
I maybe that soft landing has happened or is happening, but I know there’s still a lot of concern out there, but I think it’s also more favorable now than what people would’ve thought six, nine months ago even, so.

Ryan:
Yeah, I mean, thanks that I didn’t take a bet on it. If I could have gone to Vegas and put some bets against the economy at the beginning of the year, I would have.

Jon:
I think you’re not alone in that.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, Founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Okay, so adjust the tracking, fix the goals, then what?

Ryan:
Got it. So, now you’ve got to really think through beyond conversion tracking, what are the inputs you’re giving AI? So in general, AI is a powerful tool. We’ve had a few recent podcasts about AI and what you can do with it, and I think you can do a lot, but it really comes down to garbage in, garbage out. If you’re feeding AI dumb questions or dumb prompts to write something, you’re not going to get very good stuff out of it. So, you got to think about your Google Ads account as the AI system that it is, and you’ve got to give it good stuff. And so, I will probably default to most brands once you’ve got conversion data that is an input into your AI, you fixed that, you’ve got solid goals where you’re using Google Ads to acquire customers, not go out and try to print profit.
That’s what you want as a business owner that comes from other channels. The feed and product feeds have only gotten more and more important over the last 10 years of online marketing. Your feed is going to be the lever that really can set you apart. So, if you are one of the businesses out there that is just using the Shopify plugin or BigCommerces plugin just to send all your data into Google Ads and you haven’t done anything to adjust what’s in that system, you probably need a feed tool. It doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. There’s some expensive ones out there that can do some really phenomenal things. And there is some high-end teams that do phenomenal work in feeds, and companies that pay them usually have a large leg up in the Google Ad space. But if you don’t have the budgets for that, you can do some of the work yourself, but generally start with some type of feed system, even if it’s just exporting your system into a Google Sheet and manipulating it there.
It’s the time-money conversation. If you have more time than money, you’re going to do the manipulation in a Google Sheet yourself, but making sure that your titles are truncated correctly. As you go to Google and search, you’ll see that the entire title is not showing on the Google Shopping results. You need to make sure the important information is showing in that title that’s causing the click. Also, because the Jon and the conversion people are listening too, a lot of people want to make the conversion happen on the title because if they see the right data on the title, they’re going to come by.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
Incorrect. Nobody remembers what they clicked on. They get to the site and now the site is selling not the Google Ad.

Jon:
It needs to get their attention and give them a scent trail we call it, right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
So, give them some reason to want to click it and they think it’s going to take them down that right direction, but if it doesn’t have that scent trail, then they’re not going to follow it.

Ryan:
No, you’ve got to make sure that the title makes sense. If you’re in an industry that is very specific on sizing and brand isn’t as big of deal, you probably don’t need your brand at the beginning, but you need to make sure that the right size is showing in the truncated part or the non-truncated part. So, that’s an interesting test you need to do, but make sure your titles are there. Things like GTINs, that can be a massive thing. If your products have UPC codes and your feed doesn’t have UPC codes, you’re not even in the game at this point. Google knows what the product is, even just by looking at the image. If you assume you’re avoiding Google’s wonderful power by saying, “I’m not going to give it GTINs because I want to be something new,” you’re probably going to struggle unless you have enough budget to reestablish your products in the marketplace rather than leverage what’s already been done.
GTINs are important. If you’re a manufacturer, get your own them on the secondary market, go directly to GS1, and then register them in the manufacturer center at Google. It’s free. And then don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever change your item IDs in Google Ads. That is a fixed thing. If you have the same IDs from 10 years ago, you are light years beyond your competitors that had just gotten new item IDs. So, don’t ever change that piece in your account. And then in the feed there is a section or a field called product type. It gets overlooked by a lot of platforms and it isn’t fed much data by default, but that one single little field is the only place in Googledom, if that’s even a word, in the Google ecosystem, that you can even keyword stuff legally. Take advantage of it. In that little field product type, you can put the brand product descriptors, you can put categories if you want to get creative and put some competitor names in there.
Fully legal, doesn’t break any rules, and it’s not a field that would get you in trademark issues as well. So, if you sell Apple products, you can still have Apple in there or iPhone in there, even though you’re not using it in the ad text itself. Keyword stuff that area and make sure that it’s got appropriate descriptors in there to just give you more opportunity to show, and for that AI to scrape that information and start raising it up for appropriate searches. And that’s where you could really be able to find mid-funnel search terms where they’re looking for your product but don’t know you or your brand yet, can be some really powerful things in there. I’ll also put an asterisk in this area that testing and measuring in the fields and in the feeds are very important.
I wouldn’t wholesale change an entire feed title change, for example, unless I tested a few products in looking at that title and saying, “Okay, well if I move sizing into the front, so it shows first, what changes for these five products in a two week versus two week period?” And what you’re looking for is click-through rate primarily. If it goes up, great, that’s step one, conversions follow on the back end. Hey, you had two wins, take it. And I would roll that change out. If it was negligible or went down, maybe I wouldn’t make that change across the board, but you can’t just assume that because something works for a competitor because you saw it there, it’s going to work for you. That’s putting too much credit on your competitor, test it yourself before that works.

Jon:
It’s always the key. Okay, so it seems like AI can be trained and you can turn the corner around, but I’m also hearing there’s a lot of stuff to do here. So, probably makes sense as soon as you can to hire or as soon as you can afford to hire somebody like the team at Logical Position to kind of get through all these tasks. I mean, half of the stuff you were talking about, I was being quiet because I knew nothing about, I know nothing about, and I know that’s not my specialty. So, I totally understand you got to have the right data, right? So, garbage in, garbage out. Got to set the right goals, right? And then you need to make sure your feed is up to par and at least be manipulating it in a good way as much as you can, and you can spend that effort or get a feed tool and help you do it, and then make sure you’re testing and measuring, right? And a lot of other small things in there as well that we talked about today. So, this is not trivial, but it is possible.

Ryan:
It is, and Google did a great job when they came out with Performance Max to make it very easy for small businesses to get up and running on Google Ads. I give Google a lot of credit for that, but it’s also very difficult to win. Almost anybody can get a Performance Max campaign up and going, but making that work and achieve the business goals you’ve set is very complicated despite the ease of the system from a high level. And so, you can hire an agency if you’ve got the money to do it, and I think that’s a good option for the vast majority of people or businesses.
If you’re going to do it yourself, tread lightly on your changes. And if you go in and make a lot of changes, you can mess up what the pixel is capturing and what that AI system is getting. And you don’t want to go in and bull in a China shop type scenario and just be like, oh, I heard this great podcast, therefore I’m going to go make all these changes all at once and everything’s going to go up into the right because it’s unlikely. And so, research your changes, focus on a small piece of the account, maybe just focus on the feed for a month and make changes in the feed to make sure that you are confident that your feed is doing well.
Then you would go through and hey, maybe you need to dabble in controlling the text more and not letting Performance Max use or build them itself, you controlling some of that. So, there’s some steps you can take and maybe we’ll jump into one of those later in another podcast. But there’s a lot of information out there that you can find a lot of YouTube videos, a lot of podcasts like this or a lot of how tos, even Google’s got some great insights on their blog. So, I think it can be done, but give yourself some grace if you’ve not done this for 15 years, like myself and some of the people we work with because you’re training an AI system and it’s not going to go quick and it’s not necessarily going to be easy.

Jon:
Well, I will say that it seems to me that putting in even a small amount of effort is going to put you ahead of the large pack, right? So, you’ll quickly see some gains from that. So, you just got to do it in the right areas it sounds like. And so, putting in that effort is going to matter.

Ryan:
If you take nothing else out of this, but fixing your conversion tracking and adjusting your goals down to break even, I think you’re going to be ahead of 95% of your competitors, which is a large percentage of them.

Jon:
There you go. Awesome. All right, Ryan, well thank you for schooling us on this and it’s good to hear that you can turn Google Ads accounts around and yeah, we’ll talk to you again soon.

Ryan:
Thanks Jon, appreciate it.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.