Google Ads One-On-One With Lauren Murray
Lucy Clements talks to Lauren Murray to discuss strategies, tactics and tips to manage Google Ads effectively.
Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers pay to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, video content and mobile application installs within the Google ad network to web users.
Google Ads is a powerful marketing platform for businesses to reach their target audience and drive traffic, leads, and sales through online advertising. However, it requires strategic planning, monitoring, and optimization to achieve the best results and it can seem like a daunting and overwhelming task to manage effectively. So how do you manage Google the machine whilst delivering results?
Today, Lucy Clements talks to Lauren Murray to discuss some of the key questions and troubleshooting elements that come up daily from clients when looking at Google Ads and some strategies, tactics and tips to manage Google Ads effectively.
Subscribe for email insights
1. How is the total cost paid to Google calculated?
Number of clicks x cost per click = Total Cost. The cost-per-click is determined by various factors such as bidding strategy, relevancy of term and audience size. See additional questions for the explanation.
2. Do some search terms cost more to have an ad displayed?
Yes, they do. The type of search term, industry niche, audience niche, volume of searches, competition and location are all determining factors. The determining factors are mainly driven by audience size. As we operate in the pharmaceutical and life science industry, the types of products and services are very niche. Generally, the keyword cost is determined by the popularity of the term and therefore the size of the audience. For example, the word “Nike trainers” has 162,000,000 results so the keyword would be extremely cheap. If you use a term like ‘limited edition green Nike trainers 2000’, the number drops to 13,700,000. This keyword would be more expensive to serve as the audience is much smaller. Life Science products and services are not mass products, so are not the same. However, it illustrates how the search term and keyword drives the cost. In essence, the higher the volume of search, the cheaper the term. The more specific the term, the more it costs to service the ad to the right audience as the machine must work harder to find the right audience.
3. What might affect the cost the most? (Impressions, clicks, conversions, search terms, etc.)
Ultimately the number of clicks you get determines the cost. More clicks more cost, less clicks less cost. This is why we want to make sure that the quality of traffic coming to the landing pages through Google is high so that the clicks are genuine as we do not want to be paying for clicks that aren’t relevant. It doesn’t benefit anyone, be it the company or the customer. We work hard to ensure that it is quality traffic through monthly reviews of search terms and keywords to make sure that you aren’t paying for irrelevant clicks. We must remember that Google is a machine and therefore it needs training and education. The more we put into the machine, the higher the quality that is outputted.
But, it is important to note that the cost per click can vary due to the varying search terms and size of the audience. See previous question response. The other area that affects the cost per click is the competition-to-search ratio. I.e. If 10 people search a particular term and there are 10 companies bidding on this term, it will be expensive as it is highly competitive but limited volume.
4. explain why some days cost less and have higher impression levels and other days cost more and achieve fewer clicks and impressions.
As above, more clicks equates to more spend, but this example shows how the cost varies by day as it depends on the search term. You can’t compare day-by-day as you don’t know what was searched by day. The above example implies that on a particular day, the search terms may have been broader in reach resulting in more impressions and therefore a lower cost. Conversely the next day, the cost was higher therefore this implies that this was a more targeted keyword day as the impressions are lower, but the clicks are higher therefore more expensive keywords. Unfortunately, Google has taken away the power to look at search terms at a deeper or granular level in recent years. We can see a broad by-day breakdown but the more you dig, the more Google stops providing the information. We will therefore never know exactly what is being shown but this just shows the importance of monthly keyword management and negative/exclusions so that we don’t give the machine the ability to serve the ad in the wrong places.
5. Some ads are limited by policy in the pharmaceutical sector. Can you maybe explain why and how this occurs?
Google doesn’t like businesses using specific health or financial issues especially if they could affect people. This is why they curb financial or health-related terms. Google also does not support some key pharmaceutical industry advertising such as clinical testing, drug discovery materials, and some devices such as injectables. This means you can’t use certain terms to promote your business. If your business uses keywords that directly conflict with this policy, it gets flagged, and depending on the term depends on the severity of the impact- it may restrict people from seeing it or pull it completely. Anything with the term ‘pharma’ will have a restriction on it served automatically by Google so that people under the age of 18 will not be shown the ad. The pharma term makes it harder for Google to approve for a general audience.
If the term is deemed ‘severe’ then Google will disapprove the ads completely and won’t serve them. You must keep remembering that Google is a machine, and, in some cases, the machine has misunderstood the context of the ad. In this case, there is an appeal process whereby the ad will be reviewed manually by the team at Google.
Here is an example, when COVID just came onto the scene there were lots of businesses trying to exploit the situation by selling masks and test kits online. This happened when people could not buy masks in stores. Sellers were selling products for very high costs thereby exploiting the situation, Google quickly stepped in and introduced a total ban on all products relating to COVID. If you now, try to run ads giving free COVID masks it will get banned because it has the word COVID in it.
To make sure that Google doesn’t limit your ad, pay close attention to the Google policy center to ensure that your ads don’t include any terms that break the policy rules. For more information, please visit the Google Policy Center.
6. Some campaigns are limited by budget. If you increase the budget, will we see significant improvement in results?
We would always recommend taking budget recommendations with a pinch of salt. You must always remember that Google is a machine with the sole goal of making people spend more money. If you spend more Google makes more but that isn’t always the right strategy. Your ads will still work and yes, more budget could help drive impressions and clicks but that doesn't mean it will be quality traffic or drive conversions. The daily budget will be used up very quickly, and you can easily lose control of where the ad is seen and therefore the quality of traffic. Google will potentially push the ad to places and people we don’t want. Google will always want you to spend more money. You need to be very careful with this strategy as it might not deliver any results and could use up the budget very quickly.
We would always recommend using these recommendations and calculations in conjunction with your overall objectives for Google Ads. If your main aim is to drive awareness and increase traffic, then you might consider raising the budget to drive more views of your ad. But bear in mind that the quality of traffic may be compromised.
7. The campaign budget simulator… It Seems interesting and might be effective if advertisers wanted to increase budget.
This is a tool that you can use to see how changes to your campaign’s bids might affect the campaign’s performance. (see more information here: Estimate your results with bid, budget and target simulators - Google Ads Help)
At Orientation Marketing, we look at simulators every month to make sure the campaigns are optimised to the best of their ability. However, you must take this with a pinch of salt and remember once again that Google wants you to spend more money so it will show results that look good but there is absolutely no guarantee, and the reality is often not as they predict. Google will never promise deliverables so they might say that an additional $1,000 will give an additional 25,000 impressions, 600 clicks, and 50 conversions. But if you only get 1 lead, you have wasted $1,000 on serving ads in the wrong place. There is no accountability and no fallback, and you lose control of the quality of the traffic. The page link above goes into detail about the campaign bid simulator and the positives, and these are all correct, but it is telling that Google doesn’t talk about the negatives of using this. You must be very careful using them, and don’t just take what Google says as final. Use this tool in conjunction with other optimization principles such as increasing relevancy. More clicks doesn’t always mean more customers or more conversions.
8. Some advertisers will get a lot of spam conversions through some landing pages, do these spam “conversions” affect cost?
The simple answer is no they don’t, the clicks that bring people to your website are the only metric that counts towards your cost. If you are getting too many people as spam, here are some options you can look at to drive lead quality:
Refine the advertising strategy- review the ad copies- including headlines and descriptions.
Refine the campaign including a keyword review and search term review. Also, look at the type of phrase such as Broad match or exact match. If the keyword is too broad, it will drive impressions and clicks but may prevent conversions when people reach the landing page.
Landing page review including:
Add more filters to the form such as buying intent.
Does the landing page include the keyword so that people receive what they searched for? E.g. if you search for Nike trainers and click on the ad but the landing page has Adidas trainers, you will not get conversions. The landing page must be linked to the keywords or is this will negatively affect the conversion rate.
Add in software such as Captcha to stop bots.
Look at the landing page from a desktop and mobile point of view. In some cases, on mobile, you have to scroll a long way to get to the conversion point. If this is the case, add conversion points throughout the mobile version. This is also relevant for desktop- review how far the conversion point is on the page.
9. Sometimes companies might appear when people search, and it Does not MATCH what we are targeting from a keyword perspective. Why is this happening?
This is all to do with how Google perceives your business and where and how it shows your ads. Remember it’s in Google’s business interest to get you more clicks as the more clicks you get the more money Google makes. Google doesn’t care about the quality of your clicks or where they come from, but we as your agency do. We filter bad search terms each month, sometimes they can run into thousands of search terms. Every month we add these bad search terms to the exclusion or negative keyword list. This means that we stop Google from showing our ad if this is searched during the month. As you can imagine this is an ongoing process month in and month out to ensure relevancy. We are the gatekeepers to make sure Google is using your money in the right way to the right people. It is a case of Brain vs Machine daily.
For more on Google Ads and PPC in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you increase your rankings and visibility, visit our section on pay-per-click.
