Behind the Curtain - Cut Through the Fluff Metrics and Dominate with Google Ads

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Garrett Craig. We're going to talk about some of the biggest mistakes that you can make in a Google Ads account, specifically around the types of information that people, Google reps, and other agencies you could talk to are trying to shove down your throat about metrics that don't matter.

This episode's more about avoiding mistakes than it is about doing things the right way. We'll talk about what some of those biggest mistakes are and how you can avoid them. How are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing great, how are you?"

"I'm good. I'm finally recovered after being sick for like two weeks. I know you've been sick for your entire life, so dude, you get it."

"You know what we found out? Actually, the people that owned our home before us were putting all of our house's water through a water softener, not just into like our shower and our bathtub. So for the last year, we've been drinking softened water, which I guess is really harmful. So we're pretty sure that's why we've been sick for so much, for so long. It's because we've been poisoning ourselves indirectly. So how's that for an icebreaker?"

"Yeah, that's interesting. I think I might do the same with my house. I don't know, am I drinking... I know it's wrong to drink soft water. I think it like takes out certain nutrients or things from the water that you need. I think. I don't know, I'm not a plumber."

"Fair enough. Okay, cool. Well, good to know. Glad you're not sick right now for the first time ever. Hallelujah."

"Yes, I'm excited about our topic today. We've got something I guess a little bit more proactive. I hear from people literally daily about these problems, and ultimately they're not really problems, but I guess that's kind of the point of the episode. It's like what's a problem, what's not a problem, help explain some basic things. And from there, hopefully, we have an understanding of how do you avoid making some potentially pretty major mistakes in an ad account."

"The first one here just has to do with how we're influenced from Google. If you run a Google Ads account, if you have them for your business, you've probably received more than a few phone calls from somebody claiming to be a rep that works for Google. And there's a bunch of different levels here. I mean, there's people who are just calling you trying to get your business to manage your campaigns and stuff like that. That's always a factor. Then there's actual calls from Google, and a trap that I see a lot of people falling into is actually listening to the person on the other end of the phone. And it's not a scam, like these people actually are from Google, but let's talk about these Google reps and kind of what to listen to, what not to listen to, and how do you navigate that whole situation?"

"Yeah, so I think the first thing to understand is there are tiers of Google reps. There are the ones that work for Google themselves, and then there are the ones that work for outsource companies that have a google.com email address, but they are not a direct employee of Google. And that's the first thing: not all of them are actually trained in marketing. They're mostly just like an attack dog with an email signature that says Google, and they'll just hound you all day about a lot of different things. It's also important to know how they're compensated. It's not based on how your campaign performs, it's on how much you spend and how well you retain as a Google Ads user. So they're gonna push you to use tactics to increase your spend, and they will want you to perform well, but the spend is their big target for sure."

"Yeah, the other thing I heard is a lot of it's based on adoption of different Google Ads stuff. So that's the big ones: how much do you spend, and then how well do you adopt whatever Google's saying people aren't adopting. So like a long time ago, it would have been like automated bid strategies back when they didn't work. Reps were pushing them, and now that they work, like everything's good. Nowadays, the big ones are like broad match keywords. What are the other ones that we're hearing a lot?"

"Display expansion, conversion value-based bidding. Auto-apply recommendations is a big one they push. Discovery campaigns, demand gen campaigns which are basically Discovery campaigns. There's always a flavor of the month with these Google reps."

"I'll tell a story briefly just to give you guys an understanding. Like this is a story when I learned a lesson, a lesson that we've now learned so we don't make this mistake again. But yeah, we worked with a Google Ads account, and we started with Search Partners back before we knew that was like a big problem, right? Everybody learns whatever things they know today, you learned them at some point, right? This is when we learn that Search Partners was bad. So we track a bunch of bad leads coming from Search Partners, and we say okay, we want to get rid of Search Partners, turn it off."

"A few months later, client comes to us and says, 'You're getting... we're getting a bunch of spam leads again. What's going on?' I look in the account and what happened? Search Partners are back on. I look at why Search Partners are back on: it's something called Google auto-apply recommendations, where Google decided that it has a recommendation and then it automatically applies that recommendation into the account."

"So that's when I learned the lesson that in order to actually optimize against something that Google doesn't want you to do, what you have to do is not just turn off what you want turned off, but then you have to turn off Google's ability to turn it back on whenever they want to turn it back on, which is just wild to me. Like not only do I have to exclude Search Partners from my campaigns, but I have to turn off Google's ability to re-include them after I've already chosen to exclude them and just tank my campaigns one day."

"So it's crazy, and the level of things going on right now, if you have a Google Ads account, you search on Google for different things, you'll find that Google will actually like show up with a place where it'll say like, 'Hey, you want to spend three times the budget? Just press this button.' Like literally in the Google search results, it will throw that in to make it so easy, and it's insane."

"We've had... it's probably, and this is part of the reason we're making this episode, probably once a month we have a client that gets like called by a Google Ads rep and just says, 'Oh yeah, what they're saying makes sense. I'll just let them do what they want to do.' Or they see a recommendation in their account and they just apply it, and then everything tanks and we have to go in like damage control and fix all the problems."

"So this is kind of like a warning episode. If you're searching on Google and you see a recommendation, don't follow that recommendation. If somebody calls you up on the phone and they tell you that you need to do this to make your campaign better, don't follow that. And I'm not saying that those things are always evil, like there's good recommendations and there's bad recommendations. There's just a lot of bad ones, and I think just blindly following them can be a path to disaster. And then also, you want to turn off auto-apply recommendations. That's a big tip because otherwise, these recommendations, you're actually giving Google the right to go and change them whenever they want to."

"How is it that someone can turn off the auto-apply recommendations?"

"So there's a section of your ad account called the optimization score, and on that page, there's a button in the top right corner, I believe, that says Auto-apply. Just go in there and there's a bunch of different things that Google can auto-apply. Just uncheck all of them and then hit save, and then you're safe from Google deciding to make changes in your account. Like there's even a setting in there to like write new ads for you, and it'll just randomly add in new ads that are off-brand or inaccurate, and then all of a sudden they're spending. So yeah, definitely turn off all of those options and auto-apply."

"Yeah, I totally agree with you. And when you get Google ad reps calling you, honestly, just ask them to take you off their list. There's good and bad reps, but the ones that are calling you are the bad ones. Don't... like that's a good rule of thumb. If they're being tasked with calling lists, they're probably not the ones that you want to drive your PPC strategy."

"Yeah, the only people who get like good reps are if you have like a massive, massive budget, or agencies. But even the reps we get aren't very good, and we have still massive budgets, but they're still just like... okay, I learned more about PPC than you know in like..."

"They know..."

"Exactly. It's a tricky, tricky game."

"So you mentioned something called optimization score. This is the second thing that I want to talk about because this gets into... there's a whole... if you, whoever's listening to this, if you didn't know this already, there's crazy like political divide in the world of search marketing and lots of weird stuff going on. Optimization score is a big piece of this. For anybody who's just listening to this or hearing about this for the first time, Garrett, could you explain like what is optimization score and why it is good or not good?"

"Yeah, it's basically the account health score that Google gives you based on how well you are using their best practices. Like if you're using broad match, if you're adding in values into your conversions, if you're using responsive search ads, if you're adding on ad extensions. There's a lot of good things that go into that score. There's also bad ones, like you are under budget, you could spend three times more. Therefore, your op score goes down by 30 points, right?"

"And so Google preaches that that number, being, you know, perfect 100%, gives your account the best chance at succeeding because you're doing all the best practices. And it's an easy way, just go in there, hit apply on all of them, and your account is off to the races. But that is not true, and people that preach that that number is the end-all or is a key number whatsoever, I would argue, are incorrect."

"Yeah, we obviously do a lot of hiring and we do these skills assessments. We have people look at, you know, different ads accounts and stuff, and it's always so interesting to see what they, you know, what they gravitate towards. Because optimization score, Google just like slaps it right there, like in the very front, you can't miss it, biggest metric around, looks really appealing. And sometimes we have these people that like focus on optimization score when we're interviewing them to hire, and all I can think in my head is like, 'Tell me you know nothing about Google Ads without telling me you know nothing about Google Ads.' All you have to say is, 'Look, your optimization score is...'"

"Yeah, not at all interested in working with you unless like this is your first time looking at a Google Ads account and you've been upfront with us about that and we're hiring for some entry-level position. But like, for the most part, that's a big no-no. But it's wild how misleading a score can be. All I think when I see it from Google is like, 'So you're telling me, according to the metric that you made up that has no basis in my results, that I'm doing this well?' And it's just a little bit crazy."

"And you can actually see Google will show you like the specific recommendations of what you need to apply, and I'm not saying don't look at Google's recommendations. Sometimes I see things in there and it's like, 'Add this audience into your observation list.' I'm like, 'You know what? Sure. Would it be better to observe that audience than not?' Yeah. But then sometimes it's like, 'Turn this keyword to broad match.' Really? That? Or 'Add these keywords,' and it's a bunch of keywords that aren't good. And that can be a really rough position to be in."

"So yeah, anybody who ever talks about optimization score, this is an agency, if this is a Google rep calling you, if it's somebody you're hiring to manage your Google Ads, like just don't focus on it. Because a lot of it is more so the pushing of the adoption of technology, which all in all is not a bad thing. Like if you look at like what was Google really pushing years ago, for example, it was like automated bid strategies, and it was like responsive search ads. And then you look at today, and like responsive search ads and automated bid strategies are like a core of our strategy."

"The difference is we only started using them when they started working, not when Google decided to start using them. But Google probably has like this difficult path to go through of they need a lot... like bid strategies, for example, they're all just based on data, right? So they need a lot of data collected in order to make that strong enough to where it is today. Just the problem is for years it's in this phase where it doesn't actually work, and Google's just trying to like push people to use it because that's what they need in order to get it to the phase where it works."

"I just prefer to be a part of the working, the working strategies, not the not the test and... sometimes beta stuff from Google could be really good. It's just a factor of like focus more on your results than on what they want you to do with your account."

"Yeah, yeah. So then there's a, you know, sort of associated with optimization score, there's this concept of Google agency partners. What can you share about agency partners and how those work and what that means? For anybody listening to this, you probably talked to some agency before that says like, 'Look, we're a partner with Google,' or whatever the case is. Let's talk about what exactly that is and what's going on behind the scenes."

"Yeah, so there are two tiers of being a partner. There's just the basic partner and then there's being a Premier partner, and those tiers get different access to, in theory, to support and reps and beta tests, and like onsite visits to Google Headquarters, right? In theory. And to be the base partner, you pretty much just have to have a pulse. I believe the requirement is that your entire agency account has to have spent $10,000 in the last year, so not a huge requirement."

"And then to be a Premier partner, they require an ad spend component of I think $100,000 in the last year, and then an average optimization score of all your accounts of like 70%, and then a certain number of your team has to be Google Certified. So again, not a high bar. And it's... as agencies, it's difficult to differentiate yourself in sales in any like real way beyond like, 'I'll get you this ROI,' right? And so it's common for agencies to really trumpet that they're a partner or that they're a Premier partner."

"But that's becoming less and less meaningful as Google cuts their resources from all but their largest brands. What I've found is that agencies don't get great reps, brands get great reps. So even if an agency claims that they have their own rep, access is low, resources and support are low, knowledge is low. The big brands though, they get great teams and great support, but that's the Nikes of the world, right? So and that group has become smaller and smaller over time."

"Yeah, to me the biggest piece of this is the manipulation involved with it. Notice the requirements, and by the way, we as an agency match all of these requirements except for one, and I'll tell you very specifically why we don't match that requirement. But notice the requirements are a certain amount of ad spend. Okay, cool, any good agency should have a certain amount of ad spend, right?"

"Next requirement: certain people have taken their bogus trainings on Google Ads. Okay, I guess I think the requirement is like two... like two people out of like our 28 person team have at least taken, you know, whatever bogus trainings Google provides. They're, I guess, better than nothing at the very beginning when you're first learning PPC, but they have an agenda. That's clear."

"The third one, this is the only reason we're not a Premier partner with Google: optimization score. You have to hit at least 70%, which turns out that actually ends up meaning in your client accounts that you have to do things that you know aren't in the best interest of your clients in order to make Google happy and feel like you're a good partner to them."

"Or just hit dismiss on all of them all the time because you can dismiss it and it counts it as the thing being applied. So it's pretty much just kind of fluff because even if you don't apply it and just like follow their orders of like keeping that score high, that's all it takes. So it's really quite meaningless."

"Yeah, which is just something that I just don't think it makes sense for anybody to do, especially when like the benefits of the program are not great. So anyways, my message with this is just be... it's kind of like when you hire someone for like marketing. Let's say you're hiring a marketing director and they're like 40 years old, and the biggest thing that they can say in their interview is, 'I got a marketing degree when I went to college and I graduated with a Bachelor's of Science in marketing.' How you just like know that person's not very qualified at all, because anybody who's actually qualified cites anything but their education as like the reason they're qualified, especially like a little bit later in life."

"It's the same thing with like, 'I'm a Premier partner.' That's like me coming to you like 50 years old and saying, 'Well, you should hire me for this job because I have a degree in this from 30 years ago from some university, and that's why I'm a good marketer.' Right? It's not at all... it's a... yeah, anyway, it's just not something I think needs a lot of weight, but people put a lot of weight into it. And therefore, I think it's good to be on the same page."

"So to summarize things, don't focus on optimization score, don't focus on really the partner statuses, and when people call you to talk about like where things like impression share and optimization score and stuff like that, be very wary of that. Don't end up being one of our clients that listens to that and says, 'Well, this person works for Google so they must know what they're doing,' and ends up applying those things. Because it's a lesson you only have to learn once. I'd prefer for everybody listening to this to learn it exactly zero times through actual experience and just take the lesson from this podcast and move on with it."

"Yep, no, I agree. I think the big takeaway is that Google wants your money and they prey on people that are uneducated. And it's kind of messed up, but lucky for our audience, we are here to guide you to safety."

"Thank you, Garrett. All right, for everybody listening, thanks a ton for being here today. If you saw value from this or other episodes that we do, please share it. I, to be honest, I don't even know where our whole podcast audience has come from. There's a lot of people in there, but we don't actually... we don't actually really promote it very much. So just however you got a hold of this, there's a good chance it's from some friend that you have that shared it with you, or you saw it and it helped solve a problem that you had. Just think of the other people out there like you that could benefit from this kind of content, especially if they're wanting to improve in their online marketing for real estate investing. But I will see you all next week. Thanks."

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