PPC Essentials Part 8: How a Single Google Ads Setting Can Make or Break Your Campaigns

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Shan, our account management team lead. He works with more of our clients than anybody else on the team here at Bitman Collective, and we're going to talk all about Google ad settings. How are you doing today, Sean?"

"Doing pretty good, thanks for having me."

"Yeah, of course. Excited to have you here again. I think you've been on a couple of the episodes of this series and added a ton of value. Today's a fun one, although if I do say so myself, probably the least sexy of our topics."

"That is true, but very important still."

"Yes, we're going to be talking about things today where just a single button you could press in Google Ads could make the difference between absolutely amazing results and poor results. It's the kind of stuff you don't think about and you don't care about until you're on the wrong side of it and it's hurting you. So it's something that I think is a conversation that has to be had, even if it's not the most fun stuff in the business."

"For sure."

"That topic is all about Google Ads settings, and this is where all those little miscellaneous things that didn't fit into any of the other categories that we talked about are going to fall into. We have just a couple things, so it's probably going to be a shorter episode, but like I said, everything that we're going to talk about today has potential. If you get it right, you'll never notice; if you get it wrong, it'll destroy you. So it's important stuff."

"It's also when it comes to settings, there's a little bit less room for creativity and doing magnificent things. So there's not going to be really anything in the 'best' category, so to speak, today. Like, you get it right or you don't get it right. So we're going to talk about some things mostly just focused around some of the big things that you can mess up and go from there. Kicking us off, Sean, what's the first thing you'd like to share in terms of settings that you can get wrong?"

"Yeah, one is a really big one that took us a minute to figure out. About two years ago, we had this weird issue with spam where it seemed like we were just trying all these different things. Spam was a frequent issue with a lot of people, and we made tons of different adjustments. We were going through every channel just trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually, we figured it out. The setting was a single checkbox, kind of like you mentioned earlier. One checkbox can make or break your campaign."

"It was search partners and using that network to advertise. For those who aren't familiar with it, Google essentially has two different routes you can go. You're advertising on Google, and you're also advertising on search partners, which if you're ever on sites that have like Google search integrated with their searches, or there's a large number of other browsers that use Google but a secondary version of Google for their stuff. Advertising through that channel was bringing in tons of spam, and we figured out turning that off actually prevented, I'd say, probably like 90%, maybe even more, of our spam that was coming through at the time."

"So that's the one thing I would say. If there is a 'best' thing for this conversation, it is not using search partners because it's just the Wild West in search partners. There's a setting you just have to go into your Google campaign settings, you can turn off, just uncheck the box for Google search partners. But yeah, that's one of the biggest things. A lot of spam was coming through that channel, and it seems that it's probably easier to target through that channel for a lot of these click farms or other spam sources."

"That's where I figured I'd start here, talking about those search partners and just not utilizing it. It's very easy, just uncheck it and make sure you're not using it in your campaigns. For us, it seemed like it could make or break our campaigns, and it wasn't something that was always that way though. I think that's one thing to point out: it's something that kind of grew over time."

"Actually, one thing I would say is to pay attention. If you are using search partners right now, measure what you have and check. We haven't used it for a long time just because it became a large issue, and we have had a few instances where we've tried enabling it, and it just seems to produce still the same issues with spam. I think in its current state, it's just not a tool that we can really use in this industry. So I definitely recommend turning off search partners."

"Yeah, absolutely. I also want to open up the conversation to a little bit of a broader view on things, and it really just comes down to click fraud in general. Because I've seen a lot of people that we talk to that do have this issue with search partners, they're going about it a different way, like they're trying to solve that problem by blocking IP addresses and stuff like that. So I think it's worth us having a conversation about what different types of fraud are out there and how do you prevent those types of fraud, because this applies even to Microsoft or Facebook as well, pretty much all online advertising."

"What I would say to set the stage is that click fraud is a bigger industry than some people think it is. It's one of the largest organized crimes in the world, and click fraud is basically someone else profiting by generating fake traffic. The foundation of it usually is that Sean, for example, has this website, and this website's about whatever it's about, and he might run ads on that website, right?"

"And by running ads on that website, you know, when I go and I click on that ad off of his website, he gets paid by the network because someone else is paying to advertise there. That's a basic foundation behind this, and that's all good until Sean decides that he has bad intentions and he realizes that he can actually fake people being on his website and they don't have to actually be there. Those fake people, the better he can do at making them look like real people, the better he's going to do at monetizing his website with traffic that he doesn't actually have."

"And what do real people do? They click on the ads, they don't just look at them. And when they click on them, they might fill out the forms, etc. So they behave like normal people, but if he was faking this, he might just also fill out those forms with complete garbage information, and you might have low conversion on the people that click and all that kind of stuff."

"So that's the foundational element here. Let's just say we're talking about Google. Google has no incentive to have any fraud on its platform because it doesn't want its advertisers to get bad results. So that's where, if this is Google itself, the only person generally you could say that stands to benefit from someone else clicking on your Google ad is not usually Google. It would have to be some other platform that's not also selling the advertising because when you have the same company selling the advertising and also owning the platform where the traffic is on, you don't really have these problems."

"But where you have the search partners, where you have Google and then you have these third-party websites that can make money by selling that advertising to Google, and then Google sells it to you, that's where you run into issues. So that's where specifically for Google, this is search partners. Microsoft has something really similar. Facebook has something called Audience Network, which is basically the same thing, and you're going to find that there's a lot of fraud in all of those platforms because it's not actually owned by the main company."

"The other thing that people run into though is they try to attack that fraud in a different way. Really common is through IP blocking. Do you want to talk a little bit about IP blocking and when is that a good solution and when isn't it?"

"Yeah, essentially the IP blocking allows us to go, for example, in Google you can go up, I believe it's up to what, 500 or so IP addresses you can go in and add."

"Yeah, you can do ranges so you can block 100 of one if you want to."

"Exactly. But yeah, the basics of it is it allows us to make sure that the people who are seeing your ads are unique people that aren't coming through and have negative intentions. The pros of the IP blocking is exactly that: you can make sure that you have unique people coming in, filling out your forms and things like that. As well as it allows you to find anybody who was bad leads and things like that, you can pull them out of there and do what you can."

"It's not a perfect system, there are definitely ways around it, and I think that's something we'll talk about here in our click fraud discussion. But at the same time, it's a pretty good solution that will get the majority of people, prevent issues from coming from that route. The cons of using IP though is actually, I was talking to somebody earlier today where we were having a lot of duplicate forms coming in through their form fills and everything, but at the same time we're like, 'Hey, we could add these IPs in, but at the same time that also means that if they ever want to come back, if they're not fraudulent, they can't.' If you're blocking someone, and so there are some downsides to it where you have to give up some potential traffic that you may have in the future that might be good because it's not a perfect system."

"So there are some cons there, and it's also another con with IPs. A lot of click farms and things like that, they're pretty aware of how to get around it at times, which is why you have to bring in some other tools as well that automate the process. Because it's impossible for you to go into your campaigns and add 500 negative IPs every single day that could potentially be harmful. That's just - you don't have the time, it's not possible."

"There are tools and things like that. One of them we use is called ClickCease. It's a great option, it's something that we provide for all of our clients because we understand the value of having that where it can make that process - it watches everybody, tracks those IPs, and I believe sometimes even reports them back to Google, tries to pursue refunds and things like that through some of the management fees for ones that do get... So it's a nice tool that we really like and we like to - that's why we provide it for all of our clients. But yeah, those are some of my thoughts on stuff we want to do there, and you can expound on ClickCease and stuff too."

"Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts."

"I know you do."

"I think we have to recognize what is ClickCease and what is not ClickCease. Too often people try to solve a click fraud issue with ClickCease. It only works if their IP address is the same every time, and these people who are doing click fraud on this massive scale, they're not dumb."

"Yeah, click farms are a thing and people know what they're doing, and usually they'll be clicking from new IP addresses every time. So you're on a wild goose chase just trying to exclude things with IP addresses and ClickCease if it's an actual sophisticated fraud. If it's not, then ClickCease can be effective, and this is common. Like the scenario of 'Are my competitors clicking on my ads?' Right, Joe down the street who also owns a wholesaling company, he might search and he might be like, 'You know what, this is going to cost Shan money if I click on this ad,' and he might click a few times. So if he does that and he keeps on repeatedly clicking, then you can block his IP address and it does work in those circumstances. But that's in my experience the minority, the small minority of fraud."

"So ClickCease, I'm trying to think if I was managing my own Google ads, would I do it? I don't know. For us, it's a no-brainer across all of our client base because we build it into a process. It takes an extra however many minutes to set up for each account. We pay like a dollar per client per month for ClickCease or something, because we have one account that's the same in price as anybody would pay, but we can use it 150 times over. I don't know if I would or not. Maybe only if you have a significant problem with it."

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