Hey everyone, Regina here with Starter PPC, just wanted to hop on video and do a quick public service announcement to tell everybody that keyword management is not dead. I think that, a lot of, people get started with Google ads. they add a couple of negative keywords in the beginning they sit back and rely on the, automated bidding strategies, Maximize conversions, maximize conversion value, and they trust Google to go out and do the research and collect data and see which keywords are going to do well and Google claims. They do this, and I do think that they try a little bit. I think they try their best to get you a. maximize the conversions or maximize the conversion value, which is what you've chosen in your bidding strategy. But keep in mind, Google is always going to have its own self interest at heart. So it's not going to do That last bit to make sure that it's really getting you the Maximum, because why it loves to collect commissions on click. So it loves to fill, add placements that nobody else wants to fill, right? Low competition. If it can put yours there, then why not? if it loves to drive up. competition, right? So it might bid on certain keywords that has never done well for you, but if it can have three people bidding in that auction, it's just going to drive up to the maximum that the highest paying bidder is going to bid. And then Google gets to collect a slightly higher commission on that click. So there's little things like that, where Google is always going to have its own finances, ahead of yours. keyword management as alive as ever. and I want to show you guys an example of this, where we can see it in one of the accounts that we've been working on since, like a year and a half now. just in case anyone's curious, this is an e commerce account. They sell, interactive materials, for the religious world. so workbooks and posters and things like that for the world of religion. I don't believe it's too seasonal. and I do think that even though it's an e commerce company, these strategies apply across the board to industries because it's really, You against Google in this case. anyways, here you can see I have pulled up June through October and I'm showing a monthly view. The blue line is ROAS, which is return on ad spend. and keep in mind, by the way, that the ROAS is not a true return on ad spend because it does rely on Google's ability to track every single click through to the sale. and as we know It drops so many conversions. So the only way to find your true return is to use a metric called media efficiency ratio, which is where you zoom out and you look at the total business revenue and divide it by the total business ad spend. So that's your true return on ad spend is called media efficiency ratio. But I'm using raw as in this case, we use it a lot internally to try to beat our, Month over month or week over week, right? So we're always looking at it as a reference point, to see if what we're testing and what we're trying in the account is making things better or worse. ROAS here is in blue and you can see it was 166 in June. Cost is about 4, 000 and you can see month over month. The ROAS just starts to dip, right? 125 in July down to 130. I actually went up by 5 percent in August. For some reason, cost is staying the same the whole time. And then in September, the rise dips quite a bit more down to 97%. And, kind of raised the alarm for us starting to see this trend. knowing it's not seasonal. we had a keyword management strategy, but I would say it was a little on the light side. And here we decided we got to try something new in this account. What we've been trying isn't working anymore. And so we decided, not seeing too many other opportunities to try really leaning into the keyword management. And we started, really fine tuning and manipulating the. search terms and the keywords and the negative keywords, very granularly and spending a lot of time in there, near the end of September and the beginning of October. And you can see that even though the cost stays the same again, the ROAS shoots way up from 97 to 152. so we're almost back up to June, what we had in June. And I think that it will be even higher here in November. First of all, let's just do a quick comparison so we can see what we can see. And then we'll go over to the change history, and I'll show you just how many search terms we changed in order to achieve this type of results. So I'm going to compare October to the previous month. I'm just going to look at this total business row, total account row down here at the bottom. Here we can see the rows went up by 54%, Huge jump, month over month. cost stayed the same, 0. 3 percent difference. the cost per click went Up you guys 25 percent and I think this is a lesson because we have so many clients that are focused on the cost per click. It's not really the cost per click. That's the only metric you want to be looking for, right? If the click through rate goes up enough and the conversion rate goes up enough to make up for the cost per click, right? Because you have a higher quality of person who's clicking. More motivation means a higher click through rate. More motivation means more, more purchased intent, right? It means a higher conversion rate. Wow, conversion rate went up 267%. So we're getting a higher caliber of lead here. It's okay to spend more on that click. It's okay, you're cleaning up some of the mess and sometimes, that makes your cost per click average go up. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter in this case. so here I have the first three months. So June, July and August, where we saw that downward, the beginning of the downwards trend. And you can see that the amount of keyword changes we made in the, in these three months is 255 keyword changes. All right. So we were monitoring it, we were making some changes and this was working in the past. the account was growing, but when the account started shrinking, we thought we have to test something, and our other tests weren't working. So what did we do starting in September? Hi there. Quick interruption. Do you know the main thing that prevents small business owners from getting their Google Ads account into a position to grow and scale budget? A lot of businesses, especially those that are just starting out, have limited budgets. And so because of this, they're turned away by most ad agencies because most ad agencies have minimum budget thresholds that they're willing to work with. So what happens is the business owners end up learning Google ads themselves. And the problem with that is that most of the advice online is geared towards larger accounts. And the advice doesn't have any of those strategies or tricks that can kickstart the algorithm into giving a small account a leg up over larger competitors. So it often just doesn't work. And the business just ends up losing money month over month. If this sounds familiar, starter PPC can help. We offer Google ads management services that are designed for accounts that have between 1000 and 5, 000 budgets. Because all of our clients are just starting out, we've come up with ways to keep our management fees significantly lower than most agencies, because we know that every dollar saved on management fees just goes towards the ad budget, which is going to help the algorithm gather speed and power. So if you're serious about growing your business and you'd like a team of Google ads experts to help you without breaking the bank, check us out at starter PPC. com. Okay. Back to the video. Let's do, September through mid October, because I want to show you what we did that made October shoot up. So just across a month and a half, we did 1, 300 keyword changes here. And that's really what impacted the performance. 300, keyword changes resulted in Those higher performance that we were looking at on the other tab. you can see the row is already starting to go up where in October, right? I only have the first two weeks in October, but it's already going up to 146%. And we know that by the end of October, it was, averaging one. I say? 155. I think it was. there's so many rows. most of them are. negative keyword lists, a lot of this, was gained by digging through the data. I did, another video on this, just showing kind of the process to clean up search terms. I'm not sure there's a super straightforward step by step process that we go through. It's really a matter of, Looking at the data from a few different angles, Sort by click through rate, sort by conversion rate, sort by cost. look at a three month view, look at an all time view. and get a sense of which keywords are working and which aren't. And as you go, if you identify, this one spent a bunch of money with nothing to show for it. Check the box, add to the negative keywords. you can choose to add that keyword to just the campaign, or you can choose to add it to the account level negative keywords list over in the tools and settings. There's really no right or wrong way to do it. It just depends on whether the keyword that you're adding to the negative is right. going to be relevant to other campaigns or if it's not going to be relevant to the entire business. there's really no rhyme or reason to it. It's every decision has to be made. With a custom approach and using logic as you're going through, negative list, 26 keywords at it. I'm sure somewhere we went and found just like general negative keyword lists. none of these are all custom keyword lists based on performance. But when we first begin a new campaign, we have, some, just global negative keyword lists, which you can find online. And, that's a good place to start, but it's really not enough. Once you have many months of data under your belt, which we finally did with this account, it's time to really lean into keyword management. All right. that's all for today. Thank you so much for watching. Good luck with your keyword management.